RASHID: HER RUTHLESS BOSS: 50 Loving States, Hawaii

by Taylor, Theodora

  One moment the four-person teakwood table is there and the next it is not.

  She stares saucer-eyed at the latest mess I’ve made. “So if I say no, you literally flip a table?”

  I roll over to her, my wheels not stopping until they bump into the legs of her now tableless chair. “Don’t say no,” I answer, my voice far calmer than my resolution. “Come. Here.”

  She considers my edict, then narrows her eyes. “What happens if I say no….again?”

  Little brat.

  I drag her from her seat and spank her for daring to defy me not once, but twice in a row. Then I finger her sopping wet pussy until she begs me to let her come. What happens if she says no to me? I spend the rest of the afternoon answering that question.

  And that night we revise the consent contract. She adds, “telling you no outside the bedroom” as the one and only entry on her list of goals and fantasies. And I add “Punishing you for saying no outside the bedroom” to mine.

  Over the next six weeks, we explore both of these fantasies well.

  She puts on clothes to go grocery shopping during my bi-weekly session with Torture, instead of shopping online. When she gets back, I chase her out onto the garden lanai and forcibly strip her when I catch her. Then I bring her back to my office and tie her naked body over one of my lab stools. I leave her there all afternoon, using my breaks to tease her viciously. She begs me to forgive her, and promises to never do it again so prettily, that I end my business day early, with a special test of the Future Legs.

  Unstable if hip action is attempted, but steady if one stands still for intercourse, I note in my journal, while hot memories flash through my head of how Mika rode me while tied to the chairs. Her hips pushing back and circling, like she was designed by the gods for just such an experiment.

  “What does sayonne mean?” she asks after receiving her couch punishment a few days later. We hadn’t agreed about what to watch on TV, and thus, had ended up viewing nothing with her wrists bound around my neck and my own hands ruthlessly anchoring her on my dick. So that she could sit but not move.

  When she finally agreed that she absolutely wanted to binge Star Trek: Discovery on CBS-All-Access with me, instead of some Korean soap opera, I’d finally let go of her hips. And the ride had been so good for both of us, I let the Urdu term of endearment slip out again.

  I want her to be honest with me, so I decide to be partially honest with her. “I don’t want to tell you. I’m afraid it will scare you away before our six weeks are done.”

  “Scare me how?” she asks with a curious grin. “Does it mean, like, bitch or something.”

  Silly, silly, little rulebreaker.

  “No, just the opposite.” I bring both hands up to her face and trace the groove of her dimples with my thumbs, just as I’d imagined when I first met her in Jahwar. And, in an instant, I’m hard again inside of her.

  “Do you really want to know?” I ask, holding her gaze.

  It feels like a game of chicken. One that she loses when she closes her eyes and sucks one of my thumbs into her mouth instead of answering. Soon, she starts moving her hips again, using my new erection as the subject change this time. I don’t stop her.

  I know she’s scared. Of this. Of our intensity. Totally breakdancing, as she said. The truth is, I am too.

  It’s the little moments between the punishments. Her teaching me to make adobo at the kitchen stove, and the way I feel sad when it comes out perfectly. Because that means I really would be able to cook it myself when she’s gone.

  Over the next few weeks, she often comes to talk to me when I’m doing the scut work of reconfiguring the stairs actuator design and building the waterproof version of Future Legs.

  And on days when Torture visits, instead of leaving me alone in my room while I recover, she comes to lie down with me. Wrapping her body around mine and not seeming to care that I’m tremoring.

  I make her agree to a lot of things. But I find myself saying yes to her more often than no.

  “Yes, I’ll learn how to cook adobo. Yes, you can disturb my work and hang out with me whenever you’re bored. Yes, alright, we can watch your Korean drama while you braid my hair.”

  “Oh, I like them so much. I hope neither of them die before it’s over,” she says when we’re almost done with the K drama binge. There are only a few days left on our six weeks.

