His Absolute Betrayal - Elise's Love Story: The Billionaire's Continuum (#2) (A Contemporary Romance Novel) (17 page)

"I have cheesecake and cookies," Jessika said.  I imagined her smiling and holding out a plate of cookies for me.

"You do?" I said.  I wished I had a tissue to blow my nose.  I might have one in my purse, but I couldn't look right now.  I sniffled again.

"Where are you?" she asked.

"I'm..."  I honestly had no idea.  "I don't know.  I'm somewhere.  I don't want to come here ever again."  Some irrational part of me kept thinking that this was Elle's neighborhood, near her apartment.  For all I knew, it was.  She didn't live that far away from Landseer Tower.  "There's a sign up there," I said, spotting a side street and a sign accompanying it.  "Hold on, let me walk to it."

"Sure.  Everything will be fine, alright?" Jessika said.  I heard more after that, but muffled, like she was speaking to someone else, holding the phone to the side.

I reached the sign and scrunched up my eyes, reading it in the dim light of far away streetlamps.  "I'm on the corner of Burton and Gregory.  I don't know where that is, but that's what the signs say."

To be fair, I didn't know where almost any streets were.  If I needed to go somewhere new, I just used my GPS, then promptly forgot how to get there as soon as I arrived.  Perhaps that was a problem, but that's what the GPS was for, right?  I tried to laugh, but I failed.  Instead, I choked and coughed, crying again.

"Stay there, alright?" Jessika said, calm and nice.  "Jeremy will come pick you up.  Are you okay, though?  Are you hurt?"

No, I...  "I'm not.  I'm not physically hurt."  Not quite, anyways.  Heartache was just as bad, I thought.  "My heart hurts," I told her, barely able to admit it.  "And my chest.  My head."  Not a headache, no, but something else, something more.

"I'll stay on the phone with you until Jeremy comes," she said.  "Alright?"

"No, it's—it's fine.  I'll just wait.  I'm fine.  Everything's fine.  Really, it is."

Right.  No matter how much I said it, I didn't think I could ever convince myself of that.  My relationship with Lucent was not going so great, I was on the run from the police, and when I peeked over my shoulder again... well, at least the man following me was gone now.  Maybe.  It was probably nothing.  I was just paranoid.

I hung up the phone before Jessika could say anything else.  I needed to be alone again.  That entire conversation drained me, physically and mentally.  My feelings for Lucent had already drained me emotionally, too.

I had nothing left.  Again.

So, I just stood there, waiting, hoping.  Knowing that at least I had something somewhere sometime.  Direction.  Jeremy was coming here to pick me up, and then I would go to Jessika and have cheesecake and cookies.  Unfortunately, sweet desserts paled in comparison to everything else I needed, but maybe they'd distract me for a little while.

This was it, wasn't it?  The end?  To something, at least, but I didn't know exactly what.  Maybe I could stay with Jessika and Asher.  That'd be oddly amusing.  The police were looking for me and Lucent because they suspected us of setting fire to the Landseer mansion, and then there I'd be, hiding out in Jessika and Asher's guest house.

I didn't really know if that would work.  Thinking about it, I could hide almost anywhere if I really wanted to, right?  My job involved writing, and while I mainly went to work at Landseer Tower, a writer could write wherever they liked.  Sort of.  I needed a laptop, which I didn't have at the moment.  I could write it all by hand if I wanted, but sometimes my hand cramped up.  What a stupid thing to think about right now.

I stared up at the night sky, lost in the nothingness of it all.  Sometimes I disliked living in a big city, because you could never see the stars at night.  The streetlamps and lights from businesses that stayed open late, or from people's homes; they blocked out the starlight, polluting the sky with their luminescence, leaving the pure black emptiness of space and void.

I kind of liked that right now, though.  It made it easier.  Easier to feel nothing, and to maybe become nothing, even if just for a little while.

Unfortunately, that thought reminded me of Lucent.  That's kind of what submission was like, though in a different sort of way.  Becoming lost, becoming nothing.  Lucent took care of everything, and I just did, and existed, as a concept more than a person.  It sounded bad, but it wasn't really.  A lot of times it felt nice and relaxing.

Most of the time I ruined it, though.  I had a hard time not thinking or questioning things.  I couldn't become lost in sensation, because I was already lost in thought.  Thinking and feeling didn't go well together; I thought they might be polar opposites most of the time.

