by Roni Loren
“Yes, Papá,” I said, shrinking under that tone of his. “I promise I’ll be there for my birthday.”
Even if it wasn’t to stay. I pressed my face into the throw pillow I had in my lap. I was lying to my father. And leaving my family in a tough spot—for what? To have some crazy, kinky relationship with a boy? I was going to hell.
Worst. Daughter. Ever.
“Good night, Marcela,” my father said coolly.
“Good night. Tell Mamá I miss her.”
“Tell her yourself. Or are you too busy to call your own mother now?”
I swallowed past the dryness in my throat. “Of course not. I’ll call her tomorrow.”
The phone went dead.
I tossed the phone onto the love seat and groaned as I ran my hands over my face.
“That bad, huh?” Bailey asked from her cross-legged position on the floor. She twirled a forkful of spaghetti in the bowl she was holding. She looked so comfortable there hanging out in my apartment. I’d rarely invited her over because if I was home, I was studying. And usually she had to drag me to go out so I’d see something besides my four walls. But it was nice having her here now.
“I lied through my goddamn teeth,” I said, reaching for the glass of wine. “I don’t know how I’m going have this conversation. I thought I could, but how am I supposed to tell him I’m going to deviate from the path I’ve been planning all my life? He’ll hate me, Bay. Hate me.”
She frowned. “Your dad may get mad, but he won’t hate you. You’re just trying to live your own life.”
“No, you don’t know him. Forgiveness is not his strong suit.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, my sister, Luz, got pregnant at seventeen and . . . didn’t go through with the pregnancy. My dad cut her out of our family like she didn’t exist. She was just a kid who made a bad decision with her boyfriend, but there were no second chances. That was it. Done. He gave her money to get an apartment and then told her not to come home again.”
“Wow, that’s . . . harsh.”
“I know,” I said, between gulps of wine. “Now you know why I’m terrified to tell him. Luz has struggled every day since then—alone with no support around her. If Andre, my oldest brother, or I want to talk to her or see her, we have to do it on the sly without my parents knowing. She puts on a brave face and is too proud to accept money from any of us, but I can’t imagine what that must be like. My family is everything to me. Going through life without them being there, I don’t even want to think about it.”
Bailey set her bowl in her lap, sympathy crossing her features. “Your brothers wouldn’t disown you.”
I sighed. “No, they wouldn’t. But how could I walk away from my mom?”
“It’s not like you’re breaking the law or anything. You don’t think your mom would forgive you?”
“Not if my dad told her not to. She does everything he says without question. It nearly killed her when he kicked Luz out, but she didn’t stop him. Honor thy husband and all that crap. She just went to church and prayed for days on end, lighting candles and saying her rosary novena. I remember crying for my sister at night because I had no idea why they wouldn’t let her come home. I was too young at the time for them to tell me the real reason, so all I knew was that she did a ‘very bad thing’. After that, I thought anytime I broke a rule, the same thing would happen to me.”
“Geez, talk about pressure. No wonder you’re such a straight arrow,” she said, shaking her head.
“Ha. Right. A straight arrow,” I scoffed. “Not so sure that label applies anymore.”
She cocked an eyebrow at me. “Seriously? You’re going to take a kickass job instead of going back home. It’s not like you’ve gone all Britney and shaved your head during a drug bender or something.”
I kicked back the last of my wine, letting the warmth of it burn through my chest before meeting Bailey’s gaze again. “I’m not exactly staying for the job alone.”
Her fork hovered halfway to her mouth, then after a beat, my comment apparently registered. She set the bowl and fork on the glass coffee table with a clank.
“Oh. My. God. There’s a guy, isn’t there? I knew it! You’ve been acting so weird lately.” She pushed up from the floor and plopped on the other side of the couch from me, her dinner forgotten and her eyes wide. “Is it Pike? Please God, tell me it is. Because, seriously, if you’ve seen him naked, I’m going to need detailed descriptions. And possibly drawings. How comfortable are you with hidden video? Because I’d be willing to pay you for that, too.”
