Disciplined by the Dom (21 page)

“Yeah, well, you’d better work faster. I gotta go with this story sooner rather than later, and I like what I’ve got, but I’d like what you’ve got even more, you understand?”

A chill went through her. She hadn’t actually given him anything yet, besides some general background on the Valentine’s Auction. She’d been as careful as she could be about that.

“No, I’m afraid I don’t,” she said. “What is it you think I’ve got?”

“You got Jacob Jayson, sweetheart,” Brazzer crowed. “How come I gotta hear about that from someone else—that Jacob Jayson has been seen with someone matching your lovely description? You got the society playboy who left his brother to die in the gutter and then disappeared to do some charity bullshit, and now he resurfaces in a secret pervert society? You gotta be kidding me. That is newsworthy, believe me. Plenty of dollar signs on that one.”

Catie’s throat ran dry. She opened her mouth to speak, but thought better of it. The silence seemed to stretch out, time dilating long enough to accommodate every horrible thought that wanted to march through her head.

Left his brother to die? And then disappeared to do charity? What brother?

Stephan’s House.

Eileen Corrigan. Jake said her son died.

Catie swallowed. “What do you know about Jacob Jayson?”

“Just what I said. Big scandal, about five years ago, hushed up because his family knows people. Left the kid to die like a dog, his half-brother by his nobody father. Kid was some kind of addict or whatever. But you know these money people, connected up the wazoo, so the New York papers wouldn’t touch it. Me, I don’t give a shit who he knows, that society crap pulls no weight with me. I want this dirt.”

Secrets. Everybody had secrets. Even Jake.

Catie’s eyes were drawn to the shelf with Jake’s old movies, the movies he’d shown her that first day, the ones he would watch when his mother locked him away like some unwanted mutt. There’d been a leather case back there. Green leather. Something he hadn’t wanted her to touch, something he hadn’t even wanted her to see. She’d been too distracted by how much she wanted him at the time to think much about it—that was the first time he’d had her in this house, when she’d begged him to train her, when she’d told him she’d needed it just like he did, and the memory made her feel both warm and achingly vulnerable—but now, now that she knew he had a secret, a secret that was possibly even worse than hers, now it was all she could think about. Her head throbbed, and the shelf seemed to pulsate in her vision. She closed her eyes.

“I don’t know anything about that,” she said mechanically.

“Well, what the fuck do you know?”

Good question. She blanked.

Panicked, Catie dropped her voice to a rushed whisper. “Brazzer, I gotta go. I’ll call you when I have something, don’t call me.”

And she hung up. She was breathing fast, in a room that suddenly seemed very still. Those stupid movies, and the shelf beyond it, had a certain glow. It was difficult to look at anything else.

Catie couldn’t even identify all the emotions that churned within her, all the various fears and anxieties and desires that pitched about like so much wreckage of a shattered heart. Jake had kept beating that drum, kept insisting he knew that
she
was the one hiding something. The fact that he’d been right had kept her from wondering how he might know what that looked like. Jake had been hiding, too, all along. The man she’d come to count on without realizing it, just to be himself, just for this one interlude in Catie’s otherwise wasted life, had his own secret. Catie really did feel sick now.

Is this what a broken heart felt like?

No. That wasn’t fair at all. Wasn’t this exactly what she’d just feared would happen to her, with Jake, that he’d find out and she wouldn’t have a chance to explain? She wouldn’t take
Brazzer’s
word for it, that was for damn sure.

But Brazzer seemed to know. And what Brazzer knew…

Catie hesitated for just a moment, and then propelled herself at that shelf like she was afraid she’d never bring herself to do it if she lost the momentum. Maybe this was just a rationalization, but it was another good one: she had to know the truth if she could hope to protect him from Brazzer’s exposé. From the exposé she would theoretically help write.

And she just wanted to know. She wanted to know what Jake hid from the world. She wanted to know because she suspected that she would love him no matter what, but there was only one way to be sure.

Love.

Catie stopped just short of that shelf, her fingers balanced on the edge.
Love
.  She had managed to tell the truth this time, even if she’d done it by accident, even if she’d only said it to herself.

