He didn’t say anything, and I realized he was already pulling away, as he always did afterward. I wondered how difficult it was for him to extend this courtesy, to help me clean up. Did this bother him because he’d made rules about his life? Or did the rules about his life come because things like this bothered him?
Whichever it was, I sensed it anguished him to have to deal with me now. We were done, and I should be gone. I already knew that about him, but after today’s message I understood even better how, for him, sex was not a way to connect with others. Sex was something separate. Connecting was something he didn’t do at all.
So I practiced disconnecting too.
I didn’t watch him while he cleaned me up, didn’t think too hard about its intimacy or its eroticism. I let it just be an act. Like sex was just an act. Without meaning, without attachment. Without emotional interpretation.
When he’d finished, we silently wiped up the spilled sake and picked up the platter of tempura that had clattered to the floor. In a few minutes, the room looked fairly decent, considering.
Donovan nodded for me to kneel in my spot, and once I had, he opened the shoji. “I’ll be right back,” he said, turning in the direction of the restrooms, presumably to dispose of the condom.
While he was gone, the waitress came to leave the bill, which Donovan took care of right away on his return.
“When the meal is over, you say gochiso sama deshita,” he said when she returned with his receipt. He said it slowly, and I listened carefully the first time, ensuring that my other arm wouldn’t soon be marked up.
I turned to the waitress and put on a grin. “Gochiso sama deshita.” I brutalized the pronunciation. She nodded politely all the same.
“Perfect,” Donovan said. He stood then gave me his hand to help me up.
“What’s it mean, anyway?” I asked.
“‘It was quite a feast.’”
The waitress bowed to both of us as we stepped past her out into the hallway. Donovan led the way out, which was fine with me. Then I wouldn’t have to feel his distant stare at my back.
But before we’d gotten too far, he stopped and peered over his shoulder. “Sabrina?” His small smile nearly reached his eyes. “Gochiso sama deshita.”
Yes, it definitely had been quite a feast.
As usual, Donovan didn’t ride home with me. He had his driver take me, and he took the car he’d driven himself. Never mind that he could have given his employee the night off and taken me instead. I understood. It didn’t mean anything. I’d given him what he’d come for. Just sex. Good sex, but just sex.
I’d almost forgotten entirely about the marks he’d made on me until later in the shower. I spent most of the time trying to scrub at the ink on my arm, when suddenly I remembered to look at what he’d written lower. I hadn’t thought much about it, assuming he’d written something else that had to do with Japanese culture. Now when I examined the marks, I saw they were actually English and they formed two letters—D K.
Donovan had written his initials on my flesh.
He’d said, in every way possible, that I meant nothing to him beyond sex, and then he’d written his initials on the most private part of my body.
It was another way to mess with me. It had to be. Like how he’d signed off on my grade back in college, the grade I shouldn’t have needed to “make up”. This time he’d signed off on my skin.
It was infuriating and shitty and a turn-on and also…
Also, it hurt.
The problem was, for the first time since I’d known Donovan, his fucked-up games and how much I loved them weren’t the most dangerous parts of our association. The most dangerous part was how much I wished that his brand on my skin meant something different than what it surely did.
The most dangerous part was how much I wished it meant he thought of me as his.
Chapter 25
“But Thanksgiving is almost a month away,” my sister grumbled the next morning over the phone. “You’ve been on the East Coast six weeks, and we still haven’t seen each other.”
I resisted the urge to apologize. To be fair, it wasn’t just my job that had been keeping us apart, but also her class load. Actually, if I spent the rest of the day knocking out some tasks, I could probably take the train up to see her later and come back the next day.
“I wish I could,” she said when I offered. “But I have a group project that’s due Monday, and we’re working on it all day tomorrow.”
“Oh. It was just a thought.” I hadn’t realized how much I’d wanted to see her until right then.
Audrey seemed to pick up on my melancholy. “Are you okay? Is there something you need to talk about? Guy stuff?”
Guy stuff. Yes, actually that’s exactly what it was.
I was both confused and hungover from sex with Donovan the night before, and while I hadn’t particularly been looking to talk about it before, now that she was on the line, I yearned to have someone to sort through the strange non-relationship.
But also I wasn’t ready to put my feelings about it into words.
I shouldn’t even be having feelings about it in the first place. I was sure that was against the rules of his Just Sex policy.
“Nope. I just miss you.” It was true too. I tried to think of an alternate way to get more sister time. “When you come for Thanksgiving, can you come earlier than Wednesday? I’ll have to work some of the time, but we could make up for lost time that way.”
“I have the whole week off,” she said, sounding instantly on board. “I could come up Friday after class. And maybe we could see some shows! Will there be ice-skating at Rockefeller Center by then?”
“Probably.” I didn’t honestly know, never mind that Audrey couldn’t ice-skate to save her life.
“We definitely have to go ice-skating, Bri! And we can do the MOMA. And One World Trade Center…”
She spent the next twenty minutes giving me a list of all the things we should do on her vacation to Manhattan, about a month’s worth of activities. There wasn’t any way we’d get through even a quarter of them, but it was good to talk to her.
It was especially nice to have a few minutes when I wasn’t thinking about Donovan. Not that I spent all of my free time with him on my mind.
When we hung up, he was there in my mind though, immediately. I pulled down my yoga pants and panties and stood in front of my bathroom mirror. His initials were faded with the scrubbing I’d given them the night before, but they were still clearly visible.
Why did I like the look of them on my skin so much? It was erotic and it turned me on, yes. But there was more to it than that. It felt like he’d given me his letterman’s jacket. Or like he’d asked me to wear his class ring. It felt like he’d claimed me, and if that was his intention, then I really didn’t understand the terms of Just Sex.
There were other terms I didn’t understand. What were the rules of this arrangement? Was there even an arrangement? Could I call him up for booty calls if I wanted to or was he the only one allowed to do that? Was there a length of time I was supposed to wait in between dates?
Was he sleeping with other women right now too?