by CD Reiss
“Lean against the edge.” He tapped the table. I did it. The height came right to my waist. “Now, bend.”
I did, getting my elbows under me. The paddle was right below my face. He crouched by my feet and fastened my ankles to the legs of the table. I had to stay on my toes to stay forward, creating a forward thrust to my posture.
When both were fastened, I got scared. I wasn’t supposed to be scared. I was supposed to be aroused in anticipation.
Chris came up and looked at me. “You all right?”
“Yeah.”
“We’re playing a game, Diana. It’s not more serious than that. And no matter how hard you say you want it, I don’t know you well enough to really get in there where it hurts.”
“Just don’t bore me, okay?”
He laughed again. I was torn in ten places. He wasn’t Adam, but he seemed all right. He was safer than my husband in a hundred ways, yet he was as dangerous as they came.
“Kiss that paddle,” he said. “And spread your arms out.”
I put my lips to the paddle and opened my arms. He pulled leather cuffs from under the table and tied down my hands.
“Now, if you want to stop, just say stop.”
“I can remember that.”
“Pick your head up.”
I did, and he slid the paddle out from under me.
“Back down.”
I put my forehead against the warm wood of the table. He tapped my ass with the paddle, and for the first time, I felt vulnerable and exposed. My heart pounded, and I took a deep breath.
“Count with me,” he said.
He tapped my bottom again.
“Count,” he said.
“You’re joking. I’m not even counting that.”
“Mister Adam Steinbeck has his hands full,” Chris said before thwacking me good and hard.
I grunted. “One.”
Again, harder. Whoosh-thwack
“Two.”
“You really meant it.”
“I got this.”
He hit the breath out of me, whoosh-thwack sending waves of pain from skin to core.
“Three,” I counted through my teeth.
“That’s your sweet spot, right there.”
Again, whoosh-thwack, a little lower. I let out a deep unh.
“Four.”
I wasn’t turned on sexually, but I was on fire with challenge. I could take this. I could take whatever he dished out.
I could finish. But that was all it was. He couldn’t break me. He couldn’t find me. He wasn’t my master, and I wasn’t his property. Not even for a minute. All he could do was test me.
On the wall above, a red light I hadn’t paid any attention to turned green.
“You’re doing great,” he said before he hit me again.
Multiple strokes made each one hurt a little more as fresh pain laid itself on top of old pain.
“Five.”
The next thwack came without a whoosh and the pain arrived out of cadence.
“Six.”
The sound of the last thwack hadn’t been a thwack at all, because it repeated itself. Deeper, more resonant, farther away.
Someone was pounding on the mirror.
“Well, well,” Chris said. “I suspect—”
“Don’t stop.”
Whoosh-thwack.
Harder. I curled my toes and strained against the cuffs. “Seven!”
“You sure?”
The pounding was accompanied by shouting, but it was all muffled a million miles away.
“Yes!”
Whoosh-thwack. Searing pain.
“Eight!”
Again. Tears shot from my eyes, but someone else was crying. Someone who didn’t care if she ever got to ten. A woman in the moment. I wasn’t that woman for the next stroke. I was the huntress, and completion was my prey.
The pounding on the mirror stopped. The green light on the wall went back to red. Had he gone away? Had it been someone else? Did he decide to stop trying to love me?
“Nine!”
So busy in my thoughts, the last stroke came as a surprise and I cried out.
“Ten.” It came out as a groan.
“Good girl.”
Chris laid the paddle down and came to the side of the table. Past my tears and the limitations of a head resting on a table, I couldn’t see much besides the full-sized boner under his trousers.
He undid a cuff then crouched to meet my eyes. “You’re really beautiful.”
“Thanks.”
He walked around the table again and undid my other cuff. “If it doesn’t work out with your husband, I’d really like to hurt you sometime.”
On the wall, the light went from red to green.
“I know where to find you.”
My wrist came free just as a crash deafened me. I twisted, wobbling to feet that had been paddled for ten strokes, to hear another crash as a garbage pail came through the two-way mirror, opening a three-foot-high hole.
Adam was on the other side of it.
My husband looked like a savage. Borderline feral with his jaw clenched and teeth showing. His jacket was open, exposing a chest that heaved with breath, stretching his shirt. His hair was askew, and his fists were clenched. The fire in his eyes was directed over my shoulder, at Chris, who I’d stupidly gotten involved in something that didn’t concern him.
“I asked him to,” I said.
“I’m going to kill him anyway.” Adam stepped through the hole in the mirror, swiping the cracked edge of the opening. A spray of broken glass clicked to the floor.
“She was lovely,” Chris taunted. “Too good to throw away.”
“Chris,” I said, turning slightly, “thank you, but can you go? Please?”
Chris backed away. Adam lunged at him in one fluid move. I put my hands on my husband’s chest and pushed as hard as I could. The moment when his body parted with my fingers was the moment I realized how sore my bottom was.
Chris grabbed his case and his paddle. He didn’t seem bothered at all. “Take care. And I mean that.”
He left. I pushed Adam as he tried to charge out the door after him.
“Back off,” I said.
Finally, he looked at me.
“Blame me,” I said.
