“I’m sorry,” I said. This reaction was worse than any I’d expected. I had hoped that he would yell. That we would fight. Not that he would retreat from me. “Can I tell you why?”
He didn’t say anything, and I took the silence as consent. “I think my relationship with Nick maybe gave me a warped view of D/s,” I said. “I think I thought, subconsciously, that I was a failure as a submissive if I used my safe word. That it was a badge of honour to push through.”
I took a deep breath. “Then, there was you. Things were great between us, but I’d still run because of what Andrea had said. You were nothing like Nick, and I didn’t see that. That night, when you showed up at the hospital, when you were there for me though I’d ignored your calls all week, I felt the need to atone for my actions. I felt like I used you that night. I had to show you that it mattered that you were there. That you mattered.”
“By not using your safe word?” he asked. His tone was completely without emotion, but his eyes were troubled. So filled with pain. I wanted to reach forward and hold him, but I didn’t think I could bear it if he pulled away.
He took a long moment to speak, and I could feel dread settle between my shoulders. “There was never anything to atone for,” he said.
It felt like someone had put a hand on my heart and squeezed hard. It hurt. Everything hurt, but I deserved every bit of this. My private act of atonement had put both of us in danger.
“I was wrong,” I said. “It was a really stressful time, and I made a mistake. I’ve used my safe words since then, and you know that. Can you forgive me?”
He just looked at me silently.
Fuck. I had known that this outcome was likely. What I had done – that act waltzed into a minefield of both our previous D/s relationships. I had thought that a good submissive wouldn’t use her safe word; a lesson from the time I was with Nick O’Malley. But I’d also thought a good Dominant would be able to magically intuit when I was close to needing a safe word. Which was crazy. Neither of us were mind-readers. If we didn’t communicate during sex, I could get hurt, and by extension, so could Patrick.
“Andrea and I were married for eight years. I never tried the zipper on her. Want to know why?”
The zipper. One of the things we’d done a few weeks ago. Clothespins on my body, with a string of twine between them. When I had convulsed in climax, Patrick had ripped the pins off my body in a fluid movement. I had balanced for an instant at the perfect point between pleasure and pain, before the waves of pulsing orgasm had tipped me towards pleasure. It was among the most intense sexual experiences I’d ever had. Even now, thinking about it, my pussy clenched in remembered arousal.
He continued. “Because I could never trust her to tell me if it was too much.”
“Do you trust me?” I had to ask.
It took him a while to reply. “In my head, yes. Absolutely.” He took a deep breath. “I’m not being rational. I understand that. You probably think I’m over-reacting.”
“I can sort of understand,” I said, my voice small. “I have my own minefields as well. Can you forgive me?” My palms were sweaty. I kept my gaze on my drink in front of me. What did it mean if he couldn’t forgive me? Would we break up? We hadn’t been dating long, and this was a serious breach of trust. For both of us.
He took a deep breath. “Yes,” he said. He wanted to say more, I could tell, but he didn’t. He kept his eyes on his drink for the longest amount of time, and we sat in silence. Finally, he looked at me. “You made a mistake,” he said. “Not even a major one, in the scheme of things, but you had no idea why what you did would bother me as much as it does.”
“But it does bother you,” I said. I didn’t phrase it as a question. He was clearly troubled by our conversation. The label on his beer bottle had been shredded to pieces, his fingernails worrying at it as he struggled to find words in this situation.
“Yes, it does bother me,” he said finally. “I have eight years of Andrea as precedent. Eight years where it was one step forward, two steps back. Eight years of swiftly eroding trust.”
I wanted to cry out that I was nothing like Andrea. I had used my safe words since that day. But if he didn’t see it, there was nothing I could say.
“Are we breaking up?” I thought I’d just ask. Might as well put it out there. If he was looking for a way out, I had just given him the words. I didn’t look at Patrick.
“Hey.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him walk over to me. He put his hand on my chin, and kissed me very softly. “I feel slightly betrayed. But I love you.” I noticed he didn’t assure me he wasn’t breaking up with me. That was still on the table then.
“I love you too,” I said, and I clung to him.
He gently disengaged himself from my death-grip. “Let’s give it some distance,” he said. “I’ll call you sometime next week. Let’s have dinner Friday?”
