Page 48 of Salt Kiss
I have to reach for the words. “A little...woozy.”
He studies me a minute longer. “You need to eat,” he says finally. “Come on.”
We dress—me in some borrowed sweatpants from Mark because he seems reluctant to let me out of his sight, even for the handful of minutes it would take for me to get my own clothes—and go to the kitchen, where Mark tells me to sit on a stool by the counter and then starts opening fridge and cupboard doors.
“Is there anything you can’t eat?” he asks. He pulls out a cutting board and a knife.
I shake my head.
“Is there anything you feel like?”
“I like meat,” I offer, and to Mark’s credit, he doesn’t make a joke of it.
“Steak it is, then,” he says, and gets to work, pulling out the raw steak, butter, salt, potatoes, and greenery.
“Do you want help?” I ask, and he points at me with a potato.
“I will get that ruler and make good use of it if you move from that stool. Stay.”
I stay, a little torn, because the instinct to help is pulling at every nerve in my body. But the pleasure of watching him at work is drugging in its own right: the competent way he washes, cuts, and preps; the thoughtful way he brushes his knuckles over the surface of the skillet before he spins it by the handle and sets it on the hob.
Dazed as I still am, I can’t push away all the curiosity and fascination with him that I normally hide. I’ve just let him see me in agonies of pain and lust both—and I’d do it again in a heartbeat if he asked—so why not let him see my curiosity too? My yearning to know him?
I take a drink of the cool water Mark pressed into my hands after I sat down, and then I ask, “Why don’t you use the submissives at the club? For yourself?”
Mark has just dumped potato chunks into a pot of salted water to boil, and he turns to face me, throwing a kitchen towel over his bare shoulder. His hair, unstyled after the shower, is a tousled blond mess, the damp parts dark, the dry parts a pale gold streaked with platinum.
He doesn’t seem to find my question invasive at all. His expression is relaxed when he says, “It’s bad business to fuck the people you pay.”
And then he adds, with a small smile, “Except for my bodyguards, I suppose. I’m making a habit of that.”
“But really,” I press, not understanding. “If it’s about time or convenience or any of the other reasons why Strassburg was good for you, surely the people at your club would be the best?”
He sets to stripping kale leaves from their stems with deft flicks of his knife.
“There are other considerations,” he says. “No matter how transactional a scene is, no matter how straightforward the fuck, there is intimacy there, wouldn’t you agree? Shared vulnerability.”
I think about his teeth in my shoulder, his surprised laugh. His admission:I used to dream of having a submissive like you.
It was intimate; it was the definition of intimate. No matter how desperate or unplanned it was, no matter how unemotional I’d vowed myself to be...
“And,” Mark continues, now rolling the kale leaves and slicing them in a chiffonade, “I think you’d also agree that I am the keeper of quite a bit of information. Information that many people would like access to. Intimacy and information”—the thinly sliced kale is transferred to a bowl, replaced on the cutting board by cloves of garlic he peeled earlier—“do not mix. Which sounds alarmingly obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people think they are somehow immune to hormones and neurotransmitters. Limerence.”
“So you’re worried that you’d be compromised somehow? By a club submissive?” No matter what he says, it’s impossible to imagine him divulging something confidential to a club submissive just because the sex was good.
“I hear your doubt,” he says, putting the minced garlic in another bowl and then going to check on the potatoes. “And I have news for you. Doubt is informed by confidence. And confidence is informed by experience. And experience is a goddamn liar almost all of the time.”
“So you don’t trust yourself.”
“Or anyone,” Mark says. The potatoes are rescued from the pot and go on a roasting pan with salt, rosemary, and garlic, and then into the oven.
He sighs, facing away from me. There’s something resigned in the set of his shoulders. “Except I have decided to trust some people. Strassburg. You. You were both already as deep into my life as I’d let anyone, so there was no compounded risk.” I see the grim set to his mouth when he turns back to the salad. “Although I may have risked other things. The next twelve months do not account for an...entanglement.”
I don’t want to encourage this line of thinking; the thought of him deciding we need to stop, that we can’t do this again, has my throat closing.
“What about Ms. Beroul?” I ask, more to ask anything, to say anything, to pull him away from thoughts ofriskandentanglement.“You don’t worry that she’d compromise you?”
“Ah, Ms. Beroul. No, I don’t worry. Isabella lives in Montreal and belongs to the owner of a club there who loves to share her. She’s not in a position to leverage her proximity to me for more, given that the proximity is so limited.” Mark juices a lemon with his bare hands, juice and pulp dripping around his strong fingers. “So you remember her, do you?”
