by Penny Aimes
He was watching her intently as he returned and tore the paper bag down the middle to create a tray to spread out the goods. “Did I tell you that you look fantastic?” he asked.
“Thank you, Sir,” she said quietly, lifting her head to smile at him. She shook off her inconvenient feelings and focused on the task at hand. “So—brisket, sausage, and chicken,” she said, pointing to the three heaps of meat on the table. “They smoke it in that truck for at least twelve hours. We got a good cut of brisket here, off a new slab, so we’ve got some of the crispy end and then some more towards the middle. See that smoke ring?”
He tilted up his sunglasses. “I do, Professor Barbie-Q. I do indeed.”
“Shush and eat this.” She held up a piece of meat that was barely pink at all, mostly crispy outside. Instead of taking it from her he snapped it out of her hand. It made her blush.
“Smoky,” he said. “Hm, that’s good actually. Takes a lot of chewing, though.”
“They call those burnt ends, and they’re my favorite part,” she said, aware she sounded schoolmarmish but unable to stop. “Try this now.” She tore off a hunk of a wider slice, keeping the crust at the top as well as a juicy marbleized streak of fat.
He took this from her hand, too, and she could feel arousal uncoiling in her stomach, a sensation she had never before associated with barbecue.
“Wow,” he said, wiping his lips. “That’s...it’s like butter. It’s so tender. If I were a cow...and I had to go...”
“See?” she said. “Do you concede the Midwest doesn’t know shit about barbecue?”
“I dunno,” he said, smirking. “I might need more convincing.” He looked down at the rest of the meal with anticipation.
“Have a pickle first,” she said, grabbing a piece of brisket for herself. “It clears the palate. Otherwise it’s just grease on grease after a while.”
As they worked their way through the brisket, the sausage, the chicken, the potato salad and the mac and cheese and the cobbler, April relaxed enough to take off the overshirt. It was too damn hot for modesty, even in full view of the busy zip of traffic on Lamar. Dennis looked across the table at her.
“Hey—those shoes. I really didn’t mean anything by it. You put up a boundary about the outfit, the last thing I wanted to do was guilt-trip you about something else.” He kept gathering up their trash as he spoke, a deliberate casualness to his face and motions, but she sensed a tension there.
“Dennis.” She put a hand on his bare upper arm, where the heat baked off his dark skin. “I did it because I wanted to. They’re cute shoes. Thank you for telling me about your sister. I think that’ll stick with me. No amount of making myself smaller will ever make me small, so I might as well...”
“You might as well shine as bright as you can,” he said, and lifted his hand to touch her face. It left a smear of grease, and he swore and patted it off with a paper towel, laughing at himself. Which gave her time to pull her emotions under control again.
“I didn’t know you had a sister,” she said, for something to say.
“I got three,” he said, holding up fingers. “But Kat and Keisha are shortasses.”
She broke into laughter. “Oh, okay.”
“What about you?”
She shook her head, “Just me and my folks.” And suddenly she didn’t want him to ask any more, didn’t want to talk about her family, because for about an hour she’d forgotten altogether there was any reason for them to be estranged. There were benefits to having only a present with a lover, only short scenes with clear boundaries, and one of those benefits was that she didn’t have to talk about her mom.
“Hey,” she said, mostly wanting to change the subject. “You tricked me again.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, tilting his head.
“I’m all bloated and greasy and gross. I was supposed to orgasm today.”
“Oh, was that today?” he said, hand on his chin in an obviously theatrical pose. “Whoops.”
She stuck her tongue out. “Thank you for this,” she said. “It was great. Even without an orgasm.” It really was. Her chest felt tight with it; like her heart would burst, that silly saccharine cliché. She felt full of something she didn’t dare to name. And barbecue, of course.
“I’m glad to hear you say that,” he said. “When’s your birthday?”
She blanched; she could feel the blood rushing out of her face. “Dennis...”
“Hmm?” He beamed at her, eyes hidden behind his sunglasses again, and the part of her that liked feeling powerless felt very, very good indeed.
“It’s...in September. Sir,” she said, very carefully. Watching him intently.
He nodded. Then he leaned across the table to kiss her.
“Let’s try again next weekend then. I don’t want to jinx it,” he said ruefully, “but I’m supposed to be able to move into my house. We can christen it after the Shibari workshop. I’m sure we’ll be inspired.”
He was, in fact, able to move in—the master bedroom was finished, even if nothing else was. And they were, in fact, inspired. He tied her down and edged her himself six times. By the end she’d thought for sure he’d lose control and push them both over, but he’d pulled out at the last second and finished in her mouth. She cried that night, but when the scene was over, he showered her in aftercare. When she left in the morning, she felt happier than she could remember being. Even if somehow, she’d agreed to her birthday as the next deadline.
I’ll never come again, she whispered to herself on the way home. Just let this keep going. It doesn’t have to change. Just let it keep going.
