If anything, this would make me stronger.
Not for the first time, I thought about leaving London and going back to Ireland. Finding some quiet stone cottage by the sea and drinking whiskey all day. A place where money and businesses didn’t matter, where I could be free of any consideration aside from what I wanted. Silas could be there. It could be the two of us, secluded and spoiled, spending every moment with one another. And I would watch him staring at the surf, watch the way the corners of his eyes would crinkle as he squinted into the setting sun. I would watch those long, strong hands flex and curl as he sifted through pebbles on the beach.
But all of that only made me remember the last man I’d been on an Irish beach with. My father, walking home from my mother’s funeral, him telling me about opportunities for dockworkers in Liverpool…
Daddy.
I slid off the bed and went in search of a dressing gown, trying to avoid the crushing wave of sadness that came when I thought about my family. My mom, dying of consumption just months after my little brother. My father, moving us to Liverpool and then to London, working his way up from dockworker to manager and then to the owner of his own company, only to succumb to the same disease before I turned twenty-one.
He had poured all of himself into his work, and it was his blood and sweat that had created O’Flaherty Shipping Lines.
Well, his blood and sweat and one very lucky investment.
It had been my fourteenth birthday. We had just moved to London, and my father had taken all the money he’d earned in the last two years and purchased one ship—a beaten-up, decades-old vessel called the Aquamarine (which he’d promptly renamed the Clare, after our home.) My father was a prompt deliverer and fairly priced, and before long, we had more work than the Clare could handle. Then came the Shannon, named for my mother, the Sean, for my brother, and finally the Molly. We had the beginnings of a fleet, the makings of a thriving business.
Since my father had made sure I’d been schooled, I was far better at the accounting and bookkeeping than he was, and so I’d spent every evening after school and every Saturday in our warehouse, working the numbers.
Mr. Cunningham had come into the warehouse we rented in the East End, looking for my father, but upon seeing me scribbling at a desk, had sauntered over with a smile. He’d been a young man then, newly married. He was the handsomest man I’d ever seen, and I had looked up into his face and been temporarily paralyzed by the sudden awareness of his maleness, or rather, of my femaleness. He’d looked at me like I was a woman, not a girl. And I had felt very compelled to tell him, when he’d asked me if I was Aiden O’Flaherty’s daughter, that yes I was, and that I had also just turned fourteen years old.
“What a special age,” he’d murmured. “Happy birthday, Miss O’Flaherty.” And then he’d presented me with the small daffodil from his buttonhole. I’d clutched it while he’d spoken with my father about the possibility of investing. Only my father and I knew how desperately we needed the money—we were swamped with work and if we didn’t purchase new ships, we would have to start turning away orders. When he’d left, he’d placed a small card on the desk where I worked. Even I, as inexperienced as I was, could tell the card was expensively made, with its thick stock and filigreed letters, and so I didn’t dare refuse the order dashed in ink on the back.
See me.
And below that, an address in Knightsbridge.
The next day, when my father thought I was at school, I went to Frederick Cunningham’s house. Looking back, I cannot believe that I went…fourteen years old in a new city, going unchaperoned to a strange man’s house. I’d always been bold, but this had been outright dangerous. I suppose I’d felt special, somehow, with my card and my wilting daffodil. And when I was admitted into the palatial townhouse, I felt a little bit like a princess from a fairytale. That ended quickly, however, when I’d been shown into his library. There’d been none of the charm of the day before, none of the smiles. He’d made me stand before him as he fired question after question at me. What was the net worth of the shipping company? How many men did we employ and what did we pay them? How quickly could we recoup the cost of a new ship? The kinds of questions that he’d asked my father, but he must have sensed I’d have better answers for him, given that I actually kept the books of the business.
“What would you do with an investment of half a million pounds?” he’d asked finally, lighting a cigarette.
I’d blinked in the smoke. Half a million pounds… I couldn’t even fathom that amount of money. I stammered around possibilities of more ships, more men, advance payments on tariffs, layering it with copious thank yous, until he’d held up a hand to forestall me.
“Don’t thank me so soon. I haven’t given you the money yet, Miss O’Flaherty. It must be earned.”
“Earned?” I’d had enough sense then to start feeling wary, although I hadn’t had enough sense to run home to my father.
“Yes,” he said, and now his smile was back as he leaned forward, his eyes gleaming through the smoke. “Earned by you.”
In the end, I’d made the decision as I made most of my decisions—brashly and without much thought. What was my virginity worth to me? I’d seen dairy maids in County Clare tumble in barn lofts at my age; prostitutes in Liverpool younger than me. And half a million pounds was a princely sum for what amounted to a small barrier of flesh…
I’d missed school again the next day to be examined by Cunningham’s physician, who’d ensured that I was indeed a virgin, and then I was deposited at a gentleman’s club not far away from his house.
It had not been quick. It had not been gentle. He’d wanted more as soon as he’d finished, and he went over and over again, my blood and his come the lubricant after my own body had run dry. He’d slapped me, bruised me, and called me awful names. But even the pain and degradation I could handle. I’d refused to cry, forced myself to remain strong, for the company and for my own sense of pride. I had gotten myself into this situation…and I would see myself out, with as much dignity as I could muster.
But in the end, as he was fucking me one last time, he’d looked down at me and at my distant expression, and his face turned calculating. “No, my dear,” he’d said. “You don’t get to pretend me away.”
I hadn’t understood what he meant at first, and even as he pulled out and knelt between my legs, I still hadn’t understood. It wasn’t until he wiped me with a clean linen cloth and then lowered his face to the battered parts in between my legs that I realized what he was doing.
“No,” I’d whispered, trying to roll or buck away, but his hands—sharp with their vain, long fingernails—dug into my hips and kept me pinned to the spot. The true horror of it unfolded over the course of the following days and years, but even then, I could grasp an inkling of this terrible act. Of his tongue lapping and licking, of my body responding, of the way my mind screamed no as my body climbed inexorably towards climax.
He’d made me come.
He’d made me enjoy it.
And with that manipulative little act, he made me feel equally complicit in his perversion. The first man ever to give me an orgasm was the man who cruelly bartered for my virginity and won. It was the man who shoved his cock back into me as soon as my orgasm started, so that I was forced to feel the unfamiliar waves of pleasure while he was inside me and looming over me.