Taunt Me (Rough Love 2)

The following week, I set up a powwow with the upper brass at Schumacher, who’d heard about my new condo contract and were interested in collaborating on some of the finishes. I had no say in the unit finishes, but they didn’t have to know that.

The third week, I took her to Queens to see the Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Glass. While she drank up the designs, I used my credentials to talk us into the back, where we met the museum’s curator as well as a Tiffany & Co. designer. With the woman’s assistance, Chere made an appointment to visit Tiffany’s design labs the following week.

At each of these meetings, I was careful to explain that I’d brought my intern along because she was such a prodigy, a real up-and-comer. I hinted that she’d be the next big thing, because everyone was looking to recruit the next big thing into their design house. I could do these favors for Chere forever. She made it easy, because she played the role of the hungry prodigy so well. The ambition was there in her voice and in her questions, and in her direct gazes.

I understood the pressure she put on herself to succeed, the drive to make something of herself as some penance for her secret, squalid beginnings. I wanted to tell her to relax. She wasn’t going to fail, because she was fucking incredible. She was going to bring beautiful things to the world, things as beautiful as her smile. I tried to make her smile sometimes to balance out the tension between us. Provocative power flowed back and forth, even without sex. Especially without sex.

She probably realized by the end of the first week that denying the pull between us made it twenty times stronger. We could not be purely sexless together. Not “one hundred percent” sexless, as she would want me to agree. We had moments of focus and concentration when thoughts of sex were pushed out by pure inspiration, but that’s all they were. Isolated moments. The rest of the time we simmered in a morass of unsated, roiling lust. I would have done anything to have her, but her walls were up hardcore.

Denial. She was subjecting me to a course of sexual denial. Someday I’d punish her for this, and she wouldn’t fucking like it.

But that day wasn’t now. It wasn’t even soon. There were weeks left in her internship, and I’d promised “one hundred percent professional,” so I watched her, day after day, without touching her. Without lingering close to her. Without pressing my face against hers and breathing in the scent of her hair. Maybe it was good for me to practice this restraint.

Ha. Restraint. There was no restraint in me. I didn’t watch her through her windows anymore, but I put her desk inside my office so I could look at her all the time. If my colleagues thought that was weird or predatory, they didn’t say anything. I told them I wanted her to be intimately involved in all my projects, to be a party to all my phone conversations, meetings, and drafting sessions, and she was. She saw everything and heard everything, and observed how I worked from brainstorming session to plans to revision.

Whenever I went to lunch, I took her with me, pointing out buildings as we walked, grilling her on aesthetics and techniques. I asked her to show me the small things, not that I didn’t notice the small things. But there was large design and small design, and Chere was a zealot for small design. She dissected bevel degrees and chisel depths for meaning. We spent an hour once going over a statue in Gramercy Park, no element unturned. I wanted to shove her up against that statue and fuck the everloving hell out of her, but I didn’t. I didn’t even take her hand.

And that was really fucking difficult for me, because the more she denied me, the more my mind fixated on making her mine, getting her to a place where she couldn’t deny me. I wanted her naked, aching, crying, orgasming, begging for more pleasure or pain. Every time I looked at her I thought of it.

But I couldn’t tell her that. I couldn’t tell her how much this denial between us made me burn. She’d leave if I did. She’d quit, disappear, even with all the help and contacts I afforded her. She needed space for now. She needed distance and time to forgive me, just as I’d needed distance and time when I left her before. For her, I could have patience. The hottest fires burned the longest, and were the most difficult to put out.

I could wait until she felt brave enough again, and I knew she would. Chere was a fighter. She’d stuck with me this long, through all her fears and misgivings. She still wanted me. I think she probably cried sometimes that she couldn’t have me.