“I’m fine,” I said too quickly. I wasn’t fine at all. I was lying to him again. Dishonesty. Jealousy. Lack of trust. Those were the things that had doomed our relationship from the start.
“No,” I said instead. “I’m not okay. I haven’t been eating, or sleeping. I’m barely surviving without you. Even now…” I couldn’t admit all the specifics. I couldn’t say how magnificent he seemed to me with his stern, tightly controlled emotions, or how drawn I felt to the pain he held inside. “Even now, I still have feelings for you.”
“Then why are you at the Gramercy?” A glimmer of raw vulnerability flashed in his eyes. “Why aren’t you with me?”
“Because you’re an asshole. Because you wouldn’t let me safeword out of your cage.”
“I wouldn’t let you out because you wouldn’t listen to me. You wouldn’t trust me. You’ve never trusted me.”
“You’ve never proven yourself worthy of my trust!”
My voice sounded loud in the sedan. The driver remained stone-faced, pretending not to hear our tortured conversation. I wished I didn’t have to hear it. My emotional nerve endings felt scraped raw.
“Chere,” he said, reaching to stroke my face. Damn, I was crying again. My eyes were killing me. He was killing me.
“Don’t,” I said, pushing his hand away. “Just don’t.”
“Everything I’ve done to you, all the wrong, bad things…” he murmured sorrowfully. “It was all because I love you. I told you, I don’t know how to love the right way.”
“Then I guess there’s no hope for us.” My voice sounded bitchy, but my soul was bleeding. “I can’t survive like this. My heart can’t take this anymore.”
“Mine can’t either. Something has to change.”
We rode in silence for a few minutes with those words between us. Something has to change. But what could we change? He couldn’t turn sweet and genteel. I needed his rough edges, and he wouldn’t be able to pull off the genteel thing anyway. I wanted him to be who he was, and I wanted to be who I was, a surrendered submissive who still needed to fight every now and then.
Were we impossible? Were we hopeless?
“I miss you so much,” I said. “But I don’t know how to live with you.”
“I don’t know how to live with you, either. I don’t know how to find that line between having you and letting you go. Not letting you go from my life, but letting you go enough to let you live your life.” He rubbed his eyes and growled in frustration. “I’m too afraid of losing you. I’ve been looking… Fuck. I’ve been looking so long for love, for acceptance. My parents were absent, my nannies hated me because I was a shit. My grandmother…she died when I was young. The women I dated loved my money, my body, but none of them loved me. None of them accepted me. Only you. And I feel like if I don’t…” His hands clenched in his lap. “I worry if I don’t hold you tightly enough…”
I stared at his whitening knuckles, searching the spaces between his words to find some way to fix us.
“You don’t have to lock me away to make me love you,” I said. “Don’t you understand that? I loved you before. Your passion, your poetry, all of it changed me. God, I’ve loved you for so long.”
“You loved me until I put you in my dungeon.”
I placed a hand over his. “Even then, I loved you. You were the one who fell apart. You were the one who wouldn’t trust me, who came up with all these controlling rules that were more about suspicion and jealousy than keeping me safe.”
He made another frustrated sound. “I thought you liked control and rules.”
“I do. I love them, but I wish they came from a place of love rather than fear.” I studied his profile, his strong, thoughtful brow. “You’re right,” I said softly. “Something has to change. But it’s not you, or me. It’s this constant fear we live with, this fear that our relationship’s going to end.”
“But we did end,” he said. “Many times.”
“Because we’re fuck ups. Because we’re afraid of everything that might go wrong.”
He gave me a sideways look. “I hate being afraid.”
“I hate it too. It’s exhausting. We need to fucking change.”
The car stopped at a light. People bustled through the crosswalk, lugging Saturday shopping bags and shouldering for space. The city was busy, always busy, but inside the car, time seemed suspended. Change was scary, but living without one another was so much scarier. I prayed he was brave enough to change for me, to at least try. I was brave enough. The fighter inside me was stirring to life.
“Can you change?” I prompted. “Can you let the fears go? I know I’ll have to do it, too. But I will, for you.”