Forbidden: A Standalone (22 page)

And I wore the panties, because I was sick of the gross, disposable mental-ward underwear that rode up my ass.

I sat in the lobby, running my fingers over the damask. Peeked out the glass doors. Then stood and looked at the three-foot-high fresh flower arrangement. Then sat in front of the wood-burning modernist fireplace. Then peeked out the glass doors.

He wasn’t late, ever. Not that he fussed about it. He owned a watch as black as his car and as big as a dinner plate, but he always seemed to know what time it was without looking.

I, on the other hand, looked at the wall clocks as if they ran backward when my back was turned.

He was coming.

I knew that he hadn’t hit me. That I’d let Martin knot me, which was forbidden because it was dangerous and just another instance of infidelity. I knew nothing about the stables except that I’d been startled when someone came in, and Deacon knew everything. Only he knew the level of my betrayal, and only he could forgive me.

Behind me, a closet door slammed. Mark, the pierced orderly, came out.

I’d slammed a door that night. I jumped when I heard a car door slam outside.

Deacon. He was here.

I’d slammed the door on the way out when I’d gone to the stables. I left in a rage, warring with my shame and self-loathing.

It was him, the man walking toward me in a black wool jacket and flat-front trousers. Him, with the blazing blue eyes that had seen so much and the hands that could grasp, inflict, caress all at the same time.

He’d left me for letting Martin knot me. No, he hadn’t hit me or broken my tooth, that I’d done to myself, but he’d kicked me out.

***

“Empty your heart, my kitten. Empty your mind. Open your eyes. Who do you see?”

Deacon yanks my hair back until I’m looking at him. I feel at home and excited. He’s back. He was gone, and he’s back.

“You,” I croak.

“Are you empty?” He pulls my arm back and stops.

“Yes,” I say.

But the fluidity of the moment is gone when Deacon rubs a sore spot on my wrist with his thumb. He’s behind me, on his knees, his throbbing cock at my crack. I don’t want him to rub my wrist. I want him to fuck me.

“What’s this?” he asks.

I thought the bruises were gone, but Deacon has an eagle eye. No detail has ever slipped by him, and no lie has ever gone undetected.

“A bruise.” I intercept the next question because he already knows the answer. “From rope.”

He leans back, and I know it’s over. He’s not fucking me. He’ll forgive me, but he won’t fuck me.

“Who?” he asks it as if it’s relevant.

It’s not. Someone else knotted me. We reserved that for each other. I stand, because I can’t admit this while in a submissive posture. I have to hold up my head. Have to.

“Martin. He wanted to work on that last asymmetrical pose.”

“Was Debbie there?”

“No.”

“And?” He’s standing now, hard as a rock. Terrifying.

“And what?”

He won’t ask me if I fucked him, because that’s secondary. He’s just going to stand still with a look of shock, and then he’s going to step forward in a way that makes me step back, once, twice, until the wall prevents me from going farther. His breath falls on my cheek, and a pain in my arm runs from my wrist to the sensitive side of my bicep.

“You did not,” he says from deep in his throat. He’s naked, stunning. He pins me to the wall, the friction making the open skin on my ass scream.

Regret. Pounds of it. Miles wide. Regret to the depth of my broken spirit.

“I’m sorry.” Am I? Or am I just saying that?

“Why?”

My wrist hurts. He’s pressing it so hard against the wall, as if I’d leave, as if I’d ever turn my back on him. Yet I want to get away, to run, to show him I can abandon him the way he abandons me.

I wiggle, but he only presses harder and demands, “Why?”

“Get off me!”

“Tell me why!” His eyes are wider, his teeth flashing as if he wants to rip out my throat. “Why?”

“I need it!”

He breathes once, heavily, as if filling his lungs to say something he doesn’t want to say. He reaches for me, and I think he might say it’s all right. He brushes his fingertip across my bottom lip, and I’m about to burst with gratitude. His face is soft and loving, and he’s mine as much as I am his.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “You have to go. I can’t trust you.”

I’m still in shock when the door slams behind him.

***

I watched him sign himself in with my hand over my mouth. He was there, breathing the same air as me. He’d come. Maybe he hadn’t come on a white horse to catch me as I jumped from a tower. Maybe we weren’t going to ride off into the sunset, but he’d come for me.

