by Ashe Barker
“You don’t need to learn. You just need to fucking understand a simple instruction and Do. As. You’re. Told.” The words are forced out through his gritted teeth. “Was that too much, Eva? What part of ‘tell me when you want to stop’ was not entirely clear to you?”
His sarcasm is cutting, unkind and, in my view, unwarranted. I feel my temper start to kindle a little, fighting back. “Damn it, you mean, clever bastard.” Is that my voice? Is that me being so rude? Yes, apparently so. How odd… Still, I’m in now so I rush on.
“I’m new to all this, or had you forgotten? How was I to know how I might react to the shock of having some sadistic pig thrash me senseless with a bloody cane? I know now, thank you so very much for the educative experience. I’m so obliged to you. And you needn’t worry, I’ve learnt my lesson. I’ll get it right next time.” I am standing, leaning over his desk, shaking with anger, with defensive outrage at his callousness. I might see fit to blame me for this mess, but somewhat perversely I don’t see why he should.
The thing is, if I’m totally honest, I do blame myself. He did stop and check. He did remind me, repeatedly remind me, of the safe words. I could have called a halt. I could have slowed everything down, managed my pain better. I could have, should have gotten through it, and claimed my reward in the form of another mind-blowing erotic experience. Then we’d both have been out of our minds with delight. But I just let him beat me till I passed out. Nice one, Eva.
He shakes his head, slowly, sadly—his lips turned down, flattened in disappointment. He leans back, no longer aggressive and judgmental, just disillusioned. My flash of anger subsiding, I start to panic. I’ve seen that look of upcoming rejection before as those around me have realised I’m not for them, not like them, not one of them.
I sit, ready to grovel now, my short burst of self-defense exhausted. “Please, Nathan, can we—”
“If you can’t manage to use safe words to protect yourself, to protect me too, damn it, Eva, then you can’t play these games. It’s too dangerous. Sooner or later I’ll hurt you. Really hurt you. I could end up in jail, you in the hospital or the undertaker’s. So, it stops here.”
I am staring, the blood drains from my face, my head is swimming, spinning. “No. No. It can’t be. Another chance, surely, I deserve that. Everyone gets another chance…”
I realise I must have said it out loud as he answers me, more gently now, “It’s not about chances, Eva, it’s about keeping you safe. As the Dom that’s my responsibility, and I just can’t do it if you don’t tell me when you need me to stop. Otherwise I’m just shooting blind. Taking risks. Taking big risks with your safety. So no, Eva, no more chances.”
“You’re dumping me. Over this. It was your fault, and now you’re dumping me.” I know I sound hysterical, hyperventilating like a child on the verge of a tantrum, but the sheer agony of this heartless rejection is choking me. I need him. I need this. I need what he can teach me. I flinch under the sudden pain. The grief, the sense of loss is overwhelming. Unbearable. I am crying, my face in my hands, sobbing just as I did last night as I relived the bitter pain of losing my father. This is just the same, another bereavement, my heart is being torn from me. I love him, like I loved my father. But he’s leaving me anyway. Like my father did. I can’t bear it. I just can’t. I can’t even start to contemplate my future without him in it.
“I wouldn’t call it dumping you, Eva. I care about you…” Platitudes. Spare me, please!
Desperate, I’m ready to grovel, to plead. “Please, Nathan. Please don’t just send me back to Black Combe. Not yet. Let me try again.”
He has the grace to look uncomfortable, to shift in his chair as he picks up a slim file from the desk. “Ah, well it’s not that simple. About Black Combe… I’m not sure you can go back there either.”
The pain is sharp, physical, the pit of my stomach dropping away. My job. My new home. My new friends—all gone, gone because of this. Because he couldn’t keep his hands off me, because he was so determined to lay into me with a cane and I made one little mistake. No. It can’t be. I don’t believe this.
“Why?” I whisper, wide-eyed, bewildered in my grief and confusion.
He pushes the file across the desk to me. “Your certificates. Your birth certificate and your music degree. I had them checked out. They’re forgeries. Or one of them is. Which one is it, Eva?”
