by CD Reiss
“I never said I didn’t care. Look at you,” he said. “So tough. But your breathing is shallow and your nipples are hard.”
“You’re leading me on,” I said. “You know I love you.”
“Maybe you don’t.” He stepped back. “Maybe you think you do. Pull your skirt up.”
I was powerless against him. I wanted him. I wanted to obey him. What he was doing was terrible, and I knew it. Yet my body rushed and tingled at his command.
I pulled up my skirt.
“Get on the desk.”
When I was sitting on the desk, he grabbed my ankles, pulling them up and out until I fell backward onto my hands. He jerked my knees open so he could see my soaked underwear.
“I realized yesterday that you couldn’t go back.” He opened my desk drawer and got out a pair of scissors. “There’s no more vanilla Diana.”
He hooked his finger on the crotch of my panties and snipped them open with the scissors.
“I won’t miss her,” he said, thrusting two fingers deep inside me before I could feel anything about what he said. “But I’m responsible for who she became. Probably the most desirable submissive in the city.” He ran his fingers along my front wall, circling the hard bundle of nerves he always knew where to find. “And the worst trained. Do you want to come?”
“Yes, sir.”
“The answer is, ‘If it pleases you.’”
“If it pleases you,” I gasped.
“It doesn’t.” He took his fingers out and laid them on my lower lip. “Clean these off.” He shoved them in my mouth, and I sucked my taste off them. “I need to teach you what to expect from a Dom and show you how you deserve to be treated.” He removed his fingers. “Now what do you say?”
I didn’t know the answer. I just looked at him with my tits and wet cunt open for him, wondering how to please this godly creature.
“You say, ‘Thank you.’”
“Thank you.”
“Good girl. Now.” He rummaged around my drawer. “How do you find anything in here?”
He plucked out two silver paper clips and what looked like a credit card but was a membership to some forgotten store.
He pulled a nipple taut and pinned the paper clip to it. “You’re going to repeat after me.” He clipped the other. The pain spoke directly to my pleasure. “Then you can come.”
“This is a reward?” I squeaked.
He slapped me between the legs with the card. I had to bite back a scream. It hurt like the best hurt. Like the ugliest package under the tree that exploded into sparkles and song when opened.
“The reward is, I’m going to train you. Period.” He slapped between my legs harder. I clenched my jaw. “This is not negotiable.”
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
Slap.
“Yes, sir.”
He tapped my clit with the card just a little. I was on the edge of ecstasy. I didn’t care if he loved me. Didn’t care if I got hurt. I wanted this drug right now, for as long as I could get it.
“Repeat after me. ‘You own me.’”
Tap. Tap.
“You own me.”
“My body is your toy.”
Slap.
“My body, oh God. My body is your toy.”
“Until the end of our term.” He drew the edge of the card over the length of my clit.
“Until… God. Until the end… oh…”
“Diana,” he said, his voice deep, rough, yet so sincere I had to look at him. “You’re beautiful like this. You’re perfect. I want to fuck the breath out of you. I want to hurt you. Mark you. I want you to beg me to stop and love it when I don’t.” His fingers slid into me again.
“What pleases you.” I couldn’t do more than squeak.
“Don’t come.” He reached behind me and swiped things off the desk. “Lie back and hold your legs open.”
I leaned back and put my hands behind my knees. He put his slick fingers in my ass, deep.
Looking at my cringing face, he said, “Does it hurt?”
“Yes.”
“What do you say?”
“Thank you?”
“That’s right.” With his other hand, he plucked the paper clips off my nipples and watched me closely.
I knew what was coming, and I knew he had it under control. I trusted him with my body if not my heart. I trusted him with my pain. The stinging came a second later. He bent away from me, digging his fingers in my ass and putting his tongue on my throbbing clit. When he sucked it gently, he put his other hand over my mouth.
Good thing. Because I was lost, and without that hand, my cries as the burning pain turned into a mind-bending orgasm would have brought in the whole office.
“Stop!” I gasped behind his hand.
He heard me. I knew he did, but he ignored me, licking and sucking, stretching my ass, bringing me to orgasm again until I couldn’t breathe and my cries dissolved into tears.
I gulped for air when he stopped and removed his fingers. He went into my bathroom. The water ran. I got up on my elbows when he returned with two hot cloth towels.
“I’m fine,” I said, but he picked me up and carried me to the couch.
“I know you’re fine.” He wiped my face, pressing the heat into my tear ducts. “I’m showing you how you should be treated.”
He put a towel on my sore nipples. The warmth soothed them. Then he wiped between my legs. I lay back and enjoyed it, closing my eyes against the hard office fluorescents.
“You’re going to make it worse,” I said. “Even if we don’t have sex. Real sex.”
“You may hate me when it’s done.”
“I can love you and hate you at the same time, you know.”
A short laugh of recognition escaped him. He must have felt the same when I left him. He might have even felt the same leaning on the couch in my office, shaking his watch down his wrist.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Ten.”
