by P. J. Fox
“Yes,” she agreed, her eyes back on her plate.
“I mentioned the trip, because I thought you might enjoy it.”
She glanced up, surprised. “Me?”
“No,” he said dryly, “I’m speaking to the other girl sitting beside me.”
“Oh,” she said again. She had to stop saying oh. She sounded like an idiot. Or a deflating pillow. Oh, came the soft expulsion of air.
“Where…are you going?”
Of all the myriad questions racing through her brain—what was the purpose of the trip, why had he asked her, what were his expectations—that was what came out. Really?
He sipped his wine, put down his glass, and resumed eating. Ash had excellent table manners; his movements were slow and deliberate, making even the simple task of eating a piece of fish an art form. Having grown up around people who bolted their food, Belle found his approach consistently surprising. His grace was almost like that of a dancer’s: ingrained, and entirely unconscious. He didn’t need to prove who he was; his pedigree was evident, at all times, in how he moved.
She found herself fascinated, in spite of herself. As a dancer, she’d always been fascinated by movement. If not by aristocracy, or its trappings, like her friends. She supposed that all people of Ash’s class, whatever their national origins, must have certain qualities in common. She’d really never paid attention.
Seeing her watching him, surreptitiously, under lowered eyelids, he smiled. The expression was faint, there and gone in a second.
“I’m going—hopefully we are going—to Oxford. There’s someone I need to meet with, a professor. An old mentor of mine. And there are…friends, with whom I thought we could have dinner. The whole trip will take less than a week, possibly considerably less than that depending on how this first meeting goes.”
He poured her more wine. She hadn’t realized that her own glass was gone, and had no memory of drinking it. “I plan to use the plane.”
The plane? There was a plane?
But of course there must be; Ash was involved in at least one worldwide enterprise and he’d chosen to make his home in the abject middle of nowhere. She’d never met anyone who owned a plane before—even the little biplanes that roamed the north were beyond most Mainers’ budgets—and the idea of anyone having access to that kind of money seemed impossible but of course if he could afford this castle he could certainly afford a plane. Which, she doubted, was a Cessna.
“And you…want me to come?” she confirmed hesitantly. She was still in the process of wrapping her mind around this idea.
“Yes.”
“To…?”
“Provide companionship.”
He seemed to sense, then, what might lie at the root of her question. He seemed to also feel that he’d made his expectations obvious, and Belle knew that her doubts were a constant source of annoyance. But so far, everything he’d done had surprised her. Mostly not in a good way.
There might be no cage, but that didn’t make her life was peaceful.
“I don’t share, if that’s what you’re wondering. These friends of mine are…well, I suppose one might call them similarly inclined. One is rather proud of his dungeon and I thought you might indeed be amused by a tour. I always enjoy these little windows into others’ depravity. But I have no intention of lending you into his clutches.”
“Oh,” she said, relieved. “Well that’s good, then.”
“I don’t suppose,” he said, his tone still dry, “that one encounters an abundance of dungeons in Scarborough.”
“No,” she agreed, “but once my friend’s uncle invited us over to see his taxidermy hut.”
“And taxidermy hut isn’t an euphemism for something horrendous?”
“The sight of so many stuffed foxes, suspended from the ceiling, was alone quite horrendous,” she assured him. “I don’t think the man stuffed anything but foxes! And he wasn’t terribly talented, either; the whole place smelled of decaying thing.”
“I’m fairly certain that post-taxidermy animals aren’t supposed to smell at all.”
“Roy Rogers stuffed his horse, Trigger.”
“Who?”
Belle favored him with a small smile. Finally something she knew, that he, with his horrendously expensive prep school and fancy degrees, didn’t. “Roy Rogers. He was a celebrity—in America, anyway. When my grandparents were children.”
“And why should I know of this person?”
“Because he’s famous!”
“I watched The Dukes of Hazzard, once,” he offered.
“I saw Aladdin. I grew up thinking that all Indians were snake charmers.”
“I grew up thinking that all American men wrestled, usually while brandishing a folding chair, and all American women wore nothing but bikinis. We had a satellite dish and my ayah loved both World Wide Wrestling and Baywatch,” he explained. “We also watched a show featuring a friendly, fairly pale man named Maury Povich, who led me to believe that the vast majority of women were unaware of where babies come from.”
Belle laughed out loud. “I can’t believe you saw that.”
“Princes have television.”
“But I thought—I don’t know, that you only watched highbrow things like CNN.”
“CNN is highbrow?”
“It is compared to Maury Povich!”
“He seemed quite eloquent to me.”
“I haven’t finished telling you about Trigger,” she said somewhat reproachfully.
She’d begun to feel slightly light headed from the wine. The plates were cleared and dessert was brought in: chocolate mousse. Somewhat against her better judgment, she poured herself another glass. She was still unused to drinking.
“Roy Rogers—who was famous, I’m telling you he was, people get him confused with Will Rogers all the time but they were two separate people—used to have a show where he sang happy trails with his wife. Happy trails, to you….” She hummed a few bars.
“After Trigger died at age 33 in 1965, a very venerable age for a horse—”
“As old as I am,” Ash commented.
