She stood and it was as if a magnetic force took over his body. He reached for her wrist. His fingers circled it and held tight.
“I have questions.”
She sucked in her breath and waited.
“Were you thinking of me?”
“Mark, please don’t do this.”
“Were you thinking of me?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes. If you weren’t thinking of me then this is just an awkward adult thing that happened. If you were thinking about me then this is something else.”
“How do you figure?”
“We both agree you need to quit. I can’t be your…boss. Your colleague.”
“I know.”
He stood and faced her, still holding on to her wrist, still not letting her go.
“But if you were thinking about me…then I can be your lover for as long as you stay in Philadelphia.”
The breath whooshed out of her lungs and he could see her eyes flare at the word lover. He hadn’t been wrong, then. She wanted him, too. She’d been thinking about him being in that bed with her. But he wanted her to say it out loud.
Then her face changed as if she were deliberately shutting down her thoughts. Her desires.
“That’s not going to happen.”
He didn’t pursue his first line of questioning. Instead he moved on to his second question. The reason why he hadn’t reopened the door. The reason why he hadn’t followed her into the shower and screwed her until she screamed his name.
“Why did you stop?”
“What?”
“Before you knew I was there. Before you knew I was watching you. You stopped. You brought yourself to the edge, but you wouldn’t let yourself come.”
Her eyes closed. “Don’t say that.”
He could see he was flustering her, could see her face turning red, but he wouldn’t let go until he had his answer. He never did.
This answer felt like the most important one he would ever learn because in his life he couldn’t remember watching anything as painful as a woman on the brink of a beautiful orgasm forcing herself to stop.
“Tell me.”
“No.” She pulled at her wrist, but he held it in a firm grip.
“Then tell me why you can’t be my lover. Why I can’t take you back to my bed and finish what you started? Only instead of your hands it will be with my dick. Do you want that? Because that’s what I want, JoJo. Really, really badly.”
This time her eyes flared, but not with desire. With panic.
“I can’t. I don’t…have sex.”
He considered what she meant but decided it didn’t give him all the information he required.
“You don’t have intercourse? Is it something physical…?”
“Ugh,” she groaned. This time she pulled on her wrist with enough force that he had to let her go or risk hurting her. But instead of running, she sat on the couch with her face planted in her hands.
“I don’t have sex. I’ve never had sex. Okay. Can we just leave it at that?”
He sat next to her, not looking at her because he knew the scrutiny would make her uncomfortable, but he couldn’t let this go. Not now when it seemed like every piece of information opened a whole new part of her to him. He wanted those parts. More than he wanted the sex, which seemed completely odd to him. But there it was.
“JoJo, how old are you?”
She gave him a look that told him not to toy with her. They both know the background research he’d done on her.
“Okay, of course I know how old you are. How is it that a twenty-seven-year-old woman who—”
“Looks like me?”
“Gives off a certain…vibe…is still a virgin? Because that is what you’re telling me, right?”
“Wow, a vibe, is it? Even after I removed the silver tongue stud. What people must have thought of me then.”
“JoJo.” Mark was done playing. He needed the answers. He’d just confessed to himself and to her that he wanted to take her to bed. If he was going to have to overcome some fear or trauma she was dealing with then he needed to know that. This was his business now.
“You know what happened to my sister.”
“Yes.” Abducted off the street in front of JoJo, found dead in an apartment four days later the victim of a drug overdose. While the article he’d found on the web didn’t go into specifics, the police report he’d dug up indicated she’d been sexually assaulted.
By more than one assailant.
“They were sex traffickers. She was young and had long blond hair, blue eyes. We were identical. It could have been either of us, maybe both. But she stopped to tie her shoe—”
“JoJo.” He grabbed her hand and held it between his. He didn’t know if he wanted her to finish. He did need these answers, but not at the cost of her pain. Hell, his pain. The thought of her on that street, with those men…
It so easily could have been her.
Only it wasn’t.
“They raped her for days. A steady dose of drugs and rape to, I guess, get her ready for whoever they were going to sell her to. The overdose was a mistake. It killed her, but in some ways it may have saved her from something worse. I don’t know.”
“I’m sorry.”
She nodded, but he knew the words held no meaning for her. He wished he hadn’t said them, wished instead he’d found something more important to say. Not a single thought came to him. Not one sentence that might make her hurt, a hurt he’d pulled out of her, sink back down again into her soul. There were only more questions. He was good at questions.
“Tell me what happened with your father.”
“It broke him,” she whispered. He was about to ask her more, thinking she was done, but it was like she stopped seeing the room around her. As if she’d gone to some other place and time. “In the beginning it was easy to forgive him for his behavior. What father could handle something so awful happening to his daughter? But then I stopped forgiving him.”
“What did he do to you?”
“He drank and then he would get abusive. Not physically, not at first. But he blamed me for letting it happen. It was like every time he looked at me, he remembered I wasn’t her and he hated me all over again. It was strange, too, because it wasn’t like he’d played favorites before she was taken. I used to wonder if it had been me instead, if he would have been that cruel to Julia.”
