Chapter Twenty
Elio
I have been too lenient, too trusting, and too kind.
It was nearly laughable, this situation I found myself in: cuffed like a helpless starfish to a bed that wasn’t my own, to sheets that weren’t familiar, inside a room decorated with candles and dimmed lights.
Mostly naked, save for my briefs.
My wristwatch was on the bedside table, and my clothes had been folded carefully and placed on a dressing table on the far left. The room was big, and the bed was king-sized; the large window by the side of the balcony door showcased city lights—I wasn’t on the cruise; I was high up—a penthouse.
Unfamiliar.
I laughed.
It was low, it was carefree, and it was humorless, a sound lost to my ears because somehow, anger had eluded me. I was left stupefied, and my skin was crawling.
I had lost time.
There was what I could presume—a blank space in my existence, hours I could never get back, minutes of forced vulnerability, seconds where I had no control.
Stripped, cuffed, violated in a way that made my hands curl into tight fists at a memory I did not like to remember.
If my father could see me now, he would be laughing. He would say, “I told you so. You only know yourself. You only trust yourself. No one else. Foolish boy.”
I was, indeed, foolish.
I laughed again, shaking my head and keeping my eyes trained on the ceiling.
There was nothing else that could surprise me at this point.
Don’t let your guard down, and you are blank, a plain piece of paper no one understands; ruthless, wicked, heartless to the point of damnation, setting yourself up for a life spent alone with your unsteady mind, drowning in self-pity and trauma, growing without a conscience and prepping for an eternity spent in the pits of hell.
Let your guard down, and then you’re careless, weak, and incapable. Opening doors for people to walk all over you, you lose respect; you lose yourself; you become vulnerable and trusting; you allow your heart to lead your being to its preferred destination.
You let your mind take the back seat in the moving car that is your life, and you let your heart sit next to you on the passenger’s side.
You smile at her; you embrace the feeling that came with her; you welcome it with open arms, lost in the beauty of her eyes, the effect of her care, the spell in her words, and the warmth of her body—so lost in her that you forget you’re driving, until you run headfirst into a tree.
I always alternated between “raising my guard” and “letting it down,” but I’d never considered the gray area in between.
Why …
Why was I holding on to a humanity no one recognized … a humanity that had been challenged multiple times, one that had been pushed and tested?
What would he do if I did this? Would he shoot me?
Would he skin me alive? What exactly made him wicked?
If he was wicked and only killed with a gun, then everyone else who kills with a gun is wicked.
What is he truly capable of? Let’s test him, let’s defy him, let’s poke him to get a reaction, let’s—
Then I show them. I shut them up. I cease their chanting and their poking; I have every right to because I warned them.
I hated myself the most when I couldn’t understand myself because then I knew I was capable of anything and everything. All wrongs would be the perfect rights in my head.
This is me now. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I can’t tell what I want to do. I am terrified of what I would do.
I was outside my body, watching the unrecognizable stranger on this bed. Wary and longing to take back control.
I knew it would be irrational to jump right to conclusions. I knew I should give Zahra the benefit of the doubt and wait to hear what she had to say.
But for the first time in months, my mind was working faster than my heart—and I let it.
I let it because I had missed this. I let it because the urge to hurt was intense—it was so strong that it made my skin thrum. It made my head heavy; violent lucid images plagued my mind, and I needed to release this numbness.
If my woman didn’t plan to kill me, her first mistake would be letting me out of these cuffs, seeing as every sliver of the sane person she could goof around with was gone.
She crossed a line she shouldn’t have; she tapped into a space she shouldn’t have.
She took me back to the first time I’d lost myself and my sense of place.
Seventeen. Happy. At peace with the fact that I’d managed to impress my father. Until he gave me a drink, and I woke up naked next to two women I didn’t remember meeting.
It was much like the situation I found myself in now.
I was at peace, comfortable with someone I never thought I would grow fond of, someone that made me weak in all aspects, a careless addiction that I was beyond grateful for, my partner, the one I didn’t even realize I trusted until she broke it with a drink.
Until I woke up in a panic, sick to my stomach, unable to move.
She had resurrected demons I buried a long time ago.
