Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Romily felt herself quiver, everywhere.
As if he was still using her body as his own, personal sex toy. As if he was still inside her, using only his voice—as impossible to ignore as the plug in her ass or the clamps on her nipples.
Maybe the point was that he didn’t have to touch her, now, to make her feel the way he wanted her to feel. That all he had to do was exist.
She felt that same old electric charge seem to light her up all over again.
At the same time, there was something in her that wanted to fight it.
But even as she tensed, she remembered where she was.
She was bound. Blindfolded. There was that inescapable butt plug.
He had already fucked her mouth and licked her pussy, and yet she had no doubt that there was more in store.
Zachary never did one thing. He preferred a build. A cascade. One experience leading into the next and making it hotter and more intense. Romily knew this ride had a ways to go—and today, apparently, he thought that the intimacy should be more than physical.
There wasn’t a single part of her that wanted to tell him about her marriage.
Not one part.
Yet she wasn’t helpless in this. She wasn’t trapped . She reminded herself—as the panic began to stir in her—that all she had to do was tell him to stop.
She knew that exit strategy was available to her. It always was. She knew that he would release her immediately. And she didn’t think that if she pulled the eject button that would be the end of them, either. Romily knew Zachary well enough by now to know that he wasn’t punitive like that.
Which wasn’t to say there wouldn’t be some kind of reckoning.
She opened her mouth to do it, to say she wanted to stop—but no sound came out.
And she was so aware of him there beside her. Waiting.
No doubt studying every expression that crossed her face and every tremor that moved over her body.
Romily had no doubt that he would wait forever if he had to. She moved in her chains. She shifted her weight. Her breath was doing what it liked, and she knew he would be taking note of that too, but the panic was there and rising and —
But what it came down to was that she trusted him.
She trusted him and she proved that. Over and over again with her body. Right now her concern wasn’t the various erotic torments he was putting her through but what he wanted her to say.
Why couldn’t she put her mouth to the test as well?
If what she craved was to fully surrender to this man, to fully accept the control he exerted, because she already knew that was where she bloomed — and God, how she bloomed here—then how could she disobey him emotionally?
The whole point was that she didn’t get to decide where or how she surrendered to him. She got to say if it was too much, if she couldn’t continue, if she truly didn’t want this.
But being apprehensive and possibly even afraid of something didn’t actually mean she didn’t want to do it.
The real truth was that she was afraid of what would happen if she did.
Yet the promise he’d made to her was that all she had to do was what he told her, and it would be okay. Whatever it was, whatever they did, it would be okay.
And everything that had happened in the months they’d been together had proven that to be true.
He had never betrayed her. How could she betray him?
This time when she exhaled, she let her whole body go limp with it.
She heard his rumble of approval from beside her, because of course he knew. She wouldn’t be surprised if her struggles were obvious to him as if they danced across her skin, put into words. Or maybe tattoos like his, bold pieces of art like time stamps to mark who he had been in each moment.
“What do you want to know about my marriage?” she asked, her voice as rough as if she’d been on a sobbing jag. She felt as if she had.
“Everything,” he replied, stern and sure.
So she didn’t worry about what he might think, what it all said about her, or any of the things that normally kept her tongue inside her own mouth and her thoughts to herself.
Romily did what he wanted her to do.
Which was to give him exactly what he’d asked for.
“I was a hostess in a restaurant in San Francisco,” she told him, clearing her throat as she paged back through the set of memories she preferred not to air out unless she was in a therapy session.
But she either trusted him or she didn’t. At the end of the day it was simple, wasn’t it?
Most complicated things were, in the end.
She pushed on. “It was a pretty good job. I liked it. He was a customer and after he ate dinner that night, he waited for me to get off work asked for my number.” She sighed a little as she said that.
“That could have been creepy. I’ve looked back on that a lot, wondering what red flags I missed, but there weren’t any.
Not in the moment we met, or not any that I could have picked up.
He wasn’t rude. He was self-deprecating and charming and funny.
