Nineteen

One of my favorite restaurants in town is the Elizabeth Street Cafe. Technically it serves Vietnamese cuisine, but the mood of the place is far more eclectic than that. The waitresses all wear floral cotton dresses as they serve up classics like pho ga, or local variations on traditional dishes, like the rice noodle bowl with ranch flank steak.

It’s a good place to eat. More to the point—they have tables outside, reasonably far apart. If you want to have a private conversation over dinner without being overheard, this setup is ideal.

Which is why I asked Jonah to meet me here.

I get there a little early; he gets there a couple minutes late. Although we both smile as he joins me at the table, the moment feels undeniably awkward. I know how to negotiate with this man. I know how to surrender to him. Now I have to figure out how to talk to him like a normal person. That might be the hardest part.

The picnic table I chose is at the far end of Elizabeth’s outdoor section, so we’ll have as much privacy as possible. We look like any other patrons—both of us in jeans and long-sleeved T-shirts, mine white, his black. Normally Jonah’s cheeks bear some stubble, but he’s completely clean-shaven tonight. I realize he did that for me.

“I’m glad you e-mailed,” he says, instead of hello.

“Same here.” It was Jonah’s e-mail that changed things. I want to tell him that, but words don’t come. He doesn’t speak either, though he looks completely cool and at ease. I bet I don’t. The silence stretches between us until, embarrassed, I try to laugh. “It’s so hard to know how to begin.”

“We haven’t had much opportunity for small talk.”

I laugh again, for real, and am rewarded with a small smile. “No. We haven’t.” Okay, we’ve got to begin somewhere, so we might as well plunge in. “I’m glad you like the etching.”

“It’s extraordinary.” Jonah doesn’t say it like he’s trying to suck up to me. He sounds like he’s describing artwork in a museum. As if this were objective fact instead of his opinion. “It’s . . . precise. Complicated. I can only imagine the hours of work it took. Yet the image doesn’t feel stiff or unnatural. Instead it’s like—like you captured a moment in time.”

People have praised me more effusively, including guys trying to get into my pants. None of them made me feel as flattered as Jonah just did. “Thank you,” I say, tucking a loose strand of hair behind my ear. “You really bid on it before you saw I was the artist?”

“Technically, no, because I read the label before I wrote my bid down. But I intended to bid from the first moment I saw it across the room.” Even in a more casual setting, his smile remains fierce. “I might have bid sooner, if I hadn’t seen you first. After that I was . . . distracted.”

The two of us locked together, hidden from the world by red velvet, Jonah buried inside me up to the hilt—the memories bring a flush to my cheeks. It would be easy to let myself get distracted, to start planning the next time.

But there I go again, dodging a hard truth. Better to just say it. “That night, at the benefit, I saw you with a woman I thought might’ve been your date.”

“What?” Apparently Rosalind hasn’t spoken to Jonah about our conversation. When she said she didn’t meddle in her friends’ romantic lives, she must have meant it. “No, no. I went with a friend.”

“I realize that now. Even when I first saw her, I knew she might not have been someone you were romantically involved with, or interested in. It just didn’t matter.” Saying this out loud is so hard. “Our arrangement was supposed to be sex only. You and I were supposed to remain almost strangers. So I shouldn’t have cared so much whether someone was in your life. I mean—I don’t cheat, and I don’t spend time with guys who would be cheating. But that wasn’t the part that got under my skin. I was jealous. I didn’t want another woman anywhere near you. It’s that simple.”

Jonah remains quiet for a few long moments. Then he says, “Your ex was there. Geordie, is that his name?”

“Yeah.” I’m surprised Jonah knows that. “We’re not involved anymore. We never will be again.”

“I know. But when I saw you near him, and I knew that he’d had you—that he’d slept with you more times than I ever had, that he’s gone down on you, that you’ve come for him—I wanted to put my fist through a wall.”

That shouldn’t turn me on nearly as much as it does.

“Normally I’m not the possessive type,” Jonah continues. As coolly as he speaks, I can now glimpse the uncertainty deep within those gray eyes. “With you, I’m jealous of everyone who ever touched you.”

Should that be a huge red flag? Maybe. But when I saw him with Rosalind and didn’t understand the truth about them, it made me crazy.

I can’t blame Jonah for irrational jealousy when I’m in its grip myself.

