Page 16 of Salt in the Wound
Mark returned my gaze with his own cool one, as if to tell me that he found this to be an incomplete answer.
I opened my mouth to tell him that it wasn’t incomplete at all, that of course I didn’t want to have sex. But the words wouldn’t come.
I realized, with slow-dawning horror, that saying them would feel like lying.
“You do not have to have sex with me, Isolde, but I will say this—I am possessive by nature. Once we are married, I’m not interested in you having sex with anyone else, even if we aren’t fucking. In addition to my…nature, it would not help our carefully crafted appearance of unity if an affair of yours became known.”
As if I would tarnish such a hard-bought offering to God with a sin as cheap as adultery. “That won’t be a problem.” It was my turn to lift a brow. “Will it be a problem for you?”
Mark smiled. The first smile of the night.
It was terrifying.
“After we wed, I will be as faithful as you are,” Mark said. “How does that sound?”
I couldn’t tell if he was being transparent or something worse. “It sounds acceptable to me,” I said guardedly.
The smile deepened the barest amount, before he turned serious again. “Issues of fidelity aside, we’ll need to expand your idea of sex. It’s far more than just penetration, and it’s also a signature of my play. The people at my club know this about me.” He spread his hands on the table, as if to say,this is out of my control. “Our play might be pretend at its core, but its appearance will need to be sexual to be believable to the people watching.”
Yes, of course, people watching. That was what this entire conversation had been about. People would watch me and Mark together; they would watch me pretending to submit. It almost made me light-headed to think about, but in a way that reminded me of the first few seconds before a sparring match at a tournament. It was uncomfortably close to excitement.
“The sexual parts…will they be like sparring too? As pretend as we can make them?”
“As much as possible.” Mark turned his head to gaze out at the city, revealing the brutal beauty of his profile. His full mouth curved in another smile. “Unless you ask me otherwise in the moment, however.”
Which would never happen.
I followed his gaze out the window, seeing what he was seeing. A canyon of glass and steel and concrete, and beyond it, the darkness of water.
This is the bed you chose. The bed you agreed to climb into.
I could say no. I could refuse this and tell Mark he needed to find some other way to make us appear like a united front to his world.
Or I could stand up, go home, and tell my father that this whole farce of a marriage was off.
But I wasn’t the girl who shied away. Not from punches, not from pushups, not from wringing hour after hour of training from my body. I wasn’t the girl who ran away from what was difficult or even impossible.
If this was what was being asked of me, then I would excel at it. And perhaps I would win Mark’s loyalty as well. Perhaps it would be as easy as a few quasi-sexual performances to get everything Mortimer wanted from Mark.
And the sooner Mortimer had what he wanted, the sooner I could end this marriage altogether.
Yes, this was the shortest, sharpest course of action.
“I’ll do it,” I said to the dark window.
“Wonderful,” said my fiancé. “We’ll start rehearsing tomorrow.”
Rehearsing.
It made sense. I could hardly show up to Mark’s club and expect to perform my new role flawlessly on the first try. Like learning how to use a knife or reciting a new prayer, mastery only came through practice, praxis.
So yes, rehearsing was necessary, yes, I’d do it, but there was a slender coil of horror in my chest as I nodded. Not the least because I’d hoped to be untouched by this arrangement until my wedding day…but also, there was a danger here. Andrehearsingwith Mark felt like inviting that danger to scent my naked and exposed throat.
“In the meantime…”
He took my left hand where it rested on the table and wrapped his fingers around it. The contact nearly made me jump; his hand was huge and warm and the strength restrained in it was unnerving. I still noticed when his other hand produced a ring, which flashed and gleamed as he slid it onto my finger.
“As long as we are playing the part,” he murmured, moving the ring gently past my knuckles and to the base of my finger. When he finished, I held it up to stare at it. A cluster of rubies dotted the middle like ripe fruit, and the band was made of twisting gold, wrought like vines and leaves.
