Unbind (45 page)

“Why?”

“Because I’ve spanked you and hit you. I didn’t know, Chlo.” He thumped his fist on the floor in anguish.

“Yes, you’ve spanked me lots of times and I never said stop because I like it that we’re open enough to do that.” I shook my head. “It’s not the same, Cai. It’s just not… you’re not spanking me to hurt me, you’re doing it because you’re expressing our bond, our passion… I love it when you spank me. I love you.”

He looked like he wanted to tear his own eyes out. “Look… the truth is… I don’t like spanking, Chloe. I don’t fucking like it. I just do it because I think you want it.”

“I do want it, but only if you want it too.”

He shook his head madly, side to side. “I want to please you, I always said that. I want to give you everything you need.”

“I only want you to make love to me, how ever you need to make love to me. I don’t care how… I love you. I just need you holding me. I don’t care about the rest, Cai! I don’t care!” I yelled, trying to get him to listen. This wasn’t just about my fear of violence. This was about old demons reawakened for him, too. I knew it.

He stood and started pacing the room rapidly. “You’ll fight everyday now, Chlo. I’m not having you hide who you really are anymore. You’ll fight me and I’ll teach you some better tricks than the ones you learned. I’ll teach you and protect you. I don’t care if you hurt me, you can hurt me because I can take it. Chlo, you have to be who you are, do you hear me? You don’t know how much I need that from you? Please… say you’ll fight again, for me? Please baby.”

I moved up behind him, caught my hands together around his waist. “I’ll do it for you, if you ask it of me.”

He turned in my arms and put his hands on my cheeks. “Fight for me.”

“I’ll do it.” I sounded emotional and all the air between us felt loaded with sparks of despair and disbelief.

“Good. You’ll still keep your figure. I want breasts and my big ass, still.”

“Okay,” I said, but didn’t get chance to say any more as he rushed me upstairs in a cradled position and placed me on the bedroom floor. Then he took his clothes off and laid himself on the bed so I had to wonder what he wanted now.

“Tie me up. Do whatever you want to do to me. I need this. Now, do it. Damn it. Tie me up, tigress and use me. I’m yours to use, baby.”

I grunted and felt reckless and emotional enough to growl. “Spread ’em, then. You better be ready.”

“Fucking use me, Chloe. Agh,” he cried, “you make me so hard.”

“I see that,” I said, as I began stripping my clothes off again.

I went to my drawer and took out four stockings.

“You’re always abusing my hosiery, now it’ll abuse you.”

“Fuck me, tigress. Fuck me.” His chest heaved, his cock stretched away from his body. It never ceased to amaze me how big and broad the bulbous head of his member was.

“Behave while I bind you.”

“Ugh,” he grunted, brandishing his teeth, his eyes soaking up the curves of my body.

“Bastard,” I snarled, as I tied his ankles, wrists… and for good measure… took out a blindfold to render his eyes useless, too.

“Use me.” He encouraged, and I saw my man laid out for my pleasure. There was only one thing I wanted to do—a thing he rarely gave me chance to because he was always so eager.

“I’m going to lick every inch of your body, Cai.”

“Oooh! Yes!” He crowed.

“Then I’m going to stick my finger in your butt and suck you until you come down my throat. I might push my pussy on your face and ride it. Then I’m going to slap your ass until it stings and I’ll take your cock inside me until you cry for saviour. You’re mine, Cai. Say it.”

“Hell, I’m freaking yours you nasty bitch.”

I began a slow assault of his body with my tongue, and followed through on all my promises. After I was done with him, we slept the whole day away. A ghost exorcised, a demon expunged.

THEY SAY THAT most break-ups happen at Christmas or roundabout, when couples spending time together discover that they don’t really have anything in common anymore. Possibly the worst time of year to break up, but inevitably, one of those periods where people have no escape from their own or each other’s company. Touch wood, we were closer if anything and still finding out things about each other that I couldn’t have predicted. Yet each and every revelation made me feel justified—I knew I hadn’t moved across an ocean for nothing. Cai and I were so similar after all.

In lieu of the fact my father had just had open-heart surgery, Cai called Carl and said it might be best if I spent another week at home rather than get straight back to the office after the new year. Carl agreed and Cai took more time off too, to look after me so to speak.

I called Anabel and got the latest… she said Dad would pull through but was bitter about his illness. Thankfully she and Amanda were getting a flat together in Rotherham, where they both had jobs lined up. I was grateful, so grateful, for that. Timing is everything, they say.

During that glorious week free of burdens and work, Cai and I spent hours laid in bed talking, telling each other stories. Cai told me a lot about Claire and Dirk, the couple he considered his parents until Jennifer came along. I told Cai that Claire seemed sweet and Dirk, perhaps a bit stony, but harmless nonetheless. I recalled all the monstrosities of my childhood and my father’s sick brand of parenting—some of the other examples were less terrifying but just as ludicrous for a man to have gotten away with.

The rose and his parent’s deaths circulated my mind but I wanted him to tell me himself—if there were indeed anything to tell.

During this period there was a discernable change in how Cai made love to me following my admission about the night I was attacked. I couldn’t put my finger on it but there was something different.

It wasn’t me, it was him. He was different.

