Submission

by Alex Algren

  Now, all I want to do is watch the man I love shower, an act that never fails to arouse me beyond all comprehension, and when he’s done, to make him forgo a towel altogether and to dry every inch of his perfect body, a body that is the essence of masculinity, with my tongue. I imagine my pointy pink tongue lingering in the crevice between his thigh and groin, slowly replacing crystal beads of moisture with thick swathes of saliva, before trailing up to his heavy balls, savoring the musky scent beneath the aroma of soap.

  Despite the exhaust fan’s best efforts, it never keeps pace with Dar’s preferred scalding showers, and steam swirls around me when I enter. I close the door behind me and lean against it, watching Dar behind the wall of glass that separates the shower from the rest of the bathroom, being assaulted by the high pressure dual shower-heads positioned at each end of the shower. He doesn’t notice me, as he faces the back wall of the enclosure, allowing my gaze to fall to his muscular bottom. He scrubs himself as I silently watch. I’m filled with a mixture of admiration, thankfulness and lust as the muscles in his back ripple beneath his skin with each movement of his arms.

  Despite my silence, something in the air must have changed, because he abruptly turns and sees me.

  “Awake now, my lazy pet,” he says.

  “Dar, you didn’t really want me to run with you. You know how frustrating it ends up for both of us.”

  “Wouldn’t have asked you, Tess, if I didn’t want your company,” he replies, extending an arm from behind the wall of glass.

  I walk toward him and he steps out of the water just far enough to grab me and pull me in.

  “Dar, no, no, I’m in my robe,” I say, realizing by now it’s a moot point, it’s soaked, I’m soaked and I don’t care.

  He lifts me and presses my back hard against the marble wall, still cool despite the heated water. My legs, crossed at the ankles, are tight around his waist. His hands are flat against the wall, my fingers interlaced together behind his neck. My chin falls into the hollow of his shoulder, my tongue trailing up to his ear, licking up the plump water droplets that define my path. I feel his cock stiffening against my pelvis and thoughts of him buried inside me make me nearly feral. I bite harder than I’d planned into his soft earlobe. He doesn’t jerk away; he doesn’t even move, but he whispers words that I barely have time to comprehend, “So you want to play rough, Tess?” before he’s pushed me tighter against the wall with his hips. One of his large hands guides his cock into my ready cunt. A deep sigh, of relief, of satisfaction, is the last sound I make before both his hands are on my neck.

  Fixing me in his dark gaze, his deep voice speaks softly, nearly drowned out between the dual cascades of water and the pulse beating a steady rhythm in my ears, “You should know by now, Tess, I repay pain with pain.”

  Even as his hands tighten on my throat, I can’t take my eyes off his. I’m not sure what I hope to see in his stare. Sometimes he can go so cold that even while his eyes are fixed on mine, I know he’s looking beyond me, looking somewhere into the darkness that resides so close to the edge of his surface civility. And sometimes, like now, I know he’s watching me intently to gauge my reaction, and, as my breathing gets more and more impaired as he cuts off my respiration, to determine when to stop.

  My fingers unlace, slide free of one another, desperately clutching at his neck. Somewhere in my oxygen-depleted brain, I know I’ll have left deep crescent-shaped indentations and scratches where I claw at him. I’m terrified, and my mind won’t stop shouting, Not safe, this is not safe, you could die, he would never let you die, no, not safe, stop. But I have no breath, I can’t speak. My communication is limited to what he reads in my eyes and the pressure of my nails on his slick skin. When I have no air at all each thrust inside me feels even more intense. I know I could come; I feel the muscles in my cunt tightening around him, squeezing his erection as hard as my fingers dig into his neck. The lack of breath, the heat, his stare, the sensation of his cock hitting hard against my cervix, all these combined make me woozy, delirious. I can’t breathe. How long has it been? Not safe, not safe, not safe, my brain shrieks.

  Then, his eyes drift from mine for a moment and his words enter my ear and echo in my head: “My breath will be the first air you taste, bitch. Come now; come when you feel my lips on yours. Come.”

