“I’m not mad at you, Alexander. Why would I be?”
“That was Shawna.”
“I figured that out.”
“She keeps calling me.”
“She doesn’t want to let you go. I can’t blame her for that.”
“I’ve told her it’s over.”
“Yes, I heard you.”
He contemplated me and his expression was aggressive, both offensive and defensive. When I didn’t say anything else, he exhaled harshly. “You’re not going to have a big blow-out over it? Accuse me of secretly talking to my ex every time you leave the room?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because every other woman I know would have some big fucking ballistic tirade over it.”
I wasn’t sure what had gotten into him. I guessed it might have something to do with the fact that tomorrow morning Jake’s sentence would be delivered. And Shawna was clearly frustrating him beyond belief. More than I realized. “I guess the obvious answer to that is that … I’m not every other woman.”
He was still glaring at me, as though he wasn’t sure I was being entirely honest with him.
“You already explained it to me,” I said. “How you feel. I believe you. I trust you.”
This information seemed to flick some invisible switch in Alexander. He went very quiet but his body practically hummed with tension. “You trust me,” he finally said.
“Yes.”
Again, he stared down at me. “Prove it.”
“What?”
“I said: prove it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I’m just about going insane, trying to live my life like this. With you in it but somewhere else. Somewhere where I can’t see you or touch you. And even when we are together, you keep things from me. You hold back. What I want you to do, Lila, is to prove you trust me. I want you to give in to me completely. Tonight. I want you to submit to me. Anything I want.”
“I –” His manner was both freaking me out and leeching into me in an entirely different way, touching that under-surface lust he seemed to so easily reach.
“No pulling away. No not answering my questions. Just honesty and trust. Just giving in.”
“I already do all that,” I said, feeling strangely shy.
“No.” His hand was on my arm. His long fingers circled my wrist.
“Alexander.” He was pushing too hard. He knew I had places in me he couldn’t go. My heart was pounding in my chest at the gentle vice-grip of his fingers. He was pulling his belt out of its loops.
“Trust me.”
“I do.”
“All the way.” He slowly, slowly unzipped my dress, peeling it off my shoulders. He let it fall to the floor. He just stood there, waiting for me to adjust. To allow. He kissed my lips in a light, erotic brush. His fingers found the clasp of my bra and he pulled it off.
I was breathing more heavily now. I could be more abandoned with Alexander than I’d ever been. But this, something in this was different. He was searching deeper. Looking for locked, hidden secrets. I didn’t know how I felt, or how I should feel. I could feel long-buried abysses in my soul pulse in a dark, painful rhythm. Very, very gently, he gripped both my wrists in front of me. He began to loop his belt around them. “Do you trust me?”
“I don’t need to –”
“I need you to. I need you to let me learn you. I won’t hurt you.” He pulled the belt tighter. Around my wrists. Manacling me. Trapping me.
Unearthing a horrific, surging flashback.
You stay put, girl. Learn your place. You ain’t goin’ nowhere. If tyin’ you up is the only way to make you obey, then tyin’ you up’s what I’ll have to do. Now, hold still while I –
I made a small moan, a spoken exhale. There was something alarming about that sound. Like a wounded animal. I pulled away from him, but the belt and his grip were too tight. Rolling waves of panic sparked and whined in a high-pitched noise in my brain. “Stop,” I said. “Take it off. Take it off!”
He let the belt fall from my wrists, and dropped it to the floor. He didn’t touch me, just spoke to me in a low, calming voice. It took several seconds before I could focus. Time seemed off somehow, elastic and surreal. I looked at his face. “It’s me, Lila. Me. Alexander. Your Alexander. Look at me.”
I did. I looked at him. I looked in his eyes and I could see his own alarm. Beyond that, I could see his dawning understanding. Right there in the gold flecks of his irises. He’d learned something about me he’d never known.