It was so odd because this feeling was not directed at her. It was directed at me. I wouldn’t change anything. I would only correct, adjust, and rewrite.
I would test the gray area. Manipulate it in my favor. I would make sure there was no room for this to happen again. No room to hear my father laughing at me, so clear and loud, even if he wasn’t there. No room to be this vulnerable and defenseless without my permission.
My lack of control over my own mind vexed me.
It fucking hurt me that I had been shoved back into this space by her. The first person I’d dropped my guard for, the first person I had wholly trusted without even acknowledging it to myself, seeing how naturally it came.
This woman had seen me in ways nobody else has, no matter how important the reasons for her actions might have been; I thought we’d grown to the point that we shared a certain understanding.
I did not care if she had no idea how much her actions would affect me. She should have cleared it with me first.
I closed my eyes and swallowed hard before pulling them back open.
Almost simultaneously, the door pushed open, and in came Zahra.
The woman behind my turmoil walked in with a champagne bottle in her grip.
She wore a transparent robe that gave me a clear view of the sinful lingerie underneath; it was a red one-piece that did wonders for her curves.
My cock twitched in response. Despite my animosity toward her, I couldn’t deny her body’s pull with mine; I couldn’t look away from her beauty. I couldn’t help myself.
My chest squeezed.
How had I given her the reins to my sense of self? When did my body become dependent, always waiting to answer the call of hers?
Her head moved in my direction, and her eyes widened.
“Oh my God, you’re awake.” She almost doubled over, dropping the bottle on the dresser and quickly coming toward me, climbing up the bed, her warmth enveloping me, the familiar smell of her, sweet and mind-consuming, filled my senses, made me feel light, made my chest burn.
She was over me, on top of me, her hands were on my face, and her eyes were searching mine.
“Are you okay? Do you have a headache? Fuck—I didn’t check if there were any side effects from the drug because I was in a hurry and had to get you off of that ship.
I—” She stopped, guilt swirling in her eyes as she took in my expression.
I didn’t know what it was, but if it was based on what I was feeling, then her abrupt stopping was understandable.
“I’m sorry,” she finished, swallowing. Her thumb grazed my cheek as she leaned farther down, and my eyes remained open as she kissed me on the lips and said again, “I’m sorry.
” Then she started kissing my whole face and saying sorry repeatedly, and I failed to understand what exactly she was apologizing for.
I was so detached from this moment that it took me a while to register the sincerity in her eyes.
It saddened me that I couldn’t understand the sincerity.
“You’re angry, I understand. You have every right to be.
But I need you to understand that I did it all for a reason.
I have receipts to prove that this was for a good cause, aside from the fact that, well—I love seeing you bound up—but I just need to make sure you don’t want to kill me for drugging you.
” She swallowed. “Because you look like you want to kill me.”
I didn’t respond.
She sighed, her teeth chewing the inside of her cheek, obviously worried.
“You know I would never hurt you, right? Unless you did something to hurt me, and you haven’t done anything to hurt me, so … you know this was not done out of animosity, right?”
I didn’t take my eyes off her and didn’t release the pressure on my brows or the frown on my face; my facial muscles did not agree with me.
I don’t know what I’m doing.
“I knew you would be angry.” She sounded disappointed. “Why wouldn’t you be?” She sighed, raking her hair back from her face. “I don’t know how to be open, I don’t know how to share. Maybe if I knew how, you wouldn’t be looking at me like I squeezed all the blood from your heart.”
My brows eased after that statement, and I broke eye contact with her, allowing my gaze to roam down her body, her neck, to the tattoo on her shoulder, her chest, her breasts under the beautiful lingerie, her stomach, her center over my torso, both knees on either side of me.
A body.
A woman.
Sex.
“Listen, it was important enough that I had to get you away from the ship, okay? And it wasn’t just you …
All of Street, too, because there was something important and time-sensitive that I had to oversee, and I needed you guys away because—I needed Street away because they don’t know that part of me, and I needed you away because something else was going on, and there were people—”
“Did you get the tour pass from Kareem?”
She blinked at me, caught off guard. “Yes … I did, and it didn’t really take much convincing. Why are—”