“You changed your appearance….”
She nodded. “I cut my hair and dyed it. I thought it might make things better but it only made it worse. He thought I was defiling her by changing. By that time I was so angry with him, I liked that it made him mad. So I did more. Pierced my eyebrow, my nose, my tongue, my belly button.”
“Belly button?”
She laughed at the evident interest in his question. “Don’t get excited. The belly button ring didn’t last a week. I don’t know how girls wear those things. It pinched and got infected. I had to walk around with my midriff exposed for weeks. He called me a whore.”
“But you weren’t.”
“No. I couldn’t. When I liked someone or thought about a boy that way I would think about what sex had been like for Julia and then I couldn’t. One time because I wanted to hurt him, maybe hurt me, too, I found this biker guy with a bad attitude and a thing for ‘fresh’ meat. I figured if I teased him enough, provoked him enough, he would…take the decision out of my hands. Then I would know what it was like, too.”
“Oh, JoJo,” Mark said, closing his eyes. Imagining her as this defiant teenager trying to hurt her father and to erase her own guilt by inflicting pain on herself.
“Turned out he was a good guy with a bad reputation. As soon as I showed up at his apartment I started crying. He fed me tissues, made me drink a glass of water and drove me home on his Harley without so much as a pat on the head.
“Of course my father saw him drop me off. It was enough proof in his mind. That was the first time he really got physical.”
&n
bsp; “Where was your mother in all of this?”
“There, but not there. She couldn’t deal with what had happened to Julia any more than he could, but she didn’t want see what he had become, either. That thing you said, about denial being stronger than reality, that’s what it was for her. Anytime I talked to her about it, she would say he was just upset. That I should try to understand it from his perspective.”
“How bad did he hurt you?”
“Black eye, bruised ribs. You’re going to think this sounds sick, not that this whole story isn’t disgusting—”
“Tell me.” Mark could sense that at some point this conversation had changed from him needing to understand her, to her needing to tell him. He’d interrogated enough witnesses to know when they were ready to talk. Push them enough and the rest of the story would follow. Like lancing a boil, sometimes the short-term pain was worth the long-term relief.
“I relished it. I thought there, let him hit me and let everyone see what he was doing to me. Those bruises were my scarlet letter. Let the world know I stood by while they took my sister and now my father hated me. Hurt me. I liked it so much I continued to taunt him. Building on my reputation as a whore. I would leave used condoms in the bathroom where he could find them.”
“Do I even want to know?”
“Egg whites with a little bit of milk.”
Mark tried not to be horrified.
“Hey, you’ve got to commit to the lie.”
“When did you know you had to leave?”
Her head fell back on the cushions. “I think it occurred to me my senior year that suddenly there was this out called college.”
“Teachers didn’t report the bruises?”
“They thought it was from the crowd I was hanging with. We dressed in black so we were ‘bad’ kids. It was my first lesson in how you can control people’s perception simply with what you wear.”
Mark chuckled. “I understand your issues with authority, but I think you would have made a hell of a CIA caseworker.”
“Anyway my hidden secret was that I had a 4.0 GPA with near perfect SAT scores. I applied for and was granted a scholarship to NYU. The day I found out, I got these.”
She ran her finger along her neck. Her very own permanent keep-away sign.
“So you just left?”
“No, I told my parents I was going. He freaked. Because of the tattoos, because I was leaving, I really wasn’t sure. How were we going to continue to punish each other with me so far away? He picked up a bat and swung. It broke my arm. My mother took me to the E.R. but when she admitted me she said I had been in a car accident. That’s when I knew it was over between us. She was never going to acknowledge what he was doing. My father was never going to forgive me, and I was never going to forgive my mother. For all our sakes I needed to leave without ever going back.”
“You haven’t been in contact with them since?”
“No. But they knew I was at NYU for four years. It’s not like they ever tried to reach me. It’s better this way. None of us are innocent in this story, Mark. None of us except Julia.”
It was over, he thought. Her story was told. He knew without asking it was the first time she’d ever told anyone about what her father had done to her.
“Four years of college, two more getting your master’s and not one time—”
“I dated. I flirted. I thought once I could…but as soon as he got on top of me I freaked out. Needless to say, we broke up. Since then I’ve been about work. And for the most part there are only certain types of guys who will even look at girl like me. It’s not like I’m getting hit on by Mr. America every day.”
“What about therapy?”
She lifted her head and looked at him. “You have to want to fix the thing that’s wrong with you for therapy to work.”
“And you don’t? Want to be healed?”
“Part of me feels like I owe it to her.”
Mark nodded his head. In an awful way it made perfect sense.
“You understand then?”
He could see her expression was hopeful. She wanted him to tell her that her thinking wasn’t warped or twisted. That she wasn’t wrong to lock herself up physically and emotionally and throw away the key for the sake of her sister’s memory.
