by Adira August
She couldn't bear to look at him. “I need to know. Did I—my actions—make things worse?”
“When you decide to put self-interest in front of everything else, when you choose a path that accounts for no one’s benefit but your own, at least conjure up the balls to look the person in the eye while you do it.”
Her eyes flew to his face. But he seemed calm, his hands still folded across his lap.
“The truth is I don’t know,” he said, his voice even. “No one does. No one can.” He stood up and walked to his door. “You’re asking a child’s question. The way things work is: no one has any idea what would have happened if the thing that did happen, had not.” He opened his door.
It was the second time in as many days Avia had been thrown out of an office in this building. As she left, she comforted herself with the thought that at least Hugo hadn’t spanked her.
“YOU’VE HAD AN INTERESTING twenty-four hours,” Erin Kendall Harley said, making a note on her tablet. “But you’d already called me before this incident where”—she consulted her notes—“you were escorted from Hugo Ramos’ office.”
“Right. I called you after Ben left while I was waiting for help packing.”
Erin nodded. “At the time you called, what did you want to discuss?”
“Ben said something and Hunt agreed. Something related to what you said the last time I was here. You said I could be a great submissive.”
“If you want it. For yourself.”
“Right. Ben said I want what he has to offer. Sexually. But if we’re to make a home together, I have to want us to be Dominant and submissive. Hunter said I want Ben for the kind of sex he gives me, but I don’t want him the way he really is.”
“Is it the way he is?” Erin asked. “Or is it the way he’s chosen for himself?”
Avia wasn’t sure what the answer was.
Erin Harley got up. “I’m getting coffee.”
Avia smiled. “You did that last time.”
“Moving around helps me think,” she said. “Some for you?” Avia shook her head, and the doctor took a single mug from the shelf. “Avia, this discipline. Could you have stopped him?”
“I guess.” She thought about it. “Yeah, I mean, I have a safeword. I wouldn’t though. It was part of the original deal, and it wasn’t more than I could take.”
“That’s the only time you can use it?”
“Ben said I shouldn’t use my safeword to avoid a punishment I’d earned, but to really be at my limit.”
Erin brought her steaming mug back to the sofa. “And you believe you earned what he did? The discipline in his office?” She sipped her coffee and picked up her tablet, making some notes while Avia thought that over.
“No. Not - I mean -” She stood up and went to the window.
“And you did that last time,” Erin smiled.
“Yeah, moving is good.” Avia wiped at her eyes. “I’m going to lose him.”
“Why do you think that?”
“I was pissed off and rude, okay? He refused to discuss something. I might do that sometime, not want to talk about something. I’d be mad as hell if he followed me to work and got all insistent about it.”
“Okay.”
“But you don’t hit people! Yeah, having security toss me out would be embarrassing and well-deserved. But this? Using a belt and then hitting me with his hand? What the everliving fuck, Erin?”
The doctor looked back through her notes. “He’s disciplined you during sex?”
“Yes.”
“You liked it, in that, even if it was somewhat painful, it heightened your experience?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“What’s the difference?”
Avia just blinked.
“You know the answer to this; I read your article last year. What is the difference between a spanking with sex and one without?”
“Endorphins.”
“Correct, among other things. Endorphins produced by pleasurable stimulation. Without that, did the discipline in his office feed your masochistic side? Trigger your humiliation response?”
“Not sexually. It was humiliating but in a bad way. Made me feel awful.”
“Does he like disciplining you in that way? Does it feed his sadistic side?”
Avia recalled asking him once how he felt when he disciplined a companion. He was very troubled. “He told me he doesn’t like it.”
“So. If you don’t like it and he doesn’t like it, why would you keep doing it?” Erin sat back, cradling her mug and sipping at her coffee.
Avia wandered back to her chair and sank down. “Wait a minute. But … that means Hunter’s right. I just want him to be a Dom during sex.”
“Maybe. It’s probably a little more complicated than that, but okay. So, what does that mean to you?”
“That I’m willful, self-centered, arrogant and contumacious.”
“He wants to be in the D/s relationship full time with the right to punish you at all times. You don’t want that. So why isn’t he self-centered and arrogant?”
“Because he isn’t! He’s caring and generous.”
Erin put her mug down and made some notes. “You know,” she said, finally looking up. “You’ve told me a lot about Ben Hart. I spoke to him after the shootings and met him briefly at the hospital when I saw your sister.”
Avia nodded, surprised at the change in subject.
“My impression of Benedict Hart,” Erin went on thoughtfully, “is that he’s a resolved and individualistic man. Audacious and sometimes intractable. Would you agree?”
Avia smiled. “Yeah, that’s Ben all over.”
“Avia, those four words are synonyms for willful, self-centered, arrogant and contumacious.”
“What?”
“Why is it okay for him to be who he is and want what he wants, but not okay for you to be who you are and want what you want?”
Avia’s eyes welled instantly. “Because I’ll lose him.”
“Did he say that?”
Avia dashed away the tears impatiently, trying to remember what he had said. “I can’t ... “
“Take your time.”