That was me.  And Lucent.  Not exactly, but maybe.  Different.  Contestable, not comparable.  We didn't suit each other, we fought against one another.

Like magnets, supposedly opposites attract, but I questioned the veracity of that statement.  It sounded like something people told themselves so they could feel better about having nothing in common.

I wished it was something I could tell myself, and then convince myself I only told myself that to make myself feel better, but Lucent and I had plenty of things in common.  It was just our core essence that shifted drastically and... and separated... us...

I turned my gaze from the sky to the street.  I didn't want to be lost anymore.  I wanted to be home and held and comforted.  That's how this worked.  Even Elle knew that.  After a scene with a submissive, where she gave all of herself to her dominant and became lost in the process, he was supposed to hold her and care for her and bring her back.  There were words for that kind of thing, like subspace and aftercare.

Lucent was good at knowing about both of them.  I didn't know about either of them until I met him.

I didn't have aftercare now, though.  I didn't know how to do it.  How laughable was that?  I gave Elle a stuffed animal rabbit instead of hugging her or stroking her hair.  I didn't want to kiss her softly and whisper sweet words of thanks and adoration to her.  Why would I want to do that?  I'd done something, though, and she looked appreciative for it.

Someone came closer.  I turned to the side and saw him, the man from before.  He looked shady and strange and I couldn't quite place why until he came even closer still.  He was still about half a block away from me, but he wore darkened clothes similar to the intruder at Asher and Jessika's house the other night.  Back then, Lucent stopped him.  I tried to help, but I wasn't prepared for a struggle like that.

Was this the same man?

I still wasn't prepared.  There was no one here to stop him now.  He'd failed to steal the hard drive, and while I took it afterwards, I didn't have it now.  What did he want from me?  What was he going to do to me?

Frozen in fear, I simply stood there and watched him as he slowly stepped closer.  He reached back and covered his head with a hooded sweatshirt, shrouding his face in shadows and night.  I was the only one here on the sidewalk, waiting at this street corner for Jeremy, but I didn't know when he'd come.

His lips twisted into a wicked grin as he continued walking towards me slowly.  I couldn't see anything of his face except for a flashing glint, teeth glaring at me like the fading face of a Cheshire cat.

The man stopped.  Just stopped.  Suddenly and without warning.  He stopped smiling, too.  I scrunched up my brow, confused.

Someone grabbed my arm.  I jumped, almost fell over, but they held me tight, keeping me from toppling to the ground.  I opened my mouth to scream, but a hand clapped over my lips, muffling my cries.  I tried to swing my purse at them, or hit them with my phone in my other hand, but I couldn't see them or reach them.  I twisted and turned, bound in strong, captivating hands, until I saw...

Lucent?

I stopped trying to scream or free myself, and as soon as I did, he let me go.  As soon as he let me go, I swung my purse at him, hitting him in the shoulder.

"What are you doing here?" I demanded.

"Elise, I can explain," he said.

"Don't call me Elise," I said.

"Miss Tanner?" he asked, offering me a half smile.

"Don't call me that, either."  I didn't want him smiling at me, or happy, or trying to be.  If... maybe if he apologized, but he hadn't yet, and...

"What do you want me to call you?" he asked.

"I don't want you to call me anything," I said.  "I'm upset with you.  I don't even know why you're here.  Why don't you go back to your little plaything's apartment and have fun with her instead of bothering me?  Did you buy her all of those whips and paddles and ballgags."  What else was there?  I just started listing everything I remembered seeing.  "Riding crops, floggers, nipple clamps, ropes, the cross on the wall there..."

"Yes," he said.  "I bought Laura all of that."

"Laura?" I asked, then I remembered.  "What kind of sick game was that, anyways?  You named them after letters in the alphabet?"

He winced.  "She told you?"

"Yes, your letter Elle and I had quite a talk.  I was mad at her, though.  I'm mad at you, too.  I should have stuffed a ballgag in her mouth to keep her quiet but I didn't think of it.  I wish I had one now, because I'd do the same to you."

Lucent appraised me, one brow slightly raised, looking worried and curious all at once.

"Does that make me Emme?" I asked.