  “Why do you binge watch these kinds of shows if there’s a chance of one of them dying in the end?” I ask.

  “I dunno. They don’t all end tragically. Some couples get a happy ending. You just never know until the last two episodes.”

  We’re on the last two episodes…

  I’m sitting between her legs and she’s plaiting my hair into something she calls warrior braids. When we first met, I never would have agreed to such a hairstyle. But I like the feel of her hands on my scalp and the fact that the style keeps the hair out of my eyes when I’m working.

  We are a strange couple, I think, not for the first time. Yet a perfect match.

  And, the heroine decides she does want to be with the hero, after all, in that second to last episode. “Yay!” Mika cheers, her hand still in my hair, even though she’s done with the braids.

  But then as the pretty young woman runs across town to declare her love, she gets hit by a car and dies at the end of the episode.

  Mika slides down to the floor with me, to yell at the television and weep over the tragic couple. I put my arm around her, and she loudly sniffles against my shoulder as the credits roll over the hero walking away from his true love’s grave while a sad sweeping Korean love song plays in the background.

  “How did you remain dry-eyed through that?” she demands with a watery laugh, pressing stop on the remote to keep Netflix from automatically starting a new K-Drama with a happily ever after not guaranteed ending. “God, now I need a hit of baby.”

  She brings out her phone and opens it to her most beloved pastime. Cyberstalking my two best friends. She’d been following Keane on Instagram ever since last summer. And she ran into my office, her breasts bouncing as she jumped up and down, upon discovering the brand new Instagram account Stone’s wife Naima had made after announcing her pregnancy.

  The television above us switches to a holding pattern of Netflix stills as she scrolls through Naima’s latest pictures. And her tears dissipates as she coos over Naima’s baby bump and the picture of Stone walking through a street market with Garnet on his shoulders.

  Then she switches over to Keane’s account which has pictures of Keane’s newborn, but… “No pics of Bono’s secret baby. That’s so annoying!”

  She throws me a pointed look. “If only there was a way to reach out to him and send him a request to post pictures of his brother’s kid to his Instagram account too. Like, a handheld device on which you could send messages through some sort of magical texting system and perhaps even make person-to-person voice calls.”

  I’m aware she is only joking. My still being out of contact with Stone and Keane has been an ongoing point of teasing contention between us. But this time irritation rises within me.

  “Mika?”

  “Hmm,” she answers, still scrolling through Keane’s latest pictures.

  “I haven’t contacted Stone and Keane yet, because when I do, I would like to have good news of my own. I would like to tell them I’ve met someone. Someone I want to make a new beginning with, have children who we’ll raise with love and laughter, and of course, start our own family Instagram account. Until I can do that, I am remaining silent.”

  Her whole body, so relaxed against mine before, has now gone rigid. But the picture of Keane holding his toddler’s hand on the ice while his other two children skate in the background begins to tremble.

  “Mika…”

  She jumps to her feet. “You know what, I’m really tired. I’m going to sleep in my room tonight.”

  My chest tightens. Her room upstairs. She hasn’t slept there once in this entire s
ix weeks. She’s moved most of her things downstairs, including her toiletries and most of her clothes. I even discovered what a menstrual cup was when she was on her monthly flow, that’s how intimate we have become over the past weeks.

  Like a couple, who was always meant to be. But now she looks down at me, as if I’m a stranger, and she can’t get away from me fast enough.

  “Mika, don’t. Stay. Talk to me.” The words come out as commands, but inside it feels like I’m begging.

  And it doesn’t work. She’s headed to the stairs before I’m done talking. Running away from me. Again. This time up the stairs where I can’t chase her.

  26

  MIKA

  Do I feel like a shitty human being after I run away from Rashid? Dashing up the stairs, because I know he won’t be able to follow?

  Yes, most definitely.

  But breakdancing, breakdancing, breakdancing…that’s all I can think as I try to figure out what to do.

  I have to keep him safe. I can’t risk him getting hurt like Leon.