I snorted. “Fangirl much?”
She grabbed a pillow and swung it at me. “Yes. Talk, bitch!”
I dodged the blow with an elbow and set down my empty glass. “Calm down. Lord, wine makes you mean, you know that?”
Bailey narrowed her eyes.
“Fine. No, it’s not Pike. We’re just friends. Though,”—I gave her a conspiratorial look—“I have seen him naked, and believe me, a drawing could not possibly do him justice.”
Bailey’s mouth formed a perfect O, making her look like one of those dolls that you squeeze to make sing, only no sound came out.
“But I’m kind of in a thing with his roommate, Foster,” I finished.
She closed her eyes and held up a finger in the I-need-a-moment gesture. When she opened her eyes again, she had the expression of a girl on a mission. “Let’s put a pin in that whole, I have a ‘thing’ with some guy you’ve never mentioned to me before. And rewind back to the part where you’ve seen Pike—the drummer of frigging Darkfall—naked.”
I curled my lips inward, debating on how much I should tell her. I’d never really had a friend I talked about sex things with. Well, mostly, because I had no sex things to actually share. And my closest friends back home were raised even more conservatively than I was—nice girls don’t talk about those things aloud. But Bailey had sure done her fair share of telling me about her escapades. She didn’t have much of a filter.
And though she’d prodded me about my reasons for not dating anyone, I’d never admitted to her that I’d been a virgin. Mainly because she would’ve staged her own version of The Bachelorette: Virgin Edition to get me laid. However, tonight the need to talk to someone about all that was going on in my life was filling me like helium, leaving me ready to burst. Maybe it was time to trust Bailey as a real friend instead of holding her at arm’s length like I’d been doing with everyone since I started school.
Plus, I had been studying the binder Foster had given me. It did say a good safety net to have in place was to make a friend you could trust aware of what you were doing so you could check in with that person when you were out with someone new. Foster wasn’t exactly new, but I figured the rule could still apply.
“So, okay,” I said, gathering my courage and pretending to study a chip in my nail polish so I didn’t have to look at her. “I sort of went out with both Pike and Foster the night of graduation. Your tequila was involved. And, you know, I didn’t come home until morning.”
A soft gasp. “Ho. Lee. Shit, Cela. Both of them?”
Blood rushed to my face as I braced for the judgment. “I didn’t sleep with Pike. We just fooled around but—”
“You are my fucking hero.”
My gaze snapped upward. “What?”
“Are you kidding me? I would lose my shit being within three feet of Pike. I could barely string a sentence together when he walked in the other day. And you, Ms. All Study and No Play, managed to snag not just him but his roommate, too? And I bet the roommate’s just as hot, right? The hot ones tend to group together.”
“So hot,” I said, sagging into the couch, relieved to get the confession out. “Like I can barely look at him without wanting to jump and squeal like a twelve-year-old with Bieber fever. It’s ridiculous.”
Bailey sighed wistfully. �
��Just rub it in, Medina.”
I rolled my eyes. “Like you don’t have dudes lining up.”
“Dudes, Cela, frat guys who want to show me how proficient they are at keg stands. Not smoking-hot rock stars.”
“Foster isn’t a rockstar. He’s a business guy, owns a company.”
“He owns a company.” She blinked then reached for a garlic breadstick, shoving a bite of it in her mouth and chewing a little furiously. “I love you, but I’m totally kind of hating you right now. So a sexy CEO, which means he has money and is smart. Oh, how you suffer. And now you have a ‘thing’ with him? What kind of thing? Obviously enough to keep you here.”
I looked at the closed binder sitting on the bottom shelf of the coffee table. I nodded at the wine bottle. “You better pour us both another glass. This may take a while.”
Her eyebrows disappeared beneath her bangs, but she filled up the glasses again.
I had a feeling it was going to sound even crazier out loud than it did in my head, but there was no turning back now. She’d either grill me for every last juicy detail or drag me to the campus psychologist for an eval. Here goes nothing.
