Marriage Games (The Games Duet #1) Page 9
“Just twice?”
When she looked back up, her softness was gone. “What does it mean that he sent her to you? And why did it end? Was it because of me? You told me when we met you weren’t with anyone.”
“I wasn’t with her. Not in the way I meant when I answered. Okay, look, I’ll run it down for you.” I had to just forget who I was talking to and spit it out. “Charlie trains subs. He finds their limits, tells them what to say and how to act.”
“Do they pay him?”
“No, no, there’s no money exchanged. It’s not that. It’s what he loves to do and it’s totally with consent. Joyful consent. He’s the best, but he can’t fuck them. It’s a war injury, don’t ask. Serena was a virgin. He could teach her to deep throat and take anal using a dildo, but he didn’t want to take her virginity with a piece of plastic.”
“He’s a prince.”
“Do you want me to finish?”
“Yes. Sorry.”
“She wanted me to take her virginity. So I did. I spent thirty days with her in a house in Montauk I’m part owner of.”
“You own a house in Montauk?” she asked.
“Do not even think of suing me for it.”
“I won’t. Go on.”
“Thirty days was the limit, and we agreed ahead of time. We did all the things she was trained to do. She came a lot. I came a lot. On the twenty-eighth day, I took her virginity, and continued to fuck her until she was too sore to walk. On the thirtieth day, it was over and we drove home. The following Monday, I met you in a meeting with McNeill-Barnes regarding a buyout.”
I didn’t know what she’d think or ask. I knew what I told her had a dozen holes she’d fill with questions, and I knew as painful as it would be, I’d answer them honestly.
“You waited twenty-eight days?” she asked.
“I needed her to be sure. Also, it was torture for her, which we both liked.”
“She’s beautiful.”
“She is. It took a lot of willpower, but it was worth it to see her beg for it.”
“Wow.”
“Wow?”
“This is… I mean, this is a whole thing. Jesus, I just wanted to get my stuff. I wanted my mom’s wedding dress, and I bought underwear last week I never got to wear. And I was going to take the blue stock pot? The Le Creuset one? I had a note all ready in my mind I was going to write on the yellow pad. I was going to offer to get you a new one even though you never cook and now I’m just…” She shot up, standing in her sock feet.
“I’m going to do all that. I’m collecting my things right now. I don’t know what your plan is, Adam, but it’s not going to work. Getting me all turned on last night and trying to get me jealous today? I get it. But being horny and jealous isn’t love. It’s being a teenager.” She stomped toward the bedroom.
“You’re jealous?”
“No! Tie her up and fuck her all night long. I don’t even care.”
She pivoted on her sock and disappeared around the corner. The bedroom door slammed.
Diana was never jealous. She just wasn’t. Not of Eva. Not of the women who flirted with me. She never worried when we were apart. She was incapable of it.
Without rushing, I walked to the kitchen, took the blue Le Creuset stockpot from the cabinet, and went to the bedroom. I opened the door. Her suitcase was spread on the bed and she had a mound of underpants in her hands.
“Adam, can you just leave me alone? You weren’t even supposed to be here.” She dropped the underpants in her suitcase and opened another drawer.
“I brought you your pot. And you don’t even have to write me a note.”
She grabbed it without looking at me. “Thank you.”
I stood in the doorway, arms crossed, leaning on the jamb. She wasn’t particularly graceful when she moved. She stooped and swung, throwing herself into her task as if the only point was to complete it without looking at me.
“How was work for you today?” I asked.
“Fine.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to know how it was for me?”
“No.” She slapped the suitcase shut. It was so full it bounced open again.
I got out of the doorway and went to the bed. “It was awkward.” I closed the case and held it down.
She zipped it shut, poking pieces of fabric into the opening as she went. Still not looking at me.
I continued. “You know we’re in for a long fight over the company.”
She paused, stuffed in another sliver of cotton, zipped two inches, stopped, zipped… “It’s a family business. Why do you even want it?”
“Because I own fifty-one percent of it and put five years of my life into it. And I’m not family. I’m thinking of liquidating. Best for everyone. That building is—”
“I’ll buy you out.”
“With what? Half a condo and a Jaguar?”
In one motion, she picked up the blue stock pot and threw it at my head. The cover slid off. I ducked before the bottom smashed my head open. It flew past and made a hole in the plaster wall, landing on the floor with a hard clunk.
“You’re a motherfucker,” she seethed, pointing at me. This wasn’t how I’d intended the conversation to go. Not at all. “You have no business fighting over that company. It has my name on it. My father and mother’s name. You don’t even exist.”
“You’d love that. You’d love for me to just disappear. I’m sorry, Diana. It’s not my job to make your life easy.”
“I know.” She yanked the suitcase off the bed and it landed heavily against her calf. “It’s your job to withhold for twenty-eight days.”
“You are jealous.”
“Grow up.” She started out, right toward me, both hands on the suitcase, using her leg to distribute some of the weight.
I took the handle.
