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"Cost doesn't concern me. " He took a sip, mirroring her. "Especially when it's worth the price. I believe your private Japanese tea ceremony is your most expensive service. "
"It's only offered to the guests I choose. It's a privilege. "
"A privilege that must be paid for. "
Her blue eyes were frost. "Yes. As all privileges are. "
"A good Dom doesn't ever play with his sub's mind. But he does seek out the vulnerabilities. "
"You're casting stones in a glass house, Tyler. You take students, not lovers. You teach them everything about being a sub, and then let them go. "
"You don't know anything about what goes on emotionally between me and those women. " He kept his tone mild, though he felt the surge of temper, and acknowledged the effectiveness of her strike. She handled herself well when cornered. "While I have them, they're mine. "
"My experience is no less emotionally intense for being more brief. "
"What is it they can give you in that brief time?" He asked it, genuinely curious.
"Enough. "
"You don't achieve the bond you think you do. If you truly reached it, your sub wouldn't let you go. "
She blinked at him. Once, twice, three times. Slow, deliberate movements that reminded him of a cobra's regard when rising out of a snake charmer's basket. "Would you like to know the history of this tea caddy?"
"Pardon me?"
"A brief subject change. You'll note it's made of ivory. "
"I noticed that," he acknowledged, watching her closely. Something had shifted between them, and he was not certain where the tide of the conversation was going.
"It's over a hundred years old," she said. She stared at him another silent moment, then continued. "I keep it to remind me that beauty and cruelty often go hand in hand.
Even with the knowledge that it was taken from a creature whose wisdom is far more ancient than ours, I feel pleasure in its beauty. The duality of human nature. We're savage artists. "
She lifted her cup, held it poised just beneath her lips.
"You know how people pretend things aren't awful that really are?" She took a sip, and Tyler marked how steady the motion was. Almost uncanny in the preciseness with which she took it to her lips, put it down on the saucer again. "Like going for an annual physical. We all pretend it's something civilized. We joke with the nurse or doctor but the stark reality is that we go to a room with no windows, and we strip off our clothes for strangers. We lie on a table with our legs in the air or bent over a table so they can shove things into our most intimate areas. " The cup went up again, then down. Tyler's gaze followed it, noted how her hand lay next to it, perfectly still, her manicured nails gleaming in the light so her fingers reminded him of polished silver at a table setting.
"Our fear of some awful disease drives us to that untenable situation. "
"Sounds more like our fear of being vulnerable. " Tyler leaned forward, clasped his hand over hers on the table and deliberately slid her teacup and saucer away from her, to his side.
"What are you doing?"
"Making a point about the nature of a submissive. You were saying?" She stared at him, those pale blue eyes so focused in their frost he expected to feel a sheen of ice form across his face. "Give me back my cup. Please. " She issued the courtesy like a threat.
"No. Tell me what your point was. "
She sat back in her chair, a pose of ease but every movement was calculated as she removed her hand from beneath his and laid it in her lap with the other hand atop it, those nails curved into a loose claw.
"We go around in our SUVs, pay our taxes, mow our lawns. But underneath every person's veneer lies the Trail of Tears, the Holocaust, the atom bomb, the massacre of Christians in the Sudan. Lurking in the shadows of our darkest motivations is the eighty-year-old homeless woman raped by bored teenagers, the child who huddles alone, afraid of attracting attention. The baby who gives up crying because no one ever comes. Then there are the animals who suffer in labs from our fear of death, who are hunted for sport and captured for amusement as if we have the right to confine life just because we're bigger and stronger. All the while the land is raped and poisoned by our greed and selfishness. Every event in our lives is a chance for the civilized to be stripped away, exposing the darkest side of who we are. Our veneer is our only hope of maintaining the illusion that we can be something better. " Tyler noted she now had one hand gripping the other tightly, nails digging into her flesh. "My point. . . " she said quietly.
Her leg uncrossed, a simple, pleasurable act to watch. A blink too late, he recognized the diatribe and sexual tease for the distractions they were. Surging forward, she clasped the handle of the cake knife in her hand, flipped her grip on it and planted the blade in the narrow space between the third and fourth fingers of his left hand resting on the table. She sunk it clean and deep, cutting through tablecloth and solidly into the wood itself so the knife stood on its own, the blade quivering.
Tyler maintained his stillness, even as every muscle tensed in readiness. He'd been in circumstances before where his life depended on razor-sharp intuition, on knowing exactly how to react. Even so, he felt the fury simmer in him at the challenge he would have met equally if he sat across from a man.
"Do you want my violence, Marguerite? Am I that much of a threat to you?" She stared at him a long moment, her delicate nostrils flaring, her face inches from his. "My point - " she repeated in measured tones, though he almost felt the vibration from her body, an overwhelming tension she was not permitting to become trembling,
" - is that savagery is our true nature, Tyler. Like this cake knife, created for such a lovely purpose, to share an elegant dessert. It's a killing instrument, able to be something else only until someone's veneer cracks. " Leaving the knife, she found her teacup without looking for it, tenting her fingers over it like a spider. "Don't fuck with mine. " Deliberately, Tyler pulled his hand free of the restriction of the knife. Covering her tense hand on the teacup, he pushed it, with her hand still atop, back to her side of the table, easing her back to her chair.
