Torment Me (Rough Love Part One) (23 page)

The first time he fucked me like this, back at the Gansevoort Hotel, I didn’t know how to process it. I interpreted his passion as hatred, anger, fear...but it was none of those things. It was something pure, some drive to break down walls and connect. I didn’t understand before, but I did now.

I tried to pull away, but he whacked my ass and kept on going, and I realized that the only reason I ever pulled away from him was to be pulled back. It was so simple, so honest. So pure. When he was in control, I felt peace. How strange, that his violent lovemaking was the one thing that could bring peace to my conflicted existence.

Don’t fall in love.
Jesus, I couldn’t fall in love. But as he fucked me, I felt a yearning that was peace and agony at once. I longed for him, this john who was little more than a stranger to me. I read a saying once:
they call it longing because it doesn’t last a short while.
How long would I long for W?

“Are you going to come?” he asked, smacking my ass again. “Don’t lie there like a fucking corpse.”

But oh, I was a corpse. I was so dead, because the only good thing in my life right now was the man taunting me and destroying my pussy. I’d go home tonight and think of him, and go to sleep and dream of him, because everything else in my life was broken and hopeless.

“I’m not going to come,” I said. I was too upset to come. I never should have kept our date today, when all my emotions were pooled up at my nerve endings, waiting to snap.

“What the fuck do you mean, you’re not going to come?” he asked. “My cock’s not good enough?”

He turned me over and grabbed my face. He wasn’t really angry. I think he was going to make some joke, or maybe stick his cock in my mouth, but he took one look at my expression and all the humor went out of his eyes.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. Finish!” I ordered. He’d love that, being ordered around.

His eyes narrowed. “I’ll finish when
you
finish. You’re like a fucking wet mop today, you fucked-up piece-of-shit whore. Who pissed in your mop bucket?”

He reached behind me and undid his belt. As soon as my hands were free I went for his face, his neck, his chest, anything I could scratch or slap, because hurting him was the only thing I could do at that moment besides fall apart.

He grabbed my hands and held them hard. “That’s all you got?” he goaded. “Fight harder.”

I fought but it did me no good. He had my number. He had my heart and soul crushed between us and he didn’t even know. He kissed me roughly, laughing against my lips as I kicked and flailed and tried to break free.

“I’ll bite you, you little bitch,” he said. “I’ll bite the fuck out of your lips if you don’t cut it out.”

I tried to bite him instead, and he smacked my ass three times, hard enough to bring tears to my eyes, and then he did bite my lower lip until I moaned. Before the moan was fully formed, he left my mouth and crouched between my legs.

There was no finesse with him when it came to cunnilingus, no coy kissing down my neck, between my breasts, down my belly in a trail to the pussy. No, he shoved my legs open and fastened his lips over my clit, titillating my flesh with the deftest talent of any lover I’d ever had.

Fuck. I didn’t want to come. I didn’t want to try. I pushed him away and got my arms slapped for it.

“Don’t make me fuck you up,” he warned.

Too late. It’s too late for that.
You’ve fucked me up on some cellular, lizard-brain level because ohhhh... What you’re doing feels so good...

My pussy was alive from the fucking earlier, and my clit wanted more, and more, and more. My hips bucked. I forced myself against his mouth, but it wasn’t enough to burn under this exquisite pleasure. I needed his cock inside me too, jamming into me, joining the two of us together.

“Please fuck me,” I cried, reaching down.

He slapped my hands away again. “You don’t deserve to be fucked. You’re a bad girl.”

“Please.”

“No.”

“Please, I’ll be good. Give me another chance.”

“No.” He teased me with his tongue between words, driving my passion higher even as I begged and pleaded.

“Give me your cock. Please.”

He looked up as I grabbed his hair. “My cock wasn’t good enough for you before. Remember that? Let go of me, Chere.”

He meant it. My fingers opened and I let go. “I’m sorry.”
I love you.

As quickly as he’d hunched between my legs, he was back again, looming over me. I expected a pop on the cheek and I wasn’t disappointed. “Who’s in charge here?” he asked in a terrifying voice.

