The Saint: The Original Sinners Book 5 (26 page)

“Use your words, Eleanor.”

“Fuck.”

“No,” he said. “Not yet. I know it’s not the answer you want, but I have my reasons for waiting. Sex was created by God and He made it pleasurable. But He also made it complicated. I’ve had intercourse with two people in my life, Eleanor. Two. And I will feel a lifelong bond with these people. I won’t make that bond with you until I’m certain you’re ready for it.”

“Do you think you should only have sex with someone you’re in love with?”

“Complicated question. Sex between women and men is especially complicated. There’s always the risk of conceiving. I would never tell anyone else who they should or should not be intimate with. For my own part, I choose not to do it except with someone I can imagine having a connection with for the rest of my life.”

“I want that with you, forever,” she said.

“I don’t need to make love to you to want to be bonded to you forever. I have felt that connection since the day we met.”

She rose off the floor and Søren took her into his arms. She lay across his lap, her head on his chest, his arms around her.

“I’ll wait for you,” she said. “Always. I want you to be proud that you own me, sir.”

Søren tilted her chin up and kissed her.

“I already am proud to own you, Little One. As this proves.” He touched the collar on her neck.

“Why am I wearing this? It doesn’t seem like you.”

“It’s a symbol,” he said. “A symbol others in our world will understand. You belong to me. This is a visual reminder of that.”

“I love belonging to you.”

“And this makes it official.” He kissed her on the soft skin under her collar. “So we should celebrate it.”

“Celebrate? How?”

“Like this...” Søren kissed her and as he did, he pushed her onto her back, his hand lightly on her throat, his mouth devouring her lips. A kiss from Søren alone could bring her body to life with need. He kissed her possessively, obsessively, as if staking a claim on her body every time their lips touched.

He pulled back and pushed her thighs open. He took her hand and put it between her legs. He waited, an expectant look on his face.

“You’re going to sit there and watch, sir?”

“I may lend a hand. If you’re good.”

“One question—am I doing this while you watch because it turns you on or because it’s humiliating?”

“They are one and the same to me.”

She took a deep breath and spread her thighs wider. If she had to put on a show, might as well make it a good one. And she knew Søren wanted her, so why not make his waiting for her hurt him as much as it hurt her?

With both hands between her legs, she opened her vagina and pushed one finger inside herself. For some reason doing this while Søren watched embarrassed her less than sitting at the table and eating dinner. It made perfect sense to be naked while doing something sexual. Being naked while having dinner felt awkward and embarrassing. Being naked and touching herself? Not a problem.

“Show-off,” Søren said as she caressed her wet inner lips.

She trailed her finger up to her clitoris and started to rub it. Closing her eyes, she sank into her fantasy world where she and Søren would need a telescope to see the lines they’d crossed so far behind them. He’d warned her he would have to hurt her before he could be aroused enough to fuck her. Fine. Good. She longed for the day she could be flogged and caned and treated like sexual property, like a body to be used by Søren and for Søren. She reminded herself that even though she would be the one having the orgasm, she did this for him, for his pleasure. It made it much less embarrassing to do things under orders. She had no choice.

Søren pushed a finger into her and found that soft spot an inch inside her that made her stomach tighten and her back melt into the sofa. He made tight circles inside her that left her groaning in the back of her throat.

Eleanor continued to rub her clitoris as Søren slipped a second finger inside her. As she started to pant, he began to thrust his fingers in and out of her slowly, scraping the front wall of her vagina with his fingertips. She felt everything as he moved inside her. Her toes curled and her thighs shivered. Her hips tightened and her back arched. Her stomach fluttered and her clitoris throbbed. Her chest heaved and her nipples hardened.

“You can come whenever you like.”

“I don’t want to come, sir.”

“Why not?”

“So you’ll keep touching me.”

Søren softly laughed.

“Pick a number between one and five.”

“What am I picking?”

“I can’t tell you that. No, I can, but I won’t.”

“Then how do I know what to pick?”

“You won’t.”

“Then five.”

“I should have guessed. Come for me, Little One.”

She took a deep breath and focused on her own pleasure, on the thrumming of her clitoris against her fingers and the pressure building in her stomach. She rode the wave of pleasure to the top and crashed into it at full speed. Her inner muscles clenched around Søren’s fingers inside her and buried deep. As she panted, he pulled out of her and dragged her to him.

“That was one,” he said.

“One what?” She collapsed against his chest, spent and sleepy.

“You picked five. One down, four to go.”

Her eyes flew wide-open.

“Five orgasms?”

He kissed the tip of her nose as he slid his hand down her stomach and between her legs again.

