Girl In Pieces (15 page)

“I don’t know. I don’t think I can do that.”

“Just meet him.” Kelli reached across the table and covered mine and Julie’s hands with her own. “It can’t hurt just to meet him right?”

I snorted and shook their hands off. “You’re joking, right?”

“Just come to the party then,” Julie offered. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. But you need to get the hell out of this apartment.”

“Is this what you want?” Kelli swiped her hand at the mess in my sink, my hair, my pajamas. “Are you happy hiding and crying and waiting for Josh
Fucking
Murcek to come to his senses? You know better, Kat. When have you ever fallen for that nonsense? You know full well if it were Julie, you’d probably threaten to set her apartment on fire if she spent more than a day pining after some loathsome boy.”

“I’m pretty sure she’s actually done that before.” Julie tapped a finger against her chin. “Brad Thompson. Eleventh grade.”

“That was justified.” I scowled and reached for another donut. “You forced the Virgin Suicides soundtrack on me for two weeks straight. And there was so much
sighing.
 
And bad poetry.”

Kelli snatched the pink pastry box out of reach. “Well this is our bad poetry intervention. Come out with us. Meet him. Have a little fun. That’s all I’m asking.”

“Obviously you’ll have to take a shower first.” Julie made a face. “And change your clothes.”

“Don’t give up on what you want. Our little community is powerful strong and protective and it’ll do you good to meet other people just like you. Find out if this is really for you or if it turned you on because it was with--” Julie stopped Kelli with a look. She blanched. “Right. Did I mention Oliver lives in a very fancy pants condo in the Philomel district? He’s out of this world, I’m telling you.”

“Yeah, ok,” I murmured grumpily. “I’ll shower. Now give me a stupid donut.”

Julie wrapped her arms around me and squeezed and they might have been the worst friends ever but they were also the best and I was so damn lucky.

Julie said against my arm. “It’s ok to miss him.”

“As long as you don’t grind to a halt when he gets to keep living,” Kelli said as she tore a sugared donut into threes and handed the pieces out.

As if it were that easy.

We stuffed ourselves with greasy sugar goodness, licking sticky powder from our fingertips. They talked, swooning over this mysterious Oliver, not mentioning Josh by name but he was still there in between the words, between the ideas. None of us were stupid enough to think I wouldn’t have Josh in my head all night, lurking like a ghost who would never let me settle down. Even if I wanted to, which I didn’t.

But I nodded like a paper doll and pretended what they said was easy. Move on. Keep going. Let go.

Pretend. And the more they talked, the easier it felt, the pretending.

Sometimes it was easy to forget your whole world wasn’t just this one thing, this one piece that when it breaks so do you. It was easy, so fucking easy, to let hours tick by beneath the covers, unmoving, barely breathing because the
before
 
was gone and the
after
 
was too big to consider. The world expected you to continue breathing even though you’d been hollowed out and left for dead.

Then your friends, the rest of your pieces, showed up with 2,000 calorie cups of caffeine and they held your hand and told you the truth. You smell. You have to get out of bed. We’ll help you through the impossibility of stepping outside your front door.

You’re still alive, they said.

They brought you donuts. They gave you permission to keep breathing.

I must have been out of my mind to agree to this.

Julie and Tyler walked ahead of me, fingers entwined, leaning into each other like they didn’t have every day of their lives together. He whispered against her ear and she laughed, long and loud and unapologetically. They looked sophisticated and grown up and older than I’d ever felt in my life. Next to their tailored bodies, I felt like a little sister, all awkward knees and elbows.

They talked me into a light blue sleeveless dress. It had a white chevron pattern that accentuated my hips and chest, which I hated but they swore by. At some point I didn’t even care anymore since I had about as much interest in meeting Oliver as I did in any random stranger on the street. I wanted to go home. I wanted Josh.

I wanted everything to be just as it had been locked in his bedroom, in the quiet and shadows, him wiping the rain from my cheeks.

Kelli wasn’t kidding about the fancy pants condo, though. Philomel was a little area of town on the nice side of South River that butted up against downtown where all the financial companies showed off how much money they made. Philomel was tiny in the shadows of the big glass rocket-shaped buildings, with my favorite library and a lot of Italian restaurants owned by very Italian families who believed dinner wasn’t dinner unless it lasted four hours. My father loved Philomel and brought Brian and me here sometimes to hobnob with some of his old Catholic school buddies. They played cards in the back while wives considered whose daughter Brian would marry.

They let me color on the tablecloths and eat endless breadsticks. It was a win-win for everyone.

Philomel had money. Old money. The kind of money inherited from stuffy white men and came with prestigious English names. The streets featured old fashioned lamp posts and houses made of brick. Rows of brownstones lined streets with oak trees and little black fences that warned tourists they did not have enough money to walk on the grass. Despite the haughty, old family money, it also sported an edge of eccentric quirkiness lost on the new rich. One hundred year old townhouses flashed jazzy purple doors, ridiculous garden gnomes, and doghouses like miniature versions of the adult house. There were also a lot of churches, bookstores, and chic vintage clothing shops.