“Yes, well, hopefully you won’t be stuffed and mounted.”
“Your concern is touching.”
Belle made a face. “You’re not letting me tell the story.”
“You’re drunk.”
“I most certainly am not.”
A tray was delivered, with a bottle and two small glasses. Ash poured her one, a thimbleful or two of a strange purple liquid in what looked like a stunted champagne flute and said, “try this.”
She did. It tasted faintly like communion wine but nuttier and more expensive.
“It’s port. These particular grapes were grown on the banks of the Douro River, where grapes have been grown since before the Romans arrived in Portugal. However, this particular type of wine wasn’t known as port specifically until it was exported in the 1600’s. What you’re drinking now is a 1985 vintage, famous for tasting like butterscotch and violets.”
Belle tasted neither butterscotch nor violets. But he poured her another glass and she drank that, too. The liquid was heavy, almost syrupy, on her tongue. Taylor Fladgate, the bottle said. That didn’t sound very Portuguese. Perhaps Ash was mistaken.
Her head was beginning to swim, slightly, and she felt oddly disinhibited.
Alarmingly so.
“Trigger was mounted,” she continued seriously, “in his iconic rearing pose. As was his dog, Bullet, and his wife’s horse Buttermilk. They all lived together in all their stuffed glory in the Rogers’ house, which became a museum after their death but was forced to close in 2009 due to mounting debt and dwindling visitors. You see,” she said sadly, “no one else knows who Roy Rogers is, either. But Trigger was sold at auction for over a quarter of a million dollars to a television station that began touring him—it?—around the country. Bullet, too, I think. No word, though, on whatever became of poor Buttermilk.”
“How fascinating.”
Belle concentra
ted on her mousse. It was, like everything the kitchen produced: delicious. Frustratingly so; she didn’t want to enjoy the food here. Or anything else, for that matter.
“It’s yet another perfect example of patriarchal repression in our culture!” she announced, with rather more zeal than she’d intended. But then, having spoken the words, she realized that she agreed with them and kept going. “I mean, Dale Evans was integral to the success of that show. She sang the song, too. But nobody cares what happened to her horse. In fact—”
“But it’s just a horse.” Ash, damn him, seemed amused.
“No.” Belle favored him with her best look. “It is not just a horse. It’s never just a horse.”
“Or a cigar.”
“What?” She shook her head, in an attempt to clear her thoughts. She was going somewhere with this, God damn it. She had something to say. “It’s like, okay, here’s a perfect example. Let’s say you’re a woman—”
“I’d rather not.”
“And you go to a bar. Or a club. Or a restaurant, it doesn’t matter. Anywhere at all, with your friends. If you’re even the littlest bit attractive or, say, if you’ve bathed and washed your hair sometime within the last week, men will hit on you. You can tell them no, you’re not interested. No, you’re a lesbian. No, you’ve just been given rabies by a pack of hyenas.
“None of that will work. The only—the only—thing that works is telling them, I have a boyfriend. And that’s male privilege, right there, in a nutshell: the only thing that can actually stop a man from invading your personal space is your declaration, not that you find him excruciatingly heinous but that some other man has already staked a claim to this territory. You see, men might not respect you, but they respect each other.”
She paused, waiting for the witty and slightly deprecating response that would no doubt come. Or more than slightly deprecating. She skimmed another small sliver of mousse up with her spoon and, turning it, ran the inside along her tongue. It really was very good. Like silk and clouds, all at once. Skimming another small sliver, she repeated the same procedure. She wanted to get the most out of her experience, and make every bite last.
He was, she realized, watching her with some avidity.
Smiling, she twirled the spoon against her lips.
“Stop doing that,” he said. His voice was slightly hoarse, and there was a note of command there that surprised her.
It was only dessert. She pouted. Then she flicked her tongue against the silver a quick dart. Just to spite him.
“Stop,” he repeated,” or I won’t let you finish.”
“What?”
“You have no idea what you’re doing right now, a fact that is both annoying and makes you, even more annoyingly, all the more alluring.”
“Oh.”
Still motivated by that strange, contrary impulse, she did it again.
THIRTY-SIX
He carried her into the room and, with his foot, shut the door. Belle might have had a bit too much to drink, but she was still well able to walk. Still, Ash hadn’t given her much of a choice. And he was taller than she was, and heavier, and as she’d long ago discovered resistance was pretty much futile.
“You’re in trouble,” he said mildly.
Under normal circumstances, Belle should have been frightened. She wasn’t; she didn’t know what was wrong with her. Only that it might have had something to do with the wine. Or the port. What was the difference between port and wine, exactly? She still didn’t understand. Despite what she’d felt was a rather long-winded lecture on the subject. Remembering that the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty happened in 1654? How did anyone do that?
“And,” he added, “I’m going to teach you a lesson.”
“I don’t see how,” she answered him primly, trying to ignore the fact that he was holding her and that such a position was undignified. “You’ve already done everything you possibly could to me. There’s nothing left to do.”
“That’s what you think,” he said darkly.
A thrill of—something—shot up her spine.
