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I was someone else entirely.
I was nobody in particular.
As he slipped his tongue in my mouth and ran his hand up my thigh, I let go. Just like that. I let go of whoever it is I’m supposed to be. In an instant, all of my nerves faded into the background. Everything faded into the background.
“Do you want me to stop?” he asked.
I didn’t, and I told him as much. My words tasted bitter and foreign, like they were coming from someone else’s mouth, someone I didn’t yet know.
He didn’t stop. He buried his face in my thighs. He stuck his fingers in my mouth to stifle me. I found myself scratching at his neck, pulling his hair. Biting. Clawing. Grasping. He didn’t care. He didn’t ask me to stop. He didn’t hold back either. I tried harder. I bit harder, scratched harder, pulled harder.
“You’ll tell me if it’s too much?” I asked.
He answered breathlessly. “Nothing is too much.”
You don’t know me, I thought.
“I asked you not to speak.”
So, no safe words, then.
We didn’t need a safe word, because nothing was safe and nothing was off limits. Nothing I did fazed him.
Not even when I grabbed him and pushed him inside me. There was no hesitation, no question. He let me have my moment.
Although, not for long. With the slightest shake of his head, he pulled away. He grabbed me by the wrist and ordered me off the bed, where eventually he cornered me against the wall. “You don’t get to be in charge here,” he told me as he entered me—slowly, at first, and then not so slowly at all.
Whatever I had left in me, whatever anxiety remained, dissolved like ice on a hot day. My sensations returned. My soul felt lighter. My head was suddenly full of more empty space than I knew what to do with. I should have stopped it there, but how could I? I wasn’t thinking about the consequences. I was too preoccupied with his ass in my hands, his teeth razor-sharp against my collarbone.
He drove into me angrily, as though possessed by a fever, as though he were desperately trying to reach another place. Somewhere deep inside. Somewhere just beyond.
Afterward, when we were sweaty and spent, I lit a joint and said to him, “We must never do that again.”
He’d been fastening his tie. He didn’t respond one way or the other. He didn’t offer reassurances; he simply motioned with his head toward my hand. “It’s illegal, you know.”
I shrugged before taking a long, cool drag. I let my head fall backward. All the way back. I exhaled slowly, watching the smoke dissolve into the air. Finally, I looked over at him. “All the best things are.”
He seemed faintly disappointed, which I will admit gave me great satisfaction, at least at first, because he wasted no time after that. He washed up hurriedly, but conscientiously, like he’d seen something he didn’t like and there was no taking it back. Like maybe he walked the thin line between love and hate too.
I took three more drags from the joint, snuffed it out, and dressed quickly. I got that familiar feeling in my stomach, the one that told me it was a good idea to get out of there before I said or did something I regretted.
“I can’t find my lighter,” I said, searching the room with my eyes, slipping into my boots. “It’s red. Have you seen it?”
Max shook his head. “I’ll look for it. I can give it to you next time.”
Chapter Thirteen
Dr. Max Hastings
AFTER
“And what happened after that first time at the Belmond?” Dr. Jones asked me quizzically when I’d finished recounting the story. “How did you leave things?”
“I finished up some charting at the office, and I went home.”
“And then?”
“And then my wife and I took my daughter to visit Santa.”
