by Kris Ripper
This was a little more raw, a little more brutal, almost. Not the sensation, but the mental game. I didn’t have a character to hide behind. It was just my desire for his hand, his paddle. And his desire to make me feel this.
Thud was good. I could find a space inside it. I stayed grounded between my feet pressing into the floor and Alex’s hand pressing into my back, two points of contact with the paddle an expected, consistent third. The pain became liquid, like the water inside a wet suit, reliable and insulating, a thing I could master. I rode the tenderness of my skin, even as I began to flinch away.
It wouldn’t have been an intense paddling from Madison. But from Alex, with the weight of his palm never leaving me, even this pushed past the usual markers of control. He paused to run the paddle over me and I began shaking, abruptly overwhelmed.
“It’s okay. I have you.”
And then he did. The paddle thumped onto the bed and Alex was coaxing me into his arms and why was I shaking like this? It made no sense. I liked a paddling. Paddles rarely threw me into suffering the way other things did. That deep thud felt good, dammit, so why the hell was I acting like a fucking baby about it?
I squeezed my eyes shut and trembled and felt like an idiot, and at some point I realized that the person murmuring “I’m sorry” over and over again was me.
He guided me to the bed, and I sat when I felt it against my legs. Someone, I thought Jamie, was lightly brushing over my hair. It was the same thing I’d seen her do with him plenty of times. I wanted to allow myself to feel better, but part of me was still vibrating and strangely distraught, somehow completely undone by a stupid, not-even-that-serious fucking spanking with a paddle.
“Cuddling is good,” Alex said, holding me tighter.
“Fuck you,” I managed to say. So at least I’d stopped compulsively apologizing. I put my head down and pushed into him as if I could tuck myself against his chest and stay there.
“’S against the rules.” He kissed my head. “That was hot. The paddling more than the flogging. I think I might suck at flogging.”
“It’s only a matter of practice.” Another kiss on my head, this time Jamie. “I bet Jus would let you practice more.”
“I dedicate my body to science,” I mumbled into his shirt.
“Science appreciates it. How soon is too soon? Can we do it again this week? No pressure.”
I thumped my head into him and he laughed.
Jamie started messing with my hair again. “I think that sounds good. This week. Not too long or you’ll overthink it.”
Not this again. I didn’t overfuckingthink things. “I’m not going to overthink Alex in the bedroom with a paddle, and you in the bedroom with a flogger. I think I can figure out exactly how I feel about that, Cork, thanks a lot.”
“Never hurts to be prepared, love.” Her fingers twisted, a sharp shock immediately covered over by another kiss. “If I had my way, we’d do this every damn day, just layer you with bruises. See how much you could take.”
I shuddered between them. “Madison said I don’t make enough noise for her.”
“Mm. I’m pretty sure we could entice some sounds out of you if we put our minds to it. Right, Alex?”
“I don’t mind the lack of sounds.” He shifted, better curling around me. “I never felt like that before.”
Like what? I wanted to ask.
Jamie mmm’d. “Like what?”
“Just, it’s never felt so…I don’t know. There was so much. So much space. So much feeling. I don’t know how to describe it. Like…” One of his hands trailed down my arm, lighting up my skin. “I always have fun with other people, when Jame’s making them do stuff. Or whatever. But this was like…this felt like we’d invented a whole new thing, just the three of us.”
“I think we have,” Jamie said.
I groaned. “You’re sentimental and foolish, and I can’t stand either of you.”
“Aww.” Another tug on my hair. “Jus says the sweetest things.”
“He really does.”
More kisses I could barely feel. Since my face was still hidden, I didn’t even have to pretend to roll my eyes.
Chapter Twenty-Three
THE BUZZER TO my apartment went off at seven on Tuesday night. I wasn’t expecting anyone and let it go the first time, figuring it was just some schmuck trying to get into the building. When it buzzed again, I grumpily answered.
It was Cork.
“What’re you doing here?” I asked suspiciously as she led the way inside.
“I can’t spontaneously visit?”
“When have you ever ‘spontaneously visited’ before?”
She pointed at me. “Forfeit for repetition.”
“Whatever.” Dammit. Someday I wanted to win at Questions. Just once. “Since this isn’t a spontaneous visit, what’re you doing here?”
“Actually, it is. In the sense that I just thought about it as I was getting ready to go home and decided to stop by.”
“Uh huh. This better not be your idea of an intervention.”
She grinned. “What’re you making us for dinner?”
“I’m so not. And anyway, where’s your boy toy?”
“Fine. I’ll make us dinner.” She turned and started poking around in my freezer. “We could call him. But Alex got to do lattes with you all by himself, so I wanted to have some Justin time, too.”
Impossible to tell how serious to take her. That was the kind of comment that should have spelled jealousy, which wasn’t credible at all. “You wanted Justin time.” At this rate maybe I could get through the whole conversation just echoing whatever she’d last said.
“All right, we’ve got a few chicken nuggets, one lasagne TV dinner, and a very small amount of ice cream. That’s apps, entree, and dessert right there.”
