[fic] In our Noir Life (2/?) [aka: the one where Damon wakes up in pink pajama pants]
Title: In Our Noir Life pt. 2
Recipient: elenarain
Prompt: Damon/Elena- Damon is a big time mobster, running BDSM clubs as a front; Elena is a dancer in one of the clubs. Damon becomes possessive over who gets time with Elena and eventually claims her as his own.
Characters/Pairings: Damon/Elena, (brief mention: Jeremy, Matt, Caroline, Bonnie)
Word Count: ~ 2900
Rating/Warnings: NC-17
Spoilers: all!human-AU - no spoilers
Summary: Elena moves into the Salvatore mansion. In part one, Elena is working in the BDSM club - this section is about her establishing the rules of their relationship.
Author's notes: Part One written for the tvdfic_exchange.... November 2012! This section is shorter than chapter one - for many reasons.
Heavy dom/sub constructs at play. Heavily influenced by this post re: Fifty Shades. I'm really interested in the idea of a couple using the tropes of dom/sub as a part of a performance and simultaneously subverting them. If there's anyone in the world that can pull off a dom/sub relationship like this, it's Elena Gilbert. If there's any character EVER who'd get off on the performance of these roles, it's Damon Salvatore. I hope this is working the way I want it to. Any and all feedback would be greatly appreciated - especially since this is such an ~experiment on my part. I hope you like it.
Primarily posted for vergoldung and upupa_epops who are patient and lovely as always.
Guys. PORN IS HARD.
Part One
[It surprised no one that Elena Gilbert seduced him.]It surprised no one that Elena Gilbert seduced him.
It surprised no one that the first time they shared a bed, he had no idea how he got there.
When Damon woke that first time in Elena Gilbert’s bed (his legs trapped beneath her long limbs, her long hair tickling his neck, his right arm stretched out and held trapped by both of hers) he had no memory of the previous night’s events. But there he was - in a large, open room - sunlight assaulting his blurred senses, with Elena draped across his body as though this was the most perfectly normal situation. He tried to recall if they had - (no, he’d surely remember that, wouldn’t he?) - but the thick, cottony feeling in his mouth and the pounding in his skull and slight dizziness suggested that he had been far more drunk the previous night than he had in a very long time.
If there is one truth about Damon Salvatore - it’s that he knows how to hold his liquor.
But … He turned his head to look at the sleeping figure next to him, lying in an awkward fetal-position, holding onto his arm like it was a life-vest. Her hair was mussed and somehow everywhere, branching out all around her as if it had a life of its own, shielding her and tickling him, making her appear to be sleeping in a cloud. He shifted to lie on his side to face her (noticing as he did that he had somehow acquired a shirt with a large cartoon embossed on it and the words “Part of Your World” sprawling in curling letters across his chest), brushing aside her hair as he did so, picking up a lock to twirl in his fingers. Her face was a little mushed by the pillow, a light smudge of mascara lingered under one eye, her lips pulled into the slightest pout.
Somewhere locked in the back of his hazy memory, he vaguely recalled agreeing to go with Leo to the local bar for a drink. It was less a bar and more a bizarre amalgam of bar, restaurant, and local clubhouse. He had been meaning to make an appearance, schmooze a little more with the locals, but business and moving had kept him so busy (and his nights were full of watching her, so much so that he had forgotten the basic concept of passing time) that it had nearly slipped his mind. But last night Elena had the night off … Leo had caught Damon wandering through the bowels of the club, feeling a little edgy and aimless, and had dragged him out. Everything was pretty clear after that - his drink with the mayor and meeting her emotionally unstable son, sharing a laugh with the sheriff (seriously, what is going on in this town?), watching Elena play pool -
Oh.
Elena opened her eyes. Without that slow-to-wake, rapid-blinking that most people do when they first open their eyes. It was one movement, one direct motion - as deliberate and thoughtful as she always was. She wrinkled her nose at him and smiled (his arm still clutched to her chest), reaching out to tap his nose with one of her long fingers, “You got drunk.”
It was teasing. It was honest. It was true. He had gotten ridiculously drunk. (Somewhere in his foggy memory there was a blonde boy playing pool with Elena and she was laughing and her hair was flipping over her shoulder teasingly and he put his arm on her waist naturally and she leaned into him when she laughed and then Damon found solace in a bottle of bourbon.)