  Dark brown eyes focus on mine again as his lips meet mine. My muscles pulsate wildly around his cock, squeezing him with a pressure that surpasses his on my throat. My eyelids flutter, my head falling back against the slick marble wall. The tight grip he has on my neck relents and as I gasp for air, his breath, seeming to have more substance than is possible, enters my mouth and fills my lungs. The return of my air feels like a gift he’s bestowed upon me.

  And with that returned air, my body goes limp, the combination of fear, stress and orgasm leaving me too spent to even cling to him any longer. He holds me up a few moments longer before allowing me to slide down the marble wall, making sure my legs will support me before releasing his hold. Against the wall, as I’ve been all along, I’m out of the direct spray from the shower-head, getting wet from the water that ricochets off Dar’s body. With my robe open and slipping off my shoulders, I step into the stream, letting the water rain hard upon my upturned face. My thin sodden robe feels so weighty now that I slide it off my shoulders. Transfixed for a moment, I watch the water swirling rapidly down the drain.

  Looking up, I see him watching me. “Oh, god, Dar,” I whimper hoarsely, my throat still sore from the pressure.

  “How appropriate that the first word you speak, spoken with my breath, should be god,” he says. His face gives away nothing, impassive and utterly calm, as if he’s entirely serious, but we both know that anytime he refers to himself as god, it will spur my irreverence.

  “Yes, love, I exist solely because of you, for you,” I reply with an eye roll any teenage girl would envy.

  He pins me with a cool, dark glare, one that makes me think perhaps I’ve overstepped my bounds, before his large hands meet my shoulders and push me back against the wall once more.

  “I don’t think I can go through that again. Please, Dar, not right now,” I say, in hopes of earning his compassion.

  His face, so stern a moment ago, is now smiling, “Oh, yes, pet,” he says, as he sinks to his knees, thick fingers opening my puffy folds, “I fully intend to take your breath away again.”

  THE WEIGHT

  Rachel Kramer Bussel

  I settle into my favorite position: naked, facedown on the bed, arms by my sides, legs slightly spread. I’m not moving, but inside I’m twitching with excitement. I wait, like this, for Damian. He’s in the kitchen but he knows I’m in our bed, eager, hungry. He knows he is the only one who can give me what I need. Now he does, anyway. I’m pretty sure when we first got together all those years ago, he thought it was just my kink or fetish: get on top of me, hold me down, provide that rote set of actions that get me off.

  I didn’t know how to tell him for a long time it wasn’t that at all; it was him. He was my fetish, he was my everything, which made it easy to give so much of myself right back to him. It didn’t even feel like a choice. Better for him to think I was just a kinky girl, rather than kinky for him. He already held so much power over me after that first time, another bit of it might set me permanently in the cage he’d placed me in, the one whose invisible bars I met everywhere I turned, with every thought that passed through my mind. He’d invaded me inside and out, to the point where he didn’t need to do or say anything to keep me in place. He had me, every inch of me. I was only twenty-two, but I knew exactly what I wanted and, once he sank his claws into me, what I needed.

  “No,” I told him, looking up at him and blushing as I felt the tears rushing to give me away. “Just you. All of you.” He’d looked at me for a long time. I could sense the smile along his lips even though he didn’t dare show it to me. He likes to look stern even though I can read him just as well as he can read me and I know that while it’s
not an act, there is a heart as tender as mine beating beneath the layers of menace he slips into when we are together. He manages to make the transitions seamless, though, so I never know which Damian I will get, how rough he will be, how deliciously far he will push me.

  That first night was a lot like tonight, but no matter how many times I prepare myself for Damian, I’m never truly prepared. I couldn’t be, even if I could peer into the future with some kind of kinky crystal ball. Some things you have to live through moment by agonizing, dazzling moment. He steamrolls over my anticipation, crushing it like he crushes me, until I am a blank slate. Oh, he likes my dirty mind well enough, the fantasies I cook up and spin for him, but he wants me to know they’ll never come true, not exactly, not the way I conceive of them, anyway. His fantasies will, and do, and he will make them mine whether I like it or not, even though I always wind up liking it, even when I’m literally kicking and screaming.

