Forty-One
DALTON
“I could get used to this,” I announce when the most glorious sight on Earth greets me at my door. Essie is waiting with her hands clasped behind her back. Her expression is placid, almost serene, and I don’t even bother taking off my coat before I draw her into my arms. Our kiss is chaste but eager, and her mouth is hot against mine. I linger, indulging in the sensation of her hand curling around the back of my neck and sliding under my shirt collar to find my skin.
“I want to try something if you’re willing,” she mentions when we separate.
Something? Sick. Last time Essie wanted to try something, I fucked her down with her butt on my couch and her head on the floor. Ten out of ten—can absolutely recommend.
“I’m game,” I agree, grabbing a fistful of her dress and hiking up her short skirt.
“You don’t even know what it is.”
“Don’t care. I’m game.”
Her expression is skeptical. “I’d be more flattered by your eagerness, but you once let Everett practice-paint your nails black before he did Cora’s, so I strongly suspect you’re game for anything.” She goes to the kitchen table. “Come here, Daddy.”
When I take a seat, she finally shows me what was behind her back: a pair of handcuffs.
“Let’s fucking go ,” I murmur, watching the silver chain unfurl when Essie drops one end. “I’m so into that.”
“I knew you would be.”
I spread my legs—lap dance position. But Essie doesn’t straddle me when she cuffs my wrist to one of the chair arms. And after she takes a second pair of cuffs from the pocket of her sweater and binds me to the other arm, she takes an emphatic step away instead of getting into my lap and bouncing on that dick.
Or, like, taking out her boobs.
Huh. I am decidedly less into this now.
Essie’s expression is still serene on some level, but determined. Her pupils dance as she takes in my features, studying me not with scrutiny, but more like admiration. She bows, cups my cheeks with her hands, and says, “I have to tell you something.”
“So you’re not going to take your tits out?”
“…My tits ? For fuck’s sake. This is important.”
“So are your ti—”
“Weston Hannington is blackmailing me. He knows I’m a camgirl, he knows you’re with me, and he says he’ll tell everyone at Hannington-Hale unless I fuck him.”
I think my heart has stopped.
This one time in business school, I had to pull an all-nighter to finish a project because I had gotten super into the New York Times crossword puzzle and basically did only that for two weeks. At the time, I was sharing an apartment with Lander and Everett while they were in law school, and Everett kept this stack of National Geographic magazines in our bathroom. That night, during a three am bathroom break, I was certain I was going to pass out if I didn’t focus on something while I was taking care of business, so I picked a random Nat Geo and read this article on volcanoes.
Most of Earth’s volcanoes exist at the meeting point between two tectonic plates, which are basically the Earth’s crust. Normally, tectonic plates are perfectly-fitted jigsaw pieces, but from time to time, they move. When this happens, one slides under the other, a bunch of magma escapes, and a volcano forms.
Could have been the Adderall talking, but twenty-five-year-old Dalton thought the formation of volcanoes was profound as shit.
Essie and I are tectonic plates. We fit perfectly, but in those rare moments when one of us is out of place, I am a goddamn volcano. I am sweltering lakes of magma and plumes of toxic ash and lethal showers of sulfuric acid. I’m uncontrollable pressure and species-ending heat. I am cataclysmic .
When I try to speak, the only thing I can manage is, “The fuck did you say,” and the words are fragments tied up in the tight clench of my jaw.
“He’s blackmailing me,” Essie states as she caresses the peak of my cheekbone with her thumb.
I jerk against the handcuffs, making them dig into my skin. My muscles strain, the chair’s wooden arms creak, and now it’s abundantly clear why Essie restrained me.
“Let me out,” I grit.
She shakes her head.
“Essie.” I rattle my chains. “Baby. You have to let me out.”
“Nope.”
“You think I’ve never broken a chair? Me ?”
“Calm down,” she replies before she finally climbs into my lap. Her weight settles on me, light and familiar, and the scent of her flowery perfume surrounds me. Her hands return to my cheeks, and she tilts my face up. “Keep looking at me,” she instructs.
“I’m looking.”
“No, your eyes are darting around like you’re already envisioning the kill room you’re going to build. Look at me.”
I look at her. I focus on the deep umber of her eyes, the notes of gold in her skin, and the subtle touches of cherry in her long brown hair. When she rests her forehead against mine, I shut my eyes.
Essie’s hands splay flat on my chest, palms to pectorals. “Breathe,” she murmurs.
Inhale. Exhale.
“Again.”
Inhale. Exhale.
“One more for me, Daddy.”
Inhale. Exhale.
When she pulls back, I open my eyes.
