Page 42 of Bitter Burn
This isn’t corporal penance. I want to hurt myself simply to hurt myself, and here it is at last, the truth I’ve been fleeing since my mother’s funeral:
We are all alone, each of our hearts floating in its own dark and endless sea. And no one, no one, can ever get close enough to rescue you before you drown.
I list sideways, dizzy and faint with the hopeless clarity of it. The of course-ness of it. How stupid I’ve been that I ever thought otherwise.
My shoulder bumps against the inside of Mark’s knee, and I know I need to straighten myself, that a good submissive doesn’t lean and that Mark probably can’t stand the feel of me touching him right now, but I can’t seem to move myself. I can’t seem to make my muscles respond. It’s as if all the nerves threaded through my flesh have gone cold, already icing over in that endless sea.
It’s only Mark’s warm, toga-draped knee keeping me upright. But this too he allows, and not once for the rest of the night does he shift his weight or pull away.
Seventeen
Tristan
“Ice again, Ms. Beroul, so please be careful,” I say as I open the door for my new principal and then assist her down the glistening steps to the sidewalk.
Isabella Beroul wrinkles her nose at me, snowy fluff catching on her reddish-blond hair. In her wool coat, soft scarf, and perfectly applied pink lipstick, she looks adorable and also expensive, which I suppose she is as the most requested submissive at Hugo Budic’s club.
I open the door to the car waiting by the snow-dotted curb, help her inside, and then close it behind her. I take a beat to scan the area, noting the cars around us in case one follows us a little too long later, double-checking the windows and the fire escapes of the buildings around us. I see nothing suspicious, nothing to note other than how lovely the silver-stoned buildings of Old Montreal look in the snow.
“I’m so tired of winter,” Isabella sighs dramatically when I get into the car with her. She drops her head back and closes her eyes. “I wish I could hibernate for three months like a bear.”
I haven’t felt like smiling much lately, but I could almost smile at that. I’ve never met someone less likely to hibernate than Isabella. In the ten days since I’ve come here, we’ve left Armorica at least twice a day, sometimes three or four times a day, and it feels like we’re out of the club more than we’re in it. To eat, to get coffee, to shop. And even the word shop doesn’t do justice to Isabella’s habits. Isabella shops like the shops should have a safeword.
“What time do you need to be back to the club?” I ask, checking my watch. Isabella lives at Armorica, so there’s essentially no commute for her sessions, but I’ve quickly learned that the time she needs to get ready can vary substantially depending on what she’ll be doing. For Armorica’s raunchier, more public sister club on rue Sainte-Catherine, she’s glitter-painted and ready in thirty minutes. For a private session in one of Armorica’s luxurious, wainscoted playrooms, she might take more than two hours.
“Mmm, let’s say five o’clock,” she hums as the driver rolls us over the snowy cobblestones. “I have the Banker tonight, and she likes me to be extra tidy for her.”
All of Isabella’s clients are called things like that—the Banker, the Family Man, the Florist. It’s something of a custom at Armorica to defer to epithets whenever possible, I’ve noticed, a little flourish of privacy that is more about good manners than actual secrecy. Hugo is fond of manners.
It does give the flavor of tasteful discretion to everything, even Isabella’s sessions, which are far more explicitly transactional than what goes on between guests and club employees at Lyonesse. I’m not sure if it’s bribery, Hugo’s connections, or perhaps the shared protection of such high-profile clientele, but Armorica is a little more direct—in Hugo’s refined way—about what club employees will do with guests. (For a fee, of course.)
“Thank you again for coming here,” Isabella says after a moment, opening her eyes to look at me. They’re a bright gold-brown, large and fringed with thick lashes several shades darker than her hair. She has the kind of eyes that look sweet and soft in almost every light, paired with any expression. Those soft eyes are one of the many reasons why she’s the jewel of Armorica’s crown.
“It’s my honor,” I tell her. I’ve been vague about my expulsion from Lyonesse, but it hardly matters. The web of gossip between Lyonesse and Armorica is spun thickly enough that everyone already knows. “It feels nice to be helpful. And…wanted.”
She puts a hand on my knee. Her coat sleeve has pulled up enough to expose the edge of her leather glove, and underneath that, the line of a nitrile glove, the kind she wears always, even to bed. It’s a stark white against the pinky cream of her skin.
“You’re very wanted here and beyond helpful.” A shadow passes over her usually sunny face. “It’s nice not to have to look over my shoulder when I leave the club. Or to—to wake up and wonder?—”
She stops abruptly.
I put my hand over hers to let her know that she doesn’t have to finish if she doesn’t want to. I already know what she’s afraid of when she wakes up in the middle of the night. A club member who’d purchased weekly sessions with her had grown dangerously obsessed, and after a scene that left Isabella uncomfortable, Hugo permanently revoked the man’s membership and barred him from Armorica for life.
Three weeks ago, the ex-member had broken into her apartment at the club and left a disturbing note on her bathroom mirror, written in Hermès lipstick. He’d wedged a Polaroid of her sleeping into the mirror frame in case the meaning of the violation wasn’t clear enough.
Hugo shared all this with Mark, told him that he wanted additional security for Isabella. Luckily for everyone, Mark had a bodyguard he needed rid of and quickly.
That I long for my two blond criminals with a nerve-deep itch is a given; that I think of them constantly and worry about them and also resent their being together while I’m gone—that is a given too.
But even in my unhappiness, I can admit that there would have been no better exile for me. Armorica is a club fit for princes—opulent in a restrained, in-the-know way, outfitted with hand-sawn parquet floors, custom-mixed paint, and wall sconces imported from some workshop in the Cotswolds. Hugo is as genial as he is polished, and his co-owner Kayden Howell is a cheerful former soldier who’s gone out of his way to make me feel welcome, both at Armorica itself and in Montreal.
Better than the club or its owners, however, is protecting Isabella, who is so open and gladsome and wonderful and who doesn’t deserve any of what’s happening to her. It makes me feel like I’m doing something good and worthwhile, even if I know that I’m not a good or worthwhile person. Even if I can’t do good anywhere else anymore.
And maybe it makes me a stunted person, incapable of growth, but there’s a deep kind of comfort in the simplicity of the directive, just like there was with Mark in those early days. Protect Isabella while she’s outside the club, work in shifts to protect her while she’s inside it. Sleep in the spare room in her apartment in case someone tries to terrorize her again.
There are no secret engagements, no power-hungry cardinals, no shadowy organizations hoping to profit off war. No husband and wife watching me like insouciant hawks watching a rabbit hop obliviously in the grass.
I take my assignment here as seriously as I take everything—but the honesty in Hugo’s world is a goddamn relief.
