Knowing the Ropes (22 page)

By the dim dashboard light, Selene tried to make out the map. “Right turn, just a ways ahead.” Nick switched on fog lights long enough to make the turn, careening from low-grade pavement to what seemed to be dirt in a way that made Selene wince for the Denali.

Natalie, huddled in the big backseat, was silent except for the occasional yelp. When Selene glanced back, all she could see of the other woman were the whites of her wide, frightened eyes.

Selene was biting back on the urge to whoop with glee.

This was dangerous and crazy and potentially even more dangerous and crazy if Derrick caught them. Sure, this looked like a dead-quiet road, but you never knew who might be heading home from working the late shift. And out in the boonies, there were always deer and other critters—possibly moose or bear this far north—not to mention that the narrow dirt road itself was risky when lit only by moonlight.

Still, her heart raced more with excitement than fear.

She remembered doing this kind of stupid shit when she was a teenager, racing around on the twisting, narrow back roads between Seneca and Keuka Lakes, cutting along the even smaller and bumpier roads through tracts of state land. It wasn’t something she’d admit to most people she’d met since leaving Lodi. But she glanced over at Nick and saw he too was having a teenage flashback.

“I thought you grew up in Nashua,” she said.

“I did. But you don’t have to go very far out of Nashua to be in the middle of nowhere.” He hit a bump, and the SUV became momentarily airborne. “Yee-haw!”

“Is he behind us?” Natalie asked. “I can’t look!”

Selene looked in the rearview and saw headlights coming over the rise. “Natalie, where does this road go?”

“I don’t know. But it looks like there’s a place up ahead for hikers to pull off and park. If we go in there and keep the lights off and wait, he’ll miss us. Figure we headed straight for town and go that way.”

Nick grunted his agreement and pulled off into the rutted little spot marked with a trailhead sign. “Looks like we’re on the edge of a state park or something.”

A vehicle sped past them, going too fast on the dirt road, its lights low, though not entirely off.

“That’s his truck,” Natalie confirmed, her voice quivering.

By the dim dashboard light, Selene studied the map. “If we turn around and go back to the road we just left and keep heading away from the house, there’ll be a left coming up that’s an actual road, not a glorified logging trail. If we take that, then a right, then another left onto…it looks like Bear Creek Road…we should be able to get back to what passes for a highway without running into Derrick. I hope.”

At that moment, Natalie’s phone rang. She apparently hit Ignore, because it stopped, but it started again immediately as if whoever was on the other end—it had to be Derrick—was determined to keep calling until she picked up. She switched it to silent or maybe turned it off, because the ringing stopped. Still she kept staring at it as if it might bite her, trembling, looking like she wanted to answer it but had just enough sense not to.

Finally, she asked them, “Tell me it’s okay to litter in a good cause.”

Selene, understanding instantly, said, “It’s okay. Isn’t it, Nick?”

“Sure is. Go for it.”

The phone went flying out the window at seventy miles per hour. “Waste of a nice phone,” Natalie said, “but I was going to wear down. I know as soon as I talked to him I’d find myself agreeing to anything he said, even if I knew it was the worst thing on earth for me.”

“Phones are easy to replace,” Nick said. The implied
and you’re not
was clear.

After a series of twists and turns on the back roads, they finally felt safe they’d lost Derrick. They hadn’t seen headlights behind them for a while. Selene couldn’t help half hoping that the moose they’d seen ambling into one dark road behind them had done a public service by having a close encounter with Derrick’s truck, though it would be a shame about the moose.

Two hours or so later, after making their way to a state route with an actual number they could find on a map, they passed through a town with an all-night diner. Selene and Nick looked at each other, and groaned, “Coffee.”

Nick pulled into the parking lot and he and Selene climbed out. Natalie stayed in the backseat just long enough for Selene to think she’d fallen asleep. Then Nick said, “Come on, Natalie,” and she hopped out as if she’d been waiting for permission.

