Page 58 of Honey Cut
The lights dim and then return, and people begin moving inside to claim their seats. We make goodbyes to the president and his wife before they are enclosed in a nest of Secret Service agents, and then we find our seats. Tristan is staying outside the theater, just by the door we’ve used to enter our box.
Mark sighs as the theater lights drop.
“I hate the opera,” he says.
twenty-one
ISOLDE
After the opera,Tristan opens the door of the Pullman limousine, and Mark and I get in. Tristan is about to close the door and go to the front passenger seat to sit next to the driver when Mark makes an impatient noise.
“Back here with us, Tristan. I won’t bite.” And then: “Well, maybe.”
Tristan’s eyes meet mine, and then he looks away as he crawls in after us. “Yes, sir.”
Tristan takes the rear-facing jump seat across from me—and I know why he did it, because even in the spacious Mercedes-Maybach, his legs and Mark’s legs would be all over each other—but it means that his shoes are nudging at the hem of my dress, and the feeling is so distracting. Because just above those shoes would be his ankles, that place where the muscle-and-bone architecture of his body is so evident, and then his calves, fleeced with dark hair. And then his knees, with those tempting spots just above and to the side, where the hair of his legs has been rubbed away, leaving only smooth skin behind.
Last night, Mark punished my backside until theairhurt it, and then he edged me with relentless fingers on my clitoris until I came with my face smashed against the leather spanking bench I’d been trussed to. I’d ached all night from how hard my core had contracted as I’d released.
I’ve been deprived of nothing, nothing at all—not punishment, not sex. Not even a pair of heavy arms around me as I sleep. But somehow Tristan’s shoes against my hem are enough to make me squirm.
I’m loathsome. To hunger when there is no famine? To crave when there is no lack?
It points to some kind of perversity in me, I think. To want the forbidden—to want to devour the kind, well-behaved man in front of me and to make him as wicked as I am. And it’s not that I want Tristanin place ofMark—it’s that Tristan is beautiful and he makes me feel less alone and here is the one line in the sand that Mark has drawn, the single thing he has made taboo.
Cheating.
And now it’s all I can think about.
Mark is reminding me that there will be people waiting for us at Lyonesse—some people from the opera, like Arjun and Evander, a visiting diplomat, a celebrity and her husband. We are taking advantage of the warm September night and hosting drinks and debauchery on the roof.
“Yes,” I say in assent to his plans, determined to stop noticing the drift of cooler air against my leg where Tristan’s shoe has pushed up my hem.
“And I think it would be a pleasantly salacious display if we walked up there and I immediately showed off your wet cunt.”
It should not be shocking after the last two weeks, after what I’ve done as his wife, but somehow it is. It could be a testament to how piously I was raised…or it could be the reason I find myself so infected with him. If I am perverse, then he is perversion itself. If I am depraved, then he is the abyssal well of sin.
It’s as ridiculous as a woman falling in love with her own incubus, but here we are.
“That would be fine,” I murmur.
Across from me, Tristan shifts in his seat, his face turned toward the window. I hate that he has to witness the things Mark does to me.
I love it too.
I could not be more reprehensible to myself sometimes.
“Wonderful,” Mark says. “Hike up your skirt and get yourself wet then.”
His words hang in the air, unequivocal, and yet I can make no sense of them. I make the mistake of looking at Tristan again, who now has his eyes closed like he’s in some kind of pain.
“I…” I clear my throat. “Here?”
“We have about ten minutes until we’re pulling up to Lyonesse.” Mark seems genuinely puzzled. “So yes. Here.”
“But—” I can’t look at Tristan again. I can’t.
Mark seems to know the source of my worry anyway. “He’ll be fine,” dismisses Mark. “It’s nothing he doesn’t see in the hall every night.”
