by CD Reiss
Her recalcitrance wound me tightly around the spool of concern. When she pinched the bridge of her nose, I had to grip the arms of the chair to keep from kneeling before her.
“It’s nothing,” she said.
Needless to say, my glands fired. Nothing didn’t mean nothing. Nothing meant “I’m not telling you,” and knowing there was something wrong that she wouldn’t share, that I couldn’t help her with, or protect her from, made my skin prickle with angry heat.
“Fiona.” I growled it in the most untherapeutic way imaginable.
Shit. I’d crossed the line.
“I can’t do this,” she said, standing.
“Wait—”
She headed for the door, and I got between her and it. Her chest heaved, and her eyes looked panicked.
“You have to know,” I said with my hands up, “I’d never do anything to hurt you.”
“I know.”
Do not fuck this up by thinking with your dick. She needs you.
“I’m here for you. Not the other way around. If you want to talk, this is the place to do it.”
She crossed her arms and took a second to realign her jaw. As strong as she tried to look, she was falling apart at the seams.
“You want to talk about something?” she said.
“Yes.”
“You want to talk about something really painful and hard?”
My hands landed on her shoulders as if they had a will of their own. God damn my porous boundaries. “Talk to me.”
“I want to tell you things I won’t tell anyone, but I can’t. You’ll just make me relive it, and you’ll want to tell people who will only make it worse. But you have this way… you open me up. You crack me open and pour me out, and all you do is look at me. So you need to stop looking at me because it just makes me love you more.”
Her eyes went wide with shock, as if she’d just been slapped or surprised by what she’d said. I took my hands off her shoulders, because I didn’t want her to feel pressured, but she took it as a sign to leave.
I let her go, because that was the professional thing to do, and as I stood there looking at the seam between the door and jamb, my father’s voice broke the fog of my disbelief.
Go get her, you stupid shit.
CHAPTER 11.
fiona
Elliot burst out of the building just as I was opening the car door.
“Wait!” he called.
I didn’t. Because fuck everyone. And my brain. Fuck my brain and my stupid mouth. I must have been out of my motherfucking mind.
I didn’t love him. I loved Deacon, who was perfect for me, even if I wasn’t submissive according to him, and who I still wasn’t sure about, love or no love. All these men. All of them could go fuck themselves.
I peeled out of the parking lot, leaving that fucker in the rearview. He’d almost gotten to me. Almost made me tell him about Warren. Well, I wasn’t ready. That shit at the creek did not happen, and I was not recounting it for him, and I didn’t love him so fuck my stupid brain.
Use different words.
Confused brain.
Truthful brain.
Lying, stupid brain fuck the holes in my brain.
Of course, there was an accident on the 10. The 10 was an accident factory.
“Late!” I said to the dashboard. “That’s a word I’d use to describe myself. Late.”
I wasn’t late. Not yet. But I needed to call myself terrible things.
“Late,” I said, speeding across Santa Monica Boulevard. “Of course there’s traffic, and I’m late.”
I focused on getting downtown without killing myself or anyone else. My hands loosened, my breathing slowed, and I got there in one piece. I checked myself in the rearview. I couldn’t even see myself. I looked like a Fiona Drazen mask.
Fuck it. I took a deep breath and got out of the car.
Irving Wittenstein was the best celebrity photographer in Hollywood. He had been when we met, the Wednesday after Deacon put his fingers up my skirt, and when I got out of Westonwood, he was still the best. Worthy of keeping a six-month-old appointment at the worst time in my life.
He had a studio in the guts of downtown between a garment factory and a Mexican food warehouse.
“Hey,” I said when he opened the door.
He kissed both of my cheeks. “Welcome back.”
He was a clean-cut guy with a serious face and an arm that had lost the battle with polio when he was a child. But he managed to come off as handsome and competent, and when he’d taken my picture the first time, I looked at the results and felt as though the camera saw my insides.
Which, at the time, had seemed like a good thing. Back when I was young and stupid, or just stupid. Before Westonwood, and days before Deacon got me under control.
Before Warren.
Which I realized I was trying not to think about. I told myself I was all right with it, but if I was all right with it, I wouldn’t be thinking about it all the goddamned time.
“You look rested,” Irving said at his door. “Your team’s here.”
My team. Right. I had a hair stylist. A makeup stylist. A makeup applicator. A clothing stylist. A nail person. Each of them had an assistant.
Look casual.
I smiled and put my hand on his lame arm. “Wanna do something real?”
“For Vanity Fair? Not likely.”
I didn’t think I was sabotaging the shoot. I thought of it as bringing it to the next level. No more same old, same old. I walked into the green room and was immediately attacked by giggles and kisses. Someone put a drink in my hand. I heard the words “blow” and “flake” in the form of a question.
“Stop!” I said, throwing up my hands. I put down the drink.
They had huge kohl-lined eyes and open red lips.
“I’m doing this different. You’ll get paid. But get out.” I pointed toward the door.
“Come back for the next shoot.”
They hustled out until it was just me, Irving, and Piper Lundgren, the Vanity Fair editor. With a crop of bright white hair and a soft blue jacket by a Japanese designer, she looked like an ad for New York City.
