Eying my things curiously he asks, “What’s in the box?”
“Something I made for you, a while ago actually, while you were still in a coma.”
“You made it for me, how?”
“I’m a glass blower, it’s a hobby I’ve been into for years.” A glint of interest crosses his face.
“Well let’s see it.” He nods toward the box and I unpack the bubble wrap and remove the light fixture with two hands as it’s quite heavy, his eyes widen and a slow smile spreads across his face as he reaches out to touch it, first with one hand then the other, sliding his fingers over various points and swirls on the surface as he does with everything he touches I’ve noticed. A trait he came by from the time he spent with his blind aunt Sophia, I suppose. “You made this? For me?”
“Uh huh.”
“It’s a light, yes?” I’m actually impressed he recognized my intent, a lot of the time with glass sculpture the meaning is misinterpreted.
I smile, “Yes, I actually thought you might have a use for it somewhere, do you like it?” He looks up at me with a “duh” look on his face. “Oh yes, I have just the place in mind, it’s beautiful Mia, I love it, thank you.”
“Ahh, manners, I knew you had some in there somewhere!!” I exclaim and he frowns.
“I have manners,” he says defensively.
“I think they must be coming back slowly then, that’s the first time you’ve said thank you without a prompt from me since you woke up.”
“I’ve wondered where your smart mouth had gone, I use my manners Mia when I deem them necessary, too much please and thank you in my business can lead to lack of respect and the appearance of weakness.”
“Really? I thought being polite earned respect and promoted strength and unity between people,” I retort.
“In some circumstances maybe, but running Dominus requires a strong hand.” His voice is laced with a chill I’m not comfortable with at all. He moves to return the light to me. “Tell me about Dominus.” It seems the root of his alter ego is related to that place. so I’d better get to know more about it.
“It’s unusual to have such a successful fine dining chain, usually a place of Dominus’s stature is a stand-alone location, but I couldn’t pass on the opportunities to expand when people were practically throwing money at me to open more locations. The food was originally Italian and Greek but we serve all kinds of food now, specialties depend on the location. My first was in Italy. It was an instant hot spot; people came from all over the world for the food and entertainment. So, I decided to take the concept anywhere they would have me, which is now all over the world.”
“What makes it stand apart from similar places?” I ask.
“There’s no competition for Dominus, it’s unique, the food is exquisite, and we’ve never a bad review, but each location has a club attached, that’s the true draw.” He’s staring hard at me now with narrowed eyes, analyzing my reaction to the information, whether trying to read my body language or facial expressions now I don’t know, but he seems nervous, unsettled, which tips me off that there is more to this story…much more. “Uh…ok, what makes the club unique? Lots of restaurants have bars attached, most actually, that I can think of.” He’s silent for a few moments, like he’s trying to find the right words to explain, when a loud bell rings throughout the house, interrupting our conversation. “Is that a doorbell?” It sounds like church bells ringing on Christmas day, equally as garish as the fireplace. Evan has a knack for going overboard with things, and that doorbell is definitely one of them!
“Yes, Isaac is back and he’s bringing our food from Dominus, Mr. Saint will let him in. Do you mind if he comes back here? I have some business to speak to him about and I’m comfortable, I don’t want to have to rearrange all of this again,” he says gesturing to the mess of pillows around him.
“Of course not, it’s your house, I’ll grab a robe, or I can go to my room if you need more privacy,” I offer.
“No, no, stay here, and yes, a robe… please.” He rakes his eyes over my scantly clothed body, his jaw tightening. I know what he’s thinking, I’m thinking it too, and I really wish Isaac would just go away, for more reasons than one. I was just getting somewhere with the story of his business first of all, and secondly that look he just gave me started a fire building in my body that needs to be extinguished now, and Evan was the only man to do it.
My bag still in my lap, I pull out a thin full-length red silk robe and slip it on while Evan watches and nods with approval. I guess I’m covered enough for his liking. Isaac strolls in, holding a very large box of pizza and pauses, surprised at the sight of me sitting in Evan’s bed casually, very unprofessionally. “I’m sorry Sir, Mr. Saint didn’t say…he never mentioned…” he stammers.
“It’s all right Isaac, I told him it was ok, you remember Mia don’t you?”
“Of course, good to see you again Ms. Galloway.” He attempts to recover from his surprise, moving into the room.
“Call me Mia, please, nice to see you too Isaac, how was your trip?” I ask.
“Fine.” Averting his eyes, he looks with question at Evan and holds the box up slightly. “Just here on the bed,” Evan responds, and Isaac again hesitates.
“You want it on the bed?”
“Yes, Isaac. On the bed,” Evan answers with a little irritation. I’m thinking this must be out of character for the old Evan, Isaac has seemed to have really known Evan inside out, and I feel a little sorry for him being in uncharted waters. But he follows orders like the perfect employee, and in the next moment he’s setting the box on the bed.
