The Delicious Torment

by Alison Tyler

  Everything looked unpredictable on me now. The new hair had changed my whole attitude. It wasn’t that I’d never be able to pull off a schoolgirl look again, but this style made me want to rock black leather slacks, a hard-as-nails studded belt, and a tight-fitted, long-sleeved T-shirt. My boots worked perfectly with the rest of the attire, and I wore the outfit up the stairs to get Alex’s opinion.

  He had placed two more items next to the register: a crop and a quirt. And he had that impish look on his face again.

  “What do you think?” I managed to ask, turning around. The giggling girls buying dildos for their soon-to-be-married friend turned to look, as well.

  “You figured out the goal, then?” he asked back, apparently unimpressed with how long I’d taken.

  I shrugged. “One more thing.” I snagged a wallet from below the register, complete with a silver wallet chain, and I added this to my outfit. In the mirror, I looked tough. Joan Jett tough. And I liked it.

  Alex paid for all purchases, laughing when the clerk offered to wrap his items in brown paper. “No need,” he said magnanimously. “I’ll be using them soon.”

  He walked me out of the store with his hands full of a pain-tinged bouquet, and a bit of my inner swagger wore off when he made me hold the devices in my lap while he drove.

  “Jack’s meeting you for dinner in Santa Monica,” he said. “But we have a few hours to kill first.”

  Absentmindedly, I found myself fingering the leather prison strap he’d chosen first. I could still feel the echo of pain from that one solitary blow. I watched as Alex drove us easily through the city, understanding he had a plan when I realized he was heading away from the beach, toward Griffith Park instead.

  “Jack wanted me to prep you,” he said, his voice low, and I realized his mood was changing as we grew closer to whatever destination he had in mind. “Prep you for tonight’s activities. And he said to use my best judgment on how to do that.”

  Jack had given me to Alex for the afternoon. I understood that. And I felt nervous as Alex parked the car and walked to my side, opening the door for me like a gentleman would. But he was no gentleman. He could never be what Jack was. He could try. But he always seemed to be acting. The moves didn’t come naturally.

  “A little walk,” he said, “to a secluded spot. Where it won’t matter if you make noise.”

  I looked at him, not obeying right away, trying to gauge exactly what he had planned.

  “Don’t test me, little girl”—his pet phrase for the day—“I’m still in a good mood.”

  I followed him out of the car and down the path he’d chosen, walking in gear that was clearly ridiculous for a hike in the park. But Alex didn’t take me far. He had a location in mind, secluded as he’d promised, yet he surprised me once more when we’d reached the destination. Rather than having me assume his chosen position—whatever that might be, bent over to touch my toes, or straight up, leaning against a tree—he gripped me in his embrace. Tight. And then he backed away, slightly, looking down at me. For a moment, I thought he would slap my face. And then I thought he would kiss me.

  “Do you love Jack?”

  The question caught me even more off guard.

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Really? You really love him?”

  “Yes, Alex.”

  And then, more strange than anything, more unexpected than everything, “Could you love me, too?”

  Chapter Twenty–Three:

  Love

  “Could you, Samantha?”

  I am a deeply monogamous person.

  Oh, yeah, right, I can hear you saying snidely. You cheated, like, three times on your fiancé. Not three times, actually. But with three different lovers. You had several ménages. You kissed that waiter. You were willingly whipped by Jack’s assistant….

  But I didn’t love any of those people. That’s the difference. So, yes, I’ll admit it’s pathetic I didn’t love the man I was supposed to marry. I understand that. And it’s downright cruel that I took pleasure in bending over for Connor while wearing Byron’s diamond and ruby ring. Yet none of that changed my fundamental feeling—love should be between two people. That once I found the type of love I craved, it’s all I would want.

  I’d been there before—with Brock. And yeah, Brock was a criminal. A thief and a drug dealer. And yeah, none of that fucking mattered. I loved him. With that kind of love you read about, that unreal passion that makes everything—and everyone else—fade away. I knew what that emotion was like when I was eighteen. Some people die without ever finding it, poor souls, and before Jack, I thought I’d never find that sort of love again.

