14. Hailey
I slip the envelope from my bag on my lap and hold it for the thousandth time in three weeks and five days. My gaze studies every last detail from the thick cream paper to the name scrawled on the front in handwritten letters. The name is mine. I’d seen my name written a hundred thousand times in my life, but this one is different. It strikes a chord like never before.
“Ms. Crouther will see you now,” Tonya, Astor’s assistant, chirps from behind the computer she’s clacking away on. I guess she does actual assistant duties beyond answering the phone when the mood strikes. Yet I wouldn’t trade Nat for the world.
I stand and hold the envelope close to my chest as I hurry into Astor’s richly decorated office. Where mine is warm and minimal, hers is reviving. She looks up at me from behind her desk with the biggest grin contorting her face.
“You trying out for the next Joker movie or what?”
“No.” She rounds the heavy oak furniture and waves me to the couch against the far wall, as though we haven’t a moment to spare. “I’m just thrilled that you’re here again. You usually do anything to get out of an in-person meeting, and you’ve been here three times in the past two weeks. Now, four.”
She sits in a tufted maroon chair, and I plop myself onto the cushy couch old-school-therapy style, lying and staring up at the ceiling.
“Do you want to take your coat off? Set your bag down?”
I shake my head and hug them close to me with the envelope still in my hand.
“What’s up, Hail?”
“I figured out who donated the million dollars.” I glare at a slight imperfection in the plasterwork above me.
“Oh my gosh.” She scoots to the edge of her seat. “Who is it?”
“I don’t know.” I shove my unusually heavy and large bag off my belly and onto the floor and stare at the envelope.
“Um, you realize that doesn’t make sense, right?” Her voice goes up in a bit of a panic at the end.
“Fully aware.”
“Good.” She wraps a hand around her pretty neck, flops one leg over the other, and leans heavily on one armrest. “Explain.”
I open the envelope and pull the note from inside it. Once more, the ink is dark and rich and the letters slice across the page in a perfectly straight line, only this one isn’t one row after another in perfect form. It’s just one row. Four simple, yet stunning words.
I whisper the words where Astor can’t hear them, much like I’ve whispered them to myself time and again over the past five days and nights.
“I’m not a clairvoyant, Hailey.”
“This past Friday, I went to Crave again.” I give her time to input, to berate me for going back after what happened last time. She remains dutifully quiet. “I only went because I was able to match with my option one.”
“What prompted you to go?”
I make a bubble with my mouth, then slowly blubber it out. “It was work-related.” Again, she’s quiet, waiting for me to expand. We don’t talk about our clients, per se, but we’ll talk about situations should the need arise. “I overstepped a little.” I shrug at the sky.
“You never overstep.” Astor gasps.
“I know.”
“I overstep all the time. It’s a hard job to keep firm boundaries in place, especially with clients you’ve known for a while and have a ton invested in.”
“It’s a new client. Right before Matt…” I don’t have to elaborate.
“What is it about this client that makes your extremely impenetrable walls come down?”
“Lower. Not come down.” I correct. She doesn’t take the bait. “They’re unique and intriguing.”
“Not to the point of?—”
“No,” I snap. “I would never risk my license.” My head jerks in her direction, and her hands go up. “I just said something I shouldn’t have, and he left.”
Fuck! I said he.
“Does he remind you of Matt?” Of course, she picked up on it.
“Not in the least.”
“Okay. Did his walking away make you feel like you messed up, like you felt with Matt?”
“No.” I shake my head and look back at the ceiling. “I just felt… I felt deeper than I have, maybe ever, and definitely since I was a kid, and it shook me.”
“What did you feel?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sure you do.”
I snarl, even curl my lips. It doesn’t faze Astor. “I felt connected. Like I finally met someone as uniquely fucked up as me and that maybe I could help him and that maybe he could help me.”
“These are good feelings, Hail.”
“They don’t feel good. They feel scary as fuck, which is why I ended up at Crave after swearing it off again.”
“And what happened at Crave?”
I lost my fucking mind.
Using the envelope, I tick off one finger at a time. “First, I lost my shit because he took unusually long to come into the room. The blindfold started to feel claustrophobic again, which, as you know, is a new development.”
“What’d you do?”
“I ripped my clothes off and tossed them around the room like a maniac.” I tick another finger off. “Then I let him tie me to the bed?—”
“Not the bench?”
“You’re as shocked as I am.”
“Face up,” I add. Astor makes a gargled sound but muffles it with her hand. “Then I came, multiple times, facing him.”
“Hailey?” she breathes.
