Never Have I Ever

by Clearwing, August

  My bra was next. I reached behind my back and unclasped it, then slowly took it from my shoulders and dropped it in the pile beside me. Now I truly was naked. Cool air braced against me. My nervousness only fueled the mixed messages my body sent me. The nipples of my firm breasts grew hard at both the humiliation of standing naked in front of a complete stranger as well as the temperature in the room.

  Fuck. How was this turning me on? I spent the past several hours terrified out of my mind speculating on what was going to happen. I would even go so far as to say I was angry with Noah for this. How was the line between unadulterated trepidation and pure desire drawn so thin?

  “Hands at your sides. And stop looking so ashamed,” Master Cartwright commanded. “If you don’t lift your head up I’m going to bring out the posture collar to make you keep it that way.”

  My stance was immediately corrected so I was looking, however uncomfortably, at him.

  “I can see why he likes you, slut,” he crooned into my ear. “However scared you may be right now, you’re still obedient. You get excited from exposing yourself, from the utter helplessness, don’t you?”

  I wanted to keep some semblance of pride, but he was right. I found myself nodding with a hint of shame. “Yes, sir.”

  “Kneel,” he said without hesitation.

  As I followed through and dropped to my knees, he walked over to the chair and took a seat there. He merely sat there for a long while, as my knees ground into the hardwood floor and my skin crawled with gooseflesh from the chill in the air, and stare at me.

  After what felt like an hour but was probably no more than three minutes, Master Cartwright leaned in with his forearms on his knees and clasped his hands in front of him. “Put your clothes back on. You may go.”

  “Wait. What?” I asked, completely bewildered. “Just like that?”

  He nodded. “Just like that.”

  The statement was the absolute last thing I ever expected from the day. Especially so early in. “But I thought—”

  He lunged out of the chair and stalked toward me. “You thought what? You thought I was going to fuck you? You thought you were going to play the whore today for your Dom while he was away?”

  “With the contract and the mention of training and—and medical papers and everything—” I began to stutter, at a loss for what to say. It was a brutal tease and bordering on humiliation and it turned me on so much that the deception began to broil anger I didn’t realize I possessed. How cruel was this tease! I heaved myself to my feet. When he reached me a second later, I stared him down in defiance. “Yeah! Yeah, I thought you were going to fuck me! Isn’t that why I’m here? Isn’t that what Noah wanted?”

  Master Cartwright seized me by my hair and pulled my head back until I gasped with pain. “The beauty of this,” he began, his voice raspy and constrained in his throat, “is that you don’t get to choose who fucks you. You don’t get to choose where. You don’t get to choose when or how. Your body belongs to someone else now. You gave it away. You don’t get to choose. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  He pressed himself against me and shifted his hand to get a better grip on my hair. With only the thin fabric of his pants between us the prominence of his erection was unabashedly in attendance. In the end, as much as his body harbored the same base desires as mine, he couldn’t choose either.

  “Yes, sir,” I said breathlessly.

  After five solid heartbeats that seemed to last forever he released me and stepped back. That’s when it clicked. All the right puzzle pieces landed in place and I understood why Noah sent me to this place. All of that worrying, all of that inner turmoil and doubt… I had to cast it out. In a way, it was setting me free. All of the words that Master Cartwright said to me in our short span together drew to an apex at the very notion of trust. I needed to discover the ability to just let go of the proverbial railing and fall and know that Noah would never ask anything of me if it endangered me or misused my inherent trust of him. Noah had said as much. Experiencing it in practice was a whole different animal entirely. It sort of made me sick at the exact same time that it reassured me.

  I backed away from Master Cartwright and silently dressed myself. He told me not to worry about the toys for the rest of the day, and supplied me with a cloth bag to carry them discreetly out of the building in. Thank God for small favors. When we exited the back room, I thanked God a second time because his afternoon class was already beginning to filter in. He was a convincing liar; that much was true. Either that or I was stupendously gullible. I really had believed him when he said he cancelled his classes for the training session.

  He stopped me before I got too far away from the door frame and said, “I meant it when I told you that Noah is serious about you. Please don’t forget that.”

  Even if he was serious about me, and of course I was quite serious about him, a part of me was still angry with him about the whole thing. Good intentions aside, Noah managed to fuck with my head in a way no other man could even begin to be capable of. More than anything I wondered if I was just pissed that I allowed myself to trust anyone that much. That I let my defenses down. He didn’t hurt me, no. It was the principle of the thing; the fact that I was letting someone else past my walls for the first time in years.

  I nodded subtly to Master Cartwright. “I believe you.”

  He went on, “I don’t claim to be prophetic, but I can see a lot of good coming from you, duckling. All relationships have cracks in their foundations whether the people in them see those cracks or not. Don’t seek those cracks out. When they show themselves, take care of them. Never let them split you apart. You two are going to save one another on more occasions than you think.”

