Marriage Games (The Games Duet #1) Page 8

  That particular hallway was closed to tryouts. I was trying to avoid the bar, but I probably should have walked through it. The hallway was full of people chatting, yanking leashes, draped over each other.

  “Adam?” A female voice cut through the conversation, all white noise and ambient music.

  “Sir!” The voice came again when I tried to ignore it.

  A hand on my shoulder. I turned.

  “Serena,” I said. I hadn’t seen her in five years. She’d been nineteen in the Montauk house. There in the back hall of the Cellar, she was twenty-four.

  The bud had blossomed.

  She was five-ten with straight brown hair and bangs. Skin like silk. Lips that looked like fresh-risen dough, and a smile sweet and innocent as a child’s.

  She bowed her head. Bit her bottom lip. This alone told me she was still subbing.

  “You can look up,” I said.

  She wore a collar on her long, slim neck.

  “How have you been?” I asked. “Speak freely. As friends.”

  “Great! I just got back from Paris. I did a shoot with Ingrid Gravenstein for the Breakout.”

  “I have no idea what that is,” I said, smiling. It was nice to see her.

  “It’s a short list of hot designers and their muses,” Diana said from behind me.

  “Oh, hey. Serena, this is…”

  My wife? My future ex? My friend?

  “Diana,” I said.

  The pause was barely discernible, but knowing the woman I loved, she noticed.

  Serena bowed her head and bent slightly at the waist.

  “Nice to meet you,” Diana said.

  “I was walking her out,” I told Serena.

  “Will you come back?”

  “Yeah. Give me a minute.”

  “Thank you.”

  Still trained like a champ. I nodded and walked Diana to the elevators.

  “Well,” she said, “who’s that?”

  “I was with her just before we met.”

  The elevator doors opened and a crowd piled out. It was getting to be prime time on a tryout night. Worst night to be there.

  Diana and I got in with a few other people. She didn’t speak to me or look at me. Not even when the doors opened and we flooded into the lobby with the rest. Not at the coat check, except to insist on paying, which I wouldn’t allow. Not as we exited into the street.

  Only when I started to step into the street to hail a cab did she speak.

  “You gave her up to be with me?”

  I got back onto the sidewalk. “Yes.”

  “Do you regret it?”

  “Not for a minute.”

  Her breath made a plume of steam as she exhaled. “Are you going back upstairs?”

  “Do you want me to?”

  “I have no right to you anymore.”

  “No. You don’t. But…” Fuck it. I was just going to be as honest with her as I was being with myself. “I don’t know if I’ll go. What just happened with us, just now, it’s clouding my judgment. I’m half drunk on it, and I can’t tell if that’s good or bad. For better or worse, I let you in. I showed you who I am. I’m happy in a way. Really happy. And I’m scared to death.”

  “You’re scared of what?”

  “That I pushed you away, and that I brought you closer. Both. Neither. Everything’s changed. We aren’t us anymore.”

  “I don’t know you,” she said. “We were never us.”

  I put my fingers to the bridge of my nose and pressed the ducts. The cold soothed them. “This was my fault. You leaving. I brought it on myself.”

  “There’s plenty of blame to go around.” She sighed another white plume. “I shouldn’t have come here just because I was curious. It was completely unnecessary, and it’s not going to change anything. We need to just cut the cords and feel hurt over it and move on.”

  “Let me get you a cab.”

  “I got it.”

  She took a step into the street, and a cab pulled up. I opened the back door for her. She slid in and leaned down. She was forlorn in the dark backseat, bag in her lap, nose red from the January cold.

  “I’m going to need to come by the condo and get a few things,” she said.

  “You need to show up at the office,” I said. “I won’t bite you.”

  “Not unless you tie me up first.” She smirked.

  “Ask nicely and I might.”

  I slapped the door closed before she could joke about asking. A joke like that would get me in the backseat, and she’d either refuse my touch or accept it. Neither option was good.

  The cab took off and blended into the river of brake lights.

  Chapter 29

  PAST PERFECT

  Remember the time it was late? In the office? The time Diana leaned on her desk, crossed her arms, and looked out the window. She watched the last shoppers in the Prada store. She said that if she could change anything about her life—

  “I wouldn’t change a thing.”

  That was when we’d gotten Q2 financials back and they were minus .8 YOY, even with the downsize. That was at the bottom. Shit was bleak.

  “I’d change these numbers,” I said.

  She didn’t answer for a long time. “I wouldn’t.”

  “Really?”

  “We’re free.” Her form was a silhouette against the lit windows across the narrow street. “We’re still privately held. We can do whatever we want. No one would question it, and if they did, fuck them.”

  I pushed away from my desk and planted myself in front of her. “Tell me, what’s on your mind?”

  She moved her attention from the checkerboard of light across the street to my face. “Fiction’s dead. At least for us it is. We don’t have the leverage to break new literary talent, and the genre writers are doing it themselves.”

  “Right.”

