Slow Seduction (Struck by Lightning) (16 page)

“Yes,” I said, choking back a sob. “Damon said he would help me talk to him.”

“Maybe you better start at the very beginning again with how you met Damon.”

“I think I better go back further than that,” I said, “because he’s not actually my first contact with the society.”

“Ahhh. Do tell.”

So I gave her the abridged version of both how my advisor, Theo Renault, had inappropriately propositioned me, and how James and I had met, leading up to going to the society party together. “One of the reasons I finally got up the gumption to turn Renault in was that I was told his application for membership in the society would be rejected if I did. When he was, he showed up drunk and ranting at my doorstep about how I’d ruined his chances with what sounded at the time like ‘the Crimson Glove Society.’”

She nodded. “Sexual predators try to hide in our midst. It is very much in our best interest to rid ourselves of them. But how did you and Jules come to be separated?”

Now I had to decide how much to tell her. But I realized I could describe the situation, keeping what James told me secret. “Up until then I only knew aliases for him. Meanwhile, though, he knew everything about me, where I live, where I went to school, everything. It was starting to feel to me very lopsided. If he loved me, really loved me, when was he going to tell me?” I had to pause to cry a bit, saying out loud the fears that had gnawed at me then. “I felt we’d already gone far beyond just being a kinky fling. We’d used the word
love
, even if there hadn’t been a…a big exchange of I love yous, you know?”

“I know,” she said, giving me another moment to gather myself.

“Up until then we…we hadn’t had full-on sex, either.”

She was so earnest and calm, I didn’t even feel embarrassed telling her.

“We had been working up to it. So here we are at this huge party, which he’d been winding me up for all week, and he ties me up and does all these things, and we finally get in bed, and I t-tell him…” God, where had I gotten the chutzpah? If I’d known he was going to react the way he did, of course I never would have done it. At the time, I’d felt it was my only reasonable action. “I told him no, you can’t put it in until you tell me your real name.”

“Ahhh.” She nodded.

“I felt like if I didn’t demand it then, he was
never
going to tell me. No one was watching us at that point. It was just us, so it wasn’t like I made him say it to the whole room.”

“And he refused?”

“No! He went through with it. Told me and then we made love.” Okay, maybe it was harder to tell her this than I thought. I tried to calm myself with a deep breath. “Or, I thought we did. I thought it was the most amazing sex I’d ever had in my life. But apparently, all through it he was freaking out. At the end, he ran off and gave orders to Stefan, his limo driver, to take me back to the city.”

She let me cry for a few minutes after that, waiting until I had slowed down again before she asked, “Did he speak to you after that?”

“Not a word. Not even to tell me to get lost or to stop calling.”

“I can see why that might leave a girl with a burning desire to track a man down.” She tapped her pen against the paper but wrote nothing. “Did he change his phone number?”

“Far as I can tell, he hasn’t. But he did go into hiding. And came here, to England, I mean. I heard some members talking to him. They seem to know he’s an artist of some kind.”

“Yes, the society has funded some installations of his in the past,” she said.

The private showing of the glass houses piece, the riding crops, it made more sense to me now. “He has a reputation as a recluse. So him going into hiding is something he’s done before. I followed a rumor he was in England.”

“Very well, but where does Damon come into the picture?”

I sighed. “Jules introduced me at one point to the curator for the Tate I’m working for now. Damon showed up at the gallery for a private tour with Nadia and Juney in tow. When he got an inkling that I wasn’t as freaked out by it as your average art history student, he showed me the glove in his pocket and everything clicked.”

“Ah, so you knew there was a possible connection between him and your missing paramour.”

“Yes. Next thing I know, Damon’s offering me a position here and help searching for Jules. I jumped at the chance. At the time, it was my first real lead.”

“And, indeed, Damon put the two of you in a room together.” She clucked her tongue though, shaking her head. “Tell me more about your relationship with Damon.”

“What relationship? He’s been trying to get into my pants since that very first day. That’s not a relationship.”

“True.” She gave an emphatic nod. “So would you say it’s all one-sided on his part? He’s mad for you and you don’t particularly care for him at all?”