She was screwed.

Feverishly, Catie ripped out the film canisters, piling them one on top of the other on an antique desk. There was the little green leather case. It didn’t even have a lock, just latches. Well, why would he need to lock it? He kept himself alone. All these years, he’d kept himself alone. It was hard not to think he’d been punishing himself. Catie had to wonder if he deserved it.

“All right,” she said to herself. “One last fucked up thing. I’ll do one last fucked up thing.”

Carefully, almost reverently, she took the case and set it on the desk. She worked the latches—they were worn; whatever was in here, he did look at it occasionally—and lifted the lid.

Papers. Lots and lots of papers. No—letters. Almost retro, actual written letters, written with the uneven strokes of a fountain pen on heavy stationary, the kind a big fan of letters would use. All in the same handwriting.

Heart pattering, Catie looked. All of them were signed, “S.”

She groaned. Part of her really didn’t want to read them. Of all the shady things she’d done over the past few months, this felt by far the most…the most violating. She started almost by accident, catching a stray line, naturally following to see where it led, then another, then another. Obviously, she had meant to do this; obviously, she was choosing to do it, but still, she slipped into it almost unaware.

They were unaccountably sad. Not because they described some great tragedy, but because they were obviously the product of someone who was mentally ill. Or strung out, or both. Variously begging, accusing, laudatory, and insulting, they went on and on and on. Sometimes the writer would ask for money, other times there’d be long, rambling explanations about why he’d quit another program. Some of them were snippets of diary entries—the kinds of thing people do during therapy. Some of them were short stories. All had beautiful, demented turns of phrase.

Catie sat on the floor, and the letters began to fan out around her like petals. The record of a descending life. They were excruciatingly painful to read, taken for what they were, and instead, Catie turned a critical eye to the sorts of references that would tell her what she wanted to know about Jake. From what she could tell, Jake sent this “S”—Stephan, she supposed—to private program after private program, to hospital after hospital. He’d sent money, too, but apparently that had stopped, as the letters bitterly referenced. Catie recognized some of these patterns. She’d dated a cokehead once for about five minutes; she couldn’t imagine being related to an addict, with all the manipulative stuff they pulled. Couldn’t imagine the heartbreak.

“S” accused Jake of all sorts of things, but what stuck out the most was the accusation that Jake had no compassion. No feeling. No warmth. Catie felt herself getting angry at a dead man—this was where the poisonous lie that Jake had no heart had gained strength. Jake’s narcissistic mother had started it, she guessed, and Stephan—or the deranged addict that Stephan had become—knew just how to take advantage of it.

Eventually, the letters stopped.

But there was one more. From a different hand, an older, old-fashioned hand, on ordinary lined paper, ripped out of an ordinary spiral notebook, not the sort of thing someone who revered the written word to the point of fetishization would use. It came with a clipping—a gossip column, a picture of Jake looking blitzed out of his mind, some blonde model on his arm. Catie recognized it as the last public press mention of Jake that she herself had been able to find when she’d gone looking.

Dated about five years ago.

Again, Catie groaned. She almost didn’t want to read it, almost didn’t want to know, but she plodded on. She looked at the end first. It was signed, “Eileen Corrigan.”

And once Catie read it, she couldn’t stop. There was one passage she kept returning to, over and over again, like a sore tooth she couldn’t stop worrying with her tongue, like something that was so horrible she needed to feel the prick of it, over and over again, just to be sure it was real:

“My boy’s suicide note talked about you, Jake. He said if his own brother couldn’t stand him, maybe there was something to that. I want you to know that, Jake. He cut me out years ago, but you still had a chance. I want you to know that he killed himself when you gave up on him. I want you to know that this is what you were doing when he did it. You killed him. Your heartlessness killed him.”

Catie’s heart seized, and became a painful, twisting knot in her chest, twisting a little further every time she thought about Jake reading those words. They were so unfair, so patently, obviously unfair, and worse still was to think about the mad grief that had driven poor Eileen Corrigan to write them.

