Bound to Ecstasy

by Vonna Harper, P. F. Kozak

  9

  Chloe rushed into the house, hoping and praying that she would have a bigger window of time than she thought she had. Logan had been coming home earlier than usual over the past couple of days. Normally she loved that, but today she needed him to stay late; otherwise he’d catch her.

  “Please, baby, just finish up a report or something or go over building designs a couple of dozen times,” she murmured as she rushed down to the cavernous basement where they stored some of their things. Her bins and boxes were stacked neatly in one corner, while his stuff was in the other. Her eyes frantically read the markings on each box, while she kept one ear out for the door.

  “There it is,” she cried when she spotted the stack that had COLLEGE: FRESHMAN YEAR written on it. She could only pray that the bin really had stuff from her freshman year in it and wasn’t just labeled that way. “How cruel would that be?” She pulled the lid off and started rifling through folders and papers until she spotted the beat-up manila envelope she was looking for.

  She snatched it out of the bin, and leaving things in disarray, hurried up the stairs as fast as her three-inch heels would allow her to. Next, she went to their bedroom, where she grabbed a duffel bag off the top shelf of her closet. She unzipped it and tossed it onto the bed. Shoes, clothes, and underwear were thrown haphazardly into the bag as she kept one eye on the clock.

  She ran into the bathroom, took her makeup bag from under the sink, and started clearing the bathroom sink and then her vanity of her toiletry items. Zipping it up, she took it and sat it next to the duffel bag on the bed. She hurried over to the anteroom, where she sat at the desk and wrote her note to Logan. She agonized over what to say for a moment and then she began to write, her tears falling to leave wet marks on the paper.

  Finished, she rose and walked back into the bedroom. She futilely wiped at her tears as she carefully laid the note against his pillow—the place where she thought he’d be most likely to notice it. Her steps slow and miserable now, she picked up her bags and left the room to leave the man who’d given her so much happiness.

  An hour later, Logan closed the front door behind him. Surprised at the lack of scent besides all the potpourri and candles Chloe had all over the place, he sniffed the air. There was no smell of food. She usually had something ready for him or, if he beat her home, he had something ready for her. He smiled. She was probably miffed at him because he hadn’t called to say he’d be running a little late.

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he called as he walked up the stairs to the bedroom. “I know I should have called, but I got so caught up in the work. Then when I noticed the time and thought to call, I just wanted to finish without any distractions so I could get home to you as fast as I could.” He finished his explanation just as he walked into the bedroom. He frowned. She wasn’t there, but all the lights were on. That wasn’t like her. She turned everything off in a room if she wasn’t going to be in it. She often fussed at him about his habit of leaving lights on, saying he was going to make their electric bill hit the roof.

  I must have missed her downstairs, he thought. She kept a small office to the right of and behind the stairs, so he assumed she was there working. Before he went to search her out there, he decided to get a little more comfortable. He walked into the room and up the platform to sit on the bed and take off his shoes. His eyes fell on the note on his pillow. He snatched it up, read it quickly, his frown getting deeper with each word he read. “What the fuck?” he whispered and read it again to make sure he wasn’t losing his mind.

  “Is this a joke, Chloe?” he called as he rushed from the room and down the stairs to search her out. “Is it another one of your games to add spice to our love life? Because if it is, it sure as hell isn’t working, sweetheart!”

  He searched every room in the house and it wasn’t until he was in the attic kicking at cobwebs that his brain finally recognized what his heart had been trying to tell him for at least twenty minutes: Chloe was gone. She had actually left him.

  Chloe picked up the telephone in her father’s kitchen and dialed Mary’s number. When Mary answered, she recognized her voice immediately. “Hello, Mary. This is Chloe. Listen carefully because I’m going to keep this short. I’m not paying you. What I did when I was nineteen may have been careless, but it wasn’t criminal. You can tell anyone you want and I’ll deal with—” She frowned when Mary interrupted her. “Your finances are not my problem, Mary. Like I said, you do what you want to do and I’ll do what I have to do.” She hung up in the middle of Mary’s diatribe.

