No More Sweet Surrender

It would have been boring, had she not had so much Ivan in her head. I could make you come, he’d said. And then he’d put his hands on her, day after day. He’d held her close. He’d danced with her and made her crave him in ways she’d never craved anything before—in ways she hadn’t even known were possible. And despite all her experience to the contrary, despite everything she knew to be true about herself and her body, she almost believed he could do what he’d said he could.

It felt like some kind of revolution.

She should not have talked about sex with him in any capacity. Why not invite the wolf in from the cold, while she was at it? Introducing sex into the conversation meant it would stay there, humming between them, clouding everything, making her nightmares that much more vivid, that much more terrifying. She didn’t know what she’d been thinking. It was just that the kind of sex she suspected Ivan was talking about had never been much of an issue for her before, one way or another. She’d been so young when she’d escaped her father’s house for the safety and sanctuary of college, and she hadn’t ever really caught up with her Yale classmates, socially or emotionally.

Graduate school had been different. Miranda might have been a bit of a late bloomer, but it had seemed to matter less at Columbia. She’d eventually had what she’d always considered perfectly nice relationships with two men she met through her studies, one for about ten months, one for just over a year. She’d gotten to know each of them over very long periods of time—years, in fact. She’d become comfortable with them long before there had been any touching, or even any dating. She’d thought sex, when they’d had it, was nice. A good way to feel connected in a very specific way to a very specific person. Very nice, she’d thought, but certainly not worth all the commotion.

It had never once occurred to her until this moment that maybe the two men she’d had sex with simply...weren’t any good at it.

That was like a second revolution, smack on top of the first, all of it fusing together somehow and turning into some sort of internal avalanche.

Ivan, clearly, would be good at it. He fairly oozed “good at it.”

Miranda eyed herself in the bathroom mirror as one of the stylists toiled away on her face, adding a bit of drama to her cheekbones and extra fullness to her lips, and hoped no one would notice how flushed she’d become.

She pulled in a ragged sort of breath, and thought of his hands on her back, his arm over her shoulders. That sheer physical intensity of his. He had been touching her—kissing her—before they’d ever exchanged a word. He was the inverse of everything she knew. No wonder she felt so inside out.

And every time he looked at her, some part of her wanted to burst into flames and burn down into ash and soot. Like he compelled her to yearn for it. For him. Which was almost more disconcerting than the fact that she melted into all of that fire anyway.

She didn’t know what that meant, she thought as she tipped her head back and let one of the women work on her eyes with pencils and eyelash clamps and a palette of shadows. But she hadn’t hated all of this mandatory touching as much as she’d thought she would, no matter how many times she tried to talk herself into an appropriate state of outrage.

And he thought he could make her come. He’d said so with the same matter-of-fact confidence he’d used to tell her to listen to her messages and then get in his car in Georgetown. As if the outcome was never in any doubt.

She couldn’t seem to get that out of her head.

“You’ll be drop-dead gorgeous,” the nearest stylist told her in an accent that hinted at New York and reminded Miranda of home in this castle-like villa so far away from anything she knew. “Just like Cinderella.”

This was a business arrangement, not a fairy tale. But she couldn’t say that. She had to pretend. She had to smile as if Ivan was Prince Charming and her fairy godmother all wrapped up into one devastating male package, complete with wealth and celebrity and the breathless attention of the entire world. She had to laugh and agree. She had to act as if she found Ivan as fascinating as they all obviously did.