Red & Wolfe, Part III: An Erotic Fairy Tale Read online

  I notice the time now, because I feel sore everywhere. When I tense my leg muscles to avoid sticks and other pointy things in the pebble path, my calves and thighs feel shaky. How can I feel this way just from fucking?

  Because he was amazing.

  He pushed me, but I liked it.

  And what now, I wonder as I walk. When I get him to actually talk about being “W.,” what will I find out? I’m already gearing up to hear the mystery solved. If he tells me. I wonder if Gertrude knew.

  Gertrude!

  Hello, Red!

  I’ll go to Gertrude’s house. Grab some shoes and use her phone, then go to Race’s. Make him wait on me a while.

  I turn around and scamper down the path back toward the tree house, which sits at the back edge of Gertrude’s yard. The moonlight is back, swirling through the leaves and limbs, and now the pebbles look like pearls. I allow myself a minute or two of giddiness. I’m somewhere beautiful, with a beautiful, intriguing man who happens to be a wonderful artist. I know it’s only temporary, but for the first time in a while, I truly can’t imagine wanting to be anywhere else. Bonus points: I’m probably going to get some money out of this. Now that I know Race is “W.,” there’s no way I won’t be sure he gets the island.

  I walk below the treehouse, looking up. I smile a little, because he’s right. I am a fuck doll.

  I walk through Gertrude’s garden, nothing but a smear of textures and colors, dancing in the breeze that blows across the point; everything is bathed in moonglow.

  I’m relieved to find the back door unlocked. I walk through the sunroom, where two gray cats are curled up next to each other on the rug. I pass through the kitchen, where an orange cat sits on the counter, bathing its paws with its little cat tongue. A clock ticks somewhere. Inside the laundry room I walk past, a night light glows pale blue. I inhale deeply of the house’s musty smell. I might not have known her, but she was my flesh and blood. I feel a pang wondering what this smell might mean to me if I’d spent any time here.

  She could have made me so much less alone.

  I smirk as I step into her office. Funny how things work. I’m here; she’s not; but I am definitely less alone.

  The office is dark, but light spills through the doorway, coming from the kitchen, where a lamp was on. I sit in her creaky office chair and stare at her desk. I push a newspaper aside and there’s her landline.

  Katie, be okay.

  Everyone else I know, be okay.

  I pick up the phone and hold it to my ear. The dial tone takes me by surprise; I haven’t had my own land line in years.

  I inhale deeply. Exhale.

  I dial Katie’s number and grit my teeth, awash in panic.

  It’s not just this moment. I feel like this a lot. I guess I have an anxiety problem. I think it started as perfectionism when I was really young, but as I’ve gotten older—and since I lost Mom—it’s gotten more intense. I never feel secure. I never feel completely happy. I had a loose grip on something resembling contentment before Carl left, but I’m beginning to wonder if that was all for show. A show I put on for myself.

  Just try to live how other people live.

  What’s good enough for them should be enough for you.

  Boyfriend, good job. Later, house and kids.

  I bite my lip until I taste blood, and quickly dial Katie.

  If she’s dead or injured…I don’t know.

  I tap my foot against the floor, hearing the thump of my bare sole against the sheet of plastic carpet protector under my—Gertrude’s—rolling chair.

  The phone rings once.

  Then twice.

  Three times.

  Shit! Where is she?

  I’m licking my bloody lip, wondering if fucking Race again would calm my frazzled mind, when I realize: I could call my own cell phone’s voicemail. I didn’t set it up yet, but most passwords are 1-2-3-4, or the last four digits of your phone number. I try the last four digits of my phone number and am greeted with a notification that I have sixteen messages.

  My heart constricts.

  I punch ‘1’ to hear the first one.

  Katie’s voice greets me. I slump back in the chair.

  “Red, you’ve got to call me back. I’m like…freaking out. That picture that you sent, the one of the guy who works for your grandma? Red, you’re gonna think I’ve lost my mind but…that’s James Wolfe.”