“Choose a movie and start eating, I’ll be just a few min with Isaac,” Evan says to me while Isaac pulls up a chair and produces a laptop I didn’t see him with when he came in. I scoot off the bed and set my bag on a chair and remember to remove the vase that’s wrapped in my clothes. The roses I brought in here won’t work in it, so I pad to my room to choose another bouquet with shorter stems. That damn bear still sits there, staring at me like she has a secret she never plans on sharing. I huff back to Evan’s room and arrange the flowers in my vase, setting them on a small table that is arranged into a sitting area by the window, while the two of them hover over the laptop discussing flow charts and graphs, and shipping problems. The only thing peaking my interest is a brief mention of letting someone go, a woman I think, they don’t expand on the details of her wrongdoing. I grab the remote and manage to locate his movie collection that includes all genres; no way to learn his taste in movies from this list. Many of them are in other languages, and I wonder how many he speaks and understands fluently. With business all over the planet, I suppose he speaks several. I have no idea what to choose; I really don’t care what we watch. I don’t plan on seeing any of it anyway, my itinerary includes filling up on gourmet pizza and getting very, very naked with my patient. My patient, the thought nags at me; I’m seriously doing nothing a professional nurse would do for a patient. I’m more like a paid girlfriend…. which is essentially a prostitute. I’m going to have to make a change in this arrangement, have myself removed from his bank roll and go back to the ICU or demand some real responsibilities other than accepting outlandish amounts of flowers and passing him a sleeping pill every night.
Isaac gets up to leave as I return to bed with no idea of what movie to watch…or not watch. A look passes between the two men and then from Isaac to me and back to Evan. Evan nods his head silently in the affirmative, and Isaac retrieves something from a bag he must have brought with him. At first I think it’s a vase of some sort when realization hits me; it’s an urn. What the fuck is Isaac doing with an urn? And why is he giving it to Evan? Isaac hands the urn to Evan and quickly exits the room, leaving us alone, me staring at him wide eyed and mouth hanging open, he holds it, caressing his thumbs across what I assume is the name of the person inside.
After a moment adrift, he looks up at me as if he just remembered I was there.
“Ahh… who’s is that
?”
“Cameron,” he answers flatly.
“The women that was in the accident with you?” I wonder why he has her ashes instead of her family.
“Yes.”
“Was she…special to you?” I’ve been so curious about his past and this is the perfect moment to uncover something, if even just a taste of who he is, or was. And I didn’t even have to initiate the situation; Isaac did give him the urn right in front of me after all. “No, it’s very complicated.” Moving to his side of the bed, I perch there next to his legs. “I’d like to know.”
“Why?”
“Because really Evan, I’m sleeping with you, practically living in your home and I know next to nothing about you.”
He sighs deeply, “I’ll tell you about her but after I do, no more discussing it.”
“Ok…that’s fine.” My heart picks up the tempo as I wonder if I really do want to hear this now.
“When I was in college I found her, she was a dirty little girl, 15 years old, homeless, hungry, and alone.” He’s staring at the urn, turning it in his hands while he tells me the story. “I don’t know what it was about her, she was crouched next to a dumpster outside a coffee shop I frequented, I’d seen her there for several days when I finally spoke to her. I know how it feels to be alone and hungry with no one to rely on. I learned that she had been in foster care; abused by her biological parents, as well as the parents the government assigned her to. She threatened to bolt if I turned her in, so I took her home with me. I was well off living on the money my Aunt Sophia had left me, and I wanted to help her, something in her eyes reminded me of myself. I knew an old couple that owned a small grocery store, so I got her a job there and I paid for a tiny apartment above the store- the owners of the store paid her cash so she stayed off the foster care grid. I home schooled her, it was easy with a computer, and most of the time I just emailed her assignments from a laptop I gave to her and she sent them back completed. She was smart, could have gone to college with a scholarship if she weren’t getting her education secretly. She got her GED when she was 18. She worked hard, never complained, she was always grateful for my help, stayed out of trouble so she wouldn’t get caught. When she turned 18 she wanted to support herself. I had recently opened Dominus here in Seattle and I gave her a job as a server, she was good- made a hell of a living for a kid with only her GED. My customers have money to throw away and they tipped her well, she was beautiful and proficient at her job. But the money afforded her things she’d never had before, she started going out all the time after work, hooking up with a bad crowd, drinking, drugs and the whole fucking loser scene I’d tried to keep her out of all those years. She befriended a few of the girls who work in the club at Dominus and started learning routines, stripping, and behind my back she began working in the club, but not in the dining room where I hired her. I was livid; I thought I was going to kill her, along with the manager at the time for letting her do it. Needless to say, he is no longer with us.”
The way he said that made me consider that he hadn’t just been fired from a job…but something more permanent. A chill ran up my spine, and I visibly shivered as he continued, “Anyway she insisted on working the club, then threatened to quit and work in another club where I couldn’t keep an eye on her, so I chose the lesser of the two evils and I let her.” He pauses and I get the strong feeling he doesn’t want to continue, but I stay quiet, afraid that if I interrupt he may clam up and stop letting me in. It’s a good decision, because he goes on. “I’m not proud of what I allowed to happen…. the relationship between Cameron and I became sexual, and we slept together casually for years. She knew I slept with other women, a lot of other women, but the night of the accident I was driving her home after closing the club. She told me she was in love with me, had been all along, and wanted to take it to another level, wanted me to stop having sex with other women.” Pain passes over his face. “I don’t know why I thought she knew…she had to have known it was casual…. for me anyway.”
