Page 35 of Honey Cut
thirteen
ISOLDE
I changeinto a white silk camisole and matching shorts and then pad back into the living area in my bare feet. When Bryn and I were shopping for lingerie, we’d been lost as to what kind of lingerie would appeal to a man like Mark Trevena. Something manifestly kinky, with straps and O-rings? Something finely worked and expensive, just like the bride he’d bought with privileged information about upcoming regulations and damning FDA reports?
But I’d ultimately decided that any attempts at seduction would only work if they appeared genuine, organically me. And if I know anything about Mark, it’s that he’s interested in things far more wicked than garter belts and mesh…the total surrender of my dignity, for example.
And they don’t sell that at La Perla.
I do leave the white ribbon around my neck, and I’m glad I did when I see the way Mark’s eyes gravitate toward it once again. I log this away for when we get to Lyonesse. A couple of years ago, we did a formal collaring scene at the club, a way to build verisimilitude around our engagement, but the ceremony had been short, strangely hollow. He’d barely looked at me, even as he’d clasped the slender collar around my neck, and then afterward, he’d disappeared, leaving Dinah to pack me into a car and send me home.
I’d thought at the time that perhaps he didn’t find collars interesting, but the way he can’t drag his eyes away from my throat tonight is making me reevaluate.
“You look lovely,” he says finally, and he manages to lift his stare to my face. “Quite virginal.”
“We know that hasn’t been true for a long time.” I sit across the board from him. He’s rolled up his sleeves, and I can see the tattoo of a bird on one forearm, rendered in strong, abstracted lines of black ink.
“The look suits you nonetheless. You are exquisite in everything, but in white, you are fatally so. I’m certain our Lyonesse guests are hoping you’ll wear that reception dress again at the club—and then hoping I’ll share.”
With his unknotted bow tie, rolled-up sleeves, and gold five-o’clock shadow, he is the fatal one, but I can’t tell him so. He’s arrogant enough as it is.
“Do you plan to?” I ask. “Share me?”
He gives me a lazy look, his hand going to a glass of something amber, poured neat into the glass. Not his usual gin on ice. He must have made it for himself while I was getting changed.
“I recall you marking it as amaybeon your list of limits, having sex with other people. Have you changed your answer?”
I’ve given some thought to this over the past few months, as the wedding and my time as the bride of Lyonesse drew closer. When I was eighteen, freshly ripped from my dream of taking the veil, the idea had been faintly horrifying, almost insane in its distance from what I believed sex should be. It was a parody of godly sex—it was what good Catholics imagined that those sinful others did. If they don’t abide by our rules, then they must be like the ancient Romans, consumed in orgiastic excesses and switching beds whenever they aren’t drowning in flesh and violets and whatever else. Et cetera.
How funny that only four years separate me from that newly engaged Isolde, and yet I barely know her anymore. It makes me wonder what I’ll think four years from now and then four years after that. How could I have been socertainthat something was wrong, abhorrent, totally anathema to me and now be sitting here not only contemplating its usefulness but feeling my pulse quicken as well?
“I’ve changed my answer,” I tell Mark, meeting his waiting gaze. His eyes are like the city night outside, blue-dark and glittering. “I’d be happy to be shared if you think the moment calls for it.”
“Happy to be,” echoes Mark. “Truly? You are not just saying this because you think it’s what I want to hear?”
“Is it what you want to hear?” I counter, and his brows lift, as if to say,You caught me.
“I won’t lie, Isolde. As archaic as it might be, giving my wife as a gift to a guest would be an extremely powerful favor. The kind of favor that creates debts. But there’s a reason it’s powerful, and it’s because it’s deeply transgressive. I won’t ask it of you unless you want it for yourself.”
“Is wanting it for our partnership enough?” I ask. “If it strengthens us? Our ability to get what we want out of this marriage?”
“Ambition is a good enough reason for a lot of things. I only wonder if you’re actually ambitious or if what passes for ambition is instead a long-exploited abnegation. A willingness to deny yourself even your own consent in pursuit of some abstract goal.”
“The success of Laurence Bank—and the Laurences—is not abstract to me,” I reply. Which is a lie; the bankisabstract to me, and more than that, it’s deeply unimportant. But the bank’s success is the lie I’m cloaking myself in for the foreseeable future. “But there is another reason too,” I add, and I look down at the table. My palms and nose are tingling, and I’m fighting with my breathing. Because what I’m about to say is the truth, and it is terrifying to give Mark any part of myself that’s real. “I want to do it. It…is not unappealing to me.”
I can’t see Mark’s face, but I can see his fingers twitch along his glass. He covers the slip by taking a drink.
“Does it get you wet to think about fucking other people?” he asks. “Or is it specifically being shared? Or both?”
“I, ah—” I was raised not to fumble with my words, so I clear my throat and try again. “It’s being shared. By you. I would—if we did this, I mean—I would want you to be there. Always. If I was doing it for you, it would feel like I was doing it with you. And it would be like I’m nothing.” My voice drops. I can’t even explain to myself why that feels thrilling. “Yournothing,” I clarify as I look up at him. “To do with what you want.”
My husband leans forward. The window shows me his profile superimposed over the night. “And also my most treasured something,” he says. His voice is serious, no longer cool. “Remember, it’s only powerful if you’re the greatest gift I can give someone. If you represent all that is intimate and proximate and dear to me.”
We stare at each other a minute, his lips parted and my pulse a hot thrum, and the promise between us feels as visible as the polished chess pieces on the table. Not only about sharing, but about being nothings and being somethings.
God, I knew this was the danger of trying to seduce him, I always knew this was it.
My heart will be immolated along with everything else, the smoke not rising up to God but sinking low to the earth to coil around Mark’s feet.
