Girl In Pieces (7 page)

I am curious.

For three weeks I’d forbidden myself from thinking about the night of the party. I’d successfully kept myself from rehashing the details, daydreaming through the memories. Every thought bent towards forgetting Josh and erasing what I’d done with him. My brain knew better than to unlock that trapdoor and fall through. I’d go mad with wanting and I couldn’t bear to go through the heartbreak over and over again. No good could come of it.

But this strange and familiar girl had turned a key and all at once I flushed with memory and pleasure. I felt it in my bones, fingers first, wrapped around leather wrist cuffs and clawing at cotton sheets. I felt it in my toes, curling during orgasm, then in my trembling knees, stomach, chest, throat. I felt Josh’s fingers in my hair, wrapping and twisting blonde and pink strands into his fist, felt him pulling back, harder, harder,
harder
, until it hurt so much I could think again. He’d pulled my hair until I finally felt in control of myself.

When he’d tied me up, adored me, protected me, bound me to him, I’d gone somewhere else. I’d fallen down the rabbit hole into space where I could touch stardust and taste moonlight. I’d loved Josh endlessly in that place and I’d been absolutely sure he loved me too.

I’d felt safe there. Blissful. I hadn’t wanted to come back to earth. I’d wanted to feel endless forever.

When he’d grabbed my hair and pulled it hard and back so that he was all I could see and all I could feel was the pain he inflicted, somehow that pain had normalized me. It had made me feel grounded and in control, which made no sense, but there it was.

I wanted to feel that again. Endless and out of control. Strong and in control. Over and over again.

If not with Josh, then someone else. Hadn’t I said those words to him? Hadn’t I warned him that I’d fallen a little bit in love with what we’d done and if he didn’t want me, I’d go looking elsewhere? He’d called my bluff and I’d skittered back into my vanilla bedroom and hid, nursing a wounded heart. I thought there was no way anyone would make me feel the way Josh had.

The thoughts of a stupid, lovelorn little girl.

I didn’t need a boyfriend, I needed a teacher. I wanted to learn what I was capable of and I definitely wanted to learn how to go back to that cosmic space where I existed times infinity and felt
everything
. There’d been no fear there, no insecurities, no money problems, nothing but pleasure and adoration. I didn’t need Josh. I just needed someone I could learn to trust as much as I’d already trusted him.

 
And now I knew how to find my someone else.

You must be willing to obey. New or experienced subs, but I have expectations and you must meet them. Skinny girls only. I like my art beautiful.

U & me 1 night only. BBW ok. Be my queen and Ill be u daddy. Like spankings? lol I got u 1 4 you birthday.

In town for one night at a motel by the airport. Wear your prettiest dress but not one you don’t mind getting dirty.

It took only a cursory glance through the online personals to discover that the public school system had failed 80% of the men in the city. There was no chance I could ever take a man seriously who couldn’t be bothered to spell out the word “you” or who referred to himself as “King Cock Master.”

While the Men Seeking Women section looked like poorly spelled pornography, the Women Seeking Men section read like an erotic poetry class. No wonder we were all stumbling around blind and lonely when we couldn’t even make our personal ads speak the same language.

The women who longed for someone to dominate them were haunting and eager. I wanted to meet them so I could tell them they weren’t alone. They were too painfully beautiful in their honesty. And they were
plentiful
.

I work in a bookstore
, one girl wrote.
 
I spend my days answering people’s questions and getting books down from high shelves. I’m smart and quiet and I do my own taxes. I’d really like to spend my weekends tied up.

My husband traveled and I was a stay at home mom. Now I’m divorced, the bread winner, the bread maker, the oil changer, and the spider killer with only a four year old for company. I have a babysitter on Tuesday nights and for one night a week I want to give up all control.

No one ever asked me how I liked to be touched. No one ever asked me how I liked to be kissed. I spent 20 years thinking it didn’t matter until I read a book last week where the hero tied the heroine to her bed and promised he would do nothing to her unless she asked for it. I do not want to be silent anymore. Also I’d like to have my hair pulled please.

I wasn’t alone.

Lying on my living room floor, watching the neon lights from South River Bar play across my ceiling, I clutched a copy of my magazine and felt infinitely reassured to know I belonged to an army of women. A kingdom. That I was smart and kind and chubby and there were others just like me, women who held their own all day long and just wanted to be naughty and free of restraints except for the ones our lovers tied us up with.

