Chapter Four
Kiera
I lie to my stepfather at seven fifteen on a Friday evening, and it’s the first time in my life.
He’s in the chair by the window, which is a good sign. There’s color in his face, which is a better one. He looks up when I come in with my coat over my arm.
“You’re going out.”
“Dinner with Priya. From the fund side. She’s been asking for months.”
“Good. You don’t go out.” He turns a page. “Take the car. It’s dark.”
“I will.”
And that’s all of it. He doesn’t look up again. I stand in the doorway a second longer than I need to, holding my coat. He took it the way he takes everything I tell him. Completely.
That’s what lands. Not the lie. How easy it was, and how much it means to be trusted like that.
Four days.
Logan gave me four days, and four days turned out to be a very long time. On Tuesday, I decided not to go. Wednesday, I decided to go but changed my mind on the drive home. Thursday, I started a message that said I don’t think I. I deleted it, then regretted it for twenty minutes.
Because that’s what he did to me. If he had taken me on that couch on Tuesday, I’d have let him, and I’d have been fine. It would have been the kind of thing that happens to a person. Instead he put four days between us and handed me the whole weight of it.
You get to be sure.
I’m twenty-five years old, and no one has ever made me be sure of anything. My mother decided I’d be raised by a nanny. Garth decided I’d have his name behind me at work. Every man who ever looked at me twice decided, somewhere around the second look, that I’d be too much effort.
Logan put his hand on my face on Tuesday, took it away, and told me to come back if I meant it.
I have never been so furious with anyone.
I’m eleven minutes early.
***
He opens the door, and the room behind him is not the room I was in on Tuesday.
It isn’t romantic. There are no candles, thank God. But the table is clear, and the laptop is gone. The shirts that were over the chair are gone, and there’s a bottle open on the counter with two glasses. The bed I glimpse through the bedroom door has been made properly.
He prepared. He stood in this room this afternoon and prepared for me to come.
That undoes me more thoroughly than anything he did with his hands.
“You came.”
“You said eight.”
“You’re early.”
“I’m aware.”
Something moves at the corner of his mouth. He steps back, takes my coat off my shoulders, and hangs it up. It just seems so ordinary.
“Wine?”
“No.” My voice does something unhelpful. “Yes. No.”
“Kiera.”
“I don’t want the wine. I want to stop being nervous, and the wine won’t do it. And I’d rather not be holding a glass when—”
I stop.
“When,” he says.
“You know when.”
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he takes my hand—which he has never done—and it’s such a small, ordinary thing that I have no defense prepared for it at all. He walks me into the bedroom and stops at the end of the bed.
“Then we’ll get to it,” he says.
He takes his shirt off first, one-handed at the back of the collar, without ceremony.
I have about half a second to be pleased with myself for being ready for this.
I am not ready for this.
The arm I’ve seen. The arm is the part he lets people see, dense and dark from wrist to shoulder, and I had built an entire understanding of him around it. A man with a tattooed arm and a good suit.
It doesn’t stop at the shoulder. It comes across his chest, over the top of it and down, and when he turns to put the shirt on the chair, I see the design on his back.
“Oh,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“I thought it was just—” I gesture, stupidly, at his arm.
“I know what you thought. You’ve been very polite about it for two weeks.”
I take a step closer without meaning to. “Can I—”
“Yes.”
I put my hand flat on his chest. He is very warm, and under my palm, I feel him breathe in.
Up close it isn’t abstract at all—it only reads that way from across a room. There are objects in it, small and layered. Instruments. A bridge. A bar of music. A door standing open. None of it means anything to me. I realize I’m looking at seventeen years of a man’s life in a language I can’t read.
“You weren’t here,” I say.
“No.”
“All of this happened somewhere I wasn’t.”
“That was rather the point.”
Then my hand moves left and stops.
Over his heart, in letters an inch high, is the word EDWARDS—except it’s coming apart. The letters break down as they travel, dissolving into something else—BLAKE, clean and finished, like it was underneath the whole time.
Beneath both, in a small plain hand, one word.
Maggie.
I don’t say anything for a while.
“Your mother.”
“Maggie Blake.” His voice hasn’t changed, but something under my fingers has. “I was six. I remember about four things about her, and two of them are probably his stories I’ve decided are mine.”
“That’s why you took her name.”
“That’s why I took her name.”
I put my thumb on the M and leave it there, and neither of us says anything.
