LITMIR.BIZ

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the expansive tub, sighed at the embrace of the hot water, then sank down into it.

      “Stay there and soak,” he ordered me.

      Then he strode from the bathroom, leaving me there to do just that.

      The huge tub was set up on a dais, with a bank of windows splayed out before me, showing me Paris at night. I twisted my hair into an easy knot on the top of my head. I sank down as the water rose, letting it cover me to my chin. And I just…soaked.

      As ordered.

      I expected to start questioning myself. For the second-guessing to take me over, storming around and around inside me until it made me raw. I expected all the usual voices of doubt and worry to swamp me then and braced myself a little in anticipation.

      Because it was one thing to fantasize about something and another to do it. I already knew that all too well. It was my life. Every little girl dreams of being a ballerina at one point or another. But the actual doing of it was something else entirely. Everybody wants the tutu. Everybody imagines themselves starring in Swan Lake.

      Nobody wants the reality of practicing the same step over and over and over, day in and day out, ignoring your body screaming, your exhaustion, and all those same voices in your head forever telling you that you can’t make it. That you can’t do it. That no matter what, you’ll never get there. All that to be good enough in your local ballet school.

      The reality was that being the best in your ballet school was still not necessarily good enough to make it into the corps, much less out of it to become a principal.

      Fantasy was always en pointe, graceful and light like a sylph. Reality was the state of my feet, battered and ugly forever, and that kick of sharp agony every time I used them that told me who I was.

      I turned off the water and sank deeper into the tub. I waited for my body to finish cataloging its reaction to what had happened, and for my emotions to catch up and wallop me. I waited for my heartbeat to tip me over into sheer horror at what I had not only allowed tonight, but encouraged. Enthusiastically.

      I waited.

      But it was as if his order to sit here, to do nothing but soak, and his earlier command to lose myself in what he told me to do…held me, somehow.

      It wasn’t that I was numb or hiding from any feelings. I could feel all kinds of things. The silky, warm water against my skin. Every little tug here and sharpness there, each with its own story to tell.

      What I didn’t feel was shame. Horror. Self-recrimination or disgust that I had crossed every line there was and, worse still, enjoyed it.

      I had taken one of my deepest, most secret fantasies, made it real, and it wasn’t over yet.

      And I had no urge to jump up and run. I could have, of course. There were panic buttons in every room, I’d been told. Should anything get out of hand, my intake counselor had told me what seemed like a thousand years ago when I’d rung that bell and set all this in motion. I looked around now and, sure enough, beneath the discreet panel of light switches beside the bathroom door, there was another button. It was big and shiny and glinted like steel. If I didn’t like what was happening, all I needed to do was get out of this tub, go over there and press it.

      Nothing was keeping me from it. He had left me in this room all alone. I had nothing to do but consider each and every one of my options. Or even the fact I had some.

      I wondered if he’d done it deliberately. I was used to the mind games of famous choreographers and my various ballet masters, who always insisted that we choose. In each and every moment, every step and every note of music, they demanded it. Choose to be here, one of our teachers liked to shout. Choose to be better than yesterday. Choose perfection.

      Maybe he wanted me to keep choosing tonight, too.

      I didn’t hear anything, but something in the air around me changed. I glanced over, and he stood there in the door, that blue gaze of his as intense as when he’d been deep inside me.

      Again, the freedom of this felt heady. I was a little high on it, if I was honest, though I hadn’t touched anything but water since I’d arrived here. Because if he was any other lover, I might have asked him where he’d gone. What he’d done in the other room while I’d sat here, soaking. Why he’d left me in this room in the first place.

      But he wasn’t my lover.

      This was a different arrangement altogether. There was no reason to ask him a thing. He’d told me so himself. He would make sure I knew what he wanted. All I needed to do was what he told me to do. No thinking or worrying required.

      So instead of interrogating him, I smiled. And said nothing.

      “Give me a name,” he said.

      I noticed he did not ask for my name. I considered. “You can give me one. Whatever you like.”

      “If I wanted to give you a name, little dancer, I would.”

      I didn’t know what it was about his voice that got to me, like a length of chain coiling inside me, wrapping itself around me and pulling tight. And all those tight links gleaming bright.

      “You can call me Darcy,” I said.

      That had to be a mistake, surely. I didn’t know where the urge to be honest came from. Why had I given this man my real name? Even if I had tried to dress it up like it was an alias of some kind?

      But even as I asked myself the question, I knew the answer.

      I wanted him to know me.

      Annabelle took great pleasure in handing out fake names wherever she went. Tonight I’m Caroline, she would announced grandly, sweeping into this bar or that party. I’m a disappointed society girl from Beacon Hill, whose inheritance is nothing more than a crumbling old brownstone and three ancient VW bugs. And then she would spend the rest of the night acting and fucking the way she imagined her fictional Boston Brahmin Caroline would.

      But I didn’t want to play Annabelle’s games. This was my fantasy, and I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life replaying it in my head with another woman’s name on this man’s perfectly cruel mouth.

      I already knew that I would hoard this night like treasure. I would lie in that bed of mine back in New York, run my hands over my own body and imagine this. Him. The blue of his eyes and the particular scrape of his voice all over me.

      I would live this again and again.

      It was only one night. But it would have to last me a lifetime.

      Because I knew that I was never going to feel safe enough to repeat this, because I certainly couldn’t afford to make myself a member of this club. This was my one chance.

      A part of me whispered that it wasn’t only the safety…it was him. This particular man on this specific night.

      And if I wanted to make sure that I could hold this close to me forever, in all the years that followed, it required I give him my real name.

      “Darcy,” he said, as if he was tasting the syllables. As if it was a fine wine that required its own ritual before he could drink deeply.

      I was sure it probably was a mistake to give him my real name, like bread crumbs that might lead away from this enchanted room in this decadent club straight back to my real life. But I would have to beat myself up for that later, when my emotions caught up with me. When I was back in reality, across the sea in Manhattan again.

      Because here in this gleaming tub, with Paris like a sea of light outside the windows, all I could think about was the way it felt to hear him say it.

       Darcy.

      As if I wasn’t just another object to him, as hot as that was.

      As if I was his.

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