Catie couldn’t match up the Eileen Corrigan she’d met—the Eileen Corrigan who worked at Jake’s charity, the Eileen Corrigan who affectionately bullied him like a nosy aunt—with that damning letter. There was no address, no postmark; it had been hand delivered. At the funeral? Catie shuddered. There was so much pain wrapped up in these letters, so much festering in the deep wound that they represented. One word swam out from amidst all the others, made itself known as Catie sat in the paper ruins of Stephan’s short life:
heartless
. It was how Jake had described himself, in so many words. Like he was the tin man, a broken boy, a hollow robot without the ability to grow a human heart. It was total,
total
bullshit, and yet he believed it about himself, and those letters were part of the reason why.

I can’t be a part of this. I can’t be a part of the world that turns on him, too
.

She would tell Brazzer to go fuck himself. She would go to Roman; she would do whatever she could to find out the other source. She would beg Roman to be forgiven, beg that no one else would ever have to know what she’d almost done, least of all Jake. She would do whatever she could to try to show him how wrong that letter was.

Catie was crying for him, crying for Jake in a way that she’d never even really cried for herself, when Jake himself walked in and found her sitting in a pile of his most private papers.

chapter
24

They looked at each other. There was a long silence.

He was wearing his usual black tailored suit, and he had come into the room gently. Perhaps he’d heard her, and what she was doing had dawned on him slowly as he’d approached the room. Perhaps it had slowed him.

He stood there, shocked, possibly, his face curiously expressionless, and took in the scene. Catie didn’t try to hide anything, not even her tears. For the first time, she didn’t have anything to say.

But Jake did.

“Tell me, Catie,” he said, his eyes locked on the letters. “Is what you’ve read better or worse than what you’ve been hiding from me?” His voice shook, rumbling on a low register, deep in his chest. She watched him screw up his face, trying to find an expression that fit.

What she’d done—what she’d been caught doing—was just beginning to dawn on her.

“Answer the question,” he said, closing the door behind him. “Is what you’ve read there, in Stephan’s letters—” He paused, bringing a hand to his mouth, but managed to keep going. “Is what you’ve read about me worse than what you’ve been hiding from me?”

Catie shook her head.

“Answer me!” he yelled. He made a fist, punched the back of the couch, then took a step back, his hand covering his mouth. “I’m sorry. I won’t…”

“Don’t apologize.” Catie said, very quickly. To hear him apologize filled her with self-loathing. She deserved his rage—why wouldn’t he be angry?

“You don’t have to be afraid of me,” Jake choked on the words. “I don’t want you to be afraid of me. Even if…” He gestured at the piles of letters, shaking his head. “Catie.”

“No,” she said, gathering the letters carefully, as though they were precious, treasured things, and not poison. She put them back in the case, and put the case back on the shelf, pointlessly trying to hide them away. “This is not worse. This isn’t even bad. You—”

“Don’t tell me it isn’t bad. It damn well is.”

“You should be
angry
,” she said. She almost wanted him to do something terrible; maybe she’d feel less guilty if he did something terrible. And yet again, she was thinking about herself. Bitterly, she said, “You should be furious. You should… I
deserve
for you to hate me.”

Jake shook his head mutely, eyes wide, staring at her. The distance between them was enormous. She walked toward him, and he backed away. Her heart sank.

“I deserve for you to hate me,” she said again. “Why aren’t you angry? Why haven’t you…”

She didn’t want to say it. She knew it wasn’t in him, somehow, he wouldn’t ever be violent in anger. But that wasn’t the worst thing she could imagine. The worst thing she could imagine was that he’d never look at her again.

“Jake, please,” she said. “Just say something, anything—”

“I don’t hate you,” he said slowly. “Because I know why you did this.”

Jake’s eyes came alight and focused on her, clear as day. His face darkened, and he stopped his retreat. Jaw squared, he walked toward her.

“I know why you did this,” he said. “Catie Rose.”

Catie found herself unable to move, a gross parody of a paralytic, like it would all become real the moment she broke the stillness.