Rachel Haimowitz & Cat Grant - [Power Play 1] (45 page)

finished it, and then drank another one or two, he’d stop being so

fucking maudlin. Stop fucking thinking of Jonathan.

He could help you.

“Shut up . . .”

He tried
to help you. You wouldn’t let him.

“Shut
up
!” He chugged his beer, hoping to drown that stupid

little voice. Didn’t work. Thought back at it,
He
hurt
me. Humiliated

me. Used
me. Treated me like a fucking
whore
.

Because you goaded him. Fought him every step of the way. Admit

it—you liked
him. You liked what he made you feel. You liked the way

he made you think. You liked the way he opened your eyes.

So what if he did? Didn’t change how Jonathan had hurt him.

And what about how
you
hurt
Jonathan
?

Jesus Christ, this was fucking ridiculous. He was
not
going to sit

here having a fucking argument
with himself over warm beer.

Just go talk to him. You know you want to.

No, he didn’t. Not even a little. Never wanted to see the smug

little shit again.

. . . So then why did he keep glancing at the door, hoping Jonathan

might come through it?

I thought I taught you better than that, you worthless little shit.

Either pull on your big-girl panties or don’t, but stop the damn whining

before I shut you up myself.

Bran drained his beer and plunked the glass on the bar. “Never

thought I’d say this, Dad, but you’re right.” He stood, shrugged his

jacket on. This wasn’t gonna fix itself. Only one way to make things

right: suck it up and face them.

CHAPTER
21

onathan’s intercom buzzed around eight, and he leaned forward

in his chair to answer it. “Yes, Joel?”

The doorman cleared his throat. “There’s a Mr. McKinney here to

see you, sir. Shall I send him up?”

Brandon?
What the hell was he
doing here? Jonathan sat back,

rubbed a hand over his chin.
Probably came back to punch you in the

nose
. And why should he give him the opportunity? Hadn’t he put up

with enough of Brandon’s childishness and fits of temper?

Still . . . he was curious. Maybe Brandon had finally come to his

senses. Well, only one way to find out. “Go ahead, Joel.”

He flicked off his computer and headed into the living room.

Waited by the elevator until the doors opened. Brandon glanced at

him as if he thought Jonathan might have the stun gun ready to go.

“Well, are you coming in?” Jonathan demanded. “Or did you just

drop by to tell me to go fuck myself again?”

Brandon shuffled in, hands in his pockets. Looked around as if

he’d never seen the place before. As if Jonathan’s penthouse hadn’t

been his home for the past month. “Y-you got some of that good

scotch on hand?”

Jonathan stiffened, his mouth tightening.
You scorned every

kindness I tried to show you over the past three weeks, and now you

saunter in asking for a
drink
?
It took him a moment to conquer the

impulse to toss Brandon out on his highly presumptuous ear before

he led the man over to the couch.

The steel cuffs were still on the coffee table, right where Brandon

had left them last week. For some reason, Jonathan couldn’t bear the

thought of putting them away just yet. Brandon looked surprised

when he saw them, but sat down nonetheless, his gaze glued to them

for a long moment. Something else flickered across his face—a touch

of regret?—but it was gone too quickly to be sure.

Jonathan poured them both doubles, handed Brandon his,

and sat down. Leaned back in his chair, crossed his legs, waited for

Brandon to tell him why he’d come.

Brandon peered at his drink, swirled and sniffed it, but didn’t

actually take a sip. So this was serious, then, if he wanted to be sober

for it?

“You—” Brandon began, then changed his mind and tasted his

scotch after al . He kept his gaze locked on his drink as he spoke. “I

think maybe we fucked up.”

We?
Jonathan uncrossed his legs, fought the urge to lean forward.

“Explain,” he said when the silence stretched. He had his own ideas

about this, but was suddenly very intrigued to hear Brandon’s. Not

that he was about to let Brandon know that. He set his drink on the

side table and pasted on a neutral expression while he waited for

Brandon to continue.

“When I came here . . .” Another tiny sip of scotch, glass twirling

round and round in his nervous fingers. “I thought, well, this guy’s

fucking infuriating, but he’s also
fascinating
. And hot. Seriously

fucking hot. I liked you. I liked talking to you. I liked . . .” He finally

glanced up from his drink, squeezed now in tense fingers. “I liked the

way you made me
feel
.”

“Well, you certainly had a strange way of showing it. Fighting me
.

Biting
me. Making me punish you every day, making me break you

just to get you to eat—”

“I know, I know, and . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t understand what it all

meant. Didn’t know what I . . .”

Silence again.

“What you
wanted
?” Jonathan said finally. “That was apparent

from the very first day.”

“Look, I know, and I’m sorry, I really am, just . . . Let me finish.

Please.”

Jonathan gave a grudging nod. After al , if Brandon meant to ask

Jonathan to take him back—and that certainly seemed to be where

this was going—then he had a lot more explaining to do. And a lot

more apologizing, frankly.

Maybe, just maybe, it’d be good enough.

“When I first got here, well . . . Okay, I’m not gonna lie and say

the money didn’t matter, because of course it did. I’ve worked and

scraped and
worked
for every fucking thing I’ve ever had in this world,

and the chance to just . . . to see my whole future laid out ahead of me

like that, everything I ever dreamed of . . .”

