Darker the Release (4 page)

His chest feeling like it was constricting, Caleb straightened up.

He had a sick, heavy feeling in his gut, although he hadn’t yet explicitly worked out what was causing it. Just a minute ago he’d been glorying in some kind of primal power over his world.

Now he couldn’t even remember what it had felt like.

He moved back to sit beside a motionless Kelly, heard her panting, really looked at her for the first time.

He saw that she had gone sheet white, all color washed out of her face. She was breathing erratically, as if she were close to panic, and holding her stomach.

And Caleb felt a surge of adrenaline, his innate response to any crisis.

He knew the signs well enough. Kelly was going to either vomit or pass out.

“Kelly?” he asked roughly, his voice cutting through the stunned, heavy silence that had followed their fucking.

She was gasping almost frantically, and she’d broken out in a sweat. Then her hand went out to fumble at the switches on the door. “Window.”

He found the release and lowered the window on her side of the car, letting in a gust from outside. Kelly scooted toward the open window, sucking in deep breaths and leaning her face as far toward the night air as she could.

Caleb felt the surge of cold air flood into the car interior and sat perfectly still. He watched Kelly’s pale, breathless desperation silently. A kind of dread started building up in his gut, replacing his crisis response, which gradually faded when some of the color bled back into Kelly’s face.

Caleb didn’t think. He couldn’t really process thought. Just knew something had happened that couldn’t be good.

After a few minutes, Kelly rolled the window back up. Gave him a fleeting, embarrassed look and shifted back to lean against the seat. “Sorry,” she mumbled. “Felt sick all of a sudden.”

Caleb had known that and thought he knew why, but he was still trying to avoid admitting it. “Do you need something?”

Kelly was trembling now—violently, helplessly. Her teeth were actually chattering. “No. I must have just…eaten something bad.”

It was a flimsy excuse. And Caleb was only occasionally a fool.

He knew it wasn’t true.

He felt stupidly helpless all of a sudden. He had absolutely no idea what to do.

“Do you want something to drink?” he offered, feeling that same nauseating heaviness in his stomach and on top of it a tearing ache in his chest. She looked so small, so fragile, so incredibly miserable. And he had somehow made her so.

“I wouldn’t say no to a ginger ale or something,” she murmured, hugging her arms across her chest, as if she were now cold.

It was the most bizarre shift of mood and experience. Caleb had been primally roused. Then in a frenzy of lust and dominance.

And now all of a sudden he felt ill—almost as ill as she looked—and the air in the car felt cold and thick and heavy.

Caleb leaned over to check the compartment in the car where there were usually some drinks stocked. “No ginger ale,” he said. “Just a couple of Cokes.”

“That would be great. Thanks.” She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “Sorry about this.”

Caleb felt like someone had kicked him in the gut, but didn’t say anything as he pulled out a can of Coke, opened it, and handed it to her.

“Thanks,” she mumbled, taking a sip and looking oddly young and vulnerable. Almost like a little girl—which made Caleb wonder how he’d just been fucking her so roughly a few minutes ago.

He stared at her for another minute, trying to push all the unsettling experiences of this evening to the back of his mind.

The worst thing he’d ever done—years ago now—coming back to haunt him.

Kelly, ghost white and trembling, because she’d let him fuck her.

When she obviously hadn’t wanted him.

He shrugged off the jacket of his tux because he couldn’t stand how violently she was shivering, and he wrapped it around her shoulders, pulled her against him, and waited to see if she’d pull away in disgust or in fear.

She didn’t. She just huddled against him, shivering.

Caleb could feel his own stomach churning and tried to process something—anything—that was happening here.

After an extended stretch of dead silence, he finally forced out, “Why did you let me do that?”

Kelly gasped and turned to look up at him. “I wanted it,” she insisted, her eyes wide and innocent. “It was good. I just got…carsick or something.”

Another pitiful excuse. Not even worth countering.

“Why did you let me do that?” he demanded again.