“What were you thinking about?”
“My future. My life. What I want.”
“I won’t watch you become a whore.”
When rage surged from my glands, it bypassed my heart and mind, going directly down my right arm, which shot out and slapped his face with every bit of strength I had. His face moved with the velocity of the blow, but not enough. I swung again with the same force, but he grabbed my wrist mid-stroke.
“Diana.”
The rage wasn’t done flowing. It rerouted through my left hand, which caught him by surprise. I slapped him again. And again, when my left hand went to slap him a second time, he grabbed it midair until he was holding both of my arms up by the wrist.
I wasn’t done.
I’d been raised in privilege, but I was still a New Yorker. When I spit in his face, the aim was as perfect as the thrust, and a formidable mass of throat gunk landed right between his eyes.
“Stop it,” he growled though his teeth.
There were voices in the hall on the other side of the broken mirror.
“Fuck you, Steinbeck. Fuck you. You made me like this. You woke me up. You dragged me out of the darkness and now you don’t want me in the light. Well, fuck you.” I jerked away, and he let me go. “I don’t fit in that box anymore, and you don’t love me outside it. Fuck you. Either love me or set me free. And if you let me go, don’t think for a minute you can dictate how I live without you.”
He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face, and I took the opportunity to spin on my heel and walk to the back door, grabbing my coat and bag. I walked fast as I pushed my arms through the sleeves, into the back hall with the rug decorated with nudity. People looked at me, or I thoug
ht they did. I was a stranger, but for how long? Forever? Or was I already kin?
I was nothing. Nowhere, in the middle of a jump from one world to the next, midair, legs pumping at nothing above the chasm of in-between-ness. Neither-nor-ness. A yawning gape of indecision. A life without an identity.
The hall was a tunnel, soft and out of focus at the edges like a vintage portrait.
Only forward.
I had to make it to the other side. The other side of who I was. The other side of my life. The other side of the hall.
I clung to the million paths to success and came up with a chest full of anxiety. Go back to vanilla. Go full bore into kink. Get another Dom immediately. Remain faithful until death. Be present at the Cellar. Move to Tahiti.
Every path was a fantasy. A road not taken because it didn’t exist. I couldn’t decide what to do with my life based on how he’d react, but I couldn’t imagine doing anything without loving him.
He’d asked me for much more than I thought I could give. He’d asked me to love him when what awakened my love was the very thing that killed his love. There was no path to reconciliation. They weren’t just less traveled, knotty, bracken-blocked road. They’d been demolished by our crossed purposes, and we had so much work to do to find our way back. The thought of it made me tired.
Adam’s fingers hooked in my pocket, and when I turned, he looked so anxious I could feel the coil twisting around his lungs, squeezing out all the air. He was trying to get to the other end of something, but our paths were perpendicular. We’d cross once and never meet again.
“Please.” He took his hand from my pocket and held both out as if showing me he had nothing left to offer. “I love you.”
His words blocked my forward momentum, and the bucket of my heart filled with rage.
“Don’t you dare pull that trick. I’m over it, Adam. I’m over not knowing which end is up. I’m over letting you control me. I’m over being a puppy dog to your moods. I can’t play anymore. I’m done. Finished.”
He put his arms around my waist, his lips on my shoulder, then my chest, his arms around my thighs as he kneeled before me and held me still.
“I love you, Diana.”
“No, you don’t.”
In the hall of the Cellar, with his peers playing their parts as props on our stage, Adam knelt in front of me, hugging my thighs, wrapping me in his need.
“I’m sorry, Adam. It’s midnight. Day thirty. Time’s up.”
Adam
Chapter 38
The first time the garbage pail crashed into the glass, the window shattered like a windshield. A hole in the center webbed out in a series of tempered glass cracks that looked like her eye, ocean blue, trapped in a white net. I smashed it again, breaking the web.
I was supposed to know how far to push a sub before she broke, but I didn’t. I’d misjudged. I loved her. I knew I loved her. I didn’t know how to express it, but she knew. She knew.
She knew everything. She’d intuited it in my old bedroom, even before I digested it. The path closed behind me, and if I stopped, the inertia of the past would run me down.
I’d realized my error too late, because it was the first of so many.
Up to a point, I’d been honest with myself and Diana. That point had been in my grandparents’ reinvented porch in Sheepshead Bay. I’d gone to hell after that. Right to hell. I didn’t know what to tell her, because I was barely on speaking terms with myself. I kept my silence to buy time. If I’d bought enough, there wouldn’t have been lies, only delayed truths, but the mistake went from emotional to tactical. I’d made the mistake of not recognizing that my love had never left and a second mistake of not telling her.
I’d wanted to be sure. I didn’t want to lead her down a path she couldn’t finish walking without me.
When I saw her in that room with Chris, I broke.
I was jealous. When her toes curled and I could see the bottoms of her feet, I pounded the glass. Fuck the glass. It wasn’t stronger than I was. It wasn’t thick enough, tough enough. It was a thin layer of bullshit.