Avia took a breath and closed her eyes, trying to center herself. To remember. “We were on the terrace of the penthouse. The day before I first met you. He said, as long as I wanted him, he wasn’t going anywhere.” Avia opened her eyes. “But then he left town and the shooting happened …”
Erin made a note. “And did he tell you then, before the shooting, what he wanted?”
"If you are, truly, naturally submissive with me, what I want from you, what I want to do to you, with you, fulfills deep-seated desires you already have. … But that doesn’t mean you want it at the same time I do. Or that what I do is exactly the way you want it. Or, even if it is, that you’re ready for it to happen outside your fantasies.”
He lifted her chin so she’d look into his eyes. “You’re going to tell me. You're going to be honest with me, Avia. You’re going to stop me any time you’re uncomfortable. Or frightened. You will. Must.” He smiled. “There. I made a rule.”
Avia grabbed her reporter’s notebook from her skirt pocket and started writing furiously on page after page. “Sorry,” she muttered. “Just … hang on.”
Erin hung on, drinking off her coffee.
Avia stopped writing and looked up. “You’re a genius.”
“True.”
“We have to go back.”
“Do you think you can? Go back to what you were before all that’s happened?”
“Not back to what we were, back to where we were,” Avia said. “It’s like we left something behind. We skipped ahead a bunch of steps. I think we have to go back and do what we started to do.”
“What was that?” Erin asked.
Suddenly she was in a car with Ben on top of a mountain.
“...today is about figuring out who we are in a relationship with no rules. … It’s you I want, not someone I invent.”
�
��Figure out together who we are, what we want and how to be together. It’s where we were when all the terrible shit went down.” Avia put away her notebook.
Erin made some notes. “Keep in mind that Benedict Hart is an educated, intelligent, attractive, successful businessman. You are an educated, intelligent, attractive, award-winning journalist. You chose each other. And you can each be quite self-centered at times.”
Avia laughed. “I’ll remember that when he gets home.”
“GEORGE! I’D GET UP but I’m far too comfortable.” Ben Hart raised a pineapple mimosa in greeting to his second-most prolific erotica writer.
George Floros, fat, fifty and perpetually disgruntled, took the glass from him. “Better be rum in here, not just fizzy water.” He plopped down on the chaise next to Ben’s.
Floros downed half the glass. George drank. He also wrote a thirty titles a year Ben published under six different pen names, five of which were female.
“Not bad,” Floros said, finishing the drink. A pretty dark-haired girl refilled his glass from a pitcher sitting on a bowl of ice. Floros gazed around. “This ain’t bad, either.”
George Floros had a large condo a block from the beach on Oahu. Writing for Ben had made him a millionaire.
Ben had a ranch on Kauai. Having Floros under contract had helped make him a billionaire. The house and deck they lounged on offered a panoramic view over rolling green acres backdropped by the endless blue of the Pacific.
A lone gardener in a large straw hat, tall and tanned with a scruff of pale beard, worked at an alahee hedge about thirty feet down the sloping lawn.
“That’s a full-time job,” George said off the gardener. “Every plant on these islands lies in wait to engulf all the buildings and strangle us in our beds.”
“Thinking of branching out into horror?” Ben asked.
“Ever see a cane spider? Fiction can’t compete with the horror that is mother nature,” he grunted, picking up a mahi-mahi taco from a bamboo tray. “I’ll stick with you. You make a good drink and don’t put mangoes on the fish. What’s it all about, Hart?”
“I want you to do something for me that involves killing Victoria Raine.” Ben helped himself to one of the tacos. “You won’t have time for her.”
“That’s okay, not that fond of Southern belles at the moment, anyway. What am I doing, instead? If I want to.”
Ben wiped his fingers. “Writing story scenarios for erotic films.”
“You’re gonna do porn? ‘Bout time.” He took another taco. “I could use something good to watch.”
“Porn for women, George. I have someone I’m thinking of bringing on board to add the woman's perspective. But you have a talent for cliffhangers that compel the reader to go on to the next chapter. You write men that men like, as well as women. I want the shows to do that.”
George halted his glass before he tipped it up. “Shows?”
“I want you to be the showrunner on the first series for the Hart Channel.”
“I am not going to fucking Hollywood!”
“How about here?”
George looked around, finished his drink and smiled. “We might have to kill off another author name or two.”
They discussed Ben’s vision for the series. George, who’d gotten his start in TV, laid out practical problems and by afternoon had agreed to alterations and extensions of his contract.
Ben strolled down the lush, sloping lawn to wave as Floros’ helicopter passed overhead, ferrying him back to Oahu. He kept watching the helicopter, hands in his pockets, face turned away from the house.
The gardener scooped clippings into a wheelbarrow a few feet away. He picked up his hat and swiped a muscled forearm over his close-cropped blond head, exposing a shiny slash of scar through one eyebrow.
“What’d they say?” Ben asked quietly, not looking at the man as he settled the hat back on his head.
“No go. Too much money involved. Nobody’s for sale. No way to compete.” The gardener faced away from Ben, smoothing the top of the hedge.