  I felt the sudden, almost comical urge to bow to him as if he were some Japanese Sensei offering the wisdom of the Universe to his student. That urge, however, I kept at bay.

  “Thank you, Master Cartwright.”

  Having, in one piece and with little damage incurred, exited the Twilight Zone, I sought refuge in my car. It was a brief and suitable minute to have myself a solid freaking out. Outwardly, I was good with composure. Few people could read my emotions based on my face. Even as I pulled down the visor and stared at myself in the mirror I could barely tell what I was thinking. One second I thought one thing and the next a thought flitted through my mind which completely contradicted the previous.

  All in all, I decided I needed to make up my damned mind.

  Stress, the looming shadow of finals, and the best experiences with sex of my life all congealed into this tight ball of heaviness that I couldn’t quite describe beyond the fact that it was indeed a tight ball of heaviness. In the week that he was not around, I incurred more questions about Noah than answers. Well, he did tell me he was complicated.

  Screw it, I thought. It was Sunday. What could I be interrupting of any importance on a Sunday? I fished my phone from my bag and shot off the only text I could think to send to Noah: That was a complete mind-fuck.

  I sighed in aggravation, flipped my visor up and made my way home. I stopped trying to make sense of life for the moment. A cup of coffee, some final points of study for exams and a bubble bath were the only things that ranked on my list of Shit to Accomplish for the remainder of the day.

  The monaural ringtone of my cell phone sprang from my purse when I shut the door to my car at my apartment complex. The call was from Noah. In retrospect I realized that it was near eleven o’clock at night in Paris.

  “Hello?” I answered.

  “You went through with it.”

  “You sound surprised,” I said smugly.

  He paused. “I am a bit.”

  I laughed. “What did you expect? I was scared out of my mind, but then I remembered that I’m trying to step out of my comfort zone rather than retreat further into it.”

  As I slid the key into the lock of my front door, I noticed a legal-sized envelope nosing its way out of the crack in the door frame. ‘Ms. Piper Minogue’ was
written in neat cursive on the front. The envelope was light and resembled nothing at all like what a legal document should be sealed in. I wasn’t sure I could take many more surprises in one day.

  “I’m proud of you,” said Noah. “Howard told me you were pretty upset when you left, though.”

  “I am,” I replied. My voice was distant as I stared at the envelope in my hand. Once I entered my apartment, I shook myself from it in favor for the conversation. “I mean, I was. I think. I’m not sure exactly what I feel right now.”

  “Well, you answered my call so at least you are still speaking to me after I put you through that.”

  My purse and bag were set on the island in the kitchen along with the sealed envelope. I hopped up onto the counter and let my legs dangle over the edge. “Because I get it,” I said. “I get why you did it. I was mad. I was furious with you, actually. But it didn’t take me long to figure out why you did it. And, for the record, I trust you. It just sort of… scrambled my brain.”

  “What can I do to unscramble it?”

  There were so many questions I wanted answers to. Those answers would undoubtedly put my mind to rest. The problem was that asking those sorts of questions over the phone happened to be as impersonal as the conversation could possibly get.

  “Just come back soon, yeah? For some reason the whole world’s gone mad without you.”

  “I’ll do my best, sweetness. We’ll talk in person when I get back.”

  “Thank you, Sir.”

  We ended the call and I was left alone in a darkened apartment free to study to my heart’s content. The little envelope, an afterthought compared to the brief discussion, now waved up at me in its bright white life. I took it and turned it over in my hands a few times before breaking the seal. There was no return address, no stamp, and even my own address was missing. Only my name graced the front of it. The contents, one single piece of paper, slid out with ease.

  Disbelief consumed me as it became apparent that the rectangular piece of paper was a check.

  Because nobody ever looks at the sender of a check before they look at the amount—and I was no exception to this rule—I first saw that it had been made out to me in an amount that no human being should ever be able to comfortably write without the fear of not only going bankrupt, but working as an indentured servant for the remainder of their natural lives.

  My breath caught in my throat. I stared at it, unable to fix my sight on any other part of it for a solid minute. Then my sight roved to the person from whom the check was addressed, becoming even more surprised when the name Ethan Wellington registered in my vision.

  What followed was the catch. The memo line on the bottom left corner of the check read:

  For walking away.

  He really couldn’t have made the gesture any more obvious than that. Ethan and I had met one time for a grand total of five minutes. We exchanged a dozen words between us. That he disapproved of me, even hated me from one solitary meeting was no secret by my account. The message of this single piece of paper had been received loud and clear.

  In what manner Ethan perceived me as a threat was the real question. One possible answer was that he thought me some sort of gold digger who latched onto his brother for no other reason than money. In fact, the act of sending me this audacious gesture may have well been a bid to prove that very point.

  How callow did he assume I was? Hell, how did he even know where I lived? Then again, money could buy a lot of things. If not money then a quick Google search could have given me away.

