by Alexis Hall
It worked—not enough that I ever really got a handle on things, but just enough that I was having fun. It was a strange experience, existing as both subject and object, self and image, reflection and projection. I wouldn’t want to live that way, but for an evening it made me feel mysterious and interesting, like a character in an arty movie who the protagonist would fall for but never get close to, and who’d vanish one day in Prague with a few maddeningly cryptic parting words that would live forever in cinema history. Of course, I wasn’t like that at all—being about as aloof as a jam doughnut—but it was cool to pretend. And I got hit on a fair bit, which was good for my ego, even if I wasn’t actually about to bonk someone just because they liked a picture of me.
The pictures in question were even more, err, something now they were massive and hung on cool white walls, the images given space to be their own context. It was a lot of Arden, put it that way. Though what was odd to me was that they all had little stickers on the corners of their frames. I was sure they couldn’t have been left there by accident, as George had a fanatical eye for detail, but I picked at one anyway.
“Don’t do that please.”
I turned to find Laine Matthäus zirself standing behind me and pulled my hand back guiltily. To be honest, ze wasn’t anything like I’d imagined a gallery owner would be, but since I’d assumed they were all posh rich blokes over the age of fifty, this was a good thing. Ze was a few years older than me, slight and willowy, with platinum blond hair that fell in blade-sharp locks almost to zir waist and looked absolutely bloody extraordinary against the black wrap-dress ze was wearing.
“Sorry,” I said. “I just didn’t know why it was there.”
Ze smiled, and I was relieved it was a warm smile, not a well, aren’t you clueless smile. “It means the piece has been sold.”
“Oh. Oh. Someone must have really liked it, huh?”
“As well they might.” Ze looked up at, well, me, as I lay draped over a sawhorse, sweaty, flushed, and smug as fuck. “It’s wonderful.”
I blushed, in spite of my attempt to be nonchalant and enigmatic. “Wait, does this mean all the photos have been bought?”
Ze nodded.
“Every single one of them?”
Another nod.
“Is that normal?”
“Well”—Laine’s eyes slid back to the image—“Georgia is very talented and has very devoted admirers…”
“Is someone taking my name in vain?” That was George as she extricated herself expertly from the crowd. She was in skyscraper heels, tuxedo trousers, and a black-and-white plaid jacket with a shawl collar that fell just on the sexy side of aggressive.
“And here I thought,” murmured Laine, “vanity was your specialty.”
George just laughed and leaned in to kiss zir lightly on the cheek. “You really must let me shoot you one day, meine zuckermaus.”
“I love art. I have no desire to become it.” A pause. Then slightly too late, “And I’m not your zuckermaus.”
“I suppose not. It’s one of the few things I dislike about you.”
Laine smiled serenely. “Then you should up your game. There are many things I dislike about you.”
“Um,” I said. “I’m finding this foe yay you’ve got going on really hot and everything but could one of you maybe tell me who bought the photos?”
“Does it matter, poppet?” George slid a comforting arm round my waist. “This has been a very successful show, both critically and financially.”
“Also,” added Laine, “I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to disclose the identity of my clients.”
I breathed. Did it matter? Even if…fuck. I was jumping to conclusions quicker than a mountain goat. “Can you at least tell me if, like, it was lots of people or…or not?”
Neither of them spoke. But their faces told me everything I needed to know.
“Arden…” George made a futile attempt to restrain me.
“Oh. My. God.” I was loud enough to turn a few heads, but I wasn’t in any state to care. “Where is he? Is he still here? I’m going to kill him. Actually fucking kill him.”
Laine looked genuinely perplexed—not that I could entirely blame zir. I’d gone from normal to literally homicidal in under a second. “He was here a moment ago. I think he stepped out for a cigarette.”
“Well, of course he did.” I threw my hands into the air, nearly toppling a tray of drinks. “God fucking damn him to fucking goddamn hell.”
“How about,” George asked gently, “I take you home?”
It was a good plan. A sensible plan. A plan I would have been well advised to go with. “No,” I roared.
And stormed off.
Chapter 27
I found Caspian in the propped-open doorway of the fire escape, watching the rumpled indigo of the starless London sky, cigarette between his fingers. I grabbed it, threw it to the ground, and stubbed it out with the toe of my shoe.
“Make up your fucking mind,” I told him. “Like, smoke or don’t smoke. But stop pretending you’re not smoking when you are.”
He gazed at me, cartoonishly shocked, eyes wide, mouth slightly open. “What on earth are you doing?”
“What are you doing?”
“Well, I was having a cigarette, which you seem to have found objectionable.”
“What are you doing here? Why did you buy all the pictures? What the fuck is wrong with you?”
He was silent, the uncertain moonlight rendering him almost monochrome, all stark lines and shadows.
“Well?” I might actually have stamped my foot.
“Oh, I thought they were hypothetical questions.” His attention flicked regretfully to the crushed remains of his cigarettes and his fingers twitched. “I’m here because I…heard about the show and was, I suppose, I was curious? I bought the pictures because I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else seeing you that way. And I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I wish I did.”
This was a lot to process. I wasn’t even sure how to begin. “You just heard about the show? How?”