"There is no Emme," he said.  "There will never be an Emme.  I understand why you'd be upset with me over that.  In truth, I'm upset with myself, too.  I was never good at maintaining a relationship, because I didn't think I wanted one."

"I think," I said, "you could have ended that sentence at 'I didn't think,' and that would've been entirely accurate."

"Witty as always," he said; I could tell he wanted to call me Miss Tanner, but he refrained.

A sudden thought struck me, and I decided to go with it.  Well and good, he'd made me cry, hurt me, broken my heart, so the least I could do was stomp on his in return.  I didn't know if this was exactly that, but it was the quickest thing I could come up with on sudden notice.

"You can call me Mistress," I said to him, haughty, lifting my nose up.  "Mistress Tanner."

I looked down my nose at him, trying not to grin.  Lucent would never go for that.  He'd take it as a personal affront, I thought.  Or, that's what I hoped.  I didn't want him to agree, I wanted him to be mad at me, because I was mad at him, and he deserved to feel the same way.  Irrational, yes, but I wasn't in a good mood.  Too much had happened, too much was going on, maybe more was about to happen at any second, and I just wanted it to stop.

What if the man who was following me returned?  What if he brought more people to deal with me and Lucent?  What if the police came because of a reported disturbance?  This wasn't exactly the most populated neighborhood, but if someone called about a domestic dispute that would put both of us at risk.  And what about Elle?  What about Jessika and Asher?  Jeremy?  Where was he?

The picture on the wall during the party?  That was me.  Lucent said he didn't mean for it to be hung up like that, but it didn't matter.  That's all I was, I realized.  Just some thing, some object meant to be displayed.  I didn't really think this, and I thought Lucent loved me—or, he had loved me—but what about all the rest who were better than me?

I wasn't submissive and I didn't know if I ever could be, and so that's partly why I said what I did and told him to call me Mistress Tanner.  He needed to know, right here and now, exactly what I thought of his BDSM things.  I... I liked them, I did, but I couldn't be that.  I couldn't be perfectly content like Elle, waiting and worshiping at "Master Storme's" feet.  I would never have a room full of sexual toys, prepared and ready for Lucent to use on me.

I didn't want that.  I didn't think I wanted to be in control, either, but...

"Fine," Lucent said, surprising me.  "If you wish."  He bowed, low and courteous.  "You're correct, Mistress Tanner.  I didn't think.  And for that, I apologize.  I was hoping we would have a safe and comfortable place to stay, but I severely misjudged the circumstances.  I appear to have a habit of doing that as of late, and you're certainly within your right to be upset with me because of it."

I stared at him, blinking.  It was dark enough out that I hoped he didn't see my mouth slightly open, nor the confusion in my eyes.

Did he really?  He said it, didn't he?

"Why did you say that?" I asked.

"Why did I say what?"

"Why did you call me Mistress Tanner?"

"Here," he said.  He held the black hard drive in his hand, offering it to me.  I didn't realize he was holding anything during the commotion earlier.

I took it and asked him again, "Why?" but I didn't know exactly what I was asking anymore.

Lucent frowned.  His entire existence looked torn, as if he wondered how to explain, how to offer amends, even just how to
be
.

"Sometimes people get ahead of themselves," he said quietly.  "Sometimes we don't always recognize our faults, and instead we see them as strengths.  Please don't misunderstand, because I believe everyone has weaknesses, but if we don't acknowledge them for what they are, and ignore any attempt at overcoming them, then it can lead us on a dark and dismal path."

"I don't understand what you're saying," I said.  "Explain it to me?"

"I..."  He paused and closed his eyes.  "I thought I could protect you from everything.  I didn't realize that I wasn't as strong as I thought.  After last night, when everything happened so suddenly, I continued to make mistakes, and because of that I hurt you," he said.  "I don't know how to make it up to you, Mistress Tanner."

I didn't want him to call me that anymore.  I wanted him to call me Miss Tanner, or even Elise, but could I really forgive him so easily, too?  I was entirely unsure.  Maybe that was my weakness, like Lucent said.  Maybe I didn't think things over sometimes, and I rushed into situations for curiosity's sake.  I tried to rationalize after the fact, but deep down I knew I wasn't always making good decisions.

Still, they were my decisions.  I had a right to choose.  If I gave that up, what else did I have?