"It won't happen again."
"Sure."
"I mean it." He's backing away, putting distance between us like I'm contagious. "This was a mistake. A moment of weakness. It doesn't change anything."
"Okay." I slide off the counter, legs shaky, pants tented and wet. "Whatever you need to tell yourself."
"I don't—" He stops. Runs a hand through his hair. Takes a breath that shudders more than it should. "I'm going to my office. Stay here. Don't touch anything."
"Little late for that, don't you think?"
He flinches like I hit him. Then he turns and walks away, and I watch him go, and I think about the way his hands shook when he touched me.
The way his voice broke on the word "mistake."
The way he kissed me like I was an oxygen tank saving him from drowning.
Fuck, Daddy J, what are you doing?
He avoids me for the rest of the day.
I know because I pay attention. I hear him moving through the apartment—footsteps in his office, the creak of a chair, the occasional muffled sound of a phone call. But he doesn't come to the kitchen. Doesn't check on me. Doesn't appear in doorways to glare at me with those complicated gray eyes.
It would be insulting if it wasn't so fucking predictable.
I clean myself up in the bathroom, stare at my reflection for a while. The man in the mirror looks like shit; hollow cheeks, dark circles, a bruise on his lower lip where Jagger bit him. But there's something in his eyes that wasn't there three days ago. Something alive.
Apparently all it takes to feel human again is getting jerked off by your kidnapper in his fancy kitchen. Really says something about my standards.
I spend the afternoon in his library, because what else am I going to do? The books are arranged by subject, then by author, then by publication date, because of course they are. The man probably alphabetizes his socks.
I wander the shelves, pulling out volumes at random. All of it is boring as shit, but he does have some rare collector editions. Three different translations of The Art of War. A comprehensive history of interrogation techniques that I flip through before putting back, my stomach turning.
But there's other stuff too. Poetry, a worn copy of Mary Oliver. A whole shelf of philosophy that is worn with the pages dog-eared. Fiction that surprises me: Emily Bronte, Mary Shelley, a collection of Japanese short stories with annotations in the margins.
The annotations are what get me.
His handwriting is everywhere. Cramped notes in pencil, arguments with the author, questions that don't have answers. In a random novel I plucked off the shelf, he's circleda passage about how you can't have freedom without the possibility of suffering, and written underneath: "Is the inverse also true?"
In a poem about transformation, he underlined one sentence. The one about how every dragon that's slain becomes a princess held captive, and we're afraid to face our fears because they might turn into something beautiful.
Underneath, in handwriting that's shakier than the rest: "What if the dragon IS the princess?"
I stare at that for a long time.
Then I pull down the Dostoevsky. The one I found with his notes inside.
"The question is not whether we are guilty, but whether we can bear the weight of our guilt."
I trace the words with my finger. His handwriting is angular, precise, each letter formed with the same deliberate control he applies to everything else. But there's something underneath the precision. A pressure that pushed too hard, left grooves in the page.
He wrote this like it hurt.
I flip through the rest of the book, looking for more annotations. There aren't many, but the ones I find are telling. Passages about suffering, about punishment, about the impossibility of redemption. He's underlined a paragraph about how some men are born for destruction, how they become instruments of violence by nature rather than choice.
The word "nature" has a question mark next to it. The ink is smudged, like he touched it while it was still wet.
I close the book and put it back on the shelf.
