Forbidden: A Standalone (29 page)

“What about it appeals to you? Or disgusts you? What intrigues you?”

“That’s a personal question.”

“It is, but you’ve got your legs crossed for a reason. I bet if I put my hands between them, like this”—he slipped his hand over my knee to uncross my legs and drew his palm up the inside of my thigh—“you’d open your legs.”

Under the table, my knees parted for him. He went under my skirt. I was on fire, and I was a whore, generally, so letting a strange man finger me was just another Tuesday.

Except it wasn’t, because no one had ever touched me like they owned me. No trepidation. No questions. No fumbling. Just his thumb along the line of my underwear.

“This scene,” he said. “He’s fucking her face, and it’s doing something to you. When I touch you, you’re going to be wet, and your clit is going to be hard. Your lips will be swollen, and you’re going to come in only a few strokes.”

He had a point. No reason to be coy. Fuck it anyway. I was above people’s judgments.

I ripped my eyes from the scene and put my elbows on the table. I wasn’t ashamed of feeling the way I did, and I wanted to be utterly clear with him about that. “Make me come, then.”

“What turns you on, Kitten? What about the coffee table?”

“He’s using her. I see the scene, and I’m turned on. She’s not even a whore. She’s insignificant. Nothing. Unworthy of anyone even looking at her. Not even worth degrading… and I want it. I want it now.”

“It takes time to get there, Miss Drazen.” He spoke as if his hands weren’t teasing my skin.

“Time is one thing I have plenty of,” I said. “And money.”

He pressed his lips together and looked me up and down. “I don’t need money.” He seemed genuinely interested and detached at the same time.

His thumb brushed my clit.

“Oh—”

“Shh. Look at me. Act as if nothing is happening under the table.” He put his fingers on the walls of my opening. “Do you imagine you’re her, or the man with his dick in her mouth?”

I obeyed him, trying to look as if this was dinner conversation, but there was no tablecloth. Anyone who looked could see his hand under my skirt. “I am her.”

His finger brushed my clit.

“Watch her.”

I turned from him as he stroked the length of my wetness so gently. The rugged man pumped the naked woman’s mouth as if she were a hole in the wall.

“She’s not even moving,” Deacon said. “Not even sucking his cock. She’s a receptacle. She has no will of her own but to please him.”

He pulled out and shot streams all over her. She left her mouth open, but it was obvious he wasn’t interested in keeping it neat. He came in her mouth, on her cheeks, her eyes. He left her with her mouth open, come dripping off her face, not wiping it away or looking at her as he tucked himself back in. It was so dirty and degrading, especially when he stood and zipped his fly as if she wasn’t even there. She couldn’t wipe it away. She just dribbled like an object.

The man in the suit dropped a wadded up napkin on her back. It was that act and the Master’s fingers on my clit that brought me to orgasm.

“Look at me,” Deacon growled.

My face contorted and my muscles tightened, yet I stayed still as his fingers stroked my clit, and I came and came. Eye to eye. He was so powerful, and I was under him. I’d known him a few minutes, and already I was a servant in his kingdom.

fiona

I
 checked my watch. I could make it to my appointment with Elliot before Irving. Just get it done with. He was across town from the photographer’s studio, but I could do it. Just take the 10 to Robertson. Go north.

Deacon had made sure my Bentley was waiting for me at Laurel Canyon. Complete tune-up. Full tank of gas, new wiper blades.

North to Wilshire.

Over to Westwood.

Wait. Right or left?

You’d think I hadn’t lived here my whole life.

I should have used a driver. I wasn’t functioning right. I was disoriented in my own head, never mind the west side.

I found Elliot’s office just north of Santa Monica. A pleasant non-descript building with industrial carpet and hardy plants in pots. The whole building buzzed with therapists and clinical social workers in private pods like a hive of encouragement.

I checked my watch outside his door. I had plenty of time to get to Irving, but I was as eager to skip my appointment as I was to make it, and a shoot with Irving was the perfect excuse.

Elliot opened the door clothed in professionalism.

What a handsome little fucker. He looked at me from toes to eyes, and I turned to liquid. Not fire. Just a melted mass of tears and emotions. A sort of surrender I hadn’t experienced.