Natalie, looking very small, almost childlike, huddled in the slick red booth, shivering in the air-conditioned chill. She stared at the specials list written on a distant whiteboard without saying a word until Nick said, “Do you want something?”

“May I? Please?”

He took her hand as gently as he would treat the child she resembled. “You don’t have to ask, Nats.”

She took a deep breath. “It seems like it’s been years since I could go into a restaurant and order what I wanted to eat. I know it hasn’t been, but it feels weird.”

“Good, though, I bet,” Selene said.

Natalie shook her head. “Yes and no. Mas…Derrick has some strong opinions about food. Like, he’s allergic to tomatoes and potatoes, so they must be bad for everyone. I wasn’t allowed to eat sugar because he thought I was getting fat, and slaves can have red meat only from Master’s hand. I got used to it, but I tell you, I’ve dreamed of a burger and fries, and I was always more of a fish and veggies girl before. I could sit here all day just trying to choose between the steak and eggs and a piece of pie.”

Selene looked at Natalie’s sticklike figure. “That’s easy. Both, with hash browns. Not like you can’t afford the calories. And tonight’s dinner’s got to be prime rib and ice cream. Girlfriend, you’ve got months of deprivation to make up for.”

The eastern sky was turning pale with predawn light by the time they finally limped back to Boston, the navy blue SUV grayed out with dust and mud from unpaved roads and badly in need of a trip through a car wash.

“We’ll worry about that in the morning. The real morning,” Nick declared, and they staggered up the stairs into his condo.

Selene, fighting sleep, went to pull out the sofa bed in the living room for Natalie, but she waved her off. “Just a pillow’s fine,” she insisted, and both Nick and Selene were too tired to argue. They managed to get her to take a light blanket as well.

Selene figured she planned to crash on the couch, which looked like it would be a comfy bed for someone as small as Natalie. But the last she saw of her, she was curling up on the floor like a dog, nested in the blanket. “Nick, we can’t just…”

Nick put his hand on Selene’s arm. “It’s what she’s gotten used to. Maybe what she’s comfortable with. Some people feel it’s a slave’s place.” Nick’s tone made it pretty clear he didn’t agree.

“But she’s not…”

Selene stopped herself, suddenly understanding. One of her mom’s friends was a painter who’d developed arthritis in her hands. She couldn’t hold a brush long anymore, but she painted when she could and did whatever she could to remind herself that she was still an artist. It was who she was, Lila always said, and if she let it go completely, she’d just fade away.

Everyone had something too precious to let go. For Lila, it was painting. For her, it was her work with battered women. For Natalie, it was being a slave. That was her core identity, and she was clinging to it to help her through a rocky time.

It had never occurred to Selene that you could be a slave without a master. Could someone need to submit so badly that it didn’t much matter to whom she submitted?

It seemed strange. Maybe it was just as weird to have chosen Nick as a dom without being in love with him, but that was different. Wasn’t it? She’d just been trying to learn.

Nick was asleep almost as soon as he hit the pillow.

Selene, on the other hand, lay awake, watching light fill the room and listening to Jamaica Plain bustle to life outside. Dealing with Natalie had shaken her on a deep level, and she wasn’t proud of her own behavior. Despite her experience as a domestic violence counselor, she’d slipped into anger with Natalie as much as with Derrick, found herself questioning whether Natalie was “really” abused.

But even if Natalie had wanted a more extreme Master/slave relationship, Derrick had crossed a line into non-consent, into risking her health and safety. When Natalie had tried to confront him within the rules of their particular relationship, he’d refused. Every abused woman started out thinking she wanted to be with her abuser, and many of the ones Selene had worked with in Rochester were, like Natalie, torn between self-preservation and lingering, misplaced loyalty.

So the problem wasn’t really that Natalie’s situation was ambiguous, but that Selene was having problems being objective. Maybe it was Natalie’s past with Nick. Maybe it was the way Natalie’s ugly situation seemed like a funhouse mirror of her own wilder fantasies.