He walked her over to the fireplace and set her down. The infamous bench had long ago been cleaned and they’d—what was the right term—on it several times since. Fucked? Made love? It couldn’t be making love if the people involved weren’t in love, could it? And it couldn’t be consent if she viewed herself as a prisoner…could it? And…didn’t she? Nothing, from the moment she’d gotten up from that table and gone in search of Charlotte, had been her choice. Or so she’d told herself. If a rat was placed in a maze, the maze might give the rat a choice to go right or left—but if the rat had fought being placed in the maze in the first place, how meaningful was that subsequent decision?
Were any of its subsequent decisions?
She couldn’t deny that when he laid her down on the leather and forced himself inside her, he made her feel good. Her body responded to him. She might dread seeing him, sometimes, but she didn’t dread his touch. At least, not most of the time. And he had a way of overcoming her reluctance, so that no became yes long before the commencement of the actual deed. He knew how to make her want him.
To want—something, if only in the purely animal sense.
She regretted it afterward. Sometimes. Mostly, she tried not to think about it at all.
That she didn’t hate it was her own dirty little secret, and mostly from herself. The regret stemmed, she suspected, not from having committed the actual acts but from the memory of having enjoyed them. She should be fighting him, trying to claw his eyes out, not licking spoons at him or curling up in bed beside him, clad only in his shirt, a mound of feathers keeping her warm as he read late into the night.
The fire had been lit, again, by that same unseen hand.
“Kiss me,” he said.
She hesitated for a minute, and then did as he asked. He responded very little, at first, letting her do all the work. Almost seduce him. But then, slowly, almost lazily, he began to kiss her back. And then he pulled her to him, his kiss deepening. He was hard. Everywhere.
She felt his hands on her back, unzipping her blouse with the skill of a man long used to navigating the intricacies of a woman’s wardrobe. And then, leaving her blouse where it was, he unzipped her skirt. He liked her in skirts, and this was a beautifully made sheath of raw silk with an embroidered hem. She’d never been much for skirts, historically, but had discovered somewhat to her own surprise that she rather liked them. She liked feeling so glamorous, and feminine.
Both blouse, and skirt, dropped to the floor. She felt his hands on her breasts, his touch gentle through the sheer mesh of the material. He nuzzled her neck. Almost like a real lover.
“I’m going to tie you up,” he said.
“Alright,” she agreed hesitantly. Although her agreement was moot; he’d do as he pleased. He’d made that abundantly clear, even in such a comparatively short amount of time. He was more patient sometimes than others, but he fully expected to get what he wanted.
He’d tied her up again, since that infamous night. And while she hated the feeling of being immobilized, as well as the unrelenting reminder of her own powerlessness over both him and the situation, she hadn’t minded anything he did. At least, not overmuch. He’d done a few things she’d read about, in Charlotte’s novels, and a few she hadn’t. Hot wax, once, which had stung but not burned. Clamps in places no sane person would put clamps. Feeling them go on had been bad enough but the sensation of having them finally come off had been beyond agonizing.
The point, as he’d explained, wasn’t the clamp itself but the effect of the clamp; a responsible dominant left them on just long enough to suspend blood flow and numb the area. Any longer, and one risked inflicting permanent damage. Which, as he’d also pointed out, was also an option. Just not one that held much interest for him personally. He wasn’t invested enough in others, he’d remarked wryly, to devote himself twenty four hours a day to their care. He liked his toys, of all types, fit and happy.
But as painful as these experiences had been, they’d also been oddly transporting. She could think of no other word. She became so engrossed in what was happening to her that she started to…float, almost. To lose herself in the experience, becoming at once totally present in each passing second and oddly divorced from her body.
Nothing mattered, especially not her own confusion over what was happening to her.
And, as on that infamous night, she’d come out of the experience almost totally incoherent. When he took her, she wanted him to. And when he bathed her, and cared for her, and occasionally offered her little treats, she felt—for as long as that strange, almost tingling sensation lasted—safe with him.
It was only after, later, when she was lying in bed or sometimes after she woke up in the morning, that she remembered who he was. Who he really was. And who she was, and why she was here.
But now…now he wanted to take her on vacation.
She didn’t know what was happening.
He removed her underthings, carefully this time. They were, like everything else she’d been given, beautiful. Her soap smelled like lilacs. He continued to explore her, as if his hands had never felt her flesh before. The heat from the fire felt warm on her back. She’d worn her hair up again. He liked that, too. Although she told herself she didn’t care.
She didn’t.
He was a horrible person, amoral and lustful for all the wrong things. Wealth and power and control. Absolute control. Alcohol. Women. Men. He was jaded. To the point, she thought, of being sociopathic. He had no qualms about using people, nor did he pretend to. He was using her. Whatever favored place she might occupy, at least for now, she was still one of his toys. A toy who shared his meals and, for the most part, his bed but still a toy.
And yet….
The temptation to see him as something more was so strong.
He helped her, still gently, down onto the ottoman. The piece of furniture that, she’d discovered subsequently, had been made specially for this purpose. She’d often wondered how many other women had lain here, like this, on this same tufted leather. He eased a hard bolster pillow underneath her hips, forcing her up into the air and making her feel exposed. The position was obscene, really.