Ocean Of Need

❤️ 43 💔 Break Me

2nd June Cont...

I push through the crowds at Jamie's and make my way to the bar. I see Roxy before she sees me. She's leaning over the bar talking to not-so-hot bar-man intently. He nods back at her, his face serious. His mouth closed tight, as she looks up at the ceiling like she's trying to remember lines to a script or a spell.

I've never seen her not smiling. She looks completely different. In control. Like she's commanding an orchestra, or conducting one - what ever it is that they do. I really should leave those valium alone. My mind is ethereal and strange, pierced by moments of pure panic that the valium can't tamp down. Mac is not here. He may never come back. I am a stranger in a strange land, not knowing who to trust. I feel like Alice in Wonderland, wondering the halls, and getting smaller by the second.

'Roxy,' I say, as I slide onto the bar stool next to her. She jumps as she hears her name, then her smile slides back into place and the not-so-hot bar-man slips away. Mac said the vultures were circling but it feels more like the snakes are slithering. I don't know which is worse. It all feels frightening.

Roxy squeals, 'Lilah! Great to see you Baby!' A little too loudly and hugs me tight. Too tight. She smells different tonight, but I can't place what the different thing is. 'What'll you have? Margarita?' She asks.

'Whiskey. Straight. No ice. Make it a Hennessy please.'

'Whiskey? Really? You don't strike me as a whiskey drinker.'

'I am today,' I say grimly. I need to taste something familiar in my mouth. Instead of this sourness. This mistrust.

Not-so-hot bar-man returns with the whiskey, but instead of leaving to serve the other twenty or so customers in need of sustenance, he curls over the bar across from us.

I turn to Roxy, 'Have you seen him Roxy? Do you know anything?'

Her smile glides away as she nods.

'Tell me,' I say. 'Please. I'm desperate. I have to know what's going on, my mind is going in all directions and I feel like I'm going crazy. I don't know if he's dead or alive.'

She grips my wrist to stop my hands from flying around. I hadn't realised they were. 'He's alive,' she says.

I sag on the bar stool. He's not dead. Thank god. Once that piece of news has sunk in, I say, 'What happened to him?'

'Happened to him? What do you mean?' She frowns.

'Did someone...' Shit, I can't ask that. I can't ask about his work or if someone has got him. He's supposed to be an artist. I'm supposed to be a poet. Roxy's an actress, she's not involved in our world. I can't ask these questions without putting her in danger too, so instead I say, 'I mean, why isn't he calling me? Did he meet someone else?' God if only our lives were so simple that he'd met another girl and gone off with her.

To my utter shock Roxy nods her head.

'What?'

'I'm really sorry Lilah, but yeah. He met someone else.'

'No,' I gasp. 'No, that can't be right. That can't be it.'

She bites her lip. Her face is my whole world right now. Everything else has faded away. I try to read it for some clue that this is not true, but I find nothing.

'Mac's not a nice guy. You must know that? He doesn't play by the rules. I'm guessing he told you that you belong to him?'

My mouth falls open and I nod.

'Yeah. That's pretty standard Dom stuff. And that's all cool. But the thing about Mac is that he likes to have lots of belongings.' She makes air quotes as she says, "Belongings," and my heart constricts. Then she says, 'But he doesn't like to belong to any one woman.'

'But,' I gasp, 'But he said it was just me and him.' I sound like a seventeen year old jilted at the prom. Is this what he's turned me into?

'I know baby. But, like I said, that's standard Dom talk. It's part of the game.' She cocks her head to the side and says, 'I thought you'd played these kind of games before?'

I'm crying now. Like the idiot I am. 'Yes I have,' I say, through my tears. 'But I didn't think this was a game. I thought this was real.' I swipe at my tears with the back of my hand, and the back of my hand goes black with the kohl from my cloudy eyes. 'I thought he loved me.' I'm sobbing now and people are looking the other way. Fuck.

Roxy rubs my arm and looks uncomfortable. 'Oh, Lilah, I'm so sorry. Mac is a womaniser. This is what he does. He wins you and then he gets bored and moves on.'

'Moves on?'

'To someone else.'

'Has he moved on?'

She nods.

No. No fucking way. There is no fucking way that what we had wasn't real. You can not play a player and I'm one of the biggest players of all. 'I don't believe you.'

'I thought you might not.' She gestures to the not-so-hot barman and he nods.

Oh fuck, what now?

I watch as he pulls his phone from the pocket of his jeans, taps on it, scrolls, presses the screen, and hands it to me.

'It's from last night,' Roxy says.

It's a video. I can't make it out at first because it's dark. Then I see him. Swinging in the same cage that I was in with Roxy and all her ex's. He's with a woman. She has long long blood red hair and it's wrapped around his hand as he kisses her. She closes her eyes and he pulls away, looks towards the camera, flips his finger and winks, before turning back to the red headed woman and running his hand up her skirt as her head falls back.

Roxy catches the phone as it slides from my hand and gives it back to not-so-hot bar-man.

I pick my whiskey up from the bar.
You're
Not
Dead.

I wish you were.