I shot up, bursting out of my post-orgasmic haze like a diver cutting into cold water. “I have to go. You have to go.” I wiggled out of my shredded underpants and pulled my skirt down. “Shoo.”
“Where are you going?”
I pulled my shirt and bra back over my breasts. “Meeting.”
His head tilted ever so slightly and his jaw tightened just enough. I had no intention of telling him where I was going or why. I didn’t want him to help or hinder the cause.
“I’m going uptown,” he said. “We can share a cab.”
“No, thanks.” I stood. The skirt was long enough to cover the fact that I wasn’t wearing underpants. I smoothed it down, and he took my hand.
“You can’t go out like that.”
“Yes, I can.”
“I forbid it.”
“Really?”
“Do you want me to train you or not? This…” He waved at me from knees to waist. “This falls under my oversight. You have to put something on under that skirt.”
“You shredded my underwear, first of all. So it’s your fault. And second, we haven’t negotiated the terms of my training.” I slung my bag on my shoulder. “This isn’t Montauk. I have plenty of options.”
He put up his finger and pointed right into me. “You want me to be the one to train you and you know it.”
I did know it. I knew it better than he did. But I wasn’t going to be a passive recipient of his demands, and I wasn’t just going to let him have full control of my future. The next two weeks were going to be his training as well as mine. He just didn’t know it yet.
I put my coat over my arm. “Send me the terms.”
Before he could answer, I walked out with my head high and tossed my sliced underpants into the office garbage pail.
Chapter 13
He didn’t follow me out, as far as I could see, though he was probably tracking my phone the same way I’d tracked his. I could remove myself from the list of devices on the account, but that would change the rules.
>
Once I got into the cab to downtown, I shut off my phone. That should make him fucking crazy. I felt pretty satisfied with myself, then sad we’d come to this impasse. I wasn’t sure this was any better than a long, ugly divorce. We were playing a difficult and intense game with unwritten rules. One we could both lose.
I missed Manhattan Adam. The man who loved me beyond all sense. The guy I didn’t love but whose company I enjoyed. His good sense, his easy humor, his daily, unintentional beauty gracing the loft and the office. The daily catching up, the quick exchange of advice about important and mundane things. I’d never felt so utterly alone as I did on that cab ride.
Manhattan Adam was my best friend, and I missed him.
The cab dropped me at Metropolis. Stefan sat at a two-seat table by the window, drawing in a black pad. He closed it when he saw me and pulled out my chair like a perfect gentleman. I didn’t know if the sadism belied the courtesy or the courtesy cleansed the sadism.
“I ordered for you,” he said with his Scandinavian accent. “I hope this is all right?”
“I understand it’s standard Dominant behavior.” I said it with a smile, so he seemed to take no offense.
“Thank you for meeting me. I wasn’t sure you got the note I left.”
I’d gotten the note. We need to talk. It had tipped Adam into his fear that I was inside a world that had broken him, even as he never admitted to being broken.
“Adam found it.”
“Was it a problem? I meant nothing by it.”
“Was that the first thing you meant nothing by?”
“Regarding you?” He shrugged. “Could be. I didn’t know he was so possessive with you.”
“I’m his wife.”
Soon to be ex-wife.
“All right, Mrs. Steinbeck.” He smirked, undaunted, unflappable. “I understand. But I come from a place where we talk about fucking very candidly. Frankly, I would have loved to fuck you. If I had permission, of course. I find you beautiful and interesting.” He put his napkin in his lap. “I’m not trying to seduce you.”
“You’re speaking frankly.”
“Exactly.” He leaned back to let the waiter put plates in front of us. He’d ordered me a pancetta tartine with goat cheese that looked wonderful.
“And how does Serena feel about you thinking another woman is beautiful and interesting?”
“Usually she would want to know the woman and watch me fuck her.” He pulled the toothpick out of his turkey sandwich and laid it on the side of his plate. “It’s worked very well for us, this arrangement. You and yours don’t have the same. I understand, of course. But it wasn’t clear in the beginning.”
I focused on my tartine, trying to wrangle crumbs and pancetta that didn’t break apart easily. I had so much to learn about Adam’s world and my own, where they intersected and what I was comfortable with. I wished he was there to help me with it.
My food went down in a lump. Wishes weren’t an alternate reality of a life not lived. They were tricks of the mind, fooling us into believing we had control.
“Is that what you wanted to talk to me about? In the note you left?”
“Yes and no.” He sipped his water, considered it, then me. I should have been uncomfortable, but I wasn’t. “I wanted to continue our conversation, but Serena and I hit a wall on the way home. Figuratively, of course.”
“No seat belts required?”
“My heart needed crash gear.”
I let out a short, surprised huh that I didn’t mean. He raised an eyebrow. No beating around the bush now.
“I thought you didn’t have a heart at all,” I said.
“Ouch.”