We parked on Easton Street and walked three blocks to the address Kelli typed into my phone. November in South River brought cold wind but no snow. Tonight the clouds blocked the stars, made the sky endless and featureless. I pulled my purple pea coat closer to my body and scanned the building numbers as we passed.

The brownstones gave way to old warehouses turned condos which got taller with each block, until we found the one Oliver belonged to. It straddled old Philomel and new downtown, at least forty stories, glass and iron architecture, it’s base an old factory hollowed out to make room for the modern and vintage to collide.

There was no way I’d have anything in common with someone who lived like this. It had to cost a fortune to live in a building this nice, with a doorman and lock codes and a foyer with a waterfall bubbling down the brick façade behind the check in desk.

My dress did not look nice enough to even be allowed inside.

What if he took one look at my huge chest and poochy stomach and went,
Nope. Nope. No way. No thanks
. I’d thought about that all day. I thought, what if he’s like Thomas? What if he’s like Josh? What if he realized the mistake he made in agreeing to this and sent me on my way?

What if it went well and we ripped each other’s clothes off and I accidentally screamed Josh’s name?

What if. What if. What if.

I couldn’t do this.

“I want to go home,” I said to nobody and Kelli, at the front of the pack, announced, “We’re here!”

A doorman pulled open the door when she flashed her ID, checked her name on a list and we were in. I followed them all reluctantly, got on the spacious elevator, and headed up to the millionth floor.

There was no way this wasn’t going to end badly.

A doorman greeted us as we got off the floor and this time Kelli led the way, chatting about how great this place was and wow, did you see that view? It was hard to notice the view with my stomach wrapping itself into itty bitty knots and eating itself.

His door was one of only two I noticed on this floor and the closer we got to it the more I could hear the music whispering through the walls, thumping just enough to feel beneath my feet.

The door opened, Kelli hugged someone I didn’t recognize. Hands took my coat, and we were in.

The music was louder inside, not so loud you couldn’t hear the person next to you but not well. It piped through every room, a magic, throaty female voice who sang about love and danger. The condo was huge, room feeding into room feeding into room, balconies along the full length of one side, doors open to let in cold night air to cool off the sweaty heat of so many bodies. The lights glowed low and cast every beautiful person in long shadows.

I had no idea how many people were stuffed into this place, but enough to relax some of the dread. I wouldn’t have to talk to the host much if he had so many people to entertain. I loved music and dancing and free alcohol so this would be easy.

Sure.

The fetish community was a beautiful lot, all shapes and sizes and colors and ages. They were so possessed of themselves it was difficult not to ogle. Everyone was mostly dressed, some less than others in strappy leather outfits more costume than clothes. What hit me first was the  color and texture, every single person different than the next. Leather, vinyl, metal, feathers, satin. Compared to the woman in a red leather corset dress, piles of curls secured to the back of her neck and threaded with tightly closed rosebuds, I might as well have been wearing a grocery sack. I was so out of place, but I loved them. I loved how gorgeously unafraid they were of looking just like they wanted to look, playing the part they dreamed of playing.

One girl, hardly any older than me, wore cat ears, a halter top, and skin tight pleather pants. I grinned. Her ears were cute.

She laughed and played with tiny gemstones dangling from the loop on her collar.

Her collar.
The sight of it made my heart flutter. It was a symbol of power and pride and she clearly loved wearing it. She couldn’t stop touching it and I couldn’t stop staring at her black painted fingernails twirling the little adornments. It gave her a naked sort of vulnerability, screaming to everyone in the room –
I am owned
. 

Jealousy ached deep in my belly. Someone had claimed her and no one would dare touch her without his permission. She knelt for someone, called them Master, or Mistress maybe. Someone adored her more than anyone else in the world.

“Hey.” Julie returned from the crowd to grab my wrist and shake me. “Earth to Kat.”

“What?” I shook my eyes loose and looked at my friend, my eyes wide with wonder and hurt. Then I saw it.

It wasn’t black leather or crushed velvet, no rhinestones or spikes. A thin, silver metal ring encircled Julie’s neck, a little heart dangling at the hollow of her throat. It was delicate and beautiful and I knew what it meant immediately. How had I missed it?

Owned.

Claimed.

Collared.

My heart ached and I took a step back towards the door. I wanted that. More than I wanted anything else.

Goddamn it, Josh.

Julie frowned and pressed against my side. “We got halfway across the room when I realized you weren’t next to me. Sweetie are you ok? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I got lost,” I lied, unable to tear my eyes away from her collar.

