by Alexis Hall
Which was when I saw the college crest on the envelope, killing that poor little fantasy before it had a chance to flourish into full-fledged wankbait. Inside, was a neatly typed note inside inviting me to visit the Master at—
Oh shit, I was already late.
I pelted around the quad, through the archways, past the graveyard, and across to Reni, which contained the Master’s office and residence. Up another spiral staircase. And then I was being summoned, panting and sweating and really wishing I’d showered, into the sanctum sanctorum of St. Sebastian’s College.
I’d never been in there before, which I strongly believed to be a good thing, and I wasn’t exactly in the mood for sightseeing. It was the usual Oxford grandeur, cherrywood and dark leather, big arse desk, behind which the Master sat in state. In one of her typically alarming houndstooth numbers.
Dame Frances Cavendish was her name. Her letters, which were embossed on the door and the official letterhead and found their way onto pretty much every collegiate publication, were DBE, FRCPysch, FRCP, FRCPI, FRCGP, FMedSci. No clue what any of them meant beyond “I am better than you, bitches.”
I was fucking terrified of her. Everyone was. She had this scrawny black cat called Pongo (who called their cat Pongo?) with Gollum-like eyes that exactly matched her own. He was rumored to be a demonic manifestation of her will. And he wasn’t here now, which, to my mind, confirmed it.
“Ah.” She showed her teeth in something that, in a human, might have been a smile. “Mr. St. Ives?”
Oh God. I hated the way she addressed everyone with this strained, borderline sarcastic courtesy. “Oi, Shithead” would, at least, have had the virtue of authenticity.
“Sorry I’m late. I didn’t, um—”
“Have a seat.”
I had a seat. It was a small seat. Made me feel like a fucking Goomba. “I haven’t done anything.”
“Oh, but you have, Mr. St. Ives. You’ve been very busy indeed.”
Fuck. She knew about the blow job. Wait. How could she possibly know about the blow job? I stared wretchedly at the rug at my feet, which was emblazoned with the college crest and its (deliciously defaceable) motto Mens Conscia Recti. I didn’t know what to say.
She rose suddenly. She wasn’t a tall woman but, damn, she gave good loom. I just about managed not to cringe visibly. “Would you care for coffee, Mr. St. Ives?”
“N-no thank you.”
Dame Frances was known universally as Damn Frances. Apparently there’d been a typo somewhere once—nobody could remember the details anymore—but the appellation had stuck. She stalked past me to the posh cafetiere waiting on one of the sideboards and proceeded to make coffee in a manner I found subtly disturbing.
It smelled good though. Classy.
And that was probably exactly what Persephone thought when she saw that pomegranate.
“Um, Damn…Dame Frances…can I ask what this is about?”
She turned, cup in hand, and did the teeth thing again. “I wanted to thank you for your work for the telethon.”
Breathing. I suddenly remembered it was a good idea. “Oh, no problem. Anytime. Can I go now?”
“Of course, Mr. St. Ives. I have no intention of keeping you long.” I was halfway to the door for maximum looking like an idiotness when she continued. “You know, you were our most successful fund-raiser. By quite a significant margin.”
“Team effort. Probably nothing to do with me at all.”
“Oh really?”
I nodded frantically.
“Then perhaps you’d better take a look at this.”
I heard the rustle of papers behind me. I couldn’t really run out of the room, however much I might have wanted to, so I sloped sheepishly back to the desk and picked up the document the Master had laid out for me. It was numbers. Lots of big numbers. The sort of numbers that made me feel like I was failing GCSE maths all over again. “What’s this?”
“It’s a full scholarship to be awarded yearly to an exceptional undergraduate experiencing financial hardship.”
“Cool.”
“We’re calling it the Arden St. Ives Scholarship.”
“You’re what?” As ideas went, it was so far out of left field it wasn’t even near the grass anymore. I tried to understand what something like that might mean, but it just slithered out of my brain, unable to connect with anything already in there. The Arden St. Ives Scholarship? Holy fuck. “You don’t have to do that.”
“On the contrary”—her evil cat eyes met mine over the paper—“Mr. Hart was quite insistent.”
“Mr.…wait. Caspian? Caspian did this?” That wouldn’t fit in my brain either. Why would he…Oh fuck, no. I hadn’t asked him for anything. “Why?”
She gave me what, in the heat of the moment, I interpreted as an I know what you did last supper look. “You must have made quite an impression on him.”
I probably mumbled something.
And she probably said something in return.
And then…oh whatever. Everything had vanished into this blur of awfulness where I felt weird and dirty and guilty and used in a way I just hadn’t before.
As if I’d done something bad.
And a little bit like everybody knew about it. Or at the very least darkly suspected.
By the time the Master let me go, with congratulations and good wishes and apparently increased hope for my future success, I was trembly and nauseous with pretending to be okay.
It was mainly shock. And newfound shame.
And a kind of hopeless fury that I’d trusted him and, in return, he’d turned something good into something icky.
Is that how he saw me? Someone who’d had sex with him in order to score a big donation?
God, I’d thought he liked me. He’d made me believe I was safe with him. But all the time he’d seen me as disposable. Someone to be used and dismissed and paid off and forgotten.
