Chapter Eighteen
The Mandarin Oriental Session
Simon and I had a huge fight Tuesday night, when he finally came down from the art opening high. I made the mistake of reminding him of his promises, his plans to go to rehab. His reply was a furious rampage that left his studio—and several of his works—in shambles.
“Is this what you want?” he screamed. “You want me to destroy my career? Give up everything I’ve worked for?”
It was no use reminding him that we’d planned this all along, that he’d promised to take a break after the show to get better. Addicts had no memory, and no reasoning abilities.
His raging turned to shouting, and we engaged in the usual melee, where I called him an addict and he called me a whore, and told me that I was just jealous. “You won’t leave,” he said, when I threatened to break up with him. “You’re too fucking weak to leave.”
I drifted through the Mandarin Oriental’s lobby, still numb from the things Simon and I had said to each other, from the vast emptiness that opened between us each time we tried to communicate. It probably wasn’t the best time to show up for a date with W, but we’d made arrangements, so I wore my black maxi dress for mourning, a pair of black patent pumps, and nothing else. The last thing I needed was a pair of panties setting off my temperamental client.
He opened the door and my heart gave its usual flip as he fixed me in his leonine gaze. He was already shirtless, and his pants were undone. No underwear. That made two of us.
“Hello,” I said.
I couldn’t meet his gaze; it was too intense. I fixed my eyes on his chin, staring at a couple days’ worth of stubble. He had an amazing, stubborn chin.
“What the fuck are you waiting for?” His growl drew my gaze to his lips as he yanked me through the door.
He shoved me down with one hand and pushed his pants down to his hips with the other. He was hard in an instant, and buried in my throat. His fingers wrapped around the back of my neck when I tried to jerk away. The maxi dress pooled around my knees, and I kicked off the shoes so the patent finish wouldn’t be ruined by the carpet. I was so numb, so outside myself that those were the things I thought about: whether my skirt was arranged prettily, whether my shoes would get scuffed.
It didn’t take him very long to realize I wasn’t present in that face he violently ravaged. I looked up at him when he smacked my cheek, and I wasn’t there either. I was back in Simon’s studio, watching him rip up a canvas and call me a freak and a whore, and blame me for all his problems.
W pulled out of my mouth and yanked me up by my hair. That finally got through to me, that sharp, screaming pain. He knew the top of my scalp was more sensitive than the sides. He knew all the best ways to hurt me by now. I tried to squirm away and found myself thrown back against the wall.
“Don’t fight me today, damn you. Just let me have you.”
He pinned my legs open with his knee and yanked my dress straps down. Something ripped, a ragged sound to harmonize with my ragged breath. He grabbed my arms, slapped my breasts and pinched my nipples. He shoved his thigh up against my pussy and I cringed from the pressure, but I didn’t pull away.
If he didn’t want the fight, that was fine. I didn’t have a lot of fight left.
“I’m going to fuck the shit out of you,” he said, shoving my dress down over my hips. It fell to the floor, and his fingers were in my pussy, probing me, searching for my spot. I went up on my toes with a moan.
“That’s right. I know you’ve been waiting for this. You’ve been waiting to be fucked and hurt the way you deserve.”
The way you deserve. Yep. I moaned again, because I felt guilty and shitty and sad. I pushed at his waist and he answered by trapping my wrists and popping my cheek again. “Bad girl,” he said. “You don’t push me away.”
He took his belt from his pants. He smacked me twice on the front of my thighs as I danced and cried in alarm, then he turned me around and struck my ass five times while he muffled my screams with his hand. Next, he grabbed my wrists and wrapped the belt around them. More pain to bring me out of my drifting sadness. I loved him for giving me this pain.
“Stop,” I said, because I knew he would want me to. “Let me go.”
“You don’t fucking want to be let go.” He held the belt with one hand and smacked my ass with the other. Somehow his hand felt way worse than the leather. I shifted on my toes and begged again for him to stop. He put his cheek beside mine.
“I’m not stopping. You’re mine to hurt, to use. Are you my slave?”
How could I be his slave when I didn’t even know his name? “I don’t know,” I cried.
“Yes, you’re my slave. Whenever my hands are on you, you’re my slave, and I’m your Master.” He stopped spanking me and gave the belt a shake. “When we’re together, you’re mine, Chere.”
“I’m not yours,” I said, just to anger him. “I’m only your whore.”
“You’re whatever I say you are, and you damn well better pretend you belong to me.”