“What? What are you talking about?” I stare at him, astonished. “They’re both genuine. You can check.”
“I have checked. That’s the problem. The dates don’t add up.”
Ah, yes. The dates. I had hoped he wouldn’t notice, wouldn’t look too closely. More fool me. Of course, he would. Bloody attention to detail control freak. As my silence lengthens, he continues, explaining, “Your birth certificate—which seems genuine, incidentally, so I’m inclined to think the degree certificate is the fake—says Evangelica Byrne was born in Edinburgh in April 1990. Yes?” He glances at me for confirmation. I nod dumbly, obligingly.
“And this degree certificate says that Evangelica Byrne was awarded the BMus degree by King’s College London, in 2005. First class honors no less. Impressive, but not possible Eva. You were only fifteen in 2005.” He waits, tapping his long fingers on the sheet spread out in front of him.
I sit, my eyes fixed on my shaking hands, twisting them in my lap. I can explain. I can. He’ll think I’m a freak, but that’s no worse than the rubbish in his head now, what he thinks he knows about me. He thinks he’s caught me cheating, lying. And that’s why he wants to fire me from my job. At least I might be able to salvage that.
I look him in the eye. “Both documents are genuine.” With a deep breath, I continue, “I entered Kings in 2003, when I was thirteen. I got my first degree two years later, in 2005, when I was fifteen as you say.” I sit still, waiting for him to react. He shakes his head. He doesn’t believe me. Shit, I’ll need to prove it, and that could mean—will mean—all my cats out of their little bags.
“You’re a superb violinist, Eva, I don’t doubt you do have a degree in music. Why bother to forge one? You could play professionally…”
Yes, I could, I’ve turned down more offers than I can remember…
“But at fifteen—no university would even accept a student at that age, let alone have one graduating.”
I take a deep breath, square my shoulders and look him straight in the eye. “They do, if the student has an IQ of one hundred and eighty-one, seventeen GCSEs and counting and eight A levels. Do you want to check those certificates too?”
I have the intense satisfaction of seeing his jaw drop. For a few moments he seems truly speechless then he regroups a little.
“But why? Assuming it’s all true, what was it all for? I mean, three or four A levels makes sense, five even at a stretch. But eight? And how many GCSEs was it?”
“Seventeen. Then. I’ve picked up a few more since. I’ve been half expecting to be invited to the AQA exam board’s office Christmas party, I’m so well known there…” I break off, conscious that I sound like a total freak, and here I was trying to convince him I’m fairly normal.
“But why, Eva?” Far from reassuring him of my status as a normal person, Nathan’s expression is one of absolute bafflement. And I really have no convincing answer to his question. Still, I have to try.
“Because I could. And it’s what people like me do, sort of a hobby. I love to learn things, new things, so I’d go from subject to subject, reading, practicing, whatever was needed. I only ever need to read something once, and I remember it, absolutely. No need for revision or anything like that so it really doesn’t take that long. At school they kept on entering me for exams, and I kept on passing them. The challenge wasn’t so much to pass, it was more about getting the A* grades. My school also offered a degree level curriculum, so I had a head start. I did the equivalent of the first year of my degrees in maths and music while I was still there, but there comes a point when you just need to move on and get into a university…”
My voice trails away, and I’m still not totally convinced that he believes me. He is staring at me, then back at the documents in front of him. Time for my trump card. “Can I please borrow your iPad?” He slides it across the desk to me. I fire it up and go online, navigating quickly to my own Flickr account. I find the photo my proud mother took at my degree ceremony—me a lanky little teenager, dwarfed among the strapping twenty-somethings, all lining up to shake the chancellor’s hand. “That was me in 2005,” I say, passing back the iPad. He stares at the screen and mutters something sounding rather like ‘Fucking hell’. Then, ‘That investigator’s fired’.
I reach for the iPad, intending to close the thing down, but he has other ideas. Just as I knew he would, he Googles me. The most obvious way to find out the key facts in anyone’s life. And my key facts come up. And just keep on coming. And coming.
