He knelt on my thighs. I could hear him undoing his pants. “Don’t move. Don’t fucking move,” he growled. I obeyed, because I didn’t want him to choke me again. I turned my thoughts inward, away from the hands and hips and cock shoving between my legs. The rape part barely registered. Of course it hurt, and it was terrifying and awful, but not as terrifying and awful as knowing he was probably going to suffocate me when he finished. I started to weep, moaning against the panties in my mouth.
He made a disgusted sound. “Crying like a fucking baby. Shut the fuck up.”
He ripped my blouse open, yanked down my bra and grasped my breasts as he thrust into me. It hurt so bad. My skirt was still up around my waist, a bundle of fabric between his hips and mine. In the midst of a hard thrust, he jerked the string of costume pearls and broke it. Pearls scattered everywhere. Cheap jewelry. I was going to die wearing cheap jewelry with my skirt up to my waist and my panties in my mouth. No. You can’t die. You have to fight him. I scratched frantically at his arms as he tugged off my blouse and bra and tossed them across the room. I screamed through the gag, praying someone passing by in the hall might hear me.
But no one came to my rescue, and he didn’t let me escape. He held me down by the arms and drove into me without mercy, until my frantic cries broke from the force of his thrusts. Oh, God, what happened when he finished? What happened when he came? Was that the moment he would kill me? All I could think was fight, Chere, fight, even though the fighting wasn’t getting me anywhere. Tears ran down my cheeks into my nose, into my ears.
He pulled out of me and I fought like hell to get away, to escape his grip. He only grasped me harder and forced me over onto my stomach. When I tried to head butt him, he held my face down into the covers. I couldn’t breathe. I was going to die. The edges of my vision went black again and I thought, this is it. So fast. So soon.
But no, I woke again from a virulent, scarlet-tinged dream I couldn’t remember. He was pounding into me from behind now. I tried to crawl away, to escape this violence, but he just dragged me back and made me submit. There was a ticking in my brain. Maybe it was the last remaining seconds of my life counting down.
I wondered where W was, if he’d left the hotel yet. I wondered how he would feel when Henry told him what had happened to me. He’d feel guilty. He’d blame himself. And Simon... Oh, Simon. He’d go off the deep end, go totally batshit and overdose on some drug.
No, I couldn’t die like this. It was wrong. It was horrible and wrong and impossible. I fought with all my strength, kicking, bucking, jerking my shoulders back and forth to try to dislodge his weight.
“Yeah, baby, fight me,” he chanted, fucking me harder. “The more you fight me, the harder I’m going to come. I’m going to come so fucking hard.”
I could feel pearls rolling around on the bed beneath me, under my breasts, under my cheek. I felt him jerk inside me, felt his fingers tighten on my shoulders as he came in a series of stuttering thrusts. I waited to feel those fingers close around my neck. Would he suffocate me like this, with my face in the sheets, or would he turn me over and watch my eyes as he choked the life out of me? I thought he’d probably want to watch me die, but he didn’t turn me over. He groaned instead, and collapsed on top of me.
Oh shit, there were the fingers on my neck. Holy shit. I was so scared. I didn’t want to die. I gave a long, low moan of agonized denial. This blond man was going to be my killer, and I didn’t want that. I hadn’t planned to die like this. It was so sordid, so violent.
“No, please,” I begged with the last of my breath, as his fingers tightened around my windpipe and cut off my air.
Then they loosened. The man kissed the back of my neck and laughed softly against my ear.
And I knew that laugh. It was W’s laugh.
I felt so many feelings in that moment. I felt such an explosion of angst and disbelief that I literally couldn’t cope. I couldn’t think or react. I felt rage, I felt humiliation, I felt confusion, I felt relief, I felt sadness. But mostly I felt rage. I started trembling, uncontrollable trembling that made the bed shake. He lifted me a little. The pearls rolled under me, pooling into groups on the sheets.
