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It was mostly sexual involvement. I understood that. She didn’t have time for me during the week, and I didn’t have time for her either, with a full slate of flights on my schedule. Then Saturday would come and she was mine, a vision of eroticism, trimmed in black, finished with a silver collar.Property of The Gallery.As much as I lusted for her, she wasn’t mine alone. She didn’t want to be.
That should have made me happy. Low involvement meant low stress, but as I flew across the ocean, I’d picture her at work, in her science pow-wows with her astrophysics squad. She wasn’t only my sex toy, my plaything to fuck and hurt. She was also a genius, a goddess of gravitational waves and time-relativity. I started to ask for more of her time. Idemandedmore of her time. She agreed to let me meet her for lunch once a week.
Lunch? Fuck.
But it was better than nothing. Whenever I had days off through the summer, I went to the NSF Institute and signed in as a guest, and met her in the lobby. Sometimes we went out to a restaurant for lunch, but usually we stayed in and ate at the hushed, crowded cafeteria in the basement. Most of the people there had their noses buried in their devices, or scientific journals and models, but they usually took time to cast curious glances at the two of us. We weren’t dating, but I made it look like we were. I used the universal language of men—since most of them were men—and glared at anyone who looked at Ella too long.
She was oblivious to all this, her eyes obscured by her glasses, her mind a universe away even when she agreed to have lunch with me. It was during one of these lunches that I met Dr. Leopold Mann.
“Ellie,” he’d said, sweeping down on our table and sitting next to her on her bench. “Who’s your friend?”
She’d moved over with a glance of annoyance. “Devin, this is Leo, my boss.”
It didn’t escape me that she shrank away from him, and he still tried to crowd her. I subdued the urge to reach across the table, grab him by the neck, and shove him off the bench onto the floor.
I think he realized it, because he backed off a little. “Nice to meet you, Devin. How do you know Ellie?”
“Ella,” she muttered.
“We met in Pisa,” I finally said, when it became obvious she wasn’t going to answer.
“At Santo Stefano? Are you a scientist, too?”
“A pilot.”
I was giving him short answers because I didn’t care to know him. He was mid-fortyish, with dark, graying hair and an abrasive voice. I knew Ella didn’t like him, so I wanted him to go away.
“Well, I’m in the same field as Ellie, obviously,” he said. “We’re so happy to have her here. She’s an indispensable member of the team.”
She gave him a sideways look, like she might deck him if he called her Ellie one more time. I wondered if things were going badly here, if she would ditch her consortium at the first opportunity to get away from this Leo guy, and this dank underground cafeteria. I didn’t like the way that made me feel. Before I’d let her leave, I’d put her in a dungeon at my house, keep her in a cage for my amusement. It was a fun fantasy.
But this probably wasn’t the time or place to have that fantasy.
“Your boss seems like an asshole,” I said as I walked her back to her office.
“I’ve told you many times that he’s an asshole.”
“Everyone says that about their boss, but you’re right, he really is. What’s his deal? Why does he act that way toward you?”
“What way?” She said it defensively. That was the moment I realized something wasn’t right here. I pulled her to a quiet corner of the corridor and sat her next to me on an upholstered bench.
“You told me on the way over here from Pisa that you didn’t like him,” I said. “But youreallydon’t like him. Did something happen between the two of you? Something in your past?”
She made a face. “No. Well, yes.” She covered her eyes. “I hate to even say it. We had a…thing.”
“A thing? You had athingwith him?” Even as I said it, I realized that I’d sensed a physical history between them, which was why I’d hated him from the start. “Was he your boss then, too?” I held up my hands when she glared at me. “No judgment.”
“He wasn’t my boss. I was in college, years ago, another life.” She shook her head. “I regret it now.”
“So…you got kinky together?” As much as I hated to think about it, I wanted to know it all, especially if this “past” between them was making her unhappy.
“We got kinky for a while, yeah.” She pushed her glasses up and took a deep breath. “But it didn’t mean anything. I’d rather not talk about it.”
Bad enough that she didn’t want to talk about it? Hmm. What had they done together? How extreme had their scenes been?
“If you’re still attracted to him, you don’t have to hide it from me. I don’t care.” Total lie.
“Eww. I’m not attracted to him. I literally hate him. Seriously, don’t worry about that.”