I wanted to run toward him and away from him at the same time.

elliot

I
 took outpatients once a week in an office in Century City. It was small, and clean, and on the impersonal side. My office in Westonwood had more of my touches, but I was there twice a week, and the patients there would be put off by a standard, sterile therapy room.

I rearranged my desk, dusted a shelf that was already clean, and considered meeting her out on the patio. I hadn’t wanted to be her outpatient administrator, but once her sister/lawyer requested it, saying no wouldn’t have looked any better than saying yes. I still held out hope that this would all go away. She’d walk in and seeing her out in the real world would kill my feelings.

“I don’t think that’s in the cards,” I said to the brass cross on the back of the door.

My mother had given it to me when I’d taken my First Communion. The dying Jesus was symbolized by a flat, stylized shroud. No tortured three-dimensional body like a Catholic crucifix. Just a symbol of death and resurrection. I’d prayed to it a hundred times. It never answered, but it wasn’t supposed to. The conversation was with myself.

“I think I should just sign off on her. Just say she’s fine and let her go. I don’t… I don’t understand what’s happening to me. I love Jana. She’s good for me. A hundred times over, she made sense. And thank you. Thank you for her. But I’m throwing her back in your face. You set me up, and I reject you. Or not.”

Tell me something.

Tell me how I’m supposed to discern what to do?

She’s going to walk in here in a few minutes, and I’m going to what? Tell her how I feel? Lee is right. That’s a massive breach of trust. I don’t know if I can even sit through the five sessions with her. Five sessions. That’s all I have to last. The length of her outpatient probation. Then I cut her out of my heart. I have to do that. I have to guide her through the transition and move on. I need your help, God. Jesus. Holy Spirit, listen. Just give me the strength. Back me up here. Do what you’re supposed to do.

I wasn’t entitled to pray for God to do his job, because it wasn’t his job to make things easy for me. But I needed help, and when the little light went on telling me that there was a patient in the waiting room, my heart jumped.

Maybe I’ll open the door and I won’t care.

Maybe I just needed to leave Jana to change.

Maybe she’ll be just another patient.

I opened the door.

Her feet were pressed together, and her bag was in front of her. I was a dead man. She didn’t look particularly beautiful. She hadn’t made herself up. Hadn’t dressed to the nines, or any other number, but something about the color of her skin and the way the sun through the window hit the ends of her hair just clicked with my desire.

“Come in.” I stood to the side and let her in.

“No couch,” she said, surveying the room. “How are you going to hypnotize me?”

“I’ll get one in if we need it.”

She sat. I sat. My desk faced the wall, so I turned the chair around. There was nothing between us. I could smell her perfume.

Her foot pointed and straightened. Her naked flexing ankle. My lips around the bone, popping off, letting the tongue linger.

“How are you doing?” I asked.

She pressed her lips together as if she was keeping them from saying what was on her mind.

“You can tell me.”

This was a breach. Posing as a therapist so she could tell me what was wrong when I would use all that to bring her closer to me.

She looked down.

Her recalcitrance wound me tightly around the spool of concern. When she pinched the bridge of her nose, I had to grip the arms of the chair to keep from kneeling before her.

“It’s nothing,” she said.

Needless to say, my glands fired. Nothing didn’t mean nothing. Nothing meant “I’m not telling you,” and knowing there was something wrong that she wouldn’t share, that I couldn’t help her with, or protect her from, made my skin prickle with angry heat.

“Fiona.” I growled it in the most untherapeutic way imaginable.

Shit. I’d crossed the line.

“I can’t do this,” she said, standing.

“Wait—”

She headed for the door, and I got between her and it. Her chest heaved, and her eyes looked panicked.

“You have to know,” I said with my hands up, “I’d never do anything to hurt you.”

“I know.”

Do not fuck this up by thinking with your dick. She needs you.

“I’m here for you. Not the other way around. If you want to talk, this is the place to do it.”

She crossed her arms and took a second to realign her jaw. As strong as she tried to look, she was falling apart at the seams.

“You want to talk about something?” she said.