This might seem weird, but looking back, I think that was the moment I broke up with Simon, there with my cheek to the door, with W’s cock pressed against my spanked ass, and my hands cinched in a belt behind my back. Not that I envisioned some new future “belonging to” W. I wasn’t that stupid.
But that was the moment I realized I felt nothing for Simon anymore, while I felt everything for W. That was the moment I understood that I was falling in love with W, that he was doing all the things Simon wasn’t: accepting me, appreciating me, trying to engage with me.
I never would have said any of this to the man gripping my neck, not even under torture. But that was the moment I admitted everything to myself, that I loved W, and that if I stayed with Simon, it would kill my soul. Two facts—and both of them scared me. Jesus, all of this scared me so bad.
W kicked off his pants, lifted me up and carried me to the bed, and I thought, what the hell am I going to do now? How was I going to hide these feelings from him when they were so intense, so strong? Everything inside me felt dangerously close to the surface, like a volcano about to blow. W wouldn’t be into lava. I knew that.
He rolled on a condom. His cock was so hard it scared me. I turned on my side, away from him. “No,” I said, because no had become my word for “I love you.”
“You don’t tell me no,” he snapped, which maybe, a little bit, had become his words for “I love you too.”
I let him flip me onto my front and mount me while my hands struggled in the belt’s grip. His cock surged into me, driving deep, taking away all my words and willpower. I didn’t want to want him. I didn’t want to have feelings for him, but when he tugged at my wrists and whispered in my ear that I was his slave, his toy, I had feelings for him.
The first time he fucked me like this, back at the Gansevoort Hotel, I didn’t know how to process it. I interpreted his passion as hatred, anger, fear…but it was none of those things. It was something pure, some drive to break down walls and connect. I didn’t understand before, but I did now.
I tried to pull away, but he whacked my ass and kept on going, and I realized that the only reason I ever pulled away from him was to be pulled back. It was so simple, so honest. So pure. When he was in control, I felt peace. How strange, that his violent lovemaking was the one thing that could bring peace to my conflicted existence.
Don’t fall in love. Jesus, I couldn’t fall in love. But as he fucked me, I felt a yearning that was peace and agony at once. I longed for him, this john who was little more than a stranger to me. I read a saying once: they call it longing because it doesn’t last a short while. How long would I long for W?
“Are you going to come?” he asked, smacking my ass again. “Don’t lie there like a fucking corpse.”
But oh, I was a corpse. I was so dead, because the only good thing in my life right now was the man taunting me and destroying my pussy. I’d go home tonight and think of him, and go to sleep and dream of him, because everything else in my life was broken and hopeless.
“I’m not going to come,” I said. I was too upset to come. I never should have kept our date today, when all my emotions were pooled up at my nerve endings, waiting to snap.
“What the fuck do you mean, you’re not going to come?” he asked. “My cock’s not good enough?”
He turned me over and grabbed my face. He wasn’t really angry. I think he was going to make some joke, or maybe stick his cock in my mouth, but he took one look at my expression and all the humor went out of his eyes.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. Finish!” I ordered. He’d love that, being ordered around.
His eyes narrowed. “I’ll finish when you finish. You’re like a fucking wet mop today, you fucked-up piece-of-shit whore. Who pissed in your mop bucket?”
He reached behind me and undid his belt. As soon as my hands were free I went for his face, his neck, his chest, anything I could scratch or slap, because hurting him was the only thing I could do at that moment besides fall apart.
He grabbed my hands and held them hard. “That’s all you got?” he goaded. “Fight harder.”
I fought but it did me no good. He had my number. He had my heart and soul crushed between us and he didn’t even know. He kissed me roughly, laughing against my lips as I kicked and flailed and tried to break free.
“I’ll bite you, you little bitch,” he said. “I’ll bite the fuck out of your lips if you don’t cut it out.”
I tried to bite him instead, and he smacked my ass three times, hard enough to bring tears to my eyes, and then he did bite my lower lip until I moaned. Before the moan was fully formed, he left my mouth and crouched between my legs.
There was no finesse with him when it came to cunnilingus, no coy kissing down my neck, between my breasts, down my belly in a trail to the pussy. No, he shoved my legs open and fastened his lips over my clit, titillating my flesh with the deftest talent of any lover I’d ever had.
Fuck. I didn’t want to come. I didn’t want to try. I pushed him away and got my arms slapped for it.
“Don’t make me fuck you up,” he warned.