“You’re all right, Lila. You’re safe. Look at me. I won’t hurt you. I love you. I’m here to protect you. You’re safe. You’re all right.”
It was bizarre: my knees didn’t feel like they could support me anymore. Alexander caught me and I flinched at the contact but he hugged me closer, lowering us to the floor where he cradled me on his lap and held me while I cried.
I’m sorry, he was saying. It’s good. Let it out. Let it go.
I don’t know how long we sat there like that, me crying, him crooning to me in a low litany of reassurances. It helped. It was working. He seemed to know exactly what to say. The cage fell away. His arms began to feel familiar again, like the safety net I knew them to be.
I could see the walls, the windows. Reality was returning to me. The old shabby house was gone. The peeling wallpaper and locked doors. The iron bed with the sagging mattress. Gone. Replaced by shining windows and glittering lights. Soft, clean carpeting and expensive leather furniture.
“Alexander.”
“Right here, honey girl.”
I looked up at him. His expression was soft, so incredibly beautiful. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why –”
“It’s okay. That’s what I’m here for. To catch you.”
“I remembered something.”
“Tell me,” he said, gently playing a curl of my hair. “Just a little. It’ll help. It always helped Jake, too.”
Jake. Of course. Jake had suffered, too. And Alexander had been the one to guide him out of the darkness and back out into the light. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Tell me one thing. Just one. Every one thing you let go of loosens it. Digs it up and lets it fly away. You’ll feel lighter afterwards. Try it. I’ll close my eyes.”
“Why?”
“It always made it easier for Jake if I closed my eyes when he talked about stuff. When he was little.”
Alexander closed his eyes. It did make it feel easier, weirdly. But it was difficult to start. Too difficult.
“Just one thing,” Alexander said softly.
I kept my eyes open. I looked at Alexander’s face. His soft, thick hair that I loved. “He used to use ropes. Those hard, thin yellow ones that hurt when you try to break free.”
I fell silent. The residual anguish was making my stomach feel hollow, and sick.
“One more.”
I took a deep breath and it felt like I was inhaling into corners that were so old and dusty and dank I almost coughed. But it felt good. To get some fresh air in there. “Once he kept me tied up for a whole week. He’d bring food and water but he’d only give it to me if I –”
Alexander’s eyes opened. I could see the layers of his emotion in vivid detail: the sorrow, the fury, the pain. When I didn’t continue, he said, “He’s gone now, you know.”
“What?” My voice sounded scratchy and tired.
“I tracked him down. Just so I could –”
“What? Why?” I sat up, panicky and unhinged. “Why would you do that?”
“He’s dead, Lila.”
I felt my eyes widen in horror. “You –”
“I didn’t kill him. Jesus. I mean, I could have. But I didn’t. He drove his car off the road in the middle of the night a few years ago. Drunk. I had a private investigator look into it. Just so I could make sure he … never re-surfaced.”
“Oh my god,” I heard myself gasp. “He’s dead?”
“Yes. Gone. You can deal wit
h what happened to you and move on. I’ll help you. I want to help you break free of it. I know that’s easier said than done but I’m here for you, honey. Right here.”
“He’s dead,” I said again.
It was true what Alexander had said. I felt lighter. I felt free and light and so exhausted I let the tears do their thing and I closed my eyes. Alexander picked me up and carried me to the warm expanse of his bed, where he wrapped his arms around me and held me close.
I did not dream and the black sleep fell over me like a kind of death.
***
At some point in the night, I woke up. It wasn’t a gradual, drowsy transition but a sudden, eyes-wide-open awareness. It took me a second to figure out where I was. When I looked over at the digital clock on Alexander’s bedside table it read 3:48.
There was an unfamiliar looseness in me, as Alexander had said there would be. Like some locked, guarded, torturous door in my psyche had been opened, just a crack, letting light in. I felt an urge to act on it. To open it further. Now that I understood the healing effect that one small confession could give me, I wanted more. I wanted to tell him everything so I could, as he’d said it, Let it out. Let it go.
