BILLIONAIRE (Part 5) (3 page)

I waited for the obvious question and it wasn’t long before he asked it.  “Where was your father?”

I was far enough into the story that I figured I might as well answer him.  “He was already gone by then.  He left a week before I was born.  I never met him.  He never came back.  I never even saw a picture of him.  She burned them all.”

He was quiet for a few seconds, just gliding the sponge over my shoulder and down my arm.  “I’m sorry.”

I suddenly didn’t want to talk about any of this anymore.  I didn’t want the darknesses of my past to creep into the beauty of this present time and place.  The past was behind me where it belonged.  “What’s your favorite color?” I asked him, glad already for the reprieve.

“Black.”

“Black?” I said, turning my head to look up at him.  “Black’s not a color.”

“I still like it.”

“What’s your second favorite color?”

“Blue,” he said.  “What’s yours?”

“Red.  And pink.  I have two.”

“Actually,” he said.  “Pink is my favorite color, too.”  He touched a wet finger to my lips.  “This pink.”  His other hand slid lower, over my breast, where he swirled a finger around my soapy nipple.  “And this pink.”  His touch wandered lower, down my stomach, finding the soft petals of my pussy, not with possessive intention but with tender adoration.  “And this pink.”

“What’s your favorite band?  What kind of music do you like?”

“The Rolling Stones.  And Mozart.”

Could this man be any more perfect?  I looked up at him and he softly, softly kissed my lips.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said.  “I’m going to tell you about myself.  I’m going to tell you things I’ve never told anyone.  Because I want to.  I want you to know who I am.”

“I want to know everything about you,” I whispered.

“And you’re going to tell me things, too,” he said.  “About you.  I want to know you.  I want to know what makes you tick.  I want to know why you smile and what haunts you.  I want to share your heartbreak and ease every burden and hardship you’ve ever had.  I want you to let me do that.”

We both had secrets; this was obvious enough.  The thought of sharing with him, of opening myself up to him emotionally as well as physically felt less daunting than it had only days ago.  Knowing that his scars were as painful for him as mine were for me made me feel like we were on equal footing.  It made it feel like this relationship was about more than just sex.

And the way he was expressing himself was somewhat uncharacteristic of my macho new lover.  His sincerity was bringing out his softer, more expressive romantic tendencies.  After the force of his lovemaking, the words sounded doubly sweet.  First he’d broken me open with his lust and now he was planting little loveseeds in the fresh dirt.

“I have very eclectic tastes in music,” I said, crossing some sort of divide.  A warm, trickling emotion was filling me.  In my throat and in the low pit of my stomach. 
I loved him
. 
Oh my God, I fucking loved him.  No, I couldn’t.  I barely knew him.
  I sounded breathless when I continued, babbling now.  “I like the blues.  I read widely.  The goods and the greats, but also the cornerstones of the modern American zeitgeist.  I’m fascinated by pop culture.”

“I sometimes forget that you’re a scholar as well as a supermodel sex kitten,” he said, and he kissed me again.

As he did, my stomach made a little growling sound.

“You’re hungry,” he said, as though mildly upset by this.  “I haven’t been feeding you enough.  Something I intend to take care of immediately.  I’m going to take you out to lunch at my favorite restaurant.  Then we’ll go to the Louvre, the most outstanding place in Paris.  We’ll buy you a new outfit.  Then I’ll take you up the Eiffel Tower.  We’ll come back here and make love.  Then I’ll take you out to dinner.  Then we’ll come back here and I’ll make love to you again.  And again.  And maybe once more.”

“That sounds like a good plan,” I said, ridiculously happy.

              The setting was magical.  The food was unbelievable.  Over the next few days, we retreated into an intimate bubble with Paris as our backdrop.  We kissed at the top of the Eiffel Tower.  Alexander bought me a gold watch, new clothes, a pink silk Hermès scarf.  We ate and we drank and we made love.

He was gentle with me, almost entirely, but there were edges to him that, if I wasn’t so immersed in the totality of all the extravagant pleasure he insisted on providing, I might have thought about in more detail.  It ghosted at the fringes.  Off-hand remarks that could be easily overlooked amid the Moët and the limousine rides and the shopping sprees and the full-body orgasms. 
You’re not going anywhere alone.  You’re mine.  I’m never letting you out of my sight.

It was true that he
hadn’t
let me out of his sight since the day we’d met.  That faraway gilded moment when I’d first seen his exquisite face, and been swept off my feet by his rock-my-world sexuality.  I knew his obsession was bordering on the extreme.  Yet I couldn’t quite bring myself to worry about this.  If I was going to fault him for his sudden and complete dedication to me, I could have been equally critical of my own response.  More than not, I basked in his adoration.  I welcomed it and encouraged it by teasing him and inviting him at every opportunity I got.

It was early afternoon of our fifth day in Paris.  We were back at the Louvre, where we wandered for several hours each day.  Alexander was right: it was the most outstanding place in all of Paris and I couldn’t get enough of the art I’d spent a lifetime admiring from the pages of books.  This had become something of a ritual for us during the past few days: spending the morning in bed, satisfying our primal urges so voraciously we might have challenged some sexual frequency world record.  Then we’d shower together, an act that usually involved at least one more orgasm, before I would dress for Alexander in an outfit of his choosing.  After this, we’d eat at one of Alexander’s favorite cafés or restaurants, shopping as we walked the iconic streets, making our way past the glass pyramid and into the grand, cavernous halls of the Louvre, where the rich, timeless windows of art had a transformative effect on both of us.

