A Secret Exposed
Sixty-nine. The brass numerals on the door curved together suggestively, an erotic symbol that triggered the imagination. Piers Sinclair stood at the door to Meg’s apartment and smiled, as he always did, at the number on the door. It made him think about going down on Meg, the taste of her, the sound of her breathless sighs when she relinquished to him. It was far too easy to think sexy thoughts about Meg Sheldon. The brass numerals on the door to her North London apartment just nudged his thoughts along, because they never failed to trigger his libido. This time it was a wry smile that he gave, though, because he and Meg had split two months earlier. They no longer lived together. They’d given it a go for twelve weeks then she’d said no, it wasn’t right for her. Why? Piers still hadn’t figured it out. One thing he was sure of was that he wanted Meg in his life. He had an engagement ring in his pocket to prove it.
Rapping on the door, he ran through his plan. In order to put her at her ease he intended to say he’d called by to collect the racing wheels for his bike. They were still here in Meg’s storage cupboard and he had a triathlon in a couple of week’s time. It was an excuse to see her, of course. He was here to try to talk her around, because he wanted her back. Badly.
When there was no answer to his second knock Piers frowned. Was Meg out on a date with another guy? He didn’t believe that was the case – he’d have heard that kind of news from mutual friends, if not directly from Meg herself – but the thought did cross his mind. He didn’t like the way it made him feel. They had some hurdles to overcome, for sure, but he honestly believed they could do that and they were meant to be together.
He knocked again, more insistently.
It was only when he glanced at his watch he realized what the problem was. Meg wasn’t here because she’d probably already left for the Scottish rental cabin. Yes, it was the last week of October and they’d booked this week away back when they were still living together. She’d emailed him the week before to ask if he minded if she went to Scotland alone. The fee was non-refundable and he wanted her to be happy. If that meant hiking alone and not with him he wasn’t going to be a selfish numbskull about it, so he’d agreed. Not that it felt good, or right. It was meant to be a special week away in Scotland. It would have been their first vacation together, and on their way home at the end of the week he was going to detour and take her to meet his parents, who still lived in the small Scottish border town he’d grown up in. He wanted them to meet Meg and vice versa. That’s how far things had progressed, to his mind. Piers double checked the date on his phone. The rental week commenced the day before. He’d been so set on seeing her and talking things out he completely forgot about that.
Now what? He had an engagement ring as an offering and he still had a key, because some of his stuff was still here. He paced up and down the corridor for a few moments weighing up his options, then reached into his pocket for his key ring and unlocked the door. He would leave the engagement ring on her pillow then the ball was in her court and she could either return it or agree to talk to him. Surely a romantic gesture like that would show her how much he cared and regretted their separation?
He let himself in. The front door closed behind him and he immediately had to pause and look around. He wasn’t prepared for the way it would make him feel, being there again. It was so heavy with her presence that he ached for her. They’d only shared this space for a matter of weeks, and it was her home. Piers had wanted her to move into his house – which was much larger and had plenty of space for Meg, including a room she could turn into her own personal library – but she’d declined. Then she invited him to move in with her as a trial, but not until they’d dated for four months. She’d said she would feel more secure on her own turf. He agreed because he knew it was hard for her. Meg was a private person and a neat freak – or as she liked to call herself, a borderline obsessive-compulsive. He’d worked hard to respect her home and he knew she’d done the same about having him around, but when she told him it wasn’t working out she leaned heavily on the fact that she needed to live alone.
Even though it hadn’t been long, he had a deep connection with the place – her place. Seeing her things made him crave her even more. The neatly arranged bookshelves with lines of books in alphabetical order by author’s name, the candles on the mantel shelf in order of size. On one wall pictures were grouped in a totally symmetrical arrangement, as were the cushions on the sofa. It was so Meg. Everything conspired to remind him of those precious weeks when he thought he’d been getting closer to her, but hadn’t. Piers was a high achiever and he didn’t like failing at anything, especially failing to win Meg. He’d stepped away, but only to give her space to miss him, the way he knew he’d always miss her. She was the most enigmatic creature he’d ever set eyes on, delicate, almost wraithlike in looks and manners, a mysterious, quiet beauty who he’d instantly wanted to know better, no matter how hard that would be.
