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I couldn’t release that energy on Hanna, who was doing me a favor. I couldn’t push her back on the floor and jab into her throat while holding her down by the hair. She wasn’t my slave, so I had to let Devin be part of this scene, and in that sense, I could only go so far.
But I controlled the blowjob, varying my rhythm and the depths of my thrusts to throw her off whenever she got comfortable. She went along with whatever I did, but I wanted something less generous and more…dubiously consensual.
Like cuffing a passed-out woman to my guest room bed.
Chapter Four: Juliet
Isat uplate in the Black Wall’s communal lobby, an art-filled dump of chairs and beanbags that covered the entire ground floor. My favorite chair was in the corner, set beneath an amber, recycled-glass chandelier. The cushy seat was round and bowl shaped, perfect for curling up in order to think or sleep.
But sleep eluded me, because Goodluck was sprawled beside me, talking quietly to himself about esoteric stuff. I tried to catch the strings of his thoughts, adding them to the maelstrom in my brain. I’d done way too much thinking in this chair, thinking about Keith and why I’d let him manipulate me, and wreck my self-esteem for his kinky pleasure. Then there was the Dom before that…and, sigh, the Dom before that. I also thought about Fort St. Clair, who’d come to my rescue on one of the darkest, most miserable nights of my life.
After our limited time together, I’d been intrigued enough to do an Internet search, and I’d gotten a barrage of results. Businessman, playboy, oldest son of the wealthy St. Clair family. I’d been about to start a folder for digital clippings and photos of him—God, he wassophotogenic—but then I remembered that I’d done the same thing with power-realtor Keith. I had a habit of mistaking money and prestige—and dominance—for redeeming qualities. Lots of guys in this city were rich, especially the kinky ones. I needed to get it through my skull that it didn’t make them worth my time.
So I forgot about Fort St. Clair as well as I could, and threw myself back into work. Goodluck was riding an inspirational high, and neither of us knew when he’d crash, so I scheduled gallery shows, tracked down prospective models, and sourced discontinued varieties of film and darkroom chemicals so he could achieve the grainy, overexposed prints his collectors liked.
On top of business and artistic needs, my job involved managing Goodluck’s personal craziness, his artistic ups and down. It was mentally exhausting work, but I didn’t mind too much, because my boss wasn’t a Dominant or a soul-crusher, or even a romantic prospect. He was a friend. At twenty-nine, Goodluck Boundless was three years younger than me, but pretty much timeless.
And often a little unhinged.
“Here’s the thing,” he said, turning to me mid-mumble. “What do eagles dream about? Why do they deserve our support?”
I thought a moment. “Whydon’tthey deserve our support? I like watching them fly.”
Goodluck’s eyes went hazy. He opened his mouth and closed it, then made some mysterious centering gesture with his hand. “In the beginning, the amoebas flew in a liquid dream of existence. Every day, all day, the waves in the ocean fly along the earth’s shores.” He sat up a little straighter, grabbing my knee. “Babies fly in their mothers’ wombs as they wait to be born, floating and weightless and full of promise.” He clapped his hands on either side of his head in awed discovery. “We are eagles in our hearts.”
“Absolutely.” Sometimes the best thing was just to agree with him. “Your photos fly too, Goodluck. I think people feel your work in some deep, primeval part of themselves, the part that remembers that they once flew.”
The word “primeval” probably gave him a boner. Not a boner to use on me. We were platonic, although people loved taking pictures of us together. We looked weirdly similar, with the same wild brown hair and bright blue eyes. Rumors surfaced now and again that we were an incestuous couple. But no, he wasn’t my brother or my boyfriend, and I’d never had sex with him. I was pretty sure the only sex he ever had was masturbating to the striking, blurred images he created.
“Precision. Effort. Patience,” he said, lying back again. The amber chandelier sparkled above us, lit by colored bulbs. “Nothing worth doing is easy.”
“That’s true.”
“Sweat creates magic, but the sweat is not magic. What’s in your mind is magic. Your emotion, your will, your inner spark of expression, all this magic makes the swirl and flow of an eagle’s flight.”
Sounded like an eagle-themed portfolio was in the works. “Do you want to take a trip to Mongolia?” I asked. “There are lots of eagles there, flying across a huge blue sky.”
“There are eagles in New York. Don’t edit nature, friend. Ask yourself, why is Mongolia the first place you associate with eagles? You should ask instead, what gift do eagles bring to our lives? To the world?” He made an expansive gesture. “There are so many gifts in the world if you’re open to receiving them. Sometimes you seem like an eagle to me.” He touched my face, looking at me fondly. “But more often you seem like a grieving meteor streaking across the sky.”
“Wow.”
“I understand your power, friend, and I recognize your pain.” He sobered. “But I think you need to move on. You’re still caught in your ex-boyfriend’s orbit, aren’t you? You were too good for him. You’re made of the dust of the ages. That’s a fact.”
Maybe he wasn’t moving into eagles next. Maybe he was going to try outer space photography. Either way, I was just along for the ride.
He took my hand between his, his wide, blue eyes painfully sincere. “Don’t waste your dust, beautiful friend. You need to be a comet, not a meteor. Don’t let his transgressions drag you to earth, a flaming, destructive force that—”
“I haven’t spoken to Keith in five months. I don’t even think about him anymore,” I lied.
“You should meet someone new, someone who soars like an eagle. The last guy was more of an armadillo.”
It was a relief to laugh about Keith, to get to the place where I could do it. Bless Goodluck for taking me there. It had definitely been good luck when I met him at one of his early showings, when I was a business major fresh off the bus from Tennessee. He liked my small-town roots, and his metropolitan success made me feel like I was accomplishing things, even though my social life was dead in the water.
“Don’t change, okay?” He hugged me, his long, frizzy hair tickling my cheek. “You inspire me. You’re magical, Starcomet.”
“Juliet.”
“We’ve talked about this. I think you should change your name to Starcomet. It holds more power.”