Elena groaned and turned onto her back, bringing the hand that had just bopped him in the nose up to hold her head, “Ugh… so did I. Remind me never to do shots with you and Matt ever again.”
And then she was walking across the room and opening a door to what appeared to be a bathroom, twirling back to him with a large smile, “Hangover breakfast?”
She said it as if it was the most deliciously naughty idea she had ever had, as though she lived for the idea, as though the words themselves shaped on her tongue gave her their own pleasure (as if they had this perfectly normal conversation every day of their lives).
And then she disappeared and Damon was left alone in a bed that was quickly growing cold. He stood up slowly - his head still spinning - and looked down. And then promptly sat down again.
And laughed aloud.
Damon Salvatore was wearing bright pink pajama pants.
A few minutes later, (after washing his face in the bathroom and making use of the packaged toothbrush on the counter labeled with a post-it that read: “Damon! <3”) padding into the kitchen in his bare feet, his legs still encased in bubblegum pink pinstripes, (the bed upstairs stripped and remade, the dirty sheets deposited neatly in the hamper by the door) Damon found Elena chopping a smorgasbord of veggies at the counter. She was wearing a tight-fitting, dark purple tank-top with lace edging and a pair of blue boxers. As she leaned against the counter, one foot lifted to rub the calf of the other leg, and Damon found this action so endearing that when Elena turned to face him seconds later, he had a ridiculous grin plastered on his face.
((And when Elena looked at him straight on with that look in her eyes that he sought out so much, he grew hard as though his body existed just for that gaze. And when she set the knife down deliberately on the counter and advanced toward him, his breath caught in his chest with the power of her movements.
And when she took him - right there, on the floor of the kitchen her childhood home, his head bumping into the edge of the refrigerator and his bare back cold against the tile floor - he wasn’t really surprised. When she stripped him bare and stared at him before lying him on the cold ground and impaling herself on him without a word or a sound, he didn’t have time to be surprised or think anything but, of course. When she bit just a little too hard and smiled, swallowing his gasp with her mouth and her tongue; when she slowed down and closed her eyes to his wide gaze and moaned while biting her lip as his hips rocked her back and forth, his hand at the point where their bodies met creating shivers through her body with a simple repetitive stroke of a finger; when they both lost themselves in the frenzy of their wildly colliding bodies and it no longer mattered who was watching who- he wasn’t really surprised.
When it was raw and real, when he forgot of the cold tile and just marveled at her wide, open gaze and the feel of her hands in his hair, the sound of her laughter))
When the dust had cleared and Damon was once again clad in his pink pj’s (which were remarkably comfortable) and Elena was calmly chopping vegetables, silently directing him to assist, a tall boy suddenly came in through the kitchen door.
Tall didn’t really cut it. The child was huge. Probably a football player, Damon inwardly simpered. There was a quip ready on the tip of his tongue, a deprecating smile already curling his delicate lips at the sight of this pedestrian... And then he followed the boy’s gaze to Elena - deep purple bruises were cropping up on her thighs, there was a bright red bite mark on her shoulder, and peeking out from underneath the boxers on the back of one thigh was the hint of an impressive handprint.
Damon swallowed and stared over at the boy. He really didn’t want to kill Elena’s kid brother, but he wasn’t going to take a hit, either.
He was fucking Damon Salvatore.
And then the kid smirked.
Actually smirked. There may have even been a wink; Damon would never really be sure.
“Hey Matt! Elena’s making breakfast!”
No one was surprised that she seduced him on her kitchen floor, except maybe him.
No one was surprised that twenty minutes later he sat at her kitchen table in bright pink pj’s and had a cordial meal with her kid brother and her high school sweetheart.
Or that after leading the brigade to clean the kitchen, he sat in the living room playing video games with the two boys and the mayor’s son, while Elena and two other girls hurled insults at them from the kitchen.
If there was one thing you could say about Damon Salvatore, it was that he knew how throw himself into being in love.
She wouldn’t stop working, but to appease him she moved into his mansion instead. When he preened over getting his way, everyone had the decency to laugh only after he was out of earshot. He did finally persuade her to slightly alter her services - all the pain and none of the pleasure.