If I could just talk to her. Tell her I got it. I was jealous. I’d admit that. I’d cop to a ton of shit. Paddling Serena because I thought Diana didn’t even care. Stupid. I’d opened that door with my own actions. Me. My fault. All of it. I’d drop all my shit and apologize. I knew how it felt. And I’d tell her, for a goddamn second if I could, that the jealousy was bad but not the worst of it. I could handle jealousy. It was seeing her hurting herself that broke my heart. She was a new sub. An open wound. I’d let her down, and she did what any sub would do. She tried to find an answer, and for the love of fuck, there was no good end to this for her.
She was in that room because of my failures. She was trying to preserve her dignity with indignity.
As I stormed out of the dark room, I understood it all. I saw inside her because she was my sub, and she saw that I still loved her because of a bond I’d forged and ignored.
We were in sync. I got it. Now to destroy the thin layer of glass between us.
Heaving the pail, I hit the glass so hard my arms vibrated. It cracked into an eye-shape. I couldn’t let that cracked eye bore down on me for another second. I smashed the window again, and it came apart in a layered symphony of glass cracking, breaking, falling. A jagged hole opened from knee to chest height. I walked through it ready to connect with her. Ready to tell her I loved her. I’d always loved her. I’d fight for her.
“She was lovely,” Chris taunted. “Too good to throw away.”
The little fucker just had to poke me. I went in with the best intentions, and he’d picked at the scab like a toddler, flicking away the healing so the wound bled. I would have done something stupid if she hadn’t stopped me long enough to let him leave.
“What were you thinking about?” I asked as if I didn’t know. She was working on her own wounds.
“My future. My life. What I want.”
“I won’t watch you become a whore.”
I had more to say. Nicer things. How she didn’t have to hurt herself. That I’d take care of her. Take care of everything.
But I lost control. She was the sub. I was the Dom. For fuck’s sake, why did I lose control with her constantly?
She hit hard. I’d give her that.
“Diana,” I said as I held her wrist.
She wasn’t a lefty, but she hit like one. I held both her wrists. I could explain this. I could tell her what the fuck was happening if she’d just stop slapping me for a second. Then she spit in my face. I should have been enraged at the humiliation. Any Dom would have punished her hard or broken it off right there. But she was more than a sub at that moment, and I was less than her Dom.
She was the huntress, and I admired how she’d found a way to slap me without her hands.
“Stop it.” I maintained a deep control of my voice, but she wasn’t receptive. Couldn’t say I blamed her.
“Fuck you, Steinbeck. Fuck you. You made me like this. You woke me up. You dragged me out of the darkness, and now you don’t want me in the light. Well, fuck you.” She jerked her arms. I let her go and went for my handkerchief. “I don’t fit in that box anymore, and you don’t love me outside it. Fuck you. Either love me or set me free. And if you let me go, don’t think for a minute you can dictate how I live without you.”
I heard her. Every word. She’d said similar things before, but I hadn’t heard her the way I heard her then.
I opened my mouth to tell her, but in the moment I closed my eyes to wipe off the spit, she was gone.
I had to tell her the most important part first, but she was walking so fast and there were people everywhere. I hooked my finger in her pocket as if her clothes might accept me where her body wouldn’t.
“I love you.” I’d said those words before, but I was sure that was the first time I’d understood them.
“Don’t you dare pull that trick. I’m over it, Adam. I’m over not knowing which end is up. I’m over letting yo
u control me. I’m over being a puppy dog to your moods. I’m done. Finished.”
The moment when I crashed and all my resistance broke into sorrow, I had nothing to do. I didn’t have a plan to execute. The frustration of that note on the counter went from sharp as newly-broken quartz to smooth as a rock pounded by the sea for millennia.
Tell her. Tell her everything. Stay up all night picking it apart.
I just got on my knees and held her as if she was a buoy in a rising tide.
I had the same urgency to make it right, to do something, but I was powerless to do anything, and despair filled the space where determination had been. My attempts to love her kneeling form had worn away the need to get her back, and the intensity of my need to protect her pounded away at my ability to leave her.
Both. Neither. All.
She put her fingers in my hair as I knelt in front of her. I was going to have to get up, stand. Walk down the hall. Deal with the broken mirror and leaving my wife. I was going to have to get her back. Keep her. Turn my back on her. Let her go. Insist on possessing her. All of it at the same time.
I was exhausted. I needed her, and denying it had tapped me. I was empty. I had no will outside her anymore.
When she stepped away, I stood and walked briskly behind her without slowing down until we faced the closing elevator doors. It was full of people, and we had five floors to go. I couldn’t wait.
“Please,” I hissed through my teeth.
She didn’t answer. The doors slid open and more people got in. The floor got light as we began our descent.
“Stop playing around,” I said.
A Domme looked at me, then Diana. I didn’t know her and I didn’t give a shit.
“Not here,” Diana said, watching the numbers flicker on and off.
When the doors opened on the first floor she burst out and I rushed behind her. She and I burst into the cold, wet air of Gansevoort. Cabs waited in a line of coward yellow. She opened the door of one without looking at me. Panic gripped me when she sat and reached for the handle to close the door. I held it fast.
“What do you want?” I asked.
She started to answer, stopped herself, shut her mouth, moved her jaw a little as if she needed to chew and swallow what she had been about to say.