Once the last of them went, Piper slow-clapped. “Stunning performance.”
I kissed her cheek then the other.
“So wearing Photoshop then?” she asked.
“Oh, shut up.” I powdered my nose. I’d do foundation, mascara, lipstick. No more than that. “Let’s make history again.”
“You getting naked again?” she asked, brow raised.
I hadn’t known what I wanted out of the first shoot, but I hadn’t thought about making history or anything else.
The last cover I’d done for Vanity Fair had excited and scared the shit out of me. I’d been naked but for shoes and a copy of First Touch covering what couldn’t be printed. The book itself was about a woman understanding her need to be dominated and degraded, a journey I was about to begin during that first shoot, and a journey that was about to end during the second.
That first shoot had taken on a life of its own, and when I wiggled into the silken drapey thing I was supposed to wear and the air-light fabric touched my skin, I shivered.
Deacon had been at the first shoot.
A man I barely knew.
He’d shown up because he knew Irving, and I’d asked him to stay. Irving had it under control, but Deacon distracted me with the burn of his gaze.
“If you’re going to undress me with your eyes,” I’d said to him in a room full of people, “why not just ask me to get undressed?”
The room went silent. Someone turned off the music. Piper bit the end of her pencil and looked at Deacon as if she wanted to jump his bones, but he kept his focus on me.
With half a smile, he said, “Take off your clothes.”
It wasn’t salacious. It wasn’t “Show me your tits,” which I’d done a hundred times, even sober. It was uttered in a normal tone, and it was an order.
I unbuttoned my shirt,
and the reaction from the stylists and friends was hooting and howling with a side of clapping. Piper looked unsure. Deacon’s eyes didn’t move off me.
“Out!” Irving shouted, waving his good arm with the camera at the end.
I kept unbuttoning, because outside Deacon and me, no one was in that room. And Irving, doing his fucking job like a fucking badass, took those pictures. I’d been cut open, turned on, high on little black pills and the man with the blue eyes.
Deacon had been the one to pick up First Touch off a bench and hand it to me to cover myself. I got on my knees and opened my mouth. Spreading my knees on the floor and putting the book between my legs. Forearm over my little breasts.
The book was a reflection of how I felt, and how I wanted to feel. How I looked. Like a degraded slut with a ton of money.
The cover had been famous, and if the paparazzi couldn’t get enough of me before, the nude added to their hunger.
I hadn’t intended to go on without makeup when I got the booking for the second shoot. Piper flipped open her phone, and Irving relieved her of it. He was great. After Westonwood, he was the only one I trusted to photograph me.
I shouldn’t have trusted anyone.
I should have stayed home, wherever that was. Crawled into my dusty condo on Venice Beach and stretched out in the middle of the floor. Let the sun set on me, keeping all my shit in the dark. Because the dark was where it all belonged. Deacon. Warren. Elliot. Debbie. Even Willem, who annoyed the holy fuck out of me.
But the lights, and the heat, and feeling all those people looking at me…
“You all right, Fiona?” Irving said, camera down. He changed the roll of film. “I was going to do some large format stuff, but if you don’t feel it…”
“We can’t reschedule,” Piper said.
“I feel it,” I said. “I’m fine.”
Because fuck Piper Lundgren from Vanity Fair. I could turn this shit on and off in a heartbeat. This was my job, motherfucker. This was all I had to do. Party, be seen partying, get photographed between parties.
“I’m putting a strobe in and using slower film,” he said, snapping the large format cartridge into the camera. “So no quick moves.” He put the camera on a tripod.
“Okay.” I nodded more to myself than him.
“Fiona?”
“Irving?”
“Are you all right?”
“Do you want me to repeat my safe word? Or are you just going to believe me?”
Party.
Be seen partying.
Get photographed between parties.
I looked at the camera and jutted my hip to the right.
“Open up, Fiona,” Irving said.
The flash went off, and I was exposed. Bare. Skin and mask ripped away. All defenses burned to the ground. It wasn’t the flash. It was the flash and time. The lens found the cracks. It was him telling me to open up the millisecond before I couldn’t shore myself up, and the flash going off, and Piper with her bitten pencil, and the four-thousand-dollar dress, and Deacon’s voice when he said he wasn’t going to break me, and that god-fucking caterpillar in my face as I was a little shit-eating whore with an asshole surrounded by sentient skin, and I choked.
I just choked.
I choked on spit and bile, and both came out in a sob. A part of me was thinking, looking at myself, observing the meltdown with crystal clarity, and saying, “Oh well, I guess we’re doing this now, are we?”
And I did it. I dropped to my knees and wailed. Every ounce of pain came though my face. My narcissism and self-loathing. My moral emptiness and emotional fullness. I wasn’t prepared for pain. Wasn’t raised for it. And it hurt. Everything hurt. I felt so alone, so abandoned, so worthless, and at the same time so cherished and prized, burdened with a responsibility to strangers I couldn’t shoulder. Not through what I’d done. Not through hurting Deacon. Not through this grinding foul hate I couldn’t ignore.
