Beauty and the Baritone (2 page)

“That’s not a good reason to be here.”

“That’s not my reason for being here. I’m here because David showed me that I have a penchant for being tied up and used. But I’m not a whore. So how does a woman get the debasement she needs without putting herself in danger?”

“You seek a cripple?”

“Your words are so bitter. Did the accident destroy your soul also?”

His fork hit the plate. “You come into my home and insult me?”

“I’ve laid myself bare for you.”

“I have no need of a woman. David thinks the world needs sex. He is mistaken. Just as you are. What you seek is not to be found in a stranger’s bed.”

“You aren’t listening.” It was so frustrating trying to get him to listen. The scars on his face were less limiting than those inside. “What I need I can only get from a stranger. Once you care about me as a person then the fantasy dies.”

“There is no need for fantasy in this life.”

How could David have been so wrong? He seemed to see right into her soul but this isn’t what she thought she’d find. It must have been an elaborate ruse.

“Of course there’s need for fantasy.” Carolyn took the napkin from her lap and threw it on the table. “Look at the life you’re choosing to live. You hide in the English countryside in a manor house, you have a staff who wait on you but are practically invisible and what do you do? Do you sit and stare at yourself in a mirror loathing the sight? Are you bettering the world around you in some way? You seem able to judge me, why don’t you judge yourself first?”

“Why did David send you?” Mateo was out of his chair quickly. He stood above her, his twisted features distorted even further by anger. “Are you here to taunt the demon? Or is this the pity fuck? Did David send you to me to assuage his own guilt?”

“No woman would fuck you out of pity, Senor. You have enough self-pity to fuck yourself.” She rose. “I’ll gather my things. This was a mistake.”

“You wound me.” His voice was low enough to miss.

Carolyn stopped. She didn’t miss his words.

“How do I wound you when you’re the one throwing the daggers?”

“You are so beautiful. You know this. And I have become a man who lives with ugliness. I do not face women as you anymore.”

“There isn’t a woman alive who wouldn’t choose to be with Mateo Lopez. You know that.”

“Not as I am.” She turned and looked at him; a table divided them. A world existed between them. They might not be able to bridge the distance.

“You’re not as ugly as you think.”

He coughed a laugh. “You are a bad liar, Carolina. And you were right. I have chosen only to better the world by removing myself from it.”

“I can’t reason with you.”

“What you ask of me makes no sense.”

“You can’t hear what I’m offering. Stop arguing with me and listen.”

He threw his hands up but she knew it was just a dramatic gesture on his part. “Even without the women in my life, I am being bossed.”

She laughed. It might not have been much of a joke but it was a start.

“David said you’d gone to a few of his parties.” He was standing still and watching her. He couldn’t keep himself from looking at her body; the dress was designed for nothing other. “He said you never chose the paddle or to play with pain. You didn’t like to do that.”

“I am not happy making another hurt. Even if that person wishes the hurt.”

“I don’t care for it either.” The dress swayed as she moved and slowly she was coming closer. It was like approaching a wild animal.
I’m harmless, don’t be afraid, I won’t hurt you.

“David’s occasions were an indulgence.” His eyes seemed to move from her thighs to her breasts to her face and back down. He didn’t know where to look. His eyes were greedy.

“But you did indulge, Senor.”

“Si, I did. I am a man and there were women who wanted to have, I don’t know all the words.”

“They wanted what I want.”

“You called it by a word I dislike.”

“Debasement? There’s a certain truth to that. Do you want my armchair psychiatrist view?”

“I do not know what you mean.”

“My mother told me I was a whore when I lost my virginity to my high school boyfriend. I told her because I thought I was pregnant. I wasn’t but when I found out it was too late. My mother had unloaded all her hate on me and made me feel like my sexual feelings were nothing but my being a slut and a horrible person.

“When I went to college I was raped at a frat party. The guy who did it told all his frat brothers that I was begging for it. I got a reputation for being a slut when I was a victim. It destroyed me.”

“I am so sorry.”