Her clientele tripled.
She set up her own office in the plantation house. It was locked. He wasn’t allowed into it, even if he knocked. During the day, when she was dealing with research and classwork, she would occasionally spill into his office; papers spread all over the floor, her legs sprawled in all directions as she leaned over her laptop, a worn out pen dangling out of the corner of her mouth, her hair thrown up in a messy ponytail.
He started working from home.
When he had meetings during the day, business consultants enjoying the booze and food and decadence that the Salvatore mansion could give them after a short drive out of the city, Elena sometimes would have visitors to her office as well.
He never knew where they came from. Girls parading through his house in corsets and fishnet stockings, men being led with dog collars and delicate chains, all walking flauntingly past his study.
“But why did you take the doors out?”
“Because darling you don’t need them.”
“What if… Elena. I talk business behind closed doors.”
She blinked up at him from the floor, she was always sprawled all over the floor as if someone had poured her there like a delicate liquid, “Doors were why you left New Orleans.”
She made the plantation house seem spacious and secure, large but always separate from the outside world somehow. No one was more at ease than at the Salvatore mansion, playing pool or swimming or drinking or smoking with the host, admiring the young hostess. Men traveled further than they ever had for a taste of the old fashioned luxury only afforded them at his estate.
“Don’t get cocky,” she whispered as he bent her over the grand piano, her breasts pressing into its dark wood.
It could all disappear in an instant.
She could disappear in an instant.
She rearranged his office, had the large leather chairs face the entryway. So that when she wanted, whenever she wanted, his guests would see hers parade past. It was always a sight worth seeing. She somehow always timed it perfectly right, he began to suspect that she had the study bugged. He began moving his meetings around the mansion, keeping men in the billiards room with their cigars, strolling the grounds with their bourbon. It never worked. The parade always found them.
And her voice.
Calling out through the walls, the halls, the windows - reaching him wherever he was.
Sometimes just a rough moan that found its way through the chill of clinking glasses. Once a high-pitched wail of pain that cost him a game of badminton. Occasionally a delightful giggle, that throaty one that she knew made his toes curl, followed by the sharp crack of a whip. Her voice invaded all of his meetings, her guests always under the noses of his, her presence invading the house, echoing through the halls as he conducted his business.
Business had never gone so well.
He got in the habit of expecting her, raising his eyebrows at the men sitting in his high-backed leather chairs, as if this was all his idea to begin with. As if it wasn’t killing him to have to sit there, so still, when all he wanted was to run to her, to swallow her gasps with his lips and sink into her.
He did once. She cried out and he ran to pound at her locked door.
She had him whip her that night until she bled and he cried. And then she took him in her hands like clay and pet him so charmingly.
He never left a meeting to come find her again.
“I’m only being a good girl like you need me to be. Aren’t you proud I’m so obedient?”
Damon stopped being surprised by her. It was easier to pretend as though he was unflappable. To play the master to her charming innocence. She always knew who was coming and what they meant. She played her game for them alone. Screamed for some and laughed for others, she seduced giants before they ever lay an eye on her. She arrived at the dinner table in a clean gown with a delightful blush, sometimes shy and sometimes brazen. She played his game by rules he never knew.
Some days he longed for autumn, for the Elena in a sorority sweatshirt, for that first morning on the kitchen floor. She knew it, too.
“But darling! I’m doing independent study for my final units. I told you about that project?” Sometimes she moaned into his neck and he really felt like she wanted him the way he needed her to. “My professor is quite pleased with everything I’m sending over. I thought you’d be happy. I can be here with you more.” He’d never understand how she managed to pout with her ankles crossed above her head like that. He stopped caring.
More often than not, she knew more than he did when something more was needed. When someone was worth a little bit more of a show than the others.
He tried not to look surprised when a large crash and muffled wailing drifted down the hall on the heels of her normal parade of girls. He didn’t even deign to pause the conversation when the herd scurried out the way they came five minutes later. He smiled and joked through his guest’s inquisitive glances towards the hallway, necks craning in the direction of the previous crash. He waved off their questions nonchalantly.
This was his castle.
