The Surrender Gate: A Desire Exchange Novel

by Christopher Rice

  But there’s a flutter in her chest, and she can’t tell if it’s fear, desire, or some new sensation that proves there’s often very little difference between the two.

  For the first time in twenty-four hours, Jonathan doesn’t seem like he’s wildly, inexplicably on fire for her. After the silence of their ride across town, he seems just as full of doubt as she is.

  “Just say it,” he finally whispers.

  “What?”

  “Whatever you’re thinking, just say it. Don’t edit. Don’t censor. Don’t…” He’s staring into her eyes now and even though his handsome face is sliced by streetlight glow, there are new possibilities in that stare that would have seemed absurd just a few days before. “It’s me, Em. It’s still me. No matter what happens, it will always still be me.”

  “Fine…I think there’s a switch you know how to turn off, Jonathan. You turn it off with your clients and last night you turned it off with me. And it doesn’t make me special or not special. It just…It just means we did what we had to do in that moment. And I’d hate to think that…”

  “Hate to think what?”

  “I’d hate to think that the only way we could be together is if we kept sleeping together. Even if we didn’t really want to.”

  “I don’t sleep with people I don’t want to sleep with.”

  “Except your clients.”

  “They’re my clients because I choose to sleep with them, Em.”

  You chose to take their money and then you chose to sleep with them, she wants to say. But she knows this is an argument for another night. She knows that Jonathan’s attitudes about sex have always been different from her own. He is far better than she is at using the other parts of his body to mend a broken heart. Although, she can’t remember the last time his heart has been broken all that badly. Except for maybe Remy, but that was so long ago.

  “Alright,” she says. “Fine. But I’d hate to think we were just having sex with each other because we’ve destroyed our friendship.”

  “Emily, I don’t—what? I mean, what does that even—”

  “It means we keep screwing because we know there’s nothing to go back to if we stop, Jonathan. That’s what it means, okay?”

  Why does he look like she’s just slapped him? How can he seem so sidelined by this idea? Has he not paused to consider the very possibility himself? Is he truly that progressive, liberated, enlightened—whatever he’s calling it this week?

  “You really think we’ve destroyed our friendship?” She hates the injured tone in his voice. He sounds half his age suddenly and she feels like some cruel school marm, raining on everyone’s parade with her talk of pesky things like probable outcomes and reality.

  “I don’t know,” she says. Now she sounds like the whiny fifteen-year-old.

  “So we make a decision that we stay friends, no matter what happens.”

  “Is it that easy?”

  “It is for me.”

  So is being a hooker, she thinks. And then is enormously, epically relieved she didn’t say it out loud, so relieved, it drains the sting from her tone when she finally responds, “Don’t pin this on me, Jonathan.”

  “I’m not pinning it on you…I’m just…Maybe you could try something different.”

  “This is already pretty different, Jonathan.”

  “No, I mean. Maybe… Maybe it doesn’t have to be a relationship as much as, I don’t know, an addition to what we already have.”

  “An addition, but not a relationship.”

  “Right,” Jonathan says.

  “What does that mean, Jonathan?”

  “No labels. No limits. No rules.” If these words weren’t cheesy enough, the cocky grin and wink he gives her once he’s said them makes her feel like she’s in a beer commercial.

  “Oh, okay. So you still get to sleep with whoever you want and I’m just the token girl at the nonstop sex party that is your life.”

  The breath goes out of him. His lips sputter. Suddenly he’s staring off into space as if she’s presented him with some unsolvable math problem, and she’s sitting there waiting for him to say something, anything, that could convince her the scenario she just described bears no relation to what he’s trying, sort-of, to offer her.

  “Well, it’s not like you’ve got a bunch of marriage offers on the table,” he says, then he sees the expression on her face and suddenly he’s saying everything he can think of to stop her response. “Oh. Crap. No. I didn’t… Aw, shit, Em—”

  “So because nobody wants to marry me right now, I'm supposed to sort of, but not really have an open marriage with you?”