Too late. It’s too late for that. You’ve fucked me up on some cellular, lizard-brain level because ohhhh… What you’re doing feels so good…
My pussy was alive from the fucking earlier, and my clit wanted more, and more, and more. My hips bucked. I forced myself against his mouth, but it wasn’t enough to burn under this exquisite pleasure. I needed his cock inside me too, jamming into me, joining the two of us together.
“Please fuck me,” I cried, reaching down.
He slapped my hands away again. “You don’t deserve to be fucked. You’re a bad girl.”
“Please.”
“No.”
“Please, I’ll be good. Give me another chance.”
“No.” He teased me with his tongue between words, driving my passion higher even as I begged and pleaded.
“Give me your cock. Please.”
He looked up as I grabbed his hair. “My cock wasn’t good enough for you before. Remember that? Let go of me, Chere.”
He meant it. My fingers opened and I let go. “I’m sorry.” I love you.
As quickly as he’d hunched between my legs, he was back again, looming over me. I expected a pop on the cheek and I wasn’t disappointed. “Who’s in charge here?” he asked in a terrifying voice.
“You are. Master,” I added, although, as usual, what we were doing felt way more intense than dungeon games.
“I get to do what I want, don’t I?”
“Yes, Master.”
His cock hovered at my entrance. I shivered with the effort to stay still, to not sink down on him and ride him like the whore I was. “Please,” I whispered. “I’ll be so good. I’ll come so hard for you.”
I needed to come with him deep inside me. I needed it to survive. My whole body wanted him, every vein, every vessel, every nerve.
He slapped me again but I didn’t care, because he was thrusting inside me too. He drove all the way in and ground against my clit. I reached for him, only to have my arms pushed back on the bed. He spread his palms on my forearms and pinned me like a butterfly, wings spread. That, more than anything, made the orgasm break open.
He sneered down at me and rode me hard. See? See what I can make you do? And it was true, I had no shame. I tried to come again as he pounded into me, and when he growled and twisted his hips and reached his own climax, it set off a second set of earthquakes for me. He was shifting my tectonic plates, breaking me up and putting me back together.
I closed my eyes and waited for him to pull away. I felt so sensitive and exposed. He could have killed me, slaughtered me to pieces with the wrong look, the wrong words.
Maybe he knew, because he rose from the bed without saying anything. I thought I heard him mutter Jesus under his breath. I heard the bathroom door close. I thought about leaving, running away, but our session wasn’t over yet. Plus, I doubted I would have been able to walk.
Instead I turned on my side in a ball, and pulled the sheets over me. The light bled through the fabric, illuminating a dim world. I heard the bathroom door open, and I wanted him to stay as much as I wanted him to go. I lay very still. Go, just go. I can’t take it. I’m falling apart.
A few minutes later, the bed dipped and I felt him beside me. He pulled down the sheet and showed me a pad of hotel stationary, and a pen.
“Longing,” he said. “By Matthew Arnold.”
And I thought, They call it longing because it doesn’t last a short while.
He started to read what he’d written. “Come to me in my dreams and then/by day I shall be well again.” He paused and re-traced a letter with his pen. “For then the night will more than pay/the hopeless longing of the day.”
And that went over the edge of too much for me. Ten minutes earlier I’d been thinking about longing, and dreaming, and hopelessness, and here was this poem.
I burst into tears and vaulted off the bed, ran into the bathroom and locked the door. Help me. Oh God, help me. Here comes the volcano. I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t get his voice out of my head. Longing, by Matthew Arnold. My God.
He pounded on the barrier between us. “What the fuck? What’s wrong with you?”
“Go away.”
“It’s supposed to be romantic,” he yelled through the wood. “It’s a very famous poem.”
I turned on the shower to drown out my meltdown. I needed a shower anyway. I needed to wash all of my nonsensical thoughts of love and longing away. I needed to get clean.
“Open the fucking door,” he ordered.
“In a minute. I’ll be out in a minute. Please…”
I knew he’d leave if I stayed in the shower long enough, so I washed, and cried, and washed some more, and let the water run over my hair and back and shoulders. I could never shower this long at the loft. Our hot water heater sucked. It would have run out of water ages ago. I tried to convince myself that the only reason I felt so much for W was because the rest of my life was such a mess.
After half an hour or so, I turned the water off. My eyes hurt from crying, but I felt squeaky clean, and that was something, at least.
I hoped W wouldn’t be mad at me. What had he called it? My girly emotional shit? I dried off and toweled my hair, and stood with my ear against the door. Was he still there? I heard a knock, and “Room service!” and then W’s rumbly voice. He’d ordered food?