Alexander was asleep. He lay on his stomach, as he often did when he slept. His arm was slung around his pillow and his face was softly lit by the blue-gold light of the far-away city.
I let my fingers gently drift across his muscular shoulder. “Alexander?” I whispered. I almost changed my mind. He should sleep. He worked so hard. I was learning, after almost a full work week together, that Alexander worked like he did everything else: all in. I wasn’t surprised by this at all, of course. You don’t become a billionaire off your own steam by the age of thirty-three without some serious grit, sweat and dedication. If I hadn’t known beyond a shadow of a doubt that Alexander would want me to wake him up with this, that he’d be downright furious if he knew I was even second-guessing myself, I might not have done it. As it was, I wanted to talk to him. To tell him everything that made me hold back from him, emotionally. Because I knew he wanted to hear it.
“Alexander?” I said again.
“Mmm?” He stirred and his eyes opened. He sort of jerked awake, suddenly alert, looking around the room as though there might be a threat. “What?”
“I’m sorry to wake you.”
Again he scanned the room, then looked at my face. “What’s up? You all right?”
“Can I talk to you?”
He seemed to understand completely. He rolled onto his back and let his head fall back to his pillow. He laced his hands behind his head. “Of course you can, honey. You know that. You know you’re safe with me.” That’s what I’m here for, he’d said. To catch you.
“First of all I want to say something to you,” I said. “To thank you. For being the most decent human being I know. For being so kind to me.”
His mouth quirked in a self-deprecating scowl, like he completely disagreed with the part about him being a decent human being. But he might have sensed that I would balk at the whole spill-my-deepest-darkest-memories gig if I was interrupted too soon.
“Are you sure you don’t mind? You don’t want to go back to sleep?”
“No. I want to listen to you.”
“Where should I start?” I asked, feeling lost.
“At the beginning.”
So I did. “I … I was ten years old. He came to live with us. My mother was excited. She cut back on the drinking for a while, at the very beginning. I guess we felt like it was going to be … like having a family. Something we’d never really felt we had, either one of us. The two of us alone was … well, it was lonely. She couldn’t handle the loneliness and I couldn’t seem to fill that void that my father had left when he walked out on us.”
I paused and Alexander moved his arm, to weave his fingers through mine. It was just the kind of comfort I needed. I kept going.
“She wanted to impress him so she ran the house almost like a normal house for the first month or so. Kept it clean. Cooked dinner and we ate it at the table. But she still never quite seemed able to leave the bottle alone. By night-time she’d be drunk again. She’d miss things. Like the way he looked at me when her back was turned. Or maybe she didn’t miss it. Maybe that’s why the drinking got so bad. I always thought mothers were supposed to protect their children but that’s just not the way it was. She was always passed out by nine or ten at night. And once she was asleep, he would come to my room.”
I focused on the warmth of Alexander’s hand. He didn’t close his eyes this time but his gaze was gentle, on the fingers he softly played.
“You know I always thought of what he did as the worst thing a person could do – and it was. I was a vulnerable child. But lately I’ve started to see it a little differently. It was bad. Awful. But it wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been. He never … took it all the way. There was never a time – not even once – when he was … inside me, not in any way –”
Here, I faltered. Alexander rode it out, this silence, letting me take my time. His hands were so warm, his eyes so incredibly dark.
“It only lasted three months. Not long, really. Not long enough to completely de-rail me for life, I guess. I was his prisoner, but he was very careful not to leave evidence. No bruises, no scars. Not the kind you could see, at least. He was very particular about what was allowed, and what he wanted. It was always the same.”
A few sickening flashbacks came to mind and I let them play out. The pain in my head and my heart was vivid and sharp, but then the images flickered, and the pain began to fade. Just a little.
“I didn’t always obey. I fought him. That’s why he used the ropes, and locked the door. He knew I would run. But I never cried, not once.