  Either way, the money had nothing to do with it. Provided Ethan did his digging thoroughly he would’ve noted my employer, my education, and that while I happened to be living the life of a poor college student at the moment, it was only because the location of the apartment complex I chose was a good half-way mark between the observatory and school and that I wasn’t at all the sort of person to waste my savings on an oversized home I doubted I’d be living in after I wrapped up my Master’s.

  Of one thing I was exceedingly confident: I wouldn’t be bought. This little piece of paper’s existence insulted me to my very core. Coercion and bribery ranked down among the most debasing and cowardly of actions for the individual on the offending end in my eyes.

  I tore it in half, the paper shredding with ease in one satisfying flick of my wrist. Before I could follow through with my thoughts to discard it, I jotted down Ethan’s address onto a new envelope.

  On the back of one half of the check I wrote, All due respect… and on the back of the other half the message was completed, I don’t measure the character of a person based on the contents of their wallet.

  I sealed the pieces in the new envelope, slapped a stamp on it, and took it post haste to the drop box by the front office to see it off.

  Fancy that, my mind had been made up.

  {CHAPTER ELEVEN}

  Between the nine hour time differential, the looming dread of three exams that plainly meant the difference between my success and failure in my professional life, my PMS, and Noah’s meetings, we barely spoke over the course of the next week. In all actuality the lack of conversation was probably for the best. Had we any amount of time on the phone together it may very well have ended in me flipping out and curling into a tight ball on my bed with a king-sized bag of M&M’s while I clutched my cat to me until she suffocated from the attention and lamenting my choice of becoming a fucking scientist in the first place.

  AAGGH!! FINALS!

  Upon reexamination of that thought, it might have been better if I’d spoken to Noah. Maybe he could’ve calmed my ass down. Anya was certainly failing in her duty as my best friend through it all. She told me that one of her other psych-related friends needed help cramming and she’d rather spend the time on tutoring someone in her field than attempting to wrap her brain around physics flash cards. It didn’t matter in the end. I wasn’t setting myself up for failure. Rather, I was stressed just enough so that the pressure was on hard. As it turned out, the pressure would make me work more efficiently. I knew what I was doing; I just had to convince myself that I was capable of winning.

  At his request, before and after each final I sent a text to Noah. This was practically the only interaction we had with one another. He responded with words of encouragement, saying he believed in me, saying not to fret over it and only focus on what I could control. What I could control was the knowledge packed in my brain. So many thoughts. Too many to keep inside my head. They spilled out of me in the form of short essays and multiple choice sheets, but when they left my hand to crawl across the pages of test papers they turned right around and crammed themselves back into my mind.

  That was how it should’ve been, though. I didn’t study the material only to regurgitate what I learned onto an exam and forget it. It was supposed to stay in my brain. And it did just that. For six hours over the course of five days I looked forward to reading the next text message I received from him, just to hear once more that he knew I could pass this with flying colors.

  Nobody ever told me that they believed in me before. Literally. Nobody. Not once. Not my dad or my mom, not my teachers or my friends. Nobody in the history of existence ever told me; in text, over the phone, or to my face that they believed in me. Nobody, except for Noah. Those words appearing over the screen of a smart phone warmed my heart.

  When my last test was over, I sent my final text to Noah: Mission Accomplished.

  And then I prayed.

  ***

  Tannigan’s was a local college pub in downtown Pasadena where my small circle of friends gathered on a regular basis back when everyone was still in school. It was there that Declan, not Anya for once, demanded we all go to celebrate my success and the imminent delivery of my Master’s degree the next week. He, of course, had an ulterior motive. There were three other friends of his—newly obtained girlfriend Sarah among them—who also happened to receive the good news that they passed all of their courses and would be graduating with
their Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Doctorates, respectively.

  Sharing in our triumph happened to make sense. It was much easier to have one final get-together rather than have poor Declan bounce around to four separate places in the end. Also, I liked Sarah, and it turned out that one of the friends Declan invited was in half a dozen classes of mine at Caltech over the past couple years. Another great leap in the world of Piper was that I finally had the breathing room to take notice of this new acquaintance, Chloe, and make her into a new friend.

  I considered that progress for this introvert!

  We decided that Thursday would be best for our celebration in hopes to avoid the real party crowds which seemed to congregate on Friday and Saturday nights. Our parties were low-key by comparison.

  Declan reserved the back room of the pub and we squished three tables end-to-end in a row so we could seat more people together. He had insisted that I ride with him so that I could, in his words, “Get sufficiently fucked up,” and not worry about a ride home.

  The bar area was mostly polished wood that gave off a homey, smoky atmosphere between the four hundred dollar neon signs advertizing three dollar beers and forty inch LCD televisions broadcasting various sports and news stations. For the time being the patronage was scarce and thus I was able to make out The Killers playing on the alternative rock station for once over the noise of the people.