August
Unfortunately, at work there was no safeword. More and more, development work was being peppered into her schedule, and she was hating it. She’d always worked with the websites and products the development team built, but in truth she knew very little about the process of creating them and hadn’t thought about it too much. Now she was expected to be the representative for her ops team in their meetings and she was scrambling to catch up. It was frustrating work, in part because the project management was badly organized, but she suspected she would loathe it even if it was done properly.
She didn’t like gathering and documenting requirements, the infuriatingly meticulous level of detail required, and she didn’t like the constant meetings with developers, either. Working with the consultants was like having internal clients; the development team were more like hired experts, but fractious and dissatisfied ones. Maybe they had good reason for being cranky. At the end of July, the entire Help Desk was let go, and she knew from Fatima it had caused a lot of unrest in the technology division. The mass layoff made a certain kind of sense—the Help Desk was a shit show, had been as long as she’d worked for the company—but it was still kind of terrifying to think that her...her Dennis had fired so many people.
So maybe the developers weren’t their best selves. Most of them worked remotely, which meant mostly phone meetings, which meant their impression of her came from her voice and not her achingly curated appearance. She’d never had voice training—she honestly felt that the saccharine artificial “trans woman” voice they taught in those classes was worse than her natural voice—but for the first time she regretted it. There were a lot of accidental “him”s, and increasingly sour voices when she corrected them.
And of course, she couldn’t talk to Dennis about it. Couldn’t breathe a word, even as he increasingly vented about his troubled data migration and the backstabbing bastard she recognized in his stories as Leo Graham, her boss’s boss. Every smile-and-nod took her further away from the truth; every time she didn’t talk about it, it became more impossible to ever talk about it.
It broke down like this: if she told him, he’d be angry. That was a given. And it seemed impossible things would just go back to normal. Things would change, they would have to. They would be
thoroughly entangled in each other’s lives, and this would either become a relationship or it would end. And was it going to become a relationship? Was it really? Who was she kidding?
Towards the end of the summer, he had to go to the East Coast for a solid six weeks, and in a dark, disappointing way it was a bit of a relief. At least it was easier to keep the lie going. But when he wasn’t around, things got harder. She fell behind on the required edges and then had to catch up. It was the opposite of the way pain could blur into pleasure with impact play; pleasure blurring into a queasy ache from too much frustration, and no one to hold her and gently laugh at her until she laughed, too.
She missed him, though. That was the truth. If she’d fooled herself this was casual, part-time, practically long-distance dominance, she was now acutely aware of all the evenings or weekends they’d spent together with no more sign of kink than the comforting weight of his hand on her skin or a coy duck of her head.
She found herself spending more time at Frankie’s, for the first time all summer. It wasn’t that she hadn’t been in at all. She had planned the Shibari workshop and made sure everything went smoothly, then worked with Vic to coordinate their contingent in the Austin Pride Parade. (For reasons that surpassed understanding, Austin held Pride out of sync with the rest of the country and in the hottest month of the year. They’d attended together, although she’d had to neglect him for logistics several times. As it turned out, it was her last weekend with Dennis for several weeks.)
She’d even come in for drinks after work and to catch up with friends a few times through the summer; to help Caroline with her OnlyFans or Vic curate the bar’s social media presence or to commiserate with Max about his latest breakup. The life of a trans-masculine dom and a trans-feminine sub ran in depressing parallels. But she realized there were a lot of new faces, all seemingly getting along without the welcome wagon. She hadn’t been with anyone else all summer. She’d been approached only once, and he had turned out to be a creep worth putting on blast in the submissive whisper network.
Even if someone less shitty had hit on her, she wasn’t sure it would be...worth it, to get Dennis’s permission. She wasn’t sure she had room for anyone else, for any more emotions or complications.
It was a few weeks before her birthday when she ran into Mistress Sandra. She was as gorgeous as ever, all big breasts and soft round belly and generous ass poured into a cotton dress; even the most hardcore gave up on leather and latex in an Austin August, when the temperature rose to triple digits for weeks at a time.
“How have you been, my darling?” Sandra asked, cozied up in a two-person booth with her. “It’s been months.”
“I’m doing all right... I love this haircut.” She fingered the domme’s short-cropped black hair. “How’s Grace?”
Sandra clicked her tongue. “Oh, back home for the break. This is the first chance I’ve had to come to Frankie’s all summer, though. So busy.”
She smiled at Sandra. “I’m sorry, ma’am. Could I take your mind off it?” For this, she didn’t need to ask for permission. Sandra dealt in impact play, not orgasms, and tonight that held a deep appeal.
Sandra didn’t usually take her women home unless it was serious, but she and April were old friends. Her style was gentle but ruthless, and in a tastefully appointed playroom she tied April down and went over her thoroughly with a flogger.
“I can’t—I can’t—” April panted, dripping with sweat, and Sandra’s beautifully cruel face appeared over the bench.
“That’s not a safeword, sweetness.”
She gritted her teeth and screamed through them, but she didn’t use her safeword.
As the flogging continued, she began to take herself away from the situation, bit by bit; like pulling plugs. The longer the sensations went on the more it felt like she must have done something to deserve it, and Dennis’s face floated by. Then her ex-wife’s.