“One night, though – that last night – he forgot to secure the ropes. He’d drunk too much. He was very drunk. Stumbling, ranting drunk. He couldn’t –“ It was too difficult to get some of these words out, so I skipped those and kept going. It was enough, anyway. I could feel the long-carried fear beginning to unravel. It was a frightening yet at the same time intensely liberating feeling. “He left my hands tied but he didn’t tie the other end of the rope to the bed, like he usually did. And he forgot to lock the door. I waited til the house was quiet. And I left. I took a blanket and some clothes, and I ran. I didn’t stop until I found I place I could try to cut the rope. There was an old fence with a rusted piece of metal I used as a saw. I couldn’t even dress until my hands were free but it didn’t matter in the dark of night. I was alone. Very, very alone. I cut myself on that fence but I didn’t even notice until the next day. I didn’t even feel it until I saw the dried blood in the morning. And my feet were all cut from running with no shoes on. I swam in the cold river to wash it off. And after that, I lived wherever I could find shelter. A chicken coop, under a bridge or in a barn or sometimes under the canopy of a tree. I never spent more than a night or two in each place. I didn’t want to get discovered. In case they took me back.
“Then once I went back to school, my teacher noticed, of course. I was put into foster care for a while. But then there was another man, looking at me that same way. I ran before it started all over again. And then, they took me back to my mother, after he left. Somebody somewhere must have known what was going on because they never took me back home while he was still there, and he stayed another six months. So then I got returned to my mother and she must have fooled them or something because she was so far gone by then I might as well have been living alone. It would have been easier.” I stopped. I sighed. A light barely-there sigh that was a beginning. Let it go. I felt like that’s exactly what I was starting to do. I’d blocked it out of my mind for so long it felt strange now and somehow wildly therapeutic to tell the story. To let Alexander share the burden and the echo images.
“You’ve been badly hurt, honey, but you’re not damaged,” Alexander said, and his voice was so steady and so sure I knew I could believe him. “Not really. You can heal if you l
et yourself.”
“I already am healing. Because of you.” I paused, taking a minute to think about how to say what I wanted to say. “You know how you said when you met me, on that very first day, that you felt different. You felt a connection to me you never even thought was possible, because you’d never experienced anything like that before. Well I did too. I felt free, for the very first time. And it was a freedom that was strangely … safe. I felt safe with you in a way that didn’t even make sense. I was so used to being afraid. But with you, there was no fear. Just excitement. And an unexplained comfort. And there was something about the combination that made me feel like I was more alive than I’d ever been.”
I gently squeezed his hand, concentrating on the clever play of sinew and bone. I smiled at him and felt a light heat on my face as I said, “I guess my reaction to you was a little … unusual. I’d definitely never had that kind of … response … well, to anyone.”
“Our reaction to each other was definitely unusual. I sure wouldn’t change a thing, though, sweetheart. Not a single thing.”
“So I wanted to tell you: I don’t blame you if you have second thoughts about anything. I know I carry a lot of baggage and I’m sorry about that. I’m glad you know, though. I don’t want to have secrets from you, Alexander.”
He rolled over onto his side and cupped my face with his hand. “Oh, no. No way. I don’t ever want to hear you apologizing to me. Not for that. Not for being who you are. I want you just like this. It’s okay to have baggage, honey. We all have it. None of us are unscathed by life. What I want to do with your baggage is unpack it and rearrange it. Throw away the stuff you don’t need anymore and replace it with stuff that makes you happy. That’s my job as your … as your husband. If you’ll have still have me after I keep fucking up and hurting you.”
“You haven’t hurt me. You helped me.”
He looked thoughtful, and he ran a hand along his jaw. “I need to apologize too. For a couple of things.”
“What things?”
“Two things.”
“What two things?”
HONEY GIRL: BILLIONAIRE (Book 2) Page 9
