In. Out. In. Out. In In In. Out Out Out. Hard.
Oh, God.
He rammed me one final time, and the whole world split apart.
Everything went black. I was free-floating in space, suspended as if I were captive prey on a spiderweb. My body throbbed, clenched, throbbed again, then exploded outward. I had a deep urge to clutch something, anything to stop my endless freefall down, down, down into the abyss----the very place I had longed for, begged for. But now that I was there, I scrambled for purchase along the edges, trying to stop my descent before I went mad. But it was futile. I was bound and tied, immobilized. All I could do was surrender to the forces that now gripped me and wouldn’t let me go.
And, at long last, I understood.
This was why people tied each other up in bed. This was why my body begged for restraints from the very first second Peter Rostovich ever laid eyes on me, and I him. He hadn’t slapped those cable ties on me to frighten me, or as part of a self-important art installation, or just because he was a pompous ass. He’d done it because he’d known instinctively it was what I wanted and needed. He’d given me what I wanted and needed before I’d understood exactly what that was. He knew me better than I knew myself.
This freefalling into the deep, this world-splitting madness, these primal urges, they all had a name.
Surrender. And surrender was bliss.
Time passed, I knew not how long. It could have been minutes, or hours. The world slowly reassembled itself, like confetti sprinkling its way down to the ground. I was vaguely aware that Peter’s naked body rested on top of my own, caught in his own abyss. He had not yet returned, so I just waited, noticing the pins-and-needles sensations in my bound wrists and ankles, feeling the slight aches in my spread-eagled limbs. I wanted to wrap myself around Peter, who still remained deep inside me, to embrace him and show him just how much I loved everything he had done for me. But alas, I was still bound and could do nothing of the sort. I was still at his beck and call, waiting for him to release me.
The last spasms of my orgasm subsided. It surprised me that my sex could still expand and contract for minutes---or hours---after the initial onslaught that tore the world asunder. It was a soft, gentle, and comforting sensation, like a baby rocking to sleep in its mother’s arms. A reminder that this had really happened, it had not been an illusion.
Sex was real, even if it did send you into another dimension for a time. It was of this world, and our bodies were both the key and the door.
Eventually Peter stirred. He kissed the spot where my neck met my shoulder, nuzzled me a bit with the top of his nose. I could feel his overnight growth of beard scratching against my still-sensitive skin hard enough to leave a mark. “Still alive, are you?” he whispered.
“Barely.” It was the truth. I was still having a hard time understanding how some people managed to have sex every day, or multiple times a day. If my body’s reaction was any indication, people who did that probably would have to spend their entire lives in bed, either fucking or recovering from fucking. Nobody would ever eat, or go to school, or have a job. The world should have come to a complete standstill a long time ago.
“That’s a good sign,” he said, and pulled away from me. He clutched the condom at its base, stripped it off, knotted it, tossed it into a wastebasket. “If you were capable of doing anything besides lie flat on your back and not move for several hours, then I haven’t done my job.”
“I’d say you’ve done your job and then some,” I murmured back. I had found my voice again, but I was plenty thirsty, and talking required considerable effort. To say nothing of the fact I was still tied down and spread-eagled. “I could use a glass of water, though. And eventually, a trip to the bathroom, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course.” He unbuckled my restraints one by one, unwound them, set each of my limbs free. “Take your time,” he cautioned as he released my right ankle, the last part of me to be untied. “Don’t rush. You’ve been through quite a lot tonight.”
I tried to ignore him and just sit bolt upright, but my body refused to cooperate. I managed to lift my head an inch or two off the pillow, but that was all.
Peter chuckled. “See? You didn’t believe me. Let me get you that glass of water. You should probably eat something, too. When was the last time you ate?”
I thought back for a moment and couldn’t quite remember. I supposed it had to have been the pizza margherita at lunch yesterday, which was at least twelve hours ago now. I’d skipped dinner, of course. Peter and I had become each other’s main course instead.
He didn’t wait for me to respond. “You’re probably dehydrated, and by the looks of your complexion I’m guessing your blood sugar is low. Sex takes a lot out of you. Especially when you have it with me.” He disappeared down the hallway for a moment----stark naked, of course----and returned shortly thereafter with a glass of ice water and a croissant. “Start with this. Eat and drink slowly. I’ll bring you the room service menu. You really should have a full meal.”
I glanced at the clock. Four-thirty in the a.m. “Are you sure they have room service this time of night?”
“They do for me.” He found his discarded pajama bottoms somewhere near the foot of the bed and tugged them on. “Staying in the presidential suite has its privileges.”
“How do you afford all of this, anyway?” I asked between bites of croissant. It was slightly stale, but I was so ravenous I didn’t care. “I always thought artists were, you know, starving.”
“Only the unsuccessful ones.”
“As in, not you.”
“Exactly.”
I polished off the last of the croissant and gulped down the water. Neither did much for me, it was like feeding a gnat to a lion. “Where’s that menu?”
He opened a cabinet across from the bed and produced it. “Order anything you want. And if there’s something you want that isn’t listed, they can usually pull a few strings and get it for you anyway. Though you might be out of luck if they’ve run out of Beluga. I’m told they only get it delivered once a day.”