  So Alex’s query threw me into a spin.

  Was he asking me this as a test from Jack? With Jack, you never knew.

  Was he trying to get me back for wanting him to lie? That seemed far-fetched. My request had been minor. This was huge.

  He came a step closer, and I took a step back. He didn’t frighten me. I don’t know why. We were out in the woods together, and he had weapons of a sort with him. And yet he seemed vulnerable, and I felt as if for the first time with Alex, I had the upper hand.

  “Why are you asking me that?”

  “I need to know.”

  Jack and I weren’t married. And he definitely had an interest in seeing me with other people. He’d already incorporated Alex into our world physically. So what was the difference? Or, rather, what was the problem?

  Perhaps Alex was tired of being a tool. Or maybe before I came along, he was the one sitting at Jack’s side in the passenger seat. But I didn’t think so. Somehow, I guessed that Alex had always been relegated to assistant. To helper.

  “I don’t know,” I said, my mind flickering to a paper I wrote back in school. We’d been assigned to write about King Lear, and my composition was called “Lear in Love.” I followed that emotion through the play, and I inserted famous quotes about love in my essay. (I got an A+, I’ll say.) But when I look back now, I realize I’ve been obsessed with the concept of love for years. I thought I knew what it meant.

  And yet, when Alex asked me his question, the whole concept of love changed in my mind. Could I love him? That’s what he wanted to know. I’d never been in this situation before.

  Brock said he loved me on day two. The feeling was more than mutual. We were so well suited for each other. I’ll never in my life know how he found me. How he saw me. How he knew. But I will always believe in love at first sight based on that experience.

  Byron said he loved me after he thought someone else wanted me more. I returned the statement, knowing I didn’t feel the same way about him as I had about Brock, but thinking maybe you only get one shot at that sort of powerful body-thrilling love in your life.

  Jack said he loved me when I needed to know. When I couldn’t stand not knowing anymore.

  And Alex?

  My world felt turned upside down.

  “Could you someday?” His voice was soft. His eyes were cast down. I had hated him. I had seen the pleasure he’d taken in giving me pain. I had witnessed how much my embarrassment thrilled him. And yet sometimes I’d felt almost as if he were a brother, that strong pull of sibling rivalry alive and well in our mutual quest to please Jack. But did any of those things mean I couldn’t…I didn’t…

  He was silent. He was waiting. I looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. Alex was younger than Jack—and I do tend to like my men a bit older. But he was older than me, old enough. He liked what I liked. That was clear. If there had been no Jack in the picture, would I have fallen for him? For his coldness. For the way he was methodical in all of his dealings—from the style in which he dressed to his extreme punctuality.

  Fuck, I didn’t know.

  I loved Jack. That was clear in my head. But I didn’t know what to say. I sat down.

  Can you choose who you love?

  Alex stayed standing, and I looked up at him. “I don’t know,” I said again. “I’m sorry.”

&
nbsp; He smiled, kind of shyly. “That’s not a no,” he said.

  I shrugged. “You confused me.”

  He sat down now. Not close enough to touch me, but nearby. “I’ve been wondering for a while,” he said.

  What would it mean? Would I have two Dominant men in my life? I already did. What would the difference be if I started to look at Alex as anything other than a human device, a useful tool controlled by Jack?

  “You love him, though,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  And that one word made my heart ache. Fundamentally, truly, deep down in my core, I am so very wired to be a one-woman man. And I can hear you saying, Ha! Right. But I am. If I’d met Brock later, when I was older. If he hadn’t been arrested. If I hadn’t gone off to school.

  If… If… If…

  I wish I could tie this up nicely. I wish I could say we came to some sort of agreement out there in the wilderness in the middle of Los Angeles. But all I can say is that Alex smiled at me. That he cocked his head and looked me over. And then he said, “I’m a hypocrite.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m going to ask you what you asked me.”

