He slammed the dungeon door behind him, leaving us alone. I bent to pull Jax’s jeans back up, leaving them unbuckled and unzipped. I took his hand and led him upstairs to my bedroom. I pulled the blindfold off and finally met his eyes.
They were red with tears, with torture. I loved him, but I didn’t like him any more now than I did before.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
“Lay on your stomach. I’ll go get the ice and lotion.” There were ice-packs in the fridge. I grabbed two and then two bottles of lotion, unclear which to choose. I tapped his shoulder and showed them both to him. He pointed at the right one and then put his head back down on the bed, his arms hanging off the other side.
Having gotten this treatment, I knew all too well how important it was. I shimmied his jeans down to free his ass cheeks and then iced them, watching the clock before switching sides.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated.
I didn’t say anything.
“Anything you want, Miya. It’s yours.”
I grabbed the lotion, spending another ten minutes rubbing the bruising lotion into his swollen welts. They were atrocious. So raised and raw, they hurt my old wounds just to look at. He’d taken a cock in his mouth he didn’t want and wounds he would feel for days. Just like me.
I iced him once more than rubbed him deeply, spending a long time bringing friction and heat to his wounds. “Bath?”
“Together?”
“No. By yourself.”
He exhaled weakly, getting the hint that I wasn’t taking him back.
I poured soap and made sure the water was warm but not hot. I returned to him and helped him stand, sliding his jeans down his legs and helping him step out of them. He settled into the tub with a deep grateful moan. It wasn’t until he’d stretched his arms out, did I see the markings on his inner wrists. Two enflamed track marks in his veins.
I wanted to slap him. Maybe more time in the dungeon would have done him some good. More spankings, more punishment. I grabbed his chin roughly and pulled it up, meeting his shocked eyes. “I have about this much respect for you right now.” I held up my fingers to show how little I had for him. “What you did to me was disgusting. Those marks on your arms? Disgusting. The way you use pain as your only form of emotional understanding? Disgusting. You wanted to know where your addictions went. They went to your domination. That’s where it went. I don’t even want to touch you, Jaxon. But the fact that I still somehow love you, is even more fucked up. If you want me back, you’re going to have to fix yourself. You’re going to have to work for me. Give up your control until you figure out what it really means to have it. I love you, Jaxon, but I’ll never let you make me feel that way again. If you don’t think you can do that, then we’re never talking again. You go home and I’ll figure out where that is. I can’t—”
“I can do that. I will do that. Just don’t leave me.” He rose out of the water, but I pushed him back inside. “I’ll do whatever you want me to do.”
I sighed, sitting naked on the edge of the tub. “I can’t believe the places you’ve put me in.”
But love wouldn’t let me change my places, only my mind frame.
“I’m sorry.” His wet hand kneaded my back. It shook on me.
“Stop saying that.” I brought my knees to my chest. “Are you going through withdrawal?” I guessed.
His shaking hand settled on my waist. “It won’t be too bad. I only shot up two times, small amounts.”
“Where did you get it?”
“I have medical training. I can prescribe myself opiates.”
“What were you thinking?” I hissed, smacking his touch away. I hated opiates. “Why that drug?”
“Miya, please get in the tub with me.” His shaking hand pulled on mine. “It won’t happen again.”
“I don’t believe you!” I exploded. “I don’t believe any of this won’t happen again. The only way it won’t is if I leave you. But I don’t want to do that!” I cried, losing my cool. I slapped him as hard as I could. He took it, that’s what pissed me off the most. “Oh, you understand that, but not my fucking tears?”
He lifted his chin. “Make me feel your pain, my sweet Miya.”
He’d like that. Slap him so he understood. This time, I sat down on my hand, glaring at him through my tears. “You’re so sick and twisted. You didn’t even try to warn me. You let me fall in love with you. Let me give you my body. Let me take your beatings. Let me do all this your way. But your way was wrong! Samuel is a much better master than you.”