  She rubbed her forehead and sank down in one of the kitchen chairs. “Fucking monster,” she said. “Dad was right. I should have just stayed away from her.”

  She knew her decision—even though it was the most painful one she’d ever had to make—was the best one she could have made. It solved everything. “Well, almost everything,” she murmured and blinked back tears, as she thought about what she had to do the next day. She’d decided to tell her boss her secret, thereby taking the power out of Mary’s hands. “I’m not giving that greedy bitch any of my money,” she promised fervently. “I’ll burn it before she gets one penny of it.”

  She could make that decision to tell her boss because it was her job on the line, but she couldn’t do that to Logan, and that was why she’d left him the note. “God, Logan. I miss you already,” she said aloud.

  “Well, I’m fucking glad to hear that at least,” Logan growled from the doorway.

  Chloe jumped. “Logan! How’d you find me? How’d you get in? What are you doing here?”

  Logan strode into the room and stood over her. He was livid. How dare she leave him, with no explanation but some cockamamie note that may as well have been written in gibberish, as much as he understood it? He took a deep breath and counted until the urge to shout left him. It almost worked. “Shall I answer those questions in order? Let’s see: Once I checked with Liddy and you weren’t there, the logical place to check was here. Your father left me a set of keys too, to check on the house—and last, but not least, damn it, Chloe, I’m here because you are! Where the hell else would I be?”

  All the tension from her fear, her confusion, and her misery stretched just enough to snap and that combined with him standing there shouting at her—(unfairly, she thought)—made her explode herself and she jumped from her chair to yell at him. “Stop yelling at me! I only did what I thought was best, and if you can’t see that, then you’re a…a…” She searched her mind for a word strong enough to convey what she was feeling, and then she found it. “An ignorant! You’re just an ignorant!” she said and swiped at the few tears that had escaped.

  Logan repeated the oddly phrased term in his head. What the hell? He silently repeated it again, this time moving his lips in tandem, and it still didn’t sound right, so he put his thoughts into words. “What the hell are you saying, Chloe? ‘An ignorant?’”

  “And don’t you curse at me either, Logan!”

  Logan was so confused, he almost forgot his anger. Chloe just wasn’t the type to cry, nor was she the type to leave the kind of note she’d left him. Frowning, he looked in her eyes and saw the fear. Something was really wrong. Suddenly tired of the fight, he took her by the hand and walked with her into the living room where they sat on the sofa. “Tell me what’s wrong, Chloe. I can’t help unless you do.”

  Chloe sighed and let her head fall on his shoulder. “Oh, God, Logan, she’s trying to ruin everything,” she said and blinked back more tears.

  “Who is? Would that be the ‘fucking monster’ your dad was right about, or the ‘greedy bitch’ who’s not going to see one penny of your money, burnt or otherwise?”

  Chloe pulled away to look at him. “You heard me? How long were you standing there?”

  “Does it matter? Tell me what’s going on, Chloe.”

  “I already told you. Didn’t you get my note?”

  “You mean this note?” he asked and pulled it out of his pocket. “Mind if I read
it to you? ‘Logan, you were right. I was keeping something from you. But the secret has caught up to me and I can’t dither about telling you anymore. The envelope under this note holds my secret. Once you look at it—page ten—it will be up to you whether or not you want to be with me. Just call me on my cell and let me know. I love you, Logan.’” He looked at her expectantly when he finished reading.

  “Right,” Chloe said. “What did you think of it? Will you lose the presidency because of it?” She held her breath as she waited for his answer.

  Logan frowned. “Again, I have to ask: What in the hell are you talking about, Chloe?”

  “The picture, Logan. The stupid picture! It’s what she’s using to blackmail me with.”

  “What picture, Chloe?”

  Chloe sighed impatiently. “You know, Logan, you are really starting to piss me off! The picture in the magazine in the envelope!”