“No thanks. I hate caviar.”
“It’s an acquired taste. Rather like bondage sex.”
“Funny, it didn’t take me long to acquire a taste for that.” I pored over the menu and settled on a simple club sandwich with a side of French fries and cottage cheese. And a Diet Coke---I had a feeling I’d need the caffeine. “Shall I place the order, or will you?”
“I’ll do it. A gentleman always orders for his lady. Besides, the kitchen won’t know you from Eve. At this hour, they’ll hang up on anyone who isn’t either me or the Ritz-Carlton CEO.”
“You’re very sure of yourself, aren’t you?”
“In my position, you have to be.”
I thought about pressing further about what he meant by “my position,” but I let it go. My deadline was running short, it was true, but now I had the advantage of afterglow on my side. I’d gotten him to bare all to me---literally---and I him. He owed me some dirt, dammit. Tit for tat.
I dictated my order to him and then headed for the bathroom. I left the door partway open so I could eavesdrop while I did my business. I wasn’t sure what possessed me to do that---maybe on the off chance what he ordered might reveal something about his character tha I could write about later.
But Peter was ever the enigma. If anything, he was a cliché. He picked up the courtesy phone and ordered for me like an English gentleman, then requested a bowl of oatmeal and eggs Benedict with a side of steamed asparagus for himself. “And a pitcher of freshly squeezed orange juice, with two chilled glasses,” he added, almost as an afterthought. “Along with a bottle of Möet, just in case we feel like making mimosas. Yes, the Rostovich suite. Thank you very much.” He hung up just as I came out of the bathroom, wearing the Ritz-Carlton robe I’d retrieved from the floor. “Our refreshments will be here within twenty minutes.”
“You’re very efficient.”
Still feeling exhausted and plenty
woozy, I tucked myself back into bed, and he sat down beside me. “So are you. I’m surprised you can walk at all.”
“I’ve always been a quick study. But I could still use about thirty hours’ sleep, I think.” But I wasn’t tired in the traditional sense---my body was spent, but adrenaline was coursing through my veins at such a clip I knew it would be impossible for me to fall asleep. “I feel like I’ve run a marathon.”
“I don’t doubt it. I’ve never seen any woman come so quickly and easily, let alone a virgin. Come to think of it, I haven’t slept with a virgin since I was a virgin myself. I was seventeen, and so was she. Her name was Svetlana and she lived next door to me in Brighton Beach.”
I smiled and settled back into the feather pillows. This was more than he’d ever revealed about himself in one sentence before. Maybe I’d finally tapped the gold mine. My thoughts went to my reporter’s notebook and recorder, which I assumed were still sitting on the dining room table, but I didn’t get up to retrieve them. It would spoil the moment. “So you were an early bloomer then,” I remarked. “Unlike me. I’m about as late to the party as people get. I’m twenty-two.”
“I greatly admire you for waiting so long,” he said, taking my hand in his. “It shows great maturity and discipline. Both of which are required if you want to live this kind of lifestyle. And I think that you do, and always have.”
That rattled me. How did this man always manage to bring the topic of conversation back to me? Good journalists never lost control of interviews, but I’d lost control long ago. I pulled away from him abruptly. “What do you mean, this kind of lifestyle? Are you talking about luxury hotel suites, and jet-setting, and being all mysterious and cryptic and toying with people?” I gestured around the room. “This? Or do you mean tying people up and slapping them around?” I was a bit shocked at how casually I put the latter part. During the actual act, it had all seemed so elegant, beautiful, sublime. Now I might as well have been talking about a cheap street pimp forcing his lead hooker back into line.
Peter looked wounded. “Both. Though I wouldn’t use your terminology when it comes to our intimate relationship. I don’t slap women around. I arouse women who seek satisfaction, and I do it only with their consent. And as far as I knew, I had your consent.”
“Yes, you did.”
“Then why are you so angry?”
I looked away. “I don’t know. This is all just so new and strange.” And I still wasn’t getting what I needed to write my articles, the whole reason we’d connected in the first place. Every time I thought I had him in my grasp, he pivoted away. It was like trying to trap an eel. “And I feel like you’re using me.”
“What makes you say that?”
I scoffed. “Everything. You bring me here like some kind of kept woman. You lead me to believe that you’re going to reveal some great juicy secret that I can use to break a story on you wide open, when you all you’ve done with the media in the past is toy with them. Instead of revealing those secrets, we end up fucking. And then, you want me to solve some sort of murder mystery for you. Does that sum things up?”
“I thought investigative reporters liked solving mysteries.”
I pressed my palms against my eyesockets. He was impossible. “Yes, we do! I mean, no! I mean, we generally like to seek out our own story angles, rather than having them thrust upon us.”
Angles. Thrusts. I couldn’t help but pick up on the double entendre in that sentence. It amused me, I hated to admit. If anything, it just made me want to fuck him again, upside down this time. “It’s just not how I thought things would turn out, is all,” I said.
“Do you regret what happened, then?”
“No.” And it was true, I didn’t. If I had to do the past three days over again, I would still do them the exact same way. It made no sense, of course. But there it was.