He closed his eyes and squeezed them shut.
“Do you really love me?”
“I have never loved anyone, Miya. Not even myself. Had strong attachments to Vega. But my brain and heart weren’t on the same page with her at every second. But the moment you walked into that classroom and met my eyes, blushing pink and being unable to stop smiling at me, I felt my black heart yearn for your light. I’m not sorry for that. Monster’s don’t warn their prey. We’re too smart for that.”
“I don’t believe you. You don’t love me. If you did, how could you do that to me? How!”
He flinched, opening his eyes. “Love doesn’t make you better. It shows all your flaws, but it doesn’t make you a better person. Fixing those flaws does.”
“So you’re going to fix your flaws? Just like that?”
Anger sparked in his gaze. “I will try.”
“Answer me. How could you do that to me?”
“Will you come home with me if I do?”
“You have no right to wager with me right now.”
He stood his ground, because he knew I had to know the answer.
“Fine!” I snapped. “But I’m living in the basement. I wouldn’t sleep with you right now for the best excuse in the world.”
“I did that to you because I had no choice.”
I waited for him to continue. “What are you talking about? You had no choice but to cheat on me?” My hand ached to slap him again. “Explain yourself, Jaxon. Or I’m not coming home with you.”
“She made me,” he shouted. “She couldn’t believe how I let you talk to me. I asked for her advice at lunch. I had every intention of doing what I said. Coming home to you. But I was so angry at you and she was so insistent. Rubbing my cock under the table with her foot as she went on and on and on ridiculing you. By the time she was done, I was nothing but anger. I refused her, though. I didn’t want to sleep with her. I only wanted you. But she knows my mind, Miya. She pulled her panties to the side in the back of her limo and my cock was inside of her before I could stop it. She didn’t give me time to think, whispering filthy sexy things in my ear. And she does this thing with her pussy that I loved. She threatened me!” he continued hastily when I got up in disgust. He grabbed my arm. “If I didn’t make you understand that I was your master, she’d tell you why I am the way I am. Somehow, cheating on you and making you taste her on my cock was better than you knowing the truth.” Terror seized him. His lips trembled and his grip on my wrist did as well. “You can forgive cheating, but you can’t forget the truth.”
I laughed in derision. “So you’re telling me that your hard cock—a cock that was hard because it wanted her—fucked her while she made you cum? And you forced yourself on me to protect your secret?” I leaned close. “How pathetic do you think I am?”
“I don’t think you’re pathetic at all. I think I am. And now she won. She has power over me and you no longer love me.”
I refused to correct him because that’s what he wanted.
“You have one option. I’ll give you time to think about it. If cheating was the worse option, then it must be horrible. If you want me to take you back, for things to be different, good, then you have to tell me what your secret is.”
He paled. White as a sheet. Even his eyes lost life. He turned away. “I’ll never tell you.”
I saw it then, why he cheated. Flight or fight made our minds turn off reason and only sought survival. It didn�
��t convince me. It only showed me how another facet of his mind worked.
“Then I’ll have to leave you for good.”
“Miya!” he roared, punching the water with his fist. “I’ll never let you.” He let his monster out. “I’ll follow you everywhere. Ruin your choices so I am your only one.”
“Is that why you got rid of my apartment?”
“Yes!” he hissed unapologetically. “I went into my savings and bought your scholarship from Samuel. He has no ties to you either. You want to go to college, you’ll need me.”
I wasn’t impressed by his threat. “Do not yell at me again.”
He held my gaze meanly, but he sat back and closed his disrespectful mouth anyway. “I’m sorry. I can’t tell you. You’ll never look at me the same. You’ll never think of me as a man again. Only a … victim.”
I took this by the reins and moved back down to sit. “I lived with a foster family from nine to twelve. Kolby and Mina. They were heroin addicts. I don’t think heroin made them monsters, but it made them less inclined to hide. We had another child in the house, older. They were too high to protect me from him. His name was Gus, and he molested me for three years straight.”
