Entry-Level Mistress

chapter 7



It took me longer than usual to get ready and when, hair still wet and only a towel around me, I stepped into the living room to grab my phone and see if he’d called, there was Daniel, sitting and chatting with Leanna.

“Oh.” I took a step back as both pairs of eyes focused on me. “I, um, am running late.”

“Clearly,” he said, but I recognized that look in his eyes. He stood. I glanced at Leanna who was looking back and forth between the two of us.

“Daniel and I were just discussing Manhattan,” Leanna said, as if there wasn’t anything awkward about that moment, although obviously she was aware of the undercurrent of sexual tension and amused by it all. “And NYU. Aaannd I need to go make a phone call.”

I was only dimly aware of Leanna leaving the room because Daniel was coming closer. He put his hand on my back and steered me gently, his voice a whisper.

“Why don’t you show me your room?”

My breath caught in my throat and I turned, nearly stumbling over myself. I felt young and caught, as if everything about me were laid bare.

He walked past me into the bedroom and I closed the door behind him. When he stopped, surveying the space, I realized suddenly how it would look to a stranger. It wasn’t a large room and though clean, it was filled to the brim with neatly stacked piles of books, artwork and cheap furniture. It was only one step up from a dorm room really. I thought of the expensive new stockings I had been about to slip on. Ridiculous. Like a child playing dress-up.

“This is … ”

“Cluttered,” I filled in for him. “Yeah I know.” I was breathless and waiting for him to pull the towel off me, only, he seemed distracted by my stuff. It definitely wasn’t the sexiest room ever, not even a blank slate like his Charles Street bedroom. Or sophisticated like his high-rise condo that I had only ever seen in a magazine spread. “I could get dressed as I was planning to do,” I reminded him.

He walked, or rather wound his way, to the bust of Medusa, ran a finger over one of the twisted snakes. He seemed to take in all of the random collection of artwork I had completed over the years. I wanted to tell him to stop looking, wanted to push him out of there. Then he picked up my newest sketchbook, which he couldn’t possibly know was the newest.

“Daniel—”

He brushed past me with it, sat down on my bed.

“It’s stupid stuff, just student art,” I said with a shrug, trying to hide my anxiety as he flipped through the book, but angry with myself at the same time for putting down my work. I’d had success with sculpture, had two gallery showings in Jamaica Plains; sold some pieces. But I’d never been cocky about my abilities, not in that showy way that some of my peers had been. Sometimes I wondered if that made me less, if that difference would be what made them succeed. Only, I was going to succeed too. I would.

He put the sketchbook down, shifted to sit with one knee bent and the other leg still rooted on the ground.

“I don’t know you all that well, Emily,” he said, his tone utterly serious, and I had the sense that this would be what it felt like to be on the other side of a business meeting with him. “And while I might have had suspicions, I still don’t really know why you came to work for me. But we all make choices in our lives. At twenty-one I wasted away a fortune in the name of revenge.”

I went cold. He spoke so matter-of-factly about the revenge he had taken on my father. Revenge for some unknown hurt my father had caused. I wanted to stop his lecture and force the long-awaited discussion. Except he continued, sweeping all thoughts of any bold confrontation about the past from my mind.

“But I came back,” he said. “And I succeeded. That kind of comeback doesn’t happen for everyone. If you want to pursue this,” he gestured around the room, “this is the time to do it. Not the time for working in corporate America.”

I felt small all of a sudden. He was right and I knew it.

“I was nominated for a fellowship,” I said, hating the defensive tone in my voice. “It starts in mid-August. The Barrows Farm Art Colony.” He seemed to recognize the name and despite all my other conflicting emotions, I appreciated that.

“And you naturally didn’t inform Lance of this when he hired you.”

I sighed, and then rolled my eyes at the amusing stupidity of the whole situation. Here I was with the head of the company, admitting that I had taken the job under false pretenses, that I had never intended to work there more than the summer. I was also sitting there in a towel with drops of water from my damp hair dripping on the sheets.

Unreal.

I had a billionaire sitting on my bed.

And not just any billionaire.

Which reminded me of why we were sitting there, and the fact that I didn’t have to feel this way, like the one who needed to make excuses. I tilted my head, studied him, let the desire I always felt for him well up and show in my eyes. His own narrowed, as if he understood that my mood had shifted.

I leaned closer to him, reached out and slid the leather tongue of his belt out from under the metal. He didn’t stop me so I pushed him backward until he was flat on the bed.

“If you don’t want me to get dressed,” I whispered, unzipping his pants, “then you’re just going to have to get naked instead.”