  Logan had to count to fifty before he was sufficiently calm enough to say through clenched teeth, “What envelope, Chloe? You didn’t leave one.”

  Chloe ran out of steam and slumped back into the couch. “Oh,” she said in a small voice with a confused frown. “I didn’t?”

  Logan shook his head once. “You didn’t.”

  “Then where is it?” she murmured to herself as she thought about it. “Oh! I must have accidentally packed it in one of my bags. Either that, or I left it at the house somewhere.” She scrambled from the sofa and started looking through her bags.

  Logan watched her speculatively. She looked sexy as hell in a flared miniskirt and silk blouse. He supposed she was going for professional, and she did look that, but she also looked good enough to eat.

  “Ha! Here it is!”

  Logan broke his gaze from her legs to see her waving an old, beat-up manila envelope under his nose. He took it from her and opened it, pulling out a very thin magazine called Smart and Sexy. The cover featured a girl who couldn’t have been older than twenty, wearing a bikini and leaning against a car, and it promised to educate its readers on how girls could be smart and sexy. The magazine was amateurish at best. “Hmm. I’ve never heard of this magazine. When was it out?”

  Chloe’s response was wry. “From April 1995 to April 1995. That’s the only issue,” she explained when he looked up at her. “It was only distributed on my college campus. You see, this fraternity had gotten the girls in their sister sorority to pose naked for a calendar that they were selling for twelve bucks. To counteract it, this friend of mine came up with an idea to put out a magazine that showed girls who were not only sexy, but smart as well.

  “Yes, it showed us nude, but it also talked about things like our GPAs, our favorite classes and sports, and other things. It was supposed to be a feminist protest, a way to not only show that we had ownership of our bodies, but that we were more than just our bodies. And unlike the frat boys, we gave our magazine away for free.”

  “How’d it go over?”

  Chloe shrugged. “As I said, we only had one issue. We almost got expelled once it got into the hands of the dean, and my friend had only handed out about twenty before that happened. Hell, we only had a print run of one hundred to begin with, and they made her shred all that she hadn’t given away. Anyway,” she finished with a sigh, “they decided to go easy on us and put us on probation instead of expelling us. They gave those stupid frat boys the same punishment.”

  Logan went back to looking at the magazine. “Turn to page ten,” he heard her whisper and there were nerves in her voice.

  He turned to the page as directed. “Hot damn!” he said as he stared down at a naked nineteen-year-old Chloe. “You were the centerfold.” She lay on a white rug, with a towel trailing half on and half off her body so that one ass cheek and one thigh were exposed. Her breasts were flattened by her weight, her hair was long, and she wore large, dark sunglasses. “This is what you’re worried about?” he asked her with a frown.

  “I wasn’t at first,” she admitted. “In fact, I hadn’t even thought about it at all until I took my new job and met your boss and realized how conservative he is. I mean, I work on a children’s show. I need to be above reproach. And maybe you could lose your promotion, or worse, your job.”

  “Chloe,” he admonished. “You can’t even see your face, much more tell that it’s you.”

  “You could,” she accused.

  His grin was wolfish. “Yeah, but that’s only because I know your body. Intimately.”

  “Oh, give me that.” Chloe snatched the magazine from his hand. “You’re not taking this seriously. Mary Tanner, my roommate at the time who also posed, saw me on the show and called me at the station a couple of weeks ago. I hadn’t heard from her in over ten years, since she dropped out right before the semester ended. When I didn’t return her call, she somehow got ahold of my cell phone number and left a voice mail today for me while I was on the set. She says I have to give her ten thousand dollars or she’ll tell my boss and yours.”

  “Oh, I see. So that’s why you were running scared. Just take the magazine in and show your boss. I’m sure she’ll think it’s just as silly and harmless as I think it is. But first if you haven’t already, you need to tell this Mary person to take a flying leap. You should probably go to the police and file a report. What she’s doing isn’t legal.”

