Page 54 of Honey Cut
But it’s not nothing to me. I walk over to him and kiss him on the cheek.
His chest lifts and then falls. Slowly.
“Thank you,” I say.
His reply is matter-of-fact. “The chessboard is better.”
* * *
A week passes.
In the mornings I wake in Mark’s bed, his arms around me, the scent of rain and stone and man hanging in the air. I watch the water of the rooftop pool wave and refract until I can convince myself to leave the heavy warmth of his embrace.
That first morning I reached for the tempting bar of his erection, thinking him asleep, half asleep myself, and had my wrist snatched quickly enough to make me gasp. I’d looked up into his face to see a narrow sliver of blue under thick lashes.
“We said a month, Isolde,” he’d said, still holding on to my wrist.
“A month.”
“And even then, it would be a very daring submissive who fondled their owner in their sleep.”
“What would happen to them?” I whispered. The pressure on my wrist was hypnotizing, as was the water-strained light coming in from the room’s ceiling.
His eyes hooded even more, blue slits, dangerous, dangerous. “Anything the owner wanted to happen.”
He let go of my wrist and then rolled away. When he got up to walk to the shower, his dick was a thick, angry jut in front of him, casting a shadow along with the rest of him. He didn’t look back at me.
And that was how we woke up together for the first time.
In the mornings after I wake, I go down to the garden. There is a fountain under a long-limbed cherry tree, the kind of place that feels wonderfully private. The leafy branches stretch and droop nearly to the stone flags and lush lawn; just beyond the tree is one of the garden walls, black stone cloaked with ivy and other greenery. The garden is made up of pockets of green and stone, each one like a cloister, like a child’s fort, and by the time you get back to the fountain and the little stream leading to it, it’s like you’ve disappeared from Lyonesse. From DC altogether.
I pray there. I kneel on the grass, even as I look longingly at the stone flags that would bruise my knees. I keep my shirt on and my hands in my lap, even though there is an entire building full of floggers just a short walk away and I could whip my own back until I bled if I wanted. I wrap myself in a thick blanket when the mornings are cool, even though I could shiver and ache in the morning chill.
But my body is needed for my marriage now, for the performance that Mark and I sell night after night out in the hall, and showing up with bruises and marks he didn’t give me would hardly help.
And—I can admit this to myself only halfway, only when I think God can’t see—the urge to hurt myself when I pray, toatone, is fading.
Someone else is punishing me now, and it feels just as good as when I did it to myself. Maybe better.
I pretend that it’s because this marriage is ultimately in service to the Church, to my work.That’swhy the pain feels so good, because it’s still for God. It’s just Mark’s hands delivering God’s will now rather than my own, that’s all.
I train in my new studio until it’s time to shower and get to my office, where I write up assessments of artifacts and artworks and wait for the Scales to assign another job to me.
In the evening, I eat dinner with Mark on the rooftop or in the leather and wood restaurant at Lyonesse. Twice we go into the city for dinner, eating with people of business or diplomacy, and it’s more effortless than I would have thought, being on Mark’s arm for such things. But I speak the language of influence and money, and I know the choreography by heart.
Afterward, there is the hall or a playroom or, once, a party on the roof, where guests swam and drank and Mark had me wear nipple clamps under my swimsuit. That same diabolical white suit from the yacht that shows everything when wet—my navel, my cunt. And especially my clamped nipples.
I’m not fucked every night, but even if I’m not fucked, I’m played with, I’m edged, I’m manhandled like a pet until lust is an anchor in my stomach, chained to my clitoris. By the end of some nights, I’m so wound up that I’m begging Mark to let me come, to touch me, to let me touch myself.
It’s always a mistake. It’s like a gazelle asking a lion not to eat her. It only sweetens the hunt.
During the day, Tristan is with Mark, shadowing him at lunches and meetings, keeping an extra-vigilant eye on his every move. Dinah tells me that the security team as a whole has been jumpier since the stabbing—Mark had to tell Goran to stop following him to the bathroom while Tristan was away—but the paranoia seems justified to my admittedly violent mind. Drobny is still in the wind, after all, and there’s no reason to think he won’t try to kill Mark again.
In the evenings, we are all together in the club, and Tristan is no less vigilant but perhaps more confident in the place where he knows every sight line and every secure stairwell. He stands behind Mark’s chair or on the rooftop in a discreet corner, watching the revelry unfold. Sometimes outside a playroom, where I know he can hear my whimpers and cries.
He tries his best to hide his feelings; I honestly think he succeeds with almost everyone who happens to look at him. He hasn’t been in the military his entire adult life for nothing.
But I see the bloodless skin around the corners of his full mouth, the quick blink of those bright eyes. The long lift and descent of his throat.