  I stared at him.

  “I’m going to beg you, even,” he continued.

  He didn’t want me to tell Jack. He was asking me to lie for him. The weapons were still at his side. The crop and the prison strap and the rest. He gathered them up and handed them over.

  “Whatever you want,” he said. “Do it. But don’t tell Jack…”

  Chapter Twenty–Four:

  Liar

  I never lied to Brock.

  There are a million reasons why I was always honest with him, but the simplest is that he would have known if I hadn’t been. He would have looked into my dark brown eyes and been able to tell in a split second that I wasn’t being truthful. Of course, he didn’t maintain the same level of honesty with me. He told me he was in the import/export business rather than admitting he dealt drugs to the upper echelon of Silicon Valley. He said he was out of town when he was in jail.

  Ultimately I didn’t care. He didn’t lie to me about things that meant anything. His mouth on my neck was all that mattered. His body pressed up against mine in the alley behind the beauty supply store—that was no lie.

  I lied to Byron all the time. I mean daily. Hourly, by the end. When I look back, I think how crazy it all was. Lying means that you have to remember the stories you made up to cover your ass. Of course, maybe that was part of the excitement to me. Telling him I was seeing a movie with Elizabeth when I was out fucking Connor. Having to work hard to cover my tracks.

  Now, Alex was asking me to lie to Jack. And from the fearful look in his eyes, I will admit that for a moment I was torn. I knew that he was right—he was a total hypocrite in even asking. I understood that. But it’s all in the perspective, isn’t it? Alex was horrified when I asked him to lie to Jack. It wouldn’t have mattered what the subject was about. The concept of lying was the important thing to him. But his request felt different to me. He was asking me not to tell because he had no idea what the repercussions might be. Would Jack punish him, or break up with him?

  This showed me how vulnerable he actually was.

  When Alex shoved the prison strap in my hands, I wanted to laugh. Yeah, there were plenty of times when I had wanted to beat him, to fuck with him, to take him down not only one peg, but several. But now wasn’t one of those times. How can you hurt a man who has just asked you to fall in love with him?

  No, that’s the wrong question. Jack would easily have been able to whip me after a similar encounter. So the difference is more fundamental than that. I’m no top.

  “Please, Sam.”

  “I’m not going to tell him a thing,” I assured Alex, after a moment. Relief flooded through him, visibly. But then I added, “You’re going to come clean yourself.”

  His shoulders sagged. “What do you mean?”

  “You tell Jack. You say what you want. What you need. Otherwise, this is all going to be too tangled to fix.”

  Alex shook his head. “He wants to be with you. That’s clear.”

  “Yeah? You think so?” There was a hard edge in my voice. “He loves me,” I told him. “He’s said so. And yet he lets you touch me, punish me…” My voice trailed off. I wondered if the encounter after I had lied was what changed things for Alex. Had it been the time Jack brought him into our bedroom that made him want to be more than Jack’s right-hand man? “What were you to him before he met me?”

  Alex looked away quickly, but I caught the flush in his cheeks.

  “Come on, Alex.”

  “He said not to talk to you about it.”

  “About…?”

  “Our history. He said that he would tell you everything. When he felt the time was right.”

  I was in a soap opera filled with secrets. And now I was out in the woods with a man who could, if he wanted to, tell me all I needed to hear. Yet from the look on his face, I knew that he wouldn’t. Loyalty was about the only thing Alex had.

  Yet I thought I knew the answer from the look in his eyes.

  “You’re going to tell him,” I said, my voice as stern as before. “You’re going to tell him that you want to be more than a handler. An assistant.”

  “Yeah? And then he’s going to fire me, and I’ll have nothing.”

  “You can’t fire someone you love.” As soon as I said the words, I realized they were true. Jack loved me. I was sure of it. But he loved Alex, as well. In his own way. In his own fucked-up way, I should say.

