by Hannah Ford
SHEER DOMINANCE
(Sheer Submission, Part Nine)
Hannah Ford
Contents
Copyright
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SHEER DOMINANCE
SHEER DOMINANCE
Copyright © 2018 by Hannah Ford
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SHEER DOMINANCE
(SHEER SUBMISSION, PART NINE)
SHEER DOMINANCE
I thought about just saying yes.
I thought about telling him I’d see him tonight, letting him take me to dinner. I imagined him sending a dress to my apartment, something designer and beautiful and expensive. I imagined the food we would eat at some corner booth in the back of some exclusive restaurant, imagined his hands sliding up under my dress, his lips on my neck as his fingers pushed inside of me.
But I wasn’t going to pretend this was normal.
I couldn’t.
So I pulled the note back out.
“What is that?” Landon demanded, his eyes darkening.
“It was in the sweatshirt I got back from Paisley.” I held it out to him. He took it and I watched as his eyes scanned the paper.
“You believe this?” he demanded, his eyes back on me.
“What? That I shouldn’t trust you?”
“Yes.” His tone was short, impatient, like he was in a hurry to get to the meeting he’d mentioned he had at three, like this was some kind of afterthought.
It was annoying as hell.
“Well, I don’t know, Landon, a woman just did get her head blown off in front of me when I was with you. Not to mention my sister got followed and had a gun pointed at her back.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “Oh! And let’s not forget the fact that you yourself told me you needed to stay away from me because you were too dangerous.”
“The note doesn’t say I’m dangerous, Aven. It says you shouldn’t trust me.”
“Or your family.” I reminded him, reaching for the note and plucking it out of his hands. It was mine, and I wanted it back. “And it’s the same thing.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Stop with the semantics, Landon!” I turned on my heel, gathering up my bra and panties from where he’d tossed them on the floor. God, had that just been a few moments ago? Just a few moments ago that we’d been on his desk, him moving inside of me, his hands over my body?
Dammit.
He was so overpowering – he knew how to play me. And every time he pulled me back under. I’d been foolish, coming here, sleeping with him. But he was like a drug I couldn’t kick, a tidal wave I couldn’t escape.
Even now, I could feel him coming toward me.
“No!” I whirled around and put my hand up. “Stop. I’m serious, Landon. Don’t touch me and don’t come any closer.”
He stopped, his hands curling into fists by his sides, the only physical sign of how hard it was for him not to come to me.
“You believe this?” he demanded again. “You believe this woman who you barely know?”
“I believe that my sister was attacked. I believed I saw a woman get shot right in front of me, most likely because of something your father did. And I believe that you yourself told me you were dangerous to be around.”
He stared at me, blue eyes blazing.
The electricity crackled between us, even now, even still, and I hated him and loved him all at the same time.
After a few moments, I took a step toward him, then another. I put my hand against his chest, palm flat. I could feel his heart beating through his shirt, strong and steady, a direct contrast to my own heart, which felt as if it were going to burst out of my chest.
I swallowed. “I’m not going to lie to you, Landon. I’m not going to play this cool and pretend like I don’t love you.” My eyes filled with tears, and I couldn’t look at him. I averted my gaze, staring at the dark wood floor of his office. “But this is insane. This is totally dysfunctional and unhealthy and just completely… crazy.” I wished I had the vocabulary for some other word, something better to describe what it was that was going on between us, but I wasn’t sure such a word even existed.
He didn’t say anything for a moment.
“I love you,” he finally whispered raggedly, taking my chin and tipping it up, forcing me to look at him. “I can’t stay away from you, Aven.”
“Then you have to let me in.” I swallowed, knowing I shouldn’t let myself hope that he was capable of that, but not being able to stop myself. “What happened with Paisley, Landon? What did Conner do to her? Why did you have to take the blame for what happened?”
“It’s complicated, Aven.”
“Good,” I said, shrugging. “I can handle complicated.”
“Not this.”
“You don’t get to decide what I can handle, Landon.”
His eyes leveled me, not moving, his jaw set in that determined straight line, the expression on his face making it clear to me that he did think he could decide exactly what I could handle and what I couldn’t.
“You need to tell me,” I said. “Or I’m gone. It’s over.”
“Don’t push me.”
“Or what?”
“Or there will be consequences.”
“Stop with the fucking consequences!” I pulled away from him, zipping the sweatshirt I was wearing up angrily, and shoving the rest of my ruined clothes into my bag. “I told you my biggest secret, Landon. The thing I’ve never told anyone else, ever. And you can’t even…” I trailed off, hating that my voice was cracking, that I was getting emotional.
He stared back at me, his eyes devoid of emotion, just like I knew they would be.
Unbelievable.
I grabbed my purse and left, not turning around even when he called my name.
