The Stranger I Know (Dark Romance) (15 page)

But now... how am I supposed to feel?

I feel like a fisherman just slipped a knife under my gills and split me open. Should I be happy? Happy that the man I've been fucking is actually been trying to sabotage my entire life?

I peel myself off the couch and move into my kitchen. I don't even bother flipping the lights on, I know exactly what I'm doing. I climb onto the counter and lift myself up, scraping my knees somewhat on the granite. The top shelf above the stove is what I need. I reach in, blind but with sight, and grab a bottle of wine by its goose-like neck.

I climb down from the counter and uncork it. A glass is an extra, unnecessary step. It'll only make another glass to clean.

Back in the living room, I drink from the wine bottle like it's cheap beer. Every saccharine gulp numbs me a little and makes me that much more exhausted.

I drink until I'm in oblivion.

S
unshine claws at my eyes until I wake up. The wine bottle is overturned and a small drip has fallen onto the carpet at my feet. I'm on the couch still, my hair greasy and my body disgusting. I still feel James' touch on my skin and his scent on my clothes.

I kick the bottle away as I sit up and rub my eyes until they focus again. I force them to. I have one thing I can control — and that's my body.

A headache consumes me so fully I can't imagine it not being a reminder about how wrong I am. I hobble to my bathroom to get medicine and take a bath.

One perk of having black mail on your boss and threatening to use it is you don't have to go to work.

As the hot water works its magic, I soak a rag and lie it across my face. Steam's opened my skin and the medicine is already kicking in, and my thoughts turn toward last night. And the week before that. And the week before that. And the whole affair.

The whole time. He knew who I was. He had to have. I always showed up without the blindfold on, and it was placed on my head afterward. He knew what he was doing when he took on the job of trying to wiggle the company from my hands and put it in his.

He probably got off to it. Watching me like I was just a caged animal from his side of things. He had access to my body anytime he wished, and purposefully crafted to make me feed his other half. Every sarcastic comment and sly grin. It all makes so much sense now. The images of James and the Stranger mixing together in my subconsciousness. No wonder.

How am I going to return the favor?

The heat soothes my body, but not my heart. Just thinking about the grand lie and betrayal makes it beat faster. Manipulation, tricks, and probably bribery, just to get to me. To weaken my defenses and tear down the walls. Until he had me sucking his cock.

Not like I didn't want to, but... I haven't opened up to a man like that since I met the Stranger. I never had a reason to. It freed up my time for work and my career. Now, I don't have a career, and without the agreement with the Stranger, my tension won't disappear overnight anymore.

I can't hang out at bars to pick up young, inexperienced twenty year olds. I need the touch of a man who knows what he's doing.

And James is certainly a man who knows what he's doing.

It's happening, and I can't stop it. Either that, or I won't stop it. My hand drops into the water with a light splash and slithers down my belly and between my thighs like a snake. I tease my clit, throbbing with hate and begrudging... admiration. A man like that... really knows what to do. With the wet cloth covering my eyes, I can pretend it isn't me. The water helps hide the fact it is.

Without much effort, I coax an orgasm from my body. The rolling power of it makes me seize and spill water from the tub.

Hate and Love are a little too close. If either can create that kind of reaction. Like gasoline on a fire.

It just gets stronger.

***

I
f I can hold a sword above my boss's head, then I'm sure I can manage the same with James. Sabotage isn't hard in this world, and I have exactly what I need to do it: the pictures of me and the Stranger together.

I drain the tub and climb out, still dripping wet with sweat and water. I wipe myself down with a towel and wrap one around my hair. I really should get it chopped off.

As I dress, I think more about the photographs. It won't matter that I'm in them. The focus will be on him. I'll find the peculiarities that'll make it impossible for anyone to deny it. His higher ups might not care, but I'm sure the board of his company will care about a bit of a scandal if word got out to the press. "CEO by Day, Dom by Night."

Yeah. That'll work. At least, it'll get the ball rolling. If James has taught me anything, it's that a snowball starts off small. It doesn't take much to get it the size of a boulder and strong enough to crush a truck.