He’d come for me.

I kept repeating those words, awash in gratitude to him, to Westonwood, to Elliot, to the people who built his car and pumped his gas.

He came through the glass door. It whooshed and breathed when it closed, and he stopped when he saw me. I was a wreck, and I knew it. But I wasn’t worried about how I looked. Nothing could be further from my mind. It was never about that between us, because he saw
me
.

I didn’t have a word or a gesture to express how I felt. I kept my hand over my mouth so I didn’t spit when I cried. He took four steps, big ones, across the length of the hallway and wrapped his arms around me, lifting me off the floor. He smelled of hickory and leather, adventure and brokenness. He smelled of pleasure and pain given without regret, and when he held me tight, I felt both.

“Fiona,” he said as if expressing longing and hope.

“I’m sorry,” I said through my tears. “I’m so sorry.”

ELLIOT

I
 closed my office door and went to the window. I waited like a spider waiting for the web to vibrate, arms stretched, owning my vulnerability to her, the fact that I wanted her and someone else had her.

It wasn’t long before they came out and sat on a bench. When he put his hand over hers, I felt how Fiona felt. Worthless, consumable, a cold faraway planet circling a brilliant sun. That was my pain. Mine. No excuses. I would steep it in boiling water until it bled out of the bag and colored me the dark, opaque crimson of shame.

FIONA

I
 pulled Deacon outside like a kid showing off her dollhouse.

“And we have one guy here I went to school with. He knows every flower and all its medicinal properties. I mean, he’s nuts, but right? You can’t help it.” I walked backward to the patio.

“You’re not nuts, kitten. Haven’t I told you that?”

“God, it’s so nice to see you.”

“Nice?”

It was session time, so the rec room was empty. I was a fucklot happy about that, because I didn’t want anyone to see us. What we had wasn’t public. It wasn’t meant to be shared by sight or smell. The next hour was ours. Fuck all of them. I wanted every curious eye the fuck off me.

He put his arm around me, and we walked out into the yard. I pulled him to a bench halfway between the building and the treeline. He didn’t take his eyes from me. We were like a long-separated couple who couldn’t imagine being in each other’s presence again. He sat next to me and twisted to face me, bending one arm over the back of the bench and putting his other hand over mine.

“You look beautiful,” he said, and he never, ever lied.

“You too. Like no one ever stabbed you.”

“It wasn’t that bad. A flesh wound. Two Band-Aids and mercurochrome. Kiss it and make it better. Nothing.”

“You were in the hospital.”

“A luxury hotel.”

“The knife missed your heart by how much?”

He shrugged. “It missed.”

“I don’t need you to forgive me,” I blurted. “Even if you did, I’d never forgive myself. For everything. For letting Martin work with me, for trying to kill you. Everything.”

His hands were so tender on mine, I felt as if they’d break the bones.

“You don’t remember anything?” he asked.

“I’ve just started to remember that night at Maundy, when you threw me out.” I choked a little on the last part. “I’m not saying I blame you.”

“How are you?” It wasn’t a polite question or small talk. He wanted a real answer.

“I don’t know. I keep looking for an answer from other people, like they’re going to tell me how I am. I feel myself wanting you to tell me if I’m okay. I didn’t realize that was what I expected from you, and you know, you can’t tell me. No one can, but… this is crazy.”

“I’m ready.”

“I don’t know how to talk to myself, so I’ll listen.”

He laughed, not with humor but recognition. “You are more brutal on yourself than anyone else.” He put his fingers on my lips.

I tasted him, and the desire to open my mouth and take him down to the knuckles was overwhelming.

“I think we hurt each other,” he said. “I asked you for monogamy for the wrong reasons, and that’s what started the whole thing.”

“If it’s what you want, it’s not wrong. I can try again.”

He shook his head. “I thought you wanted it. But I don’t need you to be exclusive. I don’t get jealous of other men as long as I know them and know you’re protected. I thought it would make you happy. I thought you’d be safer if you were completely mine. But it doesn’t. It makes you trapped. It makes you do stupid things. I’ll never ask that of you again.”

“I can.”