  “I didn't mean it like that,” he whines.

  “How did you mean it?”

  Just then, his cell phone rings. Instead of dismissing the call, he studies the screen, and in its harsh glare, she can see his fixed expression. A client, it has to be. Is he calculating a price?

  In that instant, she has a mad urge to tell him he never has to turn another trick again. That she’ll use her newfound fortune to rescue him from a life of depravity. But there’s no evidence of some terrible debt in Jonathan’s life he’s been working to pay off. Just more cash and prizes, thanks to his extra income. Indeed, it doesn’t look like Jonathan turned to escorting out of some kind of desperation. His new and not-so-secret life seems like the next step in a life of constant sexual exploration and adventure.

  Can this be true? Or is she being blinded by what Jonathan wants her to see? It wouldn’t be the first time, that’s for sure. But none of that is relevant to her now.

  Jonathan Claiborne has not asked to be rescued. Period. And until he does, she’d better not offer to do so with money she hasn’t inherited yet.

  “Client?” she asks.

  He’s about to lie; she can feel it. But instead he shoves the phone back in his pants pocket. “They’ll wait.”

  “Well, don’t let me keep you.”

  “Emily, if I’ve done anything to hurt our friendship, I’ll reboot the last twenty-four hours right here, right now. I’m serious. Nothing’s more important to me than that. But…you’re wrong.”

  “About what?”

  He reaches out and cups the side of her face tenderly in one hand. But there’s a lightness to his touch, a hesitancy, and she can feel a gulf spreading between where they sit now and the things they did to each other the night before.

  “I don’t have a switch that I can turn off, Em. My switches are always on.”

  Emily reaches up and grips Jonathan’s hand, gently guiding it away from her face, down to the space above the gearshift.

  “I know. But mine aren’t.”

  Another noise comes from Jonathan’s phone. This time it’s the text message tone, probably from the same person who just left him a voice mail.

  “Your client awaits,” Emily says.

  “Maybe he’ll let you watch,” Jonathan says with a big goofy grin.

  “Uh huh,” she says, sliding out of the passenger seat and into the humid night air.

  “Don’t go falling through any more skylights, Emily Blaine. There might not be a swimming pool there to catch you next time.”

  “Goodnight, Michael,” she says, thinking So much for a sarcasm-free evening.

  When she looks back from her front walk, she sees him smiling at her through the driver’s side window.

  When they were teenagers and Jonathan first got his license, he made a practice of waiting until she was all the way inside her front door to pull off. But as the years wore on, and Emily started carrying pepper spray in her purse, Jonathan fell out of the habit, often driving away as soon as he saw her keys in her hand, and Emily didn’t think much of it. But tonight, for the first time in years, he’s waited patiently and like a gentleman to ensure she’s well inside her apartment before he leaves.

  He waited so long this time she’s watching him through the small glass window in her front door when his shiny new BMW finally pulls off into the night.

  Of cou
rse, she would see him again. How foolish of her to think otherwise. No, that’s not the fear that’s suddenly chased the breath from her lungs.

  Emily is afraid the Jonathan Claiborne she spent the previous night with has, in an instant, become more fantasy than man, a spectral version of her best friend who just passed out of her life as quickly as his BMW left her neighborhood. She’s sure he will be replaced by the old version again—goofy and friendly and cheerful, a little too confident in his looks—but she’s not sure if that’s a good thing, and she wonders how many solitary moments she will spend trying to resurrect the memory of his first hungry and forbidden kiss.

  7

  Emily dreams of Jonathan.

  She stands at the edge of a swimming pool full of writhing human limbs while her best friend is passed from disembodied hand to disembodied hand, like some crowd-surfing kid at a rock concert. Only he’s unconscious and nude, his body glistening with some translucence thicker than water.

