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He hoofed it closer and closer to Octavia’s, his temples pounding with each step. Not only not pleased. Royally pissed for invading her privacy was probably more like it.
His boss would be royally pissed too if some dickwad recognized him and posted a photo of him in a sex-club-dungeon-whatever-the-fuck-you-called-it on social media.
This is a bad idea.
But clips of her continued to play behind his eyes, like edited scenes coming together into a cohesive storyline: undressing in front of him that first time, bent over the arm of the couch, blindfolded and bound. Her skin damp with sweat. The weight of her body leaning into him, so close he could inhale the scent of her hair, raspberries and a hint of vanilla.
It was more than physical for him. More than magnetic attraction and intense sex. She had turned to him. She had trusted him with so much—her safety, her need—and revealed to him her desire. She had surrendered something magnificent to him: herself.
He had no choice but to see if she was—he recalled the women at Leigh’s, throat clearing instead of making air quotes—visiting Octavia.
He checked the phone again. The map recalibrated and zoomed in, the blue dot throbbing like the pulse in his temple.
When he looked up, he saw the small swirly silver sign on the lamppost. It reminded him of Paris. It could have marked an eleventh arrondissement patisserie or an upscale boutique.
He tapped the “I’m here” button in the app as he cased the place. Wine-colored curtains obscured the windows, so there was no peering in to see if he could spot her. But at least no burly, cranky bouncer tried to stop him from opening the door.
9
WORDLESS NEED
The metal restraints—fast cuffs, Octavia called them—were cold against her wrists. She concentrated on the contrast. Hot drops of wax fell on her back from the wick of the candle in Octavia’s hand. The wax cooled so fast, each molten droplet plunking onto her back, then hardening, tightening her skin, a minute pinch. Tonight, like the other nights during the past two weeks she had been coming to the club, she savored the feeling, let her attention meld with sensation.
It had the desired effect.
Subspace. Octavia had explained it simply, capturing the ethereal in a single word, and allowed Quinn to float in it.
If she were still and quiet enough, attentive enough, she could almost identify the bend in time when the loosening began, the sudden onset of lightness, the shift to an altered state.
She needed this badly tonight. Correction: She had needed this badly since she sent Jonathan away two weeks ago.
That day had been horrible, a low point worse than she had experienced in a long time.
Until Harris died, she had assumed grief was like recovering after an illness, lessening little by little, day by day, until you were healed. No, not healed, but functional. Able to sleep a few hours at night. Able to wake without having cried in your dreams. Able, perhaps reluctantly willing, to glance into the not-too-distant future.
It was nothing like that. Grief’s MO was to ambush at random places and times, sneak attacks, light-footed but brutal.
It came and went whenever it fucking pleased, occasionally even more cruel now than right after it happened.
It snuck onto her doorstep that day a couple of weeks ago in the guise of those boxes of laundered shirts from Harris’s old dry cleaner. Shirts that would not be worn again, lying still in boxes stapled with a yellow carbon-copy slip that listed one by one the phone calls he didn’t answer.
Those were the ways grief played you: sudden, mundane, crippling.
That night, with Jonathan, she couldn’t keep the feelings at bay. She needed to hurt to distract from them. She had asked him to slap her face, and in trying to do something gentler and less jarring, like jerking a fistful of her hair, he accidentally broke the necklace.
She was positive once she saw the chain, with its twisted links wrenched from the pendant, fallen next to her on the bed that heartache and guilt would crush her then and there. She hadn’t deserved the necklace and—like her marriage to Harris, like his last days she had not cherished enough—she had let it break.
And once it was broken, the chain and interlocking hearts that had been a posthumous gift morphed into a mirror, a mirror that reflected her carelessness as a wife and, now, her failure as a widow.
She had not seen Jonathan since. She had let his calls go to voice mail. She had let his texts stack up unanswered.
And she hated that she missed him.
How could she grieve for one man while she craved another? Craved the way he would reach for her before he had even taken off his shoes. Craved how he understood her wordless need. Craved how she could turn her body over to him silently, secretly, entirely.
And yet.
His touch, his ability to read her, his tenderness while delivering wave after wave of sensation, his hesitance to hit her—it all left her feeling too close, too exposed.