I sat down on the library steps and put my head in my hands, the gold and green of the quad smearing into the tears I definitely wasn’t crying.
Jet-setting fantasies aside, I’d known—I’d known right from the first moment I set eyes on him—that I’d probably never see him again. That we wouldn’t kiss or date or talk or do any of the things that most people counted as meaningful. That I wouldn’t be telling my grandkids, or probably Nik’s grandkids, about that enchanted evening long ago when I let a stranger fuck my throat until I came.
But that hadn’t mattered when what we’d done had been special to him in the same odd sort of way it had been special to me. That we’d both trusted and shared and taken and given.
Except now I knew it wasn’t like that: I’d been nothing to him all along.
Which was probably why the last thing he’d said had been Forgive me.
Barely out of my mouth and he was regretting me. Planning to get rid of me. Ensuring he’d never have to think of me again. Turning what we’d done into transaction.
It wasn’t as if I’d never been treated badly before—as the saying went, if you kissed a lot of princes, sooner or later you were bound to sleep with a frog—but it had never been like this. It just wasn’t something you thought to protect yourself against.
Not exactly the whole “having the billionaire you just sucked off donate a scary amount of money to your college’s endowment” because how in God’s name could you prepare for that? But discovering the distance between how you saw something—and saw yourself—and the way someone else did. And feeling cheapened by that distance.
Hurt.
So there I was, struck deep in some unexpected vulnerability, left bleeding by a blow I never saw coming. No pun intended.
It was my own fault. I should have never—
No, wait.
It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t do anything wrong. He made it wrong. And I didn’t deserve to be sitting here feeling like fucking nothing.
And that was when anger made itself my champion. It made me feel strong instead of weak, righteous instead of
used. And, through my drying tears, before I actually tried to take action, it looked a lot like courage.
Which was how I ended up on the Oxford Tube, heading for London. Convinced I was going to be able to stand in front of Caspian Hart, look him in the eye, and tell him with terrifying dignity exactly how not okay his behavior was. Genuinely believing that this was something I could do. That it wouldn’t be absurd and embarrassing and futile. That he deserved to feel as bad as I did. And that—most ridiculously of all—I had the power to make him.
Chapter 8
I shoved through the front door of Hart & Associates—which didn’t go as well as I might have hoped because it was revolving, and I had a hard enough time getting through those things when I was completely compos mentis—and then went plunging across the foyer. Everything was a haze of glass and steel and marble. Beautiful in a way, a godless cathedral, full of echoes and refracted light, but it was also the kind of space designed to make you feel shabby and small.
Which, if you asked me, was an architectural dick move.
I kept catching glimpses of myself in too many gleaming surfaces. Wildly out of place in Hart’s Temple of Mammon in scruffy jeans and a T-shirt, and my favorite jacket—the velvet one I’d worn to the dinner, with holes in the elbows and all the nap worn away, my rainbow pride bracelets disappearing under the fraying sleeve. I hadn’t even taken the time to engineer my hair so it was multidirectional and ridiculous. Basically, I looked like a rentboy who’d let himself go.
A voice called after me, “Can I help you?”
And I called back, “No,” as I jumped into the lift and hit the button. He would be right at the top because the top was the best. I’d seen Pretty Woman. I knew how this stuff worked.
The glass bubble shot silently skyward, floor after floor after floor rushing past in streaks of silver, burning at the corners of my eyes like I was about to cry.
But I wasn’t.
I totally wasn’t.
Because I was angry. Angry and invincible. Not sad. And definitely not scared.
The doors swooshed open Star Trek style and the lift disgorged me onto what would have been a landing in a less intimidatingly designed building. It was probably the closest thing to an antechamber I would ever stand in.
And, oh shit, there was another receptionist. A stately blond, built like an underwear model. Calvin Klein, not ASDA George.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I’m looking for Caspian.”
“Why do you need to see him?”
It was a fair question. I couldn’t think of a single plausible explanation why someone like Caspian Hart would know someone like me. Which was why I ended up blurting out the truth. “Because he’s an arsehole.”
The receptionist’s hand dipped below the edge of the desk, and I’d seen enough movies to know it was the “summoning security” gesture. I probably had about 0.2 seconds before I was dragged out of there by burly men with Tasers.
Fuck, I’d blown this. Ironically enough, considering I’d also blown Caspian.
I wheeled around on an inexplicable instinct—awareness or recognition or some painful entangling of both—and there he was inside a glass-walled conference room: Caspian Hart. Still the most impossibly beautiful man I’d ever seen, as cold and perfect and unreachable as a star.
Except he’d reached for me. And then cast me aside.
Blindly—God, maybe I was crying—I ran for the door. Pushed it open. And practically fell over the threshold.
Caspian paused midsentence. And gazed down at me with his hunter’s eyes, no expression on his face at all. Just the sight of him made me ache with wanting. With wanting to please, to yield, to warm and gentle him. To relieve such stark loveliness with the messiness of joy.
I’d prepared a speech. On the bus down, I’d rehearsed it over and over again in my head. It had been dignified and devastating, but now I couldn’t remember any of it.