“Cheers to us!” Emma said, clinking our glasses together.
It was later that night, and we were out at Two Past Midnight, a new restaurant/bar a few blocks from our apartment that we were trying for the first time.
It was turning out to be a good gamble – the menu was filled with normal bar food, things like cheesy bacon potato skins and spicy buffalo wings, not the kind of pretentious food that was ever-popular in New York, the kind where everything was made of kale or avocado or whatever trendy green plant the hipsters had decided to love that month.
The clientele matched the menu – normal-looking people, all of them in various levels of business casual clothes. No one looked like they’d paid more for their haircut than I paid for my rent, and there was no sign of the scraggly-looking beards that were supposed to make you look hip but really only made you look like you needed a shower.
“You’re not drinking,” Emma said accusingly. “We ordered the Riesling because you couldn’t possibly stand to drink red wine, and now you’re not even drinking it.”
I took a long sip of my wine, then another, enjoying the warm, bubbly feeling that began to slowly take over my body.
“Okay, so,” Emma said, sliding
her stool around so that she was facing me. She opened her mouth to talk, then shook her head and stopped herself. “First, do you want to play your voicemail again? Or is it time to talk about my sordid day at work?”
“We’ve played the voicemail five times.” On my way out of Landon’s office, I noticed that I had a voicemail from Miles Marx’s office, asking me to come in for a second interview, this time with the man itself.
Emma and I had played it over and over, and I’d already driven her crazy trying to decipher what the tone of the call was. But it was impossible to glean anything from the assistant’s voice -- it was totally neutral and gave nothing away.
“True, but there’s no set number of times you can replay a voicemail,” Emma pointed out. She swirled the wine around in her glass, even though she was far from an aficionado. “Remember that guy from Queens I dated for a while? Jeff? Or was it Jordan? I can’t remember…” She shrugged. “Anyway, remember he left me that voicemail about how his grandma died while she was trying to shovel her own driveway and so he had to cancel our date? And it sounded so implausible that we played the message back like a bazillion times to see if we could figure out if he was lying? And then finally we googled ‘woman dies shoveling in queens’ and then called his local ambulance service before deciding he was a bastard liar?”
“Yes, I remember. And playing that message got us nowhere. So there’s no use obsessing about this one.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.” I took my phone off the bar and placed it in my purse with defiance. I’d already responded to the email they’d sent, asking me to confirm my meeting with Miles the next morning. Which meant I should probably go easy on the wine.
“Good,” Emma said, doing a full spin on her bar stool until she was back facing me. “Now let’s talk about the accountant at work that I’m obsessed with.”
“Does this accountant have a name?’ I asked as the bartender set down a platter of overstuffed potato skins in front of us, along with two small square white plates.
I helped myself to half of a skin, knowing that an alcohol hangover was the worst, but a carb hangover was also bad. Too many carbs would make me sluggish in the morning, and I had an idea that Miles Marx didn’t do sluggish.
“His name is Roman,” she said. “I know, it’s a little ‘look at me I’m rich’ but he comes from old money.”
“You’ve obviously been google stalking him,” I said, taking a bite of potato skin and trying not to groan in pleasure. I hadn’t eaten anything since my brunch this morning, and after Paisley had shown up, I’d hardly been able to enjoy it.
“Of course. Well, just a little. Enough to know that he’s rich.”
“Of course.”
“Not that money is important,” Emma said, draining her glass of wine. “I mean, there’s other things too. Like looks.”
“Emma!”
“Kidding, kidding.” She reached her fork over onto my plate and ate the rest of my potato skin, which made no sense, since she had her own plate and there were five more skins sitting on the main plate in front of us.
I sighed and took another one for myself.
“Anyway, so you know how I was finagling my schedule so that I could make sure I got to ride in the elevator with him every morning?”
“Yes.”
“Well, this morning he wasn’t there. So I was, like, bummed out. But then later, this bitch Carla sent me out to do something that the intern was supposed to do, and I was all annoyed, because I’m, like, I’m not doing coffee runs when we have interns to do that. But it turned out okay, because when I got in the elevator, guess who was there?”
“Roman?”
“Roman! And it was just the two of us, and he was like, ‘I’m sorry I missed our morning ride.’ And I was all, ‘That’s okay, I’ll take a ride with you anytime.’”
“Emma!”
“I know.” She shook her head, then reached behind her and pulled her long blond hair up, twisting it into a loose bun and tying it with the hair tie on her wrist. “I’m so quippy.”
I smiled and worked my way through two more potato skins as Emma filled me in on the rest of her encounter with Roman, a flirty back-and-forth of sexually charged banter that culminated with Roman using their interoffice messaging system to continue that banter throughout the entire afternoon. The culmination was Roman asking her out for this weekend.