Ten minutes later when Elena appeared tear-streaked in the doorway, clad in the sheer robe and corset duo he rush-ordered as a surprise from Paris earlier that week, wobbling on six-inch heels, he didn’t even look up.
The other men followed his lead. They always followed his lead. If he was unperturbed by a half-naked, crying girl in the entryway, neither were they.
And she was so lovely.
She watched their eyes pity her from under hooded eyes, crying prettily. Her teardrops falling silently without smudging her face, her chin quavering just so, her knees only trembling under the careful and watchful eye.
He watched them watch her. And waited.
When he raised his glass in salute, a tiny tremor came from the entryway, “Damon?”
She sounded childlike and lost. He gripped the glass, his knuckles turning white. If he went to her now, if he broke, there was no telling what the consequences would be. Damon turned a lazy, disdainful gaze to his girl and waited for her to tell him what to do.
“Damon, please.” She drew in a deep, shuddering breath. The room was still. Everyone was waiting to see what he would do. “I’m sorry.”
He laughed. A short, hard laugh. It felt bitter on his tongue. He extended a hand out to her and she scurried to it, holding it to her cheek and falling into his lap, hiding her head in his neck. With one hand, he took a polite sip of his drink, washing away the taste of sand and death in his throat, the other traced a pattern on her back.
“Now, pet. There’s no use for this melodrama. Don’t you see I’m busy with these gentlemen?”
She loved it when he called her pet in public.
They all raised their voices in protest. Just as she knew they would. She murmured apologetically in his ear. She spent the rest of the meeting on his lap like a child. They pet her and told her she was a good girl. One old chap personally poured her a drink. They all laughed when she grimaced at its bitterness. Damon hand-fed her treats and they all nodded serenely at her delicate sensibilities.
She brightened at dinner, came fully clothed at their prodding. She was forgiven her outburst because he forgave her. She shyly tried to defer promises of lunches with wives and daughters. She laughed at everyone’s jokes. She was a gracious hostess.
“How does it feel to have the governor of Virginia in the palm of your hand?” she whispered from behind him, his hands twisting into the sheets.
She wasn’t teasing. She was proud.
The minute they left she kissed him softly, told him he’d been a very good boy, and led him to bed.
Recipient: elenarain
Prompt: Damon/Elena- Damon is a big time mobster, running BDSM clubs as a front; Elena is a dancer in one of the clubs. Damon becomes possessive over who gets time with Elena and eventually claims her as his own.
Characters/Pairings: Damon/Elena, (brief mention: Jeremy, Matt, Caroline, Bonnie)
Word Count: ~ 2900
Rating/Warnings: NC-17
Spoilers: all!human-AU - no spoilers
Summary: Elena moves into the Salvatore mansion. In part one, Elena is working in the BDSM club - this section is about her establishing the rules of their relationship.
Author's notes: Part One written for the tvdfic_exchange.... November 2012! This section is shorter than chapter one - for many reasons.
Heavy dom/sub constructs at play. Heavily influenced by this post re: Fifty Shades. I'm really interested in the idea of a couple using the tropes of dom/sub as a part of a performance and simultaneously subverting them. If there's anyone in the world that can pull off a dom/sub relationship like this, it's Elena Gilbert. If there's any character EVER who'd get off on the performance of these roles, it's Damon Salvatore. I hope this is working the way I want it to. Any and all feedback would be greatly appreciated - especially since this is such an ~experiment on my part. I hope you like it.
Primarily posted for vergoldung and upupa_epops who are patient and lovely as always.
Guys. PORN IS HARD.
Part One
[It surprised no one that Elena Gilbert seduced him.]It surprised no one that Elena Gilbert seduced him.
It surprised no one that the first time they shared a bed, he had no idea how he got there.
When Damon woke that first time in Elena Gilbert’s bed (his legs trapped beneath her long limbs, her long hair tickling his neck, his right arm stretched out and held trapped by both of hers) he had no memory of the previous night’s events. But there he was - in a large, open room - sunlight assaulting his blurred senses, with Elena draped across his body as though this was the most perfectly normal situation. He tried to recall if they had - (no, he’d surely remember that, wouldn’t he?) - but the thick, cottony feeling in his mouth and the pounding in his skull and slight dizziness suggested that he had been far more drunk the previous night than he had in a very long time.