I hold up my hand. “It gets worse.” I draw a deep breath and let it out slowly. I can still feel his hands on my breasts. His heat so close. His weight hanging on the precipice of my body. “I asked him to take off my blindfold.”
“You mean better?” she corrects.
I blow a heavy breath through my lips and shrug.
“What made that night so different?”
“I don’t know.” Yes, I do. “He was different. For more than a year, it’s been the same. I’m strapped in by my concierge. Then I’m pleasured, fucked, left. It took a long time for me to care who was doing the pleasuring, fucking, and leaving.”
And now it matters too much.
“Last time I was with him, he pushed his boundaries. He asked that I be standing. He undressed me, mostly. He strapped me in. He fucked me harder than ever before.”
“Whew!” Astor fans herself with a notepad.
“This time…” I remember his words, whispered, and somehow so familiar. They were soothing in a way that I’ve never known.
“Yes?” she prompts.
“He was himself, but so different too. He was so open, talking and touching me in ways he never has.” I cover my chest, where he’d touched me, though I can’t feel my skin through all the layers. “And I responded in a way I never have.”
“How so?”
“It was the best sex of my life and he didn’t even put his fat cock in me.”
“Jeeezus, Hail.”
“Mary and Joseph too,” I agree. “Have you ever had a nipple orgasm?”
Astor’s notepad fan stops moving. “Is that even possible?”
“Yes, though I’d never had one until Friday night.”
The notepad hits the coffee table with an unholy smack. My gaze finds Astor, and her mouth hangs agog. “I know."
“Would you mind terribly if I find this man and marry him?”
Intellectually, I know she’s joking, yet a dark, devilish energy washes over me. It’s heavy and rage-filled. It’s jealousy. It’s possession.
“Whoa!” Both her hands shoot up. “I was just kidding, Hail. He’s all yours.” Her pretty Afro shakes. “I can’t do the sub thing. I like being on top too much.” She winks.
“I don’t even know this man.”
“If you believe that, then how do you explain all those extreme emotions that just turned your pretty face into a velociraptor’s?”
I want to kick my legs and scream, not at the top of my lungs, but just a good long belt.
“New emotions are great. They mean you’re growing; you’re evolving.”
“Like a Pokémon?”
“Like a non-traumatized person does when they’re young.”
“I can’t imagine going through this along with puberty.”
“It’s why teenagers are the worst.” She leans back in her seat. “I think this new development is fucking amazing.”
“It’s weird,” I counter. “But it doesn’t matter. Nothing will come of it. It’s not the point anyway.” I breathe to continue, but she cuts me off.
“What if there was a way? Would you want to get to know this man on a more intimate level?”
“He’s had anal beads stuffed so far inside me they tickled my belly button, Astor.” I pin her with a sweet glare. “What’s more intimate than that?”
She glares back. It’s not sweet. “You know, Dr. Fitzpatrick.”
I do .
I bite my bottom lip. I shouldn’t have thought about it. About him. But he’s all I’ve been thinking about for the past five days. Nope, that’s not exactly true. I’ve been thinking about him, and I’ve been thinking about Mr. Judge and his mysterious eyes and his big fucking hand around mine.
Go figure, I don’t give a shit about any guy, and wham, I’m fucked in the head over two.
“Hail?”
“Huh?” I don’t bother looking at her, afraid she’ll see the guilt and total confusion in my eyes.
“The sheer fact that you’re giving it thought is a huge milestone.” Her tone is soft and kind. It hurts. It hurts because it’s true.
“We should drink to it.” I sit up. “Let’s go.” The moment my feet hit the ground, I move to stand.
“Not so fast.” Astor settles me with an open palm. “You asked him to take the blindfold off.” Her eyes are alight. They sparkle in the light of the day. “Did he?”
I lean forward and hand her the envelope with the note beside it. “After the concierge untied me, she said he left this for me.”
She plucks it from my fingers as though it’s a winning lottery ticket. Her glimmering eyes narrow on the note for a beat and then go wide. They narrow once more and then bloat as much as alive eyes can. “Holy shit!”
“Yep, holy shit.”
Next Time, I promise
“Next time, I promise.” She reads the words he wrote for me. As if I hadn’t tattooed them onto the roof of my mouth by saying them so often.
This note is written on the same exquisite paper used for the first note. Its ink is the same rich, deep color as the first. The strokes are sure and steady just like the first.
“He wants to take a step with you. He wants to be vulnerable with you. And he’s the one who donated the money in Matt’s name.”
I stand and hold out my hand for the note. “Ready for that drink now?”
“Yeah.” She gasps. “Maybe more than one.”
“Same.”