All I could remember was Caspian Hart’s fingers, tight and desperate in my hair. The careful pattern of his breath breaking. The sound he made, pleasure-wrecked, as he came down my throat in a hot, harsh rush. And how I’d followed helplessly, touched by nothing but his need.
“You…,” I said. “You’re a…a dick.”
It sounded so childishly inadequate. Just like me.
I tried again. “And I’m not your—” Whore. Except calling yourself a prostitute in an insulty way seemed a bit rude to the oldest profession. After all, there wasn’t anything inherently wrong with exchanging sex for money, as long as you both knew that was what was happening. “Um, non-negotiated sex worker.”
It turned out I wasn’t angry or invincible at all. Just far too young for a game I hadn’t understood we were playing. “What the fuck, Caspian?” I finished helplessly. “Why did you do that to me?”
He blinked. Once.
That was all I got.
Then, “This matter would be better discussed in private.”
Wait. What? Private? Oh God. Of course. He’d been talking when I’d burst in, and for some reason, my jumbled brain hadn’t quite grasped what that meant.
I turned, limbs heavy and awkward as if I’d suddenly become part robot, and sure enough, there was my audience: five of them, be-suited and exquisitely composed, regarding me with the careful nonreactiveness British people adopt when you’ve mortified yourself so severely that they’re embarrassed on your behalf.
I closed my eyes for a second on the off chance all this would have miraculously gone away when I opened them again. But no. Everything was right where I’d left it. I was in London, in Caspian Hart’s office, my heart spattering on the expensive carpet in front of a group of total strangers and the man who’d smooshed it in the first place.
Anger was rubbish. It had deceived me into thinking I was strong and bold and undefeated. And now I wanted to die.
What was I supposed to say? How did you make something like this better? Non-April Fool! “Um…sorry. I can see I’ve interrupted.”
Caspian’s hand closed over my wrist. It was not a reassuring grip. Under different circumstances I might have liked being held that way, trapped and controlled. But right then, not so much.
I tried to pull free and his fingers tightened, the message undeniable: he wasn’t letting me go. He was probably about two seconds from dragging me, struggling, out of the conference room like I was the heroine of a 1950s Hollywood movie. That had also recently been a fantasy of mine, but at the moment, it was such an awful vision that I stopped fighting.
I’d done enough damage for one day. Make that one lifetime. Maybe in sixty years I’d be able to find this funny. Hey, your granddad once…No. Just no. Even imagining looking back on this made my stomach fizz with shame.
Caspian’s gaze flicked to his colleagues. “We will continue this after lunch.”
And then he hauled me out of there.
Past the hot blond guy and into what was probably his office—corporate grandeur and the gray London skyline—where he practically threw me into a chair. My wrist throbbed with the impression of his fingers.
“Um—” I tried again.
“Don’t ever do this again. This is my place of business.”
And that was when I got it: he was furious with me. Not just a loser interrupted my meeting furious but coldly, personally furious. And he was way better at it than I was. He really did look invulnerable as he stalked across the room.
He was dressed in a three-piece suit (so far so city) but he wore it like armor, the hard contours of his body perfectly framed by bespoke tailoring. It wasn’t usually a look I went for and it could easily have crossed the line into fussy or old-fashioned, but on him? Maybe it was his height, or the way he held himself—utterly controlled—but he looked ridiculously fucking good. The epitome of modern masculine power. A predator in pinstripes.
And still, in spite of everything, I wanted to be on my knees for him. Unburdening him, my most ungentle knight, until we were n
othing but skin and surrender.
He stood with his back to me, etched in cold light, staring out at the horizon. While I just huddled there, shaking. No idea what to do or say.
At last I managed, “Well don’t treat me like that again.”
“I have already expressed regret for my behavior.” He folded his hands behind his back, the set of his shoulders unyielding. “And tried to make amends.”
Just when I thought he couldn’t hurt me any more. “You regretted fucking me so much you made amends with millions?”
“I didn’t fuck you. It was oral sex.”
“That’s semantics. You join your body with someone else’s in pursuit of pleasure, that’s fucking. And if you pay them afterward, that’s prostitution.”
His fingers clenched. I remembered them on me. Rough in my hair, soft against my cheek. I imagined touching them now, easing the tension from them.
Idiot.
“You wanted a donation for your college,” he murmured. “That was why you contacted me in the first place.”
I was going to cry. End of a perfect bloody day. “It wasn’t why I sucked you off.”
There was a long silence. The phase sucked you off belonged here about as well as I did.
“What do you want, Arden?” He sounded weary suddenly. Not angry anymore. Just sad, like me.
And I didn’t know how to answer him. All the revenge fantasies I’d let run riot through my head were just that—fantasies. The things I truly wanted were stupid and impossible: I want it to have meant something to you. I want you to like me, just a little bit. “I…”
“There’s no need to be timid. You’ve made your point.”
“I have?” I wished he’d look at me. It was eerie talking to his back and the wavering ghost of his reflection in the window.
“Why else would you come to my office?” He half turned, showing me the pale edge of his jaw, the line of his nose. “What will you do? Go to the press? The police?”