She wasn’t looking at him now. She was staring straight in front of her, seeing…nothing, as far as he knew. “I wanted it,” she repeated blankly. “I asked for it.”

“Why?”

A long pause. Then, “I’d never had sex in the back of a car before.”

“Kelly,” Caleb rasped, wishing he could just shake the truth out of her lips. “Why?”

She let out a long sigh. “I don’t know,” she admitted in a defeated tone. “I just did.”

Caleb closed his eyes, slammed with a wave of dizziness, which was an absurd reaction to something like this. His response to this entire encounter had been far more extreme than it should have been.

Yes, he’d fucked her roughly, but she had asked him to. If she hadn’t wanted it, then it was her responsibility to tell him rather than egg him on. True—their fucking had obviously been upsetting to her, but it wasn’t really his fault and shouldn’t make him feel so off-kilter. But it did.

Despite his attempt to deny it, the truth was threatening to level him anyway. Kelly had begged him to fuck her—but not because she’d wanted it. She
hadn’t
wanted it, and yet she’d taken it, encouraged it, demanded more.

Let him use her.

She’d been punishing herself. Through him. The truth Caleb hadn’t wanted to admit.

He knew she’d had a bad relationship with some Albanian gangster in the past and that she was still working through it. Maybe it had something to do with that, but it felt more personal than that.

“It’s not your fault,” Kelly added, evidently reading guilt on his expression. “It was my choice. I asked for it. How could you have known differently?”

He had known. Subconsciously. Instinctively. He had known, but he’d ignored it because his other urges had been so strong.

At this silent admission, Caleb sucked in an urgent breath and then reached down to grab another Coke, this one for himself. He took a long swallow, hoping it would settle his stomach.

Kelly kept huddling next to him, so small and fragile that he incongruously felt like a big, hulking, clumsy Neanderthal. “It’s not that big a deal, anyway,” she mumbled. “You didn’t hurt me or anything. I just wasn’t as into it as I’d expected.”

And suddenly Caleb was angry with her. For making him feel like this. For causing him to question himself. For shaking the sure foundations of his universe over the course of the last weeks. “You might have considered how it would make me feel to fuck you when you didn’t want it. I’m not in the habit of being with women who are unwilling.”

Kelly opened her mouth, as if she were going to immediately respond. Then she snapped it shut and sipped her Coke in silence for a few minutes.

When she finally did respond, it wasn’t at all what Caleb had expected. “Are you so sure about that?”

It took him a few moments to piece together her question with the last thing he’d said. But when he had, he bristled defensively. “Are you suggesting—”

“No,” Kelly interrupted, sounding more tired than anything else now. “I know you would never take someone without consent or anything. That’s not what I was implying. I just meant, are you so sure that you’re always with women who want to be with you?”

Caleb was nearly as offended by this remark as he’d been by her earlier one. “Every woman I’ve been with has come to me willingly.”

“I know,” Kelly acknowledged softly. “But have they really wanted you?”

Caleb had been about to argue some more, but something about her question struck him. It didn’t convince him, but it made an impact on him. He sat for a moment and thought about it.

Then Kelly continued, before he could work out a response, “Have you ever hired a prostitute?”

“Call girls,” Caleb said. “Yes. But that’s a business transaction, and those women received as much as they provided.”

Kelly’s voice was faint as she prompted, “And they…wanted to be with you?”

Caleb jerked away, a jolt of resentment shooting through his chest at what he took to be her implication. “Yes. I’m careful about the services I used. Every woman who was sent to me was there willingly and was justly compensated.”

“I believe you. Although I’m not sure you can be one hundred percent sure about the kinds of choices most women living in those situations have. But anyway, that’s not really my point. They fuck you for the money. Not because they want to be with you.”

This was undeniably true.

“And all those other women you fucked over the years,” Kelly continued, her voice almost gentle but somehow functioning as a weapon Caleb couldn’t avoid.

“What about them?” he asked thickly. “They were all willing. Most of them came on to me. You aren’t really going to suggest that women don’t have the ability to make a conscious, informed choice about whom they have sex with.”

