Bloom, p.15
Bloom, page 15
“I wanted to see you.”
“I was planning to meet you at the bar, as you know.”
“I had no reason to believe you would, especially after my behavior today.”
I say nothing. What is there to say? He did behave badly.
“Would it be so bad to get to know each other?” I finally ask.
“No,” he says. “It’s just that…I haven’t had a relationship with a woman in over five years.”
I’m not overly surprised, considering he’s already told me he only plays at the club. “Why?”
“It seems easier to just keep things…professional, you know?”
“No, I don’t know. Having sex with someone isn’t professional.”
“I didn’t mean it that way. Not like I’m having sex for money or anything. I guess a more apt term would be impersonal.”
“But how can anything that intimate be impersonal?”
“It’s a transaction. Scenes at the club for me are a way to live out my needs and help another live out hers, with nothing else between us.”
“And your partners are always okay with that?”
“Yes. We lay out our expectations beforehand.”
“What about the people like me, who you meet at the bar and then take to the club?”
“Actually…”
“Don’t tell me I’m the first. You said—”
He covers my lips with his fingers. “I know what I said. You’re not the first person I met at the bar as Phantom. And you’re not the first person I took downstairs. But you’re the first person I’ve wanted to reveal myself to.”
“I see. What made you change your mind for me?”
“I don’t know, Frankie. I wish I did. Something about you…”
“You’re attracted to me.” I give him the words.
“I think that’s pretty obvious.”
“But I assume you’re attracted to the other people you play with.”
“Of course I am. Physically.”
“So it’s more than physical for you with me?” I warm inside.
“It is, and what I can’t understand is why.”
“Here’s a thought, Hunter.” I playfully elbow him in his ribs. “Maybe you like me.”
“I do like you. I like everyone I play with. But with you, it’s…”
“It’s more. You want to get to know me.”
“Yes.”
“And what exactly is wrong with that?”
“It’s not something I do.”
“All right.” I take a drink of my wine. “Let’s lay it on the line, Hunter. Who burned you in the past?”
He goes quiet, then.
Yep. I nailed it.
“You heard my story,” I say.
“Yes, left at the altar.”
“Not quite. We didn’t make it to the altar. I can at least thank him for saving me that humiliation.”
Hunter shakes his head and swallows another sip of wine. “That’s looking at the glass half full.”
I chuckle. “That’s what Mandy, my sister, would say. She’s a glass-half-empty kind of person. I’m the opposite.” I sigh. “At least I was.”
“You still are. One bad experience doesn’t change who you are.”
I lift my eyebrows. “Oh? It doesn’t?”
Hunter doesn’t take my bait—not that I’m surprised.
“Do you think Penn would have left you at the altar if it had gone that far?” he asks.
Great. We’re still talking about Penn. “I don’t know. He said he’d been cheating on me for a year, so why did he stay with me? Why did he continue the charade of being with me? Why did he finally set a wedding date? He was obviously already cheating on me at that point.”
“I don’t know. Maybe he got cold feet.”
“No. Penn only does things if there’s something in it for him. I would have made the right kind of wife for him. Young, professional, you know.”
“And, of course, gorgeous.”
My cheeks warm. “If you say so.”
“I say so.” He takes another sip. “There must be some reason why he decided to level with you before the wedding.”
I shrug. “Maybe he fell in love with somebody else? One of his partners at the club?”
“Or maybe… Maybe someone saw him… Told him he’d better tell you.”
“Who could’ve seen him? It would have to be someone who knew him and who knew me.”
“And you don’t know anyone who goes to the club.”
“Besides you? I sure don’t.”
“Why do you think you don’t?”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying someone must have seen him there. Someone who knows you. Given what you’ve told me, it’s the only explanation that makes sense.”
My curiosity is piqued. Who do I know who goes to the club? Only Isabella, and I don’t know if she was at that particular club. Besides, if she were the one, she’d have leveled with me when she admitted to being in the lifestyle.
Doesn’t really matter.
I already know what Hunter’s doing. He’s deflected the conversation to me when we were supposed to be talking about him. How he got burned, not how I got burned.
“Nice try,” I say.
“What do you mean?”
“Getting me to talk about Penn instead of you talking about who burned you.”
Another sip of wine. “I don’t talk about that.”
“You just said you wanted to get to know me.”
“I do. And damn, that bugs the hell out of me.”
I can’t help chuckling. “You know what? I think you got burned badly. Really badly.”
He says nothing.
“You know what else? I bet it happened more than once.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I did an article a year or so ago for the magazine, all about the psychology of people who get burned by someone they care about. I recognize the signs. You could be the poster child.”
He raises his eyebrows. “So now you’re a psychologist.”