“I’m sorry. It doesn’t look like love. Not…”
Not when you do it that way. Not when it’s violent and demanding. Not when you’re playing with her like she’s an object.
Of course. That was what Adam was reacting to on some level. He should have known better, but the fact was, he didn’t. He couldn’t separate the violence of his dominance from the love it took to create it.
“Diana?”
“I remember what we were talking about. On the beach. You wanted insight into Serena. She was drifting away the way I drifted away, right? You wanted to ask me things you’d ask her.”
“Close enough.”
“I’ll tell you what I think. But I want you to do something for me.” My thoughts were still unformed. I had disconnected words for my feelings.
Risk.
Commit.
Me.
Separate.
Whole.
“Let’s hear it,” Stefan said.
“Sponsor me for the club.”
“Your Dominant is supposed to ask.”
“I know, and he will. Or he might. I don’t know. He’s not even…” mine. “Whatever. I need three members, and if you help with the application, I’ll get a head start.”
“What are you playing at, Mrs. Steinbeck?”
I couldn’t answer that because I was sure the game didn’t have a name. “Serena. Commit to her. Commit to her alone. No sharing. No group… whatever it is. Just her. See if that changes anything.”
“It won’t.”
“How are you so sure?”
“She demands more every time. She is limitless.”
He was in awe of her, that much was clear. What had scared Adam away made Stefan worship her. The ability to engage in sex so rough it looked and felt like rape had broken Adam’s confidence in his judgment. What she’d asked him to do had driven him to not only marry a vanilla woman, but keep his relationship so kink-free, he could convince himself he was a changed man.
“Have you reached your limit?”
He didn’t answer. He just pushed his food around until he gathered a forkful. “I do like you.” He put the food in his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. “You are, as they say, a real pistol.”
“She wants my husband. She told me as much. I’m invested in keeping you two together.”
“The feeling is mutual.”
“Sponsor me, and I’ll talk to her.”
His face betrayed nothing but doubt. His body told another story. He leaned forward, elbows on the table as if getting closer to me gave him hope. “What could you say? She’s willful. She won’t just take advice from you. Nothing personal, of course.”
“No offense taken. And I have no intention of giving her advice.”
“She won’t respond to threats.”
“Stefan. Come on. Threats don’t work with anyone. Not even masochists.”
He smiled from his perfect white teeth to his sparkling, devilish eyes. “At least not from other masochists.”
“Just trust me.”
“What’s your plan then?”
“Tell her the truth,” I said.
“I like this plan.”
“Will you sponsor me? Or do you need to see if I’m successful first?”
“I will honor the spirit of the favor. Eat now, would you? Adam will get on my case for not taking good care of you.”
We finished lunch while making small talk about Sweden, the endless night, New York snow, and the beauty of Montauk in the winter.
He walked me to a cab. “I want to apologize. For the note. If I’d known he’d act like a child, I wouldn’t have left it.”
“Don’t worry about it. If it wasn’t that, it would have been something else.”
He kissed my cheek and closed the door. Once the cab got moving, I turned on my phone.
If it hadn’t been for the note, would things have been different? Would we have stayed together? He’d come home from the city ready to settle into a life with me. Had that one thing not happened…
No.
I wasn’t stupid. If it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else. A request to go to the club. A call at an inopportune time. Anything. Adam wasn’t ready to love submissive Diana, and he would have found a way to run just as I would have found a way to chase.
The phone
connected to cellular. Adam’s half-hour-old texts buzzed.
—Three guidelines. All other
agreements in place, including
end date—
—No other Dominants —
—You are not to go to the Cellar—
—You’re at my command
24 hours a day unless
you’re working—
I sent mine without preamble, negotiation, or agreement.
—No sharing—
—I stay in the loft—
—Tell me everything. No lying.
No leaving stuff out—
I’d gone from pushing for four redlines to having only two that mattered.
My first was non-negotiable. Whether he thought he loved me or not, letting other people into our relationship wouldn’t help my cause. The second was me carving space for myself. And the third was the point of the whole thing. Without it, we had no chance.
—Agreed—
—Agreed—
And thus, he agreed to let me hope that I could fix the mess I’d made.
Chapter 14
I worked the rest of the afternoon and walked home after the sun set. The snow had almost finished melting, and the sound of cars passing and the rumble of the subway underground was cut with water dripping from rooftops and flowing through the street.
I was bone-tired. I could fall asleep to the rippling water or the car alarm. I was going to eat ice cream and watch back-to-back episodes of Law & Order until I couldn’t keep my eyes open.
I got the mail, took the elevator, walked down the hall until I got to the orange door of our… my loft.
A package sat in front of it. Four inches square. Brown paper tucked neatly around the edges. An envelope with the words Little Huntress printed on it rested on top.
Taking the box inside, I got my jacket off and barely set it on the hook before I ripped open the envelope. I stood in the foyer in my wet boots with the package tucked under my arm and the envelope on the floor.
Diana
You begin tonight.
