by CD Reiss
“Can you explain this?” She snapped the paper in front of me, jogging to keep up. “How are your shares worth more?”
“They come with me attached. I made that business work.”
“We made it work.”
I put my hand on the door to the locker room. “Is irony completely lost on you?”
She gritted her teeth. Man, she was so mad, she could have peeled the paint off the walls. I went into the locker room and wasn’t surprised when she followed.
“We were equals. Which means equal share value.”
I slapped open my locker. “I’ll lower the price.”
“Really?”
I peeled off my shirt. Two guys in towels glanced at the woman in the room, but she was Diana and she didn’t care.
“Sure.”
“Don’t say thirty days.”
“Thirty days.”
“God damn you.”
“A halt to new business development for thirty days while we sort this out.” I kicked my shoes off and hooked my thumbs in my waistband. “Access to an operating account. Maintenance of the status quo, current production schedule maintained, and limited power of attorney to a third party.”
“We can’t even do that.”
“Maybe.” I stepped out of my sweat pants and stood naked in front of her. “My lawyer says between the common assets and the company assets, it’ll take at least two years to litigate, so the thirty days might have to be extended.” I wrapped a towel around my waist and grabbed my soap. “I’m a long distance runner.”
The showers were down a short hall and through a room of bathroom stalls and urinals. She followed me the entire length.
“Is this spite? This is spite. I know it is.”
“Call it what you want.”
A guy standing at a urinal saw Diana and turned so she couldn’t see him piss. “Hey! She don’t belong in here.”
“She doesn’t.” I stopped at the entrance to the showers. “Diana, honey, you should go.”
“I’m saying this straight,” she growled. “My father isn’t going to be around much longer. McNeill-Barnes is a family business. It’s his family business. If you take it from us, it’ll kill him.”
“Talk about emotionally manipulative.”
“No joke,” said the guy at the urinal.
The showers were separate rooms all in a row, marked with green or red flags to indicate whether or not they were occupied. I found a green flag and opened the door.
Diana stopped behind me. “He can’t die without this company in his daughter’s hands.”
“Is that what this is about? Your father?”
“Yes.”
“Wrong. This is about business. This is not about family. This is not about your mother’s death wish. This is about you and me and business.”
I tried to close the door, but she stopped it.
“The thirty days you want? That’s business? Because it sounds personal.”
“You caught me in a contradiction. Oops, okay? Close the door.”
“When did you become such a monster?”
There comes a point when you win, and you can either soothe the loser into thinking there was something in it for them or you can kick them while they’re down to make sure they know what just happened.
I pulled my towel off and hung it, exposing my cock again. “Wake up, little huntress. I was the one who kicked out leaseholders on a loophole when your ‘family business’ needed more room. I was the one who called writers to break contracts. I was the one who did the company dirty work for years. Now you’re the dirty work. Deal with it.”
I closed the door and turned the lock quickly. I was shaking so hard I could barely work the shower knob. I turned it on high and hot.
She pounded the door once, then nothing.
I couldn’t gulp air quickly enough. I let the water scald me, letting the pain on the surface match the pain inside me. I never wanted to hurt her, but I had. I never wanted her to feel small or powerless. I loved her. I loved her with everything I had. I’d done the dirty work to protect her from anger and cruelty, and now I had become the very thing I’d protected her from.
I was well past the point of no return.
Chapter 36
PRESENT TENSE
Diana didn’t show up to the office the next day. I checked her phone’s location, but she’d shut off the locator service. It didn’t matter. The end of the month was approaching.
Do or die.
Sometimes do meant wait, and I considered that. But I had a sliver of time between her leaving Riverside Drive and her taking down her One Direction posters.
She’d been right. I was being manipulative. I’d learned how to toy with people as a Dominant, but I used my skills during play and not outside it. I knew better. There was no excuse for me to slap and tickle my wife’s emotions, except my hunger to make her feel something. I knew I was wrong, but I did it anyway.
—The loft—
—What about it?—
—I moved. You should live in it—
I slid my phone onto the desk. It was just about dinnertime. I had my coat and scarf on before she answered.
—Will you be out by
Thursday?—
—Already out—
—Do you want it? I’ll sign
my half over to you—
Another long pause. I was halfway down the block before my phone buzzed again.
—For what?—
I smiled at the screen. She was a learning machine and a worthy adversary. Moments like that, I didn’t think about not loving her. I couldn’t imagine it.
—One hour doing what I tell you—
The phone rang as I got to the front of our building. It was her.
“I’m not a hooker,” she said.
“It’s a two-million-dollar loft in SoHo. No hooker is that expensive.”
“No sex. And don’t even try.”
“Define sex.” I was curious. How did she define it? What exactly were her lines?
“It’s not obvious?”
“No.”
“We’ve been married four years.”
That was the problem, wasn’t it? We’d shared a bed and our bodies for that long and I didn’t know what she meant by “no sex.”