I watch his face, his eyes skimming down Google’s list of Evangelica Byrne mentions, of my accomplishments. It’s a long list. He scrolls down, keeps looking back to my face, one eyebrow quirked. Eventually he’s done, the iPad at last blank. Now he’s just gazing at me, his expression unreadable.
“Well, you are a lady of many, many talents it would seem, Miss Byrne. Except it’s not Miss Byrne, is it? It’s Dr Byrne. Am I right?”
I nod.
“Tell me. Tell me from the beginning. How did you get to do all, all this…?” He gestures at the small black screen, pressing the on switch to bring it all back up again.
“As I said, I have a high IQ. So, I’m a fast learner.”
“Lots of people are fast learners. Even I can be when it suits me.” Another inscrutable stare—I’m not sure if I’m being threatened or not. He goes on, once more reading down the Google list. “This is more than just being quick on the uptake. Don’t hedge with me, Eva. Tell me about yourself. All of it. Now, please.”
“Okay.” I take another deep breath, close my eyes to gather my thoughts, and work out just where to begin. He waits. He’s patient and not going anywhere. So, at last, I start.
“I am, was, what the educationalists would call ‘profoundly gifted’. That means I have an IQ of more than one hundred and eighty.”
He interrupts me. “You said one hundred and eighty-one. And I’m guessing that makes you some sort of fucking genius? What about the average person, someone like me? What would their score be?”
“I’ve no idea about you. Actually, you don’t seem at all average to me.”
“Are you insulting my penis again, Dr Byrne?”
“God, no!” My head snaps up, I meet his eyes and realise he is smiling, joking with me. He seems to have an unerring gift for knowing just when, and how, to lighten the mood—help me to relax, to get my story out. It works, and I continue, feeling slightly more confident now. “The average score is around one hundred, the normal range is about twenty points above or below. Ninety percent of people fall into that range.”
“So at one hundred and eighty plus you’re well outside the range of ‘normal’?”
“Yes. My score is one hundred and eighty-one.” I say it quietly, and want to explain, justify myself. “I don’t normally tell anyone that—it seems, well, it seems like boasting. But you did ask me. And the truth is it’s not always that great to be so far outside of the ‘normal’.”
“Oh? How’s that then? I can see being a slow learner would be a struggle. So how was it for you, Eva?”
“Starting school was awful. I was so bored. I got into lots of trouble, even got expelled—permanently excluded in the education jargon—for being a troublemaker, disruptive.”
“Miss Byrne, disruptive. Now I’d really like to have seen that.” His gentle smile is encouraging. Maybe he’ll listen, accept me, even after all that’s happened. Hoping, daring to let myself think this whole pile of crap might turn out to be okay after all, I continue.
“My mother was brilliant. She knew what was wrong with me, or right with me, depending on how you see it. She knew what I needed. She’d seen me learning to read, all by myself, before I was three. She kept asking my schools to have me tested, but no one would, they just thought I was a nasty, attention-seeking little tearaway and she was a doting mother who could see no wrong in me. Maybe she was, but she was also spot on about my ‘special’ educational needs. My dad’s RAF career meant we moved a lot and schools just thought I was reacting to that, never getting settled anywhere. It was only after he died, when we moved to London and stayed put at last, that my mother paid for me to be assessed by a private school specializing in gifted children. They repeated the tests three times before they accepted my scores. Then they offered me a place, on a scholarship because I was a ‘special case’. From then on, I was fast-tracked through the education system. I started taking GCSEs at around nine years old, passing them, obviously, and then A levels. By the time I was thirteen I had armfuls of GCSEs and A levels. My school said I was wasting my time there and I needed to move on. To university.”
“How did you cope, at university so young? How did you make friends, take care of yourself?” Typical Nathan, straight to the heart of the issue.