If there is one truth about Damon Salvatore - it’s that he knows how to hold his liquor.
But … He turned his head to look at the sleeping figure next to him, lying in an awkward fetal-position, holding onto his arm like it was a life-vest. Her hair was mussed and somehow everywhere, branching out all around her as if it had a life of its own, shielding her and tickling him, making her appear to be sleeping in a cloud. He shifted to lie on his side to face her (noticing as he did that he had somehow acquired a shirt with a large cartoon embossed on it and the words “Part of Your World” sprawling in curling letters across his chest), brushing aside her hair as he did so, picking up a lock to twirl in his fingers. Her face was a little mushed by the pillow, a light smudge of mascara lingered under one eye, her lips pulled into the slightest pout.
Somewhere locked in the back of his hazy memory, he vaguely recalled agreeing to go with Leo to the local bar for a drink. It was less a bar and more a bizarre amalgam of bar, restaurant, and local clubhouse. He had been meaning to make an appearance, schmooze a little more with the locals, but business and moving had kept him so busy (and his nights were full of watching her, so much so that he had forgotten the basic concept of passing time) that it had nearly slipped his mind. But last night Elena had the night off … Leo had caught Damon wandering through the bowels of the club, feeling a little edgy and aimless, and had dragged him out. Everything was pretty clear after that - his drink with the mayor and meeting her emotionally unstable son, sharing a laugh with the sheriff (seriously, what is going on in this town?), watching Elena play pool -
Oh.
Elena opened her eyes. Without that slow-to-wake, rapid-blinking that most people do when they first open their eyes. It was one movement, one direct motion - as deliberate and thoughtful as she always was. She wrinkled her nose at him and smiled (his arm still clutched to her chest), reaching out to tap his nose with one of her long fingers, “You got drunk.”
It was teasing. It was honest. It was true. He had gotten ridiculously drunk. (Somewhere in his foggy memory there was a blonde boy playing pool with Elena and she was laughing and her hair was flipping over her shoulder teasingly and he put his arm on her waist naturally and she leaned into him when she laughed and then Damon found solace in a bottle of bourbon.)
Elena groaned and turned onto her back, bringing the hand that had just bopped him in the nose up to hold her head, “Ugh… so did I. Remind me never to do shots with you and Matt ever again.”
And then she was walking across the room and opening a door to what appeared to be a bathroom, twirling back to him with a large smile, “Hangover breakfast?”
She said it as if it was the most deliciously naughty idea she had ever had, as though she lived for the idea, as though the words themselves shaped on her tongue gave her their own pleasure (as if they had this perfectly normal conversation every day of their lives).
And then she disappeared and Damon was left alone in a bed that was quickly growing cold. He stood up slowly - his head still spinning - and looked down. And then promptly sat down again.
And laughed aloud.
Damon Salvatore was wearing bright pink pajama pants.
A few minutes later, (after washing his face in the bathroom and making use of the packaged toothbrush on the counter labeled with a post-it that read: “Damon! <3”) padding into the kitchen in his bare feet, his legs still encased in bubblegum pink pinstripes, (the bed upstairs stripped and remade, the dirty sheets deposited neatly in the hamper by the door) Damon found Elena chopping a smorgasbord of veggies at the counter. She was wearing a tight-fitting, dark purple tank-top with lace edging and a pair of blue boxers. As she leaned against the counter, one foot lifted to rub the calf of the other leg, and Damon found this action so endearing that when Elena turned to face him seconds later, he had a ridiculous grin plastered on his face.
((And when Elena looked at him straight on with that look in her eyes that he sought out so much, he grew hard as though his body existed just for that gaze. And when she set the knife down deliberately on the counter and advanced toward him, his breath caught in his chest with the power of her movements.
And when she took him - right there, on the floor of the kitchen her childhood home, his head bumping into the edge of the refrigerator and his bare back cold against the tile floor - he wasn’t really surprised. When she stripped him bare and stared at him before lying him on the cold ground and impaling herself on him without a word or a sound, he didn’t have time to be surprised or think anything but, of course. When she bit just a little too hard and smiled, swallowing his gasp with her mouth and her tongue; when she slowed down and closed her eyes to his wide gaze and moaned while biting her lip as his hips rocked her back and forth, his hand at the point where their bodies met creating shivers through her body with a simple repetitive stroke of a finger; when they both lost themselves in the frenzy of their wildly colliding bodies and it no longer mattered who was watching who- he wasn’t really surprised.
