Denial

1

“Maya, why aren’t there any clothes in your suitcase?” my roommate ambushes me as I step out of my bedroom.

“Piper. Hi. Your home.” Crap. How am I going to
explain this? “I thought you were at work.”

“I came home on my break to see you off. Surprise,” she says flatly.

“Oh.” That figures. “That was sweet. I’ll miss you, too.”

She shakes her head dismissively. “Why didn’t you pack any actual clothing? It’s all lingerie.”

“Um…” This is awkward. “The clothes are on the bottom.”

“No, there are three sets of pajamas on the bottom.” I love my roommate dearly but she can
be so intrusive sometimes. “You’re going away for a month. With his family. What are you planning to wear?”

“
Luke’s going to, uh… take me shopping in Paris first,” I lie poorly. She doesn’t buy it for a nanosecond.

“
I thought you should bring that black dress of mine that looks better on you. I went to slip it in your bag and—”

“It’s too big for me now.” Her skeptical brown eyes stayed locked with mine. I never thought I’d be grateful for a chance to steer the conversation to her concerns about my weight loss. Too bad she isn’t going to take the bait.

“And when I opened it, I found this.” She holds up my collar. Shit. “Then I noticed that you took the address tags off of your bag.”

“You shouldn’t go through my things.”

“So I started looking for your plane ticket,” she ignores me. “And I didn’t find one. But I did find your out of date passport from high school.”

“
Luke has the new one. And my ticket.”

“Then I looked up flights to London that were leaving soon. There aren’t any.” That was a sloppy mistake. What do I say now? “Maya, where is he taking you?”

“Piper, we’re…” I trail off.

“Where. The fuck. Is he taking you?” Uh oh. She’s moved on from her talking-to-me-like-I’m-fragile voice to her you’d-better-start-explaining voice.

“It’s none of your business. Give me that.” I grab at the collar but she jerks it away.

“Is this some kind of messed up kinky sex vacation? For a
n entire month?”

Yes
. “What if it is?”

“Are you fucking insane? After what he did last time?”

Why did I tell her about the creepy threesome? She is never going to let it go. “It’s not like that.”

“Well, you’d better tell me what is like, because you are not getting out of this apartment until you do.” She stomps across the room and
flops her nosy ass down in front of the door with my bag on her lap. Fantastic.

“Seriously?” I roll my eyes. “I’ll go out the fire escape if I have to.”

“You are absolutely terrified of that fire escape and I’ll pull you back through the window before you get both legs out.”

“For someone who’s so concerned about violence, you’re not afraid to use it.”

“It’s coming from a place of love. Although that’s probably what he tells you, too.”

“I don’t have to explain myself to you, Piper.”

“Humor me. Where are you going?” She pats the floor in front of her. “Spill.”

Our cat scampers between us, chasing a rolled up scrap of paper that she fished from the trash. As
usual, she slides out of control and slams into the wall, turning around bewildered as if this doesn’t happen three times a day. Piper tries her best to keep her serious face on but starts laughing when I do.

“Junior!” I dip down and scoop the clumsy fur ball up. She purrs so loudly when she’s this excited. I’m going to miss her. “Well, since your other mother is being entirely unreasonable…” I sit on the floor, distracting myself from the impending interrogation by teasing Junior with her favorite squeaky mouse.

“Maya just tell me. I’ll do my best to not freak out.”

“I’m not going with
Luke’s family to the South of France,” I sigh. “You aren’t going to like this.”

“Tell me something I haven’t already figured out.”

“I’m going to… practice.”

“Practice what? That demented kinky shit?

Geez. “Yeah, basically.”

“Why do you guys have to go out of town? Why can’t you just
practice
at his place all summer?”

“
Luke’s already in Marseille with his parents. I’m practicing with someone who does this… professionally.”

“What?” she screams, throwing my bag harshly to the floor and jumping to her feet.

“Calm down. You’re scaring AJ.” I wish I could hide under the couch when she gets like this.

“Calm down? Have you finally lost your mind? You’re prostituting yourself now?”

“I’m not prostituting myself. This isn’t some call girl thing, it’s more like a training program.”

“Oh, I get it, you’re going to a freaky sex mind washing camp. That makes it so much better,” she shoots back.

“It’s not a camp, it’s one on one. And I’ll be in the city the whole time.”

“I can’t believe you lied to me like that.”
Running her fingers though her hair, she takes a deep breath and walks toward the kitchen. “Some creep could spend a month torturing you to death a few miles away and I’d be thinking that you’re having a great time in the French Riviera.”

“I’m just going to check it out. Him out.”

“This is so fucked up,” Piper rants, shaking my collar in her white knuckled fist.

“I’ll be in public, at a restaurant. I’ll leave you the address.” I take a few strides away from her to the desk. My shaking hands scribble down the name of the first downtown restaurant that comes to mind. “If I don’t like the guy, I’ll be home tonight and we can laugh about it over ice cream.”