***
Foster looked up from his laptop at the sound of ferocious growling. On the far side of the living room, Monty had his head sticking out from under the blanket in his dog bed, teeth bared, and Pike was standing over him in a bouncer stance, an odd expression on his face.
“What are you doing?”
“Projecting calm, dominant energy,” Pike said, his voice even as he looked forward and not at Monty or Foster.
“I don’t think Monty has the mental capacity to enter a Safe, Sane, and Consensual agreement with you. And to be honest, I think he may be a top.”
Pike turned then, his face contorting as he tried not to laugh. “Stop. I’m trying to send a message here.”
“Not sure he’s getting it.”
Monty snarled and snapped at Pike’s boot, and Pike bent over and touched Monty’s side with his fingers in a quick, snake-strike motion. “Tsch!”
Monty ducked his head and backed off.
“Ha!” Pike said, grinning at Foster. “Look at that. Shit actually works.”
Foster laughed. “And what shit would that be exactly?”
“Cela told me about how training dogs is all about teaching them to be calm and submissive so you can be the pack leader. And so I downloaded all these episodes of The Dog Whisperer. That dude could make Cujo turn into Benji. But I think it’s starting to work. That’s the first time Monty hasn’t gone into full attack mode when I corrected him. Your girlfriend’s a genius.”
“Cela’s not my gir—” Foster started, but then his lips clamped shut. He’d been about to correct Pike on the erroneous term. Foster didn’t have girlfriends. Not since the Darcy debacle. But wasn’t that exactly what Cela was going to be? He could dress it up with the D/s terms. She was his submissive. But this was so much more than a play partner at The Ranch. He was inviting her into his life. His throat narrowed a bit, making it hard to breathe for a moment.
“Uh-oh,” Pike said, stepping away from Monty’s bed. “I know that look. Don’t get all freaked out now. You brought this on yourself.”
“Brought it on myself?” He scowled. “You make it sound like I’ve come down with an illness.”
Pike plopped down in a chair and propped his heels on the coffee table. “Look, I’m not judging. I think Cela’s great and hot and smart and hot.”
“I got it,” Foster said irritably.
He smirked. “But just be careful. She’s young and doesn’t know what she wants right now.”
“She knows. That’s why she’s staying here,” Foster said, the conviction in his tone faltering only slightly.
“For now,” Pike said with a frown. “You’ve dazzled a virgin with your worldly ways. Bravo, boy wonder. Big feat.”
Foster pushed his laptop closed with a loud snap, Pike’s sarcasm digging right under his skin. “Now wait a second—”
Pike held up a hand. “Hear me out. You remember me telling you about, Ms. Briarstone, my junior year math teacher?”
Foster leaned forward and slid his computer onto the table, annoyance pumping through him. “Yeah, you never shut up about her back then. You said she wore skirts that inspired even you to learn quadratic equations.”
Pike gave a wistful sigh and got a far-off look in his eye. “Ah, those pencil skirts. When she’d lean over her desk to grab her notes, you couldn’t see any panty line. Not one. I lost days of my life wondering what was beneath—something sexy or nothing at all?”
“What does this have to do with anything?”
He brought his gaze back to Foster. “Because the night of my junior prom, I didn’t fuck the girl I’d taken to the dance. I lost my virginity to Ms. Briarstone at a shitty little motel she drove me to outside of town.”
Foster’s brows dipped. “You told me you did it with Laurel Woods freshman year.”
“Yeah, well, I lied. Laurel was my first blow job.” He pulled his feet off the table and braced his forearms against his thighs. “But my point is that I lost my virginity and fell in fucking love, dude. I thought that was it. No one could ever be as hot or perfect as her. I mean, she wore thongs and garters and shit. No girl in high school was going to top that.”
Foster sniffed, having trouble picturing Pike with hearts in his eyes.
“But of course all that rush of feeling wasn’t real. It was just me being young and stupid and horny as shit. We fooled around a few more times, but the novelty eventually wore off and we moved on.”