“Since the incident with my sister and the tabloids, I’ve had a Google alert for you.” Caspian contrived to look both defiant and sheepish. “It seemed prudent. But I know I shouldn’t have come tonight.”
“Jeez, you think?”
“Regret is futile, Arden.”
“You say that a lot, but you know something? I think regret is important. It’s how you learn to live with things instead of running from them.”
Again, silence. And Caspian’s profile, bleak and beautiful, and pale as bone in the gloom.
I sighed. “Okay, what was that crap about not wanting anyone to see me? You know there’s a book, right? Are you going to buy all those as well? Do not buy all those as well.”
“I wasn’t intending…that is, I’m not thinking…I’m not sure I can explain it.”
“Fucking try. Right the fuck now.”
“I will concede, it wasn’t rational. They reminded me of when we were together, and I didn’t want to share that part of you with the world.”
“Right.” I folded my arms—since it was that or start waving them around like an enraged albatross. “And so you’re just going to take a bunch of pictures of me back with you to the home, or presumably homes, you share with your fiancé and hang them up in the bedroom, are you?”
“Clearly not. I’ll put them in storage.”
And I lost it. Flew at him, flailing, managed to land a few not very effective blows against his chest before he caught my wrists. Then I burst into tears. Not because I was sad. But because I was just so helplessly fucking angry. “You wanker. You absolute fucking wanker.”
“For God’s sake.” Caspian adjusted his grip, stepping back just in time to avoid my incompetent attempt to kick his shins. “What’s the matter with you?”
Scalding tears were streaming down my face, making my eyes ache with pressure and my lips burn with salt. “I hate you, that’s what’s the matter. Those pic
tures are beautiful. I’m proud of them. And you’re locking them away from everyone because even though you don’t want me, you don’t want anyone else to have me either.”
“Of course I want you, Arden.” Caspian’s voice had gone very low, his words ragged things creeping reluctantly from his mouth. “I don’t know how to stop wanting you.
“I don’t need photographs to remember you, Arden.”
My head whirled. “I…I don’t want to hear this.” That was a total lie, for the record. I’d been wanting to hear this for months. “It’s not fair.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll…I’ll give you the pictures. You can do whatever you like with them.”
“What the fuck am I going to do with a bunch of sexy photos of myself?”
“I don’t know.” His grip on me slackened, but he still didn’t release me, and I still wasn’t stepping away. “I’m afraid I’m not making sensible decisions right now.”
“You mean because the sight of your ex-boyfriend’s o-face has completely overthrown your reason?”
He gazed down at me for a long moment, my hands still trapped against his chest, his heart thundering beneath them. “You used to look at me like that.”
I opened my mouth—but all that came out of it was a dry sob.
“How can you believe I’d stopped wanting you?” He drew me in closer, until we were pressed together. “How can you believe I ever could? God, Arden, the things you give me. The way you surrender to me. You’ve crawled for me and taken pain for me. And sometimes, I think you might have ruined me.”
“And that’s what you think is in those photos?” I asked shakily.
“A…shadow of it, maybe.”
“You still don’t fucking get it, do you?” I moved restlessly in his arms, not sure whether I wanted to struggle free, or beat myself against him until we both broke. “I’m like that in those photos because that’s how I like being. But how I was with you is because I love you.”
“Arden…”
Staring up at him sullenly, I sniffed back fresh tears. “You dick.”
And then his fingers were gliding across my damp cheeks, holding me in place as he lowered his head and pressed his lips to mine. My mouth was sticky from my crying, and salty from my tears, and I shouldn’t have let him, I know I shouldn’t, but it was Caspian. The man I yearned and hurt for. Who had been so kind to me, shown me such strength and such suffering, laughed with me and believed in me, and let me see who he was. Until he couldn’t bear to anymore. And here he was, my Caspian at last, confused and lost and in pain, just like I was. I melted into him, twining my arms around his neck, kissing him back—yielding and eager and desperately willing, smothering the last traces of smoke with the taste of us.
It was a shattered thing, this kiss of ours, both of us perpetually on the brink of pulling back, but never quite able to do it, falling back into each other with the inevitability of sailors caught in the depths of Charybdis. Normally I liked being helpless, found it sweet and bright, but it tugged at me now like a fishhook in my flesh. Made me worry and fret, even though the possibility of resistance barely entered my mind before it was discarded. I couldn’t. I wanted him too much, and his wanting of me was its own drug.
My back hit the wall of the fire escape hard enough to grind the edges of the bricks into my spine, knocking our mouths apart. Words collided in the harsh mingling of our breaths, my “Caspian please” and his “Arden, I need,” and then—terrified this would stop, that I would lose him all over again—I flung my legs around his waist and dragged him, groaning, into another kiss. It wasn’t enough, though. No matter how tightly I held him, how frantically we joined our lips and entwined our tongues, it felt like we were slipping away—scrabbling against a cliff face of unappeasable desire, tearing ourselves open as we went tumbling down it.