“Transport is lined up? Boats are ready? Receivers? Everyone is in place?”
“We’re go when you give the signal.” The gardener raked the top of the hedge to get all the clippings into the wheelbarrow. “One last time. Please. Let me do it without you. He’ll know, otherwise. He’ll know it was you.”
“That’s the point.”
Ben turned to him with a smile. From a distance: an employer complimenting an employee on a good job. “See you next week.”
Ben walked away, wandering along the hedgeline, taking a stroll.
The man went back to work with the clippers. Even if he wasn’t a real gardener, he knew the reality of the hedge: No matter how ruthlessly it was sheared off, it always grew back and needed to be done again.
“YOU’RE MAKING FRIENDS and influencing people right and left, aren’t you?” Talia St. Clair lay back amongst a raft of pillows, one holding her laptop.
“You’re making me seasick Tal,” Avia told her. “When you breathe your image moves up and down.”
“Hang on.” Talli scootched back and repositioned the laptop off her pregnant belly. “Better?”
“Yeah. Thanks. Do you think Hugo’s right?” Avia was folded up at the end of her sofa with glass of excellent rosé, courtesy of Benedict Hart.
“Of course, I do,” Talli said. “So do you. Watch the thing go down if you want, but all you’ll see that’s new is what happened after you were hit. And it was basically over then. Ben and Hugo were great, after Ben went crazy getting the pig’s body off you. And put his coat over me.
“They were all calm and controlled, assessing injuries, directing the helicopters. Security came charging in. Like the best TV cop show climax, ever. I actually told you all we needed was background music.”
“What do you mean, you told me?”
“You were unconscious, so I laid down next to you and, you know, chatted with you until they came with the stretcher. I got to have all the last words.”
“Oh. Thanks.” Half the wine went down in one. “I have a bunch of apologies to make.”
“Oh, yeah.” Talli massaged her belly. “What about a job now that Ben’s not supporting you?”
Avia sighed. “He paid my mortgage and fees for a year and restocked my kitchen. I have severance and bonuses. My last paycheck I never touched, and savings. If I don’t book any cruises, I can just hang out for a year and binge watch all the TV I missed.”
“You never watch TV.”
“So it’d keep me really busy.” She tipped up the wineglass.
“I miss wine,” Talli sighed.
“I miss getting up and going to a job I love.”
“But?”
Avia shook her head. “Right now, all I want is Ben to come through the door and take me to bed and wrap his arms around me so I know that no bad things can happen.”
Talli nodded agreement. “That would be great. Then tomorrow morning, you can pick a fight with him, follow him to work because you’re pissed he has a life outside of your bedroom, and get him to spank you so you know he still cares. Sounds like a plan.”
“Shut up,” Avia laughed.
“What do you want to do, Sister?”
Avia twirled her empty wine glass. “I want to stop being afraid.”
“And what would you do if you weren’t afraid?”
A slow smile spread over Avia’s face.
Wednesday, March 8th, 2017
“You want to build an 800-foot-high penis?”
Nicholas Hart looked out over the Rocky Mountain front range as the helicopter flew him and big brother Ben to the Castle. It was a word he always capitalized in his mind. Everything to do with Ben seemed to need upper case. He’d been a little CHARMER in elementary school, a baseball STAR in high school. An online PHENOMENON in college.
Ben glanced over at his far more brilliant and much handsomer younger brother. “A tower. Like the Stratosphere in Vegas. Only the condos and hotel ro
oms and shopping won’t spread out below, they’ll be-”
“-the shaft of a giant dick.” Nicky laughed. He pulled off his headphones as they landed.
Inside the hidden elevator that took them to the ground and the walkway to the palas, where their research and development was located, Ben stopped arguing. “Okay. So I want to be the biggest cock in the Denver skyline.”
Nicky shrugged. “It’s your money. What brought this on, anyway?”
“Cheong wants an exclusive twenty-year contract for Hartline products in all his hotels. I’m thinking I can have my own hotels and my products will be exclusive to them. I might even build one in Macau.”
“So you’re refusing Cheong again?”
“I’m going over next week. So, we’ll see.”
Nicky knew “we’ll see” was Bencode for I’ll make him come around to my point of view.
“Let me guess. You’ll give him five years to make sure the idea works and get your own plan in place and then dump him.”
They entered the palas and walked directly into the wide central room dotted with workstations. No one else was in evidence. This was the Hart brothers playroom.
“I wanted to ask you about the safety of the thing,” Ben said as they arrived at a large wooden crate holding their newest prototype.
“I’m no high rise construction expert,” Nicky said. “I’m a materials guy.” They both donned work gloves. Nicky picked up a crowbar. “I know of a guy you can talk to, though.”
“Okay, but answer a question?”
There was a surprisingly loud metallic creak as the crowbar separated the lid from the box. “Sure.”
“I’ll close down the Tech Center and move all offices to the new tower. That means a lot of internationally powerful people in the hotel from time to time. I know there are firecodes and all that, but I’m still worried.”
“About fire?” Nicky and Ben lifted the heavy square lid from the crate and tossed it aside with a crash of wood on concrete.