  *

  WOLFE

  I don’t turn Red’s phone on to verify what she told me. She said she hadn’t spoken to her friend yet, and I want to believe her.

  I can count on one hand the number of people who know for sure I’m “W.” My cousin, who doubles as my manger. That’s it. The other was Trudie, who took my secret with her. Someone else guessed: Dominique, a 9-year-old girl I tutored in Madrid, around the time I first started using “W.” for my signature. I got an e-mail from her last year—she’s 14 now, a talented young artist—asking if I was “W.” I thanked her for the compliment and told her “no.”

  I thought no one else would ever find me out, but clearly that was foolish. The only way to keep my identity ironclad is to never leave the island, and even if I hadn’t had a need to fetch Red in order to gain ownership of this place, I’m not strong enough to stay by myself forever. I get too restless. Too fucking horny.

  I tell myself, as I tromp through the woods toward my place, that this is something I can manage. What I did with Red just now and how I did it was deliberate. I’ve been too soft with her so far. Too open with her. I seem to’ve forgotten everything from my life as a dom back in New York. I trained more than a dozen subs before Cookie, and I sure as shit didn’t do it by being their friend.

  Unfortunately, something about Red inspires the protective alpha in me—a problem I need to get over. Step one: fuck her silly, leave her cold. It’s a reasonable enough strategy in dom land, but in this case, I’m lying to myself.

  That’s not why I left her.

  I ran.

  Because I was scared.

  Because I hate it that she knows one of my secrets.

  If Red tells anyone who “W.” is, it’s the beginning of my end.

  I have one of the most recognizable faces in the country. I can only assume the reason Red doesn’t know I’m me is I’m in a place she’d never think of finding me. It doesn’t hurt that I’ve traded the shaggy hair and clean shave I wore in my youth for a shorter cut and a light beard. My skin is dark, thanks to all the sun. I’m leaner. Harder. Wiser.

  But none of this would stand up to scrutiny of obsessive “W.” fans. If any of “W.”’s ardent supporters also owned televisions during the year of my trial, they’d recognize me pretty fast.

  It would be a domino effect, one I’ve invested everything I have in avoiding. It starts with someone finding out I’m “W.” Check. Next step: Word spreads, and a picture of me leaks, or gawkers flock to the island and someone gets a glimpse of me. My solitude is gone. There’s that. But it’s not nearly as shitty as what happens when someone notices that “W.” looks a lot like James Wolfe.

  The way my art is viewed will change forever.

  No one will want it anymore. Or everyone will want it, for the wrong reasons. Critics will find a killer’s mind in every cloudless sky. The forest here becomes my psyche, tangled with the voices that drove me to murder my wife. The vast ocean: psychopathic emptiness.

  If Red squeals, and it leads to people finding out “W.” is also James Wolfe, I’m out of options. I can’t change my name from “W.” and keep painting. People would recognize my style.

  But even if people did know who I really am, I can’t give up my work.

  It’s all I have.

  I swing my left arm out in front of me. I’m clutching the tattered remnants of the canvas where I painted her. My right hand grips her phone like it’s the Holy Grail. I’m edgy as hell and craving a drink—something I haven’t felt in a couple of years. A warning sign, since I’ve had alcohol issues since my teenage y
ears.

  I look up at the sky through the swaying pines. It’s bathed in a waxy glow, and something about the particular shape of the moon and the way the clouds float over it reminds me of another night when I was feeling lost like this. I make a conscious effort not to go back there, to Paige’s house.

  Instead, I have a fleeting memory of the first time I turned Cookie over and pushed my dick into her pretty little ass.

  I remember how sticky her face was after that first sobbing fit. The way I washed it with a bath towel. I should have known then, just a few weeks into our open marriage of convenience, that I was in over my head.

  I remember the look in her eyes as she told me why she’d had such an intense reaction. The memory of the secret she told me makes my chest feel tight. Before I can think too hard about it, I bend down, pick up a broken limb, and whack the pines I pass by. I can’t think of Cookie.

