Wrecked (The Blackened Window)

by Corrine A. Silver

  “You okay?” he finally asked.

  A smile quirked at my lips. “Well, no, not really. Do you really want to talk about this here and now?”

  “I can’t not talk about it at this point.” He looked down again, but when he looked back up at me, his eyes held a mix of anguish and anger.

  “Okay…so talk.” It was perhaps unnecessarily bitchy, but I was still pissed.

  “What can I even say, Leda? Of course I had relationships before you. Of course there is more to me than you know about yet. I don’t really even know what you’re upset about.” He cut himself off when the waitress brought our coffees.

  Once she walked away, I answered him, “Xander. Alexander. I don’t know how to explain it. I’m an open book for you. So open that it feels raw and dangerous. And, you’re hidden from me. Your name isn’t even really your name.”

  “I haven’t hidden things from you. We just haven’t gotten there yet.”

  “I call bullshit on that! You hid your real name from me. You hid your relationship with Stacy from me. And that’s enough for me to question my trust in you. But that isn’t even it, right? I mean, what was Stacy talking about that I don’t know about—what else is there, Xander?”

  “Leda, I never lied to you.”

  I cut him off, “No, you just never let me see the truth.”

  We held a tense silence as the waitress delivered our food. It was good hangover breakfast—greasy eggs and potatoes, covered in cheesy goodness, thick, rich coffee and, on the waitress’s recommendation, we had ordered a gooey cinnamon roll to split. The food was great, but it was only secondary in my focus. Even after she walked away, we still sat in silence. After what felt like several hours, he responded.

  “Okay, what truth do you want from me?”

  “I don’t fucking know. If I knew, it wouldn’t be an issue, right?” My tone was heavy with sarcasm, clearly implying he was an idiot.

  His expression darkened to something I had never seen in all our sex-play. This was true anger. He was actually getting pissed off at me. “I’m trying to be open here, Leda. Don’t fucking punish me right when you’re getting what you say you want.”

  Jesus, that stung, but my pride wouldn’t let me answer in kindness. I just waited, gritting my jaw.

  He sensed that he had an edge and leaned into it. “What do you want to know?”

  I concentrated on cutting up something on my plate, until he reached across the table and tilted my chin up to look at him.

  “Last time I’m asking. What do you want to know about me?” The words were measured and deliberately well-enunciated.

  I took a deep breath. “I don’t know, Xander. I don’t know. What was Stacy talking about? Tell me about your relationship with her, because I think she is a big, bitchy cunt of a person and I can’t see how you could see anything redeeming in her.” I knew I was displacing some of my anger on her, but I couldn’t stop myself. In a sick way, I wanted to see if he defended her.

  A quick smirk tugged at his lips before he answered, but when he did, he was serious. “Like I said, I grew up with her. She was there when my parents changed and started to hate each other. She was young and silly, a perfect distraction. She was like a sister. My parents’ relationship was why I went into the military—I had to get away from them. My dad was fucking half the interns who came through Noe’s office, but then he’d be weirdly possessive of my mom. Stacy was there and we had a bond that I can’t really explain to someone who wasn’t there.

  “When I went to the Academy, she was still in high school. The Army was all-consuming, and got me away from the DC bullshit. But she had to stay back and she was alone. I swear, she was so sweet then. I came home for a long visit one summer and she was just different. Grown up, sexual, beautiful—and aggressive. We started…something. I don’t really know what it was. She was beyond my girlfriends. She was just…her. It wasn’t really a relationship, but it was.

  “Anyway, the next summer, we went to the Nymphos show and, it was a crazy. We met the band and they invited us on the tour bus. And then we just… She was wild.” He shrugged.

  After a moment, I shrugged back at him and he continued, “We were gone partying and fucking and being crazy for four days. Our parents were freaking out, but no one had cell phones yet and we just didn’t go home. They didn’t want to make a scandal, so they didn’t do anything. She felt like her parents didn’t care that she disappeared. After that, she just got more self-destructive—more drugs, more sex. I don’t know—that’s when things changed. There’s a black hole in me that she has seen. I mean, she’s fucking been in it. And there’s a deep part of her that’s angry and mighty. There was huge fallout when we came back… And we stood by each other through it.”

