Chapter 39 Eight
Eight
It was three-twenty in the morning, and Shay was almost ready to lock up the club. It had been a late night.
“Lose something?” Rory asked, standing in the doorway of Shay’s office.
“The jury’s out,” Shay said. Emma might have been lost. Or not.
Rory strode in. “Want a drink?”
“Nah.”
“You think she’ll try to come back?” Rory asked, dropping onto the couch.
“Despite the push you gave her toward the door, you mean?” Shay asked with a smile.
“I didn’t push her anywhere.”
“You were rough around the edges with her and let her believe you’re rough around the edges with Kate.”
“I am rough with Kate.”
“Because Kate likes you to be rough with Kate. Outside the club, where Emma’s been until tonight, most of the time if a guy acts like a bastard, a girl puts up with it because she has to. She’s not getting off on it. She stays because there’s something about the guy she likes.”
“Like how hard he can make her come?” Rory said, smirking.
Shay smiled. “If she’s lucky, which she usually isn’t out there.
All I’m saying is that I remember when Kate was in training and someone I know did scenes with her—not easy ones, I’m not saying you didn’t put her through the paces—but when the scene was done…
Three hours of aftercare, Rory? After a punishment that only lasted twelve minutes? ”
“She gets deep into the zone, and after, she’s prone to sub-drop.”
“Yeah, but three hours of aftercare?” Shay said with a laugh.
“Hey, you wanted her and you got her. Nothing wrong with that. I’m just saying, you know what it’s like when a girl wants something she doesn’t think she should want.
And worries she’ll be judged by outsiders.
Hell, that struggle’s not even unique to submissives.
Most of us have been there at some point.
The struggle of wanting a BDSM lifestyle, but wishing we didn’t because a vanilla life would be so much less complicated. Remember that?”
Rory shrugged.
“When Kate first arrived on the scene, didn’t you help her navigate her relationships with her roommates and her family? That’s what she says. According to her, you help her through everything that happens outside the club.”
Rory got up and poured himself a drink. “There’s a decade difference in our ages and a big gap between what we’ve experienced in our lives. She’s innocent and sensitive. So, when she needs to be babied, I baby her. Maybe I get carried away with it from time to time, but that’s just the way it is.”
“Carried away?” Shay raised his brows in question.
“I was thinking about when she was in the hospital with a kidney infection. The nurses wanted to throw my ass out of there. ‘Kate needs another blanket. Where the hell is the pain shot Katie was supposed to get nine minutes ago? Get the doctor on the phone so he can explain why I can’t give her French fries if that’s what she wants.
You think I don’t know she’s been vomiting?
I’ve been here with her for fourteen hours.
She says she feels better, and she wants fries. ’” Rory laughed.
“Yeah, what happened that night? I heard there was a big problem. You usually shut problems down so smoothly.”
“That night,” Rory said, shaking his head.
“It was one thing after another. It started because she tried to hide how sick she was. She’s scared of needles, so she lied and told me she felt all right and would drink cranberry juice and go to student health on Monday.
But something didn’t feel right, so I went over, and I get there and she’s passed out on the living room floor, burning up with fever.
“She was over 104 when we hit the ER, and her blood pressure was low. They told me she was critical, and then she kept crying she didn’t want an IV, and they were talking some bullshit about how she had a right to refuse if she wanted to.
When she’s dying! The first doctor was an asshole.
So I told him straight up: ‘Do your fucking job and make her better, or get someone in here who can.’ She couldn’t even swallow Tylenol.
And she was half out of her mind, so she kept slipping and calling me Sir.
Which made me really popular with the nurses, especially when they stripped her to put her in a gown and found bruises on her ass.
They called the social worker, who I naturally told to fuck off.
I’m not going to answer bullshit questions, especially when my girlfriend’s so sick she might die.
“They made me leave the room, which I was fine with. I wanted them to help her. If I was a distraction, get me out. Whatever it took. But I wasn’t in the waiting room two minutes before they send someone to get me.
Kate’s losing her mind, fighting to get out of bed, saying: ‘I’m leaving.
I’ll sign out. You can’t keep me here.’ I get to the room, and it’s a circus.