“And the best part,” Emma said, “is where he’s taking me.” She took a sip of her drink. (She’d moved on from wine to one of the bar’s signature drinks, something fruity and pink that probably tasted delicious before knocking you on your ass.)
“Where?” I asked, eyeing the last potato skin before finally taking it and putting it on my plate.
“Cancun.”
I choked on my potato. “What?”
“I know,” she said, stirring her straw around her glass and staring into space dreamily. “Isn’t it romantic?”
“You’re going to go on a trip out of the country with a guy you barely know?”
She looked at me. “Do we really want to talk about going trips with guys we barely know?”
I nodded. “Point taken.”
“Anyway. I think it’s exciting. I’ve never been to Cancun.”
“I’ve heard it’s beautiful, “ I said, trying to keep the doubt out of my voice.
“I’ll get so tan,” she said, sighing wistfully. “I can’t wait to swim and be near the ocean, drink cocktails on the beach and have sex in the sand.”
“He must really be excited about hanging out with you if he’s already whisking you away to Cancun,” I said, feeling like I needed to be supportive even though there was a million red flags flashing in my head. But Emma was right – I wasn’t the most qualified to be giving romantic advice to anyone.
And besides, there was no changing Emma’s mind once it was made up. If anything, challenging her on a plan would only make her want to do it more.
“Yeah,” she said. “Definitely.” But something had changed in her expression, something that made me think there was more to the story than she was telling me.
Before I could decide if I should press her on it, she abruptly changed the subject, only adding to my suspicions that there was more going on with this Roman character than she wasn’t telling me.
“So, what’s up with Landon? Still haven’t heard from him?”
I hadn’t been planning on telling Emma what had happened today – my encounter with Paisley, how Landon had followed me, the sex and the argument we’d had in his office. I just didn’t want to talk about it. I’d been telling myself today had been a blip as far as Landon and I were concerned, our encounter something to be glossed over and forgotten about. It would be better for Emma to think Landon and I were still broken up.
But now, suddenly, I wanted to tell her. I wasn’t sure if it was the wine or the fact that I was still desperate to talk about him, but I found myself spilling it all to Emma.
How he’d found me on the street.
How he’d taken me up to his office, where we’d had sex.
The note that had fallen out of my pocket, how I’d pressed him on it and how he’d refused to answer any questions.
I’d expected Emma to react with wide eyes and tell me how crazy everything was, but to my surprise, it was the exact opposite.
She rolled her eyes. “You’re being so extra,” she said.
“I’m being extra?”
“Yes.” She grabbed the rest of the last potato skin off my plate and popped it in her mouth. “If you want to know what this Paisley woman is talking about, just go ask her.”
“Go ask her?” I frowned. “I can’t just go ask her.”
“Why not? She left a note in your sweatshirt. You don’t do that unless you have something to say.”
“How would I even find her?”
“The same place you find everyone,” Emma said wisely. “Facebook.”
An hour, a cab ride, and a few Fa
cebook messages later, I stood in front of Paisley’s building, an impressive silver skyscraper on the Upper East Side.
I paid the driver and stepped out, suddenly feeling intimidated. I hadn’t expected her to live in a place like this – I figured her place would be more like mine, a walkup on some random street in Morningside Heights or Bushwick. Maybe Park Slope.
But this neighborhood was sought after, and the building was spectacular, all shiny floors and soft lighting and modern fixtures.
A doorman asked my name, then buzzed Paisley before pushing a button that unlocked the elevator for me.
I took it up and stepped out onto the fourth floor, walking down the hall until I got to 411, her apartment.
She opened the door before I could knock.
“Hey,” she said, giving me a warm smile. Her hair was pulled back in a bun, her feet bare. She wore black leggings with cutouts on the side, and a lightweight oversized black cashmere sweater. Her face was scrubbed of makeup, her skin clear and flawless.
“Hi.” I walked inside. Her apartment was small but extravagant, done in shades of grey and white.
She poured me a glass of wine and we sat down on her couch.
The couch was white, and I tried to keep myself from spilling my red wine all over it. It looked super expensive, the kind of couch you bought when you were either OCD or had copious amounts of money to replace it when it inevitably got ruined.
“This is a really nice apartment,” I said.
“Thank you. “ She looked at me, her eyes wide and bright. “Are you wondering how I can afford an apartment like this?”
I blushed and reached for a cracker on the plate she’d set on the chrome coffee table, desperate to do something to hide my awkwardness. I took a bite, feeling like a mouse as I bit carefully so as not to get any crumbs on her couch. “Oh, no,” I said. “I wasn’t – “
“It’s from the settlement,” she said, curling her feet up under her. “The settlement that the Sheer family gave me in order for me to drop the charges in my stalking case.”