  But when he said that to me, put that image in my head of us having our own Instagram-worthy family…God, it hurt.

  It’s like he didn’t just spend the last six weeks breaking down my sexual fantasies, but my secret relationship ones, too. I wish I was free like that. Free to love him. Free to start again.

  But I’m not. I pull out my phone. Bible verses…they started rolling in once a week when I got back to Hawaii, then once a day, after the morning I ventured out to the grocery store.

  If we contain the relationship here, he’ll be safe. But if we don’t…

  All those thoughts cut off when the door suddenly slams open behind me.

  I turn, then gasp when I see Rashid on his stomach in the doorway, his face dripping with sweat.

  Oh God, he must have pulled himself up the stairs, I realize at once, through sheer willpower alone.

  That’s the last chance I get to think.

  In the next moment, he’s soldier crawling across the marble floor. And before I realize his intent, he’s grabbed me by the ankle and pulled with a deliberate yank, upending me face first into the covers.

  I barely have time to yelp in surprise, before he’s on top of me, his crushing weight pushing me even further into the bed. “Tell me you remember the safe words,” he hisses in my ear.

  Suddenly I understand what’s happening. He told me to stay and talk to him. And I said no by running. Part of me considers saying, “Robot” as this game teeters into very real territory.

  But another part of me wants this. Needs this.

  He likes to punish, and I want to be punished. For both my silly rebellions and the things I can’t forgive myself for. Like my obliviousness to those girls in the crate and the wishful thinking that made me return to him in Hawaii, even though I knew I wasn’t free from the start.

  “Tell me you remember.” His voice cold and hard in my ear. The exact opposite of when he asked about starting an Instagram family.

  Good.

  “I remember,” I tell him, instead of saying, “robot.”

  The time for words is done after that. Hooking both arms beneath my shoulders, he pulls down and impales me on his dick with a snarling growl. Filling me completely and stretching my pussy to its very limits. Then he begins to take me with angry rocking strokes, his breath hot against my ear and low, coarse animal grunts falling from his lips.

  He sounds and feels like an animal on top of me. And that only makes my arousal build even faster. This isn’t about boundaries or safety or fantasy this time. It’s about punishment. The punishment I deserve. I whine with shame, even as I bend one leg to let him in deeper. Deeper than I ever thought possible.

  “Ice cream!” I cry out. Again and again.

  Neither of us lasts long under the circumstances. After a few more hard rocks, he cuts off with a stream of angry Urdu. I don’t have to beg this time. I feel his cock jerk inside of me as one of his hands transfers to around my neck. “Come,” he commands, choking me. “Come now, sayonne.”

  The orgasm is a nuclear explosion. It flashes through me, blinding me with its light. And though his hand has fallen away from my neck, I choke on my own breath, unable to see, hear, or comprehend.

  When I eventually come back to the real world, I’m dizzy, and there’s a strange ringing in my ears like a bomb really did go off somewhere. Maybe in my soul.

  “Okay, sayonne, your punishment is done,” I hear him say in the distance. “If you do not wish to talk downstairs, we will sleep up here tonight.”

  This is what he always does, I recall as my ears stop ringing. Punishes me for my no, then finds a way to compromise. He thinks he’s broken. But he’s perfect. So perfect still.

  He swings around the bed on his arms and I make my liquified body move. Somehow we manage to get underneath the covers of the bed I haven’t had to bother to make for weeks. Together. But I can feel his body tremoring. From his own coming or the extra exertion he had to put into pulling himself up that long flight of stairs and then giving me that punishing fuck, I’m not sure.

  But I’m grateful he came to get me. Grateful to be sleeping with him tonight, despite my efforts to escape him earlier. And instead of trying to run away again, I reach up to flip the switch by the bed that turns off all the room’s lights.

  “You asked me why I punished you so harshly on our first full day together. Why I withheld your orgasm, even after you begged and cried. It was as I told you. I wanted to punish you for how you made me feel. And that…that was how not being able to have you made me feel inside. From the moment we met.”