Discovering these women was exhilarating.

Finding
the one
for me
,
however
,
 
proved difficult.

Most of the ads I read every day were all wrong. The men didn’t feel Dominant, they just felt horny and a little pervy. They either sounded too overzealous about hurting me or a little too uneducated about what
obeying
 
actually meant. Some of them felt scary and others felt fake, most felt porny and greasy and too many of them didn’t know how to spell, which turned out to be a hard limit for me.

I learned a lot about my hard limits from reading those ads.

“They aren’t real people,” Gwen said one day over lunch when I confessed I’d been scanning the personals and was thinking about answering some of them. “I mean they are real, but they aren’t
real
 
real. Until you meet them, they are just words. And people lie.”

The lying part really upset her.

“They tell you what you want to hear up front, but then you get something entirely different once you give them your virginity,” she said, shaking her blond head. “It’s all downhill from there.”

Then, helpfully, she added, “Max has a cousin. Cute too. I could give him your number.”

I doubted Max’s cousin knew much about Japanese rope bondage. I politely declined and went back to scouring the personals for someone who just wanted to pull my hair and tie me to their wrought iron bed. And spank me. Maybe. With their hand. Or a belt. I was a little nervous about other toys.

I almost answered an ad from a guy looking for someone who wanted to drive around town with him and make-out,
or more
, in his car. Dogging he called it, which I discovered was the act of doing “things” outside where one might be seen. With the hope of being seen. What drew me to his ad was that he was more excited about making out like teenagers than he was about doing
more
. I liked it.

It amazed me how there were words for such specific activities. It amazed me that there were enough people out there who sat around day dreaming about doing them.

It made me feel all kinds of boring and sheltered.

His ad reminded me of how I felt kneeling in front of a group of strangers as Josh tied me up. At first I’d been embarrassed, but then I could hear small gasps, quiet moans, sighs, and the unmistakable crossing of legs. I had made them feel something and that had been an incredible sort of turn on, an exhilarating sort of power. I had no idea I’d get excited about being watched.

That seemed to be a common theme these days, discovering I was capable of enjoying something I would have considered absolutely unacceptable before.

I didn’t answer his ad though, mostly because I was easily embarrassed and after a week of looking I’d started to feel nervous about it again. If one of my best friends could hurt me so easily, then what damage could a stranger do?

It wasn’t until I came home late one night after meeting Julie and Tyler for dinner that I made up my mind. It was a knee jerk reaction to heartache and maybe not my best moment.

I’d turned the corner near my apartment and there was the pink convertible parked on my side of the street, a block away from the bar. I imagined Josh asking her to park far enough away from my building so that I couldn’t silently stalk their relationship from my bedroom window.

Mi-chelle
. She had a gym bag in the back seat and dry cleaning hung from the window. There was a Taylor Swift CD on the passenger seat and an empty container for a vegan salad.

I lingered too long wondering if she and Josh ever parked somewhere they might be seen to
play
. His hand between her legs, pushing her back into the cream leather, whispering against her ear as he used his fingers to make her moan and sigh. The thought made me nauseous.

 
I trudged up the street and as I approached my building, the street level door to Josh’s apartment pushed open and there he was. He wore a long sleeved shirt beneath a Batman t-shirt, the long sleeves pushed up to his elbows showing off his muscular forearms. He roughed his hair, dug out his wallet, and paid a Chinese delivery guy for a bag of food. I watched, feeling my nausea turn to jealous longing and back to nausea. How many times had we ordered Chinese food and picnicked on his living room floor to watch Sherlock on the BBC?

Two lanes between us and this was the closest we’d been in a month.

He must have heard the screaming in my head because he looked up as the Chinese guy took off for his car. We stood there for minutes. Hours. I couldn’t see his thoughts, couldn’t analyze his emotions, but he stood there opposite me and didn’t make a move to cross the street. He didn’t make a move to go inside. We just stood, feeling each other panic.

She’s waiting,
 
I thought.
Food is getting cold.
 

He looked away, ran his hand through his hair, then turned and pushed his way back inside.

Told you
.

I climbed up to my apartment and answered the first ad I came across for a man seeking a sub to teach. I was lucky there were no misspelled words, but I’m not sure it would have mattered.