“We haven’t spoken that much outside our—games,” he says. “We both obeyed the rules. So I shouldn’t feel close to you. Not this close.”

After a long moment, I reply, “Really you only know one important thing about me. But the one thing you know is the single most intimate, private thing I’ve ever shared with anyone. That’s why I said I bared my soul to you, every time. That’s why this relationship feels like—”

Like what? I don’t have the words for it . . . or I’m afraid to say them. Maybe Jonah’s afraid too. He says nothing, but he nods. I tell myself it’s enough that he understands.

“You’re the only woman who ever fully realized what I wanted from this fantasy.” Jonah meets my eyes more evenly than I was able to meet his. “I always thought any woman who would understand that would be—”

“Frightened?” I ask.

Jonah nods again, even though suddenly I feel certain that’s not at all what he’d planned to say. But he continues, “I think we both made some assumptions about each other that aren’t true. But you’re right. Doing what we’ve done, sharing what we’ve shared—we’ve revealed more than we planned. So we feel more bound to each other than we ever meant to.”

Bound to him. Yes. That’s it. Even though I still wonder what kind of man Jonah is—even though the roots of his fantasy continue to puzzle and unnerve me—I am already bound to Jonah Marks.

For better or for worse, he’s bound to me too.

“How do we keep going?” I whisper.

There’s his fierce smile again. “You still want to play.”

“Yes.” A thousand illicit dreams remain unfulfilled inside me. Jonah can make them come true. I want that as much as I’ve ever wanted anything.

“Then we have to go back to square one.”

“What does that mean?”

Jonah’s smile changes. Gentles. “I guess we go out on our first date.”

“First date?” Now? After we’ve already fucked like animals? As absurd as it is, the idea charms me, and I realize I’m grinning back at him. “Do you mean tonight?”

“No.” He seems almost offended by the idea. “We’ll make a whole evening of it. Talk and walk around town and—”

“Act like normal people.”

He nods. “If we can.”

I start to laugh. Jonah doesn’t, but he’s smiling down at me, and I know—we’re actually going to try this.

•   •   •

It’s all delightful fun until you have to explain your life choices to your shrink.

“To say I have mixed feelings about this,” Doreen said, “would be putting it lightly.”

“You’re not supposed to give opinions about my life. That’s not what therapists do, right? They listen.”

Doreen shoots me a look. “Have we ever had a traditional patient-therapist relationship?”

“No,” I admit.

“And I doubt we’re going to start now. Besides, I gave you my opinion when you asked whether I could ‘believe this.’ If you weren’t uncertain about your decision, you wouldn’t have asked.”

She just poked through the bubble of giddiness I’ve floated in since Jonah and I spoke two nights earlier. All the concerns I had—that I still have—become clear once more.

She says, “I have to admit, I feared your meetings with Jonah would prove destructive, and they haven’t. The shame you’ve carried about your rape fantasy has diminished to some degree. Both he and you took precautions to ensure your safety. Best-case scenario, I’d say. But you need to be aware what you’re doing now—merging your fantasy life and your emotional life; that’s about a thousand times more complicated.”

“What’s going to be so different?” I snap.

“You tell me.”

I hate it when Doreen makes me answer my own questions, mostly because I usually do know the answers. They’re just answers I don’t like. For a moment I fidget on the couch—pushing up the arms of my white cardigan, curling my feet beneath me. But I can’t postpone replying for long. “. . . I still wonder what kind of a man has such powerful fantasies about rape. When we play our games, he knows exactly what would scare me. He knows how to be cruel. He’s thought about that a lot.”

“That’s a valid consideration.”

“How can I judge him for that when I have rape fantasies too?”

“You know why you’re so fixated on them. You don’t know why he is.”

I want to tell Doreen my theories about his family—about his anger with his mother, the way her threats might have taught him about violence. However, I remain quiet. Doreen would simply say that it’s only a theory, with absolutely no proof to support it. She would be correct.

More gently, Doreen says, “Have you ever considered telling Jonah the truth about your rape?”

“No.” The word comes out more sharply than I intended.

“You’ve still never told anyone besides your mother and me, have you?”

I shake my head. “Nobody else.”

One time, years later, I tried to tell Chloe the truth about that night. But she shut me down before I’d even revealed the whole story, telling me I’d always been jealous of her, asking whether I’d come on to any of her other boyfriends. It wasn’t exactly a moment for the Sisterly Bonding Hall of Fame. So Chloe still doesn’t know. “Refusing to believe” is the same as “not knowing,” right? For my sister, it might as well be.