“I don’t think he cares about me,” I said. “I think he sees a challenge, and that’s why he’s so keen on me. It doesn’t have anything to do with me at all. I think once he lands me, he’ll lose interest and move on to the next conquest.”

Vanette stood and stretched at that point before refreshing the tea in her cup, adding a dash more to mine though I hadn’t touched it yet. It was lukewarm when I took a sip.

“I can only speculate on Damon’s motives,” she said. “I’ve known him a long time. I gather you promised him something if Jules turned you down?”

“I promised him I’d let him have me for one night if Ja—” Oops. “Jules rejected me. He makes out like he’ll use that night to make me forget Jules ever existed. That he’ll be such a superior lover and master that I’ll forget my hopeless crush on the guy who dumped me.”

“Do you believe him?”

“That’s the thing. If he could really do that, and Jules really did convince me we had nothing, then I’d let Damon give it a try. But I don’t believe he really could do that, even if he intends to. Like I said, I think once the challenge is beaten, I’ll be just another trophy like Nadia and Juney to him. In a few months he’ll be chasing someone else, and I’ll be stuck, again.”

Vanette nodded. “So when you said you wanted to learn how the minds of dominant men work, you were thinking of Jules?”

“Yes. Because I clearly miscalculated terribly with him.”

“I am not sure you did,” she said. “It sounds to me like you knew him so well and that is what scared him the most. He is, as you say, a recluse, a man who lives on secrets.”

“That’s what I told Stefan! That he was afraid. I think he realized how much power I had over him. I’m sure he didn’t hand over his identity to just anyone. But how will I ever know if we have no contact?”

“And now that you have made contact, nothing he said or did tonight contradicts that feeling you have. That he runs from you because he’s scared.”

“Yeah. Until he can sit down in front of me and look me in the eye and truthfully say ‘I don’t love you,’ I won’t believe that he doesn’t. I won’t believe it’s over.” My eyes were dry as I said it. That’s how strongly I believed he would never be able to tell me that.

Vanette sipped her tea and I did the same, waiting to hear what she would say next. When she did, she brought the subject back to the society. “Well, I cannot claim you were here under false pretenses, since I knew right from that first interview you were stuck on some dom. Damon is in hot water for not telling us everything and for being a general instigator of trouble, but you’re not. The question now is whether you continue in training or not. How did you feel during tonight’s exercise?”

I couldn’t hold in a shiver. “I really have no interest in having sex, even pseudo-sex, with anyone here,” I admitted. “I couldn’t wait for it to be over. The…the men have all been perfectly nice. I enjoyed being flogged. But I’m really not interested in having kinky fun for the sake of kinky fun. I want Jules back. If training here was the way to do that, I don’t regret anything I’ve done. But I’m really not into it.”

“Alas, that was the sense I got from you,” she said. “And you’re the only one who actually displayed any aptitude for service among the trainees. Well, you and Stuart.”

“Is he going to be all right?” I asked, before I really thought about what I was asking.

“Oh, he’ll be fine. The membership gangs up on him about once a month. For the next week or so he’ll be walking on air, completely chipper and well adjusted. Stu’s got no capacity to ask for what he needs, though, and is far too obedient to act out to get it. Burns and his cronies take good care of him.”

I chuckled a little. “And here I thought he was high-strung.”

“He’ll wind up again gradually over the next month, and then they’ll take him apart again. It works for all concerned.” She smiled dotingly. “But we were talking about you. I’m sorry to say that unless you have a very strong argument for staying on, we’re going to have to let you go, and it sounds to me unlikely we’ll see your Jules here again, so you’ve little motivation to stay.”

“You’re right,” I said. “There’s no reason for me to be here.”

“I’m sorry we couldn’t engineer a resolution for you and Jules, either,” she said. “Keep my number. If he eventually does reject you, or you decide to give up on him and you want to come back, I’d be open to speaking with you about it.”

“You would?”

“I like you, Karina. You’re bright and smart and your heart is in the right place. Not to mention, you’re a born masochist with an understanding of service. You’d be very valuable to us, if you wanted to be here. It’s good we both recognize that right now, though, you don’t.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll call you a taxi home.” She stood. “My last piece of advice is this. Do you know what excites Damon George?”