I decide to risk a comment “What does that have to do with the accident?”
“We were arguing, or fighting whatever…. I wasn’t paying attention I guess, we were yelling but I had control of the car, and then I didn’t and we went over the bridge and into the water. She died on impact, the coroner told me her neck snapped, she didn’t suffer. Gabriella put together a service for her. I don’t know why, she had no family; the only people who showed up were her junkie friends and the Lee’s who she worked for as a teenager. She sent me the ashes, Cameron didn’t have anybody who would want them.” The room is so quiet; the only sound I can hear is my heartbeat pounding in my chest. “You said you saw her…. when you woke up, you told me you saw her floating in front of you and that you knew she was gone.”
“Yes, I did, it’s the last thing I remembered after going into the water. When I was unconscious I wanted to let the darkness take me, I felt so guilty knowing how I’d hurt Cameron, I should have never touched her. She was like my little sister for Christ’s sake. I knew it was wrong, I even think I knew she loved me but I didn’t care, she pissed me off by getting into drugs and blackmailing me into letting her work as a stripper. I thought she deserved it after all I’d tried to do for her.”
I gasp and pull away from him heedlessly and he closes his eyes, shaking his head. “This is why we can never talk of this again.”
“Wait…you said you wanted to let the darkness take you. But you hung on…why?” I already know the answer to my question; he’s told me before that my words kept him anchored to this world. But after that story I need reminding of our connection, of his goodness, that he’s not a monster.
“You…you were my savior Mia, you know you were. Your voice, your words, your music, they called to me, kept me holding on. I had to continue to exist so that I could get to you.” He’s pleading with his eyes for me to understand, to accept all that he’s done, and I do. There isn’t anything from his past that could drive me away, he owns me, and I am his. He is my Dominus. Master and Lord of my heart. I will not admit this to him, exposing myself that much to anyone could be a fatal risk. I cannot let him know how easily he could ruin me, and he could ruin me completely.
Chapter 24
“Yellow Light” by Of Monsters and Men
As if by magic, Cecelia appears at the bedroom door, knocking lightly on the frame as it’s open, as usual. “You need something Senior Lawson?” she asks timidly.
“Yes Cecelia take this and put it in my office, I’ll put it away later.” He holds out the urn and her eyes get wide for a split second before she hurries to the bed to retrieve it and quietly scurries away, carrying the last of Cameron.
“How did she know you needed her?” I ask, baffled as to where she must keep herself to be at his disposal so quickly.
“She knows,” he answers flatly, as if that were an answer at all.
“What do you mean she knows?”
“Just what I said, she knows.” Ok so that’s not the answer I want and he knows it, so I’m dropping it- he’s being stubborn and I refuse to fall into that trap right now, I’ll figure it out anyway. Rolling my eyes, I step away from the bed, all of the information he has just provided me with swimming around in my mind. This is not at all how I expected our relaxing evening in with pizza and a movie going. I need to get lost, I need music, I need a book, online shopping, anything normal and familiar to get my mind off all of this crap. “I’m not in the mood for a movie, can we just eat, listen to some music and go to bed?” Oh please, please, just don’t argue with me and agree.
“Yes, we can just eat, listen to music and go to bed,” he says with a sigh and a touch of regret in his voice.
“Ok…ok,” I repeat quietly, confirming to myself that this is indeed what I want to do. Looking at my feet and fiddling with the belt of my robe, part of me wants to go to my room and be alone to sort out my feelings. But I know he won’t allow it, he’ll follow me. The other part of me, the one that wins, wants the
distraction of Evan to avoid sorting out my feelings; avoidance is another skill I’m very familiar with. Setting my iPad up and turning on a playlist, I scoot across the bed while he opens the pizza box. The first song on the playlist is Yellow Light by Of Monsters and Men, and after a few words he stills and looks directly into my eyes. “I remember this,” he says softly, oh shit, I just chose the first playlist without thinking, and this was the music I played for Evan when he was unconscious. “Why do I remember this, who sings it?”
“Of Monsters and Men,” I say, turning my head to the side and looking at him out of one eye.
“I don’t listen to them, where do I know this from?” He bows his head and closes his eyes in concentration when he suddenly looks up at me. “You played this for me, when I was asleep, you put an ear bud in my ear and played music for me didn’t you?”
“Yes. I did.”
“Can you start it over? I want to listen to the words.” The song is half way through. “Why?” I ask.
“I just do.” There’s a long pause while I sit gazing at him. “Please,” he asks, and that’s all it takes for me. When he acts like a gentleman I’m putty in his hands. I replay the song, the singers take turns singing the verses and he closes his eyes, listening closely, opening them slowly, and probing mine.
I’m looking for a place to start
But everything feels so different now
Just grab ahold of my hand
I will lead you through this wonderland
Dark Kiss (The Two sides of me Book 1) Page 16