“It’s your secret. A piece of your life that’s yours to share or not to share, as you see fit. You never have to tell a soul if you don’t want to.” Doreen has never tried to make me feel ashamed of my own silence, for which I’m deeply grateful. Sometimes I see courageous rape survivors on television or the Internet, braving clueless commentators or vicious trolls to speak out about their experiences, and my admiration of them is mirrored by my own sense of cowardice. She continues, “But keeping this secret from Jonah—giving him that kind of power, without knowing how deep your wounds lie—”

“I’ve handled it so far,” I say. Which is true.

So far, though, Jonah and I have played “softer” games. Ones where I could easily reassert myself at any second. I want more than that from him, though. I want him to tie me up. I want him to fight me, to defeat me.

I want him to own me.

When the sex between Jonah and me turned out to be so freaking amazing, I thought maybe I’d disarmed Anthony’s power over me, for good. What if I only buried the bomb deeper? As Jonah and I dig further into my darkest fantasies, we might be getting closer to the fuse.

Doreen says, “Your involvement with Jonah so far has worked well because you set boundaries. Without those boundaries—what happens?”

“I don’t know,” I admit, but I lift my chin. “I guess I’ll find out.”

•   •   •

“Come on,” Shay gripes Thursday afternoon, as Carmen fusses around her. “Dr. Campbell put me on bed rest. Not in traction.”

“Still, the closer all your stuff is, the better.” Carmen steps back to admire her work: a semicircle of remotes, magazines, and snacks all around Shay’s place in bed. “The iPad is at one hundred percent, but the charger is here on the nightstand when you need it. And here’s my Netflix password! So you can watch movies all you want. Now, do you need some ginger ale? Maybe some apple juice?”

Shay gives me a slightly helpless look, and I stifle a giggle. She’s gone from having not nearly enough of Carmen’s attention to having way too much of it. In the long run, I think this is a good thing; Shay can no longer doubt how much Carmen truly does care about her. But right now, Carmen is getting on both our nerves.

I take Carmen by the shoulders. “Enjoy the Netflix,” I say. “And let us know if you need anything. Now Carmen and I have work to do.”

“But we’ll be back tomorrow!” Carmen promises. “As soon as our last classes are over!”

Looks like I can’t put this off any longer. “. . . I won’t, actually.”

Carmen looks at me, stricken, as if I’d shot Bambi’s mom. Shay simply smiles. “Got a hot date?”

She’s joking. Why did she have to pick that joke? “Well, yeah.”

“Really? You’ve been holding out on us!” Shay perks up, excited for me—and probably relieved to no longer be the center of attention. “Who’s the guy? Anyone we know?”

“Well, you know him, Shay. And I guess you might’ve met him at the party, Carmen. Do you remember Jonah Marks? He’s one of the earth sciences professors?”

Carmen might be distracted by Shay’s condition right now, but her sharp mind never forgets a single detail. “The guy with the great arms.”

I have to laugh. “They’re pretty good, yeah.”

Shay, meanwhile, stares at me as if I’d suddenly begun speaking in Hindustani. “Jonah . . . Marks,” she repeats. “The same one I know.”

“The one and only.” I feel so shy talking about him, as if I were going out on my first date ever. “Remember how I told you Jonah helped me with that flat tire? Well, we talked some at the party—and then we ran into each other again at the charity event for Geordie’s organization—and tomorrow night we’re going to get some dinner.”

Each and every word I said was the truth. Just not the whole truth.

“Okay. Wow.” Shay blinks, then pulls herself together. “I’ve never talked to him much, but like I said, he’s pretty cool to work for. He’s so quiet, though. Hardly ever says a word.”

Already I feel protective of him. “He’s not a cold person. Just reserved.”

“Oh, sure, definitely,” Shay says, nodding quickly. She’d never trash-talk anyone. Already, I can tell, she’s trying to see Jonah through my eyes. Thank God she can’t.

Carmen says, “Jonah’s quiet? Hardly seems like your type.”

I shrug. “Turns out we have a lot in common.”

They’ll never know what that means. Now I have to find out if what Jonah and I share can bring us together, or whether it’s destined to tear us apart.