by Lilia Moon
I grit my teeth. The problem here isn’t her. I’m having completely unrealistic expectations of a newbie, and I need to get my head out of my own ass and focused on hers. The only way she learns about trust is if I show her. I give her g-spot a nice, firm rub and then thrust into her ass a little harder. She’s got a micro-wiggle going on, moving the tiny bit my hands will allow to meet each thumb as it enters her.
Stupid trainer—I assumed a thumb in her ass would keep her uncomfortable for a lot longer than it did. She’s clearly messed around with at least some anal play, because she’s responsive as fuck and close enough to orgasm that it’s really tempting to ditch the main purpose of this scene and just give her what she’s begging for. I could. It wouldn’t be a total wimp-out. She’s done really well and most Doms would be happy to reward her and call it good.
But I’m not most Doms—and we’re in the dungeon for a reason.
I meet Rio’s eyes and nod. He’ll know what I want. He reaches for Shelley, who’s looking decidedly hot and bothered, and pulls her into his lap. He grabs a squirt of lube and cups her ass. She squeaks a little, which just makes both her men laugh.
I go back to my rhythm, alternating thrusts of my thumbs into Meghan’s slick holes. Her squirming is losing coherence. She’s close. She starts letting out a small whimper each time my thumb invades her ass, and Shelley helpfully sets up a companion whimper. A louder one.
I feel the exact moment Meghan remembers she has an audience. Her entire body freezes. I pause my thumbs, both deep inside her. Holding her. Giving her an anchor if she’s willing to use it.
Her eyes squeeze shut, and then she ratchets them open, at least the one I can see. The color drains from her face. A sub who had forgotten, at every level, that she had watchers.
I wait, keeping my breathing low and even. I need to give her a chance to react before I land in this.
Shelley winks at her and wiggles in Rio’s lap, trying to help.
Meghan finally breathes, but it’s shallow and shaky. The people gathered behind Shelley and her men on the couch are dead quiet, trying to look like supportive, appreciative wallpaper.
I move my thumbs a little, trying to jar loose the “yellow” that should have come out of her mouth the second she opened her eyes. I can see Harlan and Milo moving closer, both reading the scene as well as I am.
Meghan swallows hard—and then closes her eyes and turns her head away.
I growl. “Look at the people watching, sweetheart.” I have the strangest urge to be gentle right now, but that’s not what she fucking needs. She needs to face this, to know her Dom’s got her and to figure out that, deep inside her, she wants to be seen.
She slowly turns her head back around. Looks at Shelley. Angles her eyes down to look at me.
I see her make her decision.
Her legs are quaking and she’s barely breathing, but I can feel her intentionally trying to relax. She tips her ass into my thumb, pulling it deeper. Trying to get me to move again. Trying to get me to keep going—when not a molecule of her really wants me to.
Fuck. I call it, a hairsbreadth ahead of both Milo and Rio. “Red.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Quint
Using a safeword isn’t a failure. I tell my trainees that all the time, and I believe it down deep. Finding an edge you can’t handle just means you were brave enough to take a risk.
This one feels like failure. I should have stopped, should have given Meghan the oblivious, mind-bending orgasm she’d earned and not fucking pushed a greenie into a wall. Sometimes I’m way too fond of my own reputation as a hard-ass. I set my quivering sub down on the couch Shelley just vacated and take a couple of blankets from the half-dozen people holding them out. I want her in my lap, but until she’s giving me some fucking cues to read, that’s about my needs, not hers—and last time we played, she wanted space to process.
I tuck her in like a burrito, which is too damn easy, because she’s practically catatonic.
Ari puts two uncapped bottles of water on the coffee table, concern in her eyes that she makes very sure my sub doesn’t see. Shelley’s sitting quietly on a nearby chair with arnica gel, chocolate, and a look in her eyes that says if Meghan needs her Dom punched in the nose, there’s a willing volunteer.
I also know that she’ll be one of the first in line to read chapter and verse of the riot act on safewords as soon as my trainee can hear it. Shelley handles two Doms, and part of the way she does it is by being exquisitely clear when they’ve pushed her too far. I nod at her. If Meghan needs a friend after this, it’s good to know there are two hovering.
I shift my focus back to my sub. Her eyes are closed, but her breathing says she’s here with me—she’s just wishing she wasn’t. I rub my hand up and down her blanket-covered arm. “We need to talk, sweetheart. I can give you a little more time to be ready if you need it.”
She squints an eye open at me. “I want to go home.”
“That can happen. After we talk.” She doesn’t know her choices, so I need to give them to her. “You can talk to someone else if you’d rather, but we need to make sure you’re okay before you leave.”
Her eyes are still way too blank. “I’m fine.”
The others who were waiting fade into the woodwork. She’s chosen to walk this with me, and they’ll give us the privacy she needs. I put my fingers under her chin and get started. “Bullshit.”
She tries to shrink away from my touch, and then sighs. “I feel like a complete screw-up, okay? Clearly I’m not supposed to be here, so I’d like to fix that and go back to my plain, boring life.”
I’ll take attitude over vacant eyes any day. “Do you let brides walk out on their weddings if they trip on their way down the aisle?”