“I have it,” she growled.
“Let me help you.”
“Get off me.” She looked ready to rip out my throat.
“You still have to pack the duffel.”
“I just want to go. Can I go, please?”
“Yes. You can go.” But I didn’t move. I’d just confirmed she wasn’t trapped. I put my hand over hers and took most of the weight of the suitcase. “Now let go of the handle.”
She dropped it completely and gravity straightened my arm.
“You have the heaviest underwear in the city.”
She smiled to herself. “Go to hell.”
“I’m sure I will.”
She crossed her arms. “You’re not moving out of the way.”
“I have something to say.”
“If you say it, can I go? Not theoretically, but really?”
I switched arms. I wanted my right hand to cup her face from a foot away, to gesture the shape of my words. “You’re not the jealous type. I get that. But this needs saying once and once only. For clarity. I don’t want Serena. I don’t want anyone but you. I’ve never loved another woman. I know you think I’m a different person than you thought you knew. Maybe you think there’s the husband me and the stranger me. But neither guy ever loved her. I love you. Every version of me loves you. Today. Now. Always.”
She fell back and sat on the bed, hands dangling between her knees. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Say you loved me once.”
“I did. Adam, I went into this marriage with my whole heart. It’s just… what do you want?”
To not want you.
“Besides you?”
“Yes. What do you want?” She asked it less defensively, giving me the perfect opportunity to tell her exactly what I’d been thinking.
Nudged to the edge of a tall building with a net I couldn’t see past the clouds below, I asked one more time. “What I want? Now? With you on the way out the door?”
“Yes.”
“Thirty days,” I said, jumping off the side of the tallest building in the city. No turning back now. I leaned into it. “I want thirty day
s. You and me. Far away. Not a vacation, just thirty days where I show you who I was before I started lying.”
The fall was endless. The cloudline below pulled away and closer at the same time, like the horror-movie door at the end of a long hallway.
Chapter 32
PRESENT TENSE
Where is love?
In my wife’s Unicorn Journals, the query had been embedded deep in questions of how and why. The where was most interesting. Nicolla Masta started it as a dissemination on the parts of the body that experienced love. The heart—the historical center, and the genitalia—the evolutionary center.
Zack Abramson killed it. The piece went nowhere. It was DOA. And we weren’t sending her all over the world to find where love was. Waste of money and time. It was everywhere and nowhere. We moved on to the underworld lives of garbage men in Naples. Not a bestseller, but not bad.
Of course, I’d been wrong. Love wasn’t everywhere and nowhere. It just shifted around. Expanded, contracted, and moved like a nomad.
The morning after my wife refused to go to Montauk, love moved out of our loft, to the offices of McNeill-Barnes. Love was still as awkward as a thirteen-year-old boy with his first public erection. Love didn’t fit in the space. Love was uncomfortable. Love wanted out but couldn’t find the fucking door.
I could have worked at the R+D office, but I couldn’t let her off the hook, and I couldn’t make the case for keeping my piece of the company if I stopped showing up.
And I knew she’d say yes to going to Montauk if I played my cards right. It was a question of when.
When is love?
Should have attacked that question.
“Do you still need the Montauk place?” Charlie asked at lunch soon after.
“Probably not.” I tapped the white tablecloth.
“How’s it going with her?”
I shook my head. It was bad. We spoke at work, about work. She’d had divorce papers served and hadn’t looked at me for the rest of the day, out of shame and guilt. But she was being strong. I respected that.
I’d gotten myself a lawyer and made it abundantly clear, through him, that I was not going to sign over the company even if she could come up with the value for a buyout. I moved back to my Murray Hill apartment but didn’t tell her. Love wasn’t in our loft anymore, and its absence made the space seem too big.
“Her father called me. You know what he said? He said, ‘Don’t give up.’ And the more I think about it, it’s because he wants me running that business. That whole family runs on that publishing house. Their identity’s strung up on it.”
“You ever going to let it go?” He speared a piece of meat with his knife and ate off the blade. “Start living? Come by the Cellar for more than a drink?”
When I stopped loving her, I’d let it go.
Or vice versa.
I felt an answer in the intersection of the business and my lies, not in the switch between them, but in the fulcrum where all things pivoted. Our love was there. She loved that publishing house, and I loved her.
Chapter 33
PRESENT TENSE
“What’s this?”
Diana stood over my desk with a document typed onto my lawyer’s letterhead. I glanced at it, then back at the inventory reports.
“A notice.”
“You can’t do this.”
“Yeah, I can.”
“We walk out with what we came in with. I came in with this company. We can fight over shares, but it’s mine.”
I put my pen down and pushed away from the desk. “I came in with a majority interest, which is tantamount to ownership in the great state of New York. See, definitions get muddled. Let’s just let the lawyers figure it out.” I stood and swung my jacket over my shoulders. “I have a meeting uptown. Do you have the October release meeting under control?”
“Yes.”
“Great. Thanks.”