• • •



By Sunday, I was exhausted, sore and happy. We sat in his living room like a couple that’d known each other for longer than two weeks. He was reading some sort of a report and I, in one of his shirts, had plucked a collection of Hemingway’s journalism off of a pile.

It was all so domestic, so peaceful. As if there were nothing between us that might cause strife. And maybe there wasn’t. Maybe it was all some huge misunderstanding. Half-truths and distorted perspectives. Fallible narrators simply trying to do what was best.

Daniel and I had some sort of unspoken agreement to not talk about the past, but if we didn’t, how would I ever reconcile the two versions of him I knew?

“Why did you hate my father?” I asked before I could stop myself and then waited breathlessly for his answer.

He glanced over at me, at my naked legs. I smiled at that despite the seriousness of the conversation.

“Are we going to fight about this?” He placed the stack of papers on the coffee table. Moved over to the side of the sectional on which I was lounging. I stretched out, lifting my legs and he took them into his lap, stroking them.

“I just want to know.” I wanted to figure out how the Daniel I was getting to know could be the same as the mythic one I had resented my whole life. “Is it because your mother turned to him … after … ?”

“My father killed himself.”

I stilled in shock, yet Daniel’s hands still stroked my legs, rhythmically, but almost by rote, as if all of his emotion, personality, had fled his body.

“Kidney failure,” I said, shaking my head. “That’s what the paper said. That’s what my father thinks.”

Daniel’s hands tightened briefly on me before they relaxed and I realized then how tense he was beneath the casual exterior. “Everybody lied because it was an insurance issue and so many people depended on him for their livelihood. I learned by accident much later.”

A ripple of unease ran through me but I forced it away.

“I know,” he said, his voice low, answering my unspoken doubt, my discomfort with the deception.

“So what does that have to do with my father? It was suicide, not murder.” I felt completely insensitive saying that but I needed to understand.

He looked away. “He found out about the affair. “

“I don’t understand,” I pressed. I only knew pieces of the story, and it wasn’t fitting with what he’d said. Daniel’s father had died, and in his wake his mother had turned to my father.

Daniel faced me again, raised an eyebrow silently. I didn’t like what he was suggesting. It made my father seem rather immoral. But then again, there was my mother to testify to Mark Anderson’s womanizing ways.

“On that I’ve evened the score.” His expression was dark, almost frightening. Surely, he meant the past, destroying the company, sending my father to jail, but maybe he meant this. After all, sex as a revenge for sex was a far better analogy than money for sex. I formulated the question in my mind. Imagined asking him to clarify just how he had evened the score. He slid my legs apart, shifting so that he was crawling between them, covering me with his body. The weight was welcome, familiar, and strange all at once. I could feel him hard against me through the thin barrier of his cotton pajamas.

“Are you using me?” I whispered, struggling to stay strong, to remember what I wanted to ask even as his mouth found skin.

“Are you using me?” he returned, his voice a breath against my ear.

I didn’t answer because I didn’t know. And maybe he didn’t know. Maybe we were both simply drawn together because of the past and because of this attraction.

It might be wrong, terribly, terribly wrong, but it felt so ridiculously good.

“I don’t want to talk about the past,” he whispered, which of course made me want to do exactly that.

But the tip of his tongue was trailing across my neck and I was nearly gasping as I prodded. “But the past is everything that’s between us. If you take that away, what’s left?”

“An enjoyment of each other’s company.”

I laughed. More likely, he was simply enjoying the nipple he was now sucking on through the thin barrier of his shirt. “You talk with world leaders and celebrities. I still don’t understand what you can find interesting about anything I have to say.”

“Sex.” There was humor in his tone and I knew he was teasing me, but hearing it said aloud still hurt. I struggled to cover my emotions.

“Which you could have with anyone,” I said lightly. Not that that was exactly true. This kinetic desire between us wasn’t something that happened every day. But was it that charged because of the past? “So it’s not enough.”

“I disagree.” With what he was doing to me, I had to disagree as well. “I need to start keeping condoms in every room in this house,” he said, the words a bit muffled by the fact that his mouth was now in the vicinity of my hipbone. I sucked in a sharp breath.

“My purse,” I said, waving a hand vaguely to the left where the pink bag sat on the floor.

He was naked and back between my legs in a moment, pulling me down by my hips so that my head rested flat on the cushions. It was strange to be doing this right after discussing, or barely discussing, the old history, but that was our relationship: strange. I reached for him and at the sharp surge of pleasure as his body filled mine, I wrapped my legs around him and welcomed him in.