Chapter 8
At first, I’m pissed all over again.
Always with him, its thinking he knows best. I might have daddy issues, but that doesn’t mean I want to be told what to do or how I feel.
Each individual knot has created a web of sensation that I can begin to unravel by focusing on one at a time, but I can’t hold them all in my mind and they become indistinguishable again.
Sirens in the distance get closer and louder along with my thoughts before finally shutting off just in time for me to wonder:
Did I want this all along?
Was giving up my power actually some sort of tacit acknowledgement of it? Surely not. Power comes from money. From control.
I’ve known that for as long as I’ve lived in Los Angeles, and I was born here.
But even Van Gogh, the king of my heart, painted holiness into peasantry, into the drudge. The Sower depicts a farmer with the setting sun as his halo. He’s found divine meaning in back-breaking labor. If this isn’t sacred, then neither is that.
I spend a long time pondering that and trying to soothe the crick in my neck.
If there is no labor, there are no fruits.
Are people who get into this kind of life more well-adjusted than the rest of us as a result?
If the starry-eyed angels of LA didn’t experience the hells of capitalism and overpopulation and high rent and obsession and the motherfucking 101, could they possibly enjoy the heaven of possibility in this city?
This is why religion works.
He was right. It isn’t about pain, it never was. It’s about acceptance. It’s about getting off on fear and finding the want underneath. There were never three cities. There was always only one, pulsing with unfulfilled desire.
Like me right now.
I can’t move and I don’t have to. When Hank reappears, he’ll know exactly what I need. I surrender to the feelings, to the pain and pleasure, to the space-out-of-time eternity inherent in submission.
When he finally re-enters the room, I’m so ready for him all he has to do is look at me and I’ll explode. Mercifully, he takes the edge off with his tongue, and it only takes a moment before my first orgasm washes over me. I don’t even need to hold my breath to bring it on.
The bonds are enough for me to let go.
Then he’s kneeling upright in front of me, guiding my thighs onto his so that he can fuck me even while I’m still encased in rope and hanging from his ceiling. His eyes are on mine and his fingers work my nipples, my clit, bringing me to the edge again even this soon.
“I remember the first time I saw you. You couldn’t have been more than twenty-one. So young, angel. Your hair was red that night and so was your dress, and you went home with the biggest asshole in the room. I thought maybe I’d gotten the wrong impression of you, maybe you were a ladder climber, but then I heard a whisper about his Gauguin no longer being on display and I laughed out loud because I knew it was you.”
I remembered that night, my first real job. Michael had been reluctant to take the chance on me, preferring to use hackers to disarm alarms and men with tasers to do the dirty work. My way was better, and after that it was just me and him. And so much money.
One more hard thrust and the insistent movement of Hank’s thumb on me and I’m soaring again, higher than I ever did after a big score, shuddering through another gasping climax.
It takes a minute before I remember he was talking.
“I was always so careful about changing my appearance. Even Michael didn’t recognize me sometimes.”
“He’s not an artist. But you are. And watching you work was a performance I deeply enjoyed.” His words are punctuated by sharp breaths, and watching him get close starts yet another tightening in my core.
“When I heard that Michael was recruiting your replacement, it was time. You were going to be broken when he pushed you out. I wanted to teach you how to fly.”
His body stiffens in anticipation. Inside me, I can feel him thicken and as he growls out my name, he comes, and so do I. At long last, I think I’m sated.
Finally, then, he releases the rope and lowers to me to the bed, where the unraveling process is blessedly shorter than the knotting was. He massages the blood back into my extremities, pausing whenever I wince at the pins and needles it entails.
“I can’t tell if that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me, or the creepiest.” His dimples reappear.
“What, no other man’s ever hired you to steal from them before buying you?”
“I can honestly say you’re my first.” The feeling’s come back into all ten toes, and I sigh contentedly. “I don’t know what to do now. I don’t need money, but I hate being bored.”
“Hate it, or want it?” I use one of my newly freed arms to hit him for that one.
Then I groan. He’s fucking right. If I don’t spend some long, boring hours examining what I want to do with the rest of my life, I’ll just turn into a lush or end up running forever, trying to avoid being alone with my thoughts. The problem I keep returning to is that I simply adore the life I had before this weekend. I like stealing. I like fucking with people who make a living out of fucking over other people. And as Hank pointed out, I even secretly like the threat of failure, of being caught, of worse.
He didn’t just know my body, he knows my heart. Hank could be my father. Right now he’s maybe more of a priest.
He’s given me the keys to the world, the city be damned. And we all probably are. One of his dress shirts appears, and I put it on gratefully. The thought of shimmying back into my gala dress right now is too exhausting. He looks out the window while I belt it into a dress that will keep me from looking too walk-of-shame in the early dawn.
“I have one more gift for you, if you want it.” I do. I’m greedy. I accept the small object he gives me. A phone? He nods to the window and I look out.
“Is that… holy shit. Holy fucking shit.”
Lying in the street far below, surrounded by various law enforcement officers and a surprisingly small pool of blood, is Michael’s body. This is his phone I’m holding. I don’t feel much about it. Maybe I will later. Maybe if someone beats it out of me. Right now, I just feel something like relief.
“Did you…?” He was gone for a while. And his eyes, though they’ve thawed toward me, still speak to the kind of cold blood that could kill a man.
“I didn’t have to. When you are indiscriminate about who you accept money from, you’re bound to upset the kind of people who do it easily. Although I’m not exactly innocent. When I knew he’d be here, I may have been a bit indiscreet with the exact time.”
I could kiss him, and so I do.
When our lips meet and part, when our mouths and tongues and breaths become one, when I feel that I might die without more, then and only then do I finally understand art.
Because only this feeling is worth starving for, worth stealing for, worth cutting off an ear for.
And in a thousand lifetimes, no one can ever capture it in oil.
He unlocks the front door, and waits, but I’m not going anywhere. I finally know what I want.
I want to stay with him.
Then I want to call every contact in Michael’s phone and tell them who they can submit to now. I’m not just a thief.
I’m the queen of the underworld.