Peter got up and began to pace the room. “Do you understand now why I told you not to get mixed up with me, Miss Delaney? I warned you to stay away. Nothing good ever comes from getting close to me, which is why I generally don’t do it. This sort of thing always seems to happen.”
“So you always lure young women into your lair with promises of hot press tips and then drop them like a hot potato the next morning, then?”
He stopped short. “No. Absolutely not. I’ve never done anything like this”----he gestured towards me---“before. It’s uncharted territory for me. But I still seem to have managed to screw it up. I’m good at screwing things up with women, and with people in general, which is why I prefer to be alone most of the time.”
“I thought all artists were like that to some extent.” If anything, I saw a bit of myself in him. I’d always been a bit of a loner too, mostly preferring books to the company of people. My circle of friends had always been small, and you could pretty much forget about the dating department. Count on me to pick a dysfunctional international man of intrigue when I did finally fall in love.
Fall in love.
Wait a minute. Oh no. Oh, nonono. That’s not what this was. Was it? I wanted to grab myself by the nape of the neck and shake that ridiculous notion right out of my head.
The suite door buzzed, bringing me back to reality. Peter went down the hall to answer it, then returned a moment later pushing a food cart laden with silver covered serving dishes and a linen tablecloth. “The bellman wanted to bring this in himself, but I didn’t figure you were up for an outside guest.” He rolled the cart to a stop beside my bed and removed the silver covers with a flourish. My club sandwich was there, and the French fries, served skin-on with a salver of sea salt on the side. Plus there was ice-cold Pellegrino, orange juice, and the Moet in a sweating pewter ice bucket, the cork already popped and suds dangling over the lips of the bottle, dripping down onto the linen below. Peter’s eggs Benedict were on the lower shelf, but he took the time to serve me first, retrieving a foldable bed tray from inside the armoire, which he opened and set over my lap.
“Club sandwich, eh? I would have figured you more for the late-night cheeseburger type.”
“And yet you strike me as exactly the kind of man who would order an eggs Benedict with a side of asparagus at four in the morning. Reflects your extravagant tastes.”
“As do you.”
I blinked. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“You’re really quite exquisite, Nancy. I thought you would have realized that by now.”
I shrugged and popped a couple of French fries into my mouth. “I’m not exquisite at all. I’m just a regular middle-class girl who likes to read.”
“And write. Exquisitely well, I’m sure.”
“How would you know? You’ve never read a single thing I’ve written.”
“I don’t have to. There are certain things I can tell about a person right away. It’s a big reason I’ve been so successful, both as an artist and in business.”
“About that. We’re still sort of fuzzy on what exactly your business is.”
“As I’ve already told you, I’m an investor.”
“Yeah, but where do you get the money to invest? Or rather, where did you get the money? When you first started?”
“I mostly acted as a broker for the first couple of years, then began investing my own profits later on. I did also do a couple of my early transactions entirely on credit, and repaid what I borrowed in full out of my profits. I did my first deal that way, in fact. I was sixteen at the time.”
“What was the value of that first deal, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Two million dollars, if memory serves.”
I almost choked on a mouthful of French fries. “What?”
“What’s the matter? Does that seem strange to you?”
I chewed, swallowed, took a few sips of Pellegrino in an attempt to regain my composure. “Yes, it sounds plenty fucking strange.”
“Why?”
“Because sane people don’t just give sixteen-year-old immigrant street kids two million bucks to manage b
usiness deals for them.”
“Plenty of perfectly sane people did that for me. So there goes your theory.”
I sighed. “What you’re saying just doesn’t make any sense. Even if it is true, my editors will never print it without a shitload of substantiation. Which so far, you haven’t exactly been willing to share. I need names and contact information of sources who could go on the record to corroborate your story. I’d need copies of documents. I’d need something---not just your word. Otherwise I’ve got no story.”
“What about your boss? You’ve already talked to him, and he corroborated what I’m telling you, didn’t he?”
“Only in a very small way. Plus I know him personally, which kind of disqualifies him as a source for anything I write professionally. Ethics, and all that.”
“How inconvenient.”
I rolled my eyes. “You really aren’t helping.”
He sighed. “Sorry, but I don’t reveal who my clients are.”
“But you’re going to have to give me something to work with. You at least need to give me more information on yourself, and you’re going to have to be on the record about it.”
“And what if I don’t?”
“Then I won’t solve your little murder mystery for you, that’s what. And maybe we’d have to nip this”---I gestured to the bed---“in the bud, too.” I wasn’t really serious about the last part, but I didn’t want to reveal that just yet.
This got his attention. “You play hardball, Miss Delaney.”
“Hey, I gotta eat. Unlike you, I don’t have millions of questionably gained dollars at my disposal.”
He glared at me, pausing a forkful of eggs Benedict in midair, sending bits of yolk and Hollandaise sauce dribbling down his forearm. “That is uncalled for.”
“Look, if you just come clean about what exactly it is that you do and who your clients are, it wouldn’t be questionable anymore, now would it?”
Domino (The Domino Trilogy) Page 18