A whole week of not seeing Patrick. It was insane how much the idea of that hurt. I gave him the tiniest nod, and fought the urge to burst into tears.
He got to his feet and gazed down at me, his eyes troubled. “Lisa,” he said, his voice level. “I need some space right now. But I’m still your boyfriend. I’m always here for you. If you need something, please call me.”
“I’m not going to call you,” I said. “I already feel like I’m using you for emotional support.”
He rolled his eyes at me, lightening the mood just a little. “I see. That’s not okay somehow? You being there for me as I’ve fretted about Andrea and worried about Liam, that’s perfectly fine?”
I had no clever reply, so I kept quiet.
“Friday dinner. I’ll text you,” he said.
***
The thing about never being in a relationship? You have no idea how to tell the serious shit apart from the trivial shit. I mean, okay, I wasn’t an idiot. I could tell we were having a trivial squabble when we were talking about how many blankets we each needed in the middle of the night. But something like this?
I had no idea if we would survive this betrayal of trust.
Read on for an excerpt from Recovery (Doctor Dom Volume 5)!
Recovery (Doctor Dom Volume 5)
Text copyright © 2014 Tara Crescent
***The stunning conclusion to the Doctor Dom series is finally here! ***
We can remain haunted forever by the past.
Or we can move past it.
Is it finally time for recovery?
Note: This novella includes medical play, spankings, domination, graphic sexual scenes, and more.
Read on for a preview of Recovery (Doctor Dom Volume 5)…
***
Chapter 1
Patrick:
Are you supposed to run from your girlfriend in horror, because she had deliberately chosen one day to refrain from using her safe word? I had run. But through it all, I couldn’t fight free of the feeling that I was making a mistake.
I was probably being a jerk. A jackass. I wasn’t being fair to Lisa. But every time that weekend I reached for the phone to call her, I found that my hands were shaking.
The first thing I did when I got back from her place Friday night was to call my therapist, Jackie Blackburn. Jackie wouldn’t answer her phone, of course – it was late Friday night, and Jackie was very clear about boundaries. But she’d pick up her messages Monday morning. I left her a message pleading for a Monday slot – as early as she could fit me in. Because without my therapist’s cool voice of reason, I was afraid I was going to do something stupid; that I would do something to shatter this beautiful thing between Lisa and me. Not because I wanted to, because I didn’t. I wanted her more than I had ever wanted anyone before. I needed Lisa.
But I wasn’t going to pretend to myself that I was okay. There were too many shades of similarity between this incident and my relationship with Andrea, and my first, instinctive reaction was to run in fear.
It was a difficult couple of days. There wasn’t even the usual distraction of work. My
schedule left me clear on the weekend. The week ahead, I was just scheduled during the day, leaving my evenings free. Typical Murphy’s Law bullshit. I had all the spare time in the world when I wanted to be buried in work. I tried to read, to do other things, but my mind kept returning to Lisa.
I remember well the day I fell out of love with Andrea. Or maybe I don’t. Memory is a funny thing. It plays tricks on you. When you look back on your past, you shape your memories to form a narrative. A story, with a convenient start, a middle and an end. But of course, that’s not exactly how things play out in real time. At the moment we are living it, life is messy and chaotic and random. It’s only when we think back that we arrange our experiences to fit the story we wish to tell.
But still. When I think back, there is one incident that I will swear to my dying day that marked the beginning of the end for Andrea and me.
Andrea was a runner. She ran marathons and when she was in the mood to take it easy, she ran 10Ks. I wasn’t as dedicated a runner as she was – I’d never have the desire to run a marathon, but I’d occasionally join her for shorter runs.
Anyway. We played that night. I’d tied her up on our bed – legs splayed wide, ankles cuffed to the two corners of the bed. Arms cuffed as well, and tied to the headboard. I had flogged her on her inside thighs. Not particularly hard, my goal hadn’t been to cause pain. I’d hit her just hard enough to reach that place where every sensation was felt more deeply. Just hard enough so she was squealing and squirming with mingled pleasure and pain with each whistling stroke.