The room’s full. Everyone’s pacing and raising their voices.
I told them all to get the hell out and send me one nurse.
Meanwhile, Kate’s trying to use her safeword with me to avoid getting the IV. Her goddamned safeword, Shay.”
Shay smiled in spite of himself, picturing Rory who was never at a loss to control a situation, especially a confrontation, in the midst of chaos that he couldn’t quiet.
“I’ve never seen her so scared. It’s some kind of phobia.
So I told her, ‘I’ll give you anything, buy you anything, take you anywhere on vacation later to make up for this, but this IV is happening.
’ Then I just held her down and kept her arm pressed to the bed.
That old nurse they sent got that thing in. Christ, I could’ve kissed her.
“Afterward, Katie settled down, but she wanted me in the bed with her, to hold onto her. The staff were rolling their eyes and sighing. And when her fever came down, she started apologizing to everyone using her breathy little girl voice. Then they kept trying to talk to her alone to see if she’d admit that I was abusing her, so they could call the police, but every time they’d bounce me, she’d start to cry.
And I guess a hospital is like the club.
Word travels fast. Because when we moved from the ER to her room, they saw us coming.
And the new nurses felt compelled to tell me that they’d be watching everything that went on.
If I caused any trouble, they’d call security.
They said they knew the bruises on Kate didn’t come from any fall, and they were going to file a police report.
I was calmer by then, so I told them to do what they thought was right.
They even called the cops, but of course the cops said they could only do something if she told them what had happened.
Well, that made the nurses furious. And they got angry at Kate, too, because she’d clammed up.
“The harder they tried, the more Kate resisted talking, and the madder they got. So they kept repeating that as soon as visiting hours were up, I’d have to leave and then the truth would come out.
Of course, she didn’t want me to go. She kept saying that I’d just have to tell them I was staying.
And I thought to myself, she’s not going to stay in this bed.
The second I leave, she’ll pull that IV out and follow me.
“So I left a message for D, telling him I needed to know whether it was safe to move her to another hospital or if he knew someone at St. Joseph’s with some pull who could make Kate’s doctor give her a sedative or something to get her through non-visiting hours.
But while I was waiting on D to get the message, she started throwing up.
And the goddamned nurses stalled bringing her medicine, even though the doctor had already put it as a standing order.
They were punishing her for not talking to them.
She got sick seven times. I pressed that call button every five minutes for thirty-five minutes.
By then, I was smoking mad. I yanked the call button out the wall and went to the nurse’s station.
I told them someone had better move her ass to get Kate some medicine or there would be hell to pay.
“Then I got on the phone and woke up my lawyer and said, ‘Get your ass to St. Joseph’s and bring a malpractice attorney and criminal attorney with you because I might need one of each.’”
“Fuck,” Shay said grimly, shaking his head.
“As you might imagine when the lawyers showed up and started calling hospital administrators and waking up the chief of staff, everything changed. ‘Obviously we were having a very stressful night,’ the administrators said. And then my lawyer finds out there are these VIP suites where Kate would have a nurse just for her, to get her anything she needed immediately and where there were no restrictions on visiting hours. I could stay with her every minute if that’s what she wanted me to do.
Four grand a night. I was like, ‘Why the fuck didn’t someone say so?
Move her to one right now.’ I had more than that on me, so I took out my wallet and gave it to my lawyer and said, ‘Get it done now.’
“But then I was pissed at myself for not calling the lawyers in sooner. I knew how I looked to the medical staff. I’m wearing jeans and a t-shirt.
They can see the barbed wire tattoo on my bicep and the outline of my nipple ring.
I haven’t shaved in two days. They aren’t seeing a guy who went to Princeton and has a hundred million dollars.
To them, I looked like a bouncer from a biker bar.
Katie’s only nineteen, and without makeup, she looks even younger.
Her ass is covered in bruises, and she’s really emotional.
Probably if anyone else would’ve been with her, she would’ve acted like a regular coed, but because her master’s in the room and she’s sick and scared, most of the time she acted like a kitten. No wonder they called the police.”
“Jesus Christ.”