“Wait a minute. Hold on,” he said. He worked at the gag, unknotting the tie. As soon as I could, I spit out my panties and turned around and punched him in the face. He deflected my fist, but I punched him again, punched him as many times as I could before he grabbed my hands and stopped me.
He laughed and tried to catch my gaze. “Stop, Chere. Jesus. It was just for fun.” The Texas accent was gone. W was back, laughing at me, laughing at all the horrible things he’d just done. “Don’t be mad. It was fucking hot.”
“Hot for who?” I shouted. “I didn’t know it was you!”
“You weren’t supposed to know. That would have ruined all the fun.”
Fun? Fun? I tried to hit him again and then I thought, why expend the energy? Why am I still here? I’d gotten to see W, which was the only reason I’d come here. I’d learned that he was a handsome, smiling, blond psycho, and that was pretty much all I wanted to know about him.
I hated him. I despised him. I pushed past him, staggering away from the bed and pulling down my skirt. “I need my clothes. I need my clothes.” I saw my bra and blouse on the floor, but I felt too numb to bend and pick them up.
He studied me with his brows drawn together, and his lips pursed in a line. “It’s okay,” he said. He wasn’t laughing anymore. He reached out to me with the same hand he’d used to suffocate me. “It was just a kinky game. If it upsets you this much, I won’t do anything like it again.”
“Stay away from me.” I was afraid to take my eyes off him. I still didn’t know. What if he wasn’t W? What if he was? My mind was officially broken. “I don’t know you,” I said. “I want to leave.”
He reached for me again, and now he looked worried. “Chere, come here, please. It’s me. I wouldn’t know your name if it wasn’t me. I’m not fucking with you now. The game’s over. I’m sorry, I took it too far.”
He kept calling it a game, which I didn’t understand. You couldn’t scare someone that bad and call it a “game.” I couldn’t stop shaking. The danger was over, but the adrenaline was still coursing through my veins with nowhere to go.
This wasn’t a stranger. This man wasn’t going to kill me. He wasn’t going to snuff out my life and cram me under the bed, and fuck off back to Texas, but for ten whole minutes I’d believed that would be my fate, and my mind couldn’t seem to grasp the fact that this had all been W’s idea of “hot” and “fun.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really fucking sorry. I didn’t think you’d freak out this bad. I thought you’d realize it was me.”
“How?” I started bawling, loud, awful bawling in the silent room. “You choked me and raped me. I thought you were going to kill me when you finished. How was I supposed to realize it was you?”
“You know my body. You know what my cock feels like. I even used a condom.” He held it up in his hand like he deserved a medal.
“I don’t think about those kinds of things when someone is raping me.” My voice rose to a shriek and broke, and I knew I had to stop talking to him, or I wouldn’t be able to figure out how to get dressed again, how to breathe and talk and leave. He threw away the condom and watched me struggle with my blouse. I couldn’t put it on. I was shaking too bad.
“Shit,” he said.
He came toward me and I held up a hand to ward him off, but he still came. He yanked up the comforter and wrapped it around me, and sat with me on the edge of the bed. He held me tight and nuzzled his lips against my ear.
“Okay, baby. Take deep breaths. Try to calm down.”
I couldn’t calm down. I turned my face into his neck because I needed shelter, even if that shelter had to come from him. He ran a hand up and down my back and told me everything was okay now, but I couldn’t stop shivering.
“I thought I was going to die,” I repeated, over
“I’m sorry, Chere. I’m really sorry.”
He didn’t make any more excuses. There were no excuses. He’d fucked up. At least when Simon attacked me there was a reason, an explanation. W had done this thing for fun.
I cried and cried, because he was awful and what had just happened was awful. The fact that he was soothing me now was awful, but he made me curl and rest against him until there were no more tears.
“Better?” he asked, tilting my face up to his.
No, nothing was better, but fuck, now that I could look at him, he was so fucking handsome. He was so much sexier, so much more beautiful than I’d ever imagined behind my blindfold, even if he was gold instead of dark.
It didn’t matter. I still hated him. “I’m not better,” I said stiffly.