“No. I’m a magazine writer and editor who did a lot of research on this particular subject. That’s what I am, Hunter.”
“I see.”
“And you’re a professor. A learned man. A teacher. A scholar. A student of language. A student of love.”
He sets his glass down on my coffee table. “A student of love?”
“You teach literature, Hunter. What is the greatest theme in all of literature?”
He smiles, then—a big, beautiful smile.
My God, he’s handsome.
“I suppose you’re right,” he says.
I smirk. “You suppose?”
“You’re absolutely right, Frankie.”
“So you understand love, and you’ve been burned.”
“As have you.”
“We have that in common. And I still say you’ve been burned more than once.”
“All right. I’ll bite. You’re correct. I have been burned more than once. But the first one wasn’t her fault.”
“What happened?”
He clears his throat. “She died, Frankie. She died.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Hunter
I don’t talk about Allison. Not ever. It was ten years ago now, and at the time I thought she was the love of my life. I didn’t think I’d ever feel anything again.
Until I met Teresa.
She turned out to be…
Well, I don’t like to use those words.
“Tell me,” Frankie prods.
And I want to.
I want to tell her the whole damned story. Want to pour out my soul to this woman I hardly know. This woman who somehow managed to crawl under my skin and start to chip away at the cement around my heart.
And I don’t even know her. I don’t get it. This is so not me.
“Her name was Allison,” I say. “We met our first year at Mellville. Our first week, actually. We lived in the same dorm, and our eyes met during orientation.”
“Love at first sight?” she asks.
“No. More like lust at first sight. Kind of like…”
“Like you felt with me,” she says.
“Yes.”
She places her hand on my forearm. “That explains why you’re fighting it so hard. Go on.”
I close my eyes, but the images flash before me. Allison, with her reddish blond hair and light brown eyes, the spray of freckles across her nose. She wasn’t classically beautiful like Frankie is, but she had a girl-next-door quality that men found irresistible. She was pursued by several upperclassmen, but for some reason, she chose me.
“She was smart, and we shared a lot of interests,” I say.
“And…?”
“We were friends first. For about two months, but I was falling hard, and one day I took a chance. I kissed her.”
“And she kissed you back.”
“Yeah. It turned out she felt the same way. She had been dating this upperclassman, and I was so jealous.”
“So she dumped him for you?”
“She did, and we were together for the next six years.”
“What happened?”
“Car accident,” I say matter-of-factly. “She died instantly, which I was thankful for. I mean, later. At first, I wasn’t thankful for anything.”
Frankie pauses. “I’m so sorry. Did you have any plans to get married?”
“We had just set a date. I hadn’t bought the ring yet, though.”
“And did she…share your proclivities?”
I nod. “She did.”
“Did you ever take her to the club?”
“The club didn’t exist at that time. It’s only about six years old. And I didn’t belong to any club back then.”
“So how did you…”
“At home. In our bedroom.”
“So you lived together.”
“We did, since our junior year of college.”
“I’m so sorry, Hunter.”
“I’ve made my peace with it,” I say.
The words are true. If Allison had lived, we’d probably still be together. But she didn’t live. I mourned for nearly a year, until I decided it was time to move on. With the help of a therapist, I did.
“So who’s the next one who burned you?” Frankie asks. “Or I should say, the one who burned you. Because with Allison, it wasn’t her fault.”
“No, it wasn’t Allison’s fault, but that didn’t make it hurt any less. Didn’t make it any easier to go forward and try to find a new relationship.”
“But you did,” she says, “because you said you were burned more than once.”
“I did. I figured, what were the chances of me losing another woman I love to a freak accident?”
“Pretty low.”
“Exactly, and call me naive, but because what Allison and I had was so special, I never imagined…”
“You never imagined that a person you loved could turn out to be something different.”
I nod.
I don’t feel any words are necessary.
Frankie and I both know what we’re talking about.
My relationship with Teresa nearly cost me my sanity.
After that, I began masking myself and going to a club. Playing only with submissives who wanted what I want, without a relationship of any kind.
“It’s still difficult to talk about,” I say.
“I’m curious,” she admits, “but if you can’t talk about it, Hunter, I understand.”
“Maybe if you told me a little about you and Penn.”
“Penn and I were together for nearly six years. We were on-again, off-again so often. We actually met at Mellville as well. We didn’t get together until our senior year. He’s a trust-fund baby. He never cared about his studies. He was kind of a bad boy, and, well…I was a good girl, so that attracted me.” She looks down at her lap. “Plus his trust fund didn’t hurt.”
I suppose at some point I need to tell her I have a trust fund of my own. Not yet, though. “College professors aren’t exactly overpaid.”
She grins. “You don’t think I’m after your money, do you?”
“I know you’re not.”