  “The newspapers can’t monetize the internet. They’re hemorrhaging. Websites can’t pay journalists to research solid, deep pieces.”

  “All true.”

  “I think we should kill the literary fiction division. Get out of our contracts.”

  I crossed my arms. “That feels like suicide.”

  “No. We circle the wagons around long journalism. Book length. Poach established writers and editors from the newspapers. They’ll abandon a sinking ship if we pay them.”

  “Okay, look, I get it. This shit sells. But stories that work in this genre are unicorns.”

  Even as I said it, I knew the answer, and the beauty of us was that she knew it too. Her eyes lit up, and together, we laughed.

  Her journals with their thousands of questions.

  “This is it,” I said. “We find the best in the business to answer your questions.”

  “We put a call out.”

  “Lists. We list the best ones.”

  “Long-form answers. Experiential and research-based.”

  “We throw everything behind it.”

  We talked over each other for the next ten minutes, an entire plan falling into place.

  And that was how we saved her family business.

  Chapter 30

  PRESENT TENSE

  As Diana’s cab disappeared, I thought I’d just go back to our place on Crosby and look at all her things. Maybe digest what the fuck just happened. Take a healthy mental break.

  “Hey, mate,” Charlie said from behind me. He leaned on his cane. Serena stood a step behind him, averting her eyes to the ground when I looked at her. “We’re off to the Loft House. You coming?”

  “Sure.”

  Fuck it. I was pumped full of unanswered questions and undefined emotions. Perfect time to have a couple of drinks.

  The Loft House wasn’t a sex club, unless you consider money orgasmic, but with an impossibly long waiting list that required recommendations from three members, the sexiness could have sprung from exclusivity.

  That night it was sparsely populated, but there was still enough ambient conversation over the experimental clas
sical music to keep our conversation safe. Charlie, Serena, and I were tucked into a corner. Since we were in a vanilla location where I didn’t need such a clear head, I moved on to whiskey. Charlie never stopped drinking, and tonight it was rum. Serena drank only water with lemon.

  “Who you keeping dry for?” I asked. If she had a new Master, he probably didn’t let her drink, or she was only allowed to drink with him.

  “I feel better when I have water,” she said.

  “You look wonderful,” I said. “It’s great to see you.”

  I wasn’t thinking of her as a potential fuck, but she blushed and looked down, pressing her knees together. She wore a polo shirt, same as always. Sexless and plain. Sometimes she buttoned them all the way.

  “She was the most sought-after sub in New York,” Charlie said smugly. “Got her pick of the best. And I trained her, thank you very much.”

  “Never went to law school?” I asked.

  “No. I didn’t like arguing all the time, and modeling is more fun. More money too.”

  I knew the truth, and it was sadder. Her mother had died from complications of her stroke. Her father was useless for much besides haranguing her for her failures.

  “She socks it away like a squirrel.” Charlie was beaming like a proud parent. “Gotta love her.”

  She smiled. You never forget your first Dominant, they say, and Charlie’s praise would always mean something to her. I wondered if I’d made an impression at all.

  She excused herself. I must have wondered while watching her walk away, because Charlie cleared his throat as if he had a ream of crumpled paper wads in it.

  “The wife,” he said. “You back on? You and her?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I saw her. Same as you. She has potential.”

  I didn’t even want to talk about it. “You said Serena was the most blah blah—past tense.”

  “Why do you care?”

  “Making conversation.”

  “This thing you have?” He put his drink down in pause. “You never loved a submissive.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Have you tried?”

  “Once I break them, it just dies. It’s not something I can control. Do you have a point?”

  “Serena blames herself. Takes it out on herself.”

  “It didn’t start with her.”

  “She’s been with Stefan going on three years now. That’s his collar. The arrangement satisfies her need for punishment and his need to touch everything you’ve touched.”

  Stefan was a charming fuck. He was one of the few rich painters in the world. He was educated, talented, and back-breakingly sadistic. Along with Charlie and me, he was one of the three owners of the Montauk house, and he denied hating me.

  “Three years isn’t spite,” I said. “He must care about her.”

  “I’m sure he does. But they’ve been having problems.”

  “Do they both know there are problems?” My voice was laced with bitterness.

  “Been tense as the last hour of a cricket match for months.”

  “And you want me to charm her away?” I asked.

  “I like you better than that Scandie.”

  “I’m married.”

  “Good thing one of you sees it that way.”

  “Low blow, Charles. Low blow.”

  He nodded and waved an apology my way, acknowledging I was right without saying the words. It was enough for me.

  “Alayne Kerry was asking about you,” he said. “Not a repeat. Take her out to Montauk for a month. The main house is empty. You’ll be Master Adam in the first twenty-four hours.”

  “What’s in this for you?”

  “Seeing you happy.” He leaned back and crossed his legs. “Go. You’ll be over your little vanilla wife before the first week. By the end of the month, you won’t remember her name until you sign the divorce papers.”