Marie had loved to do this, to stretch her out and gently torture her for ages. She’d learned to love so many different types of impact toys that way...
(...and sometimes, later, when things had begun to go sour, she’d leave April there and bring in one of her other lovers. She called it a flogging of the soul and swore it would bring them closer together. Like sisters.
Sisters. That’s what they’d said on Facebook, when they split up. We just feel like we’re more like best friends or sisters now. We’ll always love each other but—April didn’t have any sisters, but she suspected sisters didn’t normally do that to each other...)
She was almost completely unaware of her body when suddenly, she felt the bindings on her feet release. Then her wrists. Sandra was helping her from the bench, putting her into the bed tucked in one corner of the playroom.
“I—I didn’t. I didn’t say it,” she pleaded.
“I know, darling. You did so good. You were so, so good. Just lie in here in my arms like the good girl you are.” Sandra was stroking her hair, and as she returned from numbness, she realized how sore she was. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been flogged so thoroughly. It didn’t normally hurt so much—a paddle usually hurt worse. It was sensation, impact, intensity rather than pain. But she’d definitely been put through her paces tonight.
“I think I... I don’t think I was in a good place,” she realized slowly.
“No, you weren’t, love,” said Sandra. “But it’s okay. Sometimes these sessions can bring out old pain we need to heal. It’s my job to know when to quit, and your job to be good and let it happen. Let yourself feel it.”
She wanted to burrow into the other woman. They were both nude, but April realized she didn’t feel aroused at all. She felt wrung out. She let herself drift as Sandra took care of her.
She woke up eventually, disoriented. It was the middle of the night. Sandra was still there. “I was thinking about my ex,” she admitted, drawing her knees up. “I mean. Before.”
“Ahhh. I thought I recognized the fingerprints of that woman,” said Sandra. “I’m so sorry if I made you think of her.”
“No. I don’t know why I... I’ve done things like that plenty of times. She doesn’t own flogging. I just kept feeling like...” She exhaled. “I felt like I was cheating.”
“That must have taken you to a bad place.” Sandra knew all about Marie. Sandra had, perhaps, saved kink for April. She hadn’t known where to turn except the community when she came to Austin, all alone, but she hadn’t really known if she could ever trust it again. Sandra had redeemed it.
But Sandra was married, and her boundaries were clear. She came with an expiration date. It seemed all of April’s relationships did.
“Who did you feel like you were cheating on? That woman?” Sandra had a particular way of saying that woman that sounded worse than any curse word April had ever heard.
“No. There’s... It’s ridiculous. I’ve got...a crush. On a dom I met.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” said Sandra, laying a hand on April’s tensed arm. “Isn’t this your space to do those things? Let your feelings run wild? If I had known, sweetie—”
“No,” she said quickly. “I wanted to. It’s an open relationship. I mean, we’re just friends.”
“How long has this been going on?” Sandra asked.
“Since May,” she said quietly.
“Three or four months.” It was a simple observation, with no judgment in the inflection. “Are you sure it’s not more serious than a crush?” Sandra asked.
“It isn’t for him,” she whispered.
The domme sighed heavily, and rubbed April’s back, pressing the constant knot that formed between her shoulders from trying to shrink herself. She knew Sandra would never suggest that she needed to take some space away from Dennis; she wouldn’t interfere that way, especially if it might be construed as trying to pry April away from another dominant.
April almost wished she would. She felt the simple submissive ache for someone to please tell her what to do. That was the trouble with playing power games; eventually they had to end, and you were, inevitably, responsible for yourself. While the game with Mistress Sandra lasted, she took her comfort there.
September
And then it was her birthday. Well. The Friday night before her birthday.
I’m going to tell him it has to stop, she decided, as she waited for the video chat to connect; he was still out of town. The clothes, the denial, the texting. I know how to be alone, but I can’t deal with a boyfriend who isn’t my boyfriend. We made it to the deadline, and now I’m out. She’d already insisted he not buy her anything additional for her birthday.
Instead before she knew it, she found herself begging. Not begging to come. He had an idea. A wonderful, awful, despicable idea, and it vaporized every other thought in her head.
“Beg me not to let you come. Convince me you want to live without orgasms. If I find you believable, I’ll let you come. If you seem like you’re pretending, another month.” His face was stoic through the video connection; his eyes were black.
“You’re evil,” she breathed.
“Happy birthday,” he said, and grinned at her.
She begged like a maniac. She promised him depraved things, things she never intended to deliver and he never intended to ask her to follow through on. It was just so hot to hear herself say it.
(“Please don’t let me come. I’ll tell everyone how good your control is. I’ll tell every sub in the bar. I’ll tell my friends. I—”)
She was either too convincing or not convincing enough. It didn’t really matter. Some games you don’t play to win.
Virtual aftercare was hard, but he didn’t hop off, although it was late and an hour later on the East Coast. He sent her videos of bunnies and maniacal hopping little goats. He told her jokes and silly puns. She asked about the ongoing data migration, which she knew only as the reason email was down twice that week. Talking about his work was safe. He asked about her other birthday plans.