“Of course, next time I make you pick, you could be picking how many hours I’ll tease you before I let you come.” He gripped the back of her neck roughly; his tone grew forceful, dominating and cold. She loved it.

“You’re a sadist.”

“I am.”

“I’ll always pick the biggest number even if I don’t know what I’m picking,” she said, panting.

“And that, Little One, is why I love you.”

“I love you, too. Even if you do torture me and make me wait and beg for you, sir.”

“But will you always?” he asked, his voice suddenly serious and somber.

She touched her collar around her neck. She’d almost forgotten about it. In less than an hour it already seemed like a part of her, a second skin.

“I will love you forever. I’ll wait as long as I have to for you, sir.”

“What if I make you wait one more year?”

“I’ll wait.”

“Two more years?”

“I’ll wait.”

“What if you find someone else?”

“Not interested,” she promised. “If you can’t have sex without pain, I don’t want it, either. And I don’t want anybody but you.”

“Are you sure of that?”

She leaned her head against his chest.

“Completely,” she said and meant it. There was no man for her but Søren, now or ever. “You really think some other guy is going to try to steal me from you?”

Ridiculous idea. If she’d said no to Kingsley in the back of his Rolls-Royce, who on earth could ever tempt her to stray from Søren? No one, that’s who.

“Eleanor,” Søren said, kissing her on the forehead, “I’m absolutely certain of it.”

27

Eleanor

“‘TWO ROADS DIVERGED
in a wood, and I...I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.’” Dr. Edwards closed her book with a wistful sigh, and Eleanor fought the urge to bang her head against the wall. Sophomore American literature and they were reading the same poem she read freshman year of high school? Weren’t there a few billion other poems out there they could be dissecting other than “The Road Not Taken,” otherwise known as the only poem anyone remembered from high school?

“First thoughts on the poem?” Dr. Edwards asked.

A girl in the front row raised her hand—Rachel Something.

“I love this poem,” she said. “It’s about how you have to choose the path other people don’t take. Be a leader, not a follower.”

Eleanor felt her IQ dropping.

“Very good. Anyone else?”

A freshman raised his hand and parroted back almost the same interpretation. Guy walking in the woods. Sees two paths. He picks the road that fewer people had taken and that makes him a hero, blah, blah, blah. Eleanor mentally picked up a baseball bat and slammed it into the back of that freshman’s head.

“Great thoughts. Other first impressions?”

“Yeah,” Eleanor said. “You’re all idiots.”

The room went silent. Dr. Edwards’s dark eyes widened. She raised her chin and stared Eleanor down.

“You need to have a very good argument to back up a statement like that.”

“I have a great argument. Read the poem.”

“I read the poem, and I agree with them.”

“Then there is no hope left for humanity.” Eleanor sank into her seat with a sigh. At the age of nineteen, she had come to the realization that unless she was in the same room as Søren, Kingsley and Sam, she could count on being surrounded by idiots.

“Care to tell us what your interpretation of the poem is then, Elle?”

“Sure. Why not?” She held up her book and pointed at a line. “Did anyone happen to read something in the poem other than the last stanza? Lines nine and ten—‘Though as for that the passing there had worn them both about the same.’ Anyone else see that part? One wasn’t
less
traveled by. They were traveled the same.”

“Then why does the narrator call one less traveled by in the last stanza?” demanded Dr. Edwards. “Can you explain that?”

“I can.” A male voice piped up from the other side of the room. Eleanor turned her head and looked back at the guy who sat in the farthest corner of the room. She’d seen him before but never paid any attention to him. He had black hair with streaks of bright red through it, an eyebrow ring, black punk nail polish and tattoos on his hands.

“You can, Wyatt?” Dr. Edwards asked. “Tell us, then. Nice to hear you speaking in class.”

“I’m with Elle here. I can’t keep my mouth shut around so much stupidity.”

Wyatt. So that was his name. Seemed to fit him. Weird name. Weird guy.

“What do you find so stupid?” Dr. Edwards sounded less irritated with Wyatt than she’d sounded with her. Dr. Edwards always gave the boys in the class more attention than the girls. But in this case, Eleanor couldn’t blame her. Now that she looked at Wyatt she noticed for the first time how attractive he was. Piercings, tattoos, spiked punk hair and he read poetry and called people stupid to their faces? Her kind of guy.

“It’s obvious. This poem is in two parts. The first four stanzas are about the actual event. The fifth stanza is the speaker telling us how he will narrate the event in the future. And he’s an unreliable narrator. Like Elle says, in lines nine and ten he says the roads are the same. Neither one of them is more or less traveled. But in the last stanza he says that in the future when he’s talking about this moment, he’ll lie and say one of them was less traveled than the other. As a young man he made a totally arbitrary choice—left road or right road—and in the future he’ll make it sound like the choice wasn’t arbitrary. He’ll give it meaning that it didn’t have in the moment. He’s not a hero. He’s an old man telling lies to the younger generation.”