“You don’t have to meet him if you don’t want to. We could just go out on the balcony and dance our butts off. If that’s what you want. You don’t have to do this.”

“It’s ok.” I shook my head. “It means a lot to Kelli. I’m sure this is her way of trying to apologize for what happened by pimping me out to someone else. She means well, let’s just meet him and get this over with.”

She nodded and we moved through the crowd hand-in-hand, shoulders pressed together. It reminded me of high school, when holding hands with your best friend was no big deal but meant everything when you faced a horde of crazy teenagers just trying not to lose their minds completely.

We spotted Kelli near the kitchen waving at us, bright lights pouring out from around the door behind her. Tyler waited next to her, his face animating when we got close.

“There you are,” he said before kissing Julie’s temple.

“Here we are,” she said, but didn’t let me go. He didn’t seem to mind.

“Come on,” Kelli said, screwing up her nose in annoyance. “Oliver’s hiding in the kitchen being weird.”

“Because you know how I like them weird,” I said at her back as she soldiered in.

Despite the size of the condo, the kitchen was small, all stainless steel and sparkling marble. The breakfast bar was covered in alcohol, a wall of it to protect us from the rest of the party. There was only one other person in the room with us.

Oliver.

Julie and I stopped in our tracks. Tyler swore when he nearly knocked us to the ground. She and I exchanged wide glances and I knew she was thinking the same thing I was.

Yowza.

He was gorgeous. Unfairly so. He was photoshop pretty, dark brown hair perfectly coifed by some expert barber who designed hairstyles for celebrities. A few loose pieces broke from the sweep, this tiny flaw only making him more attractive, not less. He was taller than Tyler and Josh, wide shoulders and arms like pit bulls. He wore a white button down dress shirt made of shiny expensive linen, sleeves rolled up messily to his elbows and collar unbuttoned. One glance and it was obvious this rumpled look wasn’t normal for him, everything too neat and close cut and orderly but for those few distinct markers of someone unmoored and trying to hide it.

I could spot my own. We were a small but mighty club of the lost and heartbroken.

He was leaning against the bar, slouching more like, colorful drink in hand sucking on a lime wedge. Shit, he made sucking on a lime wedge look elegant. I swallowed. Julie swallowed. Tyler snorted softly like maybe this wasn’t the first time women had lost their minds in front of his friend.

“Oliver.”

He nodded towards Tyler, a bored sort of acknowledgement, then eyed the three of us with a similar disinterest. Or maybe it was distraction. He exhaled and tossed the lime wedge at the trash before inhaling his drink in three gulps.

“You’re missing your party,” Tyler pointed out.

“I wouldn’t say I was
missing
it.”

Kelli beamed. “I want you to meet--”

“You can go,” he interrupted and turned away to start pouring more alcohol into his newly emptied glass.

Kelli faltered. “But you said…”

Oliver sighed with his whole body and shot her a wearied look. “Take them out of here, Ty. Go show them the balconies or ice sculpture or something.” He frowned into his drink. “I’m pretty sure there are ice sculptures. Maybe. Probably.”

Tyler nodded, then pulled on Kelli’s arm. “Kel. Julie. Kat. Let the man drink in peace.”

Kelli hesitated, her nose wrinkling at me.

“It’s fine,” I whispered, nudging her out as Julie and I started our retreat.

“Not you,” Oliver interrupted, pointing at me with his drink hand. I froze in place. “You stay.”

“Oliver,” Tyler shouldered the door open, giving his friend a reproachful look. “Don’t freak her out.”

He shrugged like it didn’t matter to him whether I was freaked out or not.

I stood paralyzed halfway between Julie’s outstretched hand and the Dom who looked like he’d had the same sort of morning I had. I looked at Oliver, beautiful and a little bit crazy. Then at Julie who looked at Oliver like she wasn’t convinced his being beautiful was enough to leave me alone with him.

“I’ll be out in a second,” I told her.

She nodded and let Tyler pull her out. I heard him tell her not to worry as the door swung shut.

Oliver was already pouring another drink when I gave him my attention. He had great shoulders, muscles filling out his shirt completely. I could feel the electric tension in his body though, restrained emotion a man like this never showed.

I wondered what secret he was hiding. I wondered if it was anything like mine.

I pressed myself against the counter, wondering why someone with a giant home had a kitchen barely bigger than closet. Everything looked new too, like he never cooked or used the pepper grinder or olive oil tucked beside the stove. I would have bet money that they were props.

“Well this isn’t awkward at all.”

He grunted in response, tipped back a shot of tequila and sucked a new lime wedge between his lips. He didn’t look at me, intent on the alchemy he was working between various bottles and his glass.

“Did you expect romance? I thought you were my pleasure slave for the night,” he said dryly. “I think I have your ownership papers here somewhere. I’m pretty sure that gets me out of having to pretend to be a gentleman.”