  And then someone’s banging on her front door. Half-asleep, and half-convinced it’s the real Jonathan, beaten and bloodied by some terrible client, Emily opens her front door, but whoever it is, he's pounding on the door at the base of the inside stairs that lead to her second floor apartment. Relieved that whoever it is hasn't broken into her duplex, she stumbles down the chilly steps, clutching the hem of her oversized T-shirt to the side of her waist.

  The door’s not open an inch before a tide of shadow rises before her and Emily thinks. Is this my test? Already? Then she’s slammed against the sidewall of her building, a powerful arm clamped around her chest. In that moment, she’s convinced George Dugas is a liar and a murderer and she’s stupidly walked everyone she cares about into some giant deadly trap.

  “You’re dead, Emily Blaine,” a male voice says in her ear. The voice is accent-less and psycho calm. “Reckless, trusting, and dead.”

  She tries to scream. There’s no hand covering her mouth, after all. That’s when she realizes her captor has applied equal parts pressure to her chest and throat, turning her cry into a dry, breathless wheeze.

  “Don’t scream,” he says. But how he says it is the way someone would say, Don’t touch that stove. And he’s let up the pressure on her throat.

  Suddenly she’s free. She rocks forward on her heels, thinking surely his other arm had her pinned somewhere. But he’s walking up the dark stairs toward the apartment door she left standing open behind her, back to her, as bored with her now as he was intent to choke her just a few seconds before.

  “Burglar alarm?”

  “Who the fu—hell are you?”

  “Drop as many F-bombs as you want, Miss Blaine. Whatever’ll make you remember not to poke your head out of the front door at one in the morning like a chicken about to get—” He makes a swift, axe-falling motion with one flat hand.

  Breathless and half-dressed, Emily is still standing outside the front door to her apartment, as if her name was no longer on the lease. The guy’s all shadow, but he looks incredibly tall. He’s also one flight of stairs above her now, staring down at her from the top step.

  “Burglar alarm?” he asks again.

  She’s got a dozen furious remarks cycling through her head, but she’s too frightened and breathless to manage anything other than a shake of her head.

  “We’ll have one installed tomorrow,” he says. Then he turns and vanishes into the shadows.

  Emily expects to find the guy sitting at her kitchen table, feet propped on the table, beer open beside him. But there’s no such cockiness on display when she steps back inside her apartment. Instead, the tall stranger is checking the windows, throwing the old, paint-flecked locks, opening each one a few inches to test the smoothness of its glide.

  “Did Arthur send you?” she finally says, hating the stammer in her voice.

  “He’s Mr. Benoit to me, but yeah. I’m your shadow now. His words.”

  “There was a better way to do this, you know. You didn’t have to—”

  In what seems like one motion, he hits the switch on the nearest lamp and turns to face her. She’s not sure what’s sidelined her more: his hard-edged intensity or the fact that he’s a Nordic god in form-fitting black jeans and a hooded sweater. His face is all hard ridges and angles except for his generous, full-lipped mouth, which makes him look like he’s either about to snarl at her or kiss her, she can’t tell which. And she can’t tell which one she’d like more.

  “You scared?” he barks.

  “What?”

  “Right now. Are you scared? Shaking? Can’t decide if you want to run screaming from the room or break my frickin’ nose?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Then you’ll remember this moment for the rest of your life, and you’ll never throw open your door for a stranger at one in the morning again. Ever.”

  Having delivered this unforgiving pronouncement, and with no regard for whatever reaction might be written on her face, the guy returns to the task of checking her windows. She’s tempted to comment that if he’s going to be her shadow, he might want to consider not pacing her apartment loud enough to wake her downstairs neighbors, but she’s pretty sure the joke won’t go over well.

  “Own any weapons?” he asks from the kitchen. “Knives, guns.”

  “Kitchen knives and pepper spray. That’s it.”

  “Good. If you’re not well trained on them, an assailant will just use them against you.”

  “You know, it’s not that dangerous, what we’re doing. It’s not like—”

  “It’s not my job to know what you’re doing or what you’re involved in.”