She gives me a mystified dirty look. “No.”
“Same deal here. Don’t throw all of this out because one part didn’t work. A lot of good things happened on that bench, and we’re going to talk about those. Right after we talk about why your Dom had to safeword out.”
She’s still not remotely happy to be here, but I have her attention now.
Good. I’m about to use really hard words and she needs to hear all of them. “Do you know what it’s called to do something sexual to a woman without her consent?”
She’s still confused.
I crouch down beside the couch so that our faces are only a hand-span apart. “After you saw Shelley and Rio—did you want me to keep going?”
She shakes her head slowly. “No.”
I push, because that’s the kind of asshole I am. “Then why did you try to get me to do just that?” I glare at her, because if she denies it, I’m going to totally lose my shit.
She swallows hard. “I thought it might be okay.”
I’m angry now. At me and at her and at the people-pleasing crap that just hit the wall. “So you decided it was better to let me do things to your body, things that you didn’t want me to do, rather than to disappoint me or the people watching.”
She’s looking sick now. Slapped around by my hard words.
I’m not done with them. “I called red because I’m not an abusive asshole. I do all kinds of crazy shit to my subs, but I require their absolute consent—and I didn’t have yours. You loved the slapper and you wanted my thumb in your ass even though it hurt, and it made me feel great to give you those things. But you forgot about the audience, and when you remembered them, instead of calling yellow or red and giving us a chance to deal, you decided the best way out was to let me be an abusive shit.”
There are tears in her eyes—and fire. “You knew. You knew to stop.”
I can feel my hands wanting to make fists. To punch walls. Which is a fucking dangerous place for a Dom to be. “I did. The next Dom might not. And if you let him abuse you because you didn’t use your safewords, that’s on you.” I grab her white chin in my hand. “That’s on you, Meghan. You can’t play here unless you can be an adult who can own your own choices, or you’ll to
tally fuck yourself up and anyone you play with.”
Her tears are a river now, one I don’t even think she’s noticed. “I’m sorry.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Meghan
He hit me with a crop yesterday and he was proud of me and happy to do it and said he’d do it again and leave marks. And today he’s horrified that I would have let him keep touching me when I didn’t really want him to anymore. I close my eyes and try to wrap my head around the enormity of that.
They do big, scary things here. Things that could easily be abuse. Things I saw as abuse when I stood on the outside with my judgmental eyes, looking in. The line is a very fine one—which means it needs to be shiny, bright, and strong.
And I’m the line. The only thing that makes this man different from an abuser is what I want. I open my eyes again, because we both need to hear me say this. “You give me that power. To decide whether what you do is abuse or not.”
He nods slowly, his gaze never leaving mine. “Yes. You decide that with your consent.”
And if my consent is wobbly or unclear or I don’t say it out loud, then I’ve just taken a good person who was trying to do something I wanted and thrown them into utter muck. I squirm my arms out of the blanket he’s wrapped me in, because under the hard look on his face is something I need to touch and hold and apologize to, and I’m just beginning to understand how profoundly. I put my totally shaking hand on his cheek. “I don’t think I realized in my head that my answer was actually no, but I knew it wasn’t yes, and I absolutely should have told you that. I’m so sorry. You told me that trust was really important, but I didn’t get why. Not until now. I screwed up, not you. This is not on you.”
He snorts, but something in his eyes has lightened. “You’re a brand-new sub and I’m your trainer. Trust me, those kicking boots belong on my ass too.”
I don’t want either of us being kicked. “I’m sorry.” I’m repeating myself, but it feels like it needs to be said about a million times. I tuck my hand back under the blanket.
His eyes keep getting softer. “Do you know why you did it?”
That part I do know. It’s something I do on a regular basis—it’s just never had consequences quite this big. “To not ruffle feathers. To keep everybody happy. I’m really good at smoothing things, and sometimes that means taking my needs out of the equation. Or what’s realistic.” I sigh and make a wry face. “Emily can tell you all about how often I do it at work.”
He looks so solemn. “You can’t please people in here, Meghan. Not unless you actually want to. The risks are too high.”
I sigh again, because I don’t know what else to do. “So I guess I flunked out, huh?”
He raises an eyebrow. “Hell no.”
I’m shivering, even all wrapped up in the blanket. “I don’t understand.”
“You screwed up.” He’s holding me, just with his eyes. “That happens all the damn time in here. You know how you screwed up, and we know some about why, and if you do it again, you won’t sit down for a year. Now we move on.”
I’m staring, but I don’t know how to stop. “What does that mean?”
“It means I’m still your trainer and you’re still my sub and we’re going to do lots of practice on when to use your safewords.”
I wiggle backward on the couch, because that doesn’t sound fun at all.
He puts a hand on my leg and holds me still. “It also means you need to make some choices about public scenes.”
I never want to be anywhere near another one again in my life.
He’s shaking his head, even as I think it. “No way, sweetheart. That’s the easy way out of this, and you didn’t pick a Dom who gives easy ways.”
I raise an eyebrow. “I didn’t pick you. You said you were my only choice.”
He grins. “I am.”