“Man, that’s kind of fucked up. She was a grown woman, and no offense, but you were a pretty screwed-up kid back then. She shouldn’t have messed with you.”
He shrugged. “Fucking a beautiful older woman was the least of my potentially psychologically damaging experiences back then. And hell, if I was with her, at least I didn’t have to go home to sleep.”
Foster sighed and leaned back against the couch, Pike’s warning echoing his own worries. “For the record, you’re not telling me something I’m not already worried about. I know I’m a novelty to Cela right now, and that on some level, I represent all the bad in her good-girl world. But it feels like more, Pike. When we’re together, there’s this sense of . . . rightness. Like she’s supposed to be mine. And she chose to stay here. But, don’t worry, I’m keeping myself in check about it.”
“Sure you are.” Pike shook his head, but there was a smile there. “You’re so fucked, my friend.”
Monty barked, as if seconding that remark.
“No, I’m serious. I’m not letting myself get too deep yet. I’m just seeing how it goes.”
“Uh-huh,” Pike said, obviously unconvinced. “Just be careful.”
There was a loud knock at the door and a shout of, “Delivery!”
Pike glanced toward the sound as Monty scrambled toward it in full guard-dog mode. “What’s that about?”
Foster pushed off the couch. “You don’t want to know.”
But Pike was already hopping up from his chair and beating Foster to the door. He swung it open. The guy on the other side handed Pike a clipboard. “Delivery for Ian Foster. We wanted to make sure you were home before we brought it up.”
Pike looked down at the paperwork, obviously scanning it to see what was being delivered. He turned to Foster with his jaw slack. “Tell me you didn’t.”
“Shut up.” He grabbed the clipboard from him and signed.
Pike laughed and put a hand on his shoulder. “So. Fucked.”
Chapter 25
I walked up the stairs to my apartment Tuesday afternoon with butterflies the size of mutant bats in my belly. Foster had emailed me informing me that we’d be going out tonight, and that he’d left instructions for me in an envelope he’d slipped under my door.
When I unlocked my door and saw the innocuous white rectangle lying atop the rug I’d knelt on the last time I’d seen him, a frizzle of anxiety went through me. I picked it up and brought it into the kitchen to set down the rest of my stuff. But that was about all I could manage before tearing it open. Inside were a note and a key.
I unfolded the letter.
Cela,
Thank you for emailing me your hard and soft limits. Tonight you will accompany me to dinner to further work out the details of our arrangement. I’ve selected what I’d like you to wear. It’s hanging in the entryway closet in my apartment. Use this key to retrieve it. Only wear what I’ve provided. Nothing else. Wear your hair down.
Do not drink any alcohol beforehand. I need you clearheaded and totally focused tonight.
I will pick you up at seven. Be ready.
—F
My breath whooshed out of me, the curt instructions waking something inside me. And so it would begin. Deep end of the pool, here I come.
***
After a long shower, a detailed grooming session, and a blowout, I slipped into the strapless dark magenta dress Foster had picked out for me. The luxurious material slid over my bare skin like a soft caress, inspiring images of Foster’s fingers gliding over me. Warmth gathered between my thighs. Hell, if I was already getting worked up, it was going to be a long dinner. I’d managed to obey his instructions not to get off, but reading through all the information over the weekend, and even talking about some of it with Bailey, had wound me tight enough to feel constantly on edge.
I took a calming breath and reached for the panties he’d included—a little triangle of satin that barely covered anything. I was surprised he’d even given them to me. I figured any guy, given the chance, would have a girl wear nothing at all beneath her dress. But after I slipped them on and headed to the other side of my bedroom to get the black belt and heels he’d provided, I realized exactly why he’d chosen the panties. The fabric instantly molded to my freshly shaven skin and the wetness that seemed to be ever present since I’d gotten home, making me that much more aware of my arousal. I groaned and ventured a glance toward my bedside drawer, where my handy-dandy vibrator was stored.