He grabs my arm again, pulling me along faster. “It’s quiet. This late, nobody would see. Should I fuck you here?”

It’s Halloween. People will be out and about—which means they’ll be coming in at all hours. “No. We shouldn’t—”

Jonah pushes me against the nearest pylon, hard enough that I have to steady myself to stay on my feet. “I’ll fuck you here if I want to. It’s not up to you, is it?”

The game has intensified. We’re working out something through our fantasy, even though real anger should probably never play a role in what we do. But that edge of anger only makes me want him more. “No,” I whisper. “It’s up to you.”

Apparently satisfied, Jonah drags me with him into the building.

He turns a key so we can ride the elevator to the penthouse floor. When the doors slide open, they reveal the large, shadowed space of his apartment; Jonah is the only one on the top level.

So I can scream or struggle all I want. No one will hear.

“Take your goddamned clothes off,” Jonah says. He starts stripping off his scrubs, right there in front of the elevator door.

I obey. The space is too dark for me to see much, besides the city lights of Austin shining through the windows. I can tell his apartment is enormous, though, open-concept—so I’m standing in the middle of a vast, murky room I don’t know. Trembling, I ditch my shoes and socks, push my skirt down to the floor, then lift my peasant blouse over my head. Now I’m only in a strapless bra and panties.

Before I can remove those too, Jonah steps close to me and grips both my arms, holding me fast. He’s stark naked, his erection jutting between us. The dim light from the city outside shows me little more than how big he is, how muscular—how futile it would be for me to fight him. That, and the anger in his eyes.

Tonight, for the first time, Jonah’s fury is absolutely real.

Surely this is when he’ll start calling me names. Slut. Whore. Bitch. In my mind I can hear his voice growling those words.

But tonight I learn that when Jonah is truly angry, he falls completely silent.

His silence is scarier than anything he could ever say.

The hardwood floor slams against my knees when he shoves me down. He grabs my hair, hard, to hold me in place as he pushes his cock inside my mouth. If he would slow down, I’d try to suck him off, but nothing I do is enough for Jonah. He keeps thrusting, relentless, going deep enough that I cough and sputter for breath around his cock.

Jonah could hurt me. He wants to hurt me. Say silver, or snap your fingers. Make him stop.

I don’t.

The sheer force Jonah uses on me stuns me. All I can do is kneel there, mouth open, letting myself be used. I whimper in both fear and desire. That’s when he pulls out and yanks me to my feet again.

“Jonah—” But I can’t think of what to say, and he doesn’t give me a chance to say it. Instead he pushes me forward until I make contact with something low and leather. A bench or ottoman, maybe.

He tugs me against his chest and whispers the first words he’s said since the garage. “On your knees.”

By now I’m shaking. But I do what Jonah demands. I climb onto the bench and kneel there, waiting. Everything around me is darkness.

I feel something slide around my arms—a belt, I realize, as the leather tightens. Jonah has bound my wrists behind me. Never before has he bound me; the thrill of fear I feel only sharpens my desire. By now my fear and arousal are so overpowering that it’s as if I’m drunk. He yanks back on the belt, nearly knocking me off balance, and I cry out. His hand slides down the center of my back, a touch that I know means possession.

Jonah owns me now, and he knows it.

He pushes between my shoulder blades, so that I nearly topple over. When I’m bent like that in front of him, one of his hands seizes my hip and he shoves his cock inside.

Jonah takes me with a ferocity I’ve never experienced before. One of his hands closes around the belt, holding me in position by my arms; the other releases my hip to fist in my hair, and he pulls back hard. Jonah pumps me, so fast and so hard that my breasts shake and my entire body starts to sweat. My knees and wrists ache—my shoulders feel like they’re being pulled back too far—and yet there’s nothing I love more than the slap of his body against mine, the feel of his cock filling me up. Jonah vents his full fury on me, inside me.

Yes, I think, fuck me. Punish me. Make me take it.

Desire sharpens inside me. Peaks. The darkness seems to be turning red, and my heart thumps so hard I think I can hear the rushing of blood in my ears. Ragged cries escape my lips; I couldn’t hold them back if I tried.

And then, in a blinding rush of pleasure, I come. For the first time in my life, my orgasm makes me scream.

Jonah doesn’t stop. Doesn’t even slow down. He just fucks me harder, so hard he must want to break me—but then he comes too, shouting out as he pumps deep inside me and stiffens. We spend a couple seconds locked together, too stunned to move.

Then he slides out of me, hot and wet. The belt around my arms loosens and falls away. I try to get to my feet, but I can’t; I’m still shaking too hard for that. Instead I slump onto the nearby couch.

Jonah stands above me, a black, featureless shadow. Everything I ever told myself about fearing this man comes back to me, and I wonder what happens after this. If he’s still angry, if what he just did to me isn’t enough—

But my eyes are adjusting to the darkness, and I see an expanse of white on a nearby brick wall. A square, in a silver frame.

The etching. The man’s hands cradling the dove. That’s what I’m looking at.

And in that instant I remember that whatever twisted fantasies bind me to Jonah, our connection goes beyond that. Or it can, if we figure out how.

I whisper, “Hold me?”

Jonah pauses, but then he sits by my side and folds me in the warmth of his embrace. He is as gentle now as he was cruel a minute before.

Slowly he lowers us to lie on the sofa, and I curl next to his chest. I say nothing else, and I don’t look at Jonah’s face. Instead I stare up at the etching, trying despite the darkness to make out the lines of the dove’s fragile wings, and the man’s strong hands.

Twenty-six

Few things could be more embarrassing than taking the Walk of Shame dressed like the St. Pauli Girl. So Jonah lends me a T-shirt and some workout shorts with a drawstring that allows me to cinch them around my waist.

I almost don’t remember the moment when, half asleep, I let Jonah carry me into his bedroom. But this morning I woke up next to him in an enormous, king-sized bed, and since then he’s been considerate. Almost courtly. The total opposite of last night.

As Jonah scrambles some eggs for us, I walk around, taking a look at his place in the daylight. His bedroom and bathroom are the only fully enclosed spaces, occupying a bricked-in area at the center of the enormous open space that forms the rest of his apartment. Stainless steel shines in the kitchen, yet the dining table nearby seems to be made of reclaimed woods, rustic and yet somehow perfect here. I circle around to see low bookshelves beneath the wide windows that look out on Lake Austin and the rest of the city—a space defined as the living room by low leather sofas, a Turkish carpet, and the ottoman I remember. Turns out it’s dark red. At the far end of his apartment—the part where I’ve nearly circled back to the kitchen—is a home office with books stacked around his computer, and a seismograph sitting on a small end table. All the lines move slowly and easily—no tremors today. I step around a treadmill to reappear in the kitchen, where Jonah is spooning our finished breakfast onto our plates.