I saw the moment he truly undoubtedly saw my position.
“He never raped me, but he was only fourteen, and who knows how’d far he’d go when it stopped. Kolby OD’d and finally social services woke up. I never told them about Gus. They put me in a new home. An older woman with no sons. She didn’t like me one bit, but she never touched me either.”
He outstretched his arms, his tears mirroring mine. “Please come here.”
“I have never told anyone that, Jaxon. No one. I pushed it down and I don’t think about it. I refuse. I’m not even thinking about it now. I’m just talking. But now you know the most painful part of me. Do you only see a victim?”
He grabbed me by the waist and arm, bringing me down on his lap in the bath and holding me to his chest. “No, I see an incredibly strong persevering woman.”
“Is your past similar?” I whispered, bracing myself.
“Worse,” he whispered back, his shaking body holding mine.
I held him. “You’re a man to me, Jaxon. A gorgeous successful man. You’re a monster too, a dark hurting being. But you could never be a victim to me. Never. I’ve never thought of myself that way and I will never think of you that way either.”
We remained that way for a long time, our bodies pressed tightly together in the bath, before he gave in. “I will tell you, but not now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. I want to know you’re undeniably mine before I bare my soul to you.”
I let out a sigh of deep relief. “Take your time, as long as you tell me.”
If Vega knew, I would too. Otherwise, she’d still have power over him. I recalled the way she looked at him the first time we met, how she made no effort to meet me, but to kiss him in front of me. Inspiring his infidelity. Using his painful past as a weapon. She wanted him. But she’d never have him.
I put my lips over his ear. “If you ever cheat on me again, with Vega or anyone else, I will give my utter submission to Samuel. He’ll gladly take it. I’ll spend night after night with him inside of me, pretending it’s you. I’ll spend years letting him ruin me just so you won’t ever get me again.”
He didn’t say yes or no, because he’d never do that and I didn’t need his compliance.
“Then I guess we both have everything to lose, don’t we?” He kissed my neck. “Can we go home now?”
“I still don’t like you.” I rose off his body.
He gave me a small pained smile. “Correct me.”
I grabbed a towel and dried off. “I still love you.”
“Doesn’t matter if you like me then. I’ve never liked me and it’s never really made a difference.” He rose out of the water with a groan. “I’m throwing out all the canes in my chambers. I’d forgotten how brutal they were.”
“I want to see inside your chamber. Where is it?”
“Third story. I didn’t want to take you inside until I took your virginity. But I blew that, didn’t I?”
He wanted me to correct him again. I wouldn’t. “Where are your clothes you came in here with?”
“I don’t know. The fucker gave me an enema with hot water and gave me a pair of his jeans.” He came out of the tub with his back to me. There were large scabs on his lower back and shoulder in the shape of crescents.
I counted them all and then held my nails up to them. They were from the night he took my virginity. But eight marks didn’t fit and they were in the oddest places I’d never touched. Like at the bottom of his spine near his waist. Where dumb mistress sluts touched.
“I hate you,” I corrected, leaving him to get dressed. I put on clothes I found in my dresser, feeling guilty that Sam had done this all for no reason. I put on a pair of comfy jeans with my unsexy cotton panties and matching t-shirt bra. I put on a plain yellow shirt and plunged my university hoodie on over it, stuffing deodorant under my arms and putting my hair into a ponytail before he’d made his way out of the bathroom.
He struggled into the jeans he borrowed and laid on his stomach once he’d finished. I felt no sympathy for his pain. I scooped up my purse.
“Where are your things?”
“I didn’t come in with anything. It’s all still in my car. I feel sick.” He pushed to his feet, face pinched in pain.
“Drive yourself home. I’ll meet you there.”