I was almost out of the room, hand on the doorknob.
“Adam!”
“What?”
“Why?”
“Because I can.”
It wasn’t an answer she would understand. Her ambition was always tied to the strings of her heart. She didn’t understand the hunger to just have.
I did. My attempt to force her into a buyout wasn’t about mindless acquisition, but I understood the psychology of it. It had been my mindset until she came along.
“What do you want? Is it money?”
“I told you.” I opened the door. “You. Thirty days doing what I tell you.”
“That won’t change anything.”
“Yes, it will. I’ll sign it all over to you for nothing. You’ll win.”
I didn’t wait for her to ask for a definition of winning. She wasn’t in this to win. She was divorcing me to get out in one piece.
That was my goal too.
Get out in one piece.
Chapter 34
PAST TENSE
“Please.”
Serena was the first in her family to go to college. She was synthesized in mediocre education and middle-class values, but she overcame both. When she’d submitted to me, she was released from her responsibility to her education and her family. I was her vacation.
She was intelligent and learned the rules of sophistication quickly. Outside scene, she had a sharp wit that wasn’t cruel or cutting. She could choose her future, though in the middle of our stay in the Montauk house, she only had the next hour or so on her mind.
“I have to get back to the city, pet. I’ll see you tonight.”
She wore only her white gauze gown and her collar. I’d left a polo shirt out for her, but she’d refused it. She was draped over my leg.
“Please.” Her brown eyes were as big as saucers, and her light brown lashes curved up at the ends. Her lips parted. When she opened her mouth so I could come in it, I made sure to get some on her bee-stung lower lip.
I didn’t love her. I’d never been in love, so I didn’t know what it felt like. I didn’t feel anything for Serena I didn’t feel for any other sub.
But two things were different with Serena.
One, I didn’t take her virginity after the first week, or the second.
Two, it became quickly apparent that I’d somehow let her develop feelings for me. She didn’t say as much, but I knew women, and I’d inadvertently gotten to her.
“I’ll take you when it suits me. Not you.” I stroked her cheek.
She turned her head and dragged her lips along my palm. She mouthed please please please against my hand. I could see my watch near her lips. We did have time.
“If you ask again,” I said, and relief poured over her face before I even finished the sentence, “I’m going to violate you in ways you may not like.”
I said it knowing she’d like it. The idea that I could and would do things outside her limits was exciting.
“Please take me.”
I sighed as if annoyed and pushed her off me. “Go outside. Get a stick at least a foot long and thinner than your thumb. Crawl back here with it in your teeth. Put it at my feet, then put your head down and your ass up.”
She ran out, near naked at the end of September. The front yard was covered in sticks that would do, but if I’d asked her to walk for it, she’d happily die of exposure.
I didn’t love her. Couldn’t. I’d break her a dozen times before I even took her virginity, and every time I did, I’d feel satisfaction, peace, compassion, and power. But I’d never love her.
I’d never made a choice not to love. I tried, but I felt nothing. I was frustrated with myself, but I was coming to the conclusion that it wasn’t the women. It was me.
She came in, closed the door, and got on her knees with the stick in her teeth. She did exactly as she was told and it pleased me. And her.
But I didn’t love her. The perfect sub isn’t always the perfect match. It was possible no sub was a match.
Chapter 35
PRESENT TENSE
The ha
rdest thing I ever did was stop.
I stopped telling Diana what was on my mind. I stopped trying to get in her way. I stopped chasing her around. Once the lawyer’s letter came to her, describing my intention to fight her for the company, I behaved like a calm professional and so did she.
That lasted two whole days. She texted me close to midnight.
—We need to talk about
this ownership thing—
A dozen jokes about possession crossed my mind. I tossed them. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know what she was talking about.
—That’s fine. My lawyer will relay
the message or we can set up a meeting—
—I don’t want to talk to lawyers—
—I want to talk to YOU—
I didn’t answer. I wanted to talk to her too. I wanted to touch her and whisper to her, but I couldn’t.
She found me at the gym the next morning. I was on the treadmill, and she looked as if she’d walked a few thousand miles herself.
I didn’t stop the belt. I hit the button to make it faster.
“Are you all right?” I asked, jogging six miles an hour straight into nowhere.
“You’re not playing fair.”
“How’s that?”
“You’re being emotionally manipulative and spiteful and it’s not okay.”
My legs burned, but I didn’t stop.
“Did you hear me?” she shouted.
“I heard you.”
“You can’t demand a price for your shares and offer me less for mine.”
She was loud. People were looking. Fuck them.
“Mine are worth more,” I said.
“Can you stop that thing?”
“Why?”
She reached onto my panel and hit the emergency stop button. I nearly fell over.
“Because I want to talk,” she sniped. “We were talking before, then this started.” She waved a piece of paper.
My lowball offer for her shares had been meant to insult her. I’d obviously succeeded.
“It’s for the best.” I snapped my towel off the machine. “The only thing talking was doing was getting you to feel good about leaving.”