And so disarming. I gave him my number when he asked and he walked off, instead of getting handsy or strange or any of the other things that I thought were going to happen. ”
“Did that happen a lot?” Zachary asked.
“Enough.” Romily shrugged a little, but that made the nipple clamps sharp all over agaon and she pulled in a sharp breath. “He called about five minutes later, while I was walking home. We talked and talked.”
She shifted a little, not because she was uncomfortable—though her breasts were on fire—but because she wanted to hear the soft clank of the chains so she could remember where she was.
Not on that street in Cows Hollow. Not grinning and giddy as she walked down dark sidewalks, heedless of the danger.
Both on the streets of the city and on the other end of the phone line.
“Looking back now, all I can see are the red flags, but I didn’t see them then.” She sighed and tested her arms against the tension of her chains. “Everything was perfect. He was perfect. It was as if I’d conjured him up out of my own head, like every fairytale I never believed in as a child.”
She would have done anything in that moment tear her blindfold off and study his face, so she could see the look in his eyes.
To see if she could discern any pity. Any judgment.
Or any of the other uncomplimentary things he could be thinking or feeling—because he had to be thinking them. Romily was sure of it.
Because she had been so unforgivably stupid.
But she had no way to get the blindfold off. Maybe that was better.
“I grew up kind of rough,” she told him.
Not an excuse, but maybe an explanation.
“My parents died when I was little and the good part about that is that I don’t remember them.
I think I grieved them less than some would.
I can only grieve the idea of who they might have been for me, which is really just another fairy tale. ”
“And the bad part?” Zachary asked quietly.
“The bad part is that I was passed around from one family member to another until I was eighteen. Never really wanted. Forever a burden. It was always really clear to me that the best course of action was to stay quiet and not to all attention to myself. To hope that no one noticed me. Because when they did, that was usually when I had to bounce around until I could impose on another family member’s charity. ”
She blew out a breath, hating the memories of those years. Always shrinking herself down and trying to stay small and inobtrusive. Always having to stay sweet and obliging or she’d be accused of ingratitude. Usually being told she ungrateful anyway.
“I was happy to get away from that,” she said now.
“I left all of them as soon as I could and I never went back. I waited tables until I had enough money to move to San Francisco, because if I never see Modesto again it will be way too soon. I was twenty when I met Joseph. Or when he found me, I guess you could say.”
Romily shuddered then—and not the way she did anytime Zachary looked at her.
She felt his hand moving over her jaw. Her cheek. She pressed her face into his palm, because that was what centered her. Him.
He kept her safe. Even while she talked him through a nightmare.
“It took him six weeks,” she told him, her voice low.
“Six weeks of being the answer to every prayer I’d never dared say out loud, because who was listening?
It was a dream come true in every possible way.
I couldn’t wait to marry him. The life we had planned was better than anything I could ever have imagined. ”
It was funny, though. She couldn’t really remember what that planned fantasy life was now. Too much had happened, and then she’d left the reality of that life. Now there was Zachary. So when she looked back, all she could really access was that she’d been so sure that she and Joseph would be happy.
That everything would feel like those six weeks had. A mad rush of giddy perfection.
And today when she looked back, she discovered that she no longer hated that twenty year old girl she’d been. She no longer despaired of her, thinking she was such an idiot and so blind. It wasn’t a character flaw to trust a person who claimed they loved her.
It was on him that he never had. That it had all been a sick game.
Today, Romily just felt sorry for the version of her who had believed in someone for the first time in her life.
“We got married one day at the courthouse, just us, because that was so special. He told me he’d planned our honeymoon and it was supposed to be beyond romantic.
I was so excited.” Romily had to clear her throat again.
“But the moment we got married, things got weird. He drove us down the coast to Monterey, to a hotel he’d picked out and had been telling me about for weeks, but we didn’t talk much on the drive.
That was strange. Different. I was a little overwhelmed and still pretty giddy myself, so I thought he was too. But I was wrong.”