How will I get the pictures though? I don't have copies for myself. I'll have to do something I thought I'd never do: actually ask Stacie for a favor.

Even though she's the one who leaked them and got Michael to try and pick me up. Both of them — idiots.

I open my laptop that's nestled between my bed and the wall and access my work email. I don't even have to go into work for this little chore. I find Stacie's email and find her signature. Her phone number is clearly displayed; both her work and cell.

I dial the number and shove my phone against my cheek The towel tries to fall off my head, but I correct it.

"Hello?" she answers, leaving out a title and everything she's supposed to say, as if she doesn't work for a company but instead works at a fast food restaurant.

"This is Marcy," I begin, making my voice hard as iron and just as jagged. Her tone changes from curious to something that is a mockery of my own. She's bad at it. It's like crushed clay beneath my feet.

"What do you want?"

"I need those pictures."

"Why would I give you that?" she quips. I'm already exhausted of her.

"If you don't email me the pictures right now, I'll make sure you and Michael are both brought up on sexual harassment charges. Not through HR either. I've done it before — and I'll do it again in a heartbeat. You aren't the first handful of idiots to try and screw me. Don't fuck with me."

She moves the phone and the speaker goes to static for a bit. Rubbing against her clothes, I'm sure. Indistinct chatter. I press my ear harder to try and hear, but it's no use.

"Fine." She hangs up the phone.

Even with the line now disconnected, I can't help but snap back. "That's what I thought."

I drop the phone onto the bed before climbing off and going to my closet to get dressed.

This will work. It has to. If not, I can go to more extreme lengths. I can get his work address and start mailing him all sorts of things. A real doll, dildos, anything that'll get his mail office and his understaff raising their eyebrows. He'll play it off as a joke at first, that's his attitude, but he'll start to crack eventually, especially as things become more and more obnoxious and overbearing. And when he cracks, that's the perfect time to drown him. Just like he tried to drown me.

Maybe he thought, when he met me as the Stranger so long ago, that he was dealing with a weakling. That he was dealing with someone weaker than himself. Someone who he could overpower: mentally and physically.

I'll give him a seed that'll sprout into doubt. A kind of doubt over himself and his ego. One that'll flourish and grow to create huge cracks into his foundation with its roots. Devastation is all he'll have left.

A man who has the ability to keep up a charade like that, while simultaneously antagonizing me from both sides of my life, has a fucked up heart. I might be wrong, he could be more... everything... than me, but I have to find out.

I stare at my laptop's screen as Stacie's emails pop into my inbox. Not my work email, that would be stupid. I review them again, the bright screen straining my eyes.

In one photo, my mouth is agape as he pulls on my wrists, my hands bound together by his strong fingers. Looking at them now, it feels overwhelmingly obvious that James is the Stranger. That cocky posture, the way he would run his hands over my back when he's fucking me. How he grabs my hips.

I close the pictures before deleting them. My blackmail idea won't work.

He isn't stupid. He isn't someone that would fall for something like that. Besides, I don't want to spend years trying to crack open his business-office exterior with stupid pranks. Not when I have a much more intimate way of getting under his guard.

The Stranger I know.

***

M
y phone sits in my lap, dumb and dying from my neglect. I dial the last number the Stranger gave me and wait for who I now realize is James' voice to answer.

"I thought you had lost interest," he answers. It is James, but he's putting on an accent or something. I don't know how I couldn't connect those dots before. I hear what I want to. And I definitely didn't want to hear James' voice.

I exhale away from the microphone as I compose myself. "Of course not, I was just... surprised."

Which is putting it lightly. I was fucking shocked when he kissed me. The line is silent, he has no reply. I have to keep going. "Can we meet again?"

He breathes a little into the receiver and I hear his stubble scratch the line. That damn stubble. Should've been my first hint. "Yes. Tonight. Eight."

I slide into my sub voice. "Yes, sir. Of course."

