CHAPTER 16 - CONTACT

Dominic is meaner today.

I don’t know how he knows – I don’t know how EITHER of them knows anything about what I do when they’re not in the room – but something shifted between last night and this morning because the man standing at the front of the lecture hall targeting me with questions he knows I can’t answer is not the same composed professor who said my name in his office like a secret.

This version of Dominic Voss is surgical, and every question he aims at me is a scalpel designed to open me up in front of thirty students.

“Ms. Cross, the significance of the attic in Victorian literature?”

“Confinement of – of women who didn’t conform to–”

“Insufficient.” He moves on before I finish the sentence, and the word hangs in the air like a slap delivered with perfect posture.

He doesn’t look at me when he says it and he doesn’t need to because the dismissal is louder than eye contact would be, and I sit in my chair feeling the heat crawl up my neck and I don’t know if the burning in my face is humiliation or something worse.

He does it twice more during the lecture – calls on me with questions that require reading I haven’t done and analysis I can’t produce because my brain has been colonized by his son’s hands and mouth and voice for the past week and academic rigor is not currently a priority.

Each time I stumble, he waits just long enough for the silence to become uncomfortable before moving on, and each time the word “insufficient” or its equivalent carves a notch into something inside me that I don’t want to examine because examining it would mean admitting that being found lacking by Dominic Voss makes me feel something that has no business existing in a classroom.

After class, I’m walking toward the main exit with my bag over my shoulder and my pride somewhere on the floor of the amphitheater, and he passes me going the opposite direction.

He doesn’t slow down, doesn’t turn his head, doesn’t acknowledge me at all except for the two seconds where he’s directly beside me and his mouth barely moves and he says, quiet enough that only I can hear over the foot traffic:

“You should be more careful about who you let touch you.”

He keeps walking, but I stop.

My feet actually stop moving in the middle of a crowded hallway and I stand there while students flow around me like water around a rock because the sentence just detonated inside my chest and I can’t tell if it was a warning or a threat or a confession. And the possessiveness buried underneath the paternal concern is so thinly veiled that I’m surprised he bothered with the veil at all.

***

Family dinner. My mom cooked.

She’s been doing this every night since Dominic moved in, and the effort she puts into these dinners makes my jaw tight every time because she never cooked like this for ME. She never set a table with cloth napkins when it was just us. So if she wants to pour her devotion into a man instead of her kid, she doesn’t get to be surprised when her kid stops feeling guilty about what she takes back.

“I was thinking a spring wedding,” she says, passing the salad bowl to Dominic with a smile that reaches her eyes in a way that makes me want to leave the table. “April, maybe. Before it gets too hot.”

“April sounds perfect,” Dominic says, and his voice is warm in a way it never is in the classroom, and my mom beams at him, and under the table his foot presses against my ankle.

I don’t move. He doesn’t move. The contact is light enough to be accidental and we both know it isn’t, and my mother is sitting three feet away discussing floral arrangements while her fiancé’s shoe rests against her daughter’s bare skin beneath the tablecloth.

Knox’s hand lands on my other thigh.

I am being claimed from both sides while my mom debates between orchids and peonies, and the dual contact – Knox’s warm palm on my left thigh, Dominic’s shoe against my right ankle – sends a current through me that makes it physically difficult to hold my fork steady. Knox’s thumb traces a slow circle on my inner thigh through my skirt and Dominic’s foot slides higher, past my ankle to my calf, the smooth leather of his shoe pressing against bare skin, and nobody is listening to my mother talk about the wedding and she doesn’t notice because she never notices because she is blinded by the same optimism that has gotten her hurt by every man she’s ever loved.

“Ivy, what do you think? Orchids or peonies?”

“Orchids,” I say, and my voice comes out normal which deserves some kind of award because Knox’s hand has slid high enough to press against the crease where my thigh meets my hip and Dominic’s calf is now hooked lightly against mine under the table like we’re playing footsie at a family dinner which is exactly what we’re doing and I need to leave this table immediately.

My mom stands to get dessert from the kitchen, and the four seconds she’s facing away from the table are the longest four seconds of my life because Dominic’s hand shoots under the tablecloth and grabs my knee and SQUEEZES – hard enough that I know there will be fingerprints tomorrow, and a sound catches in my throat that I have to swallow before my mom turns around – and then she’s back with a plate of brownies and his hand is on his wine glass and his expression hasn’t changed and the only evidence that anything happened is the throbbing in my kneecap and the pulse between my legs that’s so strong I can feel it in my ears.

“Excuse me,” I say, and push back from the table with a composure that I’m manufacturing from absolutely nothing, and I walk to the bathroom and close the door and press my back against it and my hand is between my legs before the lock clicks.

I’m thinking about his hand on my knee. The bruising grip of it, the precision of the timing, the four-second window he calculated and used and the fact that he was tracking my mother’s movements to the second so he’d know exactly how long he had before she turned around.I’m thinking about the way he said “insufficient” in the classroom and the way he said “Ivy” in his office and the way his foot felt against my calf and I’m rubbing my clit in fast tight circles while my mother laughs at something in the kitchen and the sound of her happiness coming through the bathroom door while I touch myself thinking about her fiancé is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever done and I cum to it in under two minutes and the orgasm is sharp and mean and doesn’t feel like relief.

I wash my hands. I look at myself in the mirror. I don’t recognize the person looking back at me, which is becoming a pattern that I should probably address at some point but not tonight because tonight I have to go back to that table and sit across from the two men who are turning me inside out and next to the woman I’m betraying, and I have to eat a brownie and talk about spring weddings and pretend that everything is fine.

I sit back down. Knox’s hand returns to my thigh immediately like it never left. My mom asks if I’m feeling okay because I look flushed and I say I’m fine, just warm.

Dominic excuses himself to refill his wine, and as he passes behind my chair his thumb grazes the back of my neck – one second of contact, his skin against the top knob of my spine – and I shiver so visibly that the water in my glass trembles.

Knox’s eyes snap to Dominic’s hand. Then to Dominic’s face. Then back to the hand that’s already gone, already wrapped around the neck of the wine bottle like it was never anywhere else.

Knox looks at me. I look at my plate.

Oh no.