When we were done a few hours later, when we both lay slumped, our needs sated, I removed the cuffs around her ankles to find one of them raw and bleeding. She’d had a few blisters from her socks around her ankles, and the cuffs had aggravated them so much that they had burst. She must have been in incredible pain the entire time we were making love, but she hadn’t said anything.
It was so typical of Andrea. It was so in keeping with her fantasies about what a good submissive did or did not do that she hadn’t thought for one minute how I’d feel to see blood flowing from the woman I loved. Blood that I was responsible for causing. All she had needed to do was ask to be tied differently. But she would have viewed it as failure of some impossible standard that didn’t make sense in real life anyway.
I remembered watching her bleed and feeling like a heel because I caused it.
Through my childhood, I had felt responsible for being born, for causing my mother to forsake her dreams. Through my teenage years, I had felt responsible for not caring enough for the family business, for not being the heir my father wanted me to be. And that day, I had felt responsible for failing to ensure Andrea’s safety in a session.
It took me a long and substantial time in therapy to realize that I was responsible for none of those things. But feeling responsible for things was a bad habit of mine. In some ways, it made me a good Dominant. I would always be responsible for the safety of my submissive. But there was a fine line, and it was easy and possible to tip over the line to the other side, where nothing was left except self-loathing.
That day with Andrea – that day when she wouldn’t use her safe word to pause the session so she could be tied a different way – that day was the beginning of the end for the two of us.
What Lisa had done was relatively unimportant in the greater context of our relationship. An honest mistake, she’d called it, and I believed her. But she had had no business playing that night, worried as she was by her mother’s trip to the hospital. I should have known better as well, but I wanted so much to be with someone that would be responsible for their own well-being. I had ignored my instincts that night and punished her.
I had wanted Lisa to make that decision that night because Andrea had never made decisions. Doug had been right when he had expressed his disquiet about the way I thought of Lisa as the anti-Andrea.
The issue wasn’t really that she had decided not to use her safe word that night, though that was a pretty major breach of trust. The bigger issue was that she really shouldn’t have been playing any D/s games in the mental state she’d been in. And I had let her. I had failed just as much as she had or more. I had needed Lisa to prove to me that she wasn’t Andrea, and I had put her in an impossible spot.
I had thought I was finally ready to embark on another D/s relationship. After our conversation Friday, I wasn’t really sure of that anymore. I wasn’t sure of anything anymore.
I sat on my couch, in my empty house, feeling entirely alone, trying to figure out where to go from here.
Jackie really needed to have a spare slot on Monday.
Continue reading Lisa and Patrick’s story in Recovery (Doctor Dom Volume 5)
End Notes
Dear Reader,
I hope you enjoyed reading Relapse (Doctor Dom Volume 4) as much as I enjoyed writing it.
If you’d like to know when my next book comes out, please visit my website to sign up for my new release email alerts. I hope you’ll also leave a review with your thoughts on this book – I can’t wait to hear what you think of it!
Happy reading!
Tara Crescent
http://www.taracrescent.com
Books by Tara Crescent
BDSM Romance:
Teaching Maya
The House of Pain
The Professor’s Pet
BDSM & Medical Play:
Triage (Doctor Dom Volume 1)
Observation (Doctor Dom Volume 2)
Diagnosis (Doctor Dom Volume 3)
Relapse (Doctor Dom Volume 4)
Recovery (Doctor Dom Volume 5)
Doctor Dom Series Sequence One (Triage | Observation | Diagnosis)
BDSM Fantasy:
Magic Everywhere (Chronicles of Raan Volume 1)
Raina’s Wedding (Chronicles of Raan Volume 2)
Leila’s Training (Chronicles of Raan Volume 3)
Chronicles of Raan
Erotic Shorts:
The Alien, the Doctor and the Virgin (Adventures of Suzie and the Alien Volume 1)
The Alien Trains the Virgin (Adventures of Suzie and the Alien Volume 2)
The Alien, the Virgin and the Warrior Queen (Adventures of Suzie and the Alien Book 3)
Tentacle Monsters and the Virgin (Adventures of Suzie and the Alien Volume 4)
The Virgin Returns Home (Adventures of Suzie and the Alien Volume 5) – Coming July 2014!
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Relapse (Doctor Dom Volume 4) (A BDSM & Medical Play Novella) Page 11