  “I’ve already told her and trust me; she didn’t like it,” Chloe said and opened his arms so she could sit on his lap. “And I’d already planned to talk to my boss tomorrow. That’s not the point. I’ll let the chips fall where they may when it comes to my job. After all, I’m the one who posed for the picture. I’m worried about you. I don’t want your job jeopardized because of something your wife did eleven years ago.”

  Exasperated, Logan said, “Damn it, Chloe! You’re such a drama queen. A normal person would have come to me to discuss it. But no, not you. You have to go all Dolly Dramatic on me and pack your stuff and leave. Why didn’t you just tell me about it?”

  Chloe’s lips twisted and she was ready to defend her character, but he pressed his hand to her mouth. “Don’t even think about it,” Logan demanded. “Unless you’re ready to tell me why you acted this way, then don’t talk.” When her eyes narrowed and flashed at him in anger, he sighed. “I mean it, Chloe. Do you have any idea what it felt like to come home and find you gone? And the worst part is, you didn’t even give me an opportunity to discuss it. You just walked out.”

  All of the indignation left Chloe and she gave up. She took his hand from her mouth and held it between hers, kissing his fingers in apology. “You’re right, and I’m sorry. I guess I just panicked. I was afraid of your answer. I guess I couldn’t bear to be there while you made up your mind.”

  “Why? The answer should have been obvious.”

  She was shaking her head before he finished. “It should have been, but it wasn’t.”

  10

  “I don’t know if you remember this,” she began. “But right after we started dating, you asked me to come out to dinner with a new client, Mr. Carter, and some of your colleagues. The client was in town for a couple of days and you guys were squiring her around. You wanted me to come because other people were bringing their spouses. Remember?”

  Logan nodded. “Of course. Linda Giles had come into town.”

  “Right,” Chloe said with a nod. “So, anyway, we were having dinner and this young girl walked past our table. She had on this two-piece, barely there outfit. Mr. Carter was disgusted. Do you remember what he said?”

  “No, not really,” Logan said, feeling impatient.

  “I do. He said that it was absolutely shameful the way some people dressed. He said that the girl looked like one of those disgusting centerfolds and if his daughter had ever tried to leave the house dressed like that, he’d have locked her in her room and thrown away the key. It was very clear that he didn’t approve.”

  Logan was confused. “So? What’s that got to do with me?”

  “I’m not finished. After Mr. Carter’s
comment, someone started talking about Playboy. He said that posing for the magazine was just a stepping-stone for many women—that they did it to jumpstart their careers in acting and modeling. Mr. Carter said that he still found it wrong and disgusting.”

  Logan was still confused. “I still don’t get what that has to do with me. I know I didn’t agree with him.”

  “You didn’t disagree, either, Logan. In fact, at one point you laughed—just like everyone else did.”

  “And what did you do?”

  “I said that if a woman were of age, then it shouldn’t matter to other people what she did with her body, especially if she wasn’t hurting anyone. Mr. Carter looked at me like I was crazy.”

  “And did I say anything?” Logan asked.

  “No,” Chloe said and swallowed back a lump because it had hurt her that he hadn’t said anything supportive. “But Linda Giles agreed with me.”

  “Exactly. That much I remember, and then someone else changed the subject.”

  “And you didn’t say anything to back me up,” she said in a stifled voice.

  Logan looked at her face. She was sulking. “Oh no,” he said. “Don’t tell me that you’ve been thinking about that all this time. All you had to do was ask me, Chloe. Would that have been so hard? You could have asked me and I’d have told you that it’s no big deal.”

  Chloe shrugged uncomfortably. “I thought that maybe I wouldn’t like the answer, and then where would I have been? I didn’t want to lose you, so I didn’t tell you. And I didn’t want you to lose your job—”

  “I wouldn’t have left you over something like that, Chloe, even if I didn’t agree with you posing for the magazine. That’s just stupid. Besides, how could he have ever found out about it?”

  “Well, since I’m on television I’m recognized—not a whole lot, but enough—and I thought that there might be a chance that someone would realize—”