Mission Statement

by Catherine Gardiene

  He went to her and wrapped his arms loosely around her waist, pressing himself into her back and brushing his lips against her hair.

  “Sweet, brave girl.” He pressed a kiss to her neck and followed it with a nip of his teeth. “Thank God you’re finally opening up.” He stroked his hands along her arms. She stood there, stunned to silence by his actions, water running slowly down the drain in front of her. “I’m so sorry. When I said nothing, I didn’t mean what you thought. I promise you, sweetheart, I’m far more into control than pain.” He reached over and shut off the water, turning her slowly to face him. He held her face in his hands.

  “Dear, sweet Victoria. All I meant was that I hadn’t given you nearly the pleasure I would normally have given you. I hadn’t gotten close to your limits or my own. I hadn’t put any thought into how I would…” His voice trailed off.

  “Can we take this conversation to the living room? I really think we’d both be more comfortable sitting for this.” His gaze implored her to give him a chance.

  She was torn. He said she’d misinterpreted him, but what about her own confusion? What about the fact that she wasn’t someone used to giving up control?

  Still, she knew he’d given her the best orgasms of her life, and lots of them. She’d gotten so used to faking it she had started to wonder if she’d ever come again with another person involved in the act. He’d not only proven it was possible, he’d made her hunger for sex again.

  This time she moved purposefully, taking his hand and guiding him to the living room sofa. He sat with his back in the corner and his body angled toward hers, pulling her to the cushion next to him so his knee brushed her thigh.

  A look of annoyance passed over his face as she settled, and he jumped up quickly, moving swiftly to the foyer to grab his backpack. He brought it back with him, slipping his weapon and cuffs into the outer pocket, checking the safety beforehand. With a look of apology, he settled in again, his leg slightly atop hers then instead of just touching it. The backpack rested against the sofa, within reach of his hand.

  “Maybe we should start from the beginning. I didn’t handle things very well the other night, I’m afraid. Did you enjoy being tied to my bed?” She noticed his voice had changed slightly. It wasn’t only when he talked about sex that it happened either. It was when he expected her to listen…to obey. She’d had a “don’t mess with me” voice with her kids, and it struck her as similar to that. Except that his “don’t mess with me” voice made her panties wet. Vibrations shot up and down her spine, and all her nerve endings tingled, waiting to hear what he’d say next.

  That was some scary mojo.

  So as much as she wasn’t comfortable talking about sex in general, and her body’s traitorous and confusing response to kinky sex in particular, she found herself formulating an answer.

  “I think so. I wanted to touch you so badly, so that part of it I didn’t like. But knowing I was helpless did something to me. I mean, there was the physical part of it—my back being arched like that…”

  He waited a beat, then mercifully finished the sentence for her. “You mean with your tits on display for me?”

  She blushed. “Yeah, that.”

  “Say the words, Victoria. You get so unbelievably turned on when I talk dirty to you. I almost wonder if I could make you come from it. But you don’t say anything yourself. Tell me why you liked having your back arched with your hands over your head.” He ran his finger along her lower lip, and she wondered how he expected her mouth to do anything coherent as long as that contact was there.

  He trailed his hand down to the neckline of her shirt and smiled as she unconsciously arched her back slightly, raising her breasts to him even then.

  “Sweetheart? Tell me what you liked.”

  She closed her eyes and exhaled. “The feeling of pushing my chest out, offering my breasts to you, was incredible. My nipples are so sensitive. Nobody has ever paid attention to them like you did. Since I had to push them out that way because of how you’d tied me up, it felt like it was okay to get lost in the feeling.”

  He kissed her warmly, his hand sliding under the fabric of her shirt and caressing one of those sensitive nipples over her silken bra. Just talking about it had made the peaks harden. She wondered if he could make her come just from touching her breasts.

  “That’s right. Nobody has ever paid attention to your body the way I will. Being submissive doesn’t make you weak, and it doesn’t make you a doormat. Some people say the sub has all the power. I’m not sure I buy that, either. It takes strength and self-control to be a sub, just like it takes strength and self-control to be a dom. Really, I think doms and subs connect because they have that in common. The difference is this: subs exercise their self-control to overcome pain, vulnerability, even humiliation in order to please the dom, whereas the dom does it to bring himself and his sub pleasure and to test limits and boundaries, to know she’s pushing the envelope for him. If someone gets pleasure just from giving pain, that’s a sadist, not a dom. A dom who gives pain does it because he knows it will bring the sub pleasure.”

  She was confused.

  “Who gets pleasure from pain?”

  He chuckled. His hand was still resting inside her shirt, softly stroking her breast. He pinched the tight little peak between his thumb and forefinger, eliciting a squeal followed by a sigh. “You do, if your reaction to that is any indication. I do, if you count the fact that I like love bites and hair tugging. But a sadist wants to inflict severe pain. Fortunately for the sadists of the world, there are masochists out there that love that sort of thing.”