When it was raw and real, when he forgot of the cold tile and just marveled at her wide, open gaze and the feel of her hands in his hair, the sound of her laughter))
When the dust had cleared and Damon was once again clad in his pink pj’s (which were remarkably comfortable) and Elena was calmly chopping vegetables, silently directing him to assist, a tall boy suddenly came in through the kitchen door.
Tall didn’t really cut it. The child was huge. Probably a football player, Damon inwardly simpered. There was a quip ready on the tip of his tongue, a deprecating smile already curling his delicate lips at the sight of this pedestrian... And then he followed the boy’s gaze to Elena - deep purple bruises were cropping up on her thighs, there was a bright red bite mark on her shoulder, and peeking out from underneath the boxers on the back of one thigh was the hint of an impressive handprint.
Damon swallowed and stared over at the boy. He really didn’t want to kill Elena’s kid brother, but he wasn’t going to take a hit, either.
He was fucking Damon Salvatore.
And then the kid smirked.
Actually smirked. There may have even been a wink; Damon would never really be sure.
“Hey Matt! Elena’s making breakfast!”
No one was surprised that she seduced him on her kitchen floor, except maybe him.
No one was surprised that twenty minutes later he sat at her kitchen table in bright pink pj’s and had a cordial meal with her kid brother and her high school sweetheart.
Or that after leading the brigade to clean the kitchen, he sat in the living room playing video games with the two boys and the mayor’s son, while Elena and two other girls hurled insults at them from the kitchen.
If there was one thing you could say about Damon Salvatore, it was that he knew how throw himself into being in love.
She wouldn’t stop working, but to appease him she moved into his mansion instead. When he preened over getting his way, everyone had the decency to laugh only after he was out of earshot. He did finally persuade her to slightly alter her services - all the pain and none of the pleasure.
Her clientele tripled.
She set up her own office in the plantation house. It was locked. He wasn’t allowed into it, even if he knocked. During the day, when she was dealing with research and classwork, she would occasionally spill into his office; papers spread all over the floor, her legs sprawled in all directions as she leaned over her laptop, a worn out pen dangling out of the corner of her mouth, her hair thrown up in a messy ponytail.
He started working from home.
When he had meetings during the day, business consultants enjoying the booze and food and decadence that the Salvatore mansion could give them after a short drive out of the city, Elena sometimes would have visitors to her office as well.
He never knew where they came from. Girls parading through his house in corsets and fishnet stockings, men being led with dog collars and delicate chains, all walking flauntingly past his study.
“But why did you take the doors out?”
“Because darling you don’t need them.”
“What if… Elena. I talk business behind closed doors.”
She blinked up at him from the floor, she was always sprawled all over the floor as if someone had poured her there like a delicate liquid, “Doors were why you left New Orleans.”
She made the plantation house seem spacious and secure, large but always separate from the outside world somehow. No one was more at ease than at the Salvatore mansion, playing pool or swimming or drinking or smoking with the host, admiring the young hostess. Men traveled further than they ever had for a taste of the old fashioned luxury only afforded them at his estate.
“Don’t get cocky,” she whispered as he bent her over the grand piano, her breasts pressing into its dark wood.
It could all disappear in an instant.
She could disappear in an instant.
She rearranged his office, had the large leather chairs face the entryway. So that when she wanted, whenever she wanted, his guests would see hers parade past. It was always a sight worth seeing. She somehow always timed it perfectly right, he began to suspect that she had the study bugged. He began moving his meetings around the mansion, keeping men in the billiards room with their cigars, strolling the grounds with their bourbon. It never worked. The parade always found them.
And her voice.
Calling out through the walls, the halls, the windows - reaching him wherever he was.
Sometimes just a rough moan that found its way through the chill of clinking glasses. Once a high-pitched wail of pain that cost him a game of badminton. Occasionally a delightful giggle, that throaty one that she knew made his toes curl, followed by the sharp crack of a whip. Her voice invaded all of his meetings, her guests always under the noses of his, her presence invading the house, echoing through the halls as he conducted his business.
