Exit Strategy (19 page)

She turns to me, and I can see the anguish on her face that she’s trying valiantly to conceal. “Can you believe it? I’m off by one dollar and twenty-seven cents.”

“Then you’d better find that damn dollar and twenty-seven cents, or somebody just might not get paid this month,” I say with mock indignation.

She cracks up, and I laugh with her, but when Jada continues laughing almost hysterically, I go over and hug her tight. I hold her for at least five minutes until she calms enough to talk. She doesn’t cry, and I don’t expect her to.

“Keisha, Nate and I had a huge fight last night.”

I don’t automatically go on the assumption that it was about the pictures with Lavender. “Why?”

“After we all had dinner at his dad’s, I confronted him about being seen and photographed socially with his ex-sub.”

“You think there’s anything to it?”

“He says there isn’t, but I don’t trust that bitch. When the first picture of them surfaced, I thought it was just a throwback from the days when they were together, so I didn’t say anything about it. As a matter of fact, he even warned me about that picture, and I was cool with it. But last week, gossip blogs all over the fucking Internet were posting pictures of them in an L.A. club partying together.”

“Who broke up with whom in their relationship?”

“They parted ways because she wanted to keep swinging and didn’t want children, and that was a deal-breaker for Nate.”

“So there wasn’t any hooking up in LA?”

“He says no, and there better not be. Cheating is a hard limit for us both.”

“Did you tell him why?”

“Yes. He knows all the Jameson family secrets.”

“Even about Omari?”

She nods.

Jada has a seventeen-year-old brother in Barbados the world doesn’t know about. When she was fifteen, she and her mother learned of the existence of her father’s love child, and it almost tore their family apart. The mother had died in childbirth, so Senator Jameson was blackmailed by the child’s grandmother, who was his caregiver.

They’d thrown enough money at the woman over the years to keep this family secret. The mother had been the child of a beloved politician on the island, so the story of her illegitimate pregnancy and death was spun for the press.  Jada had to learn to trust her father again. For this reason, their relationship is usually on tenuous footing.

“I guess it’s good you found out now before you became another me.”

Jada frowns. “I’m probably worse.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I’m a sub in love with a Dom who’s still hanging out with his ex-sub.”

I gape at her admission. It seems I’ve been an open fucking book, but sistergirl’s been holding out on me.

“Keisha close your mouth before you get a fly in it,” she says, sounding just like my mama.

“You don’t get out of this by spouting Clara Lee-isms. Why didn’t you tell me you and Nathan were the real deal? You let me believe you two were just like Tristan and me, but with a little more experience and understanding.”

“I didn’t want to rub our new status in your face, considering what was going on with you two. Nate told me months ago that Tristan
never
entertains the possibility of having more of a relationship with his subs. I knew this, but I didn’t know how to warn you away because I saw how Tristan made you feel, and I hoped against hope you’d be more than just a sub to him. Even Nate thinks you’re wearing him down. Tristan has never resumed an arrangement once a sub safewords. You’re the first.”

I don’t even know how to process what she’s saying, because there’s just too much going on to get my hopes up, and with this crazy person sending Tristan threatening letters and including me in the threats, not to mention Byron’s upcoming trial, I have no other alternative but to stay with him—if only for the protection he affords me. Granted, I might be in more danger staying with him than publically leaving him, but I don’t want to do that unless there’s no other alternative.

I’ll stay because it would hurt me too much to be away from him. Even though Tristan’s words and deeds are diametrically opposed, I can only go by what he says. He doesn’t want a lasting relationship. However, every time he does something sweet, I hold out hope that he will eventually grow to care for me the way I care for him. If things don’t go the way I’m hoping, I know without a doubt Tristan is going to break my heart. It’s inevitable.

“That’s neither here nor there,” I say. “What a fucking tragic pair we make.”

She laughs. “You don’t know the half of it. It’s like Nate has this insatiable need for adulation and human touch. It’s worse after games. The crowd feeds this need when he’s on the court, but afterward, all he wants is sex. It’s why I don’t want Lavender anywhere near him after a game.”

“How did he handle this before you? He and Lavender couldn’t have been together all the time.”

“He didn’t actually have to handle it. He and Lavender had an open relationship, and even though they tried to make sure she was with him after games, sometimes their schedules didn’t coincide. She was cool with him taking another lover if it was only about the sex. I knew she indulged all his fantasies because I was in a ménage with them once at a BDSM party.”

I gape at her. “Jada Rachelle Jameson! How many more secrets are you going to drop on me in one day?”

“Well, that’s it. I just told Nathan about a month ago that I was the other girl. He didn’t know it was me because we all wore masks and exchanged no names. I knew who they were because of Lavender’s hair color and his height. My crush on him got serious that night, and even though I was with Derek at the time, I never forgot.”

“So Derek just let you go off and have sex with two other people?”

“Derek had his fun, too. He was bi-curious, so he scened with a different couple.”

“Oh my God!” I plop down on her bed. “I thought nothing could surprise me ever again, but this is... whew.”

Jada stands before me, wringing her hands. “You still love me though, right, roomie?”

“Pfft... Of course I do. It’s just this sad little former BDSM virgin has had her sensibilities screwed with yet again.”

Jada looks so forlorn, I reach out to her. “Come here.” She moves over to the bed, and I grab her and give her the biggest, tightest hug. “You’re my best friend, forever and always. It doesn’t matter to me what you’ve done or what you might do in the future. You’ll still be my bestie.”

Jada sniffles. “Thanks, Keisha. You don’t know how much that means to me.”

