And something snapped inside of Leigh.
She got up, her lover’s prick making an audible plop as she dismounted him. She hurried towards the exit, picking up her dress from a silver tray atop a table on the way.
The lust had gone. All the excitement, all the craving. All the fun. It was all gone. All that was left was anger.
She didn’t even look at Jonas as she passed him. But by the time she reached the antechamber, struggling to get back into her dress while still rushing off, she could hear him catching up with her.
“Where are you going?” she heard him ask.
“Home. I’m going home, Jonas.”
She felt him near her, so stopped and turned before he could force her to do it anyway.
“I don’t get this. You were enjoying it, Leigh. I saw you in there, you were definitely getting off on all of this. So why are you doing this now?”
“Yeah, I know you don’t get it. And you know what? I don’t want you to get it. I just want to go home and forget this ever happened.”
She turned to leave, and as she half expected, his hand caught her shoulder. He didn’t force her, or grab her hard, he just made the gesture to persuade her to stay.
There had been enough of that already, as far as she was concerned, so she swatted it off and walked away.
“Leigh… Why are you doing this? This was all for you. This was what you wanted…”
She could hear the defeat in his voice, but that didn’t stop her from getting angrier. It did stop her from leaving, as she turned back towards Jonas. It was all she could do not to slap that perfect face of his.
“What I wanted? Like hell. It’s what you wanted. You wanted all of this, not me.”
“Leigh, these are your fantasies—”
“No, they are not. Don’t you dare say they are! Yes, they look like my fantasies. They’re certainly based on mine. But they’re yours, Jonas. These were your fantasies all the way, you just chose to stick me in the middle of them.”
“Leigh—”
“No! You want to know what’s the problem? I’ll tell you what’s the problem. Remember the day you met me?”
“Yes.” He couldn’t stop a hint of a smile, and despite her anger, Leigh didn’t blame him. The memory was precious to her too.
“Remember consoling me? Putting your arm around me, a perfect stranger, telling me everything was going to be alright?”
“Of course I do. That’s when we became friends.”
“Nope. That’s when you think we became friends. We became friends later because I got to know you, but not then.”
His mouth opened. He tried to say something, but all that came out was a garbled, confused sound. When he didn’t say anything else, she continued.
“Before the crash, that was the happiest day of my life.”
“Before?” he asked.
“Yes, before. When I was driving all the way to college, and all I had in front of me was possibility. When for the first time in my life, I was on my own, free to make my own choices, my own mistakes. To be in charge of my own life for once. Don’t get me wrong, I love my parents, they’re wonderful people. But they do like to take matters into their own hands, and that includes their children’s matters. So yeah, getting out from under their shadow was a relief. I was happy. Then the crash came.”
“And you met us.”
“And I met all of you. And you specifically. I look upon it now as an important day, that led to a lot of great things, and it’s probably the most important day of my life. I love the Club, and I love you, but… Believe me, when a girl is striking out on her own for the first time, and at the first problem she encounters she gets a stranger putting his arm around her saying basically ‘don’t worry, I’ll take care of everything’ is not the greatest thing ever.”
Jonas’ face was tense, his mouth clenched. He started nodding for some reason, though his mood seemed far from positive.
“Oh, that’s fine. That’s rich. It was terrible that we helped you, right? It was a tragedy. But I seem to recall you being glad to take the help. I remember you having no choice at all, in fact.”
“That’s my point! That’s why I’m talking about this. I had. No. Choice. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“I understand that the woman I love apparently thinks that the day we met was horrible.”
“No, that’s not…” Leigh took a deep breath, and tried to compose herself. As angry as she was, she was failing to communicate her point clearly enough. And she needed to be clear. “I’m glad it happened. I’m glad I met the guys, and that I met you, and that you’re as wonderful and amazing as you are. But what I wanted most that day was choice. And with the best of intentions, you took it from me, and I’m starting to think that unconsciously, you made it a pattern.”
“I did no such thing, I—”
“You kidnapped me two days ago!”
“That wasn’t kidnapping, that was…” It was his turn to try to compose himself, and Leigh could see it was hard. “Yes, I took you without asking. I thought you’d like it. Knowing what you like, or thinking I knew, I thought you’d enjoy yourself, and appreciate what I was doing.
“I did enjoy myself, but—”
He raised his hand. “No, let me finish. Please. It’s my turn now.” He paused to make sure Leigh wouldn’t protest, and then continued. “I remember you telling me you’d like to be swept off your feet, to lose yourself in your fantasies, and yet you never did. I wanted to give you that. To literally sweep you off your feet, to make all your fantasies come true, so that when we’d…” Jonas actually cleared his throat. “So that when you eventually settled down with someone, you didn’t have that hanging over you. I thought that was a good thing. Clearly I was wrong, and I’m sorry.”
‘When we’d…” The pregnant pause stuck in Leigh’s head. Did he really mean to say what he almost said?
“It would have been a good thing, yes,” she said. “If I had any choice about the matter. Jonas, I need to have agency in my life, and that includes my sex life. And this past couple of days… You took it all. You had the plan, you made the arrangements, you made the choices. That’s not what my fantasies were about, Jonas.”