Business had never gone so well.
He got in the habit of expecting her, raising his eyebrows at the men sitting in his high-backed leather chairs, as if this was all his idea to begin with. As if it wasn’t killing him to have to sit there, so still, when all he wanted was to run to her, to swallow her gasps with his lips and sink into her.
He did once. She cried out and he ran to pound at her locked door.
She had him whip her that night until she bled and he cried. And then she took him in her hands like clay and pet him so charmingly.
He never left a meeting to come find her again.
“I’m only being a good girl like you need me to be. Aren’t you proud I’m so obedient?”
Damon stopped being surprised by her. It was easier to pretend as though he was unflappable. To play the master to her charming innocence. She always knew who was coming and what they meant. She played her game for them alone. Screamed for some and laughed for others, she seduced giants before they ever lay an eye on her. She arrived at the dinner table in a clean gown with a delightful blush, sometimes shy and sometimes brazen. She played his game by rules he never knew.
Some days he longed for autumn, for the Elena in a sorority sweatshirt, for that first morning on the kitchen floor. She knew it, too.
“But darling! I’m doing independent study for my final units. I told you about that project?” Sometimes she moaned into his neck and he really felt like she wanted him the way he needed her to. “My professor is quite pleased with everything I’m sending over. I thought you’d be happy. I can be here with you more.” He’d never understand how she managed to pout with her ankles crossed above her head like that. He stopped caring.
More often than not, she knew more than he did when something more was needed. When someone was worth a little bit more of a show than the others.
He tried not to look surprised when a large crash and muffled wailing drifted down the hall on the heels of her normal parade of girls. He didn’t even deign to pause the conversation when the herd scurried out the way they came five minutes later. He smiled and joked through his guest’s inquisitive glances towards the hallway, necks craning in the direction of the previous crash. He waved off their questions nonchalantly.
This was his castle.
Ten minutes later when Elena appeared tear-streaked in the doorway, clad in the sheer robe and corset duo he rush-ordered as a surprise from Paris earlier that week, wobbling on six-inch heels, he didn’t even look up.
The other men followed his lead. They always followed his lead. If he was unperturbed by a half-naked, crying girl in the entryway, neither were they.
And she was so lovely.
She watched their eyes pity her from under hooded eyes, crying prettily. Her teardrops falling silently without smudging her face, her chin quavering just so, her knees only trembling under the careful and watchful eye.
He watched them watch her. And waited.
When he raised his glass in salute, a tiny tremor came from the entryway, “Damon?”
She sounded childlike and lost. He gripped the glass, his knuckles turning white. If he went to her now, if he broke, there was no telling what the consequences would be. Damon turned a lazy, disdainful gaze to his girl and waited for her to tell him what to do.
“Damon, please.” She drew in a deep, shuddering breath. The room was still. Everyone was waiting to see what he would do. “I’m sorry.”
He laughed. A short, hard laugh. It felt bitter on his tongue. He extended a hand out to her and she scurried to it, holding it to her cheek and falling into his lap, hiding her head in his neck. With one hand, he took a polite sip of his drink, washing away the taste of sand and death in his throat, the other traced a pattern on her back.
“Now, pet. There’s no use for this melodrama. Don’t you see I’m busy with these gentlemen?”
She loved it when he called her pet in public.
They all raised their voices in protest. Just as she knew they would. She murmured apologetically in his ear. She spent the rest of the meeting on his lap like a child. They pet her and told her she was a good girl. One old chap personally poured her a drink. They all laughed when she grimaced at its bitterness. Damon hand-fed her treats and they all nodded serenely at her delicate sensibilities.
She brightened at dinner, came fully clothed at their prodding. She was forgiven her outburst because he forgave her. She shyly tried to defer promises of lunches with wives and daughters. She laughed at everyone’s jokes. She was a gracious hostess.
“How does it feel to have the governor of Virginia in the palm of your hand?” she whispered from behind him, his hands twisting into the sheets.
She wasn’t teasing. She was proud.
The minute they left she kissed him softly, told him he’d been a very good boy, and led him to bed.