Page 29 of Salt in the Wound
“Do you imagine that it will be different in your marriage? That offering sex as a necessity, as a neutral transaction, will have the same impact as you wholeheartedly desiring it? I’ve heard plenty about Mark Trevena; I saw him sparring you that day. He’s not going to be fooled by someone closing their eyes and thinking of England—nor, I daresay, would he be interested in it. I think if this arrangement is to have any benefit whatsoever, then it will be preciselybecauseyou want it. Or parts of it, at least. Does that absolve you?”
“But do you think it absolves me in God’s eyes?” I asked quietly, my eyes back down on the bourbon. “It doesn’t make me fickle? Or inconstant to him?”
Then Sister Mary Alice did something that she never did.
She softened.
“My child. If God didn’t want us to be fickle, he would have never created the ages of seventeen through twenty-seven. Your feelings now don’t make you any less who you thought you were a year ago; they only mean that you’re getting closer to who you’re meant to be a year from now. Five years from now.”
She then gave me a sharp smile. “And our God would not send you to battle the dragon withoutjustthe very sword for the job.”
And that night, I emailed Mark an updated list of my limits, withyes, yes, yesmarked next to all the different kinds of sex.
nine
There was to be a club anniversary celebration that summer at Lyonesse, and the expectation was that Mark would scene publicly with his new, mysterious submissive.
“Something short, easy,” he said when he told me during our second rehearsal in his penthouse. It was the first time we’d seen each other since New Year’s Eve.
His eyes were on the snowy expanse of Central Park just beyond his windows. “They don’t need more.”
“Do you do public scenes often at the club?” I asked. It was a genuine question—I had no way of knowing—but there was a sharp hook in my chest as I awaited the answer.
It was an answer that shouldn’t matter, an answer I was pretty sure I could guess, because did I really imagine that someone who built a place like Lyonesse didn’t also indulge himself there? Didn’t make full use of it?
When his other alternative was a fiancée who knew nothing about what he liked and had barely even been willing to marry him?
He turned to look at me then, framed by Manhattan blanketed in snow, and his eyes were a brilliant blue in the gray winter light. “I do,” he said evenly.
“And that’s not—” I closed my mouth. I didn’t know what I really wanted to ask.
He seemed to know anyway. “It would be stranger if I stopped.”
“Oh.”
“Do you want me to stop, Isolde?”
And there I was, standing in my sports bra and bike shorts because I was too shy or too stubborn to rehearse without the Lycra reminder that everything between us was false. Because after that knee-quaking kiss on New Year’s Eve—even after my conversation with Sister Mary Alice—I wasn’t ready to admit how I was starting to feel. There was an instinctive need to wedge some distance between us, any distance at all.
We’d been engaged for over seven months, and I knew next to nothing about him other than that he was fourteen years older than me and had been a soldier before he was CIA. And that he usually drank clear alcohol on ice.
Conversely, he knew far more about me than I knew about him, and in that moment, him looking at me, that kiss last week lingering between us, I couldn’t bear for him to know this: that I wanted him to stop doing scenes with other people.
I couldn’t even bear for myself to know it.
Wasn’t it bad enough that I’d given up my vocation, my purity, my freedom in order to serve God on the darker, thornier path he’d asked of me?
Why did I also have to be drawn—snared? Coveting something so deeply unwise?
Why did I have towantMark on top of everything else?
And what did I want from him, really? To stop fucking other people when we weren’t fucking either? When our engagement was a business decision and nothing more?
But now you’ve told him he can have sex with you, a tiny, petulant voice inside me said.So why won’t he just take you?
It felt like I’d surrendered something only to have it rejected, neglected. And he absolutely could never, ever know how much that stung.
“No,” I said calmly, meeting his gaze again. “I don’t want you to stop.”