  Each sentence feels like a quiet explosion in the dark.

  Then he drops one last bomb. “Sayonne…it means soulmate. Soulmates, that’s what I believe we are.”

  My eyes well with tears. And I wish…I wish so many things, that can never come true.

  RASHID

  Her tears fall onto my chest. Small and silent. Tomorrow, I think. Tomorrow I will make her explain to me why she believes our relationship can only be temporary, and whatever obstacle she lists, I will remove it.

  My body spasms, racked with the pain of my exertions. But lying there with her in my arms, I regret nothing.

  Yes, tomorrow, we will talk, I silently vow as I drift off to sleep. And no matter what it takes, I will convince her to stay here in this paradise we’ve made. Together.

  But when I wake up the next morning, I find myself alone. In a very cold bed. How long has she been gone?

  I raise up on one elbow to call out to her, only to stop, my heart ices over when I see the post-it attached to the alarm clock on her nightstand.

  The yellow note only has one word written on it.

  ROBOT

  27

  MIKA

  “Mika? Mika? What are you doing here?” Jazz asks when I appear at the North Shore beach where she’s teaching the camp’s morning surfing class.

  “Where’s Albie?” I demand with a gasping breath.

  “He just paddled out with the rest of the kids.” Judging from her concerned expression, I must look exactly how I feel. Crazed and frantic. I don’t care. The pictures I found on my phone this morning are still flashing through my head.

  “Albie!” I scream, walking into the surf when I see him out past the break, waiting for the next set to roll in. “Albie come back!” I wave my hands and jump up and down, but he doesn’t see me.

  “What’s this all about?” Jazz asks, splashing into the water to stand beside me. “What’s wrong?”

  “The Lacerdas sent me a text,” I answer. “But this one wasn’t a Bible verse or a phone call, it was a picture of Rashid and me sleeping in the upstairs bedroom.”

  A slimy chill goes through me, remembering how I’d been so confused when I saw the picture of Rashid and me from last night. He was on top of me and my head was thrown back in ecstasy.

  And before I had time to fully process what I was seeing, a text came through underneath the pic
ture, “Does he know what happened to the last guy who tried to make you forget your vows? Got a bullet with your sand rat’s name on it. If you don’t want him to get hurt or worse, leave Hawaii now. ”

  Then another picture came through. This one was of me standing next to the bed, reading the text message I’d just gotten.

  “Whichever Lacerda sent those texts watched us last night. And they’re still watching us,” I say after I finish telling my sister, how I’d quickly gathered my things and drove straight here. “It was a mistake to come back to Oahu. I can’t believe I played with Rashid’s life by returning to Hawaii a second time. That I was so caught up in the idea of having six weeks with him that I ignored all the escalation signs—”

  I break off to scream across the water again, “Albie! Albie!”

  “That’s not going to work,” Jazz says beside me. “Even a bullhorn wouldn’t break through the noise of those waves. But he’ll be back in within the next twenty minutes—”

  She breaks off when I turn and start running up the beach toward the boy’s cabin as best I can in ocean-drenched flip flops.

  “What are you doing?” Jazz asks behind me.

  “Getting his things!” I answer. “If it’s going to take twenty minutes I want to be ready to go.”

  I burst into the boys’ cabin and quickly find Albie’s bunk.

  “Mika, wait. Will you just wait?” Jazz comes running up just as I reach the duffel he’s left open beside his bed. “You don’t know what I had to do to get you and Albie this opportunity?”

  “I’ll pay you back!”

  “It’s not just about the money. You can’t make Albie leave before camp’s even done because some little island police took dirty pictures.”

  “Those ‘little’ island police have guns!” I point out. “And long-range surveillance equipment, apparently. Plus, we already know they can break into a house and make it look like a home invasion. I’d never forgive myself if they hurt Rashid like they did Leon. Especially after how far he’s come in his recovery.”