I press my hand to my mouth and avoid my reflection. I will not cry. I will be strong, I tell myself while, another part of me stands appalled by his violence. I know what is in the box. I pull the satin ribbons and lift the cover of the box.
And frown.
It is not white lingerie and shoes.
As if in a trance, I pick up the familiar velvet box and open it. Under the yellow lights of the bathroom the diamonds in the sapphire necklace glitter like the bling on a rap singer. The next thing I find in the box is even more surprising. Billie’s shorts, the ones I borrowed to wear to the party. I must have left them behind. I had totally forgotten them. I remember that night again. What did it mean? That he himself has gone through all my stuff and kept these? That this item of clothing means something to him? I open the last item—a shoe box. A pair of snake skin orange Christian Louboutin shoes, but startlingly similar to the ones I wore the first night we met.
I try to imagine how he came upon them. Did he describe them to Laura? Did she then search the net and give him a list to choose from? I undress quickly. I consider leaving my knickers on, but I remember his eyes when he held my hands behind my back and told me everything I should be wearing is in the box.
The necklace is cold on my skin. I pull the shorts on, zip and button them. I get into the shoes and look at myself in the mirror. Oh dear. The shorts hang about my hip bones and my rib bones show. I look gawky and awkward and as sexy as a pole in shorts. I console myself that the lights in the bedroom will be muted. I stare at my breasts. The nipples are erect. This morning I could have covered them with my hair, but now that the front has been feathered that option is gone.
I touch the light switch and kill the light, in the hope that he will not see the silhouette of my skinny frame, or my half-naked exit from the bathroom. My steps falter and I stand uncertainly by the wall in my high heels. Half-hidden in the shadows at the edges of the room, I stand and stare at the magnificent specimen sitting shirtless, in a pool of light on the bed.
His legs are crossed at the ankles and his arms are folded across his chest. The muscles of his arms seem even more defined than I remember. He must have taken his frustrations out in the gym. He moves slightly and the action ripples the golden row of thick muscles in his stomach. My mouth dries. Suddenly I feel exposed and ashamed of my body, my arousal. My hands rise up to cover my breasts. My nipples are hard pebbles against the palms of my hands.
‘Come in,’ he purrs. His voice is silk, but his eyes are shadowed and his face is a blank wall. Expressionless. Impenetrable.
He begins to unbutton his trousers. I stare at the flat stomach, the beautiful body that I have longed for. The trousers slip to the floor. Black briefs. The bulge is clearly, clearly visible. Dear me, but it’s been so long. I feel my own body producing its juices, getting ready for the sweet invasion. He steps out of his briefs. Wow! Nothing has changed. He is as gorgeous as ever.
But I don’t move. I can’t. My soul refuses to allow me to go forward. Not towards that demeaning drill again. I remember it like yesterday. Go to the middle of the room, strip, turn around, spread my legs as wide as they will go, and bend down to touch the floor. Then it had been strangely exciting, but now it seems sordid. I’m not here because he paid me to be here. I’m here willingly. I am here to atone for a wrong I did him. I’m here because, even though he doesn’t believe it, I’m crazy in love with him.
‘New games, Lana?’ he mocks when I make no move towards him, but his voice is different. The silk is gone. It is sinuous and alive with the kind of unthinking lust that only a man knows how to feel.
I watch him bound off the bed, and come towards me, tall, dark, dangerous, and looking for trouble. He stops in front of me. Heat comes off his body in waves. The air thickens. I want to taste that golden skin. I blink to break the spell. Take control, Lana. The blackness of what I have made him become envelops me like a bleak shadow. His vengeful eyes bore into me.
A strange fascination with danger slides down my spine. I want to shut my eyes and try to picture him as he was, but I don’t. One wrong move and he’ll take me now, roughly, and the chasm between us will become wider, impossible to breach. But a woman is never without options, my mother always said. Start the way you mean to carry on. I need not be powerless. I can be as powerful as Billie, as powerful as my mother.
I take my hands away from my breasts and slip the copper button of my shorts out of its eye. Slowly I unzip my shorts. His eyes do not follow my fingers but watch my face. Even so my fingers are trembling with a kind of feral excitement. I don’t have to push them down my legs. They are so loose they run down like water. For a while I stand there in my necklace and my high shoes.
When I lift one leg to step out of the shorts, he catches my leg firmly under the knee and forces it up high so I am spread open to him. I feel air in places that have never seen the sun. My gesture of submission has done nothing to lessen his cold regard. His eyes are deliberately barren. I wonder how someone can be as turned on as he obviously is and still look so cold and distant.
His other hand cups one bare buttock possessively and my pussy, already wet, floods and clenches with anticipation. He plays with the wetness he has aroused. Pleasure and delicious release shimmer between us. It has been so long. My body doesn’t care how he does it or why he wants to do it. It just wants him inside. It has always been like that for me. My body weeping for him. He lets his fingers sweep along my open sex and brings it to his mouth. He sucks his fingers.
‘Mmnnn you still taste like heaven.’
I whimper and that sound has an electrifying effect on him. With a growl he thrusts his fingers into me. Again. And again. Harder. Faster. A sound escapes my lips. My head presses against the wall and my hips thrust towards his hand. He is rough, but after all this time I welcome it. My pussy creams with the force. I feel the excess fluid trickle down my thighs.
But it is not enough.
I rock my hips mindlessly. Looking to fill that ache. Where his fingers cannot reach. Begging him with my body, with every jerk and every gasp, but he will not give me that. His fingers pump with a steady, forceful tempo, pushing me towards a rough, humiliating climax.
Which comes while I am standing on one foot like a stork, my body twisted open. The rapture is explosive. My muscles lose all their strength and I sag against the wall behind me. The dizzying roar of my own blood abates to a dull thud. He looks at me with frosty eyes. He wants me to lower my head in shame while he pretends he has felt nothing. But I know different. My eyes defiant, I lift a hand and cup his hard erection.
‘You are as aroused as I am.’
He smiles. ‘Sure,’ he drawls. ‘I want to fuck you. What man wouldn’t? To tell you the truth, babe, I’m drowning in lust.’
He lets go of my leg and with rough hands grabs me by the upper arms, whirls me around, and pushes me forward. My palms and forearms hit the wall. My right cheek is pressed against the cold surface of the wall and my breasts are crushed into it. He takes the hair that covers my face from his gaze and hooks it behind my ear. He wants to watch me. My eyes swivel desperately to the side to look at him, but I cannot see him.
‘‘You taste and smell the same, let’s see if you feel the same,’ he says, and, lifting me slightly off the ground, grasps my thighs and spreads them wide apart. My shoes fall off with a dull thud. He returns my bare feet to the ground soundlessly. His large hands grab my hips and tilt my lower body so it is perfectly aligned with his cockhead. For a second I feel him tease me by running it along my clit and then he drives into me.