Page 6 of Love Me

The police wouldn’t listen.Then: When you’re involved like I was? It looks consensual. It rarely is.

During dinner, we ate in silence. It wasn’t unusual; sometimes Owen was completely spent from meeting people all day that he needed silence. He looked up at me. I smiled, then looked down, spun my fork in the noodles, then unhooked the tines, watching the pasta fall apart.

“You’re not eating,” Owen said.

“I ate some,” I said.

My phone vibrated in my pocket. Owen glanced at me, having heard it rattle.

Meet me. I’ll show you, the message said. Please. I’m begging you. I clicked the screen off.

I thought about lying, saying it was my mother so he wouldn’t suspect anything, but I couldn’t. Thankfully, he interrupted my thoughts.

“If you’re free this weekend,” he said, “there’s a house I’d like for us to visit in Rye.”

“A house?”

“For sale in Greenhaven.”

For sale? Us, buying a house together? I knew I had stressed finding a place together, but it felt like we were on the relationship fast track. Renting a place we found together was one thing, buying a house was another. “Where’s that?” I asked.

“Less than thirty miles north,” he said.

“You’d have to commute.”

“I need the privacy,” he said.

His grin faded when he realized I wasn’t going to return the mischief. “What’s on your mind?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

Another text buzzed. Please. I’m begging you.

“If you’re not ready for it, we don’t have to go,” he said.

I shook my head. “It’s just that meeting with Orinda Jones is this weekend,” I said.

“We’ll go another weekend then.”

“I can probably do both,” I said. In fact, looking at a house and freaking out about the commitment might be the exact medicine my nerves needed before the meeting that would determine my fate with Winter Precipice Galleries. Owen reached over the table and squeezed my hand.

The dim lighting in the bedroom cast shadows of us on the walls, our figures reminiscent of cave paintings illuminated by a glowing fire. I undressed, feeling Owen’s eyes following my every move, lusting for me. But I couldn’t shake those messages out of my head: He almost strangled me to death. Please. I’m begging you.

I needed to know, didn’t I? I had to confirm that it wasn’t real, that it was only a trick to scare me. I needed to know what the truth was, and I needed to know it from him.

“Have you ever choked someone before?” I asked.

“Breath play?” He nodded. “Are you interested?”

I shrugged, wanting to get as much information out of him as possible without letting him know about the stranger’s texts. I didn’t want to cloud his response in any way. “I read about it in a book,” I lied.

“What did you read?”

I decided to go with a vague answer. “Some people get off on the excitement. The thrill of it. Being choked is—” I paused, trying to find the words, “pretty intense, I guess.”

I sat on the bed, waiting. Owen stepped out of his pants, folding them and placing them on the dresser. I admired his perfectly sculpted ass in his boxer briefs. Even if the man was supposed to be dangerous, a man who had supposedly attempted to kill someone, he was gorgeous. But I knew that may have been the reason the stranger had fallen for him too.

Owen stepped closer. The bed held me in place. He nudged my knees apart and stood between them.

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