“I do, because I know you’ve done the same for me. You’ve loved me unconditionally from the moment we became friends. Even when I wasn’t sure why a senator’s daughter wanted to be my friend.”

“Because I’d never had a true friend who got my issues like you did. All my high school friends wanted to be close to me because of who my father was. You treated me like a normal person.”

“You mean you liked the way I cussed your ass out all the time?”

“The sub part of me liked that, yeah.”

“So I guess it was your Domme nature that quickly got with the program and gave as good as she got?”

“You know it,” she says.

“Where does this leave you and Nathan? Are you going to be okay?”

“Yes, I think so. Thanks, Keisha,” she mumbles, not letting me go.

“For what?”

“Being here for me and reminding me of shit I should probably know already. I’m acting like a fucking spaz.”

“Love will do that to you,” I say. I pull gently away from her and flash her a loving smile. “Here. Why don’t you lie down a little while? I think you’ll feel better.” I turndown her bed, and she kicks off her slippers and climbs in without a fuss. It’s a complete role reversal. Jada is usually the one who consoles and takes care of me.

“I’m going to make you some tea, okay?” I say as I tuck her in. “Be right back.”

Jada is asleep when I return with the tea, so I set it on her nightstand and tiptoe out of the room.

I decide I’ll wait until she wakes up before I leave, because I want to make sure she’s really going to be okay. I think again about what transpired between Jada and Nate, and I fear what the future holds for me and Tristan. Each of the White twins have revealed to us that underneath their shining veneer of perfection lies some deep-seated issues. Couple those with the ones Jada and I have, and we’re volatile cocktails of dysfunction waiting for the right moment to explode.

BDSM can be dangerous in the hands of the truly sadistic and masochistic or people hyped up on emotion. Jada has been in the lifestyle longer than I have. I adopted this lifestyle for a man who doesn’t love me, so who’s to say he won’t zone out in a scene and seriously hurt me one day? I have my Hulk watch now, but I can’t imagine what I’ll do if Tristan loses it or even accidentally breaks my skin.

This leads me to wonder again what happened between Tristan and that girl Aimee he and Nate were talking about. I go in search of my laptop but then realize it’s at Tristan’s, so I borrow Jada’s.

From my set-up at the kitchen table, I sip tea while I search his name first, hoping to get a hit. This brings up pages and pages of business articles about Tristan White that would probably take me months to slog through. Next I try Tristan White girlfriend, and yours truly pops up in every conceivable recent article about him imaginable. Several pages over, I find articles and pictures of him with Silicone Sara.

“Bitch.”

Lydia was right; Tristan did seem to have a thing for blondes, because I find four more in rapid succession. Every one of them blessed with super-sized knockers.

“Damn, Tristan. What’s with you and your obsession with ta-tas?” I look down at my meager bosom, which he’d feasted on and stung repeatedly with a crop a little over twelve hours ago. He seems satisfied with them, so I’m not running out and get a boob job any time soon.

“This will take forever at this rate,” I mumble.

Next, I try “Tristan White accident,” and
voilà
. I get a hit on an article from seven years ago.

BILLIONAIRE TWIN IN NEAR-FATAL ACCIDENT

TELLURIDE (Reuters) - Tristan White, the eldest twin of Chicago venture capitalist Charles Xavier White, and his girlfriend were involved in an automobile accident near the tiny celebrity ski resort where they were vacationing. White, 25, emerged from the accident with only minor bruises and contusions, while Aimee Gabriel, 24, was thrown from the vehicle. Ms. Gabriel was stabilized at Telluride Medical Center before being air-lifted to a Level I trauma center at St. Anthony Hospital in Denver. There’s no word of her specific injuries, but she’s said to be in critical condition.

I read several more articles related to the accident. Some even have pictures, but they’re either grainy photos of a twenty-five year old Tristan looking stoic, even at such a young age, or pictures of emergency personnel wheeling someone away on a gurney.

“Well, now that I have a full name, let’s see what else I can find out.”

When I put in Tristan White and Aimee Gabriel, I get pages of articles and pictures on the pair, and she’s none other than the redhead I’d seen on the gurney in the condo beneath Tristan’s.

I slump back in the kitchen chair. “What the fuck?”

I read all the articles I can find. They apparently met when Ms. Gabriel was a junior at the University of Chicago and worked for his company. Their relationship was kind of on-again, off-again in the beginning, but soon they became the “it” couple of Chicago. I was a freshman in high school when all this drama began and on my way to college when the accident occurred, so I wouldn’t have paid any attention to society goings-on, especially those that didn’t involve musicians or random pop culture.

Aimee had been adopted by a childless couple from whom she emancipated herself when she was just sixteen. She’d made allegations of abuse against her adoptive parents, and there had been enough evidence to secure her freedom. She graduated high school at seventeen and went to UC on scholarship, majoring in business administration. Her short-lived career in the financial industry was cut short by the accident, and the final article documents how she was transferred from Colorado to the Lakeshore Meadows Rehabilitation Facility near Chicago. Her prognosis was not good. Her physicians expected she would never walk again.

I study a picture of Aimee. She looks like a younger version of Angelina Jolie but with red hair. No wonder Tristan was crazy about her. She had a “mind for business and a bod for sin,” just like Melanie Griffith in
Working Girl
.

I think I’ve had enough of reliving Tristan and Aimee’s history. Now I want to know why he felt the need to move her into his building after all these years. She wasn’t mentioned in the letter, per se. Couldn’t his army of security staff have kept her safe at the nursing home?

My Triple G tsks.
For shame. You’re jealous of a quadriplegic?