Exit Strategy (3 page)

Once I’ve gotten control of myself, I call Jada to let her know I’m close by so she can take the chain off the door. She sleeps in on Saturdays.

Jada clears her throat and says, “Hello.”

When I attempt to form words, I explode into a nasty, snot-producing cry, the likes of which I haven’t experienced since I was a teenager and fighting my crazy ass father. I mumble words through my tears in that high-pitched slur like the church girls I used to hate.

“Keisha? Keisha, girl, what the—Did Tristan hurt you?”

“No-oo.” I sob in her ear, and she comforts me through the phone with the soothing motherly voice she used when we were going through therapy together at DePaul.

I rummage in my purse and find a travel pack of tissues, which reminds me of Tristan, and I cry even harder.

“Are you almost here?” Jada sounds anxious.

“Ye—ah,” I say around a spastic sniff. “Open the door, please.”

“Okay.”

Moses is a consummate professional, even though I’m a blubbering mess. When we get to my house, he opens the door and helps me out of the car.

“Are you going to be all right, Ms. Beale?”

I’m so damned embarrassed to have him see me like this.

I answer him with a vigorous nod and say, “Yes, thank you.” Then I run to Jada, who’s standing on the porch, her arms folded. I ram into her with a force that almost knocks both of us down, but Jada is strong. She gives me a fierce hug.

Moses takes a call and judging from his side of the conversation, where he mostly says “Yes” and “Yes, sir,” I know it’s Tristan. He hangs up and clears his throat just as Jada and I break our embrace. “I’ll be back in about thirty minutes to unload your things,” he says.

I’m not sure if he’s giving me time to compose myself or seeking privacy to give his boss a play-by-play.

“Thanks, Moses,” Jada answers for me and walks us into the house before she closes and locks the door.

“Here, sit down,” she says. “I’m going to make us some coffee, and you can tell me all about it.”

Her expression changes from studied interest, to concern, to commiseration as I tell her the whole story. She sighs when I’m done.

“So, the anxiety attacks are back?”

“Yes, this was my second one.”

“Keisha,” she says, and takes my hand. “Hon, you should’ve told him about your dad. Tristan would understand. He could’ve worked with you on avoiding triggers.”

I shake my head. “No. I can’t. Then I’d have to see his pity every time he takes me in his role-play room. I saw it once when he punished me on the wooden horse. I don’t want to see that from him every time we’re together.”

“So, you’d rather end things like this?”

“Yes.” I take a sip of my coffee.

“Your emotions give you away. You’ve grown to care about him, haven’t you?”

For a split second, I think about lying, but I can’t. “Yes.” A lone tear rolls down my face. Jada wipes it away with her fingers then gathers me into her arms.

“Those White brothers do kind of grow on you,” she says.

~*~

Moses brings my things back just as he promised, and this causes another dilemma. I don’t have room for half the stuff I’ve accumulated at Tristan’s. Too bad I need the designer clothes for my job; otherwise I’d give most of them away to charity.

I move to help, but he won’t have it.

“You just take it easy, Ms. Beale,” he says. “I’ll bring everything inside.”

I fill up my closet, stack two suitcases next to it, and there are still four hanging bags full of cocktail dresses and evening gowns I have to hang in the living room closet.

It’s only been a little over an hour, but already I miss Tristan like a crack whore misses a hit on the pipe. Moses waits as if he senses I want to ask him something. I decide not to.

“Thanks, Moses.”

He turns to me when we reach the car.

“May I speak freely, Ms. Beale?”

I find it almost funny that, like Tristan, he prefers to call me “Ms. Beale.” I smile. “Yes, always.”

“I’d hoped you’d last longer than the others. Mrs. Naven and I agree; he’s been much better to work for with you around. And you’re a much nicer girl than his usual type.”

“Really?” I’m so at a loss for words.

“The society girls treat us like we’re invisible or mud on their shoes. Mrs. Naven and I could tell your folks raised you right.”

I had no idea Moses and Mrs. Naven paid so much attention to the goings-on at their employer’s Gold Coast condo. “If you ever need me to wrangle a skank on your behalf, just give me a call.” I flash him a wicked smile. “I ever tell you you’re the spitting image of my Uncle Eduardo? I won’t have anybody disrespecting you like that, and you can thank my mama for my manners.”

“If you ever need me in a pinch for a ride—or anything at all—call me,” he says.

“I will.” As he goes to open the door, I yell, “Moses!”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Can I call you from time to time? To see how you’re all doing?” 

I’m sure he gets my meaning when he says, “Absolutely.” Then he touches the brim of his cap in a salute before he slides into the driver’s seat. With a parting toot of his horn, he’s gone.

CHAPTER TWO

Tristan

Tristan acknowledges that his gym is the safest place for him, even after the lung-busting run he took at the country club while Keisha was leaving. He had to get out of the house, and Chicago in January doesn’t lend itself to a neighborhood run. He deflates a speed bag, uses the heavy bag as target practice for several dozen martial arts stars, and then hits and kicks the shit out of it. He finally stops punishing his body when he puts his foot through the bag, spilling sand all over his state-of-the-art gym floor.