“I’m not talking about choice,” she said, her trembling finally starting to ease. “Every woman chose to be with you. I’m talking about something else. And are you going to suggest that every single one of those women you fucked for the night and then paid off with some offensive, expensive trinket wanted that experience? And did they actually want you for
you?
And not for your wealth, your power, or something else you could give them?”

Caleb was shaking now too, with some sort of rising intensity—only he was shaking on the inside. His fingers were motionless and relaxed on the seat beside him. “If they were with me for other reasons, then they were trying to use me as much as I used them. I’m simply the one who succeeded. Besides, they all had a good time.”

“Did they?” Kelly asked blandly, the mildness in her voice almost merciless. “How do you know?”

He didn’t.

He didn’t know at all.

Most of the time he hadn’t even cared enough to wonder whether they’d really come or not.

“Anyway,” Kelly concluded, suddenly sounding sad and almost ancient, “I’m not saying you’re to blame for it. All of those women chose to do what they chose to do. Just like all the men I was with before. I used to think…”

There was a pause. And Caleb found himself holding his breath until she finished her sentence.

“What?” he asked at last, when she never completed the thought.

She shook her head. “Nothing. I used to think sex could be simple—just something to do. I never really thought what might be going on with the other person.”

Caleb had always been exactly the same, rarely thinking about the human being on the other end of the encounter. The revelation hit him with more power than it should have.

Kelly went on, as if she were speaking to herself now. “I went a really long time without ever knowing what it was like.”

“What?”

“Having sex with someone who saw me as a person and not a body. And who I saw in the same way.”

Caleb let out his breath and took another swig of Coke as his belly clenched sickeningly.

She’d been talking about herself, but the words so clearly applied to him too.

Surely there had been someone—in all his years of fucking—who’d wanted to be with him for no underlying reasons. Who’d just wanted him…for him.

It was tragically implausible, but if there had been someone like that in his past, Caleb couldn’t recall her.

Until Kelly. Maybe Kelly. But she might not even really want him either. Not completely. There was so much more going on inside her that she wasn’t revealing to him.

Why had she fucked him just now when she hadn’t really wanted to?

“Anyway,” Kelly concluded, “I’m sorry I messed up our hot sex. I’m still trying to work through a lot of issues, I guess, so it wasn’t as good as I’d hoped.”

It hadn’t been good at all, except for the empty physical release.

As they rode back home in exhausted silence, Caleb realized something else that hit him just as jarringly.

Their fucking hadn’t been much different from most of what had passed for good sex in Caleb’s life, until Kelly had entered his world.

It just had never bothered him before.

They only said a few words during the remainder of the drive. And when they got to his house, Kelly went right to bed while Caleb went to his office to return a couple of calls.

When he got up to the bedroom a half hour later, he saw that Kelly was under the covers.

She hadn’t brushed her hair, and her dress was tossed on the floor beside her shoes.

He’d half expected her to take a shower before going to bed, and the fact that she hadn’t wanted to immediately wash off all evidence of Caleb’s body on hers relaxed something in his chest.

Maybe it had just been one of those things. Maybe it wasn’t something he needed to feel guilty about.

He did, though. And it was somehow all tied up in his mind with the guilt provoked by his conversation with Sean Moore.

He took off his clothes, dropping them on the floor next to her dress, and then crawled under the covers beside her.

“Are you all right?” he asked, scooting over toward her.

She turned to face him, and even in the dark room he could see that her eyes were slightly red.

She’d been crying.

“I’m fine,” she assured him, smiling faintly. “I’m glad you didn’t work all night.”

Caleb didn’t even register her comment. The small comfort he’d taken in the fact that she hadn’t showered had dissolved completely at the sight of her face.

He was overwhelmed with another sick, heavy feeling rising in his gut.

It wasn’t guilt so much now as knowledge.

There was so much going on inside Kelly that he didn’t know about. Her life was just as complex and conflicted as his was, and that meant everything she did might be more than what it initially appeared.