Then she’d left, wearing the clothes she’d come in that first night and not capable of giving a single shit that she was on the streets of Berlin at midday on a Monday with her thong visible, her ass cheeks hanging out and a tiny, strappy little top that might as well have shouted her interest in bondage to everybody she passed on the street.
But it was Berlin, so nobody paid her the slightest bit of attention.
And that stung, too. Because it was impossible to discount everything Dorian had told her when there she was, prancing down the street as if she wanted some stranger to pay her some mind.
He had introduced her to herself, then confronted her with all that meant, and she didn’t like it.
She’d gone back to her hotel, packed up her things and gotten the hell out of Germany.
But another fun fact about her madcap existence, about which she bragged to all and sundry as if she loved every second of it, was that she didn’t have anywhere to go. Not really. She lived out of hotels, or in the guest suites at friends’ houses. She’d been doing it so long that she’d long since stopped thinking too closely to be...rootless.
Untethered. Unattached.
If asked, she called it freedom.Pure happiness, she’d said a few weeks back. She’d been on her way to Berlin with a small stopover in Copenhagen to see the sort of friends who asked deep questions over wine, not because they were deep themselves, but because they liked to compete with their answers. The better to pretend their shallow lives had depth.
Erika was fantastic at pretending to be the happiest.
Are you happy?Dorian had asked her. Mercilessly.Or have you wrapped uphaplessin a curated social media feed and forgotten that the core of all that glossy performance is emptiness?
In retrospect, what Erika was happy about was that she’d been gagged when he’d asked that question, because she still didn’t know how to answer it.
Nor did the answer come to her as she landed in England, and made her way to Devon, where her mother was living it up in a country manor with her latest conquest, who claimed a Windsor connection and spent as much time tramping about his property with his dogs as he did tending to his gout flare-ups.
Not that Chriszette was ever in the mood to entertain a full-grown daughter for more than the odd meal.
Erika was dispatched to a renovated carriage house far enough away from than main hall that Chriszette could pretend she wasn’t about, where she assured herself that she wasperfectly fucking happy. And then fumed, like it was her job to prove it.
She was angry with herself for putting herself into that situation in Berlin in the first place. What had she been thinking? She was angry with her brother in general for being an overbearing asshole, and specifically for having such terrible taste in friends. She was angry with her mother, who could have taken maybe five minutes from her own narcissism to do a little parenting, back in the day, when her daughter was clearly acting out her grief—but hadn’t bothered. And certainly felt no compulsion to make up for that now.
And she was deeply, volcanically angry at Dorian.
Because she couldn’t help feeling that the only revenge taken had been against her. By her, which was worse, because she’d been correct in her initial assessment, if nothing else. Dorian was an excellent weapon.
“You’ll forget him in about forty-eight hours,” she told herself, out loud and with great confidence, when she sat down on the side of her carriage house bed, high in the eaves. “Less, probably.”
Because forgetting about men was something Erika was very, very good at. But Dorian wasn’t like other men. He didn’t fade away, out of sight and out of mind.
For the first time in her life, Erika was plagued with insomnia, hollow-eyed and up at all hours, because her body wanted what it couldn’t have. It wanted Dorian’s body next to hers, holding her tight, when she’d spent her entire previous life asserting with great confidence that she was the kind of person who didn’t like to cuddle while she slept.
She never had, before.
But then, there were a lot of things she’d never done before that weekend in Berlin with Dorian.
And toward the end of that first week and into the second week after she’d left him, Erika mostly just cried.
She felt tossed out to sea and abandoned while wave after wave of old, ugly emotion found her and sank her. Over and over again.
She almost thought it would be easier to drown.
But Dorian didn’t let her.
He didn’t call every day. Perhaps every other day. Sometimes he sounded terse, busy, and she hated that she felt particularly special that he made time for her. Other times he sounded tired, and she wished she could have the opportunity to soothe him. But he always sounded likehim. Dark and richly textured andhim.
“I don’t want to talk to you,” she said when she picked up the phone, the way she often did. Because even if that was true, she still obeyed him. He’d told her he expected her to answer and here she was, answering. Every time. “But you asked me to answer when you rang. Behold my obedience.”
“I never doubted you, Erika.” His voice did magical, terrible things to her body. Her nipples pinched so hard she could feel that line of sensation spiral down into her clit. She was wet instantly. Soft and ready for whatever he might do to her. “Are you ready to talk about your feelings yet?”
“I talk about my feelings all day every day,” she lied, and pretended she didn’t feel a little kick of pleasure when he laughed. “It’s true. I stop people on the street and download my every last emotion. I’ve already made a lot of new friends that way.”