Beyond Shame

you’re supposed to hold back.”

“I don’t know.” Rachel pulled free and lifted another rack of glasses onto the bar. “I try not to overthink it. Like…if I just sit back and let whatever happens happen, then it’ll make sense.”

“Does it work?”

She met Noelle’s gaze with another almost sheepish smile. “If you have to ask, I think you already know the answer.”

No. No, it couldn’t possibly work. Not in a place like this, where intimacy between lovers could be withheld as surely as it was in Eden. The O’Kanes gave their bodies freely enough, their affection. You could be family or fucking or both, but wasn’t that what Lex had tried to explain to her? That thing she wanted too fast, the thing she offered along with her body.

She didn’t have a word for it, but she knew what it was. Too much trust. A yearning for possession that went both ways. Hope that what you had would never change.

Maybe it was love.

* * *

The unsettled feeling from that afternoon hadn’t gone away.

Noelle stared unseeing at her own reflection, only vaguely aware of the rote movements as she dragged a brush through her hair. Lex’s vanity was another oddity in a room filled with oddities, beautifully restored and covered with silver-backed hairbrushes and expensive glass bottles that wouldn’t have been out of place in Eden. Some had undoubtedly been gifts from Dallas, but Noelle had yet to see Lex touch any of it. She kept her makeup, lotions, and perfumes in utilitarian containers cluttering up her bathroom sink, out of sight behind the closed door.

The vanity was a stage. A scene as carefully set as the vast bed and its lush pillows—the romanticized version of a woman’s private domain, with the messy reality tucked away.

The fact that Noelle felt more at home in the polished, empty fantasy than she did anywhere else wasn’t flattering or reassuring. If she unfocused her eyes a little and let her mind drift, she could be back in her own bedroom, a room filled with empty tokens and an empty girl being groomed as Eden’s flawless, unrealistic version of a woman.

Decorative and hollow.

What a horrible, hateful ideal.

Lex lay with her head pillowed on her arms, watching. Finally, she made a sleepy noise of amusement. “One hundred strokes before bedtime. Do they teach you that in Eden too?”

“Yes.” Blinking, Noelle shifted her gaze to Lex’s reflection in the mirror. “Do they teach you that in the sectors?”

“Mmm, Sector Two. That’s where I’m from.” She closed her eyes. “‘It’s all in the presentation, Alexa. A woman must never be herself.’”

The words could have come from her mother’s lips. “So it’s not so different from Eden, there.”

“In some ways.” Lex sat up and reached for a cigarette. “My mentor at the training house was stone cold. Makes Dallas look like a fucking saint.”

“Training house?” She wanted to snatch the words back the moment they left her mouth, because of course there was only one thing they could be training Lex to do in the sectors, and it didn’t have anything to do with hosting dinner parties.

“You haven’t heard what they do out in Two?” Lex took a deep drag off her cigarette. “They buy up pretty little things, train ’em just right. Sell ’em to all the rich old men looking to corrupt some innocent darling who isn’t too innocent to suck their balls on occasion.”

Noelle clenched the brush until she could feel each individual swirl of the handle’s carvings digging into her skin. “I’m sorry. That’s—” Horrifying. Degrading. And the fact that she could recognize that and understand it only made her craving for corruption and a little degradation at Jasper’s hands that much more twisted. “I’m sorry.”

“For what? I didn’t stick around for that shit. I ran away.”

“Good.” Noelle said it forcefully, trying to hide her confusion from Lex. She set down the brush and dragged her hair over her shoulder to braid it, watching her fingers so she wouldn’t have to meet Lex’s eyes. “Is that what men really want? Someone they can corrupt?”

“Depends on the guy.” Lex crushed her cigarette, slipped from the bed, and walked into the bathroom. The water cut on a moment later, and she ducked back out, her toothbrush in her hand. “In Sector Two, the rich men buy girls as companions—gay or straight, whether they want one or not. They have to if they want to fit in.”

Noelle had almost grown accustomed to Lex’s casual nudity, but it was different tonight. Different because she’d had her face between Lex’s thighs, because she’d felt pleasure at her touch. It was impossible to figure out the boundaries now, which was why she was still seated at the vanity, fiddling with her hair. Would it be a rejection to climb onto the couch after she’d slept tangled between Jasper and Lex? Or an invitation she didn’t understand to crawl into the vast comfort of Lex’s own bed?

She did the cowardly thing and stayed put, carefully smoothing each strand of hair into its place in her braid as she rested her gaze safely on her own hands. “I knew the sectors were all different, but I hadn’t realized how different. Are they all like that? Each its own little world?”

“Kind of. Three’s not so different from us, and Six and Seven are a lot alike.”

“It’s so much to learn.” With the end of her hair tied off, Noelle had no choice but to look up. “I’m still trying to understand the rules here.”

One corner of Lex’s mouth quirked up. “Is that why you’ve been sitting at my vanity for way too long, looking nervous as hell? You don’t know if you’re supposed to sleep with me?”

Yes, trying to hide things from Lex was pointless. Noelle flushed but refused to look away. “Mostly, yes.”

Lex gestured to the bed. “Are you unsure about whether or not you’re invited, or concerned that I might try to fuck you?”

“Try?” Noelle wrinkled her nose. “You’d succeed. I just…don’t know the rules. You know, with Jasper? With me? If he expects…” She was afraid to finish the sentence, afraid to see sympathy in Lex’s eyes. For all Noelle knew, Jasper was in bed with another woman right now. It didn’t feel like something he’d do…but he hadn’t come to Lex’s room, wondering where she was, either.

“If he expects…?” Lex asked leadingly, then stuck the toothbrush in her mouth.

She didn’t know if Lex honestly didn’t understand, or was forcing her to say it. “If he expects me to be… faithful.” That made her sound like a loyal pet, but she didn’t know a better word. Surely monogamous couldn’t apply, not when most of their sexual encounters had involved other people. “He’s said some things, but not exactly about that.”

Lex rinsed her mouth and then the toothbrush. “What’d he do, tell you not to mess around with anyone else?”

“Not exactly,” she repeated, remembering the night of the fight. He’d come on her face and she’d been so wet she ached when he told her to keep her fingers out of her panties. She’d spent half the night pressing her thighs together and listening to Lex’s breathing, as turned on by the command and denial as she had been by touching him.

It wasn’t explanation enough. Lex was still watching her, so Noelle clutched at the hem of her T-shirt. “The night before I got my cuffs, he told me not to touch myself.”

Lex’s brows drew together in a stormy frown that slowly smoothed into an expression of understanding. “Oh—not without him.” She wrinkled her nose again, this time with a laugh. “Damn, that’s hot. I’m impressed.”

A little of the tension knotting Noelle faded, even as her cheeks burned. “It was hotter than I expected it to be. And then the next day…” She shivered. “That was the most I’d ever felt, until last night.”

“I didn’t know he had it in him.” Lex flipped off the bathroom light, climbed back into bed, and patted the mattress beside her. “No wonder you’re spinning.”

Switching off the vanity light plunged the room into darkness, but just enough light snuck under the door to the hall for Noelle to navigate to the bed. Lex’s features were a vague outline mostly in shadow, and knowing hers would be similarly shadowed made it easier to talk. “Sometimes he talks like he wants to own me. And that shouldn’t be okay. I shouldn’t like it, because that’s what they wanted to do in Eden. Own me.”

“Does it feel the same?”