When I heard the room door close, I pulled on one of the neatly stacked bath robes and unlocked the door. W stood by the table, fully dressed, arranging platters and bowls. I knew a simple fucking sandwich cost forty dollars at this hotel. There was probably five hundred bucks worth of room service on that table, but that wasn’t as impressive as the way W looked standing over it.
He glanced up, noticing me. I pulled my robe closer around my waist.
“Are you hungry?” he asked.
He didn’t sound angry or accusing. In fact, he sounded like he was trying to keep his voice modulated. I tried to keep mine modulated too.
“Not too hungry,” I lied.
“Sit down with me anyway.”
I hugged myself. “Maybe I should get dressed first.”
He shot me an irritated look. “We’re done for tonight. I won’t touch you again. Anyway, I ripped your dress.” His frown deepened. “Do you want me to leave?”
“You paid for the room.”
“Are you staying tonight?”
I wanted to stay. I didn’t want to go home, where depression and grief threatened to overwhelm me. “I’ll leave if you want me to,” I said.
“I don’t want you to leave. I want you to sit the fuck down and eat something.”
Somehow, his snapping and frowning was better to me than leaving, so I crossed to the table and pulled out a chair. The food was still hot, and it smelled amazing. He’d ordered Vietnamese pho, and Mandarin chicken on salad, and a burger, and some spaghetti, and some salmon with vegetables. There was wine and dessert. Cheesecake, my favorite.
“I didn’t know what you liked to eat,” he said as I stared at all of it. “If you want, I can order something else.”
I choked back a laugh, because there was so much food. He’d done a really kind thing, and the last thing I wanted to do was laugh at him. I wanted to curl up in his lap and bury my head in his neck and tell him how much his kindness meant to me. I didn’t. We were off the clock, and Henry wouldn’t approve of this.
Not that I cared. I was going to quit.
“Thank you,” I said. “I guess I’m kind of hungry after all.”
“Did you have a good shower?”
There, that was sarcasm. And a little more irritation.
“I feel better now.” I looked up and met his gaze. He’d lowered the lights, or maybe it had just gotten darker outside. “I’m sorry. It was the wrong poem for me at the wrong time. Things have been… It’s been a stressful week.”
“He didn’t go to rehab, did he?” He didn’t say it in a mean way. If he had, I would have crumbled into dust, but he said it sympathetically. Of course, he’d known all along that Simon wouldn’t go, just as I’d known that he wouldn’t go.
“We had a really big fight,” I said.
W’s face didn’t change. He possibly breathed a little deeper, a little faster. “Did you lock yourself in your room again? Your safe room?”
“No,” I said, which was a lie. I pulled the sixty dollar burger across the table and picked up my knife. “You want to split it?”
“You can have the whole thing,” he said, reaching for the pho.
“I can’t eat the whole thing. Plus I want to try some of the salad and spaghetti too.”
I sawed the gigantic burger in half and thought to myself that for once I’d be putting something bigger than W’s cock in my mouth. Maybe he was thinking it too, from the expression on his face as I bit into it.
It was a great burger. It made me feel better. As for W, he ate the pho with chopsticks—expertly—and it was pure sex to watch. Not just because of his dexterity and beautiful long fingers, but because of his teeth and lips.
Our session was over. There could be no more sex. Neither one of us wanted to cross those lines, but some other line was being crossed. We were eating together, sitting across from one another at a table.
“Anyway, I’m sorry I flipped out,” I said. “It was a nice piece of poetry. I always love your poems.”
The word “love” felt heavy and guilty on my tongue, because I really meant that I loved him. I just wanted to say the word love. His eyes narrowed, or maybe I just imagined it.
“I think you should leave Simon,” W said.
“I know.”
“You have your own money, don’t you?”
The burger tasted less delicious now. I put it down and poked at the spaghetti. “I have money. But I’ve been supporting Simon for a while.”
“Why?”
“Because I loved him.”
Loved. I didn’t mean to use the past tense, but the word came out and echoed around the room. Afterward, resounding silence. I ate a few bites of salad. W ate his half of the burger, and the salmon, and the rest of the spaghetti. He poured me a little more wine. It was probably a full five minutes before either of us spoke again.
“This is good wine,” I said, to end the silence.
“What do you know about it?” he scoffed.
For real, I knew nothing, but he wasn’t being mean. He was being…insecure.
There in the dim light, over wine and quickly emptying plates, I saw that he was nervous beneath all his violence and posturing. He was insecure, just like I was insecure. He only masked it well. The mask came back within seconds, the hard look, the curve of his lips. He made a motion down the side of his face, a curling finger.
