He just smiled at that. "Surely we will," he said, and leaned in and kissed me. We were naked, lying in his bed, and his hand came up and stroked the inside of my thigh, lazily. "Have you ever seen the sculpture of the lovers?" he asked me.
"The Rodin?" I said. "Of course. I mean... in books, I guess."
He leaned in, pushing me onto my back. "It is extraordinary in person. The flesh gives way so easily in stone." And he put a hand to my breast and squeezed lightly, as though to emphasize his point.
I laughed, an old, familiar self-deprecating thing. "Oh, sure," I said, "if I had any flesh there to give way."
A scowl passed across his features and his grip tightened, sending a sharp pain shooting through me and I gasped and wiggled. "Your breasts are fine," he said. "Stop speaking so poorly of them."
I still wasn't used to submitting. I never would be. My customary rebellion welled in me. "But then I'd have to listen to other people speak poorly of them. You know, I'm just putting it out there. Laughing at yourself is a pretty good way to get other people to laugh, and then the jokes already over with." I managed to scoot back and his grip eased.
He wasn't happy with my answer. He tied my hands to the bed and lashed my breasts over and over again as he pumped his hand in my pussy, hot and hard and demanding, until I came with a scream and a tearless sob.
And then one day Malcolm said, “We have to stop for fuel,” and just like that it was over.
Chapter Thirteen
Time came back. The sun was setting on the horizon, turning the sea purple. We were sailing with purpose now, but I was still in a stupor. I couldn't have told you how long we'd been at sea, but I knew it had been a while. Sometimes the motors had cut out entirely and we drifted, but I knew we needed to get more fuel soon, or be in trouble.
“Where are we going to get it?” I asked.
Malcolm stood at the railing. We were on the highest deck, and he leaned back against it. His hair had bleached out almost white, and his face had tanned to a rich golden-brown. His fine linen shirt hung open, fluttering in the breeze over his white linen pants. He was barefoot. He looked more like an underwear model than a troubled billionaire, but the lines around his eyes that only I knew about gave him away. “I doubt we are going to even have a chance to land,” he told me. “We're off the coast of Turkey and the captain has been in radio contact with the police on the land.”
I raised my eyebrows. This was the first I'd heard of this. “And?”
“We'll probably be boarded by the coast guard. Don has alleged that there are large numbers of weapons aboard this boat. Protestations to the contrary are met, obviously, with suspicion.” He sighed. “He really is one step ahead of me. I don't deserve to win against him.”
I rubbed my eyes. I felt sleepy. Drugged. The sun had baked my brain. “That's not true,” I said with a yawn. “He's only one step ahead of you because you don't want to stoop to his level.”
“But that's how you win, Sadie.”
I sighed. My god, he frustrated me. “It's not about winning. Stop thinking like that.”
“I can't. It's a disease.” He tossed his head and looked behind us at the water churned white by the engines of the yacht.
For a terrible moment I had a vision of him throwing himself into those turbulent waters and going under, never to surface again.
A hard knot tightened in my stomach and I hugged myself, sobering.
“Anyway,” Malcolm said, breaking the spell. “Prepare to be boarded.”
“Said the pirate to the pretty maid,” I joked, though I didn't really feel it. The reality of the situation was starting to sink in. The big question hovered over us, and I was afraid to put voice to it.
I was lying on one of the deck chairs. One of the three thousand dollar deck chairs, and I realized I hated it. It was a nice deck chair, but it was just a fucking chair. In fact, I hated this boat. Malcolm talked a good game about enlightenment, but he wasn't even close to it. Giving up one's worldly possessions was supposed to be part of it. I stood up, abruptly feeling gross and confined by the tiny world of the boat, by the threat of Malcolm ending it all. How could I have hoped to convince him the world was worth hanging around in if we were on such a gaudy boat?
“It'll be thirty minutes before we're out of international waters,” he said after a second. “Would you like to have one last fuck, for old time's sake?”
“Are you going to kill yourself?” I blurted.
He turned his face from the white-churned wake and stared at me. “I haven't quite decided yet,” he said.
My heart suddenly felt lighter. “Is that so?”