The fact she still had a photo of them together mounted on the wall amongst the photos of family and friends made him even more sure that he was doing the right thing, proposing. Surely if she really thought it was over that photo would have gone by now? He stared at her image, the way their bodies leaned together for the photo. Her pale red hair and freckles made her feel like sunshine, to Piers. His sunshine. Next to her femininity he looked like a heavyweight. She’d said she liked that about him though.
They’d been introduced by mutual friends at a dinner party. Someone had jokingly said that Piers was patient and Meg was pernickety and they would be the ideal match. In so many ways they had been. Meg blamed her pernickety ways for the failure of the relationship, but Piers thought there was more to it.
“Wish I could figure out what the hell it was,” he muttered as he moved away from the photo. She swore there wasn’t another man. And she did care about him, she admitted that. They loved each other, but she had withdrawn, and Piers still couldn’t get his head around it. Especially as she kept in touch with him, the occasional phone call and emails arrived daily. Her voice sounded wistful. He always told her how much he missed her.
That was an understatement. Now that he was back living in his own home there was such a huge hole in his life and he couldn’t bear it. Reaching into the pocket of his leather jacket his fingers closed around the small velvet covered box he had stored there. Yes, he would leave the gift for her. Decision made. He headed for the bedroom.
Again he was forced to pause as he entered the room. This time it was because he could smell her perfume. He glanced toward the dresser where she kept her feminine fripperies in small boxes in a row. Order and tidiness ruled her world, to the point of obsession. In her work as a hospital administrator it might be appropriate, but she didn’t have to be that way all the time and she was. It was a mystery to him but he’d understood it was important to her, and he’d worked with it. Especially when she gave him one empty box on the opposite side of the dresser to put his necessaries in, which had made him want to chuckle until he saw how serious she was about it. He walked over and glanced into that box. A bottle of his cologne and a spare watch were still there, after all these weeks. Everything conspired to keep his mind questioning. Why hadn’t she packed his things away or asked him to call by and take them? It was as if she didn’t want to say goodbye or remove his things. Did she want him back as much as he wanted to be back? If she did she’d say so. Wouldn’t she?
He stared down at her pillow and felt that familiar, intense longing for her – the woman he loved – and it was the same feeling that had haunted him for the past weeks. Why had she ended it? Piers would never understand. He’d thought it was simple. He loved her and wanted to cherish her, but she was a prickly, independent sort. They’d argued a couple of times, but not a lot. She had never shared a living space before him, not since she’d lived at home with her family, and she blamed that – her need for order, solitude, and privacy. No, there was more to it. There was something about her that he’d never been able to understand, a mystery, some aspect of her personality he hadn’t unveiled.
When she said they should split, he hadn’t been happy but he gave her space and time, hoping she would come back to him. Now it was time to push it along. But she had already gone. Leave the ring and hope it opens the door, he told himself. He opened the velvet box. The ring nestled in black velvet and when he moved it he could see the engraving. Their names either side of entwined hearts. He clicked the box shut.
As he skirted the bed he noticed something was different.
It was her bedside table. She always kept one book there, next to the lamp. The book was there, but it sat on top of a stack of magazines and a couple of other books. Piers did a double take when he spotted the leaning tower of reading material. It was unlike her to have quite so much reading material to hand, and he’d never known her have magazines in the apartment. Not to mention the fact it was so…untidy looking.
Placing the velvet box on her pillow, he carefully lifted the book on the top – a romance novel, with a pretty pink cover and a laughing heroine in a man’s arms, the sort of thing she usually had there – to reveal what was underneath.
When he saw what it was he lifted his eyebrows. The story of O by Pauline Reage.
Beneath it was a beginner’s guide to BDSM. Astonished, Piers turned the book over and read the bullet points and strap line: Safe. Sane. Consensual. BDSM tips you’ll thrill for.
A bunch of hard core bondage magazines stacked up under that title.