  I’ve talked so much about Brock. And I know that it’s ancient history. Beyond ancient. Right? But that relationship is what everything is based on for me. Everything I know. And maybe you’re supposed to have nice sweet love for your first time. Maybe you’re supposed to go out with the clean-cut Christian neighbor who brings you home on time and sits at Sunday dinner next to your parents. The one who picks fresh violets for your anniversary. But I had the hoodlum instead. And I learned from my first time around that love isn’t something you can capture in a Hallmark card. It’s not clean. And it’s not easy. If being in love with Jack meant learning to find a place for Alex, I was willing to go there.

  But suddenly, I was willing to do something else, as well.

  Alex was pitiful at this moment. Head in his hands. Nearly crying. He’d been with Jack for years, through various girlfriends, I could guess, and nothing like this had ever come up with him before. I stood and looked down at him. Taller for once.

  “Stand up,” I said, and he gazed up at me, hesitated for a moment, and then stood.

  “Drop your slacks.”

  Now, he gave me the most incredulous look.

  “You offered. I’m taking you up on it.” I spoke harshly, through gritted teeth, and Alex obeyed, unbuckling his belt, lowering his slacks. He was wearing striped blue-and-white boxers, and I was the one to pull those down. I didn’t bother with his new toys. I pulled the belt out of his slacks and used that, doubled up. This made it worse, somehow. I knew what I was doing. (Yes, I just told you that I wasn’t a top. But like people say, there are levels of sexuality—fluctuations on the Kinsey scale. I think there are levels, ranges, of submission. If you know how to bend over, then you also know how to take control.)

  I striped him, not hesitating when the lines bloomed dark pink on his pale skin. When the angry welts formed. He took the blows like a pro, and I was sure he had at least as much experience at submitting as I did. Jack had to use someone to take out his aggression on between his chosen subs. Alex fit that part to perfection.

  I don’t know where the power came from. And I don’t even know why it was so important that I marked Alex. I only knew that I had to do this. Had to.

  I whipped him hard, the way Jack would have had he been in my place. All the frustration and the aggression I’d been feeling for weeks came out in the strokes on Alex’s naked skin. And each blow turned me on more than I can say. So this was what bei
ng in charge felt like. Pretty fucking nice, I’ll admit. How bizarre that Alex had brought me out there to punish me, when I was the one who ended up in position of top dog. That’s L.A. for you. Things are never what they seem.

  “I’m supposed to meet him at that sushi place?” I asked, dropping the belt, breathless from the exertion. Alex slowly pulled up his slacks, and I watched him wince, and that gave me nearly unbelievable pleasure. I could have come in seconds if I’d stuck one hand down my panties and stroked my clit.

  “Yeah. In Santa Monica.”

  “Drop me back at the apartment,” I told him. “You’re going to meet Jack instead.”

  Once more, Alex’s shoulders sagged.

  “He doesn’t want to see me. He wants to see you. Your haircut. Your outfit.”

  “I’ll still have the haircut later on tonight. I’ll wear the same clothes. None of that matters.”

  “He’s going to be upset,” he said, and I grinned, unable to help myself.

  “Yeah?” I asked, taunting him. “Well, you’re prepared. You’ve got all those brand-new devices to give him as a peace offering.”

  Alex looked at the bundle on the ground, and he shook his head.

  “Come on,” I told him. “We can’t go back to everything being the way it was. You’ll resent me. Hate me. If not today, then soon. And I won’t be able to trust the things you say, won’t know whether you’re telling me something Jack wants, or something you want. You have to go meet him. And you have to tell him you want more, and that you asked me, already. And that I need to know where Jack stands.”

  Alex closed his eyes for a moment, as if considering. When he looked at me once more, his eyes were blazing. I saw fear, and I saw power, struggling within.

  “And when he asks what my response was, you take him back to the men’s room, and you show him that.” I nodded to his ass and stepped forward. I then stroked his rear once, and I felt him relax, slightly. “Then tell him I’m home. Waiting…”