“Blindfolds?” I guessed.

“Pushing the boundaries,” she answered. “The thing that gets him the hardest is pushing against the rules and the strictures. Not breaking them, because that would get him thrown out of too many places, but on seeing how far he can go, how much he can get away with in the gray area before he crosses the line into too far. And this is a man who thinks with his cock.”

“Are you saying don’t trust him?”

“I’m saying understand what drives him.”

“Thank you. That’s good advice.” It applied equally well to James, too. What drove James to be so secretive, so closed, so careful? I hoped I would have the opportunity to find out.

T
he taxi let me off in front of the ArtiWorks. Despite the late hour, I could see the lights in the gallery were blazing through the paper that covered the front windows. Inside I found Michel with a roll of tape on his wrist like a bracelet, pacing back and forth on the raised section of floor that would serve as a “stage,” though it was only a few inches higher than the rest.

“Ah, Karina, you can help me with this.” He held out one end of a tape measure, which I took between two fingers. “Hold that down on the piece of tape over there.” He pointed to the edge where I could see he had marked an X.

He then measured a distance he had in his head and put down another taped X. He marked out two more spots and then stood back. “Perfect! It will fit. Thank heaven.”

“What will fit?” I asked.

“The rather large installation that your friend will be contributing to our opening, of course! This will leave plenty of room along here…” He gestured to the open area that would extend from the edge of the raised step to where the chairs and tables would be. “For the dance performance, which it looks like we will not have anyway, but I am hopeful, nonetheless.”

“What happened to the dance performance?”

“Oh. The leader of the troupe has a severely sprained ankle, and her husband, who also dances in the troupe, a broken elbow, I believe. Quite a coincidence, no?”

“Were they in a car accident?”

“Heh. That would be a convenient cover story. But no, I believe it was described as a sex swing accident.” He looked up at the ceiling where two large eyebolts had been installed. “They were rehearsing for this very performance and got carried away, I think. And then the attachment to their ceiling gave way. Alas. It will be dull without dance.”

I had thought maybe he was going to say it would be dull without sex, but no. I looked up at the bolts. “I guess you’ll have to hang a sculpture or a lamp or something.”

“Yes.” Then he looked at me for the first time since I had come in. “Mon chérie, are you all right? You look as though you have been crying.”

“Oh, I’m fine. I’m fine.”

“This man who took you on the weekend-long date. Is he a problem?” Michel took my hands in his.

“It’s not him, Misha. I…I’ll be okay. So, this installation. When’s he coming to install it?”

Michel cleared his throat. “Well, he is shipping most of it down with two assistants, who will do the initial construction. He won’t arrive until the day of, with the final segments. I can see from your face that you are disappointed about this.”

I squeezed his fingers in mine. “I should probably tell you and Paulina something.”

“Something serious?”

“Very serious. Although first I should tell you…I used to do modern dance. I…I could put together a performance for the opening. In fact, I would really, really like to.”

“Truly? All right, chérie, let’s finish up down here and then you can tell Paul and me all about your idea and whatever your other secret is.”

“Okay.”

We turned off the light and went out the front door. Michel locked it with the key and then unlocked the door to the flat. Upstairs, Paulina was emerging from her studio and putting on the kettle as we arrived on the landing.

We settled ourselves in their art-filled sitting room again, with the latest in Paulina’s baked creations on the table in the middle, éclairs and cream puffs. “If I can get it right in time for the opening, I’ll cater it myself with these,” she said, holding up a mini-éclair. They tasted delicious, but some of them were oddly shaped.

“
Tsk
, they are artisanal,” Michel scoffed. “I think you should make
none
in the traditional shape! Each one should be unique.”

“That’s harder than making them uniform,” she said, licking chocolate from her fingers.

“No one said art was always easy.” Michel looked up at me. “Karina has an idea for the opening, too.”

“Um, yes. I heard about the dancers who got injured, and Michel was saying with less than two weeks to go it’s too late to find someone to replace them. But I thought I could do something.”

“Do something?” Paulina asked.

“Dance something,” I said. “It’s been a while, but I have an idea. If the piece that is being installed is the same one I saw in York, I even have a way to integrate it into the performance.”