“Thank you. I am also. I sometimes wonder if I might have been different, had a different life if I’d only done something. What would have happened if I’d gone to the police after I was raped? What if I’d gone to a school counselor?”

“But you did none of that?”

“No. None of that. Do you want me to take off the dress? I like how you look at me.”

“No, keep the dress on. I’m not ready for you, Carolina.”

“Then let me tell you more of my story. Because I started to go crazy in college. I drank, I took drugs. And I fucked. I didn’t care about myself. I was too chicken to kill myself but too damaged not to try to do it in other ways.

“I never said no to anyone. Get me a drink or a snort and I’d open my legs. I didn’t feel anything. I was so numb I might have well been dead. I don’t know how I managed to graduate but I did. And I got my Masters and then got a job and somehow I kept going.

“I slowly started climbing out of that pit. I stopped taking drugs. I stopped drinking. And I stopped dating. I became a drone.”

“You lived the life then that I live now.”

“Yes. I continued not to feel. And then I met Gene. He was the musical director of an opera company that employed me. He was married. He told me when we met that he was going to fuck me but not fall in love with me. He was right on both counts.

“He wasn’t very nice to me but I didn’t mind that. In fact, secretly I liked it. I liked that he had a wife and it tormented me. I lived for his attention and I rarely got it. Usually the only way I could get him was by sex.”

“And you hated it?”

“I loved it. Deep down it was exactly what I wanted. He treated me terribly, used me and it made me feel more alive than anything else.”

“This was not healthy.”

“I know. But my psyche is what it is. The only men that managed to get me were those who were unavailable and uninterested emotionally. David helped me see that I didn’t have to turn to married men to get what I wanted. I need a man who can use me.”

“I am not that man Carolina.”

“Can you fall in love with me?”

He hesitated. She saw it on his face. He hated the truth.

“No,” he slowly admitted, “I cannot.”

“Would you be able to tie me to your bed and use my body for your own pleasure?”

He couldn’t help himself. He looked at her breasts and his breathing quickened.

“Damn you and damn David too.”

That was answer enough.

*** *** ***

Once upon a time he had been Mateo Lopez. He hadn’t questioned why women were with him or why he was with a woman. He was famous, he was celebrated and women wanted him. He had his choice of women also and he indulged.

He’d been in love a few times but love was the same luxury as a vacation or a bottle of wine. It all ended. Bottles were emptied, vacations were replaced by jobs and commitments. Love was brief and forgotten in the next rush of celebrity or between the thighs of another.

“You are not the first woman since my accident.”

He hadn’t meant to say it.

“I’m glad to hear it.”

The woman was determined to confound him.

She was sitting on the edge of his bed, completely naked yet demure. Her feet were on the floor, her hands folded on her lap.

He was still wearing his clothes. What was he supposed to do?

“Do you want me to undress you?”

He’d never questioned what to do with a woman before. She wanted to be used yet he had no idea any longer how to use a woman. She would be disgusted with him. She might not have turned away from his face but there were scars on his body that she’d see. Scars that shamed him.

He stood too long, indecisive and then she stood. She was beautiful in the most basic feminine way. He wished he was the man he’d once been so he could take her without hesitation.

In her bare feet she was almost as tall as him. Her hands came to rest on his chest, feather light. He felt her breath, warm and soft on his skin.

He’d been with a prostitute, he wanted to tell her. Not once but twice. There was no satisfaction with them, no warmth, no passion. It had been his way to prove he was still a man. The shots his doctor had to give him proved further he was capable of sex as well as stupidity.

His shirt was peeled off his shoulders and he watched her face as she examined his body. “My leg,” he said and then stopped.

“You were hurt.” She traced the scar that puckered his shoulder. “So badly hurt.”

He thought she meant to kiss it as she leaned in but it was her tongue, tracing the line of it from his shoulder to his chest. Scars crisscrossed his chest and her mouth traversed the path they created.

She was working her way down and he stood, his belt loosened and his trousers pulled down.

