“My bedroom is the closest one,” I say. “The door right behind you.” He kisses me and grabs a blanket from the back of the couch, to cover me. “I’ll keep you warm when I get back.” He stands and adjusts his pants.
I sit up. “You didn’t even get undressed.”
“The night is young,” he says, giving me a wink that sets that flutter in my belly to life again, before he heads to the bedroom.
I watch him cross the room, the muscles of his back flexing, confidence in his every step. He’s gorgeous and unexpected in every way. I’m unexpected with him. I’ve been tied up, flogged, paddled, displayed, clamped and more, and as time went on, to extremes that didn’t arouse me or make me cower. They made me angry. They made me withdraw, but not out of fear. Out of self-respect, something the past few months made me lose, I realize now. And so I went with Nick, telling myself he would take me back to that punishing place, but he was right. On some level, I knew that wasn’t true.
He is the unexpected.
Different than what I’ve known. And I’m different with him. He didn’t spank me hard, he didn’t push me to uncomfortable places, and yet he pushed me. I felt exposed and vulnerable with him in ways that I have never felt before. I don’t want to be exposed, and I glance at the bedroom, and in light of these thoughts, I wonder why I’ve sent him to my most private space alone. I stand up, and the straps at my ankles cut into my skin, reminding me I still have my heels on. I sit back down and quickly unclip them and kick them off, then wrap the barely there throw around my shoulders, and hurry across the living area. Entering the bedroom, I hear Nick talking on the phone. “It’s nearly midnight, kid. I give you an A for dedication but an F for strategy. You still aren’t going at this the right way.”
Relief washes over me as I realize his delay isn’t about nosing around my room, like a man like Nick would care about my personal items. He’s talking to his associate again.
“Okay,” Nick says. “Let’s try this another way. How do you think he perceives himself? That’s what you need to find out in questioning him, then use that to finish the questioning.” He’s silent a moment before he says, “Because how he perceives himself reveals strength and weakness, and we need to know what both of those things are.”
My brow furrows with Nick’s comment. How do I perceive myself? I think about this. And I think some more and I don’t have an answer. I don’t know me anymore. Maybe that’s why I don’t know the woman who Nick just brought to her knees in so many ways. Who Nick seemed to know when I did not. My gaze catches on the card on the bed and I walk to it. I stare down at my father’s script, a knot in my belly. I pick it up and sit down, the low pedestal allowing my feet to easily touch the ground, and when the blanket begins to fall from my shoulders, I don’t even try to catch it. I just stare at the card, trying to convince myself to open it but what’s the point? It won’t surprise me the way Nick has. I know what it says. I know what he thinks of me and what he expects. Those thoughts and expectations have driven every moment of my life for two years. I just don’t want the reinforcement of him saying it again from his grave on this particular day.
“Faith.”
I look up to find Nick standing in front of me, and I never even heard him approach. He goes down on one knee, draping my pink silk robe around my shoulders. “I thought you might want this.”
There is a protective quality to his actions, again unexpected, and unfamiliar in every way. No one protects me, and I don’t know what to do, how to react. It scares me how good it feels to have someone actually care, what I feel or need, and I know that I cannot allow myself to want or need. But it’s a moment in time, one night, and I cannot wish it, or him, away, any more than I could the chance to experience that art display tonight.
I stuff an arm into the robe, and shift the card to my opposite hand, then do the same on the other side. Nick reaches down and grips the silk, his gaze raking over my breasts, a touch that is not a touch, my nipples and sex aching all over again. But he doesn’t touch me. He doesn’t turn this into sex. He pulls the robe closed and ties it for me, our eyes locking and holding as he does. And it is then that I see the shadows in the depths of his stare, and for the first time since meeting him, I see beyond the arrogance and sexuality of the man. I see his own torment. I see a man as damaged as me, and I think, maybe, just maybe that’s why our connection is so very intense. That something I felt when we were naked and lost in each other, moves between us again, a living, breathing thing that bands around us. “Is it from him?”
I don’t play naive. He means the card and he knows there was someone in my life. “No,” I say, and I shouldn’t say more, but yet, I do. “I don’t talk to him.”
“Ever?”
“Ever.”
“For how long?”
“Most of that two years I mentioned.”
“But the card—”
“It’s from my father. He died two years ago, but apparently left it with Frank for me on my thirtieth birthday.”
Nick glances at his Rolex but I am looking at the craftsmanship of the black and orange tiger tattoo covering his entire right forearm. “You still have fifteen minutes to read it on your birthday.”
I give a humorless laugh and set the card on the bed. “If I read that, I might need you to spank me again but harder and longer this time.”
“Then you should read it before I have to go back to San Francisco Sunday night.”
I don’t miss the inference he’s going to stay with me until then, but any right or wrong I might feel from that is muted by the fact that he’ll be gone. This will be over.
He sits down next to me and as his hand settles on my knee, allowing me to catch another glimpse of his tattoo, the black and orange ink evident now. Curious, I reach for his arm and turn it over to study the detail of the beautifully detailed blue-eyed tiger etched into his skin. “It has your eyes,” I say, glancing up at him. “Tiger.”
“That was the artist’s idea.”
“Who did it?”
“I had it done six months ago by someone Chris knows in Paris, actually. A guy named Tristan.”
“He’s incredible. I’d be terrified to ink someone’s skin.”
“Your ink would be as incredible as your art, Faith.”
I look up at him. “You don’t have to keep complimenting me.”
“I’m no sweet talker, Faith. Surely you know that by now. You’re talented, and like my tattoo, your art is a part of you, Faith.”
Rejecting the many places those words could take me right now, I quickly grab his other arm and study the ink there. Just words that read: An eye for an eye.
“That one I got in college,” he says, but I barely hear him speak, the phrase replaying in my mind: An eye for an eye, clawing at me, to the point that I feel like I’m bleeding inside. I can feel the rise of emotions, when only yesterday I was afraid because I could feel nothing. I jump to my feet, and try to escape Nick, but he grabs my arm and turns me to face him.