As I learned from Nat Geo, after an eruption, the area destroyed by the volcano doesn’t simply descend into a desolate wasteland of smoke and ash and ruined dirt. On the contrary, the land actually comes back more fertile than before. New ecosystems thrive with the minerals from the eruption, and more often than not, the first thing to grow in the aftermath is moss.
Moss.
It may seem unlikely that something so soft and small and green could flourish in the harshest environments, but it’s true. And not only does moss thrive, but it also prepares the land to grow back better and richer than ever.
I may be the volcano, but Essie is the moss and the ferns and lichens.
Her hands—hands that have touched every part of my body—go from my chest to my pants. She takes them off. For a hot second, I think she’s going to ride the residual rage out of me…but she doesn’t unleash my cock.
Instead, she undoes the buttons on my shirt.
Her fingertips skim my abdomen, tracing the defined lines until her eyes connect with mine. “Weston saw these,” she explains. “When he saw you shirtless at the party, he recognized your tattoos from my camming page.”
“Damn.” I bite down and clench my teeth, releasing a frustrated exhalation. “ God damn it. Are you mad at me?”
She’s still tracing the lines of my X tattoo. “To be honest, I should have known your insatiable urge to intimidate him with your abs would be our downfall.”
“I’m so sorry—”
“Don’t,” she warns, tapping her fingertip against my lips. “You’re chaos embodied, and I’ve known it since day one. I wouldn’t have you any other way. Do you understand me?”
I nod.
Her hand travels to my thigh. “I knew you were downplaying your tattoos when you said they were drunken whims. Underestimation is your thing—and mine too. But you wouldn’t give just anything a place on your body forever.” She moves her finger over the roots of the treehouse. “This one is for you. It’s the place where you felt safest.” A smile emerges on her lips. “Knowing how sacred your treehouse is, I should feel bad about getting off on this tattoo.”
“Don’t. If it were sacred, I wouldn’t have fisted you in it.”
Now Essie laughs fully. “Maybe that makes it the most sacred place of all.”
“Definitely,” I agree.
Her hand moves to the tattoo on my lower right side. “This one is for Lander and Everett,” she continues, streaking her finger over the coordinates above my scar. “It’s Lander’s home in St. Michaels.”
“When I was eighteen, I had an emergency appendectomy on the day we were supposed to go on a graduation trip to Rome. They skipped the trip to stay with me—didn’t even hesitate. Lander drove us to St. Michaels, and we spent the week while I recovered.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. They love you so much, Dalt.” She flattens her hand over the tattoo. “I’m glad you’ve always had them.”
“I feel the same about Valeria and Cora when it comes to you.”
Essie nods in understanding before her hand goes to the flowers on my ribs. “This one is for your mom. It took me a while to solve, but when we were at the party, Everett was telling me the names of the plants in the backyard and mentioned how many hawthorn trees there are. Your mother was Alyssa Hawthorn before she married Frank. These are hawthorn flowers.”
“And she’s our mom,” I reply—and Essie smiles.
“And lastly, this one.” Her fingertip taps the X on my heart. “This one is for me.”
She’s right.
“The night our parents got engaged, we sat there.” She glances at my living room. “You drank a lot. I watched. Then, you got sleepy, so I brought you back to your room and tucked you in. I figured you were asleep, so I kissed you—” She traces the two lines inked into my chest. “—right here. I didn’t know you were awake. Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Because I would have told you I loved you that night.”
Essie takes a deep breath. “X marks the spot?”
“X for Emerald X,” I respond, speaking softly.
Essie exhales. Her eyes have gone glossy. Before I can speak, she kisses my tattoo, my collarbone, my neck—anything she can reach. Her mouth eventually finds mine, and after the purest and most tender kiss of my life, her lips—those lips I waited two years to kiss—utter the words, “I love you, Dalton Cavendish.”
I close my eyes, letting the words sink in. I’ve waited so long to hear her say them. Even when I knew, even when I inherently understood how Essie felt, I wanted the words. I wanted to memorize them like I memorize everything I hear.
I love you, Dalton Cavendish.
“I love you deeply, profoundly, and far beyond what I knew was possible,” she continues. “I’m going to uncuff you, but before I do, I’m going to promise you I will destroy Weston’s life. I know the full-time offer isn’t happening, and I’m fine. I’m still going to make him so pathetically sorry he ever crossed paths with me. Remember that when I uncuff you.”
It takes me a beat to realize my jaw has lowered.
Everything about Essie impresses me, but one things stands out. It’s not her unerring loyalty. It’s not how unbelievably talented she is at coding, and banking, and camming—and all these things I didn’t know a single person could be good at. It’s not her work ethic, or ambition, or her unflappability. It’s not even that she’s indescribably gorgeous.