Something happened to us under the paintings’ influence.  The oily romance and the brutal tragedy spoke to our inner demons.  Our barriers loosened.  We talked more freely, like we had nothing to hide.  And on this fifth day, holding his hand, high on some perfect cocktail of endorphins and champagne, his questions began to burrow deeper, as every other aspect of him had.  I felt giddy and young.  Happy and beautiful.  Alexander, all male energy and tall, lean, pirate perfection, had never looked more dazzling.  His silk-black hair touched the collar of his shirt in glinting flicks, adding to his billionaire rogue appeal.

“How come you know so much about art?” he asked.  “You know all the paintings in here.”

“I minored in Art History at Princeton,” I said.  “I’ve always loved looking at the pictures.  The colors and the scenes always seemed so faraway and decadent and so …” I balked at using the word, but blurted it out anyway,  “… rich.  I used to spend a lot of time at the library in my hometown.  It was quiet and clean.  And warm.  Warmer than …”

He looked at me, corraling his surprise at my spontaneous offering.  After a brief pause, he repeated, “Warmer than …?”

“My house.  We couldn’t afford electricity sometimes.  It used to get cold.  So, so cold.”

He paused before saying, “We couldn’t either.  But in Florida, and it didn’t get cold.  I used to hate having to read with a weak flashlight all the time, though.  Jake and I didn’t have baths for about two years.  We just swam in the sea.”

And so it began.  A surrender of sorts.  An admission that we were growing closer.  That we were beginning to trust.

“What about your parents?” I asked, even though I suspected he wouldn’t go there.  Already, we were treading into unusually personal territory.

But there, under the painted, bloody agony of a Delacroix, Alexander shocked me with his raw honesty.  “My mother died when I was eight.  Jake was two.  He doesn’t remember her.  My father was a millionaire businessman with interests in both oil and insider trading.  He made a couple of bad deals and big mistakes that completely ruined him.  He killed himself when he lost his fortune.  Shot himself with a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun.  I was ten years old.  I found him.”

My hand fluttered to my mouth, covering it unsteadily.  I sat on a green couch in the middle of the huge room, and he sat with me.  “Alexander,” I finally said.  “I’m so sorry.”

“We got sent to my uncle’s place in Florida,” he continued matter-of-factly.  “He lived alone.  He had a small practically-derelict house with an even smaller cabin out the back of it.  Jake and I moved in and lived in that cabin for six years.  It was on low stilts and when the storms hit, it used to flood us out now and then.  But we had nothing worth saving except the clothes on our backs and a couple of surfboards.”

His hands were on his knees, gripping lightly.  His black hair framed his face artfully, touched by the reflected purple shade of the painted walls.  And he kept talking.  “Our uncle was a lowlife.  A real fucking scumbag.  A drunk.  He worked odd jobs but he didn’t have enough money to feed us.  So we stole, to begin with.  I got a job in a surf shop waxing boards, which I could do after school and on the weekends.  I kept Jake with me a lot of the time but he was so little.  He was a hell-raiser even then.  I tried my hardest to keep him out of trouble.  The job brought in enough to keep us from starving, but only just.  Not even close to enough to get the electricity hooked up.  Just enough for batteries, sometimes, so we could read, and I could help Jake with his homework.  I knew school was our only out.  So I was cutthroat about it.  We had a few off years at the beginning.  Jake never cared for the academics much, but I forced him through it.  And I forced myself.  I worked my way up.  It took a while, but by high school, I started hitting the honor roll.  I kept working, blind to everything except the drive of getting us out of there.”

“I used to read in the dark, too,” I said softly, amazed at our common ground.  “By candlelight.”  He waited, and I could sense he was eager to hear whatever I would give him.  “I told you my father left the week before I was born, and we never saw him again.  My mother never recovered from that.  She loved him.  She was completely heartbroken, and scared, I guess.  All alone with a baby like that.  My grandmother moved in with us and she took care of me.  My mother was … it was like she was broken.  She started drinking and never stopped.  When my grandmother died, I was seven years old.  By then my mama was … pretty far gone.  She just couldn’t cope.  It was like he took part of her along with him when he left us.  Everything about her just drifted away, or got drowned in that bottle.”

Here, I faltered.  There were people around us, so far outside our scope they might as well have been characters milling around in the rococo gardens or the dusky painted slave-trading halls, or clinging helplessly to the sinking raft on a framed and windswept sea.  We were on a roll now, and Alexander spoke again.  His fists were clenched now.  “It was only a few weeks into my junior year that I came home after work one day.  My uncle … he was in our cabin.  With Jake.  Doing God knows what to my little brother.  I completely lost my shit.  I went crazy.  I nearly killed the fucker.  I thought I
did
kill the fucker.  I
meant
to.  I took Jake and the two hundred dollars I’d saved and got us the hell out of there.  We went to Houston because I knew a guy there, and we ended up staying for a few years.  I worked and worked and studied my ass off and got a full scholarship to Princeton.  Just like you did.”

“Yeah, I did.”  Certain things were starting to make sense to me.  About him.  About his overdeveloped sense of protectiveness.  “You spent all those years taking care of him.”

“I tried to.  Sometimes I think I fucked him up more than I helped him.  Like he might have been better off in foster care.  But I just couldn’t do that to him.  Hand him over to some stranger who could’ve been as bad as what we’d escaped from.  I was all he had.  His only family.  I just couldn’t give up on him like that.  I had to try to make it work.”  He paused here, as though debating whether or not to continue.  “But Jake … he’s …
missing
something, I think.  He’s missing an element of compassion that most people have that just never had a chance to take hold in him because of the way he grew up.  I worry about him sometimes.  He’s been in trouble a couple of times.  He’s been accused of things.  But never convicted.  By that time I had enough money to settle out of court.  But I worry about the way he uses women.  He lacks remorse in a way that pisses me off sometimes.  He’s got a real … dark side.  He doesn’t think of consequences.  And he’s still a hell-raiser.”