  “You mean…”

  “Yes, I mean I’m not one of them.” He smiled and kissed her lightly across the lips. “Of course, gaining and maintaining control sometimes involves punishment, which I willingly and happily administer.” Her eyes widened, and her heart began to beat faster. “But only within the limits of what you can handle. In those cases, I don’t expect you to enjoy the spanking itself, for instance, but I expect you to take pride in the fact that you withstood the punishment and learned your lesson. Because I’ll be proud of you for it, and you’ll have pleased me.”

  The idea of him spanking her, of relishing her acceptance of it, made her insides flutter. The voice in her head that had rebelled against the idea so strenuously only one day earlier was growing more and more quiet. Listening to him explain the dynamics of the Dom/sub relationship, she began to understand more about why she had been so drawn to BDSM-themed erotica in the first place. There was no pressure on her to figure out the right thing to do; she only had to do what he wanted, take what he dished out. While it still scared her from a physical perspective, mentally it sounded freeing.

  “Even inside the world of doms and subs, there are differences. I told you I’m a sexual dominant. That means that I like control in the bedroom, or anytime sexual play is involved, but not when we’re buying groceries, doing the laundry. You know, everyday stuff. There are doms and subs that engage in 24-7 master-slave relationships, where the sub is in service all the time. Some people do that for a set period, like the weekend, and some do it for three weeks a month. The rules and activities in those relationships vary, but can be as extreme as the sub almost never leaving the dom’s house, never speaking without permission, and rarely even wearing clothes.”

  As he’d spoken, she’d begun to watch his hand under the fabric of her shirt. When he finished talking about full master-slave play, she looked up at him, her lip quivering slightly. “Have you ever done that? Do you want to do that?”

  He answered quickly, but she noticed a momentary change in his features. Where he had been relaxed and open during his explanations, he suddenly had seemed very tense.

  “That’s definitely not my style, sweetheart. I like my independence, and a relationship like that is a lot of responsibility, for both parties. But as the dom, I’d crack under the pressure. Before I can ask you to give me control of everything—your physical and emotional w
ell-being—I have to accept responsibility to care for them as if they were my own. To have that responsibility every minute of every day, and over not just sexual pleasure but every aspect of someone’s life? It would kill me.”

  “Did someone want you to?”

  It was as if a cloud passed over his face, and not a fleeting reaction this time. His eyes darkened, his face hardened, and small lines at the corner of his mouth showed the tension that had overtaken him.

  “Once. It was a long time ago. I couldn’t be what she needed.”

  “What happened?”

  He sighed, pulling back from her and dry washing his face with his hands. His head dropped back so he faced the ceiling, and he took a deep breath before exhaling slowly.

  “The only way a Dom/sub relationship works is if we’re both honest with each other. If you tell me what I want to hear, instead of what you really think or feel, I could hurt you. And if I don’t tell you the truth, you won’t trust me. Without trust, none of this works.” He rubbed his eyes and faced her again. She immediately saw the unshed tears and regretted asking him the question.

  “Before I tell you about Holly, I need to tell you this: I haven’t done more than scene with subs since it happened, because I didn’t want to answer the question you just asked me. If there’s no chance of a future relationship, nobody ever asks about past relationships.” He smiled wanly and took her hand. “So if nothing else, I hope this shows you that I’m not being a hound dog, and I don’t do this sort of thing all the time. I meant what I said. Something drew me to you.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “You don’t have to tell me. I’m sorry I asked. I didn’t mean to cause you any pain.” She stroked his cheek and tried to soothe him, but she sensed he needed to say it as much as she needed to hear it. Hopefully it would help her understand his hesitancy.

  “It’s been more than seven years. Past time to deal with it, really. I guess I never had the inspiration.” He pulled her to him and kissed her gently, first on the lips, and then in trailing kisses down her neck. Leaning away and settling back into the corner of the sofa, he began.

  They’d met at a club when she was relatively new to the scene. After playing together off and on for a couple of months, they’d run into each other downtown. A cup of coffee led to a date, which led to more dates, eventually going to the club together instead of meeting there. Six months later, Holly had moved in with him.

  He hadn’t made detective yet, so his hours were a little more stable, and they fell into a routine quickly. More and more, she’d been waiting to play as soon as he’d walked in the door. The excitement of play at home as well as at the club was heady, and they’d turned one of the spare rooms into a playroom.

  Falling in love was easy. Neither of them had been in a long-term relationship before, so they were hesitant, but things were so comfortable and natural that a year after she moved in, he asked her to marry him. As they began to make plans, she asked him if he’d consider a formal collaring ceremony in addition to a wedding. That wasn’t something he’d really thought about, since she was going to be his wife, but he thought she just wanted to declare their commitment in the BDSM community the way they would with friends and family. It was, he thought, his greatest failing as a dom that he didn’t delve deeper into what was driving her request.

  The whirlwind of early romance combined with their particular sexual desires had masked a deeper need of Holly’s that he hadn’t recognized. Playtime and real life intermingled so often that it wasn’t unusual for him to want to control her when they went out, dictating her clothing or having her wear a butterfly bullet vibrator for their mutual pleasure.

  Victoria chuckled when he confessed to being something of a neat freak.