  His ode to Stacy’s dark and fucked up beauty was beginning to piss me off. “Okay, so you’re both beautifully damaged. What the fuck have you been doing with me for the past few months?”

  He blanched at my tone, realizing that my patience was waning. “Let me finish the story. It was one thing for me to be doing all that shit at twenty-two. It was still fucked up, but not so much outside of the normal wild oat sowing of the early twenties, especially for guys in the military. She was only eighteen. It was different for her. She was actively rebelling and she tied all that to me, switched all her weird dependence on her parents to me. We tried to be together, but she was too fucked up and I didn’t want to be tied down to one person and she wasn’t submissive at all. It evolved into a love-hate thing. We’d fight then fuck. Fuck then fight. When I went overseas, she tried to fuck Jason.”

  I started at that, not realizing they knew each other or even had a history, but it made sense. “Does she ever go to the Window?”

  “I don’t know, Leda. I don’t have any kind of relationship with her anymore. But I think Christy would let her know how it is if she ever tried to get after Jason again. It’s not really an issue, because he really slammed the door on that. He never liked her. He likes happy girls, like Christy. It’s why he likes you.” He glanced up at me, gauging my reaction to his subtle flattery.

  “Finish your story and get to the point that explains why you lied to me, and why you were in the hall with her, in a bathrobe and nothing else, kissing her, in the middle of the night when you were supposed to be in bed with me.” He gave me a wry glance, implying that I was being ridiculous, so I added, “Reverse the roles for a minute. What if my close friend from childhood, who I apparently had fucked like crazy showed up in the middle of the night and you woke to find me in the hall, talking with him, in nothing, nothing, but a robe, and you were sure that he kissed me? How would that sit?”

  His eyes hardened and the muscle in his jaw twitched. “Okay. I get it. Because I might kill a motherfucker.”

  “Okay. So stop implying that I’m overreacting.” My voice was hard.

  “All right, killer.” He thought he was funny, but I wanted to slap him. “Ultimately, I was discharged from the Army and got my job at the Pentagon. Her dad was on the Congressional Defense committee. He helped me get the job. When I moved back to DC, she was in undergrad at Georgetown, so we started hanging out again. And then we started having sex again. And she wanted to try to be submissive again. So we started slow, like you and I did.”

  Oh, what an asshole.

  “And she was doing great. So one night, she was at the Pentagon, visiting her dad or something. She stopped to see me because I was working late. At this point, I had started visiting dungeons and play parties and I knew more about what I wanted. She agreed to try…more.”

  I took a deep breath. Did I really want to hear about this anymore? My stomach was in knots and I stopped eating.

  “Are you sure you want to hear this, Leda?”

  I laughed as another wave of dread-tinged nausea washed over me. “No. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want it to exist. I don’t want there to be a problem between us. I don’t want to think about you touching someone the way you touch me. I don�
�t want to think about you being in love with someone else.” My voice cracked.

  “I wasn’t in love with her. She was like a sister, and—”

  “She was like your sister so you had sex with her intermittently, for several years. Thank God you don’t have any biological sisters.” I paused to control myself. I could feel the rising emotions getting out of control. “No. I want to know what happened that changed the course of your life.”

  “Okay, stop me if it’s too much.” The irony of that statement stung a little. “You have to understand, we would come together, try to figure out how to be together and then it would implode. We just cycled like that, over and over.”

  I nodded my understanding, but didn’t speak.

