BREAK - A Bad Boy Romance (92 page)

Chapter 8

“You can use borax to get rid of a yeast infection, everyone knows that.”

I was laying on my back, on the grass, staring up at a bird that seemed as lost in the infinite blue of the sky as I was. It was one of those clear, empty days. My mind, though, was far from clear.

Jess threw a blade of grass at my head.

“What’s up with you? You’re quiet today.”

I grunted and waved her off, staring at the sky and thinking.

“Pay attention ladies and gentleman, behold, this is what happens when you get too far up your own ass. Violet here is having an epiphany, I think.”

“Shut up.”

“You know, it’s the rules, if you have any juicy secrets, you have to share them.”

I swiveled my head and looked at Jess, who was towering above me, the sunlight fanning out from behind her into a crown that hurt my eyes to look at. I happened to know that boric acid did, in fact, cure yeast infections, but I preferred it when she was wrong. The other girls where lounging around in various postures, like a bomb had exploded and scattered limbs, notebooks and backpacks all over the grass but we were all too listless to move now.

Jess was twiddling a stick between her fingertips. Lee was plaiting and unplaiting the same strand of her hair. In the olden days, a great master might have been struck by the beauty of this scene and decided to paint us in oils and title the piece “late summer nymphs” or something. In the current days, though, we were just a bunch of teens talking crap on the library lawns after school was finished.

‘Ok, fine, I do have a juicy secret…” I said.

Lee stopped braiding. Jess stopped twiddling.

“…but you have to promise not to tell
anyone
.”

They all fixed their eyes on me. I shut my eyes and let the sun warm my eyelids.

“Well, I’m cheating on David,” I whispered.

Silence.

“It’s been going on for like a month already. I feel awful. I don’t know what to do.”

Jess, sensing we were entering into her area of expertise, sat up straight and flung her stick away, suddenly serious.

“Oh my God you have to tell us
everything
. Have you …you know?”

“No, not yet.”

“Ok good. Just kissed? More?”

“No, no kissing. Nothing else.”

I opened my eyes to find her scowling at me. Lizzy giggled and started braiding her hair again.

“You know,
looking
at a boy doesn’t count as cheating Violet.”

“Shut up. We’ve been …chatting.”

A knowing smile.

“Oooooh, I get it. Ladies, our little Violet has discovered sexting.”

“No it’s more complicated than that.”

David had been busy with preparing for college, and I was almost glad, since the less time I spent with him, the more time he spent with …her. I don’t know when it happened, but all at once we were trading “secrets”, and I couldn’t stop. When I was Violet, I was the clingy, highly strung virgin who didn’t budge an inch. But when I was Annie…

“I know I should stop but I just can’t. The thing is …I think he’s cheating, too, so maybe that makes it OK?” Saying all of this out loud made the whole thing seem worse than it had a second ago.

“Oh, honey, no, this is bad. Is he really? Not David, surely?”

“What? I thought you said everyone cheats!”

“Well, sure I did, but you know I’m not always right about everything.’

Well, fuck.

“You should end it or break up with David. Don’t be a cheater.” Lizzy was offering advice, which she rarely did; I guess the great order of the universe was shifting and now I was a cheater and Lizzy was now the group’s token virgin and good girl. I sighed.

“So who is it?” Jess asked.

My face prickled.

“Go on, tell us.”

“It’s David.”

“No, who are cheating
with
?”

I shut my eyes.

“David. I wrote to him pretending to be another girl. And now, well…”

The braid fell right out of Lizzy’s hair and Jess look gobsmacked. It felt good to tell them. The rest of the afternoon was spent picking over the details, and what had happened, and when, and why I was so messed up. By non-negotiable girl consensus, we decided: I was being crazy, I had to stop immediately and I had to make sure to never breathe a word about it to David.

But there was something I didn’t tell them. I
liked
it. David opened up to Annie in a way he didn’t open up to me. And it was reciprocated. Without the stress of either of us being the other one’s True Love, and without ever needing to meet in person, I went further with David in one month than I had in the years I had known him.

I promised my girlfriends I’d cut it out and give David a blowjob already.

Instead, I went home and started to write an email.