“You did make choices. You chose to stay, right at the beginning.”
“Because it was you! Because you offered me the chance to be with you, to finally be with you without fear, and I took it blindly. But everything else… Jonas, minutes ago you gave me a line of men to choose from.”
“Yes. You chose!”
“No, I chose one. You said I could choose two, yet you picked the second one. That was the last straw. Hell, you chose them all to be there in the first place, Jonas!”
Jonas exhaled sharply as his shoulders dropped and his eyes went to the floor.
“So. What do you want to choose now?”
She wanted to kiss him. To throw her arms around his neck, smash her lips against his, pull his body tight against hers. To spend the rest of her days with him, and enjoy how wonderful a human being he was, and how amazing a companion she was sure he could be.
But he had, finally, given her an actual choice. And despite his best intentions, she knew that if she chose to stay with Jonas, choices would be rare.
“I want to go home.”
“Fine,” Jonas said, spinning around and walking away. “Just let the driver know the address. He’ll take you there.”
Leigh stood there. She tried coaxing words out of her mouth. Some sort of goodbye. An acknowledgment of how much Jonas meant to her, and that she knew what she was giving up.
But as he walked back into the other room and closed the door behind himself, Leigh said nothing.
At the office
Some days, Leigh wished she had an assistant of her own.
Brock had actually offered to hire one. Several times, in fact. “You’re not my secretary, you’re my E. A. You don’t have to do everything yourself, you know?”
But Leigh had always
assured him that she was more than up to all her duties and responsibilities. And she was right, too.
Most days, at least.
Today wasn’t one of those days.
It started well enough. Brock approved the meeting schedule she had set up for next week, and the first calls she made to set those meetings fell into place pretty quickly. Then the architect she had scheduled for Tuesday called back and asked to meet on Wednesday instead.
If the meeting was just with him, that would be one thing. But the company handled all the steps involved with house building. The design, the construction itself, the interior design, even furniture carpentry. And for some high-end clients, they had started offering package deals. They’d pick what they wanted right at the top, make as many decisions beforehand as possible, and the whole thing would go through as one continuous process, effectively saving everyone time and money.
Tuesday’s meeting concerned precisely one of those packages, and the people in charge of every step of the creation of the house had to be there. Which meant that rescheduling one meant rescheduling all others. Tuesday turned out to be the one day everyone could meet, and Leigh was forced to spend the entire morning calling everyone multiple times to see which specific hours of each individual day they were available, and then sometimes having to call back because of incorrect information.
It felt like grunt work, and it was hell. As Brock’s Executive Assistant, she had a large amount of freedom, but this kind of thing always made her feel almost helpless.
On top of that, another package was falling through because the budget for construction was rising, the client didn’t have more funds available, so Leigh was forced to negotiate with the people in charge of the other steps of house creation to get them to lower their prices correspondingly, yet still maintaining as much of the quality of service and client specifications as feasible.
This was the type of job Brock had called back to himself more than once, but when he ended up paying for a client’s bathroom out of his own pocket just so he could spend 30 minutes less on the phone with the contractor, Leigh persuaded him to leave it to her permanently from then on.
But today, it was just too much. Normally, Leigh would just send for lunch and spend half an hour eating while watching or reading something online. But today she needed to get out of the office and go relax for an hour somewhere.
She was about to do just that when the phone rang.
The number was way too familiar to her already. It was Terry, some girl whom Brock had slept with and who couldn’t seem to convince herself that Brock didn’t want anything else to do with her.
Women didn’t cling to Brock that often. As much of a player as he was, he was always kind, courteous, and pretty clear of what he wanted and what he was all about, so no one ever came away from a night with Brock with bad feelings or wrong ideas. No one, that is, except Terry, who had been trying to get Brock on the phone the whole week, after a Friday night that according to him didn’t go so well, and a Sunday afternoon he spent telling her he wanted nothing more to do with her.
Leigh took two steps towards the door, almost letting the phone ring.
Then she sighed and picked up the phone from the front of her desk.
“Hello, Terry.”
“Oh, hi,” she said, like Leigh was a dear friend she hadn’t heard from in ages. “How are you, dear? Look, is Brock in? I really need his help with something. It’s for real this time, I promise.”
“Look,” Leigh said, looking through the door into Brock’s desk, where he repeatedly pretended to slash his throat with his index finger. “Brock’s left for lunch. If it’s really important this time, I’ll gladly take a message.”
“Noooooo, it’s really important, but you know, totally private, I can’t tell it to you.”
Leigh had never met Terry, but wished she had a really amazing body and/or face, just so her opinion of Brock wouldn’t drop precipitously.
“Then I guess you’ll have to keep it to yourself, because he’s not here right now. In fact, he’s not coming back today. In fact, I’m pretty sure he’s taking an extended vacation, and I don’t know until when.”
“Well. I don’t know who you think you are, but I don’t appreciate you being rude. I’ll make sure to tell that to Brock, you hear?”
