Coercion Page 5

  She does exactly as asked, stroking my length with a whispering touch as we kiss. Heat and need and madness gather there, and I close my hand over hers, demanding friction. My mouth and fingers turn clumsy. Sighs become pleas then dissolve into moans as the pleasure finds its crescendo, until my release bastes her fingertips and belly. She kisses my chin as I catch my breath and reaches beside us for a cloth. By the time she casts it aside, I’m smiling like a madman.

  She settles against my chest and as I stroke her hair I think, I love this woman. For her kindness, her oddness, for the way she looks at me. I love her for having come to seek me, and even more so for spurring me to seek her, out in the wide world. In the most literal sense, she has brought warm sunshine and cool breezes and the smell of grass and clover back into my life. And if that isn’t love, I do not know what is.

  I will tell her so…but not tonight.

  Our bodies have already spoken the words in their carnal language. When I tell her, it will be outside. It’s too easy to love inside this safe place, too easy to feel such things for most any woman who’s invited me to spoil her rotten for an evening. I will tell Caroly someday soon. I’ll tell her as I’m trembling, amid all those buildings and all those people, beneath that crushing sky. I will tell her when I am at my absolute worst, my least beautiful. And if she chooses to say it back, I will know she speaks the truth.

  “Tomorrow,” she says through a yawn.

  “Yes?”

  “We’re not going to that café.”

  My heart seizes at the thought of leaving at all, then soars at the prospect of a morning’s cowardly respite. A morning’s safety, or perhaps a morning’s pure and lazy pleasure, lolled away in bed with this woman before work calls her away. “Oh?”

  She kisses my temple, then my ear, affectionate little gestures. “No. We’re going to a different one.”

  “Oh.”

  “Farther away.”

  Another hitch in my chest. “How far?”

  “Not as far as the museum, certainly.”

  The museum where she works was the first place I left my building to visit, to end my three years of domestic exile. It is halfway across the city, very far. But I took a taxi that afternoon, when the pain of missing Caroly trumped the comfort of the known. I shut my eyes and allowed another to ferry me.

  Tomorrow we will walk. There will be crowds and noises, cars honking and rushing. Chaos, and a million opportunities for humanity to confirm for me how callous it is. Every shouted word will bring back a hundred catalogued taunts from my childhood. Every person streaming by who makes no eye contact, regards others as little more than obstacles…I’ll see my mother in their detached, distracted faces. At every traffic light my memory will overlay the moment I saw a woman and child struck dead by a car. The world will prove itself as senseless and uncaring as I’ve always known it to be.

  “It’s not super far,” Caroly adds, stroking my arm. “A kilometer, maybe. And a quiet kilometer, I promise. I picked it for all those reasons. With you in mind. And I’ll walk you back, don’t worry.”

  “That’s very kind.” Yet the frightened child in me does not agree. I’m being punished, he says. She wants to hurt and upset me, and when I fail she will mock me, abandon me and leave me out there in the city, no inner compass to guide me home.

  I tell the voice to be quiet, because I know things, even if I don’t feel them. I know she wants me to succeed at this. She wants me to be better. And though it stings my ego to admit I’m broken enough to warrant fixing, I’ve known that for years. I pull her closer and press my face to her throat. “We will go.”

  “Good. My treat.”

  “No, mine.” Her elbow linked with my arm, her leading and reassuring me as one might an elderly blind relation…that is indulgence enough. I do not need my breakfast paid for.

  “You’ll do fine.”

  “I’ll shake so badly people will think I’m having a seizure.”

  “You do that less and less every time we go out.”

  “Do I?”

  “You do.” She strokes my hair. “And you talk more and more.”

  “I hadn’t noticed. I barely remember the moments of being out, once I’m home.”

  “Well trust me, you’re making progress.”

  I wait for words that never arrive, for gentle suggestions that I seek professional counsel, get a prescription and find normality in a bottle. But she never poses these solutions. After all, she treated her own anxiety regarding men by soliciting a prostitute. If I am her therapist, why shouldn’t she be mine? I suppose that may be codependent, but I find my own inner workings far less enjoyable to diagnose and obsess over than those of my clocks and music boxes. She is welcome to make a hobby of me.

