Chapter 7 #2
“That’s where you’re wrong,” he replied with a laugh. “I’m good at managing a lot of things, Romily. Obsessive, you might say.”
“Just a little,” she murmured.
When he laughed again, she tried not to show how much it meant to her that she could tease him. That there were no land mines, no eggshells.
“I like to pretend I like this place no frills, but the truth is, I hate managing shit like attendance and who paid and all that crap.”
“Well,” Romily said, smiling, “I happen to be excellent at that kind of stuff.”
Or she had been, once upon a time. She wondered if she was overselling herself—but when she started working the desk the next day, her worries melted away.
His system was archaic, if it could even be called a system.
Romily started researching gym management and payment options, and had the whole gym sorted out within a week.
He celebrated her accomplishments by tying her up on that big X above his bed and introducing her to his favorite whip.
Romily cherished those marks she’d earned until they faded.
Sometimes, deep down, she wondered if she was getting too involved all over again. Wasn’t this what she did? Not that Joseph had offered anything to get involved with aside from his ego—not that she’d understood that then.
But Zachary was so different from Joseph.
Night and day. She couldn’t really entertain those thoughts for long.
For one thing, she actually worked. She wasn’t playing pretend at the desk.
Once she set everything up, there were phones to answer and endless calls about payment plans and membership and drop in costs.
She even made a round of swag that Zachary was sure no one would want. But the vintage-looking t-shirts with the gym name stamped on the front and no other adornments sold out within a day.
He’d celebrated that, too. This time with a paddle and what he liked to call the butt plug flight, like it was fancy. He got very stern when she laughed about that in the middle of a scene and had taught her to mind her manners.
Her ass had hurt for days, and the memory made her smile.
Zachary was also incredibly stern and serious about paying her directly, every week.
He paid her a generous salary. He also never acted like her lover when she was on the job.
It wasn’t that he pretended she was a stranger.
It was clear to anyone who paid attention that they were.
., whatever they were. But he never delivered those orders they both knew she’d obey.
He never touched her in a way that could be deemed inappropriate, by anyone.
She didn’t realize how much she appreciated this until she been doing it a while. Until it became clear to her that what he wanted was for her to be comfortable above all else.
In certain settings, that was. For as stern and diabolical as he was in the bedroom, he was even more wicked in the gym, where he made her sweat, relentlessly. He made her limp. He made her hurt.
Still, he took care of her after gym sessions, too. He rubbed her sore muscles and lectured her on the benefits of creatine and showed her what active recovery looked like.
And after a handful of months rolled by, Romily barely recognized herself. She had muscles. She wasn’t frail any longer. She was actually strong.
She knew this was true without having to glance in the mirror, because he told her. Because he celebrated all the muscles in her body, took pride in her gains, and seemed to only want her more and more as each day passed.
One night, he went out with his friends and she decided she should stay back in her boat.
It was funny, but she barely went on the boat any longer unless it was for her therapy sessions.
She hadn’t realized that, really. Not until she went back down to the marina and settled herself into her berth, expecting to feel at home the way she always had there.
Only to realize that it didn’t feel like hers any longer.
Romily stretched out in the bed she’d once thought she’d never leave, having worked so hard to get here.
She stared out the window at the sky and the lights above, trying to remember if she and Zachary had ever discussed the fact that she was spending so much time at his place. But she already knew they hadn’t.
Meanwhile, she practically lived there. Maybe it was more accurate to say she did, in fact, live there.
He’d gotten impatient almost immediately with her having to go get clothes from the boat, so she had a whole section of his closet.
She’d learned quickly that she slept deeply with him, without so much as a hint of a nightmare.
They worked together now, and it seemed to make sense to just… go upstairs afterward.
It all seemed to work seamlessly.
That probably should have alarmed her.
It was so rare to have a night to herself that Romily thought that what she really needed to do was sit here, take a breath, and ask herself if she was already fucking up.
Already giving some other man too much of herself.
Already making sure that this would end badly, because she obviously couldn’t trust her own feelings?—
But she couldn’t really connect to that line of thinking, so she fell asleep instead.
And when she woke up, there was a Viking standing over her, though he had to stoop to fit in her berth.
“Why aren’t you in my bed?” he demanded, looking… surly and annoyed and so delicious she went from fast asleep to awake and hot in an instant.
Romily didn’t ask him how he’d gotten into the marina, which was supposed to be locked to keep everyone who didn’t live here out.
Or how he’d gotten onto this boat, for that matter, without any of her neighbors questioning him when—despite everyone’s preference to keep to themselves—they were still a pretty tight knit community.
They didn’t throw block parties but they knew who was supposed to be on their docks.
Yet she had no doubt that Zachary’s talent for getting what he wanted was infinite.
And she supposed this should have scared her, that he could just show up when he felt like it, possibly by performing an illegal entry or two — but she wasn’t scared, she was happy he was here. Besides, she hardly had a leg to stand on, given the way they’d met.
She smiled at him. “I don’t actually like your bed that much when you’re not in it,” she told him.
His grin flashed in the dark, a dangerous promise. Just the way she liked it.
As she lay there in the cozy V birth, watching him sleepily, he stripped off without another word.
She got to behold the glory of him that never got old for her.
He was tattooed, beautiful, so much a man that he made her ache all over.
She could feel herself, slippery and ready for him, immediately.
Then Zachary crawled into the bed with her, where he barely fit, and made her hold on to the shelf above her bed as best she could. While he fucked her so intensely that she was surprised when she actually woke up again the next morning.
She didn’t sleep on the boat again.
By the fourth month, she’d even come to appreciate all the running he did, though there was really only jogging for him when she tried to match his pace.
Still, they did laps together at the strangest hours, because it was safe when he was there.
While Oakland slept, and the Bay slumbered, they ran together in the dark and it felt like the two of them against the world.
For a girl who never felt she had anyone, not even while she was married — maybe especially not then — this was some heady stuff.
“It’s nice to finally meet you,” said one of the gym members one day, as he was checking himself in. Using the system that Romily had set up.
Romily smiled by rote, then sat up straighter.
She hadn’t seen this man in the gym before.
Most of the men here were a lot like Zachary.
They kept to themselves. They looked at her, not exactly with suspicion, but not in any forthcoming way, either.
Many of them looked like they preferred the shadows.
Not this man.
He was tall, commanding. Not visibly tattooed or bearded, setting him apart from a lot of the other clientele.
He was also dressed in a suit, not jeans or work trousers like many of the others.
He also had a different air about him. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but she could tell that this was a man who got everyone’s attention, wherever he went.
The man’s gaze was also assessing in a way that seemed to penetrate, deep into her. It wasn’t quite sexual, she thought, though there was something about it that reminded her of Zachary’s stern appraisal. She felt her breath pattern change, like he was changing the air around them.
She glanced at the screen and saw his name. Frederick Hill .
“It’s nice to meet you, too,” she replied, and then when she smiled again in her usual polite fashion, he didn’t smile back.
“I hope that when the Club opens in a physical space, you’ll enjoy it,” he said.
And though she thought she covered the way everything inside of her seized— because wasn’t that the name of that app?
How did this person know — his uncompromising mouth curved.
“With Zachary, of course. I didn’t mean to alarm you.
Your private information is safe. I’m the founder. And Zachary’s friend.”
“Oh,” Romily said, flustered, and then she couldn’t look at him directly.
It wasn’t because she was embarrassed. It was because she understood that assessing look, now. She understood that like a lot of the men she’d seen here, but had only speculated about, this man absolutely played the kinds of games that Zachary liked.
She doubted she could look up again if her life depended on it, but she knew the exact second when Zachary came in in the main part of the gym.