“Laugh about it. Over fucking ice cream. This is literally turning into one of those
Lifetime
movies, isn’t it? You know, the one where the promising college student gets
murdered
at the end?”

She’s away from the door and I tentatively step towards my bag, but I can’t leave it like this. As much as I hate to admit it, obviously there is a slim chance this could go horribly wrong and it would suck for our last conversation to be a fight. Plus she still has an iron grip on my collar
, the only thing that I absolutely must bring with me.

“Piper, look,” I stammer, fiddling with the hem of my shirt as she glares at me. “I have to know what’s going on. There’s this whole other world he disappears to
—”

“
That you will not be disappearing to because you aren’t going anywhere.”

“I’m not going to get caught up in
anything, I swear. I just have to see it. I need to know what he wants.”

“How is
screwing some other guy for a month going to tell you what Luke wants?”

I shouldn’t get into the specifics. “
Maybe I just need to know what
I
want.” That’s almost halfway true, so I’m not technically lying to her.

“Maya, you know me, I’m all for casual sex but—”

“This isn’t casual sex,” I correct her. “It’s hard to explain. It’s basically just a long kinky game.”

“This. Is. Insane.” S
cooping up my bag, she lets out an exasperated sigh and blocks the door again. “You cannot play games like that with strangers.”

“This guy has a different… style,” I explain
calmly. If I let myself get pissed off this is going to escalate fast. “One that I’d like to try out. He’s patient. It will be formal, he won’t actually be mad at me if I mess up, so when I—”

“Does that mean
Luke gets mad at you?” she screams. Shit. I could have phrased that better. “Are you hearing yourself?”

“He gets frustrated, yes. Disappointed,” I
reply. She blinks in disbelief at me and rolls her eyes. “I want to figure out if I’m really into this or if I’m doing it for Luke.” Okay, I’m 95% sure that I am totally doing it for him, but still. “I’m curious about what it’s like with someone else. And I can leave whenever I want.”

“What if you can’t?”

“That’s not how it works.”

“What if you’re locked in some basement somewhere for real?”

“Luke wouldn’t do that.”

“Are you sure?” she asks. I answer her with a frustrated huff because I am not going over this again. “You don’t even sound like yourself
, Maya. You were always the cautious one. You can barely let your guard down enough to have more than three drinks at a party. This is beyond dangerous. Is he threatening you or something?

“Piper, come on. You know him.”

“Obviously, I don’t. I thought I did but
clearly
, I did not.”

“He’s the same guy.”

“Then he’s an asshole. You dropped this fucked up Master/slave thing on me a couple of months ago after crying for three days straight about some fight you won’t talk about.” Because I can’t let myself think about it. “Stop asking me to pretend that didn’t happen. This is not normal.”

“A lot of people do this.”

“Not like this. I do freaky shit all the time but this ordering you around thing—”

“It’s like foreplay.”

“Maya, you do not like this,” she shrieks, hurling the collar at me. It hits me square in the chest. Junior bolts from under the couch and skids into my room.

“Yes, I do,” I murmur, picking it up off the floor. “I can really get into it. I was honest with you and now you slut shame me every time I come home and—”

“Don’t you dare pull out some Women’s Studies bullshit terminology to justify this ‘tie me up and spank me Master!’ servitude thing,” she mocks me. “Not to mention you’re a fucking math student.”

“It is a lot more complicated than that and he’s not the only person that gets something out of it,” I snap, momentarily losing my temper
and raising my voice. She has a lot of nerve. “Bottom line Piper, you judge me. You know you do.”

“Maya, I’m not…
look I loved your whole secret sexual awakening story even though I’m
positive
you are leaving a lot of shit out.”
You’re not wrong
. “It was so unexpected and fascinating that I couldn’t even get that pissed that you kept it a secret from me for almost a year
.
”
Try more like five years, but obviously we’ll never get that far into it because you’ll really freak then
. “And I don’t understand it, but—”

“No kidding.”

“
But
,” she hisses. “I think it’s fine. In theory. I guess. Honestly it still majorly creeps me out, but whatever… gets you there… that’s fine and I understand how you would want to keep this kind of thing private…

“Thank you so much for your blessing, Piper. I don’t know what I’d do without it.”

“Look, your kink or whatever you call it is not the problem.”

“Bullshit, because that’s all this is and you are literally detaining me for it.”

“Okay it’s part of the problem, but Luke… he’s not right for you. Aside from all of that stuff.”

“I am not going to stand here justifying every decision I make and this is not going to turn into the big
Luke talk. You will never get it.”
Because you’re rich and I’m not. We might live in the same house, but you still live in a different world. And you can’t figure out a way to bring that up without implying I’m a whore, so you won’t.