“What can I do? How can I make it up to you? How can I make you feel better? I didn’t hurt you, did I? I mean, your body? I was careful not to hurt you, even if it didn’t feel that way.”
In hindsight, I realized that. When he hit me, he hadn’t hit me hard. When he deflected my kicking and scratching, he hadn’t retaliated. But he’d scared me to death, which was the worst injury of all.
“I wish you hadn’t done this,” I said. “You ruined everything between us.”
He looked into my eyes, and then he shook his head. “There’s nothing between us to ruin. You didn’t trust me to begin with. You don’t trust me now.”
He could be so harsh. Such an asshole. “I trust you less now than I trusted you before,” I said.
“You shouldn’t. You know what I look like now. That’s trust, isn’t it? I’m not horrible. You thought I’d be horribly ugly, didn’t you?”
“You’re horribly ugly because you’re mean. You’re a psycho.”
I watched the faint smile fade from his lips. “I go too far sometimes,” he admitted. “I do everything too big, too far. It’s my worst fault. You know what your worst fault is?”
I gave him a withering look. “Continuing to see you?”
“No. Your worst fault is not trusting yourself. Not believing in yourself. You knew it was me. You knew in the lobby. You knew in the elevator. You knew when we stood there looking at each other in the hall.” His quiet voice accused me. Everything he said was true. “You knew in your heart that it was me, but you doubted yourself. Not only did you doubt, but you didn’t speak up. If you’d turned to me and said, ‘I know it’s you’ I would have nodded and said you were right. I mean, I still would have stuck your panties in your mouth and raped you, but I would have admitted it was me.”
“I couldn’t say anything,” I reminded him. “Your hand was over my mouth. You made me pass out.”
“That was extremely hot, by the way.”
“I hate you. I should press charges.”
He didn’t look afraid when I said this. He looked approving. “Yes, you should, but you won’t. That not-trusting-yourself thing again. Is it enough for me to say that I won’t ever fuck with you that bad again? On the bright side, now I know how far is too far.”
“First thing,” I said, sticking a finger under his nose. “There is no bright side to what you just did to me. Second thing, you don’t know how far is too far. What you did was way, way past what I’m okay with. What anyone would be okay with. Especially me.”
“All right. Let’s talk about that.”
“No, I’m leaving.”
He took my hand when I tried to get up. “Did you bring a bathing suit?” he asked. “I told you to bring a bathing suit.”
Of course I’d brought my bathing suit. I enjoyed following his directions, to a point. “I brought one, but it doesn’t matter, because I’m leaving,” I told him. Our time wasn’t up, but I didn’t care.
“The pool here is really beautiful. Peaceful. When’s the last time you went swimming?”
I looked into his eyes, his handsome, intent blue eyes, and said, “I don’t want you to touch me ever again.”
I saw a flicker of disappointment. Regret. He let go of my hand. “Will you go swimming with me if I promise not to touch you?”
His promises meant nothing to me. Less than nothing.
On the other hand, I hadn’t been swimming in a long, long time.
In Between
Now that I was calmer, and not in fear of being murdered, I was able to study the man across from me in the azure blue pool. He was handsome as fucking sin.
So far he’d kept his promise. He hadn’t touched me. I needed distance and he seemed to understand that. Even in the elevator, we’d stood on opposite sides, facing the front.
The Empire Hotel’s pool was beautiful and peaceful, situated high above the cacophony of the city. The sun was setting and the air was thin and pink, like my bikini. Breezes blew across the patio enclosure. The pool was small, but the sky was big, and no one else was here. W swam laps like a fucking Olympian, perfect form, back and forth, muscular arms slicing through the water. I bobbed in the corner because I could only dog paddle.
It had been a hard week for me. Between Simon’s attack and W’s quasi rape, I felt battered. Not my body. My body was used to indignities. It was my soul and my emotions that felt battered. I’d looked forward to this date all week. I’d looked forward to finally finding out what W looked like. I’d tried to look all pretty and feminine and special for this first real meeting. I wonder how special I’d looked while I was sobbing, choking on my panty-and-necktie gag.