  “You’re progressing too,” I tell her.

  After a pause she murmurs, “Thank you.”

  I pull back to study her face. She wears a queer little smile, shy and proud at once. An ache rends my chest—so badly I wish I could say this was my girlfriend. My heart hurts as sharply as it does when I venture outdoors, only in slow motion. I press my forehead against her neck to hide my fear.

  It is a strange sensation to lie in this bed, a woman’s body against mine, and still suffer these insecurities. But Caroly’s no longer my client, and when she’s with me now I am only me, the faulty human, not the perfect man women pay me to be. It feels sometimes as though my skin has come off, as though she’s peeled away my clothes and not stopped at exposing my mere nudity, but shed every layer straight down to my heart and nerves and bones. If she lets go, I might come apart.

  The anxiety hurts, so I think of other things. I go inside her body in my mind’s eye, and imagine all the places I might take her, within these walls. All the people we might become for an hour or two…women I’ve known and the man they wished me to play. There is no fear in these journeys, only excitement. I hold her tightly and, from the way her breathing hitches, I realize I’ve woken her.

  “Go back to sleep.”

  “Okay,” she mumbles, already back in her dreams.

  Dreams and clockwork and other people’s fantasies, so many fascinating places to go without ever mustering the strength to open a door.

  Tempting. Very tempting.

  I keep a whore’s hours, falling asleep late and rising around noon, but I can feel myself dropping off. Safe against her warm skin and beneath this sloping old roof, safe in my own dreams, if they prove kind tonight. The dawn will bring a stab a dread sharp as a knife, and I will be awake, so very awake. I will trade all this security for the tremors of bravery, led on halting feet like a kicked dog to some unknown destination. There will be coffee—decaffeinated, at Caroly’s wise insistence, lest my heart jackhammer my ribs to dust. Its heat and flavor will go unregistered on my tongue, drowned out by the volume of the café, cranked to deafening levels by the echo chamber of my anxious brain.

  Then I will look across the table, into those blue eyes. I’ll find concern and patience there, but also pride. Pride in me for having come so far, and pride for being seen with me. Those eyes will tell me they’re finding things in me I do not feel, like courage and potential and worthiness, and I’ll try to believe in what they see. The noise will quiet and the activity will slow, if only for a breath or two. But a breath is all I need, just air in my lungs, blood moving through my body, proof that fear may hurt but it does not kill. Perhaps my shaking hand will find her slender, still one across the tabletop. She’ll squeeze my fingers, happy somehow to be with this man, even at his worst.

  I wonder if maybe that too is love—to feel fondness for a person’s deepest flaws, to recognize beauty even in their least flattering portrait. It is what I see, looking back at me across those terrifying café tables, and suddenly, somehow, I’m looking forward to waking up tomorrow. To uncovering proof that someone might find my company worth keeping, even away from the candles and the calm.

  I would walk a kilometer for that.

  I would venture into t
he earth alone and cross Paris on the Métro, suffer the crush of a thousand strangers to believe that was true. To see it there, reflected back at me.

  I may surprise her someday, show her exactly how far I might go.

  Someday, I may even surprise myself.

  About the Author

  Cara McKenna writes smart erotica: a little dark, a little funny, definitely sexy and always emotional. She lives north of Boston with her extremely good-natured and permissive husband. When she’s not trapped inside her own head, Cara can usually be found in the kitchen, the coffee shop or the nearest duck-filled pond.

  Cara welcomes comments from readers. You can find her website and email address on her author bio page at www.ellorascave.com.

  Tell Us What You Think

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  Also by Cara McKenna

  Backwoods

  Brazen

  Convenient Strangers

  Curio

  Dirty Thirty

  Don’t Call Her Angel

  Getaway

  Ruin Me

  Shivaree

  Skin Game

  Willing Victim

  Print books by Cara McKenna

  Lessons in Letting Go anthology

  Off Limits anthology

  Stray Hearts anthology

  Ellora’s Cave Publishing

  www.ellorascave.com

  Coercion

  ISBN 9781419941924

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Coercion Copyright © 2012 Cara McKenna

  Edited by Kelli Collins

  Cover design by Caitlin Fry

  Photos: Yuri Acurs

  Electronic book publication August 2012

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