“Yes.”

“You want to talk about something really painful and hard?”

My hands landed on her shoulders as if they had a will of their own. God damn my porous boundaries. “Talk to me.”

“I want to tell you things I won’t tell anyone, but I can’t. You’ll just make me relive it, and you’ll want to tell people who will only make it worse. But you have this way… you open me up. You crack me open and pour me out, and all you do is look at me. So you need to stop looking at me because it just makes me love you more.”

Her eyes went wide with shock, as if she’d just been slapped or surprised by what she’d said. I took my hands off her shoulders, because I didn’t want her to feel pressured, but she took it as a sign to leave.

I let her go, because that was the professional thing to do, and as I stood there looking at the seam between the door and jamb, my father’s voice broke the fog of my disbelief.

Go get her, you stupid shit.

fiona

E
lliot burst out of the building just as I was opening the car door.

“Wait!” he called.

I didn’t. Because fuck everyone. And my brain. Fuck my brain and my stupid mouth. I must have been out of my motherfucking mind.

I didn’t love him. I loved Deacon, who was perfect for me, even if I wasn’t submissive according to him, and who I still wasn’t sure about, love or no love. All these men. All of them could go fuck themselves.

I peeled out of the parking lot, leaving that fucker in the rearview. He’d almost gotten to me. Almost made me tell him about Warren. Well, I wasn’t ready. That shit at the creek did not happen, and I was not recounting it for him, and I didn’t love him so fuck my stupid brain.

Use different words.

Confused brain.

Truthful brain.

Lying, stupid brain fuck the holes in my brain.

Of course, there was an accident on the 10. The 10 was an accident factory.

“Late!” I said to the dashboard. “That’s a word I’d use to describe myself. Late.”

I wasn’t late. Not yet. But I needed to call myself terrible things.

“Late,” I said, speeding across Santa Monica Boulevard. “Of course there’s traffic, and I’m late.”

I focused on getting downtown without killing myself or anyone else. My hands loosened, my breathing slowed, and I got there in one piece. I checked myself in the rearview. I couldn’t even see myself. I looked like a Fiona Drazen mask.

Fuck it. I took a deep breath and got out of the car.

Irving Wittenstein was the best celebrity photographer in Hollywood. He had been when we met, the Wednesday after Deacon put his fingers up my skirt, and when I got out of Westonwood, he was still the best. Worthy of keeping a six-month-old appointment at the worst time in my life.

He had a studio in the guts of downtown between a garment factory and a Mexican food warehouse.

“Hey,” I said when he opened the door.

He kissed both of my cheeks. “Welcome back.”

He was a clean-cut guy with a serious face and an arm that had lost the battle with polio when he was a child. But he managed to come off as handsome and competent, and when he’d taken my picture the first time, I looked at the results and felt as though the camera saw my insides.

Which, at the time, had seemed like a good thing. Back when I was young and stupid, or just stupid. Before Westonwood, and days before Deacon got me under control.

Before Warren.

Which I realized I was trying not to think about. I told myself I was all right with it, but if I was all right with it, I wouldn’t be thinking about it all the goddamned time.

“You look rested,” Irving said at his door. “Your team’s here.”

My team. Right. I had a hair stylist. A makeup stylist. A makeup applicator. A clothing stylist. A nail person. Each of them had an assistant.

Look casual.

I smiled and put my hand on his lame arm. “Wanna do something real?”

“For
Vanity Fair
? Not likely.”

I didn’t think I was sabotaging the shoot. I thought of it as bringing it to the next level. No more same old, same old. I walked into the green room and was immediately attacked by giggles and kisses. Someone put a drink in my hand. I heard the words “blow” and “flake” in the form of a question.

“Stop!” I said, throwing up my hands. I put down the drink.

They had huge kohl-lined eyes and open red lips.

“I’m doing this different. You’ll get paid. But get out.” I pointed toward the door.

“Come back for the next shoot.”

They hustled out until it was just me, Irving, and Piper Lundgren, the
Vanity Fair
editor. With a crop of bright white hair and a soft blue jacket by a Japanese designer, she looked like an ad for New York City.