“What the fuck?” Piers needed to sit down. He’d been planning to leave
the ring box and depart quickly to avoid any other signs of intrusion, but when he caught sight of the kinky fetish magazines beside his lover’s bed, he sat down onto the quilt. What the hell was going on here? He had no idea this kind of kinky material would appeal to Meg.
She’d told him she was inexperienced, and even though she wasn’t a virgin she was extremely shy when they first made love. They’d progressed to passionate, eager love making, and that was part of her letting down her barriers, but she’d never once given the hint she’d be interested in any of this.
He pulled the magazines onto his lap and began flicking through them. From what he could see, they’d been thoroughly flicked through already. These weren’t coffee table type magazines that were left sitting around just to give a certain impression to visitors, oh no. These had being thoroughly rifled through and the pages pored over, by the looks of it.
Piers frowned. Why in hell did I not know this about her?
They hadn’t been together long, and he’d never seen any evidence like this before. Even so, he never would have guessed. What a kick it would have been to have lain alongside her while she thumbed through this stuff, both of them getting turned on together. A moment later, he began to feel betrayed – angry even – that she hadn’t shown any signs of this side of herself to him. Maybe if she had they’d still be together now. That was unbelievably frustrating to him.
He stared down at the image on the page in front of him and saw a woman on her hands and knees, handcuffed at the wrists, wearing a collar and lead. The woman had her chin lifted, her attention firmly on the man who stood over her, holding her lead. Behind her, another man knelt on one knee while he gave her a good spanking. The two men were stripped to the waist, baring muscles. The woman was entirely naked but for the collar and cuffs. Although it was clearly a carefully arranged tableau for a photograph opportunity, the feminine curves of the bottom already bore red hand marks, evidence of previous spankings. The woman’s lips were parted, her eyes dilated. She was clearly aroused and enjoying her submission at the hands of her male lovers. The anger that Piers had felt moments earlier morphed into an entirely different primal emotion: lust.
He wanted it to be Meg on her hands and knees while he was the one applying a rigorous hand to her bottom. He inhaled her scent from the pages of the magazine, her perfume. Her arousal too? He hoped so. How good it would be to have his hands on her while she looked so beautiful in her submission. The very thought of her like that made him hard. A few pages on he found images of women with their wrists bound by rope, nipples clamped, while being finger fucked. “Meg, oh Meg, why the hell didn’t you say something?”
Moving on to the next magazine -- something similar but more artsy -- Piers found himself looking at images of women’s faces in submission, many of them while in orgasm. Did she want to look like that? Did she want to be fucked by a man who took control? The notion unleashed a powerful emotion in Piers, because he was dominant by nature and he’d been cautious and reeled that in around Meg because of her inexperience, her shyness and her need for space and privacy. Had he inadvertently done the wrong thing and what she was secretly hoping for was for him to take control. Completely?
He’d have to be sure. It was either something that she looked at to get turned on or this was her secret, the part of her she’d never revealed before now, a hard core desire that she couldn’t voice. One thing he knew for sure, he intended to find out, and he wasn’t waiting for her to get back at the end of the week to do so. There was not a hope in hell of waiting. He had to know, to resolve this as soon as possible.
Apart from anything he was hard as rock. The thoughts of Meg alone and aroused by desires that she had withheld made him crazy. Quickly, he rearranged the magazines and then lifted the velvet box containing the engagement ring and put it back in his pocket. This situation now called for a personal delivery – expedited.
Reaching for his phone from his inside jacket pocket he scrolled to his brother’s number. His younger sibling, David, had moved in to take care of Piers’ property when he moved in with Meg, and David had stayed on at Piers’ request. They not only shared a house, they worked together at the financial software design business Piers had launched since his move to London two years earlier.
“It’s only me,” he said quickly, once his brother answered. “I need you to do me a favor, a big one. I need to disappear for a few days.”
“Sure thing, anything in particular you need?”
It was a big thing to ask, more responsibility than he’d given David before, but Piers was totally focused on his goal.
“You’ll have to stand in for me at the meeting tomorrow.” As he spoke he walked back to the main room and looked at the photo of them together on the wall. Now he was sure.
“I’m going to Scotland, to get Meg back.”