“Your hair looks darker when it’s wet. You look different.”
“My natural hair color is dark,” I confessed. “Dark brown.”
“Why do you bleach it blonde?”
“Because men like blondes.” I looked up at him from under my lashes. “You asked for a blonde, or Henry wouldn’t have paired me with you.” I didn’t know if I was flirting or lecturing him.
Having pillaged the plates, we moved on to cheesecake drizzled with hazelnut chocolate sauce. I was too full to eat very much of it, but the rich, decadent taste of the hazelnut sauce would stay with me forever. It would bring this moment back to me for the rest of my life.
“Will you leave me the poem?” I asked. “Even though I freaked out, I’d like to have it.”
He nodded toward the side table. “It’s over there. Along with something else I brought for you. A gift. Are gifts allowed?”
“Yes, gifts are allowed.”
“I bet you get a lot of them.”
“I used to, when I had other clients.”
He downed the last bite of cheesecake as I stood up to see what he’d brought me. One thing I’d learned about presents…when clients brought them, they wanted you to open it in front of them and enthuse about how cool it was. I’d feigned ecstatic bliss over many a custom negligee or exotic sex toy, although I doubted that was W’s style. Maybe a book of poetry? Or a velvet noose, so I could choke myself whenever he wasn’t around to do it for me?
But there was no book or velvet noose, just a small ivory box beside the lines of poetry he’d written. I opened the lid to find a silver key on a bed of black satin. I blinked at it as W made his way to my side.
“It belongs to an apartment on Bleecker Street. An apartment for you.”
It belongs to an apartment? I tried to figure out what he meant. It belongs to an apartment on Bleecker Street. It was a key to an apartment.
An apartment for you.
That part finally registered in my brain. My head shot up. “You’re giving me an apartment?”
He shrugged. “I have more of them than I need.”
He was a real estate mogul. Of course. That explained all his money. I looked down in shock at the key in my hand. “It’s still yours though, right? I mean, you’re not literally giving me an apartment?”
“Yes, I’m giving it to you. It’s nothing fancy.”
“It’s an apartment. It’s crazy to just give someone an apartment!”
“It’s not yours yet.” W tipped up my face and looked into my eyes. “I have this ace lawyer, starshine. He’s worked out this deal, although you don’t get to see the paperwork. The apartment is yours, legally and officially, one year from now, if you follow two simple rules. First, you don’t rent it out. Second, you don’t let any drug-addicted assholes through the front door. Ever. I’ll take it back if you let Simon so much as step over the threshold.” His fingers tightened on my chin. “Remember that. It’s not a joke.”
I felt a little scolded, but I’d just been given the key to an apartment on Bleecker Street, so my irritation didn’t last long. “I d-don’t know what to say,” I stammered. “I expected, like, a necklace or something.”
“A necklace?” He snorted and let go of me. “After all the shit I’ve done to you, you thought I’d give you a necklace? No.”
He moved away from me, back toward the table. “Don’t get all bent out of shape about this. The thing is…” He poured a little more wine but didn’t drink it. “I kept thinking about you locking yourself in a room, and him banging on the door. You don’t have to live that way. You shouldn’t live that way.”
I blinked hard, swallowing past emotion. “I know.”
“So maybe this will help. I hope it does. But don’t ever let him in there, or I swear to God I’ll make you sorry. Don’t tell him where it is. Don’t even let him know you have it. Promise me.”
“I promise.”
The key in my palm was the key to my new life. I knew it and he knew it. I just had to be brave enough to make it happen, brave enough to cut those ties to Simon. I had a place to go, now, tonight if I wanted to. I had no more excuses or reasons to delay.
W was back at the table, holding my dress. I watched him for a while, feeling numb. I had an apartment. He’d given me an apartment.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” I said. “Did I say thank you yet?”
He grimaced down at the tear in the fabric. “No.”
“Thank you. I really appreciate this.” There was a blank pause after “I really appreciate this” that I would have filled with his name, if I knew it. But I didn’t know it. He made a motion with his arm, brought his hand to his mouth and bit something off. I realized it was thread.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Fixing your dress. It’ll only take a minute. Are you tired? You should lie down.”
I needed to lie down. Life was too weird at the moment. First W gave me an apartment—conditionally—and now he was mending my dress. I needed to sleep a while and see if things made more sense when I woke up. I vaguely remembered W touching my hair and kissing my forehead just before I dropped off, but maybe it was a dream.
I awoke hours later to a slew of manic messages from Simon, and the sun in the window, heralding a brand new day.