Trust Me (Rough Love #3) (18 page)

“We loved each other once,” I shouted. I felt hurt and humiliated, all my feelings belittled. “Simon hit me, yes, he used me, but at least he let me live my life and be myself. He allowed me to have normal human emotions like concern and anger and grief.”

“Because he made you have those emotions every single fucking day, and he would have done it again if you got involved with him. He
did
do it again! This is all happening because you let him in the door of your fucking studio.” His expression was awful. His gaze burned me. “Are you seriously grieving over his death? What the fuck for? He never loved you. He used you and hurt you. God, Chere, what’s wrong with you? Why can’t you fucking
remember
?” The tortured words echoed off the glass walls of his office, resonating between us. There was a faint knock at the door.

“Not now,” he said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

His voice was strident enough to send the timid knocker away. He turned back to me, the bright glare from the window outlining his powerful frame, and glinting in his blond hair.

“I don’t give a flying fuck about Simon Baldwin’s death. I don’t care,” he said. “What I care about is you being safe and protected—”

“Protected? You keep saying you’re protecting me, but you don’t care about anything but your own interests!” He stalked toward me, but I kept talking, spitting out words. “You’re jealous of Simon, jealous of anyone who has a part of me. You want everything. You want me all to yourself.”

“We both know that! We both agreed to that. I earned you, you little bitch. You’re mine.” He grabbed my hand and showed me the ring on my finger. “You wear my collar, you live in my house, you belong to me.” He snaked an arm around my waist and pulled me roughly against him. “And you know how that goes, starshine. I decide who you have in your life. I decide who you help, and who helps you.”

“Let go of me.” I struggled in his grasp, but he only held me tighter.

“I’m never letting you go. I told you that at the beginning.”

“But someone
died
,” I shrieked. “Someone died, and it makes me crazy that you don’t even care.”

“I don’t care because he was an asshole who hurt you.” He shook me until my eyes met his. “I don’t care because you were always meant to belong to me, and Simon was always meant to flatline in a fucking nightclub bathroom, and you need to fucking get over your emotional victim bullshit.”

I slapped him. Hard. When he didn’t react, I launched myself at him, scratching and flailing. We struggled until he caught my hands in his. The arrogant nonchalance had left his face.

“Are you finished?” he asked.

“Yes, I’m finished with you.”

His whole body tensed. He looked really big when he was angry. “You’re wrong about that,” he said, his blue eyes pale and cold as ice. “When this fucking tantrum is over, you’ll still be mine. Remember that.”

I shivered at his tone, and subsided in his grasp. I couldn’t bear to think about a future between us, much less the repercussions of this confrontation.

“This conversation is over,” he said. “I have to go back to my meeting. I have work to do.”

I stared at him in befuddled silence. He had to go back to his meeting. Nothing I had said to him mattered, nothing about my feelings or my emotional pain managed to permeate his armor of control.
You need to fucking get over your emotional victim bullshit.

He claimed to care, but he didn’t fucking care. I pulled out of his arms and ran away from him, because I needed some space to breathe. I left his office, ran down the hall and through the lobby, and out into the corridor toward the elevators. I listened as I ran, straining to hear if he was coming behind me. That was when I realized I wasn’t looking for a place to breathe. I was looking for a place to hide.

Control

I
didn’t expect
her to leave the building. I didn’t expect her to literally
go
, but when I went back to the meeting and switched on the feed to her studio camera, she wasn’t there. I kept watching, but she didn’t show up. And didn’t show up. And didn’t show up.

She’d left.

I resolved not to panic. She was in slave revolt mode, which sometimes happened. I finished out the meeting and went home, and waited for her there. Nothing. She didn’t come home. Of course, I’d never given back her goddamned phone, so I couldn’t call her. My mind ran in circles, hot anger mixed with regret. She’d left me. I knew she’d do it eventually. Now I had to figure out how to bring her back, because Simon wasn’t going to be the one to steal her from me, especially from the grave.

When eight o’clock arrived with no Chere, I texted Andrew.

Is Chere at your place?

No
, he texted back.