I turned away from him and stared up at the sky. What did a pink sunset mean? Good tidings, or bad? I needed some good tidings. I felt miserable enough to drown.
No, no drowning. There was something healing about water, perhaps because it washes things away, or because it embraces you and makes you buoyant. W swam over and leaned on the edge of the pool near me. Not touching. Don’t touch me. I still felt confused by his Anglo-Saxon blondness, when I’d expected him to be a dark Mediterranean lover.
He didn’t say anything to me, just stared at my breasts. He was winded from the billion laps he’d just banged out. I tried not to notice the drips of water traveling down his sculpted chest, or his rippling arm muscles.
“How old are you?” I asked.
“None of your business.”
Any other personal questions were sure to get the same response.
“I thought you would have dark hair,” I said, because it still flustered me.
“I don’t have dark hair,” he said. “I have blond hair.”
“Are you from Texas?”
“No. But the accent’s not that hard.” He sighed. “I’m sorry I fucked with you. You’re fun to fuck with. You’re so earnest.”
Earnest? Never heard that before. Sweet, sexy, feline, seductive? Yes. Earnest? No.
His eyes left my face and traveled to my shoulder. “What happened to you? I didn’t do that.”
There was a lingering bruise from when Simon had socked me on the collarbone. I covered it with my hand.
“What happened?” he asked again.
“None of your business,” I replied, borrowing his earlier phrase. “So, I guess there’s no more mystery between us.”
“Huh?”
“The poetry from last time. It was Mystery by D.H. Lawrence.”
“Your Googling skills are impressive. And there’s still mystery between us. What do you know about me? Besides how I look?”
I thought a moment. I could pretty much list the rest of what I knew on one hand.
Good swimmer
Rich
Private
Pervert
Psycho
“Are you still going to see me after today?” he asked.
I wanted to say no. I should have said no, but instead I said nothing at all, because I was undecided.
“I’ll give you more poetry,” he said. “You’ll be swimming in rhymes and metaphors. Speaking of swimming, why don’t you swim? Why are you hugging the wall?”
So I won’t hug you. Because I want to hate you, but now you’re being kind and charming and polite and I want to hug you and grope your muscles.
“I’m not a big swimmer,” I muttered. “But the water feels good.”
“I’d like to kiss you.” He didn’t move closer to me, or grab me. He kept his distance. “We haven’t kissed yet today.”
“I don’t know why you want to kiss me when you won’t even tell me your name. It’s stupid.”
“It’s not stupid. Not to me.”
“Do you have a horrible name?”
“No, I have a normal name.”
“Mortimer? Herman? Gaylord?”
“Normal.”
“Wilbur? Barnabus?”
“Keep guessing. You’re pretty far off.”
A hot young stud strolled onto the pool deck. Another escort, probably. His Speedos were about twenty times tighter than W’s navy swim trunks. I gave Young Stud the once-over just to yank W’s chain. When I looked back at him, I realized he knew my intention, and that it amused him. Ugh. Why did I bother trying to ruffle him? He was unruffle-able.
“Can I kiss you?” he asked. And I knew what he really meant was, Are we okay again? because his eyes were saying I’m sorry and his lips were saying let me kiss it better.
I didn’t answer, I just swam over into his arms, because that’s where I wanted to be, for better or worse. He caught me against him and lifted me in the water, and fastened his lips onto mine. The young stud made a faint sound of disgust, but I didn’t care.
W tugged at my hair, demanding my attention as his lips recaptured mine. His kisses mended my soul, at least a little. He might not tell me his name, but he kissed me like a lover every single time.
“Do you want to go back down to the room?” he said when we parted.
“Maybe.”
“I probably owe you an orgasm.”
I glared at him. He owed me a lot more than an orgasm after what he’d done, but an orgasm would work for starters.
“All right, then,” I said, moving my arms under the water. “Yes.”
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