The fabric of his suit beneath my palms gave me nothing. Barely an impression of the heat of him. So I curled my fingers through his hair, twisting sharply enough to make him growl and drag his mouth to my neck. More kisses there. Then hot, heavy bites that blossomed redly in the dark behind my eyes. I felt the sting of tears on my cheeks. And my cock ached, drenched with need.
“Fuck me,” I gasped out.
The universe teetered like a spinning top, Caspian its centre. He raised his head to look at me, his face a shadow-broken patchwork of passion and pain.
I let my brow fall against his. “You want it too. Say it, Caspian. Say you want me.”
“More than anything in the world.”
“Then take me. Fuck me.” Love me. “You know I’m yours.”
He brushed the back of his hand against my swollen lips. “I…I’ll hurt you.”
“Lube in my wallet.”
It wasn’t what he’d meant, but it was easier for both of us to pretend it was. His hands dropped to my belt, the clack and clatter of the buckle way loud in the fire escape, and then he was…well, it started as peeling but quickly became dragging followed by out-and-out tugging until he’d got my jeans down as far as they’d go—which was just below my arse. He made a sound that might have been a laugh, if not so full of other things, and pressed his cheek to mine.
It was absurd, everything was absurd, my partially exposed legs pale and blotched green from the exit sign above us, and I might have laughed too, but I was too scared of crying. If I’d known someone was going to be trying to get me out of them, I’d have worn less tight-fitting jeans. I mean, apart from the fact I wasn’t sure I owned any.
“We should,” I began. Maybe about to say, We shouldn’t. Because this was fucked up. We knew it was fucked up.
But Caspian pressed his palm tenderly to my mouth and I closed my eyes and let him take the choice from me. He kissed across my cheeks, then the tip of my nose, and I trembled with the terrible sweetness of it. And when he put his lip to my ear, the heat of his breath curled around me, licked into my corners, like Prufrock’s yellow fog.
“Turn around,” he told me. A low rasp that could almost have been the voice of a stranger.
Except Caspian could never be a stranger to me. Even when he feared he was a stranger to himself.
I shaped a kiss of my own, imagining my heart dissolved, flowing slick and glitter-bright into the runnels of his hand. And unwound my legs from around his waist. No sooner had my feet hit the ground than he spun me, my cheek hitting the wall, the air knocked from my lungs. Catching up my wrists, he shoved my palms flat to the bricks and splayed me out beneath his body.
God, the strength of him. And in that moment, all of it was for me. With Caspian, force had never felt like a threat. It felt like a fucking gift. Everything was a gift. The weight of him against my back. His harsh breath. The fretful pressure of his teeth in my nape. The sting of his bites and the throb of his bruises. The promise of his hard cock ground into my arse, his suit dragging roughly across my legs. I was melting not just into submission but submission to Caspian, the pleasure of it a dark tide rising inside me, as deep as despair.
Caspian’s fingers slid between mine against the wall, half trapping, half holding me. “Don’t move.”
He stepped away, fumbling in my pocket for my wallet. I waited, my ears catching at the crinkle of foil and the swish of fabric, the murmur of voices from inside the gallery—oh shit, what if someone else decided they randomly wanted to sneak a cheeky ciggy in the fire escape? And here I was, in a fuck-me pose against the wall, with my bits hanging out. I mean, I guess it was nothing they hadn’t seen, but I wasn’t quite ready to upgrade from stills to live action.
Before I could get into a real panic, though, Caspian’s hand landed on the small of my back, the touch remarkably steady given how harsh his breathing sounded. I arched into the reassuring warmth of him, which I suppose counted as technically moving, but he didn’t chastise me for it. Just stroked, soothing me in ways I hadn’t realised I needed soothing, before he moved lower and gave my arse such a possessive little squeeze it had me up on my toes, swallowing a yip.
The thing is, Caspian wasn’t as awesome at not breaking my heart and leaving me in pieces on the floor as he could have been. But I also knew, with the faith Elizabeth Barrett Browning once gave to her lost saints, he would never let me come to harm. Besides, there was no way the man who had flipped his lid at the thought of other humans looking at pictures of me was going to let them stand around watching me get fucked. And, wow, my dick was an idiot: It was already looking for ways to find Caspian’s behaviour secretly endearing, when the rest of me was still quite annoyed by it. But actually…it was hot, in principle, to be that coveted. It was just the practice that had been severely fucked up the arse.
Much as, I hoped, I was about to be. I spread my legs a little wider and nudged up into his palm—flaunting. And suddenly a different need opened up inside me like quicksand.
“Oh God,” I heard myself whisper, “I wish you could spank me.”
His muffled a groan in the back of my neck. “Arden…”
“Obviously don’t. That shit’s not quiet.” Even if the idea of it was insanely hot.
“It’s what you want, though.” A taunting note had crept into Caspian’s voice—a delicate edge of cruelty that made my heart stutter with fearful delight. “To be spanked in a back alley like a dirty slut.”
There was such…such affection in the words—I might even have called it love—that I lost my head. “Yes please.”
“Not tonight, my wicked one. My brave boy.”
That briefly reminded me that less than two seconds ago I, too, had been aware it was a terrible idea. But I still wriggled and whined, safe in the knowledge Caspian would take care of me.