But he was an idiot, because if she wasn’t at his place, he would have texted something appropriately dramatic like
OMG WHAT HAPPENED
or
OMG IS SHE LOST?

I had to go get her. She was wrought up. I understood that, but rules were fucking rules and she couldn’t just blow up in my face and run away to her friend’s house. I took a cab to Andrew and Craig’s building and helped a woman with her grocery bags in order to get through the door. I walked down the hall and knocked on the door of 24B.

Andrew answered with a pout on his face, and his arms crossed over his chest. “She’s not here.”

“I know she’s here.”

I pushed past him into the living room. Craig stood up from his place on the couch, but didn’t greet me.

“I need to talk to her,” I said.

“I don’t think she wants to talk to you,” said Andrew. “In fact, she told me to give you this. She doesn’t want it anymore.”

He held out her garnet ring. Fuck. I wasn’t shocked that she’d taken it off, but it wasn’t staying off, not if I had anything to say about it. I shoved it in my pocket.

“Is she in the back?” I moved toward the hallway, but Andrew jumped in front of me, his skinny arms held out, his lips pursed in a stubborn line.

“She doesn’t want to see you. Aren’t you listening? She needs some time.”

I stared at him, at his wild, blond, curly hair and his childishly innocent features. Cute kid, trying to play the hero. The protector. His boyfriend hovered in the background, doing some protecting of his own. Both of them were good guys, but they weren’t going to keep me from retrieving my runaway.

“I know you’re her friend,” I said calmly. “I understand that you want to help, but the best thing to do right now is to let us talk.”

“Talk?” His frown deepened. “When do you two ever talk? You give orders, and she obeys.”

“Yes, that’s the way we work,” I retorted. “You understand about us, about our dynamic—”

“No, I don’t understand. I don’t get why you treat her like a dog on a leash, like a child who needs to have every aspect of her life micromanaged.”

“Andy, hon,” said Craig. “This isn’t your fight.”

“It
is
my fight. Because he—” He pointed angrily in my direction. “He’s taken all the fight out of Chere. You saw how she was when she got here.”

“She was upset because we argued,” I said. “We just need some time to work things out.”

“No, you’re going to leave her alone.”

I raised my eyebrows at him, to no avail. Damn toppy subs.

“Chere’s my best friend,” he said, sticking out his chin. “If she won’t speak up for herself, then I’m going to speak on her behalf.”

I sighed and rubbed my forehead, because I had to listen. It was that, or beat up a twenty-two year old gay kid wearing a lavender scrunchie, and I already had a police record from beating up Simon last year.

“If this is about the thing with Chere’s ex—” I began.

“No. It’s about more than Simon’s overdose. This is about all your rules and consequences. This is about the fact that you monitor my texts to Chere, and take away her phone whenever you want. This is about Chere and I having to hang out at the Big Apple Diner because I’m not allowed to be alone with her anywhere else. I mean, what the fuck?”

“Every relationship has rules.”

“Yes, but most relationships also have freedom, and consideration for the other person’s feelings. Most relationships involve some fucking trust. She used to love you.”

“She still loves me!”

He shook his head. “She’s lost faith in you. She told me so when she got here, that you don’t care about her, that you only care about yourself.”

“That’s not true.”

“Oh, I believe you care about her,” he said, looking me up and down. “I believe you love her, but you need to think about how you show it, because from the outside, your relationship looks majorly fucked up. To me, from the outside…” He faltered, then persisted. “To tell the brutal truth, you come off like a desperate, cowardly man. The way you behave toward her—”

“Cowardly?” I interrupted. The word felt disgusting in my throat. “Cowardly?”

I heard Craig shift as I raised my voice, but Andrew didn’t back down. “Yes, cowardly. You’re afraid of losing her, so afraid of losing her that you’re scaring her away. She showed up here scared out of her mind. I only just got her calmed down.”

“Scared? Scared of what?”

“Of your jealousy! What would it have hurt, to let her try to help Simon?”

“It would have hurt Chere.”

I was shouting now. Craig came closer and held out a quelling hand. “Can both of you calm down? We have neighbors.”