“You are. Master,” I added, although, as usual, what we were doing felt way more intense than dungeon games.

“I get to do what I want, don’t I?”

“Yes, Master.”

His cock hovered at my entrance. I shivered with the effort to stay still, to not slide down on him and ride him like the whore I was. “Please,” I whispered. “I’ll be so good. I’ll come so hard for you.”

I needed to come with him deep inside me. I needed it to survive. My whole body wanted him, every vein, every vessel, every nerve.

He slapped me again but I didn’t care, because he was thrusting inside me too. He drove all the way in and ground against my clit. I reached for him, only to have my arms pushed back on the bed. He spread his palms on my forearms and pinned me like a butterfly, wings spread. That, more than anything, made the orgasm break open.

He sneered down at me and rode me hard.
See? See what I can make you do?
And it was true, I had no shame. I tried to come again as he pounded into me, and when he growled and twisted his hips and reached his own climax, it set off a second set of earthquakes for me. He was shifting my tectonic plates, breaking me up and putting me back together.

I closed my eyes and waited for him to pull away. I felt so sensitive and exposed. He could have killed me, slaughtered me to pieces with the wrong look, the wrong words.

Maybe he knew, because he rose from the bed without saying anything. I thought I heard him mutter
Jesus
under his breath. I heard the bathroom door close. I thought about leaving, running away, but our session wasn’t over yet. Plus, I doubted I would have been able to walk.

Instead I turned on my side in a ball, and pulled the sheets over me. The light bled through the fabric, illuminating a dim world. I heard the bathroom door open, and I wanted him to stay as much as I wanted him to go. I lay very still.
Go, just go. I can’t take it. I’m falling apart.

A few minutes later, the bed dipped and I felt him beside me. He pulled down the sheet and showed me a pad of hotel stationary, and a pen.

“
Longing
,” he said. “By Matthew Arnold.”

And I thought,
They call it longing because it doesn’t last a short while.

He started to read what he’d written. “
Come to me in my dreams and then/by day I shall be well again.
” He paused and re-traced a letter with his pen. “
For then the night will more than pay/the hopeless longing of the day.
”

And that went over the edge of too much for me. Ten minutes earlier I’d been thinking about longing, and dreaming, and hopelessness, and here was
this poem
.

I burst into tears and vaulted off the bed, ran into the bathroom and locked the door.
Help me. Oh God, help me. Here comes the volcano.
I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t get his voice out of my head.
Longing, by Matthew Arnold.
My God.

He pounded on the barrier between us. “What the fuck? What’s wrong with you?”

“Go away.”

“It’s supposed to be romantic,” he yelled through the wood. “It’s a very famous poem.”

I turned on the shower to drown out my meltdown. I needed a shower anyway. I needed to wash all of my nonsensical thoughts of love and longing away. I needed to get clean.

“Open the fucking door,” he ordered.

“In a minute. I’ll be out in a minute. Please...”

I knew he’d leave if I stayed in the shower long enough, so I washed, and cried, and washed some more, and let the water run over my hair and back and shoulders. I could never shower this long at the loft. Our hot water heater sucked. It would have run out of water ages ago. I tried to convince myself that the only reason I felt so much for W was because the rest of my life was such a mess.

After half an hour or so, I turned the water off. My eyes hurt from crying, but I felt squeaky clean, and that was something, at least.

I hoped W wouldn’t be mad at me. What had he called it? My girly emotional shit? I dried off and toweled my hair, and stood with my ear against the door. Was he still there? I heard a knock, and “Room service!” and then W’s rumbly voice. He’d ordered food?

When I heard the room door close, I pulled on one of the neatly stacked bath robes and unlocked the door. W stood by the table, fully dressed, arranging platters and bowls. I knew a simple fucking sandwich cost forty dollars at this hotel. There was probably five hundred bucks worth of room service on that table, but that wasn’t as impressive as the way W looked standing over it.

He glanced up, noticing me. I pulled my robe closer around my waist.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

He didn’t sound angry or accusing. In fact, he sounded like he was trying to keep his voice modulated. I tried to keep mine modulated too.

“Not too hungry,” I lied.

“Sit down with me anyway.”