I realized suddenly that she was checking up on me. “I’m not overthinking anything. If that’s what you’re worried about, cram it.”
“Why would I worry about that?”
The woman was fucking impossible. Not unlike her boyfriend. “Anyway, you don’t have to babysit me like I’m gonna freak out or something. I’m not.”
“How does the dinner menu sound?”
I gave up. “Fine. Those chicken nuggets have been in there since Obama was in office, though.”
She sighed. “God, I miss him so much.”
“Amen, sister.”
“We shall eat Obama-era chicken nuggets and long for days of yore.”
In the end, we threw out the Obama-era nuggets and made microwave popcorn for an appetizer instead. The lasagne was good, though.
* * *
I’d picked up wine to take to their place on Thursday, and told Jamie that there was no way I was planning to replace it, so count me out for beverages.
She’d ignored me and opened the bottle anyway. To my relief, really.
“Tell me more about Hazeltine.” She was lounging on the other side of the couch, glass of wine in one hand, Attic Salt in the other. She’d stopped on a line drawing: two thick thighs, flaccid penis nestled against plump balls in between. “I only remember his protest art, not his writing.”
“It was all protest art.” It wasn’t a rebuke, and she didn’t seem to take it that way.
“True. I think about that. James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich. Keith Haring. Susan Sontag, maybe. People whose work reflects outsider identities. I mean, you read James Baldwin, and you can practically feel him bleeding.”
“Exactly. That’s what all of Hazeltine’s work feels like to me.” Strange that we’d never really talked about art, given how many hours we’d spent debating books and philosophy. “And I didn’t think Chad could really do that, at least not consistently, but for this project he is.”
Jamie lifted her glass. “I look forward to seeing it. I can’t imagine the work it takes. All the steps from imagining a thing to actually making it.”
“It’s a lot. Hazeltine has this interview where he talks about failing
at a piece he wanted to do. Like, failing over and over again, and even when he was determined to get it right, he still failed at it.”
“So what’d he do?”
“He tried it again. And it’s probably his most famous piece, the one that grabbed Chad’s attention. The Longest Day. He said he’d been working on that one idea off and on for years. That’s crazy, right?”
She raised her eyebrows, elegantly, despite her windblown hair and slightly rumpled office clothes. “I don’t know. If he had the conviction that it would be worth it, why wouldn’t he keep trying?”
“That’s a pretty hard argument to make, though, don’t you think? I didn’t get the impression he felt he’d…earned it working out. More that it was a fluke.”
“I don’t believe in flukes.”
The decisiveness in her tone alerted me to danger. “Well, I don’t believe in locking yourself in a room without food until you finish a painting. Seems fucking dumb to me.”
“I guess it must have worked.”
“Actually, no. That was the seventh time he failed.”
Jamie smiled, and I looked at her one crooked tooth to keep from looking in her eyes. “Maybe he had to fail that many times in order to figure out what he wanted, Jus. You ever think of that?”
“I thought we weren’t doing a goddamn intervention.”
“Oh, we’re not. We’re really not.” She paused, sipped her wine. “You know, you never told me how you ended up hospitalized.”
I was so totally shocked that I accidentally looked at her for real, maybe out of desperation.
She swirled her wine. “They caught me puking in the bathroom in eighth grade and carted me off to a treatment center.” She said it like it was nothing.
My heart was pounding, but I did everything I could to match her tone. “Fainted during a passing period. Tried to convince them to let me go to class, but the idiots called an ambulance.”
“Idiots.”
“Alex was there. You could have just asked him.”
“Alex won’t talk about it because you won’t. Treatment was a barrel of laughs, right?”
“Jesus, Cork, what the fuck.” I refilled my glass and offered her the bottle. “Seriously.”
She set the bottle, and the book, on the table. “The thing is, when I was in treatment one of the main messages was that we had to be able to talk about things. And you never do.”
“I wasn’t allowed on the eating disorder ward,” I muttered. “Girls only. They let me go for group twice a day, with this attitude like if I screwed it up no boy would ever be allowed to go again.”
“Fecking hell. That sounds…unfortunate.”
“Yeah, well.” I didn’t want to think about it, blocked all the doors in my head that could lead back there. “Mostly it’s a lot harder for girls anyway.”
“I’m not promoting a competition, but I doubt you could make a convincing case for that. They didn’t even let you on the ward.”
“And yet I lived, so I guess it’s fine.”
“Jus—”
“I’m not talking about this. It was fucked up, I hurt Ma, I hurt Alex, and I did everything I could do to protect them from ever being hurt by me again. End of story.”
She closed her eyes and for that moment I looked at her: brows I’d seen arched in every possible expression, strong chin, lips I’d actually kissed. And wanted to kiss again. Maybe now, because I felt exposed and raw. Because maybe she understood. Not that we shared some quintessential disordered eating soul or something, just that Jamie was perceptive and bright and empathetic.
And knew me.
She opened her eyes, which were damp. “I love you, you know.”
“I know that, Cork.” Sure. I love you was a thing we’d said to each other. It masked other things really fucking well. Like I’m in love with you and also I fantasize about making you come with my tongue.