  Sometimes my fantasies morph into his, or maybe it’s that they merge. Maybe it’s that what I think I want is never actually what I really do, or that when the fantasy comes alive, like now, it’s more intense, more scary and far more arousing than I ever could have predicted. Damian takes away my predictability the same way he takes away my mobility, my breath, my agency; they’re there, and in a flash, they’re gone. I could protest, but he knows me too well for that. I like offering those elemental facets of my being to him, only him. I like the way he looks when he knows I’ve stripped away even the flimsiest of barriers between us. Too many of my exes thought stripping was about the skin, about getting naked, and that was all it took to see all of me, to capture me. How little did they know. I’m the queen of the invisible cover-up, but Damian can induce fear and lust and a scarily possessive passion all with a look, even with my clothes on. So now, when I’m bare in every sense of the word, is when the real magic happens, when I truly come alive, and so does he. I can almost see the power shift animate him, light him up like a rocket about to shoot into space, only it’s my space he’s about to barrel through; the spaces inside me, the ones I’m not even aware I’m clinging to, he’s about to invade.

  There’s nothing showy about this. If you were watching us, you’d see a large white man lying on top of a smaller white woman, if you could see her at all save for her brown hair splayed across the sheets. There are no pillows beneath me; he is pillow enough for both of us, even above me, his heavy softness cushioning, momentarily, what he is about to do. I’m aware we could be on the floor, we could even be on the sidewalk; he could get me to do that, I’m pretty sure, my cheek pressed to the filthy concrete, drool leaking out of my mouth. So any lack of amenities simply makes me more conscious of what I do have in this moment: him, his body, every last ounce. I don’t know how many there are, ounces or pounds, but I know there are a lot. I know he can easily scoop me up into his arms. I know the guards size him up when we get on a plane. I know he is not just big, but huge, so when he is on top of me, I am small, able to be crushed, flattened, compressed.

  It feels like the air whooshes out of my lungs; I’d take a polygraph and tell you it makes a noise, like when you deflate a balloon, though the rational side of me knows it’s a silent motion. It seems to go so fast, even though I know it’s actually escaping me in tiny increments as he settles on top of me, as the full weight of him starts to crush me. I am calm as I savor both the last breaths I have, and their extinguishment. I wish sometimes I were smaller, and he were bigger, that his very presence could smother me entirely, but we manage to come very close, his arms atop mine, his heft making me feel petite, worthy of what he is giving me, whether I truly am or not.

  He seems to get heavier as the seconds pass, and it doesn’t take very many of them before my lungs are trying to find purchase, a way out, even as my nipples, smashed into the mattress as they are, tingle with the thrill of the fine edge of sanity we are dancing upon. We are both well aware of that fine line; we are tweaking it, plucking it like a guitar string, watching it teeter back and forth. Wondering where we will land excites us. I can hear it, feel it, when he pushes my arms down tight to my sides and wraps his hands over my head. Damian loves to cover my face with his giant palm, to hold it right over my lips, to cover my eyes, to literally manhandle me. He manages to somehow bear down even more and the panic starts to rise in me until he lets up for a moment.

  I don’t gulp in greedy, deep breaths of air; that would be too obvious. I take the smallest breaths I can, savoring them, making do with what I can get, while I can. He raises up just enough to turn me over, settling down again with his knee planted firmly against my pussy, so firmly it hurts a little. He’s not trying to make me wet, or make me like it. I know that much by now. He’s trying to simply tell me that even his knee owns me, that even his knee can make me do anything he demands.

  It’s the look on his face that makes me shudder as surely as if someone zapped me. I can breathe a little now, but I can’t move. He has me pinned, strapped in as surely as the fanciest of handcuffs. The shudder rises from my red-painted toenails on up. I tremble against him where his knee is greeting me, and he shifts so the pressure lands at my wrists, where he’s raised them above my head. At any moment he might shift both wrists into one meaty palm and tickle me, threatening my bladder, threatening my control.