  Serena came back across the room, head high, legs up to her neck, black polo shirt open to show her fashionable leather collar. I wouldn’t try to seduce her away from Stefan. I was soon to be single, and I needed the Cellar. Stealing another Dom’s collared sub could get me thrown out.

  I was formulating another plan.

  Chapter 31

  PRESENT TENSE

  Diana and I had spent the day at the office acting like adults. We had meetings and made decisions. We didn’t talk about anything but work. The activity was a relief, in a way. In another way, I felt as if I were trapped in a bag and thrown in the Hudson.

  We were too polite. I’d never felt more awkward in my life.

  “I was thinking of coming by tonight to get some things,” she said as she slung her bag over her shoulder. The winter sky was charcoal through the window behind her, and the rectangles of yellow light from the building across the street made an orderly grid.

  “How long are you living on Riverside?” I moved papers around my desk.

  “End of the month.”

  “Where to then?”

  “I don’t know. Dad says I can have my old room back.”

  “Sounds tempting.”

  “He never took down the One Direction posters.”

  “You can move back into the loft with me.”

  She froze with her hand on the doorknob. “I can’t. It’s too complicated.”

  “I understand. Come by after eight so I can be gone.”

  She nodded, rueful. “Thank you.”

  I had no intention of being gone.

  I was back in the condo by seven forty-five. When she came in, she had a suitcase and a duffel. Thank God she was alone. I had a plan if she brought someone, but it wasn’t as good.

  “Oh, hi,” she said when she saw me, keys still dangling from her finger.

  “Yeah, hi. I decided to be here.”

  She dropped the suitcase. It clapped. Hollow. “Why? Did you think I was going to swipe your cufflinks?”

  I laughed. “If you want the cufflinks, you can have them.”

  “I don’t want your cufflinks.”

  “Can we sit? Because I want to talk about what you want.”

  She tilted her head up, eyes closed in pure annoyance. “I want a divorce. That’s all I want.”

  “No, it isn’t. You want that and more. Come on. Sit.”

  I indicated her own couch, with its cold modern lines and warm colors. I’d kept the light ambient and put a pitcher of water on the coffee table.

  “Do I need my lawyer?” she asked.

  “I hope not.” I sat in a chair and indicated her spot on the couch again.

  She kicked her shoes off and sat the way she always did, with her socked feet tucked under her. I remembered the sub in the viewing room, how she went on her toes when her Dom paddled her and how I could see the dirty bottoms of her feet.

  I knew where I’d planned to start, but now that she was sitting there, looking at me with eyes the icy color of shattered tempered glass, I couldn’t launch into the offer.

  “When you got home from the club the other night, what did you do?” I asked.

  “I really don’t want to talk about the club.”

  Defenses up already. I was going to have to lower mine to draw her out.

  “I need to,” I said. “You don’t have to do a damn thing for my sake. But I need to.”

  “Then let’s talk about the club. You want to hit my pussy. I don’t know what that says about you.”

  “The fact that I never did says a lot about how I feel about you.”

  She continued as if she didn’t even hear me. “I mean, I know it’s not in anger. But it’s violence and it’s weird. I don’t understand how you can want to do that to someone you love.”

  “I can’t do that to someone I love. That’s the point.”

  She wasn’t listening, she was looking deep inside herself. “I can’t get my head around it.”

  “I’m concerned you think it’s just violence and the sub gets nothing out of it.”

  “What does she get o
ut of it?” She was leaning forward, drilling again. She wanted all the information. All the words.

  I didn’t know if it was just Curious Diana or if Aroused Diana was showing up.

  “When you got home last night, what did you do?”

  “Went to bed.”

  “Did you sleep?”

  “Who could sleep after that? I was all turned around.” Her face and posture told a thousand tales.

  “You touched yourself.”

  “Shut up.”

  “I need to know.”

  “How is that your business?”

  “How is it not?” I asked.

  “Did you jerk off?”

  “No. I went out.”

  “Where?”

  Shit. I was derailed. How did she do that?

  Just by being Diana, that was how she did it.

  “I met up with Serena and Charlie, the guy with the cane. From the bar.” I sat back, leaning into the new angle the conversation took. “He trained Serena years ago, then sent her to me.”

  “Right before we met.”

  “About five weeks before.”

  “Sent her to you? What does that mean?”

  “Did you touch yourself after you got home? Under the sheets? Standing over the toilet? On your hands and knees?”

  Long pause. She absently ran her finger along the pressed edge of her cuff. “What if I didn’t at all?”

  “I’d be shocked.”

  She spit out a short laugh, looked down. Lordamighty. It’s amazing what a man won’t see what he doesn’t want to see it. Was she full-blown submissive? Or did she just have tendencies? How did I not know it?

  Charlie’s voice answered.

  You knew it, you whacka. You knew it from the beginning.

  “I didn’t even get my jacket off.” Her eyes were still cast down. “I dropped my keys on the floor and got on my knees. I did it right in the foyer. Then…” She smiled again, looking away as if laughing at herself. “Then I took a shower and made myself come again.”