  He continued, “The night that she was talking about, the night that got me fired, was when I was at the Pentagon. She came to my workroom and told me she wanted to try again, that I was the only person she could ever submit to.” His eyes glazed a bit. “I told her it was all or nothing. I didn’t want to just dabble in controlling her. She agreed, and I grabbed her. No discussion of limits or safewords. I realize now how absolutely terrible that was, but I was relatively new to BDSM then. I remember pulling her head back by her hair and asking her if she was sure. She said she was and that was it. I turned her around and flattened her across my boss’s desk, and secured her hands to the drawer pull with my belt.”

  Why would I have thought that was a new trick just for me? It’s probably the only reason he wears a belt. Dick. Why am I listening to this? Maybe I was more of a masochist than I knew.

  “I tied one ankle to the leg of the desk with my tie, and pushed her skirt up. I used some scissors to cut her underwear off and, I went after it.” He stopped, as if that was the full story. I waited, but he said nothing.

  “Keep going, Xander. I want all the details.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Because I heard her last night. I heard her say that she knew your darkness and she had something to match. I want to know what this cosmic fucked-upness is that you two share. I want to know how real it is. Have you just been playing at something approaching normal for me? Was it a game? I have to know.”

  “Leda, I don’t want to tell you this. It’s the past and a lot has changed since then.”

  “The fuck it has. She’s at your door in the middle of the night and you just waxed nostalgic about your whatever the fuck it was with her. Your shit with her is not resolved. Now I understand why she has been such a bitch to me, at least.”

  “Leda, let’s just let it go and work on moving past this.”

  “There is no consideration of ‘past this’ until and unless you tell me the truth. Now.” I knew it was irrational. I didn’t care. I knew I would probably regret it. I didn’t care. I could see something unresolved between them. I had to know before I could decide what to do next.

  “Okay. But remember, when you hate me, when you’re disgusted with me—you fucking asked for this.”

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Xander

  The Neighbourhood, Afraid

  When I opened my mouth to tell Leda the truth—the deeply sick shit from my past, I couldn’t speak. I had run into Stacy’s father that morning and his words echoed in my mind, forecasting what Leda was going to know about me as soon as I spoke the words.

  I had seen Jackson in the lobby as he’d been coming off the elevator. I’d thought he was going to completely snub me, but as he’d passed me, he’d stopped, pushing his face into mine.

  “I don’t know what really happened between you and Stacy, but she followed you to Texas. She never said a word against you, even though I saw… I saw what you were doing to her. She never said anything about it, just begged me to leave it alone. As far as I’m concerned, you’re a rapist, sick as fuck and should be in prison. She saved you from that. You owe her, you piece of shit.”

  Leda cleared her throat in an impatient sound.

  I swallowed against a wave of nausea and continued, “I had her tied down, with one free leg, so I could move her around however I wanted.” I got a reckless feeling, a feeling of fuck it. If it was gonna be destroyed with her, it just proved I really was a monster and I was gonna lean the fuck into it.

  “I started behind her, licking her. She wanted it so bad I remember laughing at that. She got offended and said something smartassed. I slapped her ass, hard enough to see the creases from my palm in the handprint on her ass. When she began to protest, I started playing with her, until she forgot she was upset. I got her close to coming and stopped before she could. Just to fuck with her, for no other reason at all. I knew she was afraid of anal sex and I wanted to scare her, so I started fingering her ass. She was so wet that I didn’t need lube. I know I was running my mouth the whole time, just spouting off the foulest, dirtiest, most depraved shit I could think of. I was testing her.”

  I paused to take a breath, looking at Leda to see her reaction. Her face was a blank mask, so I continued, “Mostly I wanted her to prove to me that she would really submit, so I gave her the worst of me. I know at some point, I called her a cunt and she got really mad, and tried to turn over some to yell at me, and I slammed her down on the desk.”

  In the years since it happened, when I looked back at that day, I knew…I should have been better. Should have been sure she was into it. Should have given her a safeword. A million should haves..