  I try to think of Red, and that helps some. But, now awoken, the ghosts inside my mind are out to play.

  They whisper: ‘You killed her.’

  And it’s not untrue. I’ve never been able to convince myself that it’s untrue.

  What I did after she told me about her sick fuck father is what cost us everything.

  Not you, Jimmy.

  It didn’t cost you anything.

  It cost Cookie her life.

  I sprint the rest of the way home and toss my crumpled canvas into the compost pile before I open up the box under my bed and start preparing my room.

  When Red turns up, I’m going to enjoy her.

  Tomorrow, I’ll have a non-disclosure agreement delivered and her paid off and discarded before she finds out anything else about me.

  CHAPTER THREE

  RED

  Is Katie right about Race? I can’t decide, so I let my intuition do it for me via my bare feet. I leave Gertrude’s cottage in a post-sex, post-shock stupor, feeling like an escapee from a mental ward.

  Race looks like James Wolfe.

  Katie says he does.

  Does he really?

  Maybe yes. Or maybe no. I don’t have an eye for faces. I never have. Names—now those I remember. Phone numbers—gravy. But if someone I know well changes their hair or gains a bunch of weight, it throws me off.

  “He’s leaner now,” she told me. ”Not quite as cut as he was during the trial. His spokespeople used to say he worked out twice a day to keep busy during house arrest,” she told me. “But Red, look at his face. Look at his skin. How dark it is. If your Race is James, his mother is from Spain. Have you seen him much up close? Does he have those dark brown—almost black—eyes, with the long, girl eyelashes? It looks like he’s got his hair short. Was that a beard?”

  “He’s got a light beard,” I said.

  “That’s him. That’s frecking him, Red. I watched him in that courtroom too much not to know. You need to get away from there!”

  I told—well, I didn’t tell her outright— I misled Katie into thinking Gertrude has other staff here. Apparently word of her death has finally gotten out, and, that considered, Katie went on and on about how I should leave the island right now.

  I didn’t tell her the whole story. Didn’t tell her that my “Race” manipulated me into coming to Charleston, that he deposited and withdrew money from my account like it was nothing, that he reminded me of someone in finance (Wolfe’s father was the president of NASDAQ, and James himself managed hedge funds).

  I couldn’t tell her about any of the crazy things I’ve done with him. How he pulled me from the sea and washed my hair. How I’ve already gotten far closer to him than I’ve ever been to anyone.

  And I let him put his cock in my ass.

  Katie wouldn’t understand. Maybe no one would, but definitely not Katie. She’d worry herself sick.

  I didn’t tell her that he took my phone.

  I didn’t tell her about “W.”

  We agreed I’d call her again tomorrow. She conned me into agreeing to let her share the photo I text’d with an old co-worker from the New York Times—a cousin of the father of Wolfe’s deceased wife, Cookie. Apparently her father is former Secretary of State Robert Smythson—a detail I’d missed before.

  “Cookie’s family would know James Wolfe anywhere. They hate his guts,” Katie said.

  As I walk through the thick, ankle-length grass around Gertrude’s cottage, I try to remember what I saw the night I watched the Wolfe documentary. I was drinking, so not much sticks out. But I do remember something about his wife, and their sex life. I want to say he testified that they had an open marriage. Both of them were having sex with other people, and the only reason they married anyway was because she—Cookie (what a crazy name)—needed to be married to inherit the Smythson fortune.

  I’m pretty sure I remember someone interviewed saying Wolfe—“Jimmy,” she called him—and Cookie were childhood friends. I have a vague sense that he was older than her, but what I remember for sure is that the friend said a few months before the murders, Cookie had told her Jimmy had fallen in love with her.

  Jimmy Wolfe fell in love with his wife, but she was fucking someone else. And so he killed them both.

  I stop in the grass, just over the rocks I climbed down earlier today. They’re covered with sea foam and splattered by saltwater. They glisten in the moonlight like giant gemstones.

  I stand still, listening to the ocean crashing against the rocks. I stand there, feeling my heart beat.