“You’d better.” He stared into my eyes after he stood. “I’ll be waiting for you. I love you,” he said, sighing when I didn’t return the sentiment.
I turned Sam’s note over and wrote him one.
Sam, I love you for everything you did tonight and before tonight. I need you in my life.
Your Sweet XOXO
I left it on my pillow and then I went home.
17.
Jaxon was still in his car when I got home.
I didn’t wait for him. I went inside and straight for the basement, turning on lights. The last time I’d been down here I was so deep in my lust and false views. I saw clearly now, and it was simply a furnished basement. That’s it. A basement beneath a house while my ex-dom shuffled around upstairs.
I wore my panties and bra to bed, falling asleep quickly and staying that way until noon the next day. I showered, brushed my teeth, and got dressed, going upstairs once I’d done all that I could to put it off.
I found him upstairs on his stomach naked, his ass a flaming wounded battle scene. It was grotesque, making me think that Sam hadn’t hit me nearly as hard as he had Jaxon. Ten thick red and black lines marred his once perfect ass.
“Miya,” he moaned, turning his head to see me. His eyes showed how rough his night had been, the swollen red in his whites and the heaviness of his lids—he hadn’t slept. His pain would only get worse, I knew that. “Aspirin. Bathroom cabinet.”
I shook out four and filled the glass I grabbed off his nightstand. He swallowed them down and let the glass fall from his hand, turning his face away from me. I caught it just in time.
“You need to go to the hospital.” They looked like some of them had torn open.
“No. I can’t.” He buried his face in his pillow.
I felt helpless. I wasn’t someone who caused enough pain to understand how to heal it. I ransacked his medicine cabinet. There was a tube of analgesic antibiotic ointment. I got a bowl of ice from downstairs, along with some washcloths that I steamed in the microwave, and ran up before they could cool. I draped them over each ass cheek, his deep groan of relief sounding muffled from his pillow.
“Did you call into work today?” His cell wasn’t anywhere around and I’d seen his briefcase on the floor by the door while I was down there.
“Yes.”
Well, at least there was that. “Your TA must hate you.”
He grunted.
After the cloths cooled, I removed them and used the ointment. I rubbed it into each long th
ick line of welts. That seemed to relax him further. Once the analgesic ointment took effect, I used the ice, rubbing each cube into all ten of the wounds. I repeated the process twice more, running down each time to heat up the cloths. When I was done, he didn’t look any better, but his muscles had relaxed and he’d rose onto his elbows, his dark eyes regarding me unflinchingly.
“Thank you.”
“Hmm.” I crossed my legs and sat facing him. “Now what, Jaxon?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never done … this before. I want you the way I had you before Monday night. I want you to trust me again. To look at me the way you did, instead of how you’re looking at me now.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“One smile at a time?” But it sounded like a question, and I wasn’t in the mood to say yes or no. “Or perhaps one orgasm at a time?” He winked.
“How about no pain at a time? How about you don’t make me suffer for your love? How about we try that?” He really was clueless. I rolled off the bed in disgust. “Are you hungry?”
“No more pain, then. Unless it’s good. You like a little of it, Miya. Your pussy was soaking wet the first time I spanked you. You wanted to be tied down when we had sex. You took to this lifestyle, but you never took to the punishment part.”
“Then no punishments. Spank me before sex, but don’t whip me with a belt because I talked back to you.” I was so over his desire for complete control.
Giving him all my control last time backfired. This time I would keep some. Or at least choose when he got to have it.
“You’re disrespectful.” Even now, his nostrils flared.
But I wasn’t afraid of him anymore. “You deserve ten times more disrespect, Jaxon.”
“Am I no longer your master, Mistress Miya?” A small glimmer shone in his dark depths.
I put my hand on my hip. “You just love pain, don’t you?” It was so unsettling how much he wanted in his life. Even if it led to good, he craved it.
He looked down guiltily. “Old habits.”
Dark Master (Dark Masters Book 1) Page 14