“I didn’t. That’s why I’m the screwed up mess I am now.” At his puzzled look I press on, anxious now to get all this out. “I went to universities in London so I could live at home, like any other thirteen-year-old.” I noted his eyebrow quirk again at the mention of universities, plural, but we’d come back to that. “I was so much younger than the other students, I had nothing in common with them. I couldn’t go to bars. I had no interest or talent for sport. I hadn’t even started my periods so how could I relate to the other girls, much less the boys. Actually, I was terrified of the boys. My mother always warned me to stay out of their way, that they were dangerous and would take advantage of me because I was so young. Looking back, I understand her concerns, but I got it fixed in my head that boys, men, were to be avoided. So, I avoided them. In fact, the other students, males and females, were generally kind enough, when they took any notice of me at all. But mostly I was the little nerd at the back. The strange, brainy kid, who went home every day for her tea.”
“What about other kids your own age? Kids at your school?”
“At my special school I was okay, I did make some friends there, although the catchment for the school was so wide—most of southern England—that I had no friends living near me, no one to socialize with outside of school. So, I never did socialize. And in any case the friends I had were left behind when I went to university. I’ve had acquaintances since, colleagues, but no friends. Until now. At Black Combe. That’s partly why I so want to keep my job. Please.”
“The jury’s still out as far as your job with me’s concerned. I want to hear the rest of this then I’ll decide. Please, continue.” He stands, walks around me to the table, squeezing my shoulder as he passes me. I take that as an encouraging sign and listen to him pouring coffee, before he brings me a cup. Instead of sitting back behind his desk, though, he grabs a chair from the meeting table then turns it to face me. He sits down just a foot in front of me. Feeling more vulnerable, more exposed than I have during any of our sexual or Dom-sub encounters, I sit still, staring at my hands. I can feel his eyes boring into me as he considers. Then taking my hands in his, he squeezes them until I look up at him. He smiles.
“I can see this is difficult for you. Take your time. I’m listening.”
I close my eyes briefly, starting to relax—slightly—and I rush on before he thinks better of it. Best to get my academic CV dumped on the table, so to speak, and let him pick over it. Work out just what sort of a weird bitch he’s got mixed up with.
“I studied music at King’s because I loved it. It was easy, light relief really. But music was the second string in my bow if you’ll pardon the pun. Really, I was a mathematician. I got the first class BMus, but I also got a first in Mathematics the same year.” His eyebrows shoot up again—apparently a mathematician is to be viewed with even more respect than a gifted violi
nist. “The two sets of skills are often found together,” I hasten to explain, somehow wanting to reassure him that I’m not that special, not that odd. Not really. “Then I moved to University College London, did an MSc in Mathematics and Modern Languages. I was awarded that in 2008, when I was eighteen.”
“So, a musician, a mathematician and a linguist. There really is no end to your remarkable talents, Miss Byrne. Sorry, Dr Byrne.”
Sarcasm? But he is smiling. His eyes are smiling. He really doesn’t mind. “So, what did you do from 2008 to now?”
“I went back to King’s, this time into the Faculty of Modern Languages. I got a research fellowship and did my PhD in Linguistics. Then in 2010 I was offered a research fellowship at Oxford, St Hilda’s College, and that’s where I was until a few weeks ago.”
“So, Dr Byrne, it sounds as though you’ve had a glittering academic career. Why did you leave?”
Ah, the six million dollar question. The one I still struggle to answer. But I’ll try. For Nathan, I’ll try.
“I wanted more in my life than just academic institutions. I’ve never been anywhere else, done anything else except learn, study, research and occasionally teach. I like to teach, but I don’t get to do it that often…”
My voice trails away. The next bit is the hard part. This is where I become vulnerable again, my emotions and needs laid bare. I reflect on the irony—I’ve already laid my body bare before Nathan, and on balance he’s looked after it pretty well. Apart from that one mishap, for which I do accept some measure of responsibility. But emotional fulfilment is a whole new ball game. Men are not good at emotional stuff, at the touchy feely stuff—or so I understand. But hey, who am I to talk?
“I… Growing up I got the education I needed, eventually. Some of it. Most of it. Intellectually I matured, and I am now a respected academic in my field.” Well, several fields really.
“Physically too. I may not have much in the way of curves and sex appeal, but I am a normal woman, everything works fine. Even my libido, as I now know.”