He’s not wrong about being a hard-ass. I sit up and take a sip of the water someone’s helpfully provided, trying to buy enough time to get my head straight. It’s a lost cause. “What are the not-easy ways out of this?”
He lifts up my legs and slides in beside me on the couch, setting my legs back down in his lap. “Two choices. You can make public scenes a hard limit. Or you can trust your Dom to work on this at a speed you can handle, even if you think you can’t.”
The last shoe drops. “You think that’s why I froze. Because I didn’t trust you.”
“No.” He shakes his head. “You froze because you opened your eyes and there were people watching you and getting off on your pleasure and I had a thumb up your ass, and all of that is totally foreign territory for you. You closed off and didn’t use your safewords because you didn’t trust me. And because you didn’t trust yourself.”
He’s painted a really vivid, really distracting picture of where we were right before everything went to hell. I swallow and shove it out of the way. “What would trust have looked like?”
His fingers on my cheek are so gentle. “You would have said ‘yellow.’ We would have held still for a bit while you figured out whether you needed to stop, or whether being watched was an edge you wanted to explore and you needed your Dom to help you do it.”
I close my eyes, because the shame is finding even deeper places to go. “I think I would have chosen to try.” I can feel the raging discomfort—and the desire. “I wimped out. I didn’t give either of us a chance.”
He smiles, and it smashes through the shame. “So you will next time.”
He means it. He believes I can get this right.
And there will be a next time.
Chapter Thirty
Quint
It’s not Harlan or Milo or Shelley waiting for me in Damon’s office. It’s Ari. She hands me the water I didn’t drink earlier and pulls me over to the couch. “How’s Meghan?”
That remains to be seen. “She went home. I texted Emily to check in on her.” Which she took pretty well, given that it’s midnight and I probably interrupted something fun. Or sleep.
Ari nods. She’s been on both ends of more midnight texts that she can probably count. “You helped put her back together.”
“Since I broke her, that would be my job.”
“You didn’t break her. You just let her have the hard landing that her shit needed.” She’s watching me carefully. “You know that, right?”
I sigh. “Yeah, I do. But it still didn’t feel good to let it happen.”
She leans forward and kisses my cheek. “Of course it didn’t. Was it worth it? Did she understand?”
“It’s always worth it, but yeah, she got it.”
Ari winces. “You used your really hard words, huh?”
I did, and I won’t apologize for them. “It’s what I do.”
She calmly takes a drink of my water.
I reclaim it and down half the bottle. “Where’s everyone else?”
Her lips twitch. “I chased them out. You already know what they’d tell you.”
Sometimes it’s good to hear things you already know. “They’d be telling me I did the right thing. That a sub who can’t use her safewords is toxic.”
She smiles wryly. “Yup. I don’t need to read you a speech you wrote.”
I co-wrote it. “So why are you here?”
She grins at me. “To make you tell the rest of the truth.”
I have no idea where this is going, but I’m sure I don’t like it. “Which is?”
Her grin morphs into a smirk. “You got pretty hot under the collar for a hard-ass trainer who deals with newbies making big mistakes every day of the week. Something else got you riled.”
I shake my head. “Like what, smartass?”
“Like you’re sweet on her.”
Shit. “You sound like Damon.”
She glares at me. “He figured it out first? Damn. I’m losing my touch.”
She isn’t losing anything. “I figured it out first. There’s some chemistry. Some attraction. I’m not interested.”
“Why the hell not?”
/>
Damon’s hidden his freaking stapler, so I can’t throw it at her head. “He asked the same thing. I’m happy here. I like my deal at the club, I like my life, and Meghan’s not looking to be my barmaid and dungeon buddy.”
Ari looks at me like I’m three-week-old gym socks trying to claim I don’t smell bad. “Have you asked her?”
“No. I’m her trainer. I wouldn’t let wires cross like that. And we both know she’s not barmaid material.”
“Have you learned nothing from what’s been going on around here lately? Damon and Emily? Harlan and Scorpio? Daniel and freaking Gabby?” Ari shakes her head. “Never mind, scratch that. Damon and Harlan were idiots. Daniel was actually pretty smart about seeing how he and Gabby might work.”
I raise an eyebrow, because if there’s anyone who shouldn’t be giving me grief about this, it’s the woman currently giving me grief. “So you expect to find your match in our next trainee class, do you?”
She meets my eyes—and gives a sigh and deflates. “No.”
I nod. “You and I, we play too hard to do that. We need someone with a lot of experience to match us so that we get what we need. Otherwise we end up being the caretakers.”
She smiles sadly. “And in a long-term relationship, we need to be able to let go too. To be the ones with needs that don’t always take second place.”
I wrap my arm around her shoulders, because I might not be looking for a long-term hook-up for exactly those reasons—but she is. “You’ll find him, babe. Or he’ll walk in the door and find you.”
She cuddles into my side. “This is about you. And giving Meghan a decent chance.”
I kiss the top of her head. “I heard the speech you gave Milo and Mattie. That’s not what this is. I’m not all gone over Meghan. She’s sexy and interesting and that’s making training a little bumpier than usual, but that’s okay. Once she’s safe, I’ll let her go find someone else to play with.”
