“Not transparent enough, or I’d already know the answers to those questions. I need to know. Communication, remember?”
“Yes. Communication. Okay. My father was more about emotional baggage. As for Macom, I don’t know if it was money or fame, or both, but it went to Macom’s head.”
“Meaning what?”
“He would throw the money and fame in my face.”
“How?”
“Does it matter?”
“It affects you, Faith. So yes. It matters.”
“He’d criticize me and then build me up and then do it all over again. I knew that he was inherently insecure, which made his actions about him, not me. I tried to build him up and support him. Eventually though, with him and my father talking in my ear, it wore on me. Their negativity became poison and I started to doubt myself.”
“And the doubt led where?”
“I’m not sure it was the doubt that led me down a rabbit hole I couldn’t quite escape.” I think of the fight I just had with Nick. “Macom and I didn’t fight like you and I fight.”
“How do we fight, Faith?”
“We do what we just said. We communicate.”
“And with Macom?”
“He never hurt me, but he threw volatile temper tantrums and destroyed things. The next day, he would buy me extravagant gifts to apologize.”
“Well, to start. I’m not insecure, in case you didn’t notice. I’m good at what I do but you have a gift that I admire. You are brilliant, Faith.”
My cheeks flush not as much with the compliment, but the vehement way he delivers the words. Like he means them so very deeply.
He doesn’t give me time to reply, “And as for money. I’m going to spend money on you. Because I want to. If I want to do it just because, I will. Because I want to. And if I want to do it because I piss you off, I will. Because I want to. He doesn’t get to change that. He doesn’t get that kind of say in our relationship.”
“I don’t need you to spend money on me but I don’t want him to define me or us. I hate that we’re even having this conversation.”
“We needed to have this conversation. You lived with him. You must have thought you loved him.”
“I did. The man I knew before the fame and the money.”
“Money and fame don’t change people, Faith. Those things simply expose their true colors.”
“I don’t dispute that, but I don’t know how he hid those true colors so well. I’ve thought about that a lot. How did I miss so much?”
“Were you his submissive?”
“No. I told you. I’m not a submissive. You know that I’m not a submissive.”
“But he tried to make you one.”
“Yes. He did. I refused.”
He narrows his eyes on me. “He found that world while he was with you, not before.”
“Right after his first big sale, he was invited to an expensive, invitation only dinner club.”
“That wasn’t a dinner club at all.”
“Exactly. And I agreed to go because he was still the Macom I thought I knew.”
“And what happened?”
“For us, it was voyeurism and sex that felt daring and sexy at the time. Looking back, I think something was always missing for us, and that night, in that club, it felt as if we filled some void.”
“And so you went back.”
“Yes. And for a while I liked it. In some ways I always did, but why and how changed.”
“Meaning what?” he presses.
“Starting out, we kept to ourselves. Just going there made things exciting. But then he got darker at home. More demanding at the club.” I rotate and face forward. “The first time he crossed a line, he tied me up and then invited people to watch us without telling me, without asking. It spiraled from there.”
Nick rotates forward as well, both of us side by side, arms resting on the table. “But you kept going?”
I glance over at him, daring to look into his eyes. “It’s like you said earlier. I use sex to protect myself. That goes back to what I said a moment ago. I don’t know when or how it happened, but that club became the place that I trained myself to be something that I wasn’t before. It’s was where I learned to be in control, even when I was seemingly not in control at all. Sex became a different kind of escape. I actually found those moments, when I could be in a room of naked bodies and still feel alone, sanctuary.”
“From what?”
“Everything I didn’t want to face. In reality, my control in that club was a replacement for claiming real control of my life.”
“And then your father died,” he says, and I cut my gaze. I look at his arm resting on the table, his tattoo partially exposed. The words etched there are taking me back to a place I don’t want to be, but my father’s death always leads me there. I reach over and cover those words with my hand. “An eye for an eye,” I whisper.
“You keep going to it. You clearly want to tell me what it means.”
Now I look up at him. “No. No, I really don’t.”
He studies me a beat and then says, “Then don’t.”
Just that easily he has accepted my answer and offers me an escape. I take it. “I need air.” I slip off the stool and start walking but as I round the table, I realize that the past is in this room, when Nick is my present, maybe my future. I don’t want to shut him out. I want to take him on the ride with me. I rotate to find him still at the table. “Come with me?”
His expression doesn’t change—it’s unreadable—but his actions are what matter. He stands, and it’s only a minute later that we stand side by side on the balcony at the railing, and for several minutes we don’t speak. We just stand there, the blue sky and ocean stretching far and wide before us, like paint perfectly inked on a canvas. The wind lifts over the balcony edge, and I can almost taste the salt water on my tongue and with it, the words to be spoken and not just for him. I need to face the past fully and be done with it. I inhale and let it out. “There was another artist who went to the club. Jim was his name.” I rotate to face Nick again, and he does the same with me. “He was the one who got Macom the invite.”
“They were friends then,” he assumes.
“I believe that was Jim’s intent, but he and Macom sat on a high-profile board for a charity together. They bumped heads and Macom got kicked off. The day it happened, Macom called me at work and told me about it. I got home that night to comfort him and found him with Jim’s wife, in our bed. He invited me to join them. An eye for an eye, he’d said. I could help pay Jim back.”
“Had you been with Jim and his wife before?”
“No. His wife was a submissive and Jim was very possessive and protective of her. I’d actually found it enviable until she hopped in bed with Macom. Anyway. They were still fucking when I got the call about my father. I left. Macom called the next day looking for me.”
“And you never went back.”
“No, and honestly I hated the L.A. scene. I went to college there and learned the world there, and it just made sense to stay. And it kept me from my parents’ drama.”