  I’m not sure why I stopped. I sway with the salty breeze.

  And then it hits me: one of the few details I remember from nearer to the end of the documentary. One of the few details I remember because it struck me as particularly awful: The police said the night of the murder, Cookie had been forced into anal sex.

  I draw my hands up to my face and press my fingertips against my skin. I lick my lips. I look around, though I’m not sure for what.

  Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.

  He saved me today, I argue with myself.

  Then he fucked me. He fucked me like an animal. Like a fiend. He fucked me so hard, I’ll never forget it. So hard I’m still reeling, willing to put myself in danger for another taste of his cock.

  Whoever he is, Race ruined me.

  Reeled me in and got his barbs in me.

  I’ll never be the same.

  If he’s a killer, he’s still hot as hell.

  That kind of warped reaction he evokes in me is why I have to go.

  I turn and run across the yard, pointed toward the south side of the island, where I think we left the boat.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WOLFE

  Two hours after I pillaged Red’s tight bud and left her belly down on a bench in the tree stand, I’m stalking through the forest, feeling like an ass. While I called my cousin Bob to work on getting a NDA whipped up, then prepped my room for a night of pleasuring my former landlord’s fair granddaughter, she was…what?

  Falling down the stairs?

  Getting carried out to sea?

  It’s not possible she left, is it? There’s only one boat here, and I’ve got the key to the steering console in my pocket.

  I duck under a veil of moss and rub a hand over my head. She’s probably pissed off. Maybe it was a mistake leaving her there.

  Hell, I guess it was.

  I’m probably a bastard for fucking her the way I did. Woman throws off sub vibes like I’ve never felt before, from anyone, but she also seems…breakable.

  Should I be pushing her “on” button just because I can?

  It doesn’t matter.

  I’m not going to stop.

  Not as long as she’s here.

  I can’t help myself.

  The others, in the past—they sought me out. Two of them, I dommed in club settings where things were regulated. The others came to my place, to the home I would later share with Cookie. One of them, I fucked while I was married to Cookie, but that girl—Sharee—Cookie found on my behalf. Because she knew we’d never satisfy each
other and was willing to admit it before I was. We took turns dominating her.

  I’m getting closer to Trudie’s house, where the tree stand sits at the edge of her yard. My chest starts feeling tight. I have the impulse to shout Red’s name. The notion of waiting until I climb the stairs around the tree to find out if she’s okay is one that drives me mad. I wonder what the odds are that she’s still there.

  I was caught up in myself. So caught up in my anger that she’d seen the painting. I wanted to make her feel dominated. Make her feel used, even. I wanted her to know that I’m in charge. And why is that?

  Because I hate her knowing even part of who I am. Because now that she does, part of me sees her as a threat.

  Considering this, was I too rough with her?

  “RED!” I start to jog, jumping fallen logs and saplings, lengthening my strides until I can see the tree stand I built, one of a few around the island that I made for painting.

  I call her name once more, twice more, as I hurry to the stairs.

  Maybe I wasn’t as rough as I think. She got off, didn’t she? Fuck yeah she got off.

  I take the stairs two at a time, bursting through the doorway like a motherfucking one-man army. When I don’t see her on the bench, I look under it. Nothing.

  Shit.

  Back down the stairs, moving faster now. What the fuck is wrong with me? All I had to do was carry her back. She should be tied to my bed right now, ready for a night of fun.

  I stalk toward Trudie’s house. She’s probably here. She’s probably upset and hiding out. The annoying memory of her cat allergy tugs at something in my gut, but I push it aside.

  She’s gonna be here.

  When I find her I’ll haul her back to my place, tie her up. It’s true—she’s not my sub; it’s true—she seems fragile—so I’ll make it good for her. I can be the best she’s ever had.

  I open the back door. “Red?”

  I hear something in one of the rooms past the little den and cold fear grips me. The sensation of being too late… Of having not known where my woman was. Of not being there to protect her. I tell myself that’s crazy. There’s no one here but me—and her, I hope.