“I’m not trying to turn you on. I’m trying to talk to you,” I said, pacing from the front of the building to the edge of the curb, confusing the hell out of the doorman. “Define what you mean by sex. Is it talking about sex? Describing how much I want you? Is that sex? Is it me touching you? You touching you? Is it kissing? If I can smell your cunt’s arousal, is that sex? If I taste you? Or if I can sense you spreading your legs a little wider under the table? What’s that? And if it makes me hard, is that sex? Define it. Draw your lines around it and I won’t cross.”
A puddle of melted snow had formed at the curb. It reached the height of the sidewalk and no higher. The temperature had fallen with the sun, and the puddle had frozen at the top. I poked it with my foot while I waited for her to answer. My toe made a divot in the crust of ice but didn’t break through.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Then how am I supposed to know?”
“I feel like if I say no to something, I’m saying yes to everything else. And I just…” She took a deep breath. “I just want to move back into my own place.”
I was such an asshole. Constructing ways to eroticize our meeting so I could trade bites of submission for an asset I didn’t really want. I was treating her like a whore. She deserved better. She deserved a man who would split everything down the middle and disappear. I wasn’t that man. I was much worse. I was a monster. I demanded sacrifice. Recompense. I demanded to be made whole for all the love I’d spent on her. I actually felt compassion for the woman who had shattered my heart.
“Let me define it then,” I said.
“Okay.”
“I won’t touch you unless you ask.”
“I won’t ask.”
“And if I say anything that crosses a line, you can tell me. Just say the word.”
“What word? I can’t get into spiraling discussions about what’s appropriate.”
“You pick the word. Make it something that would never come up in conversation.”
Her breath changed. I heard a rustle. She was either changing clothes or putting clothes on. Naturally, I got hard.
“I don’t know,” she said, the phone leaving her ear and coming back. Must be her putting a shirt on.
Or getting one off.
“Just pick a word.”
I wondered if she was wearing a bra. Her nipples were thick and hard when she was cold or turned on, and I hadn’t given them a good bite in too long. I hadn’t thought about them over the phone in months. Years maybe. My sexuality must have been more closeted than I thought. All I could imagine was her naked on the other side of the line.
“Pinochle,” she said.
“What?” I’d lost my train of thought.
“If you cross a line, I’ll say ‘pinochle.’”
“Come over. I’ll have dinner ready.”
“God, this is so crazy.”
“It is,” I said before we hung up.
And it was. She’d chosen a safe word.
Chapter 37
PRESENT TENSE
I rolled my sleeves up, took off my tie, and got to work. I whipped up chicken and a wine sauce with the stuff in the freezer. I wasn’t much of a cook, but I managed some green beans and warmed bread. My grandmother had always told me enough butter and salt made stones taste good.
She came in while I was setting my side of the table. Tiny snowflakes stuck to her hair. She’d done nothing to prepare. Her hair was a mess. She wore no makeup. Old jeans. Her favorite button-down shirt. A few bracelets she never took off anyway.
Just the way I liked her. Effortless.
“If I knew what you wanted out of me, this would be easier.” She unraveled her scarf. It was blue with embroidered birds.
“I told you already.”
“Thirty days for the company and an hour for the condo?”
“Something like that. Look, I’m not going to try to fuck you.”
“So what are you going to try to do?” She stuffed the bird scarf in a pocket and pushed her coat buttons through the holes. I got behind her to take it. “Besides be a jerk, which you were totally being at the gym.”
“Show you that you might enjoy a month learning about the guy you married. The one I lied about.” I hung her coat. “I want to undo all that.”
“I’m not going to fall in love with you again.”
Would that ever stop hurting?
“I know. But you’re curious.”
“I am. I read The Book That Shall Not Be Named, of course. And after we were in the Cellar, I did an internet search,” she said.
“How was that?”
“Hot sometimes. Scary sometimes.”
“You can satisfy your curiosity with me. For an hour.”
I pulled out her chair. She didn’t go toward it.
I waited.
“I have this choice,” she said, looking at the chair. “You have things I want, and you’ll give them to me if I do what you want. If I don’t, you’ll make my life a living hell trying to get those things.” She took her eyes off the chair and laid them on me. “When I put it that way, do you understand why it’s hard for me to say yes to any of it?”
“I do. But you have more to gain than lose. And I can admit something I couldn’t admit before. There’s a part of you that might have enjoyed this part of me if I’d been a man and let you in. If I thought for a minute there wasn’t a good chance you’d like it, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“I’m not leaving you over sex.”
No, it wouldn’t stop hurting. Even when she used different words entirely to say she didn’t love me, she still ran me through and twisted the blade. And I realized that it was getting easier for her to say it. She’d become immune to the venom of her detachment, and I kept on asking for the sting.
“The reason you’re breaking up this marriage is irrelevant,” I lied. “I’m not after ‘why,’ I’m after ‘how.’ And the ‘how’ I’m after is ‘not that easily.’ You don’t have to like it. I don’t believe in heaven. I don’t believe there’s a reward for leaving nicely or being the bigger person. I’m not ready to let you leave with everything. Not easily. Not without payment.”