Ah, yes, the
money.
The only reason Brandon had agreed to this

in the first place.
And now here you are, about to beg me to take you

back so you can collect your three million? Not bloody likely—but I’ll

still listen to you grovel.

Brandon put his drink down, barely touched, on the coffee table,

right near the steel cuffs. Scrubbed both hands through his hair and

then folded them in his lap, fingers tangling. “But I told myself it was

more
than that, you know? That I would’ve spent the next six months

sleeping with you anyway. And I
meant
it. But then I get here, and

suddenly we stop talking. You stop asking me questions. You don’t let

me
say a fucking thing at al . Everything I know about you I learned

from fucking
Google
, for fuck’s sake. I felt like . . .” He swallowed,

flushed clear to the tips of his ears. “You made me feel like a
whore
,

Jonathan,” and thank God he was still staring at his hands, because

Jonathan flinched at that like Brandon had hit him. “Like the one

fucking thing I’d never,
ever
sunk to, even when I was living on the

streets. Like a . . . what’d you say to me that last day? Like a hole to

fuck. Like a thing to be used.”

Jonathan pushed back in his chair, gripping the arms as the

shock—and the truth—of Brandon’s words sank in. Not what he’d

meant to do. Not
at all
. Good God, he really had messed this up right

along with Brandon, hadn’t he? “Oh,
Brandon
, I never—”

Please,” Brandon said, holding a hand up. “Just . . . just let me

finish.”

Jonathan swallowed back his protest and nodded. He owed him

that much. More. Maybe if he’d let the man speak his mind three

weeks ago . . .

“I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t
deal
with that, you know? Couldn’t
hear

you when I felt like that. So all that shit you said, all those things

you did and all your reasons for them . . .” Brandon huffed, shook his

head, the corners of his mouth lifting ever so slightly. “In one ear and

out the other. But now I’ve had some time to think, and some time

to realize
how much truth
there was in all that. I’m . . .” He shook his

head, hands once again scrubbing at his hair. “
Different
now. You’ve

changed
me somehow, and I can’t . . .” He shrugged, finally
looked

Jonathan in the eye, plaintive and desperate, confused and naked,

totally
naked
, for the first time ever in Jonathan’s presence. “And I

don’t understand it. I don’t know what to
do
with myself, with my

feelings, with these . . . these
things
I want now, these things I think

about. I don’t . . . I don’t want to be alone anymore, and I’m tired of

fighting all the time. And so I thought . . .”

This time, as the silence stretched on, cautious hope built so

strongly in Jonathan’s chest he couldn’t stop himself from saying, “So

you thought you’d come back.”

Brandon nodded ever so slightly, like a man convinced he couldn’t

possibly have what he was asking for.
Could
he, though? Brandon had

never said so much to Jonathan. He hardly knew what to do with it

al —the long-overdue revelation, the stirrings of self-awareness, the

pseudo-admission of responsibility for their separation.

Hardly knew what to do either with
You made me feel like a

whore.

Had he? He’d been so careful
—
or so he’d thought—to care for

Brandon, to not dehumanize him, not objectify him, not dismiss or

ignore his pleasure, not oversexualize his suffering.

And yet he
had
stopped talking
to Brandon, hadn’t he? Or

rather, stopped talking
about
Brandon. About himself, too. Had

been so focused on the man’s training, on breaking through the

stubbornness and the pride and that thick wall of shame to coax out

the submission lying beneath that he’d forgotten to focus on
them
, on

what had drawn them to each other in the first place, on their pasts,

their present . . . maybe even their future. In that, he’d been just as

culpable as Brandon. More, even.

He took a long sip of his own drink, then put it down. Now was

not the time for tipsiness. “When I was eight, I got into my first and

last fistfight with another boy. Over something ridiculous, I don’t

know, I don’t even remember anymore why we were fighting. What

I
do
remember is the thrill of wrestling him to the ground. Of how

satisfying
it felt to make him cry. And of how
horrified
I was by that

satisfaction, that pleasure, that desire I couldn’t even name. I fled. I

left him bleeding in the dirt, and I fled right back to Mum and Dad,

where I promptly confessed everything in a fit of tears, right down to

how good it had felt to hurt him.”

Brandon blinked at him, opened his mouth, closed it, opened it

again. Said, finally, “What’d they do?”

“They made me apologize to the boy
and
his parents, and then

they grounded me for a week. But they also
told me it was all right

to feel that way. That there was nothing wrong with me, that I wasn’t

a bad person. That as long as I felt too guilty to do it again, the good

guys were winning and all would be well.”

A hesitant smile curled one corner of Brandon’s lips. “The origin

of a sadist, huh?”

Jonathan smiled back. “It was quite the relief, you understand, to

grow up and find others like me. Find men who
wanted
to be hurt,

who
liked
to cry at my feet.”

“I bet. And those other men? Did you tell
them
stories about

your childhood?”

Touché.
“I’m man enough to admit when I’ve made a mistake,

Brandon. I held us back. I won’t— I
wouldn’t
do it again.”

Brandon met his gaze, quite serious of a sudden. “You promise?”

Jonathan nodded. “I promise.”

Brandon nodded back. Then his gaze fell away from Jonathan’s,