It’s that she’s so goddamn ruthless. She may even scare me a little—and god, I respect it.
“I’m so in love with you, Essie. I don’t know where this feeling ends. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe this is it.”
Essie is nodding as I speak. “That feeling in your veins. It’s everywhere, isn’t it?”
I nod too. “It’s brilliant, right?”
“It’s everything,” she agrees, beaming. “So, you’re with me?”
“Doubt you need my help, but I am. Always.”
“Well, you’re right. I could pull his banking information and frame him for wire fraud or even insider trading—”
“So hot, babe.”
“—but I think I can do better.”
“Better than twenty years in a federal prison?”
Essie’s brow rises. “I’m not at all surprised you know the penalty for insider trading off the top of your head,” she says as my front door opens to reveal Lander, Valeria, Everett, and Cora…
…and I’m still in my underwear, handcuffed to a chair, with my girlfriend in my lap.
Normal. So normal. Just a regular Monday night with this friend group, frankly.
“I called reinforcements,” Essie explains.
Cora’s expression is equal parts amused and intrigued. “You two are legitimately too horny to function.”
“We function perfectly,” Essie declares before facing me. “I can’t think of a better team.”
“And I’m not cuffed for fun. It’s for restraint,” I clarify. “But I’ll add: I’m very into this.”
“Restraint?” Valeria asks as she walks two bottles of wine to my counter.
“We’re going to murder someone,” I announce. “And Everett is going to help me bury the body.”
In a move that surprises nobody, Lander frowns. “Wait. Just Everett?” His blue eyes narrow, and he murmurs, “You two love to exclude me.”
I sigh. “Everett knows the woods, Lander.”
Everett scoffs and heads into the kitchen, where he takes the wine opener out of a drawer. “I’m not helping you hide a body in the woods,” he says as he cuts the foil from a bottle. “We should dump it in the Chesapeake Bay.”
And before I can respond, Lander grabs a bottle of whiskey off the bar and takes an enormous—possibly life threatening—gulp. Slamming the bottle down, he grins, wipes the back of his mouth with his hand, and declares, “Payback, fuckface.”
I genuinely have no clue what he’s talking about, but he’s smirking like he just taught a masterclass in the art of revenge, so I shrug. “Yeah, you win, Lan.”
Lander’s expression brightens. “Baby, hear that? We’re even for the graham crackers.”
Valeria stares at him longer than normal, sighs, and faces Essie. “Anyway, you should do Operation Frame Game.”
“What’s that?”
“This guy I went on a date with once stole my credit card. Essie found his mother and mailed her framed photos of his sexts,” Cora answers, waving her hand like it’s nothing. “It’s a great plan B, but hear me out: Hofbr?uhaus Guy.”
“Oh, I love the idea,” Essie muses, biting her lip. “That was fun .”
“Who is he?” I demand. “Am I going to have to kill him too?”
“Two and a half years ago, this guy at the Hofbr?uhaus in Munich spilled an entire liter of beer on me, so Essie posted his picture online with a bounty saying anyone who could find him and pour a liter of beer on him would get a hundred euros,” Valeria explains. “The guy was drenched within fourteen minutes.”
“Wait…how many men have you ruined?”
“Not enough,” Essie muses. “But those are random men we’ll never see again. Weston pretended to care. He made me trust him. Worst of all, he threatened you.”
“That’s not the worst part.”
“For me it is,” she replies, locking her eyes on mine, “because I’m many things, but first and foremost, I’m an eldest daughter. ”
I look over at our four best friends. None of them seems surprised. For the past two years, every delicious vengeance scheme they’ve carried out has depended heavily on Essie and her refined mercilessness.
“What’s your plan?”
“I need help,” she admits—possibly for the first time in her life. She looks over her shoulder. “Cora, I take it you’re comfortable if I use your condo.”
“I’d share anything with you except for Everett,” she replies before she faces and appraises him for a beat. “Actually...”
Laughing, Essie faces Valeria. “I’d love it if you could help me plan out a scene.”
Her eyebrow rises. “I’m interested.”
Finally, Essie faces me. “And you’ll help me with the most important part—if you’re in.”
“Every new day is the day I love you most. Ask me to do anything. The answer is always yes.”
Her smile is going to wreck me for the next sixty years—I know it. “Good. Because for this to work, I need you around when I invite Weston over.”
“You’re inviting that jizz depot over? To do what?”
Essie kisses me. When she pulls back, she gazes into my eyes. And in that sweet and melodic voice of hers, she says, “I’m going to invite him over to fuck me.”