“Well, then do it. Just do it, if that’s what you want. I haven’t touched another woman since you, and I won’t. None of them are interesting to me. But that’s my choice. It has to be your choice too. I can’t impose it on you, and I can’t punish you for who you are.”

He couldn’t punish me for who I was. A whore. A fucker. A sex bag with no goals, no worries, nothing inside her. But he didn’t mean that. I knew he meant I was some sort of life-giving spirit-goddess above the care of mundane things like fidelity, but he was cutting me.

“You mean that?” I said. “You mean you could just let me swell and fuck when you’re not around, and it’d be okay with you?”

“I’m probably the only man in the world who doesn’t get jealous at that thought, but you have to be you. I take you that way or nothing. You know what you are to me. You’re my reason to feel good. Even after everything, when I think of you, I’m happy. That’s all I want, to feel that freedom. I’m not interested in the baggage that comes with enforced exclusivity. Kids, marriage, the myth of the happy home. None of it is for us.”

He’d said it before, and I’d embraced it then.

“I want to ask you something,” I said, casting my eyes down.

“Yes?” He raised an eyebrow. He knew what I was going to ask; I’d bet the entirety of my trust fund on that.

“Can you tell me what happened? How I stabbed you? I can’t get my head around it.”

He looked away. In profile, he looked thoughtful, statuesque, with a bump on his nose where it had been broken and his chin at a right angle to his neck. “There’s no point, me narrating a story, is there? You need to remember.”

“I can’t.”

He leaned in. “You can.” His voice got low, turning breaths into words.

When he spoke like that, I could understand him no matter how loud the music was. I shook my head with a sting in my sinuses, tears borne of shame.

“I can help you.”

“By telling me. Please.”

“No, I can help you remember. Do you want that?”

I nodded. Fuck, he was so close, breathing on me, his stubble so near I had to twitch to feel it. “Yes.”

“We need to be alone,” he said.

“What do you have in mind?”

He raised an eyebrow. He had no intention of telling me. God, I loved him. The power he carried in his bones, as if everything in his reach would be all right. No wonder I fell apart when he went away.

“Okay,” I said. I didn’t mention that being alone was against the rules or that breaking them could keep me incarcerated longer than either of us wanted. “Wait here.”

He leaned back, and I got up. I glanced at Mark on the way to the bathroom, jerking my head toward the inside. Like a good little monkey, he followed me, catching me outside the door to the ladies’.

“What?” he asked. “You doing all right?”

“I need to be left alone by the fence.”

“With the guy?”

“With the guy.”

He crossed his arms. “I could get fired for that.”

“I’ll make it worth the risk.”

“You ain’t that good, baby.”

I should have put a little more effort into our bathroom encounter. That would have made for an easier negotiation. “Five grand when I get out.”

“Ten.”

“Seven. No more bullshit. You’re not the only orderly in here.”

He considered that for a second, probably spending the money in his mind.

“And I gotta have the guy at the monitors turn the camera. He could get fired too.”

“Five for him.”

We were taking too long. I already knew I was being watched, and talking to Mark outside the bathroom would be noticed anyway.

“You gave pretty good head,” he said.

“Jesus, you’re a pig.”

He seemed to like that. I should have called him a gentleman.

“My cock needs sucking, dollface. I’m on night shift, and it gets a little boring watching you whack jobs beat off.”

“Fine. Just take care of it.” I pushed my way into the bathroom before he could demand my ass as well.

Karen was coming out of a stall. “That Deacon? The guy on the bench I saw you with?” Her breath smelled of puke. Her voice and gait were weak and drowsy.

“Yeah.”

“Wow. He’s like… I don’t know the word. Powerful, maybe? Jesus. And those eyes.”

“Yeah. He’s great on the inside too.” I didn’t have to pee, so I just straightened my hair in the mirror. I needed a minute for Mark to do his thing.

“Good for you,” she said, going for the door. “You could use a break.”

“Thanks.” She was about to open the door when I said, “Can you keep away from the holes by the creek?”

“Sure. Everyone’s in session, more or less. You should be fine.”

I held the door open for her, because she was having trouble with the weight of it. Mark was across the room, moving a tray of medication. He saw me and winked. A little nod of his chin told me what I needed to know.