“He gave you a diamond tennis bracelet?” Wren gawked, fingering the bracelet that she’d spotted the moment I sat down at the table, before I’d even had the chance to say hello.
“For me to wear as long as we’re in this arrangement,” I replied, trying to hide my complicated feelings about the bracelet and the meaning behind it.
“Like a collar,” Zoe deduced, her face impassive.
“A four-carat collar,” Wren interjected.
“A diamond cage still traps you as well as an iron one,” Yasmin offered.
“It’s not a cage,” I argued, grabbing the drink that Zoe was intuitive enough to have ordered for me.
There was no way I wouldn’t need alcohol while trying to tell my best friends about the weekend I’d just had.
“Just look at her.” Wren ordered the other two women, pointing at me. “She is glowing. Glowing. Have we ever seen Stella look like that?” Her eyes went to mine. “And I’m not saying you don’t look excellent at all times, but this is something radiating from the inside.”
Zoe would normally roll her eyes at Wren saying something like this. She was all about the tangible, scientific, the opposite of Wren who believed in crystals, in chakras, spiritual healing. So it shocked the hell out of us all when Zoe said, “She’s right. You look different. The sex was that good?
I took a large sip of my drink. “It was that good. And then some.”
Wren clapped her hands. “Okay, was there a red room? Did he make you crawl around on the floor the entire weekend?” She inspected my mouth. “I don’t see any marks from the prolonged wearing of any kind of ball gag, and trust me, there is no way to hide that.”
None of us even raised an eyebrow at this. Wren didn’t have secrets. And she didn’t have limits.
“No red rooms. No ball gags of any kind,” I told them.
Yasmin raised her brow. “Nothing of the BDSM variety?”
I shook my head. “There were a lot of ... commands.” I thought about the way he restrained me with the tie from the robe. How that had felt. How it was nothing close to romantic, how it never would be. “But no restraints. Yet.”
“Yet?” Zoe repeated. “Correct me if I’m wrong, girl, but you sound excited at the prospect.”
I bit my lip, trying to hide my smile. “Is that a bad thing? To be excited?”
Zoe’s entire face softened. “Oh no, baby. It’s not a bad thing at all.”
Wren held her drink up. “To Stella getting herself fucked good and hopefully getting tied up and ravaged in the very near future.”
The waiter chose that moment to approach the table, doing his level best to act like he hadn’t heard what he’d just heard. But no matter what he wanted his resume to say, he was no actor.
We all laughed and clinked our drinks together. I got lost in the talk with my friends, sinking in to the comfort they offered as I tried my best to forget about Jay, to remember who I had been before I met him.
The problem was, after less than 48 hours with Jay, that woman was already becoming harder and harder to recall.
The rest of the week dragged on. I hated that I couldn’t focus on anything else but counting down the days until the weekend. That I was now checking my phone obsessively for any kind of contact from Jay.
There was none.
But there was evidence of his presence, of his ownership, with the diamond bracelet around my wrist, the aching muscles and the small marks covering my body. Bruises from his fingers pressing into my skin. Jay was everywhere, yet he was nowhere.
And I certainly didn’t have free time to be obsessing over Jay, since I was working by six in the morning, never home before seven and usually out the door again by eight. A mixture of industry gatherings or a dinner with Wren that turned in to her talking me in to going to some speakeasy until two in the morning.
Technically, there should not have been time to think about Jay. But, of course, there was.
On Friday night I went to an art gallery opening that Zoe had convinced me to attend, despite the fact she knew well and good that I was not at all interested in such things. Sure, I liked art. But I did not like it enough to spend thousands of dollars on it, walk around with a plastic glass of cheap champagne and pretend to talk about the ‘mood’ that an image of an orange evoked.
Not my scene.
Zoe also knew that I was pathetically waiting for some kind of communication from Jay. However, Zoe was not a friend who’d let another friend pathetically wait by the phone while drinking cheap wine and watching reruns of Friends in stained sweats. So I was talking about art while drinking cheap wine from a plastic cup. Apparently, that was somehow less pathetic. I did look good, so I supposed there was that.