I hugged myself. “Maybe I should get dressed first.”

He shot me an irritated look. “We’re done for tonight. I won’t touch you again. Anyway, I ripped your dress. ” His frown deepened. “Do you want me to leave?”

“You paid for the room.”

“Are you staying tonight?”

I wanted to stay. I didn’t want to go home, where depression and grief threatened to overwhelm me. “I’ll leave if you want me to,” I said.

“I don’t want you to leave. I want you to sit the fuck down and eat something.”

Somehow, his snapping and frowning was better to me than leaving, so I crossed to the table and pulled out a chair. The food was still hot, and it smelled amazing. He’d ordered Vietnamese pho, and Mandarin chicken on salad, and a burger, and some spaghetti, and some salmon with vegetables. There was wine and dessert. Cheesecake, my favorite.

“I didn’t know what you liked to eat,” he said as I stared at all of it. “If you want, I can order something else.”

I choked back a laugh, because there was
so much food
. He’d done a really kind thing, and the last thing I wanted to do was laugh at him. I wanted to curl up in his lap and bury my head in his neck and tell him how much his kindness meant to me. I didn’t. We were off the clock, and Henry wouldn’t approve of this.

Not that I cared. I was going to quit.

“Thank you,” I said. “I guess I’m kind of hungry after all.”

“Did you have a good shower?”

There, that was sarcasm. And a little more irritation.

“I feel better now.” I looked up and met his gaze. He’d lowered the lights, or maybe it had just gotten darker outside. “I’m sorry. It was the wrong poem for me at the wrong time. Things have been... It’s been a stressful week.”

“He didn’t go to rehab, did he?” He didn’t say it in a mean way. If he had, I would have crumbled into dust, but he said it sympathetically. Of course, he’d known all along that Simon wouldn’t go, just as I’d known that he wouldn’t go.

“We had a really big fight,” I said.

W’s face didn’t change. He possibly breathed a little deeper, a little faster. “Did you lock yourself in your room again? Your safe room?”

“No,” I said, which was a lie. I pulled the sixty dollar burger across the table and picked up my knife. “You want to split it?”

“You can have the whole thing,” he said, reaching for the pho.

“I can’t eat the whole thing. Plus I want to try some of the salad and spaghetti too.”

I sawed the gigantic burger in half and thought to myself that for once I’d be putting something bigger than W’s cock in my mouth. Maybe he was thinking it too, from the expression on his face as I bit into it.

It was a great burger. It made me feel better. As for W, he ate the pho with chopsticks—expertly—and it was pure sex to watch. Not just because of his dexterity and beautiful long fingers, but because of his teeth and lips.

Our session was over. There could be no more sex. Neither one of us wanted to cross those lines, but some other line was being crossed. We were eating together, sitting across from one another at a table.

“Anyway, I’m sorry I flipped out,” I said. “It was a nice piece of poetry. I always love your poems.”

The word “love” felt heavy and guilty on my tongue, because I really meant that I loved him. I just wanted to say the word love. His eyes narrowed, or maybe I just imagined it.

“I think you should leave Simon,” W said.

“I know.”

“You have your own money, don’t you?”

The burger tasted less delicious now. I put it down and poked at the spaghetti. “I have money. But I’ve been supporting Simon for a while.”

“Why?”

“Because I loved him.”

Loved.
I didn’t mean to use the past tense, but the word came out and echoed around the room. Afterward, resounding silence. I ate a few bites of salad. W ate his half of the burger, and the salmon, and the rest of the spaghetti. He poured me a little more wine. It was probably a full five minutes before either of us spoke again.

“This is good wine,” I offered shyly.

“What do you know about it?” he scoffed.

I knew nothing, obviously, but he wasn’t being mean. He was being...insecure.

There in the dim light, over wine and quickly emptying plates, I saw that he was nervous beneath all his violence and posturing. He was insecure, just like I was insecure. He only masked it well. The mask came back within seconds, the hard look, the curve of his lips. He made a motion down the side of his face, a curling finger.

“Your hair looks darker when it’s wet. You look different.”

“My natural hair color is dark,” I confessed. “Dark brown.”