“Oh, that’s exciting,” Paulina said. “Misha, do you have the photos from the e-mail?”

“I’ll get them.” He set down his teacup and hurried into the other room. I waited until he had come back. The photos were marked with dimensions, height and width, of each piece and the floor layout of the footprint of the sculptures.

“This is exactly what I remember.” I looked at the images and passed them to Paulina. “Did he tell you what the art is meant to evoke?”

“Not a word, but I can interpret abstraction with the best of them.” Michel cracked his knuckles. “All of the red? You cannot think it is anything but blood. Spilled blood is conflict. And the looming, jagged red maw above? Why, it is the piece of his heart that is left after being broken. No?”

“The entire thing is a carnivorous flower,” Paulina said. “The petals turning to teeth, a warning that beauty does not mean passivity. And this protuberance in the center is of course the stamen. Or the pistil. I forget my botany. The sexual bit that protrudes.”

“Go with Freud and call it the phallus,” Michel joked.

“To me it also evokes the floating world of Japanese art.” I pointed to the shape of the overhanging red claw/maw. “This looks like the breaking wave,
the Great Wave
of Hokusai, only in red instead of blue.”

“Ah, I see that!” Michel grew very excited then. “This cannot be an accident. It must be intentional. Right down to some of the shards having opaque white parts capping the red. But what do you think the piece means?”

“I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I think the association with the wave is saying something about the force of desire, about how once the tide of lust is unleashed, it cannot be stopped. This is a part of nature that mankind thinks can be controlled, but once the wave reaches its crest, it’s going to be unstoppable.”

“Ah, and your phallic pistil then is truly the phallus,” Michel said. “What artist doesn’t dream of glorifying his own penis?”

“Female ones, perhaps?” Paulina swatted him on the shoulder. “Listen to Karina.”

I went on. “Well, it probably is the phallus in this case. I need to ask you guys, though. Misha said the other dancers were going to do a very…sexual show.”

“Well, I think they intended to merely simulate sex, but possibly in such a way as to make the audience wonder whether it was real,” Michel said. “Why do you ask?”

“I’d do that, too,” I said. “I would interact with the art as if it were a monster of male desire come to life. Some of it might be, um, quite racy.”

“Racy is good,” Paulina said. “Racy is very good. But what about the artist himself?”

“I would like to keep it a secret from him. And I promise I won’t damage any of the art. Here’s the other thing I’ve been meaning to tell you.”

They were both silent, hanging on my words.

“I did an art performance with J. B. Lester once before.” How could I come out and say this? What if I was wrong and they didn’t really know James? “That was before I knew…who he really was.”

Paulina nodded. “We’ve suspected he was J. B. Lester for some time now, but we’ve never told anyone in the LL community.”

I sighed in relief. “Then you understand.”

“Yes. I believe one of the reasons he responded positively to the invitation to the ArtiWorks is he knows we’ll understand the need to keep his secrets,” Paulina said.

Michel cackled a little. “And he’s owed us a favor for, oh, only about ten years.”

Paulina poured fresh tea into my cup, then her own. “I’m sorry, you were saying?”

“Yes. I was…in a relationship with him. I think I still am. But he’s been in hiding from everyone, including me.”

Michel’s eyes were bright with mischief. “Oh, we must keep you a secret, too, then!”

“Well, I wanted to talk with you about it, because I don’t want him to cut you off because you helped me. He can be sort of…irrational at times.”

“And a diva, and self-absorbed, and miss the forest for the trees?” Michel said. “That is the nature of being an artist, perhaps. Do not fret, chérie. We can handle his tempers, should they flare. I wholly support your performance art idea. Will you wear a mask and reveal yourself at the end?”

“You read my mind. I’ll need to choose music, of course, and rehearse, but I can be ready in two weeks. I might need some help with a costume…”

“My sewing machine stands at the ready!” Michel said, standing up and saluting like a soldier. “Oh, this is going to be great fun. And how wonderful it will be to see James again.”

Hearing his name spoken aloud sent a shock through my whole system, an electric thrill that ran from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. It was real. James was real. He would be coming here. I had a plan to confront him and I had real allies this time.