What did it all mean for her chosen career, or, for that matter, her relationship with Nick? BDSM wasn’t likely to lead her down the same dangerous path it had Natalie, but it could still screw her life up if she wasn’t careful.

It might be smarter to run away, to go back to a vanilla world in which the sex might not be as good, but at least the line between right and wrong, play and abuse, consent and rape, was clear.

The problem was, Selene didn’t want to run away.

Because while tonight had raised a lot of tough questions about her vocation and her ability to be kinky and still do domestic violence advocacy, it had made one thing painfully clear.

Nick was a genuinely good man, strong and caring and willing to go out on a limb for people he cared about.

And God help her, Selene loved him.

Which was not the thing to figure out on a night when everything she
thought
she’d figured out about herself seemed up in the air.

Chapter Twenty-One

Selene got to Nick’s house that night before Nick did. She’d known he’d be a little late at work tonight, but he’d said to meet him in Jamaica Plain. Natalie should be home to let her in. It still seemed weird to think of Natalie being “home”, but she’d been crashing on Nick’s couch for over a month, temping whenever she could get work. It made sense from an objective point of view. Her mom lived in a small town where work was scarce, and the commute to Boston was too long to justify for a temp job. But in the one-bedroom condo, it wasn’t the most convenient arrangement. More often than not lately, Nick had been going to Selene’s place.

When they’d been getting together at all. The fall semester had started a few weeks ago, and Selene had thrown herself into her studies, determined to find her way back to her vocation. Between that and the volunteer position she’d taken on at an abuse hotline, their dates had tapered off to once a week or so.

Selene kept telling herself it wasn’t a totally bad thing. Okay, it sucked, but it helped keep her cravings for pain and control—and her feelings for Nick—in perspective, as a fun part of her life but not its center, nothing that should derail her work or her emotions.

Most of the time it worked.

Tonight, she was in JP because Kate from upstairs was doing a reading at the bookstore on Centre Street. Everyone from the house was going. And Natalie be damned, tonight she was staying with Nick.

The door was unlocked when she arrived, so Selene breezed right in. Natalie sat folded up on the couch, doing something on her laptop. The laptop, it had turned out, had taken up most of the one small bag she’d had with her when she escaped Derrick. In a rare burst of practicality, she decided that since she’d bought it long before Derrick had claimed it, like everything she owned, as his, she was taking it back.

Natalie emitted a muffled shriek when Selene entered. “Oh my God, I’m sorry. I didn’t… Oh, hi, Selene, it’s you.”

Selene wondered briefly what she was apologizing for. Nice girl, but very weird. Then again, she supposed that after what Natalie had been through, she had a right to be weird, whether or not she’d been a bit odd to start with.

The speed with which she’d shut down the laptop offered a hint. Probably she’d been watching a movie or playing a game or, for all Selene knew or cared, surfing for porn, not job hunting. Selene figured even the most dedicated job hunter had a right to take a break, but Natalie seemed to feel she’d been caught goofing off.

Natalie actually blushed as she unfolded herself from the couch. Like a cat, she could get herself into seemingly impossible positions, and, like a cat, she seemed to find them comfortable. Selene imagined a man would enjoy watching the process, especially considering what Natalie was wearing.

Or wasn’t wearing, more to the point—a tiny cotton-knit camisole in a baby blue that brought out her eyes but was too sheer to really hide her nipples, with matching boy-short panties.

Hell, Selene enjoyed the view herself. She wasn’t attracted to Natalie, not the way she was to Alison, but other than still being too skinny, Natalie
was
nice to look at. Even the shaved head looked good now that it was a soft fuzz rather than a concentration-camp buzz, as if Natalie was some kind of cutting-edge artist or rock star.

The blush made Selene curious. Natalie always jumped and apologized if she’d been “caught” taking a few minutes for herself, but the blush suggested the other woman had been up to something particularly fun and maybe even frivolous. It was a good sign that she could goof off again. “What are you up to?”