Page 14 of Salt in the Wound
“Why didyouagree?” I asked him. “What was in it for you?”
Mark’s expression remained a cipher, but his finger trailed along the rim of his glass. The ice in his drink had long ago melted, and I wondered what was inside. Gin? Vodka?
“Information can flow both ways,” he answered finally. “Laurence Bank has some very powerful clients. Both clients that it shares with me, and clients that are of interest tomyclients. Access to what your father knows about these people would be extremely beneficial to me.”
So it boiled down to the same thing for Mark and my father and Mortimer too. I was a means to an end, and that end was the mysterious, all-importantinformation. Mortimer wanted it for the Church, my father for money.
I didn’t know why Mark wanted it. Perhaps only to broker it, to profit from it. To consolidate his obscure throne back in DC.
Information.
I should have been relieved that was all Mark wanted. I wondered why I was abruptly upset instead. I rolled my lips together and looked down at the table. Mark’s hand on his glass was at the very corner of my vision, and I watched as his finger stopped moving along the edge. As it lifted, and then he rubbed his thumb over the knuckle once before resting his hand on the table.
“That’s not the entire truth,” he said. There was something a little rougher in his voice now, like he was admitting something he wasn’t sure he should. “It’s part of the truth, certainly, but not the whole.”
I lifted my eyes from his hand to his face. “What is the whole?”
A beat passed. To anyone else, it would have been nothing more than a second. But to two people like us, used to slicing and stabbing and all the other things that could happen in the blink of an eye, the beat felt like an hour. Like a year.
“I asked for you,” he said.
My heart jerked in my chest. My face burned.
“You asked for me? Why?” The words were faint on my lips.
He regarded me. “Because I wanted you,” he said, like it was that simple.
I didn’t know what to say to that. I didn’t even know what to think…except that I had been foolish to be disappointed by Mark only wanting access to information from our marriage.
This was worse. This was much worse.
“But I’m aware that to you, this arrangement is transactional,” Mark went on before I could gather my thoughts, “and so: tonight’s dinner. Because there is a needle we must thread between you and me, if we want our relationship to appear genuine.”
The waiter arrived with our food just then, and another glass of something clear on ice for Mark.
Genuine. I thought about the word as the waiter explained our plates to us, as I stared at my poached lobster with grape and fennel salad. I could tell Mark that our relationship appearing genuine meant very little to me. What did I care if other people knew our relationship was fake? And really, what didhecare?
But no. I immediately saw the problem here; I saw why it mattered. The more natural our relationship appeared, the more leverage we both had for gathering information. The more I could ingratiate myself into Mark’s world and gather crumbs for my uncle.
We needed to play the part.
“I run my club carefully,” said Mark after the waiter left. “I run it so that both my authority and my reputation are unquestioned. Part of this is creating an armor of loyalty among those closest to me. If there is a perceived gap between me and my wife, then you could see how this armor would appear fissured. Ripe for exploiting.”
I took up my knife and fork and began eating. “Does the owner of a sex club have that many enemies?”
A flicker around the edges of his mouth. “You’d be surprised.”
The lobster was delicious, the salad bright on my tongue. Mark cut into his beef with the precision of a surgeon and the unconscious habit of a butcher. I watched as the blood-red meat made it to his lips. When he chewed, that startlingly perfect jaw flexed.
“So there shouldn’t be any perceived gap between us,” I said, ducking my eyes down to my plate before he could catch me staring at him as he ate.
“Yes, and here we come to the heart of the matter. Are you familiar with kink at all?”
There was something buzzing under my skin. A warning maybe. An ancient instinct that told me that a storm was coming, that a wolf was in the woods.
I could feel Mark’s gaze on my face, and I fought the urge to look up at him. I studiously cut another piece of lobster and put it in my mouth.
When it became clear that he was not going to allow silence to be its own answer, I set down my fork and swallowed my food. After a drink of water, I said, more self-consciously than I wanted, “It’s like…BDSM.”