Then he takes my wrist, moves my hand away, and says, “That’s enough of that.”
And I understand I’ve reached the limit of him explaining his ink.
He undresses me himself, and takes a great deal longer over it than is strictly necessary.
He does the blouse the way he did on Tuesday, a button at a time, except tonight he doesn’t stop at the blouse. He turns me around to get the zip at the back of my skirt, and I feel his mouth at the top of my spine. I lose the ability to stand up straight in any convincing way.
When I’m down to nothing at all, he turns me back to face him and steps away. And just looks.
I have never been looked at in my life. I’ve been assessed, I’ve been ignored, and once, memorably, at eleven, I was measured. I have never stood in front of a man with nothing on and had him take his time about it. I want to cover myself so badly that my arms actually move.
“No,” he says.
They stop.
“Put them down.”
I put them down, and it is the single hardest thing I’ve ever done. My face is on fire, yet he doesn’t hurry.
“Good girl,” he says.
Something goes through me from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet.
I’ve heard men say things to women. I’ve been on the edge of enough rooms. It has never once occurred to me that two words could take my legs out. But here I am, standing with everything on show, undone by a compliment for doing what I was told.
He sees it. Of course, he sees it.
“Oh,” he says softly. “There it is.”
“Don’t.”
“No, we’re keeping that.”
He puts me on the bed but doesn’t get on it.
He stands at the end of it instead and takes my ankles, pulling me down the mattress toward him until my hips are at the edge. I wonder at the ease of it—how little I weigh to him, how completely he can just move me where he wants me. It does something to my breathing I can’t control.
Then he takes my left wrist, presses it flat against the mattress beside my hip, and holds it there.
He leaves the right one loose.
I understand later that this is deliberate. That he could have pinned both and didn’t, because one held and one free means I have to keep choosing, over and over, not to cover myself. That every second my free hand stays down is a decision I’m making. One he wants me to make.
“Knees apart.”
I hesitate. It’s not even a real hesitation. It’s a half-second of my body remembering it’s supposed to be embarrassed. He sees it and waits, and doesn’t say it twice.
I open my legs.
“Wider.”
I do that too. My face burns as I process how exposed I am. I can feel the air on me, and he stands there and looks his fill, taking his time about it.
“Good girl.”
He drops to his knees.
“Now, here’s what’s about to happen,” he says, and his voice hasn’t risen at all.
It’s conversational, which is somehow the filthiest thing about it.
“I’m going to use my mouth on you until you come. Then I’m going to keep going because the second one is better, and you don’t know that yet. Then I’m going to fill you—first with my fingers, then my cock—and I want you looking at me the whole time.”
His thumb strokes once across the inside of my thigh.
“Your hand stays where it is. If it moves, I stop. Nod if you understand me.”
I nod.
“Say it.”
“I understand.”
“Then don’t be quiet. There’s no one here but me.”
He puts his mouth on the inside of my knee.
Not where I expected. Not close to it. He works his way up the inside of my thigh with his lips and the flat of his tongue, unhurried, taking whole minutes about it, and every inch he covers makes the next one harder to bear.
By the time he reaches the crease of my hip, I’m shaking.
He stops there and breathes me in, and I make a sound I have never made in my life.
“Please—”
“There she is.”
Then his mouth is on me properly, and everything else fades away.
He starts slow. One long, flat stroke of his tongue from bottom to top, so unhurried I feel every part of it. I arch straight off the bed. His forearm comes across my hips and pins me down, and he does it again, exactly the same, and again, until I can only whimper in response.
Then he narrows it.
His tongue finds my clit, making my vision white out at the edges.
He circles it—slow at first, then tighter, then flicking, then broad and soft again just when I think I know what’s coming, so I can never quite catch the rhythm and get ahead of it.
When I try to close my legs, he pushes them wider with his free hand and holds them there.
“Logan—”
“Mm.”
The hum goes straight through me, and I sob.
He draws me into his mouth then, gentle suction, his tongue still working underneath it, and something starts building low in my stomach. It isn’t pleasure exactly. It’s pressure, and it’s frightening. It’s climbing, and my free hand comes up off the bed toward his hair.
“Down,” he says against me.
I put it down. It nearly kills me. He rewards me by going harder.
I feel his fingers then, two of them, tracing where his mouth has made me slick, circling without pressing in—teasing at me until I’m lifting my hips trying to make it happen myself. He lets me try for a while before he gives it to me.
One finger, slowly, all the way.