  “Looking back, I think I knocked the wind out of her, because she stopped talking. This is how bad of a Dom I was then— Fuck! I can’t even call myself a Dom. I was a stupid kid, trying to be something that I had no idea about.” I took a deep breath and continued when Leda gestured at me impatiently. “I thought she was submitting, but she was shutting down. And remember, we had no safeword, hadn’t discussed limits. And I don’t really know, maybe she was dropping into a crap version of subspace, because she got really limp. I stood behind her and fucked her, still running my mouth about what a whore she was and whatever else.”

  My brain was a fucking mess. Because this was what I had believed about myself for the last ten years and Stacy had turned it all on its head last night. And now, as I tried to explain it to Leda, I realized I had been replaying all the same shit with her, trying to do it right, but still trying to find a way to be with a girl that I could completely defile. I wanted to be able to love her and hurt her. It wasn’t a real thing. It couldn’t be a real thing. I had already done all these things with Stacy. My mind reeled in a torrent of self-recriminations. Leda was talking, telling me to keep going, not seeing that I was realizing how much I had been mindfucking myself this whole time.

  I looked up at her, wishing she could save me, but knowing that she couldn’t. Ah, fucking hell. It’s gonna fall the fuck apart. And then I’m gonna fall the fuck apart. I kept talking, because it was the only thing to do now. The end was inevitable. I just had to play my part out.

  “I grabbed the scissors and told her I wanted to cut her. She started squirming and crying and then she screamed. I cut her off with my hand over her mouth. And here’s how totally sick I am, just the thought of her bleeding almost made me come. And then it was all I could think of. I wanted to make her bleed. I wanted to taste her blood. I kept fucking her and after a moment, she started talking against my hand. Pleading for more, for something different. She was all over the place. I told her I’d let her talk as long as she didn’t make a lot of noise, but first to hold her tongue out. She obeyed me, and I flicked the blade of the scissors over her tongue and cut her. Just to taste it.”

  Jesus Christ, I’m a monster. I’m a monster. Then it just kept running through my head. I’m a monster, I’m a monster, I’m a monster, I’m a monster. The realization came that I had to get Leda away from me. She couldn’t be with me. I had been worrying that I might harm her in some way. Of course I would. I already was. I wasn’t capable of anything else. She was too good. I had to get her away. I let her have the last of my deepest shame, the worst thing I had ever done.<
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  “She started crying and the blood coated her lips. I flipped her over and licked the blood from her tongue as I fucked her, as she cried and whimpered against my mouth, telling me to stop. But you have to understand—she liked to play games like that. Liked to tell me no, just to make me make her. It was so fucked up, I can’t even explain it. But it… It wasn’t that abnormal for her to say something like that.”

  There it was. I was as naked as I could ever be in front of her now. She could see the rottenness in me, the wrongness in me. She didn’t say anything but her face was pale. I finished the story, to get it over with. “Her dad walked in shortly thereafter. Her dad, my boss’s boss. It was awful. It’s a blur, but I remember him pulling me off her and punching me, while my dick was still out. I was done at the Pentagon. The only reason he didn’t press charges or make a huge spectacle about it was that she defended me and wouldn’t make any kind of statement accusing me. She saved me from a lot of shit—prison, ruining my dad’s life.”

  And since that day, I had thought I had raped her, even though I hadn’t intended to, even though it had been a horrible miscommunication. That I thought she wanted what I had, but the way it ended…I was sure I was the worst person ever. But last night, she had told me she wanted it then and still wanted it now. It was fucking with my head. What I thought was true about that night wasn’t.

  Leda’s voice interrupted my circular logic. “So what did you do then? Because that was a few years ago.”

  “I took six months off and Jason and I went to Europe. When we came back, I worked for a private intelligence firm, basically mercenary intelligence stuff. I did data analysis and some interrogation shit. The medicine of it was still the most interesting part, so ultimately, I applied to med school. That’s the whole story.” I waited a few beats. “Well, do you hate me?”

  “No. I don’t hate you, but…Xander. I, I…I just need to think about all of this. I don’t really know what my reaction is. Let’s get through this visit and when we get back to school, I just need some space to figure it out.”