*
 
*
 
*

Tonight’s the night. Tonight’s the night. Tonightsthenight.

“Coming!” I shoved one leg into yoga pants, hopped towards the front door while threading the other leg through. “Just a second!”

The fist hit the door again, three deep thuds that rattled the door on its cheap frame. I knew it wasn’t Sherman about rent since he’d already been by two days earlier to remind me I was two weeks late. Again. I’d managed to scrape up about a third of what I owed him and promised the rest on my first pay check. That had emptied the last of my bank account and he knew it, had watched as I’d tried not to cry when I’d pulled up my bank statement online and wrote the check for the exact amount left in my checking account. Right down to the last penny. He’d watched me embarrass myself begging for more time, promising the same promises I’d made dozens of times. He shook his head and told me we couldn’t keep doing this and I’d said
I know I know, I’m sorry
, but by that point I couldn’t stop the burn of humiliation in my throat or the tears welling behind my eyes. He’d high-tailed it out of my apartment before the waterworks started.

Sherman wouldn’t come back until he had to.

I patted my hips to make sure everything was in place before setting the chain lock and opening the door an inch to peek out.

My brother lifted two fingers in his version of
hello
.

“Brian?” I pushed the door shut enough to unclip the chain and move out of the way so he could come in. “Have you ever actually been in my apartment?”

“Har har.” He huffed and shouldered his way inside, made it halfway through the living room before stopping and glancing around blankly like maybe he hadn’t ever been in my apartment after all. It was sort of not true. He’d been there, but not long enough to have an actual conversation. “The couch is new.”

“No, just in a new spot.” I shoved a wayward bra from the back of the couch under a throw pillow. “What’s up, bro?”

“I hate it when you call me that.” He sucked in a breath, glanced around at the various seating options, and chose the chair by the window that was remarkably free of random clothes or books. “I haven’t seen you in a while. It’s been more than a fucking month. Can’t remember the last time you stayed away that long.”

I plopped cross-legged in middle of the room facing him. “I’ve been busy.”

“Too busy to answer your phone?”

“Kind of.” I turned my attention to running my fingers through the purple, fluffy rug beneath me. “I got a job but I’m still working on design stuff on the side. I’m pretty exhausted by the time I get home.”

“You got a job?” Brian ran a hand across his jaw which I realized had been shaved smooth. He looked ten years younger, baby faced despite his compact, muscular body. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d shaved his scruff. I squinted and gave him a once over. He’d cut his hair too and his clothes looked newer, or at least less wrinkly. Mysterious.

“It’s no big deal.” I shrugged. “Just something steady to help me pay the rent.”

“Yeah, they’ve been calling. You’re pretty behind.” His usual vitriol seemed shockingly absent all the sudden. I had no idea where this clean shaven, gentler Brian had come from and it unnerved me. We hadn’t had a normal conversation, especially one about money, since before dad died.

“I’m working to catch up. Literally. I punch a clock and everything. Very retro.” I watched him mess with the fraying fabric at the end of the arm of the chair. It seemed shabby and tiny with him slumped into it. “I think after my next paycheck I should be just about caught up. Hopefully Sherman hasn’t tossed my ass out by then.”

“Well, maybe this will help.” He hitched his hip up and dug an envelope from his back pocket. When he reached out to give it to me, I almost didn’t take it. It seemed like if I took the envelope, he’d have to do something equally mean to even out whatever kindness he was doing.

We weren’t always like this. I didn’t used to fear his cruelty or his unkind words about my money situation, my hair, my weight. Once upon a time we used to be friends, though it seemed unbelievable anymore. After a year of silence and mistrust, we barely knew each other.

Without comment, I took the envelope and peeled back the top flap. Inside there was cash. Oodles of it. I had to count it twice to be sure there was actually $2,000 in crisp, straight from the bank bills. It took a moment of staring, of trying not to shake or cry or scream before I could look up. It seemed like if I accepted this token, if I got excited in any way, he’d snatch it from me and set it on fire just to spite me. Shit, I needed this. I needed this gift so badly.

“What--” I swallowed. I shook my head. “What is this, Brian?”

He shrugged. “It’s from Josh. For the page and the ad work. I thought you’d appreciate cash over a check you’d have to wait through the weekend to get into your account.”