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Opening a cabinet in the kitchen, I do see a few items that I’ve been able to keep over the past few months. There’s some peanut butter, which would be great if I had bread, but I’ve got some crackers next to it that might still be good. And next to it is a box of tea, which sounds just perfect.
Taking all three out, I find my tea kettle and rinse it out before starting a pot on top of my stove. I take my time grabbing my mug from the living room, and for some reason, I really look at it.
The images on it hit me hard. I got this mug as a Christmas gift my junior year at college, when I’d gone home and Dad included it in my stocking stuffers. It’s one of those customizable travel mugs where you can unscrew the whole thing and put pictures or other thin objects between the walls of the mug.
He said it was so that I didn’t forget the faces back home. But looking at it now, I’m amazed at how much has changed in the three years since then. How much I’ve changed.
I doubt my quiet, steady, working class father would even understand. Looking at his face smiling up at me from behind its clear plastic dome, I wonder if he knew even then that the cancer was eating him away inside.
Maybe he didn’t care. Mom had been taken from him when I was just two years old, and other than some nostalgic smells, I have no memories of her. Looking at the other photograph, I’m reminded that I do look a lot like her, although it’s hard to tell in the mid-eighties’ fashion she’s wearing while holding baby me.
Dad never recovered from her death. Oh, he smiled, and half of the mug contains pictures of me and him, grinning over everything he tried to give his little girl to make her life complete without a mother.
But when the cancer diagnosis came, it was like he was absolutely fine with it all. Like he was ready and had been ready. There wasn’t an option to fight it. It was terminal, so he could have also just been putting on a brave front for me.
In the last four years, everything has changed.
I start the water and recognize that while I might not have my parents any longer, I have good memories of my father.
Gabriel would probably spit on his father if he ever saw him again. His mother... well, who the hell knows? She ditched them when Gabriel was still in diapers. His father spent most of Gabriel’s childhood either ignoring his son or making ridiculous demands of him, forcing him to act like an adult in a child’s body as he showed him off as some sort of... I don’t know, accessory, maybe?Here, see the good single father. Isn’t his son such a fine young gentleman?
The stories he’s told me late at night when neither of us could sleep are unconscionable.
To say things were tense is an understatement, and from the start of sixth grade until his father died, they only saw each other for about two weeks out of the year as Gabriel was sent to boarding school.
Gabriel didn’t even go to his father’s funeral. When I asked him why, he said the dead man was a stranger, and the parts he knew of him were nothing he wanted to acknowledge.
Now his only true friend, the only one of the bunch he can trust, is a man named Joshua, who I’ve met at the club. He’s an intimidating man, but Gabriel speaks warmly of Joshua, who I’ve never met but Gabriel says is ‘a handsome sonofabitch.’
I know so much about Gabriel, and at this point, it’s impossible to deny what I really feel for him.
Either way, I feel like we were both kind of on our own until we met one another. My college friends have quickly gone their own ways, off to do whatever they’ve done. I’ve seen a few emails announcing engagements, and two talking about babies, but none that I feel I can talk to. Certainly not about this predicament I’m in.
My father always did say I was a lone wolf. He prided me on that, but right now, I don’t want to be alone. I search my phone thinking of who I could possibly confide in and ask for help.
Hell, in the past six months, I’ve barely spoken to any of them. The last time I emailed my closest friend, Kelly, was three months ago, responding to her news about her new home in Lugoff, South Carolina. Apparently, Mike, her now husband, was able to get a management position at some chemistry plant there, and with it came a deal on a nice little Colonial-style brick house complete with a garage and a half-acre of land that had three pecan trees on it.
That’s it. I have one email from about two months ago, a group email to a bunch of her college friends announcing that she was pregnant, and how is everyone else doing?
I didn’t even reply with my updates, although I told them all congrats. What was I supposed to tell them? That I’ve spent the past eight months being auctioned off at a sexy club on a monthly basis to be a man’s sexual submissive and that’s my new “job”? Or that I’ve had kinkier, naughtier sex than we would even whisper about half-drunk in college? That I know what a saddle, a St. Andrew’s Cross, and nylon rope are really for?
What would she say if she knew that my greatest pleasure, at least until tonight, was to get gang-banged until I was nothing more than a ragdoll? Just the thought makes the area between my thighs ache with that painful feeling from earlier.
What would she say if the man I’m head over heels in love with has said time and time again that he’s not ‘looking for a girlfriend’ and that despite that, I’d do anything for him... I’d kill for him?
I’m quick to toss my phone down, intent on never picking it back up, as the kettle cries out and I tend to it. After pouring the hot water into my mug and letting the tea bag steep, I head to my bathroom, where I find a bottle of Motrin. Not quite what’s hurting, but it’s got what I need, and I shake out three pills before going back and taking a sip of tea to swallow it down and then carefully lying down on my couch.
It’s only as I sit and hear it groan that I realize this sofa is nearly a decade old.
I could replace this couch. Hell, after these past eight months, I could buy a whole apartment in New York as long as I’m not looking in Manhattan. In Brooklyn or Queens, I could have a decent-sized place and still have enough to be comfortable for a long while. Never in my life did I imagine I’d have this kind of money. Even after the club’s cut and taxes and fees, I have over two million in the bank ... and yet, at this moment, I feel worthless.
If I wanted to leave New York, I could probably find a beautiful house and maybe even retire if I wanted to live cheaply. But I know that I can never fully go back tonormallife. I can’t even imagine a life without Gabriel.
My contract runs out next week. Each of the past eight times that we’ve done this song and dance, I’ve known that it was just a game, a contract and a deal. No emotional attachment, nothing but an arrangement.
But will he bid on me again? I grip the mug tighter as more intrusive thoughts enter...do I even want to keep doing this if I’m not getting my other needs met?
I don’t know, but as I sip my tea, I think about every little detail and every possibility. Do I want this life forever? Do I want to be Gabriel’s whore, his party favor to hand out to his buddies for amusement? I know it was my idea. I know he allowed it for me ... but I also know he enjoys it. He’s fucking addicted to it now, and I don’t know if he’ll want to stop. I don’t know if it would affect his business relationships.