I didn’t know what I was saying as I twisted my body on itself and wept. Large-format abandoned, the camera clicked even when I got back up on my knees and looked into my cupped hands, where I’d caught a line of spit. I thought how much they looked like leaves, and how the streak of mascara across my palm looked like a caterpillar. And I got mad.
I’d gotten away with everything in my life. I’d banged up cars, spent money, done more drugs than a body should be able to do. And Warren was from my tribe. He’d walk away. I knew it was the truth. The only one who could punish him for what he’d done was me.
I looked at the ceiling and cried out, because I was joyful in my rage. My face was smeared with kohl. A red gash of lipstick lacerated across my cheek. The dress had shifted, exposing a breast.
They’d ask me later if I’d been aware of the camera. And I was. Of course I was. I was born to be aware of the camera. But I was also born to be honest before it.
I was born to party.
To be seen partying.
To be photographed between parties.
And there was my power.
This life was my life. Fuck anyone who tried to take it away.
CHAPTER 12.
fiona
I left the studio drained. Nice and empty. I was going to spend the night filling myself up with something fun, something positive for a change. I was done with this weepy shit. My life. My choices. My control.
As if he’d heard my determination, Deacon was leaning on my car when I got out of Irving’s.
When he saw me, he opened the passenger side for me. He’d taken the fucking liberty of putting Wagner in the stereo.
I approached him, eyes locked on his, his face peaceful and powerful, as if I was just a section in an orchestra he conducted.
“I don’t do this old world shit,” I said.
“You fuck to it all the time.”
I swallowed. I’d done lots of things to classical music, mostly staying still while being manhandled, and they all flashed through my head. “Who said anything about fucking?”
See, that was a denial. I was telling him I didn’t want to fuck him, even though I did. And that meant I was looking for a sweet beating or a knotting or something else. But I wasn’t looking for anything I would have looked for before. I didn’t know what I wanted besides swift, sharp change.
He saw that. In the way he looked down, and the way his sculpted hand moved a lock of my hair away from my eyes, he saw everything. “What’s going on with you, Kitten?”
“You’re the one who jacked my car.”
“Get in then.” He stepped aside, and I got in the passenger seat. He slapped the door closed and walked around the front. Jeans. Boots. Jacket. Six-three in a full suit of badass.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Where were you headed?”
I had been headed somewhere he wouldn’t want to go. Somewhere he wouldn’t be welcome, where he’d see things he didn’t want to see.
“Is this what you meant by ‘not submissive?’ You my chauffeur now?”
“I’m whatever you need.”
“Let’s hit the 405.” I snapped the lap belt closed. “Really open this bitch up.”
“I can’t get arrested.”
“I know.”
Deacon was on a watch list. He could move in and out of the country, but if he was arrested, the domino effect from the investigation would put him in jail, or worse, get him extradited to Sudan. He’d never elaborated on why that was bad or what he’d been caught doing in Sudan, but I had enough of an imagination to make me not ask.
“I’m moving out,” I said. “I’m going back to my place in Malibu.”
I saw him mostly in silhouette against the painted sunset and grey geometry of the city. He looked like he wasn’t going to answer, but I knew better. He didn’t speak for the sake of speaking or answer because I’d asked a question. He was a Dominant, a Master, and he knew his words had power.
“I need to know you’re all right, and when you’re not living under my roof, anything can h
appen. That’s very uncomfortable for me.”
Saying it was uncomfortable for him as well, that I knew. He didn’t enjoy expressing his feelings as much as he enjoyed acting on them.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know if I can be that for you anymore. You said so yourself.”
“You’ll always be mine, whether you’re submissive or not. You can just make it easy or hard.”
“I don’t want it to be hard for you, but something changed. I don’t know what changed. Believe me, I’d love to have things stay the way they were. I never felt so safe as with you on Maundy. But it’s not the same. And I don’t mean the location is different. I mean… something happened in Westonwood.”
I froze. I meant something psychological. I meant a change in my own chemistry. But to my ears, it sounded like I was segueing into Warren.
“With the doctor?”
“No!” The denial came too hard and too fast. “Yes, but no.”
We hit the 405, and I thought for the first time that maybe he shouldn’t open this bitch up. Maybe he should drive straight and clean and well under the speed limit.
“Yes, but no? What does that mean?”
“Are you jealous?” It was a ridiculous question. Deacon wasn’t jealous. He just didn’t have that gene.
“Just tell me,” he growled. “I want to know.”
Yet he’d avoided my question.
“Yes, he changed me, because he asked questions and told me things and saw me in a way I’ve never been seen before. But to the heart of what you want to know, no, I didn’t fuck him.”
The acceleration of the car was so smooth and powerful, it reminded me of a horse moving fluidly from walk to canter to gallop. And Deacon, whose grace always reminded me of a stallion, was wound tight.
“I don’t care if you fuck him!”
I’d never heard him raise his voice. Ever. I didn’t know if I looked as deer-in-headlights as I felt.
The car sped into the eighties. The freeway was empty for a change. The whup of the tires under me was soothing. I paced my breathing with the seams in the road.
“Deacon. I was joking. Slow down!”
“You let him in!” His hair whipped over his forehead, and mine swirled over my face.