“I care about her,” I said to Andrew. I worked hard to modulate my voice. I had to get my shit together. I had to be the strong one, so I could get Chere home and calmed down, and get us out of this fucking mess. “As for the rules, she agreed to every one of them.”

“Of course she did. She’s a submissive, and a masochist. She’s never going to put the brakes on. Believe me, I know the mindset, but your job is to—”

“To keep her safe. To keep her out of the hands of users and abusers.”

Andrew glared at me. No, it wasn’t a glare, exactly. It was a stare. Craig stared at me too, and then, like a lightning strike, I got it. They thought
I
was a user and abuser. They thought
I
was a threat to Chere. Not Simon Baldwin. Me, the man who had saved her from that relationship and given her my love at great fucking risk to my peace and sanity.

“I’ve never abused her,” I said, my voice rough with roiling anger. “I have never, ever abused her. Everything between us is consensual. Everything I do, everything I say, every rule, every protocol, every session between us is motivated by my fucking love for her. I guide her. I encourage her. I write her fucking poetry.”

“If you love her, why do you hold her so hard? You control everything in her life.” Andrew said it like it was a bad thing. Like it wasn’t what she’d begged for that day in my dungeon a few months ago.

“You don’t understand us.” I waved a hand at him, waved off all his misguided, meddling-best-friend bullshit. “I need to talk to Chere. She needs to come home. It’s late.” I made another move toward the hall. Andrew didn’t budge. Motherfucker.

“She’s not going anywhere if she doesn’t want to.”

“She’s coming home with me tonight if I have to pick her up and drag her out of here,” I informed him. “And you and Craig aren’t going to fucking stop me. I’m sorry, but you’re not.”

He ruffled up. “I’ll call the police if I have to.”

“Andrew, it’s okay.”

Her voice materialized first, and then she was there, a miserable angel drifting out of the darkness. I wanted to go to her and hold her, but Andrew still stood in the way. She put her hands on his shoulders and turned him to face her.

“Thanks for sticking up for me,” she said, pressing her cheek to his. “You’ve been so brave, but I think you’ve done enough.”

He shook his head. “I haven’t done enough. I’ve been too quiet about…about this.” He gestured toward me, the evil user and abuser who couldn’t be named.

“Chere, we need to go home,” I said, staring at her very intently. “We have things to discuss.”

She didn’t look happy to see me, or happy at the idea of coming home with me. She looked tired. “It’s okay,” she told Andrew again. “He’s right. We have things to talk about. This is something I need to work out on my own.”

“But I don’t know…” He stopped, clutching her hand. “I don’t know if you can. Remember…?”

Remember Simon? That other abuser you got tangled up with for ten years?
It was all I could do not to pummel him. I was nothing like Simon. In fact, I was the opposite of Simon. Simon had never cared for Chere, and I…

Well. Maybe Andrew had a point. Maybe I cared about her too much, to the point where I exerted unhealthy levels of monitoring and control. Well, I’d warned her. It always came back to that. I’d warned her what I would be like, and she’d agreed. I’d told her that if she ran away from me, I’d bring her back whether she wanted it or not. I knew she was remembering that now.

“It’s going to be okay,” I said, and I was talking to her, not Andrew. I wanted her to understand I wasn’t going to take her home and explode. I was going to take her home and fix what had gone wrong between us. If I could build bridges and skyscrapers, I could fix a faltering relationship.
There’s always a way…

She gave Andrew a long hug and stepped away from him, back into my control. We didn’t touch each other. There was too much tension. I followed her to the door as Andrew watched with a doom-and-gloom gaze. He was a nice kid, but he didn’t have a clue about Chere and me, and our dynamic. He needed to butt out and let us work through our own complicated shit.

“Are you going to punish me?” Chere asked when we were almost to the car. She sounded a bit snarky, but mostly terrified, which touched something in my heart. Despite her fear, her vulnerability, she’d agreed to put herself back in my hands.

“I’m not going to punish you,” I said, because I knew that would be the wrong tack. “Simon doesn’t deserve any more of your pain. I’m going to re-train you instead. Take a few days and go back over what it means to belong to someone. Do you think that would be helpful?”

She only hesitated a moment before she answered. “Yes, Sir. That would probably help.”