The Billionairess

Chapter 16

After she unhandcuffed me, I helped Rose prepare for bed. I undressed her lingerie and helped her slip into a black satin nightgown. As she slid under the covers, she gave me a kiss on the cheek and a pat on the bum before sending me off.

As I walked through the living room, I found a bouquet of yellow roses in a vase with a ribbon that must have once held a note. No doubt the note had Tristen Grey's signature on it. I would've burned the roses, but I knew Rose would have been displeased.

I knew it was all silly to worry about. Rose seemed to make herself very clear to whom her heart belonged to. But I couldn't help thinking of Tristen, and how persistent his pursuit would be. I could never fight him. I didn't want to fight him. Plus, I knew Rose wasn't the kind of woman who wanted to be the prize in two men's d**k-measuring contest.

Rose was busy with work for most of the rest of the week, so I just attended class and hung out with Lance in the evenings. Lance and I continued our usual Netflix binging and video game nights. Emily would occasionally come over and we would all end up playing board games or watching Netflix.

Emily occasionally asked about Rose. I expected much more jealousy from her. While she didn’t know about the s****l aspect of Rose and I’s relationship, I imagine having your crush snag a new job for a gorgeous billionairess would stir at least a little jealousy. Not to mention Emily and I had known each other longer, so she may have developed some protectiveness for me as an old friend she knew better than Rose. But she seemed to have accepted it. I answered her questions to the best of my ability and she took my answers with a nod.

But in spite of how nice it was to see my friends again, because lord knows I had abandoned them enough to shower all my attention on Rose, I couldn’t quite relax completely. There was something in the back of my head, always nagging at me. The memory of Rose, the submissive that needed his mistress and always wondered where she was when she wasn’t around.

I tried to enjoy my time off, but I felt anxious without Rose. A burning, insatiable desire for her touch, and a separation anxiety of not being around her. And I felt nervous wondering if she were speaking to Tristen.

I knew it was wrong to feel this way, but the jealousy and anxiety burned nonetheless.

In class, Mr. Noland rambled on with his lecture on Renaissance literature, but I could never begin to pay attention to him. My leg twitched under my desk. I stared down at my textbook, specifically at the picture of Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus. I stared at the image of Venus, the so-called "goddess of beauty." Her ivory curves, her luscious golden-red hair, standing on the ocean waves surrounded by celestial attendants.

I sneered at the picture in disgust. This was not the goddess of beauty and love. The goddess of beauty and love was in her penthouse, probably curled on her silk sheets in her lingerie, riding men like Tristen Grey when she should've been riding me...

There was a loud snap, and I glanced down at my broken pencil, one half in each hand. A few classmates glance back at me. I blushed, then quietly put my snapped pencil away.

I needed to see Rose again.

---

In the beginning, being with Rose set me off like a firework. And I still felt that silky wave of fire whenever I thought of her. But the initial blaze brought about by the billionairess had mellowed, and the more I thought about her and Tristen, the closer I came to a startling conclusion:

I didn't know this woman.

I knew she was rich, powerful, and beautiful. But it was all so surface level. Beneath her coolly charming demeanor, there was a complex person I had barely scratched the surface of knowing. And despite how intertwined we’d become, she still had an aloofness to her. Like she was purposely keeping me at an arm’s distance, even when we were tangled in each other’s arms. There was so much she hadn’t told me. And after your interaction from that day with the chocolates on the bed, I had feeling she wouldn’t tell me much if I asked. But I needed to know. I knew I couldn't call Rose at work, so I decided it was time for some research.

Rose Delacourt had thousands of hits on Google. Articles chronicling her life from business journals to celebrity gossip magazines. I never paid much attention to celebrity news before. It was all trivial pish-tosh to me. So-and-so get married. So-and-so got divorced. So-and-so had a baby. So-and-so caught cheating, ran away, has s*x tips, stole money.

But now I was all over it like a scholar on the verge of a revolutionary discovery.

I couldn't find much about Rose's personal life. I skimmed across her Wikipedia page. She grew up in Seattle. She went to NYU with a business degree. Normal parents. Nothing too scandalous.

Then I began searching Tristen Grey with her name.

That's when things got interesting.

I found articles dating all the way back to 2011. The two had been dating for a while. The articles in chronological order flipped back and forth between them breaking up and getting back together. I watched their on-and-off again relationship like flipping through the pages of a book.

After a few hours, I had enough and shut the laptop.

The two of them kept going back and forth. It made sense now why she was still seeing him. I didn't completely buy that she was just trying to get him to leave. With that came a thought that tucked into my stomach and buried there like a plague.

What if they get back together again?

It had happened dozens of times in the past. What if this was just the cycle coming full-circle once again? The thought of it sent my stomach twisting into knots. The idea of that I was just thing for her dispose of as soon as Tristan came back frightened me. And yet, part of me wouldn’t be surprised. What woman wouldn’t prefer an alpha male like him over someone like me?

But none of it added up. Why would Rose recruit me as her lover if it wasn't true? Was it just to make him jealous?

And moreover, how could a woman like her date someone like him? Why would a dominatrix keep returning to a man who so wanted to keep her under his thumb? This was no longer simply me being jealous. It just plain illogical. How could such a dominating woman keep returning to a man who insisted on dominating her? It was so counter to the personality of the woman I knew.

Questions swirled in my head. There was so much Rose wasn't telling me. I had been so caught up in everything I realized how little I knew about her. Her past. The complexities that made her up and I had yet to unravel. I had yet to understand why she would even want to date me. Even with her dominant nature and my useless shyness, I couldn’t understand what about me was even deserving of someone like her.

Yes, indeed.

I needed to see Rose again.

I needed to know who the mistress was that enslaved me.