“There is no road less traveled,” Elle chimed in. “It’s convenient fiction to explain why he went right instead of left. We have to believe the choices we made were for a reason if we want our life to have meaning. This poem isn’t inspiring. It’s creepy and depressing.”

“Right,” Wyatt said. “That’s why I like it.”

Eleanor looked back and smiled at him, mouthing a thank-you. He gave her a nonchalant no-big-thing shrug.

When class finally ended, Eleanor grabbed her backpack off the floor and stuffed her book into it. She saw feet facing her feet. A note with her name on it appeared before her face. She looked up and saw Wyatt standing in front of her.

“It’s a very important note,” he said. “Life altering. Read at your own risk.”

“You’re kind of weird, Wyatt. You know that, right?”

“Should you be flirting with me, Elle? This is the first time we’ve talked, and I’m very shy and girls scare me. I’m probably still a virgin.”

She arched an eyebrow at him. She’d been practicing that in her mirror.

“Probably? You don’t know if you’re still a virgin or not?”

“I didn’t ask myself if I was or not. It’s a really personal question, and I don’t know myself well enough to bring it up.”

“I’m going to open the note now.”

“I wish you’d reconsider,” Wyatt said.

“I might need it for evidence in my criminal case against you.”

“Good point. Open it.”

She unfolded the paper.

“This is a shark, Wyatt. This is a drawing of a shark.” She held up the note.

“What? You don’t like sharks? What kind of person doesn’t like sharks?”

“I’m not saying I don’t like sharks. I’m saying I don’t know why you gave me a picture of a shark.”

“The shark asked me to.”

“Why did the shark ask you to give me a picture of it?”

“Because he thinks you’re beautiful, brilliant and he wants your phone number.”

Eleanor studied the shark. It was about as well rendered a shark as she could have drawn. For Wyatt’s sake she hoped he wasn’t an art major. Still, it was a cute shark with impressively large fins. He’d even given the shark a red Mohawk.

She folded the paper back up and handed it to Wyatt.

“Please tell the shark I’m sorry. I’m not available.” It shocked her how hard she had to work to force those words out.

Wyatt’s eyes clouded over for a split second, and she saw the hurt and disappointment behind the adorable mask of male arrogance.

“Can you and the shark maybe be friends?”

“I’ve never been friends with a shark before. Will he bite me?”

“If you ask nicely.”

“Worth a shot. Shark lunch?”

“Shark lunch.”

They talked all the way to the cafeteria in Weinstein about how they couldn’t believe Dr. Edwards had been that obtuse about “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost.

“Here’s what I think,” Wyatt said as he finished off his lunch of a cheeseburger and fries, some of the only safe food in the cafeteria. “I think if you know more about a subject than your professor, you get to take their Ph.D. from them. Education should be like heavyweight boxing, but with Ph.D.s instead of belts.”

“So which one of us gets Edwards’s Ph.D.? I think Dr. Schreiber has a nice ring to it.”

“It does. You can have it because you spoke up first.”

“Yeah, but you gave the better argument.”

“You can have the Ph.D. if you’ll play doctor with me, Dr. Schreiber.”

“Did the shark forget to tell you I’m not available?”

“He told me, but he didn’t have many details so I’m not sure I can trust him as a source. Boyfriend?”

“Sort of.”

“Does he go here?”

“Nope. He’s in Europe right now defending his dissertation.”

“Older man, huh? I see how it is.”

“You see, huh?”

“Not even a shark can compete with an older man for a college girl. That’s like bringing a stealth bomber to a knife fight.”

“It gets worse.”

Wyatt winced dramatically.

“How much worse? Is he rich?”

“He’s gorgeous. It’s obscene how gorgeous he is. But he’s not rich. Not anymore. Went the low road, real job, not taking Dad’s money.”

“Poor by choice. God, I hate this guy. Tell me more.”

“Are you a masochist?”

He pointed at his eyebrow ring and the tattoos on his hands.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Eleanor said. “What do your tattoos say?”

“They’re in German. The right hand says—”

Before he could finish she grabbed his hand and yanked it across the table.

“Es war einmal,”
she read. “Once there was...”

He handed over his left hand and she read aloud, “
Und wenn sie nicht gestorben sind, dann leben sie noch heute.
And if they haven’t died, they are still living.”

“You know German?” Wyatt said, seeming to be in no hurry to take his hands away from her.

“German grandparents. You have the beginning and ending lines of German fairy tales tattooed on your hands.”