I indicated the seat again, but she didn’t sit.
“Would you just sign everything over if you didn’t think I was curious?”
The question was one of two things. Either she wanted to gauge whether or not pretending to not enjoy it would make the path easier, or whether or not her curiosity had gotten her and McNeill-Barnes into this situation.
“No. That’s not how I do business.” I pivoted the conversation back to the matter at hand. “You need to obey me, but I won’t ask for anything I don’t think you’re ready for.”
“How do I know you know what I’m ready for?”
“You have to trust me.”
She ran her finger over the sharp edge of her front pants pocket. “An hour.”
“An hour. And you say pinochle whenever you want.”
She nodded. Blinked.
“Is that a yes?” I asked.
Her eyes went to me. Through me. She could hurt me again and again if I let her, because she went a few degrees warmer, seeping tiny droplets of tenderness through the seams in her disdain.
“Yes,” she said.
She sat, and I pushed in her chair.
The clock started ticking.
“What did you make?” she asked when I took the cover off the dish.
“Chicken. I think.”
“Was it in the container with the blue cover?”
“Yes.”
“It’s duck.” She put her hands on the table. “I need a plate.”
She started to get up, but I put my hand on her shoulder and gently pushed her back to sitting. “No, you don’t. Just relax.”
I sat down and put my napkin in my lap and duck on my plate. I cut it.
“You got an eyeful the other night at the Cellar,” I said.
“Yeah.”
I speared a piece of meat. “But what you didn’t see is what a Dominant really does.” I held the fork out to her. She reached for it. “Sit on your hands.”
Her hand froze midway. “Literally?”
“When I talk to you like this, you can assume it’s literal.”
She lowered her hand, shifted her body, and slid her hands under her. I could see her wheels turning. My wife didn’t take orders.
“Open your mouth.”
She was so scared of herself and me. When she parted her lips, the rest of her face registered nothing but trepidation.
“When you do what I ask you to do, it gratifies me. I have the sense that everything is in its right place. I breathe easier. I think more clearly.”
I held out another piece of meat. She opened her mouth.
“Don’t open until I tell you.”
“Okay. Sorry.”
She wasn’t supposed to speak, but I couldn’t shush her. Too many rules too soon would turn her off. This hour wasn’t about my enjoyment. I had to remember that and not get ahead of myself.
“It’s all right. Open.”
She did, and I fed her.
“Do I have to ask to chew?”
This was why Charlie trained them and I wore them in.
“You’re not there yet. You can chew when you like,” I said.
“Are you going to eat?”
“I might eat before you, after you, with you.”
She took another bite.
“It depends on the guy?” she asked while chewing, and my mood darkened.
Other men. If she discovered she liked this, would she seek it out with other men?
Shake it off.
I took a bite of duck. It wasn�
��t half bad. “I’m going to feed you. You’re going to eat, and you’re going to listen.”
She nodded. She was still on her hands. They were going to fall asleep.
“Put your hands on the table.”
She did it, palms down. The ring was gone again. I fed her a forkful of vegetables.
“Since we only have an hour and I don’t want you to give me something you’re not ready to give, I’m going to tell you what I’m not going to do to you and what I’m not going to ask you to do.”
Before she could speak, I fed her a forkful of duck.
“I’m not going to ask you to stand in front of the window and get undressed. Slowly and purposefully, down to the skin. Your nipples would be hard, and your cheeks flushed, but I won’t ask you to stand still in front of me, feeling how naked and vulnerable you are while I sit here in my clothes, just staring at how gorgeous you are. I won’t ask you to turn around, bend at the waist, and hold your ass and thighs open for me. I’d probably have to tell you to spread your feet apart. This is so I can inspect you. I’d run my fingers over your cunt to make sure you’re wet, but I won’t tonight. And I won’t get my fingers wet so I can slide them in your ass.”
She let out a short, hard exhale. I wiped the corners of her mouth with the cloth napkin and tipped the water glass to her lips. She drank.
“The downside is you won’t come. Because if you did what I just told you to do, my fingers would graze your clit over and over.” I took the glass away. “You can spread your knees if you want.”
The tablecloth moved enough to let me know she did.
I stood and got behind her. “I’d tell you to get on your knees and open your mouth. And then, my wife, I’d teach you how to let me fuck your face. Not give me a blow job, but to let me take one from you. With your hands behind your back, you press the back of your tongue down and I fuck your throat. But not tonight. Tonight all I want is your obedience. I want you to let me take care of you the way I’m supposed to.”
She was practically panting. I had her.
I took a handful of her hair and pulled her head back hard enough to hurt. Her lips and eyes were open, and I kissed her. I probed her mouth with my tongue, let her groan fill my mouth. She tasted exactly as she always had. Like my wife. My partner. My very heart.