Page 24 of After Dark
Not that she liked weights enough to join him for his evening workout at that stripped-down, bare-bones, lifters paradise of a gym down to the marina. She’d gone with him one night and had realized pretty quickly that the men he worked out were old friends of his—and also hers, but mostly his—which meant they all fell silent when she appeared with him. Josette had been back all of five days at that point, so she’d smiled as if it didn’t bother her. Because it shouldn’t bother her.
Though it did.
She’d gone to sit in the tiny lobby and found herself face-to-face with a receptionist who had never been therebefore.Not going to work out?the receptionist asked her, smiling.
Maybe some other time,Josette replied, settling into one of the chairs.I’m the wicked ex, you see. They all hate me.
And that wasn’t surprising. Yet… it had surprised her. Not the men in question, but how emotional it made her. Like she was seeing the cost of what she’d done to Arlo on all those other men’s faces, and it hurt.
The dark-haired girl behind the desk had looked startled. Then she’d tilted her head a bit to one side.Are you?she asked.Wicked, I mean?
Not on purpose,Josette found herself saying, surprisingly emotional with it too.
The girl behind the desk, who looked fragile, shifted in her chair and then suddenly didn’t look particularly fragile at all.And it’s none of their business, is it?She said softly.
She found out later that the receptionist was a new submissive of Zachary London, the gym owner who, as far as Josette knew, had sworn off anything but scenes he could arrange through the Club app.
I think Romily and I are going to be friends,Josette told Arlo they walked back to their building.I like her.
I think she could probably use some friends,Arlo said after a moment, and when she glanced at him, she caught the strangest expression on his face.
Only now, looking back on it, did she get it. He didn’t think she was going to stay. He didn’t think she was going to be around long enough to make friends with fragile girls who had a tough core, down in there somewhere. He didn’t say he didn’t trust her and he acted as if he did. But all the same, he wasn’t out here planning futures.
Josette knew she had to stop letting these things hurt her when they were her fault.
Arlo’s security services had an office in San Francisco and he liked to get his workout in and a good fuck before he went. Sometimes that meant in the shower after the gym workout, her back against the slick wall, her hands held above her head, and Arlo like thunder deep inside her. Other times he had bigger plans. Every morning she could feel the tension shift when they got back in the elevator, getting brighter and hotter as the elevator rose toward the top floor. Sometimes he made her crawl down the hall to the door, and then inside. Other times he waited until they walked to the door before he ordered her to kneel.
Once they made it inside, it was an anything-goes kind of situation. There were usually only a few props, if any. The morning round, as he called it, was usually dirty and quick, getting them both off so they could focus during the day.
Josette took pleasure in the fact that he always left the apartment in a good mood. No matter what he had to face at the office.
She’d never had to cook or clean or any of the rest of it, unless he was there and wanted her to play the role of a housewife—a role that usually involved spankings and the kind of missionary position sex that she doubted very much featured in actual housewives’ lives. Not the way Arlo did it.
Otherwise, they’d always sorted out meals spontaneously and Arlo had a cleaning service that did the rest. Josette had discovered that first morning that he’d done absolutely nothing with her office here, or any of her things. She couldn’t decide if it pleased her or not that he’d kept all of her stuff the way she’d left it. Was it a shrine? Something… worse than a shrine?
The truth was, she didn’t know.
But she certainly liked the fact that she could go into her office the very morning after Arlo left and get right to work. She didn’t have to catch up with anything here. She didn’t have to try to figure out her options. It was as if she’d never left.
She’d cried that first morning. A lot.
After she pulled herself together she’d called over to the hotel where she’d stashed her things and arranged to have them delivered. While she waited for the delivery, she settled into her lovely, light-filled nook of an office with its sweeping views over to San Francisco and thought about how grateful she was for the work she did. She could take it anywhere, and she had. All it took was a login and she was up and running.
Josette had taught herself how to trade investments when she’d first moved in with Arlo. At that time, she’d had the vague notion that she wanted to open some kind of fitness studio over in Marin, where she was sure she could rope in the kind of women who belonged to such fitness studios the way other people collected loyalty cards. That was how she’d ended up at that business event, listening to extremely boring people talk about the ins and outs of running a business like the one she’d thought she wanted. She’d been convinced to give up that dream so quickly that it was clear to her it wouldn’t have been the right thing anyway.
Despite what it had taken to show up there in the first place.
Then she’d run into Arlo and the rest was history. He had been equally bored, but he’d taken one look at her and pronounced himself notably interested, immediately.
They had walked directly out of that event. They’dgotten a room at the front desk, gone upstairs, and hadn’t come up for air for two days.
He’d helped her move out of her place a few days after that and she wasn’t sure she’d really touched ground for the better part of that first year.
Today, ten days into the new them, she tried to trace her way back through their history, but those early days were still a blur. It had been all about sex and scenes and pushing each other’s boundaries, lighting each other on fire.
I don’t care if you have a job,he had told her in the second year.But I’ve never known anyone to be bored all the time and make good choices.
That had come on the heels of a little too much intensity one night, when she’d claimed she was perfectly content and he’d suggested that she could not possibly be—not when he met her as an entrepreneur and she’d given that up entirely. Not long after that, she’d happened to find him doing a little trading himself one day, and she’d been fascinated. Josette had always loved numbers, and growing up in a family that made what could only loosely be called a living from the tourist influx, she was more comfortable with risk than she liked.