  “Well, if you’re going to be my shadow, it’s going to be kind of hard not to know, isn’t it?”

  When she enters the kitchen, he’s frozen in front of her sink. But he’s staring over one shoulder in her direction. His startled expression suggests he’s not used to being spoken to in this way by a woman half his size, a woman shifting nervously from one foot to another, wearing only a baggy night shirt and no bra, a woman who is, despite her best efforts, gazing at the hard swells of his chest underneath his black T-shirt, wondering if he’s the kind of man for whom anger is just a hop, skip, and a jump away from arousal.

  “It’s not like I’m going to watch you in the shower, Emily Blaine.”

  His voice gets hoarse when it gets quiet, and even though it only lasts a second, the time it takes his eyes to sweep her body leaves trails of gooseflesh up the front of her half-exposed thighs. She feels a sudden, strange stab of guilt, as if these lustful thoughts about her intruder amount to cheating on Jonathan.

  She reminds herself that Jonathan is her best friend, and that his last offer wasn't anything close to what she'd call a real relationship.

  Also, he's gay.

  Then she reminds herself the man before her is a colossal jerk and all she really wants to do is go back to sleep. (Provided she can manage to have a less disturbing dream this time.)

  “So you’re, like, from a private security company or something?” she asks.

  “I’ve worked for Arthur for three years.”

  “Well, I haven’t seen you.”

  “That’s because it wasn’t my job for you to see me.”

  “But now it is?” she asks.

  He turns the knob on the backdoor and the door opens in his light grip.

  “Woops.”

  “You didn’t mean to leave this unlocked?”

  “Downstairs one’s probably still locked.”

  “Still. This is Mid City, not Chateau Estates.”

  “Yeah, well, technically I'm still a restaurant manager, not a spy.”

  “We’re talking about intruders, not assassins.”

  “I get it.”

  “You don’t get it. You have a smart mouth that makes people think you get it. It might even make you think you get it. But it won’t mean squat when you’re in a dangerous situation.”

  “And what do you rely on? Shock and awe?” And lips, and that jawl
ine, and those biceps and that…brawn. That’s the word that keeps strobing through her head. It’s rare that she meets a man who truly personifies it, but that’s what this guy has. Brawn. She slaps herself, silently, on the inside, without lifting a hand, and tells herself she’s just sexualizing the guy to distract herself from her fear, from the loss of control she felt when he threw her up against the wall outside.

  Bullcrap. She’s sexualizing the guy because he’s sexy.

  “You’re getting a burglar alarm tomorrow,” he says.

  “Can’t wait.”

  “Your attitude will be your responsibility.”

  “Good, then I assume you’ll stop having such a big opinion about it.”

  Even in the kitchen’s harsh overhead light, his face looks sculpted by a master. And his eyes are blue, with lots of white that give them a focused, slightly wild gleam.

  “Whatever you’re doing, Miss Blaine, you may not think it’s dangerous, but Arthur Benoit does. That’s why he assigned me to you.”

  “I see that.”

  “I’m just saying, he’s not a stupid man. And he’s scared. Maybe you should be too.”

  It feels like the first honest moment they’ve had together, and the way the man’s eyes suddenly cut from her feet, to the front door, to the far wall, suggest he doesn’t have honest moments with strange women often. But given how many times she's probably driven past him while he watched her from one of the guardhouses at Magnolia Gate, can he really consider her a stranger?

  “What about Jonathan?” she asks.

  “He’s got a shadow too.”

  “Well, I hope the shadow’s a bottom,” she whispers.

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing,” she says with a smile.

  But he looks nervous and insecure suddenly, maybe because he just failed the test she put to him. She didn’t say who Jonathan actually was, didn’t mention they were working together—if that’s what you could call it—and he gave her the information quickly, without pause. Maybe you’ve been as thrown off guard by me as I’ve been by you, Mister…

  “Marcus,” he says suddenly, as if he’s been reading her mind. “Marcus Dylan.”