Only it was. Her sister was dead. She needed to accept it and move on. She needed to live.
“Yes, I completely understand.”
“Because I was thinking maybe…now that you know all of it, maybe I don’t have to quit. Maybe we can just get beyond this…this…attraction thing.”
“No, I’m afraid that isn’t going to work.”
“Why? We just agreed that nothing is ever going to happen between us.”
Mark’s eyebrows raised. “We certainly didn’t agree to that.” Mark patted her on the thigh, in a gesture meant to soothe her rather than arouse her. “JoJo, I don’t want you to be alarmed but something is going to happen between us.”
“What?”
“I’m going to take your virginity.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“SOPHIE’S OKAY TONIGHT, isn’t she?”
JoJo was startled to hear Mark’s voice behind her. Immediately, her heart picked up speed and she could feel her face flush. She was thankful for the darkness backstage.
She should hate him for that reason alone, for making her feel like some teenage girl with her first crush, jumping at the sound of his voice. JoJo was not a jumper.
She’d been happy to have a close-up and private view of Sophie’s performance. Because Sophie was a minor, Mark had access to Sophie at all times. It included her dressing room and the privilege of watching the performance from the best seat in the house. Onstage, at the edge of the curtains. Not twenty feet away. If they needed to get to her, they could.
Mark didn’t clarify JoJo’s connection to Sophie and fortunately the producer’s assistant escorting them to the stage didn’t question it. Most likely, he thought they were dating.
Which they weren’t. Couldn’t be.
Stagehands milled about ready to handle curtains, lights and all the behind-the-scenes activities that took place during every live performance. It really was quite astonishing, the work that went into a show with just a bunch of people in chairs playing instruments.
Once the performance started, Mark had left the stage to “assess the environment.” JoJo imagined that was fancy CIA talk for checking things out, but she indulged him if for no other reason than it removed him from her “environment.”
To say that she had been on edge since the moment he made his declaration was an understatement.
After he said it, patting her on the thigh like she was a small child, he quickly changed the subject toward a host of innocuous things. Did her head hurt, where they should get breakfast, had she made a decision on an apartment yet?
She’d been grateful for the distraction and had made her escape from the apartment as quickly as possible. Just in case he had the crazy idea of throwing her down on his bed and ravaging her.
In case she had the idea of letting him.
And you don’t? Want to be healed?
His words came back to her and she thought about her answer. Was her virginity really a tribute to Julia? The honest answer punched her in the gut.
No. Julia wouldn’t have wanted this.
The reality was, her refusal to be intimate was a result of the trauma she’d experienced at having to watch her sister be taken, and the knowing, without really knowing, what had been done to her. It was easier to believe there was some noble cause in holding on to her virginity. Some higher calling she was serving, like a nun saving herself for God.
So did she want to be healed? Should she maybe see someone who could help her?
She’d thought about it in the past, especially after taking so many psychology courses in college. At one point she’d even considered psychology as a profession. In a lot of ways it was like solving mysteries. Mental ones anyway. How ironic that wo
uld have been. Shrink, shrink thyself.
JoJo didn’t want think about her answers to his questions. The combination of embarrassment over being caught touching herself in his bed, shock at discovering he was attracted to her, and exhaustion from telling him about her father was more than her mental synapses could handle.
Leaving him had been easy. It felt like a reprieve. She’d gone back to her hotel to change. He’d gone to the office to take care of some business. Simple.
Seeing him again, that was the hard part. They met up at the theater in the afternoon to watch Sophie’s final rehearsal. JoJo had been nervous and edgy, but he’d been himself. His charming self. She thought the entire morning might never have happened.
Except now every time he looked at her she thought of a hungry lion. One who had the ability to pounce at will. She couldn’t aspire to prey. She felt like something far more vulnerable. An injured gazelle who couldn’t run or kick. He wasn’t pouncing quite yet, but it felt as if the threat was always there.
The worst part was that she had to keep suppressing a tiny part of her that wanted him to do it.
Stupid gazelle.
“You didn’t answer. You think Sophie’s killing it, right?” Mark pointed to the stage.
“Yes, she is,” JoJo finally croaked out.
“Are you going to be this way every time I get close?”
The words were said softly into her ear and she could almost feel the touch of his lips on her lobe. A sensation passed through her that defined the word shivers.
“I don’t know what you mean. You should watch the show.”
“I’ve already seen it.”
He captured her arm just above the elbow and tugged, pulling her deeper into the shadows until it felt like they were draped in heavy curtains.
“What are you doing?” she whispered.
“I’m getting something out of the way,” he muttered.
“Look, Mark, if this is about what you said, forget it. It’s not going to happen. Maybe you mean well. Or maybe you don’t and the idea of getting it on with a newbie turns your crank. Or maybe you think you’re being generous and kind and can cure me. But I don’t want to be cured. I don’t want any of this.”
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