He hangs up the line. Perfect. Eight is the perfect time, nothing out of the ordinary. I'll show up sooner than he does, for once. Then we'll do everything like normal.

Until I tip my hand, and at the same time, swipe away his.

T
he clock is silently blinking, the red letters glaring from its plastic frame. The hotel lobby let me check in, the receptionist recognized me from before. I played it off, and selected the room myself.

She smiled and let me by as if I was a normal patron. Not a woman who checks in every single week. Who finds pleasure in a Stranger's touch. Who lets him do whatever he wants with her, just to feel real again. To feel like she can be that woman again.

I uncross my legs and drop my purse from my elbow. There's no point in hiding it out in my car now. It leans against the nightstand in an ugly pile. I stare at the door, my ears bristling and the air almost too loud for me to hear any footsteps.

I got here early. It's fifteen until eight and he's usually here when I show up. He's always instructed me to show up right on time and never earlier, so this will already be... interesting.

The card slides into the lock and the latch clicks open. It's him. I lower my head to my chest and shield my eyes from looking as he steps inside. I can feel his presence across the room. The ten or so feet separating us feels like a chasm full of rushing white waters. I can only see a small edge of his shined shoes.

"You're early," he says, trying to play it off. I can tell though, maybe only because of James, that he's a little shaken from seeing me. I'm playing the game. My head turned away and my eyes covered with my hand. I'm sure he isn't wearing his mask.

I fake shame and a stammer. "S-sorry, sir. I showed up early and didn't want to wait in the car. It's been getting colder. I made sure I wouldn't compromise your identity though."

He sucks in air and holds it in for what feels like forever. My hand wavers, my forehead is sticky with sweat. A loose strand of hair is sandwiched between my fingers and skin. Just that much is irritating.

"I understand. This can't happen again." He ruffles around in his bag for a few moments and by the time I figure out what he's doing, he's speaking again. "You may lower your hand."

I drop it into my lap and look up. James stands before me, his mask obscuring the top half of his face. I can see his eyes through the small openings. They're steel colored and guarded. Even now, I feel a completely different energy coming from him, but it's just a shade. He's James, and always has been.

And that's what so frustrating. It isn't like I wanted to know.

He crosses the roaring chasm as if it doesn't exist and places his hands on my shoulders. I look up at him, channeling the last time we met, when he was still just an anonymous figure. I looked at him expectantly.

"Are you ready to please your Master?"

"Always," I insist. One of his hands slides up from my shoulder, brushes my neck, and cups my cheek. He presses his thumb against my chin and tilts my face toward his crotch.

"Good. Unbuckle it."

I undo the buckle and pull the belt free from his slacks. The same belt, the same slacks, as when I was with James. I should have known. But I never examined his clothes that closely... did I? I was too distracted by what was hiding underneath them. Everyone else gets the whole treatment, a dress down and judgement, but I already decided who James Pierce was before I ever met him.

I feel him growing hard. I unzip his pants and yank them down to his knees with a stunning amount of strength. He almost loses balance, but steadies himself. "Try and be less eager about it," he says. Is he mocking me?

His boxers are easy. I pull them down just enough to free his cock. It springs forward and nearly touches the tip of my nose. I glance at it, then up at him.

"What are you waiting for?" he says, "Suck my cock."

"Yes, sir. If you feel like I deserve the honor."

"Oh?" His voice raises, and I have a feeling if he didn't have a mask on, his eyebrows would be raised. "Do you need to be punished tonight? Have you been exceptionally wretched these last couple nights?"

"Very much," I admit, somewhat truthfully. "Very much so."

"Then, this won't do. This is a reward for a well-behaved woman, not just a tramp who decides she wants it when she wants it. Stand up." Is he talking to me as the Stranger or as James? It's hard to tell the difference.

Face to face with him, I try and peer into the shadows of the masks' eyes. A gleam of James' blue flecks appear, but only when he moves his head a certain way and the light catches it. My hands are shaking and my heart is trying to swim to safety. The air is buzzing.