He sinks to his knees on the mat in front of the rapidly shrinking bag. His knuckles are bloody, and every joint in his body aches. But the ache in his chest that took residence when Keisha walked out of his home, out of his life, still hasn’t gone away.

What the fuck is this?
  He’s severed relationships with plenty of submissives before and moved right on to the next.

He tells himself he’s angry because she didn’t allow him to end the Dominant/submissive relationship on his terms and he isn’t keen on finding another submissive right now. Not to mention there are several appearances he has to make in the next couple of weeks, and now he’ll be without his “plus one.”

Then there’s the business trip to Hong Kong in February, a trip he planned to ask Keisha to take with him. He’d only gotten as far as asking her if she had a passport when she called to set up their first real romp in the role-play room since her mother’s recovery from a radical mastectomy. He saw Keisha through her mother’s surgery and gave her all the support she needed because he’d been there and had known exactly what she’d be in for.

He and Nathan had become motherless as a result of another form of cancer, but losing his mother had been painful, nonetheless. He wouldn’t wish what he and his brother endured on anyone, so his first reaction had been to do everything in his power to make sure Clara Lee Beale survived breast cancer. Through Dr. Guyton at the University of Chicago, he made sure Dr. Jane was competent and then had Dr. Jane suggest Mrs. Beale see the most preeminent oncologist in the Midwest for a second opinion. Neither Keisha nor her mother was any the wiser that he was behind it.

He spared Keisha the pain of losing another parent, although from every indication, her father had been an asshat who had abused Keisha’s mother. Any child who witnessed that would be traumatized, and the resurfacing of the anxiety attacks proved she’d been affected. Maybe the role-plays themselves were the trigger, and he could kick himself for not seeing that coming. Yet he’s still not convinced her father hadn’t abused her, as well. But Keisha wasn’t forthcoming about her past.
Surprise, surprise.
He wasn’t forthcoming about his, either.

The routine background check he performed when they first met yielded the police reports for domestic altercations, but at face value hadn’t posed a red flag for him. Keisha seemed well-adjusted enough. There was a decided snark that bled through her outwardly submissive demeanor. He should’ve suspected there had been something unsettling about these events in her background.

To err on the side of caution, Tristan had eased her into the lifestyle, and in the nine months she’d been his submissive, they’d performed dozens of strenuous role-plays. The anxiety attacks occurred twice, and they surfaced when her mother became ill. He goes over the role plays in his mind and can’t remember anything about them that was different. He’d used floggers on her many times with no adverse reaction whatsoever. He shakes his head.

“You worshipping inanimate objects now, brother?” Nathan asks, his deep voice reverberating through the acoustics of the gym.

Nate is halfway across the floor when he gets a clear look at Tristan and visibly recoils.

“I’ve only seen that look on your face twice,” Nate says. “When Mom died and after Aimee’s accident. What’s up?” He’s in his fencing whites, clearly expecting their standing Saturday morning match.

“Nothing to the tune of those tragedies,” Tristan says while swallowing a bolus of denial. He stands up and glowers at his brother.

Nathan looks down at Tristan’s hands and says, “Whoa. What the fuck? You’d better clean that shit before it gets infected.”

When Tristan doesn’t move, Nathan jogs to the cabinet below the wet bar and returns with peroxide, Neosporin, and gauze. “Plant your ass on this bench.”

Tristan shoots Nate a baleful glare but does what he’s told. Nate sits beside him, takes his hands, and quickly cleans them with the peroxide. Then he applies the antibiotic and wraps his hands to absorb the blood seeping from Tristan’s bruised knuckles.

Nate says, “So, you want to tell me what’s got you beating the hell out of your gym equipment?”

“I’ve got to find another goddamned submissive,” Tristan says. “And I don’t have time for this shit. I’m going to the inauguration in a week and then leaving for Hong Kong in three weeks.”

“Then why’d you end it now?” Nate finishes off the first wrap, secures it, and begins on the second one.

Tristan contemplates letting Nate believe he ended it, but Keisha’s roommate is Nate’s submissive, so he’d know the truth soon enough. “I didn’t. She safeworded.”

“No way! Jada said Keisha was really into your buttoned-down ass. How’d you let this shit happen?”

“I didn’t let anything happen. She started having anxiety attacks in the Grotto and they frightened her. I tried to get her to stay so we could work it out, but there was nothing I could do to convince her.”

“There
is something
you could’ve done.”

“Enlighten me.”

“You could’ve given her hope.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“You always follow the letter of the contract with your submissives, and you tell them up front it’ll never amount to anything. You never open yourself up to even the possibility of your arrangement developing into more. My submissives have stayed longer because they’ve believed, even in the few cases where I knew better, that the relationship could’ve eventually been more. Women want romance, even if the relationship ultimately fails. Didn’t the shit that went down with Aimee teach you anything?”

Tristan jerks his hand away and clamps it around Nathan’s throat. His hand hurts like hell—and even more so when Nathan pries it away and squeezes it mercilessly for good measure. They are behaving as if they’re ten years old again, and engaging in a sibling squabble.

“Fuck!” Tristan yells and wrenches his hand away, scowling.

“Stop bitching and let me do this,” Nathan says and finishes the wrap. “There.”