Chapter 9

David,

I read your last email at least a thousand times. It turned me on. A lot. I imagined you were here with me, and that we were alone, and that we had all the time in the world, and that we could fuck, as much as we wanted. I think of how you’re thinking of me during the day time. It makes it hard to focus on …well, anything else. I swear I was wet all day today…

Thank you for sharing your fantasy with me. I made a promise that I wouldn’t share it with a soul, and I won’t. I want you to trust me. What we talk about here is our secret, always, and you can tell me anything. I’ve already told you more than I’ve told anyone before. Here is one of my fantasies, since you asked so nicely:

I’m on a stage, naked. I have a metal collar round my neck attached to a rope, and I’m being led onto the stage by a brutish man who yanks me up and displays me like that, to a crowd of men. I’m for sale. The brutish man turns me round so that the men can see every part of me. Then they bid on me. The winner will get to keep me, own me as his slave, and I will have no choice but to obey him completely. I’m carried away by a sexy man with dusty hair and a soft, dry voice. His hands are gentle as he takes the rope and leads me to his home. I am his now. I belong to him and exist solely to please him.

He chains me to a beautiful bed, and attaches straps to me – straps to bind my arms to the ceiling, straps to expose me, straps to spread my legs wide open so that he has full access to me, whenever he wants. Because I belong to him, I cannot resist, even a little, when he fucks me daily, savagely. He uses me, over and over, and I cannot escape. I am shared with a never-ending string of men who never seem to run out of depraved and humiliating things to do to my body. But it’s really to him that I belong. I accept it all, because I am not really a person, but an animal, an object, a sex slave…

Annie

Dear naughty Annie,

Damn. I quite liked that. I should ask you to share your secrets with me more often. It’s always the quiet ones isn’t it? It’s pretty naughty of you to have such an innocent face and be hiding such dirty thoughts in there.

You have such a refreshing imagination. I thought of your story a lot today. Consider that you’ve gotten your revenge and now it’s me that has lost all ability to focus on anything during the day. I think a metal collar and a rope round your neck would suit you very well indeed. Do you like the idea of being possessed? Of being mastered?

I had my own fantasy today, inspired by yours: I am at a strange market, a market you go to buy beautiful girls so that you can do whatever you want with them. It’s a secret place, only reserved for the most elite, most illustrious members of a cult, and I am there, and I’m looking for just the right girl. They all seem wrong, each of them, as they’re paraded one after the other on the stage in front of me. But then I see her and I know: I look into her eyes and I see what I need to see. A certain tolerance for the extreme. A fearlessness. A taste for submission. I buy her. I spend an enormous amount of money, buy she is more than worth it. I take her home in silence, leading her by her rope to a bed I have prepared for her. Here, I teach her how to accept my body; I train her how to be open for me, and to always be open, to me or any man of my choice.

I train her body, day by day, sometimes roughly, sometimes with tenderness. But in everything her body is mine, and everything she has is given to me, over and over again. There is nothing that she doesn’t do with and for me. No dark place her body won’t go…

I want to ask you to send me more stories but I’m wondering about how I’m ever going to pass my classes with so much delicious distraction around. Maybe you should send me a sexy teacher-student story next? Maybe that will inspire me to study.

D

David,

No, teacher and student doesn’t do it for me I’m afraid – let’s keep going with the sex slave story. I’m imagining you tie me up somewhere, blindfolded, and then we play a game: you have trained me hard, but now my task is to know you, to recognize your cock. I am fucked by a roomful of men I cannot see. If I correctly identify you, I am released, but if I fail, I am fucked again until I guess correctly.

Violet

Of fuck! Oh fuck! I had already hit send and the message was gone already, sent out into the world like that, with that one stupid, poisonous word dangling off the end of it. My name. My real name. The only thing that was true. This was probably what it felt like to have a heart attack. I stopped breathing and stared in horror at the screen, my heart threatening to bust out of my chest. There was no way to explain this.

I don’t know what I was expecting – to keep going on this way, as if it was nothing? Well, now I had finally gone and done it.

I read the emails over and over, not really sure what I was looking for. Why had I made such a careless mistake? I read the last email. I pictured myself, in a room full of anonymous cocks, blindfolded and floating in my own world of pleasure, nothing but his body able to puncture that world; in this fantasy, I knew every last inch of him and he knew me, and my body would recognize his anywhere, his hot dick as unique to me as his voice, as identifiable as his face with its unique constellation of moles and freckles.

It was
me
that had written those words, not Annie. It was me that had felt them, and imagined them, and filled my head with their images late at night when I was alone in bed. I had signed that email “Violet” because I wasn’t pretending anymore.

He didn’t reply.

Chapter 10

“I have to tell you something David,” I said.

“Sure, what is it?”

He sat opposite me, our hands wrapped together on the table in front of us. Setting up a “romantic dinner” like this felt a bit phony, but I couldn’t imagine the moment being any more awkward than it was going to be already. His mom was doing the late shift, I had signed my name “Violet’ and he hadn’t responded –
now
was the time for me to come clean. I had to tell him. I couldn’t even begin to picture what his response would be, but to be honest, I just wanted to be rid of the burden of carrying this secret with me.