“Tell that to— Listen to me, you vacuous piece of hollow shit. You’re never going to speak to Brock again, you hear me? He doesn’t want anything to do with you, and if you weren’t such a clingy, dumb, empty moron you’ve figured that out the first twenty times he told you personally, and the hundred times he refused to pick up the phone!”
The phone suddenly flew out of Leigh’s hand, and Brock was speaking into it.
"Hello,” he said, leaning against Leigh’s desk. “You’ve just reached Brock Anderson’s office. I’m not here right now, because I'm dead. I died two days ago in a horrible, horrible accident. There's no need for you to try reaching me again, really. Ever. But be sure to check your local entertainment listings for details on my wake, funeral, and anointment into sainthood. Bye."
He hung up without waiting for an answer and just stared at Leigh, his brotherly smile belying his piercing look.
“Could you sit down for a minute, please?”
“I was going to have lunch, Brock.”
“I know, but lunch can wait. Please. Just for a minute.”
She complied, begrudgingly.
“Okay,” he said. “What is this? What’s happening here?”
“What do you mean, what’s happening? I’m doing my job, Brock.”
“Yeah, yeah. You’ve been doing it for a long time, but somehow you never seem as angry as you did just now. And you’ve been off your game all week. What’s wrong, Leigh?”
“I’m just tired, Brock. Okay? I’m just overworked and exhausted and in no mood to handle your one-night-only bimbos.”
She regretted it as soon as she said it. The last thing she wanted to do was to get Brock mad at her. He was a good friend, yes, but he was also her boss, and she should’ve known better than to confuse the two.
To his credit, he didn’t flinch.
“See, I don’t buy that. You’ve handled plenty of my bimbos before, and you never lost your cool. I mean yeah, this is the first stalker bimbo as far as I can recall, but still. I don’t think that’s it.”
Leigh almost got up and told him to shove it, but this time she remembered her place.
“Look, if it’s work, we can get someone to help you—”
“I don’t want help.”
“I know you don’t. Just saying we can. But I don’t think we need to either.”
He finally pulled up a chair and sat in front of her.
“Come on, Leigh. This is me here. Not your boss, your friend. Your close friend, and proud of it. You know you can talk to me.”
“I know.”
“Then why don’t you?”
“I know I can talk to you, Brock. Doesn’t mean I should. Or that I want to.”
His smile faded for just a second.
“Fine. Fine, I’m not the boss of you.” He looked around the office. “Present location notwithstanding. If you don’t want to tell me what’s wrong, I can’t make you, and I wouldn’t want to anyway.”
“Good. Thank you.” Leigh inhaled deeply, then forced all the air out, hoping her frustration would go with it. “Look, I know I haven’t been myself lately, but… I’m just working through some stuff, that’s all. I’ll be okay.”
“Okay.” He raised his hands in mock surrender. “That’s all I want here. For you to be okay.”
“Thanks.” Leigh almost got up and left, but he wasn’t done.
“One thing, though. Have you talked to Jonas lately?”
Leigh bit her lip, then hoped he hadn’t noticed.
“No. No, I haven’t, not for a while.” She hesitated. “Have you?”
“Only once, right after you guys came back from that little escapade. And wouldn’t you kno
w it, he didn’t seem like himself either. Come on, Leigh. I’m friends with both. I want the best for both of you, and I know how to be objective. I’m not here to judge either of you. What really happened between you two?”
Leigh sighed, holding her own hands on her lap. She hadn’t told anyone about anything that happened. Not that she could. There weren’t that many people with whom she could confide that sort of thing. There was Jonas, and he was out of the question. And aside from Jonas… There was Brock. And for the life of her, Leigh couldn’t find a single good reason why she shouldn’t get it all off her chest.
So she relented, and opened up to her friend. She avoided specifics, particularly the ones involving the details of her fantasies, but gradually she found herself telling her friend everything else.
Surprisingly, it felt good.
Perhaps not as surprisingly, Brock was smiling when she finished.
“What?” she asked. “What is it?”
“It’s just the irony, you know. I mean, you know Jonas. He’s always treated his ladies right, like equals. He’s not the greatest gentleman around, but he’s not full on alpha either.”
“So?”
“So, as far as I know you’re the first woman he’s actually put up on a pedestal and treated like a queen, taking every load off you that he could. And trust me, from what I’ve seen of his previous companions, every single one of them would give everything to be treated like that. And yet here you are. The only one he does treat like that, and not only don’t you want it, it actually ruined everything.”
“Yeah. Irony. I’m splitting my sides.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be mean.”
Leigh gave him a smile, only half forced.
“You weren’t.” She paused. “You think that if I did enjoy that kind of treatment, things would’ve been fine?”
Brock thought about it for a second.
“Probably not, actually. I’d think he wouldn’t have fallen for your.”
“There you go, then. Catch 22.”
“I guess. But look, here’s the way I see it. All that stuff, all that serving and doing things, all that need for control… That’s all bullshit, you know? Deep down where it counts, that doesn’t matter at all.”
TRAPPED IN LUST: A PUSHERS CLUB STORY Page 6