Page 19 of Honey Cut
He stands, and I’m vaguely aware that we are not alone, that there are boutique employees, our wedding planner, my best friend, watching us. I am aware that now is the time when he should step back and allow the tailors to check the hem with the new shoes.
He doesn’t step back. And I don’t scold him for seeing the dress before the ceremony like a real bride would do. Instead I lift my skirt and look down at the shoes.
They are fairy-tale shoes, but this is no fairy tale.
I look back to Mark, who’s watching me study his gift. His jaw works slightly to the side.
“Leave us,” he says to everyone else, and they do, even Bryn, who catches my eye in the mirror and gives a look that says she hasn’t missed the energy between Mark and me. She is one of the very few people who know that this marriage is arranged. She knows more than Mark even because she alone knows that I’m doing this for my uncle and not for my father.
She’ll have questions later, but I hope she’ll understand when I don’t have any answers. The line between business and pleasure blurred the first time I crawled to Mark and was erased the night he put his fingers inside me.
There’s no line anymore, only stain after stain.
“I have to go back to work,” Bryn says. And then adds with some meaning in her voice, “I’ll call later.”
“We’ll wait for you at the desk,” the boutique director adds smoothly as our planner makes a gesture echoing the sentiment, her phone still pressed to her ear.
Mark and I don’t respond, our eyes on each other while everyone else leaves.
“It was bold of you to come here,” I say after we’re alone and the door is shut between the fitting area and the rest of the boutique. “If we want to keep up appearances.”
It doesn’t matter that I’m a foot taller than him right now, that his face is tilted up to mine. The power between us feels the same. But I do appreciate this new vantage of him, seeing the magazine-ready perfection of his blond hair, the way the light filters through his eyelashes when his face is tilted up. His mouth dents in at both sides—nearly a real smile—and I’ve been caught admiring him.
Shit.
“I am keeping up appearances,” he says finally. “Do you trust me?”
No. I shouldn’t. I don’t. He essentially warned me not to, all those years ago in my penthouse.
I will win because I’ve won before. I will win because I’ll die before I lose.
But he doesn’t know how I’ve changed, what I’ve done. Things that I could never flagellate myself enough for, starve enough for, atone enough for. Now there is nothing left for mebutto win.
My sins to save God’s kingdom.
“Yes,” I answer. “I trust you.”
The lie is sold perhaps by it being maybe less of a lie than I’d like, but it doesn’t matter. Mark moves fast—fast enough that even I struggle to process it—and his hands are like manacles around my wrists. A defensive instinct, natural as breathing, flashes through me like the first flip of a knife, and I only keep myself from fighting back by remembering that I’m in a dress that represents thousands of hours of work and even more thousands of dollars.
A sharp smile cuts across Mark’s face as he says, “Why I’ve bothered with cuffs and rope all these years when I could just put someone in pretty clothes is a mystery.” He’s dragging me off the pedestal now, and with the full skirt of the ball gown and the unfamiliar heels, I stumble.
He catches me easily around the waist, and then I’m forced to my knees in a pile of silk and Chantilly.
“Open your mouth,” he says, his hands already on his fly.
The shock of it has me frozen, struggling to grab hold of my thoughts. I’ve been in lethal, existential fights, in pursuits down rain-wet alleys, subway tunnels, through the woods. And yetthishas me grasping, floundering. Being forced to my knees, the sight of Mark’s hands pulling apart the placket of his pants.
I’ve done this before, technically. On the yacht, there was almost nothing Tristan and I didn’t do. But this is different; this is not like when Tristan and I were lost little hedonists devouring each other. This is Mark pushing the same buttons I’d only discovered once I’d crawled to him or allowed him to batter my backside until I came from that alone.
Hyssop. My safeword. I could say it now.
But as I watch Mark pull out his rigid organ, already hard just from putting his shoes on my feet, I know I won’t. I have permission to enjoy my sins, after all.
I open my mouth, and he uses his thumb to press against my bottom lip and open it more. Then he slides his thumb onto my tongue. I taste a hint of salt and—juniper. Gin, probably.
“Stoic little thing,” my future husband says. “Quiet little queen. What thoughts are behind those eyes right now, I wonder?”
I can’t talk, not with his thumb there, but what could I tell him even if I could? Not the truth. Not the truth about anything. Tristan, the Church, what I’ve done the past three years—all of me is held on the edge of a knife, and secrets are the only things keeping the balance.