“Is that what those are? I walked into the shop and told them to give me whatever the special of the day was. That’s weird that tattoo parlors have those, right? I thought it was weird. You got any ink?”

“Not yet. I want to get the Jabberwocky tattooed on my back.”

“Jabberwocky? Better than a goddamn butterfly. Why him?”

“Jabberwocky’s my sa—” She stopped herself before she finished saying “safe word.” When she’d turned eighteen, Søren had instructed her to choose one. But that wasn’t a conversation she needed to have. “My spirit guide. You know, totem or whatever. So you like fairy tales?”

“Grimm’s fairy tales, the real ones. Not those Disney ones. The real stories.”

“The real fairy tales are incredibly violent,” Eleanor reminded him. She not only knew Grimm’s fairy tales, but she’d also read them in the original German. “In the original
Cinderella
the wicked stepsisters cut off their toes and heels to fit into the glass slipper.”

“I know. It’s not the Grimm’s version, but in the original French
Sleeping Beauty,
the sleeping princess doesn’t get kissed by the prince—”

“She gets raped. Small price to pay.”

Wyatt gaped at her.

“Rape is a small price to pay? Did you say that out loud in this school?” He glanced around wildly as if checking for spies and/or women’s studies majors.

“
Sleeping Beauty
has the same theme as the creation myth,” Eleanor said. “Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden so young and innocent. If they eat the forbidden fruit, they’ll have knowledge of good and evil. But they’ll also lose paradise. They give up paradise for knowledge without even knowing what that knowledge is. Sleeping Beauty loses her innocence in exchange for waking. Otherwise she’d live in a dreamland forever.”

“She didn’t consent to getting raped awake,” Wyatt reminded her.

“Adam and Eve didn’t know what they would win or what they would lose until they’d both won and lost it. It’s like that poem we read. The guy doesn’t know what the meaning is of the road he took until he got to the end of it. You choose first, then you find out what you’ve chosen after. Every choice has a price. Sometimes we don’t know what it is until after we’ve paid it.”

Wyatt leaned forward and stared at her from across the table.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, Elle, but you should be a writer.”

“I am a writer.”

He nodded knowingly and tapped the table a few times as if in deep thought.

“Wyatt?”

“Give me a sec. I’m trying to figure out how to bring down a stealth bomber with a knife.”

“Don’t even try it. Do you write?”

“Yeah, but don’t tell anybody. Writing’s like masturbating. Everyone does it but no one likes to admit to it.”

“I admit to it.”

“Writing or masturbating?”

“Both.” Eleanor waggled her eyebrows at him before realizing that she was now in full-blown flirtation mode. She had to shut this down and fast.

“So what do you write?” she asked, trying to get onto a safer topic than sex.

“Mostly poetry about death and the meaninglessness of life and how you make decisions when you’re young that are arbitrary, but when you’re older you have to pretend like they meant something.”

“Holy shit. You’re Robert Frost, aren’t you?”

“Shh...” Wyatt hushed her as if she’d leaked a state secret. “Keep your voice down. I don’t want to get mobbed by the poetry groupies, which have never existed in the history of the world ever.”

“You’re ridiculous.”

“And you’re beautiful and you speak German and you write and I want to move into your dorm room and sleep in your dirty clothes hamper.”

Eleanor stared blankly at him.

“The last part about the clothes hamper was too much, wasn’t it?” he asked.

“Only because I don’t have a dirty clothes hamper.”

“One date. All I ask. Your stealth bomber is in Europe. He’ll never find out. He’s too busy being smart and pissing me off by existing. We get dinner, we talk. I’ll show you my poetry. You’ll call the suicide prevention hotline on me. It’ll be amazing.”

“You are really determined, aren’t you?”

“You told Dr. Edwards she was an idiot. I want to make love to your brain. Like Marvin Gaye–style.”

“Just dinner?”

“Just dinner.”

“You won’t try anything?”

“I will try everything.”

“You’ll take no for an answer?”

“Yes. I mean no. I mean yes, I’ll take no for an answer. Wait. What’s the question?”

“If you ask me to have sex with you, I’ll say no,” Eleanor said, giving him a death stare.

“If you ask me to have sex with you, I’ll say yes.”

“I’m serious, Wyatt. No sex.”

“Agreed, sex is off the table.”

“So we can’t have sex,” she said.

“No, we can have it. Just not on the table. That’s gross, Elle. People gotta eat here.”

Eleanor sighed. She regretted this date already.

“My stealth bomber comes home in a week.”

“Then you’re safe from the shark in my pants.”

“Does your pants shark also have a red Mohawk?” she asked as she gathered her things and stood up.