The routine of morning sex and last thing at night sex ceased. Whether it was because it was the holidays still, I didn’t know. What I did know was that Cai began taking me whenever and wherever he pleased. For the first time, he made love to me in a public place—a toilet in a pizzeria.

He bent me over the kitchen island without even preparing me, took me on his desk (yes, again!) without warning, even once plunged himself inside my mouth though I sat on the toilet.

When he did take me to bed, he kissed me for so long that even when I begged him to push inside me, he didn’t. He refused. He kept me dangling. I figured he was testing my love, trying my patience. Taking me unannounced to see if I would baulk or cry out in ecstasy—the latter always the case. I didn’t know what was going on but the unpredictability had me in knots, making me jump whenever he brushed his fingers across the nape of my neck—just the thought of him fucking me then and there gathering wetness between my thighs. He knew when I needed him and he might give me one look that I knew meant,
Don’t you dare see to that yourself
.

I couldn’t explain how he began to make me feel, especially when we also began working out together. Some sex became more like wrestling. He made me shave everything away too, down below. In fact he did it for me. He was more man than any other I had ever known yet I still knew, beneath it all, he was still that frightened 14 year old, worried nobody loved him.

So when he came and sat by my side on Friday night and said, “We need to talk,” I had my high hopes. I prepared for a glut of revelations that might satisfy my curiosity.

He perched on the couch wearing a robe. We’d spent the day screwing so hard my whole body hurt. He had just stepped from the shower and I was poised to take a long, hot bath.

I saw his hands shaking, his whole body shaking in fact. I took his fingers between mine and asked him, “Please, talk then. Whatever it is, I’m here for you.”

“You’ll hate me when I tell you. You’ll hate me.” He held his forehead, his eyes tight at the corners with tension.

“How could I hate you? I’m in love with you.”

“You’ll hate me,” he said, “what I have to say won’t be easy to explain.”

I turned his face to get a look at his eyes and he seemed adamant that what he needed to impart had to be said. Now was the time. Yet he hated it. He’d worked up to it, no doubt. Felt a bit sick over it, even. I knew that feeling—facing a truth you thought you had tucked away nice and tight.

I felt my pulse quicken and chills raced down my spine, but somehow I kept a lid on my fear and said bravely, “I’m ready and I’m here. We’ve conquered so much already, Cai.”

“My name’s not Cai,” he said first and foremost.

I held two hands at my cheeks, bit my lip to keep my shock inside and nodded, over and over again, begging him to get it over with.

“I mean, it is Cai. But it isn’t. I was born Caius Cortez and when Jennifer took over my guardianship, she made me change my name so that it cut my association from him… my father. I always used to shorten it to Cai and so when she made me change my name to something less like the name they’d given me, I don’t know… I thought of Kincaid. Seems dumb, doesn’t it? Yet when I thought about it… Kincaid
is
so far removed from Caius, the Mexican gangster’s son.”

From the look on his face, we were only just getting started.

“Jennifer thinks I was there when my mother died and she’s right, I was there. I know exactly what happened and I haven’t told a soul, not until right now.”

I launched myself across the sofa and whimpered, “My love.”

I wrapped my arms tight around his shoulders and burrowed into his neck.

He took my hand and explained softly, “There’s so much you need to know, if you want to understand the whole context. It’s difficult for me to know where to begin because this is such a major head fuck, even for me… and I was there.”

“I’m here for you, Cai. Please, tell me everything. I love you so much.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll start where this whole thing really began…”

Past

IT HAD BEEN another summer spent trying to avoid Bonnie and Clyde. The only remarkable thing about it up until that point was that he had shared his first kiss with Jackie. One summer night while they snuck into the pool of her parent’s house, he noticed how pretty she looked with her hair slicked down her back—wearing one of those
Baywatch
swimsuits—and he just grabbed her neck and kissed her on the lips. Quickly. She giggled. That was that.

In his mind, he thought that perhaps girls started out innocent and then got tarnished as they went along. He had taken her offered kisses ever since that moment in the pool, even though he didn’t love her and knew he never could.

Cai was filling out and felt really happy about this. It meant he would be better placed to stand up to his father when it came the time to tell his parents that he was going—and he was never coming back. He knew he might reach his father’s six feet and three inches or even get taller than that. He also knew he wanted to train in boxing—there was just something about fighting
that he loved.

Cai snuck in to speak to his ill mother whenever he got the chance. He asked her on numerous occasions whether Aunt Jennifer might visit. After all, Claudia constantly talked about the sister who was making a name for herself in the fashion world. He listened intently as she often repeated, “Your Aunt Jennifer… she’s going places. She’ll be running her own magazine before you know it.” Claire often picked up magazines for Claudia and stacks of reading material laid on the floor of the bathroom.

His mother seemed to hold Jennifer on a pedestal so high, he wondered why they didn’t see each other more often, if at all. Surely Jennifer travelled for work and if so, she’d stop by New York often… so why didn’t she ever visit the house? Then again, Cai was never informed about anything. Sometimes he only knew his parents were alive because he could hear them through the wood of his hiding places.

Caius was even naïve enough to ask Claudia if he might one day be allowed to visit Jennifer himself—to get some work experience or something. His mother’s reply was, “The simple fact is your father will never let us leave this house.”