Thoroughly Whipped

“Same here,” I said, feeling like I had a balloon attached to each of my shoulders, lifting me high off the ground.

“That first day, in the meeting room for the interns…” I winced, remembering that day all too well. Harry sighed. “I had just begun getting some help.”

“Help?”

Harry rubbed his fingers over his heart. “After all the drinking and shagging around stopped.” He stared at the flames in the fire, lost in the past. “After I calmed down and tried to focus on my life, my future, most of the time I felt numb. When I wasn’t numb, I was angry or sad.”

“Why?”

“Mum,” he said, the single word filled with so much love it made my heart clench. “I hadn’t realized it, but I was still in shock. Even as a man approaching his mid-twenties, the shock, the trauma from losing my mum so young, festered within me like a mortal wound that would not heal.” He paused and gathered his composure. “Her death…our not saying goodbye…had broken a part of me, taken away a piece of my heart that, honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever get back.”

“Harry,” I said, my voice catching with sadness.

“I have always been introverted. I would look at people like you, full of life and joy, talking freely with others, and wonder how it came so easy. How you could brighten up the room by your mere presence.”

“You think that of me?”

Harry met my eyes. “Yes.”

“The day before we first met, I’d had a rather intense session with my therapist.” Harry sighed. “It had affected me greatly, talking of my mum and dad and those years after her death. I had a headache and felt so bloody angry at the world. Angry that I wasn’t sure who I was as a man, as a person, and sad that I had wasted so many years filling the absence in my heart with mindless and superficial relationships.”

Harry’s lips lifted in a smirk. “Then I met you, so full of life and exuding happiness. The other interns moved to you like you were a magnet and they couldn’t resist your pull.” He frowned. “I had never seen anyone so…so…alive as you were. Alive, and…beautiful. So exceptionally beautiful.”

Exceptionally.

“Harry—”

“I liked you. Despite myself, and how wrong for a man of my station my peers and father would say you were, I liked you. And that tormented me more than anything. I would see you in the office, all vibrant and confident, men and women falling at your feet…I didn’t know what to do with you. With how I felt about you. I refused to believe it was attraction and convinced myself it was distain.” He laughed, and I couldn’t help but smile too. “Then you said ‘yes, sir.’ No matter what I said to you, you would always smile and answer with ‘yes, sir’ and it broke me.”

“I knew it got under your skin,” I confessed.

“That it did,” Harry said. “In fact, it almost drove me insane.” He raked his hand through his dark waves. “Even when I returned to England over the summer, then began working in publishing in Manhattan part time, I would often think of you. The woman who had gotten to me like no other.” He huffed a laugh. “Henry Sinclair the Third is nothing but an overprivileged cockface. An overprivileged cockface who needs nothing but a good spanking and a thorough fucking.”

Harry laughed loudly, and I melted at the happy sound. “Those words tortured me, Faith. Circled my mind for years.” He quickly sobered. “I tried to tell myself I didn’t care that you disliked me, that you were nothing to me, didn’t even know me. But even if I convinced my mind that it was true, the dull ache in my heart exposed me for the liar I was.

“When my father told me he wanted me to take over his New York office a few years later, I immediately said yes.”

“To get away from the pressures of being here?”

Harry held my eyes with his own. “That. I had NOX there, which I could be closer to, I could escape the stifling society scene here in England for a bit…and, I now realize, because I knew you’d be there too.”

I reared back in shock. “What?”

“Call it masochism, call it self-punishment, but I wanted to take over the New York office, and despite how much I fought it, I wanted to see you again.”

“You hated me,” I whispered.

“I tried to convince myself I did.” He shrugged. “Turns out it was something else entirely.” I didn’t have any words. “But I was intent on keeping you at arms length. I knew you thought me cold and arrogant, were repelled by my unpleasant character. So I played the part. If you hated me, I could never let myself believe there could be anything more between us. It was my only line of defense.”