  I’m tempted to bite my lip, but I don’t. He’d only force them apart, force my mouth, like the rest of me, open; shove something, probably his fingers, many of them, inside. I’m not sure if I miss his weight yet, because I love how strong he is, how his strength brought to bear full bore demands an equal showing of strength from me. I look up at him, not sure which Damian I will see. Sometimes his hazel eyes are dark and stormy, and he’ll lean down and bite my lip, digging his teeth in, clamping down until I mewl to get away, and then giving me a few extra seconds of pain before rising and spitting into my mouth. Sometimes he’ll raise his hand so suddenly I hardly have time to be aware of what’s about to happen, then strike my cheek so hard my ears ring. Sometimes he shackles my arms above my head, to the cuffs secured to the headboard, and pinches my nose and mouth shut, holding them tighter and tighter until I start to truly thrash, and then he’ll let go of one hand, keeping the other in place. Like I said, I’m not into all the accoutrements of bondage, but I gladly give him my arms, and savor the tightness of a cuff or the sweetly deceptive smoothness of a silk scarf, even though he is my favorite sex toy of all.

  Sometimes he just looks at me, stares at me so intently it’s a form of sadism in itself, if you’re the type of girl who shies away from being seen too deeply, from being naked in quite that way. His eyes devour me, shear all the layers off of me, drill into my consciousness as surely as any spell caster. He uses those looks sparingly, thankfully, because I am most helpless when he binds me with them, when he locks me down with a look that I’d be able to see from across the world. Those are the times when I truly know I’d do anything for him, though usually what I do in the moment is cry. Even one tear is such a symbolic surrender that it’s enough to make his eyes at least dim a little, following the tear’s path or going for the spot on my neck he loves to claim.

  Mostly Damian likes to break me, to get me to crack so he can put me back together, if he chooses. Knowing he can choose is the spark that fires our relationship, that he can keep me whole, yet aching, or cracked open, raw, his, is the ultimate mental power trip. He likes to talk to me when he knows I can’t answer, at least, not with words. He gets his answer from the rest of me, from the way, when he feeds his fingers into my mouth, I open so wide I’m in awe as four fingers quickly invade my, truth be told, favorite hole. He probes my mouth like an explorer and grabs for my tongue, pinching, pressing, raking his short, smooth nails over it.

  Then his hand is covering my mouth, the other pinching my nose for a second. He is waiting for me to squirm, resist, struggle. Instead I stare back at him, will him to lie back down on top of me. He moves so he’s again leaning down on my bottom half, his arms pressing
my wrists into the bed, but there is far too much room between us, precious air he is letting separate us. He seems to get my message and mulls it over while we engage in a stare-down. Part of me wants to laugh, not at him, but with him, because this is, in a way, silly. I want to be as close as we can possibly be without melting into each other, and he wants me to surrender to him. I strain upward, pushing with my arms, gritting my teeth. I shut my eyes and summon from deep inside a true desire, or at least, the closest facsimile I can come up with, to escape.

  It’s only when I truly try to press back against him, straining muscles that rarely get used, from every recess of my body, that the power truly becomes something we are reckoning with. I’m too busy to think about smiling or laughing, only about winning, because if I fight back enough, Damian will give me what I really want. He’s fair that way. I can’t look at him or my own weaknesses will be my undoing. “Submit,” he tells me, his voice a low, seductive weapon, and I ball my hands into fists, then open them, curl and uncurl my toes, utilize any part of me that’s been spared his touch. I try to rock my hips back and forth, but he’s too heavy.

  I bare my lips, going totally feral with a silent snarl as his breath hits my forehead. He is bearing down and I only have so much left in me. His weight is again sinking into me and I just want to rush toward it. This time it’s not the crisp sheets that caress my face, but him. He wraps his arms around my head again and lays his face atop mine and instead of fighting back, I give in, sinking deeper and deeper, realizing yet again how much power I’ve given him. He must hear or feel my minuscule breaths because he again shifts so a hand is covering my mouth and I savor the warmth of his skin there, of him holding my breath, literally, in his hands. The pressure of his weight sinks me deeper into the bed; I’m sure there’ll be an indentation in the mattress when we get up.