“You know, for all the shit about body image and wanting to be attractive—and that stuff’s an issue for everyone, not just us—people miss that eating disorders are more about control.”
Oh good. Mutual agreement to change the subject. “Exactly. I might have started working out because I wanted to look like the gay men of my extremely unrealistic fantasies, but after a while it was all about what I could do, or not do, or do harder, or longer.”
She nodded. “Eat or not eat or puke up after eating. Like it almost had nothing to do with me at all. Like food was this weirdly external thing that existed apart from me, which also ran my entire life.”
In deference to the conversation (and to avoid a real intervention), I didn’t have another glass of wine. “The obsession was more addicting than anything else. And the hardest thing to break.” If I ever had. Or maybe I’d just switched obsessions. It was kink, or sex, or Alex. Things I built my day around.
Alex, of course, was the longest running of my obsessions. But that had changed since I told him I was in love with him. Now that I had permission it no longer felt like a twisted secret dependency, like I took hits off his smiles, his laughter, to get me through the day.
Now it felt real, and true, and that was bullshit because it could never be.
I leaned my head back against the couch. “Maybe I never did…break the habit of hurting myself.”
“Yeah, you should give that up. Moment of silence, Jus.”
Which was a joke. And also not. It might actually be harder to quit thinking I was an asshole than it had been to quit smoking.
“And anyway, let us hurt you if that’s what you want.”
“You would suck at really hurting me. You don’t have it in you.”
She shifted closer, and I wasn’t surprised when she mirrored my position, our shoulders touching, both of us looking at the ceiling. “I’d hurt you way better. If you let me. The way you do it, you just feel worse and worse after. If I did it, you’d feel bliss.”
“Oh Jesus, Cork, come on. The myth of kink being healing is so beneath you.”
Silence for a second, but I could feel her marshaling her forces. I braced for a fight about the psychological benefits of power exchange.
I didn’t get one.
“I choose to see a lot of things as healing. Like this conversation. Or working on the Saints house. None of us came from happy homes, Jus, you ever think of that? Alex’s parents are monsters, your dad cut out and left you and Ma alone, and my dad’s a beast.”
“At least we have Denny.”
“Yeah. And we have this house that was a happy home once, for a family. And we’re remaking it.”
I shook my head. “It’s…your house. Not ours.”
“Uh huh.” Her hand slid down, fingers entwining with mine. “But you are my family. Doesn’t it feel more like our home than any of our apartments did? And we don’t even live there full time.”
I wanted to laugh that off for a stupid fantasy, but my attic room, with its golden light and stained glass windows…felt more mine than any room I’d ever had, including the one I grew up in. “Was this your evil plan all along, making us fall in love with the house? Is this like you got us pregnant so now we have to marry you or something?”
“Oh, I wish.” She abruptly let go of my fingers and stood up. “I should head home. Don’t want Alex to get too lonely without me. Wanna come?” Her eyebrows waggled in what I assumed was meant to be a suggestive manner.
“You look ludicrous.”
“I think that’s your way of saying you’d love to come home and ravish Alex with me, but you’re a little too scared of how good that would feel. And you know, Jus, we love you, so we’ll wait until you’re ready.”
“Oh, bite me.”
She blew a kiss. “You know I would. See you Thursday!”
The door shut. Then reopened. “Lock this behind me, I don’t have your key on this ring.”
“I’ll lock it if I feel like!” I shouted back, just to be argumentative.
“Rolling my eyes at you, boy. Lock the fucking door.” It snap
ped shut again.
Ugh. Bossy asshole.
I levered myself off the couch and locked the goddamn door.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I WENT TO their place on Thursday feeling oddly upbeat. Chad had started in on the actual sculptures—both at once, which was unusual for him, but he said he wanted them to “share a coherent bond”—which meant that I could read a book for most of the day just as long as I kept up with email.
Colin Paulson had stopped by again to check out the work and after a touching father-son greeting (which included phrases in both English and Grunt), Chad told him to call ahead and make an appointment next time because the workshop was closed to visitors. The paternal affection was palpable. So I shot Colin an email inviting him to stop by Friday morning, since Chad was never in early on Fridays.
I’d also decided to stop constantly repeat googling Enrico Hazeltine. Chad didn’t need more research done, and all of it…hurt. Which seems like a silly thing to say about words on a screen that had really nothing to do with me, but hunting down new quotes, new interviews, had ceased to be a way I was trying to embrace a guy whose thoughts and ideas I admired, and had become a way I reinforced my own feelings of crappiness about the world.
So. No more doing that.
Plus, I had better shit to do. Like think about Jamie and Alex. And buy another bottle of wine to bring to dinner. And wear a good pair of boxers and white cotton socks because I knew Alex had kind of a thing for guys in white cotton socks.
I buzzed up to the apartment and waited for them to let me in. Everything about this was gonna be fucking amazing. The paddle again? Maybe Alex would have a better time with the flogger if I was braced against something. Or he could use his hand. I had to adjust my jeans when I thought about him using his hand.
He could take me over his knee. Oh my god.
The buzzer sounded and I went up.