“Well, I know we’ve both been a bit distant lately, and you’ve been so busy with your course load, and I know we did expect that this year would be difficult…”

Something contorted his features and he frowned, then shushed me with a finger to my lips.

“Violet, before you go on, I have something I need to tell
you
.”

I went quiet and stared at him.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this now, but…”

He began to turn my hand over in his, stroking my palm and fingers as though to soothe them. His eyebrows were tightly knotted, and he struggled to make eye contact.

“I’ve been …I haven’t been honest with you about something. I’ve been chatting with a girl. Nothing’s happened, but I’ve… we’ve…”

“I know” I said quickly, relieved he had said something and spared me from it.

“What?”

“You’ve been chatting with Annie.”

He pulled back his hands. I know you might judge me for this, but I’m going to tell you anyway: at that moment, I became inexplicably turned on. Something in his hard expression made me think immediately of the fantasy man we had described between the two of us; here was the man who had written with such filthy detail about dominating my body, about owning my pussy and punishing it for not accommodating him fully enough. My sweet, innocent David had written those words, and thought those thoughts, and now a familiar twinge was growing between my legs as I stared down as his strong masculine hands and his bare forearms.

“What? How …how do you know that?”

It was my turn to squirm away from eye contact. Some sick part of me hoped he
was
angry when he found out. I had broken my promise. But then again, so had he.

“It wasn’t Annie who you were talking to. It was me.” There. It was done.

He looked as though he didn’t actually believe me. A confused smile flashed on his face and then the angry expression grew on top of it as his mind worked.

“It was
you
?” he said eventually, his face going blank for a moment. I nodded.

I was having trouble hiding how turned on I was. All this time, our “fantasies” had been clean, safe words on a screen and nothing more, but it struck me all at once that David had a body. An
amazing
body. I thought of all the times he told me had thought of me as he jerked off, imagining me face down and ass upturned to him, presenting myself to be ravaged. It was though this secret David and the real flesh-and-blood David where finally converging and becoming one and the same to me. But from the look on his face, it was clear he was having trouble converging “Annie” with “Violet”.

“You lied.”

“I’m so sorry, David, it got out of hand, I regretted it so much but then once I started I couldn’t stop and then we had already gone so far…”

“But why did you do it?”

To be honest, I had almost forgotten.

“I was seeing if you would …if you would cheat.”

“So you lied and said you were someone you weren’t and then deliberately tried to lure me in? And then what?”

I didn’t know. I had no answer for him. I hadn’t thought that far.

“I’m sorry David…”

“Did I ever give you any reason not to trust me, though?”

His voice was getting louder.

“Well, I guess not, but then, you did carry on a huge thing with Annie, which is basically cheating…”

“Cheating? And what did you do?”

‘I don’t know, stop yelling at me! I don’t know what I was doing. It just started as a joke or something, I don’t know. I didn’t mean for it to get to this point. But then I actually started to enjoy it…”

“So
you
cheated on
me,
” he said.

“With you,” I said and we both sat for a while and tried to think of who was to blame in all of it.

“You suck for doing this, Violet” he said eventually. His hands were in his lap now, and all I could think of was having them in my hands again. Opening his eyes wide, he stared at me with fresh interest.

“Oh wait, you messed up and wrote your own name? Yesterday?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Holy shit.”

“I’m sorry.”

“We made a promise to each other. I would never have… “

Another wave of anger flushed over his face. I was beginning to wonder if his hands would ever touch me again.

“Just explain one thing to me – you never want to do anything sexual with me, you always stop me, we always avoid …well, you know. And then you write all this stuff? Jesus, did you
really
write all that?”

I nodded, unable to look him in the eye.

He laughed, but it wasn’t the same warm, woolly laugh I knew and loved, the laugh he made when we built pillow fortresses or I tried to copy his Russian accent and failed. This was a bitter, ugly laugh. A pang went through me.

“I wanted to do all that stuff with
you
” he said, standing up.

“You
did
do it with me!”

His face looked pained and he shook his head. Before I knew it he was standing at the door, holding it open.

“Just leave.”

I wanted to throw my arms around him and kiss him until he stopped saying those hateful words. I wanted to show him how sorry I was, and how much I just needed to feel his warm, heavy body against mine in that moment, and that I had never meant to do any of this, but that I had
liked
everything he said, and I didn’t want to stop…

All I could do, though, was leave.