Now I merely had to prepare to perform an art I hadn’t done in two years. Somehow being tied up and flogged sounded easier. But I was committed now. I would be dancing for high stakes.

I started practicing. It took us and a crew of about six of Paul and Misha’s friends to paint the entire gallery before the floor could be finished. Add two full days for the varnish to dry, but once it did, the gorgeous hardwood was perfect. There were no chairs or tables yet, so I used the entire space as a dance studio, remembering my warm-up exercises bit by bit and stretching. Flexibility came back faster than I expected.

So did Damon George. My phone rang one night while I was practicing in the front and Michel was working on refurbishing a gigantic secondhand espresso machine he had acquired.

“Karina, how are you?” Damon said.

“I’m fine. Do you need something?”

“No need to be snippy, Karina. I know your two weeks aren’t up yet. I need your help with a project.”

“What kind of a project?”

“An art project.”

“Really. I’m very busy, Damon—”

“I need a model and you’re the only one who will do.”

“I don’t have time to sit for a painting.”

“Not the painting. The photographs that will be used as a reference. It’ll be two or three hours at most, I promise.”

“Damon—”

“And I keep my promises. You know that.”

“Two hours, no more, and you promise not to try anything.”

“Define anything.”

“You promise not to stick your cock in me, okay?” I shouted. “Are we clear on that?”

“Yes, yes, of course! God, Karina, did you think I’d forget that?”

“Did you think I’d forget you tried to talk me into it last time?”

“I said two weeks and I meant it. Really. I promise. I won’t penetrate you with anything, cock or no. Okay? How about tomorrow?”

“Fine. What time?”

“I’ll pick you up at the museum after your last tour. How’s that? And I’ll have you back home before sunset.”

“Sunset isn’t until like nine o’clock,” I said. “It’s summer.”

“Nonetheless.”

“All right. Will I need to bring any clothes?”

“No.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

“I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon, Karina.” He hung up.

God, he was infuriating. I couldn’t imagine James ever jerking me around like that. If James said he was giving me two weeks, I would bet my phone wouldn’t ring even one minute early. And if I told him I didn’t have time for something, he wouldn’t wheedle me into doing it anyway. James respected limits and knew how to take no for an answer. Damon…well, Vanette had told me, he would try to get away with whatever he could without outright breaking the rules.

Michel poked his head out from behind the machine. “Everything all right, Karina?”

“Oh, fine. An artist wants me to pose in the nude.”

“Ah, hence your emphatic statement of your boundaries. Good girl.” He grinned. “Did I ever tell you that Paul and I met in art school?”

“No, but I kind of assumed it had to be something like that.”

“She was in painting, I was in sculpture, and we each ended up needing to pose for the other when either models or references didn’t pan out. Amusingly, I needed a male model, she needed a female model, so that was the first time we changed for each other.”

I’d been wanting to ask about that but hadn’t known how to. I sat down at the marble bar, where there was one creaky stool. “Is that how the portrait of you wearing each other’s clothes came to be?”

“Exactly. She makes for a handsome man. I, unfortunately, make a very frumpy woman, but she loves me anyway.” He shrugged with a smile. “James, when he first learned to work with glass, was part of a coterie of students who would come to hang around our studio.”

“How old was he then?” It was still thrilling to have someone to talk with about him.

“Oh, still in university, maybe twenty or twenty-one. He was the quietest of all of them, if you can believe that.”

“Oh, definitely.”

“Always let someone else take the spotlight. He stayed in the background. Of course, he was such a good-looking chap he had no shortage of the others throwing themselves at him. Oh, but you don’t want to hear about that.”

I shrugged. “I assume as a famous rock star he has people throwing themselves at him all day every day.”

“Which is perhaps one reason he is so secretive. He can walk down the street to buy a newspaper without hordes of fans trampling him. Many at his level of fame cannot do so. They are literally captives of their own fame.”

“Is that why he retired from performing? Was it becoming too hard to maintain the secret?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps you’ll get a chance to ask him.”

The next day, as promised, Damon picked me up at the museum. He drove a very cute, very small Italian sports car. I think I was supposed to be impressed by it. He was all business as he took the car along the Thames and then across it. He told me he had been painting for years but had been throwing away every canvas as “unworthy.”