  “I think I figured that out about thirty seconds after I walked into your house.”

  He shrugged his shoulders and gave her a sheepish smile. He went on to explain that Holly was a bit of a slob, and he finally resorted to punishing her for leaving towels or clothes on the floor or dirty dishes on the table, just because having a messy house annoyed him so much. In truth, he admitted, it made him anxious and unsettled, which he knew was a little OCD, but it wasn’t something he could easily change.

  Holly kept looking for more rules, rules that had nothing to do with sex or intimacy. She asked him to help her diet before the wedding by having him punish her when she cheated. Then she said she was worried that her wardrobe was too risqué, that she was up for a promotion at work, so she insisted on getting his approval on her clothing, finally asking him to pick things out for her while she showered.

  About six weeks before the wedding, he came home to find the house was an absolute disaster. She’d taken the day off and had left empty snack wrappers all over the living room, little scraps of fabric in their bed and all over their shared office from favors she had made, and clothes piled all over the floor from a halfhearted attempt at organizing her side of the closet. He’d had a shitty day, and he snapped.

  She wasn’t home, so he paced and cleaned, building up a wicked head of steam about how inconsiderate she’d been and how little she cared about their home. By the time she got back from running errands, he was ready for a fight.

  When she bustled into the kitchen, dropping the takeout that she’d picked up on the table and throwing the dry cleaning and shopping bags onto the sofa, he exploded. But instead of a fight, she dropped to her knees and looked at the floor. Her reaction wasn’t that of a fiancée who had pissed off her boyfriend; it was that of a slave who’d disappointed her master. Instead of fighting, she wanted to be punished.

  In that moment, he realized she’d been controlling him all along.

  “Topping from the bottom, they call it. She was trying to get me to dominate her all the time, to be her master. I wanted a partner, someone who’d carry the burden of responsibility sometimes, but she only wanted to serve me.” While he’d been recounting the incident that led to their breakup, he’d begun to pace the room. Vicki’s gaze followed him, noting again how much he reminded her of a panther on the prowl as he moved.

  “I tried to get her to argue, to tell me I was being ridiculous, but she just went to the playroom, stripped, and knelt in front of the spanking bench. She was crying and shaking, but all I could do was stare. I stood in the doorway, watching her kneel in position waiting for me to make it right by beating her ass until it was bruised, and a part of me died inside.” He turned his back to Victoria and put his forearm against the wall, his forehead pressed against it in defeat. “I haven’t played in that room since.”

  Suddenly he pulled back from the wall and walked into the kitchen. She fought the urge to follow, realizing his emotions were still raw even seven years later and believing he just needed a moment to reestablish control. If she’d learned nothing else about him, she’d learned to appreciate how much control meant to him. She heard a cabinet door open and water running. A few minutes later, he returned with water for both of them; he began to speak again before he’d even reentered the living room.

  “Intellectually I know it just wasn’t a good fit, that we weren’t right for each other. She wanted more from me than I could give. But it shook me that I could be with someone—live with her, love her, prepare to spend my life with her—and be so unaware of what she really wanted and needed. As a dom, it nearly broke me.”

  He sat down on the sofa again, his eyes closed and his head back.

  She watched him as he centered himself; moments passed. As if a switch had been flipped, he sat up quickly. Turning to face her, his mouth was set in a firm line. “So you can see, I know what I want and what I don’t want. She fell apart more than I did. Separating our lives and cancelling all our plans was probably easier than the emotional aftereffects, but I decided then and there that I wasn’t going to try to mix love and sex again. It wasn’t worth it.”

  Victoria’s shoulders sagged. In some ways, his story and hers weren’t all that different. But unlike Michael and Ho
lly, she and Alan had never really come to terms with what either of them wanted. They concentrated on the business of family, on hockey games and volleyball tournaments, on scouting trips and PTA meetings. It had given them common ground, but intimacy was never something they focused on. Perhaps it was because, deep down, they’d recognized that they were incompatible in that way.

  What if Michael was right about her? What if she wanted what those submissives he’d been with wanted? Did that make her flawed in some way? Was it something she could figure out at forty-two, or was she too far past that fork in the road to turn now?

  With all those thoughts clamoring around her head, she sank into herself on the sofa. The empathetic side of her wanted to hold him, tell him he’d done the right thing then but that he needed to move on. But she was hardly the person to give that advice. She’d been a much bigger failure in so many ways.

  Still, by telling her his story, he’d helped her to think about her own. Almost instinctively she leaned against him, and he wrapped his arm around her. Without any conscious thought, she snuggled into him, and he pulled her onto his lap. They held and comforted each other without words, without thought to what it could mean.

  Minutes passed. It felt like an eternity. She lifted her head and stroked his jaw.

  “I’m sorry.”

  His eyebrows lifted in question.

  She sat up, leaning against the back of the couch but remaining in his lap.

  “I’ve been an insufferable bitch to you, yet you’re still here. I guess there’s something to be said for the communication thing,” she acknowledged. “So I’m sorry. And I’m sorry that things went the way they did with Holly.”