She laughs then, and it’s a joyful sound. A sound that makes me feel happy inside. Like I want to hear that laugh every day.
“But that’s the thing about Penn,” she continues. “He was nothing like what I thought he’d be. He had this bad-boy reputation, but he wasn’t a bad boy. He was a dick but not a bad boy. I can’t believe I actually saw him at the club, because, like I said, all he was into was the purest vanilla sex.”
“And that wasn’t enough for you?”
“I pretended like it was. I pretended a lot of things with Penn. I kind of fell into a routine, and part of it was great. It was great being able to go to the most expensive places in town, to have him buy me lavish gifts. But we fought a lot. He’d say something stupid, and I’d walk out on him. A few weeks later he’d come back, and I’d forgive him. It was horribly codependent. Not healthy at all.”
“Then maybe it’s good that he came to you and confessed that he was cheating, so you could break the engagement.”
“Oh, absolutely. I should’ve ended things with him years ago. But you just get used to the bad parts, you know?”
I know more than she knows.
That was part of the problem with Teresa. We had an intense physical chemistry, and I mistook that for something deeper.
Something deeper that she apparently never felt.
I thought I could replicate what I had with Allison. That it would be the same, just with a different person.
I learned it’s never the same.
“Anyway,” Frankie continues, “I learned a lot. Wasted five years of my life along the way.”
“Time is never wasted if you learn something,” I tell her.
It took me a long time to realize that myself.
But what I did learn was that I could never reproduce what Allison and I had, so I was no longer going to try. I’d find a place where I could satisfy my sexual desires without commitment, without a relationship of any kind. Where I didn’t have to reveal anything more about myself than what I wanted in a scene.
And I found it.
I found Black Rose Underground.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Frankie
“Sounds like we’re in kind of the same boat,” I say. “You had Allison and then your next relationship, and that’s it. I’ve pretty much only had Penn. I dated a little bit in high school and in college, but I never had anything serious. Penn was the first guy I said ‘I love you’ to. And the last.”
“I’ve only said it twice,” Hunter says.
“To Allison…and the other one.”
“Teresa.”
I resist widening my eyes. This is a big step for him already—I can tell. He said her name to me. For a man who wanted to keep himself masked, he’s revealed more than I ever thought he would.
“She’s the one I never talk about,” he says.
Curiosity is of course gnawing at me, but he’s already disclosed so much. This is a man who normally disguises himself to hide who he is from his sexual partners.
“Tell me something, Hunter,” I say. “If I hadn’t recognized you in the coffee shop, would you be telling me all of this now?”
He pauses…clearly thinking. Then, “No.”
“Why? You’ve already said you’re developing feelings for me.”
“I am. And I’ve been fighting them, Frankie.”
“Then why? Why did you come here? Why did you send me that email? You could’ve walked away.”
“True. And I probably should have.”
“How can you say that? After all you just shared with me. After all I’ve shared with you.”
“Maybe I’m having second thoughts.”
“Are you really?” My heart drops.
He sighs and finishes his glass of wine. “Actually, Frankie, I’m not. I’m not having second thoughts at all. I want to tell you everything. I want to tell you the hell Teresa put me through and the reason I stopped seeing women with the goal of having a relationship. Hell, I want to tell you what my favorite flavor of ice cream is. And it’s driving me to the brink of madness.”
I want to smile. A great big smile. But I don’t. Because even though he wants these things, he’s not happy about wanting them. I’m trying to understand, but I just don’t.
“My favorite ice cream is vanilla,” I offer. “Would you like some more wine?”
He shakes his head.
“A glass of water, maybe?”
He nods, so I rise, pad over to my tiny kitchen, and get a glass of water from the faucet. I return and hand it to him.
He downs almost all of it in one gulp.
“You okay?”
He sets the glass down on the table as if he’s just taken a shot. “I’m so far from okay. I mean… Hell, I don’t know what I mean.”
My God. That woman—Teresa—must’ve done a real number on him. Is it possible she was worse than Penn?
“We don’t have to talk, you know,” I say. “There are…other things we could do.”
He widens his eyes a bit, and then he scans my small apartment. “I don’t see any toys here.”
“Do we need toys, Hunter?”
“My God,” he says. “I want to say no, we don’t.”
“Then say it.”
“But that would mean…”
“That would mean regular old sex, Hunter. And you’ve trained yourself to think that’s not what you want anymore.”
“It’s usually not.”
“And…”
“I want it now, Frankie.” His eyes narrow, darken. “I desperately want to fuck you, and I don’t care if you’re tied up. I don’t care if you’re gagged. I don’t care if I don’t get to spank that sweet little ass of yours. All I care about is getting my dick inside you. That’s all I care about in this single moment.”