He couldn’t remember a time he’d ever been undressed by a lover. Not like this; completely stripped and left standing and she used her mouth to caress those parts of him he despised.

She nuzzled around his penis, touching it with whispers of breath, a brief kiss, the silken touch of her hair. She dragged desire up from him. He thought it had been broken also, destroyed with his body but his penis hardened and his body quickened with need.

She was brave but not skilled. Carolyn told a story that drew her as a woman with more experience, more technique than what she showed. Her kisses though brave were not bringing him to the peak of desire. Her touches did not make him forget the soreness of his muscles.

Even when her mouth closed on his cock, when the soft, wet wonderland of her embraced and sucked his hard flesh; his leg throbbed with ache. He’d stood too long; his muscles were bunched and sore.

He fisted her hair and roughly drew her head back. Her face was rosy, her lips wet and slightly swollen.

“Go to your room,” he said roughly.

“I don’t understand. I can make it better.”

“No more. Leave me now.”

He saw the shame that flushed her face. Her expression shuttered, brittled.

Standing she was still glorious. How he wished he could be the man he’d been. He might once have satisfied her, But now he needed to sit, to get the weigh off his clenching muscle.

He sunk onto the bed as the door closed and pushed his fist into his leg. There was still so much pain.

There would always be pain.

*** *** ***

There was a television hidden in a credenza. Her e-reader was fully charged as was her phone and tablet. There were any number of distractions but Carolyn couldn’t be distracted by them.

There was only him.

It was her damned nature to see things from the world of opera, the vestiges of large emotions and dramatic stories.

He was a hero worthy of the stage.

He couldn’t hide his discomfort and she cursed herself for not recognizing it. She should have had him sit or lay down. There were other ways to have done it and not left him standing on his bum leg.

Damn David and his suggestion that she come here.

She turned her tablet on and pulled up a page she had looked at numerous times: the Wikipedia page on Mateo Lopez. The picture at the top showed him before the accident; back when he was headlining the best houses. Back when he was the greatest living star in opera.

He’d never look like that again. So much masculine attractiveness in the lines of his face, the depth of his eyes. The mouth was lush and without the sardonic twist that a windshield had carved into his face. Before his body was a roadmap of scars and puckers that would never fully heal.

He still had the presence of the greatness in him. He was commanding, despite his body he was strong. She would have walked out but the way his shoulders were always held back, his chest forward was a draw to her.

If he had been soft, the accident took it from him. He was the same as the carcass of the car he’d been in: twisted and destroyed. But where the car became scrap, the man became a recluse.

She wanted him.

It was an impossible situation. He would never take her as she wished to be taken. It would take a miracle.

Thankfully she still had a few planned.

*** *** ***

He was going to send her away. There really weren’t other options. She was a reminder of a past he no longer knew, a future he couldn’t have.

He turned in his bed, his body unable to find comfort. There was no possibility of sleep, less even of rest. He would start his day with exhaustion and pain. He hoped she wouldn’t cry.

It was just like David to send this woman into his world. David was the devil, damn him, and always untouched by the destruction he wrought. Did he send this red-head knowing that she would create such chaos in his quiet life? Did he plan yet another way to bring the baritone down?

A noise from the hallway froze him. He knew all the sounds of his house, from Simon’s footsteps to the creak of the roof in a hard rain. He knew when a tree limb brushed a window or when a shingle fell.

He knew it was her.

His door opened slowly and she appeared as if a vision. She wore something, he couldn’t see it clearly but it didn’t matter; once the door closed behind her she dropped it from her shoulder and down to the floor.

Carolyn approached the bed and Mateo lay still, pretending to sleep.

She was made of shadows and light. Her hair was black in the moonlight, framing a face he could only see glimpses of. The shape of her body, fluid as the dappled darkness, teased him.

The bed sighed under her weight as she climbed in next to him. He tried to appear sleeping but knew that the quickness in him would be apparent to anyone. His breath was shallower, his heart was drumming, his pulse dancing in his throat.