by Reiss, CD
“He knows I liked it.”
He?
You was the correct pronoun. I kept treating them as two separate men when they weren’t. It was all Caden. He’d penalized himself for his kink, then turned it on me because I encouraged it. Comforting daytime Caden about it only enraged the other.
What was next? Were these two personalities going to torment each other day and night? What kind of damage would he inflict on himself?
“You can’t do this anymore,” I said.
“I’m going to get this under control.”
“How? By proving your dominance over him? Over me? No, you’ve tried to get this under control. I can’t watch this escalate. I won’t be a weapon of war.”
I met his gaze, the blue Iraqi sky, remembering the man I fell in love with. All his inner conflicts, all his grace and dignity, they were all there, and none of it worked in pieces. He only worked as a whole man.
“I want you back,” I said. “I want that dominant, loyal, devoted, loving, careful man back.”
He leaned back a few millimeters, enough for me to discern I’d said something unexpected. I’d mentioned traits he knew the other side of him had retained.
“I have limits.” I took a breath before saying something that couldn’t be taken back. “You’re going to lose me. Maybe not today or next week. Maybe not next year. But you’re going to lose me if you don’t engage in a sane way of fixing it.”
“You want to sell this house?” It was a challenge more than acquiescence.
“Move out. Rent it. Leave it empty.”
“No. We sell. If we’re doing it, we’re doing it.”
“Strategic therapy. A specialist who can help you merge these two personalities.”
He hesitated. I reached for his dick, and he pulled away from the pain.
“What’s he going to do to it next time?” I asked.
“Nothing.” His authority would have convinced anyone else, but I knew how little agency he had once the sun went down.
“What’s he going to do to me?”
Anger saturated his blood, flowing to his face. His expression was one of revenge for a crime not yet committed.
I knew he’d agree before he did. The battle was won, but the war was just beginning.
* * *
“Hey,” he said from the doorway, in jeans and a tank.
I was under the covers in the guest bedroom, reading a PTSD study Jenn had sent me. It was night, so I knew who I was talking to.
“How’s your dick?” I said without preamble.
“So, you’ve seen it.”
I put down the papers. “That was childish.”
He sat on the bed. “I hurt myself to keep him from hurting you.”
“All you did was guarantee I sleep in here from now on.”
“Bed’s a little hard for me, but I can manage it.”
I folded my arms.
“Greyson, listen—”
“No, you listen. This is hard enough, worrying about your mental state all day and night. Now I have to worry about your body?”
“And I have to worry about yours!” he growled. “I will not ever, ever see you get hurt like that again. I will throw this motherfucker in front of a freight train first.”
It wasn’t like Damon to speak like that, and I was stalled with surprise.
“I’m sorry,” he said, reaching for my hand. “I mean what I say, but I’m sorry I said it like that.” With his thumb, he pushed my ring from side to side. “This all… it’s very stressful.”
“Really?”
He looked at me and gave me a rueful smile. “You’d know.”
“I’m going to lay down some ground rules. And actually, I’m repeating them.” I flipped through the journal Jenn had sent and found a piece of paper. I unfolded it and passed it to my husband. It was a list, and he’d already signed the bottom. “One, you’ve agreed to sell the house. Two, you’ve agreed to see any specialist I think is best, and you’ve agreed to be enthusiastic and constructive about it. Three—”
“I can’t agree to three.”
“It wasn’t on the table until you jerked yourself raw.”
“How long are you going to go without sex?”
I took a pen off the night table and plopped it on the paper. “Sign it.”
“This isn’t legally binding.”
“Thanks. You’ve saved me the trouble of getting a lawyer.” I pushed it an inch closer to him. “You—meaning those eyes—will see in the morning that it was signed a second time after sundown, and I won’t have to argue about who agreed to what. This is for me, so I can sleep at night. So I can have a life. This does more to protect me than your heroic string of masturbation sessions.”
He snapped up the pen and tilted it in my direction. “It was fucking heroic.” He signed. “I’d cut it off to defend you.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.” I snapped the paper away.
He crawled onto the bed and over me, placing a kiss on my forehead. “How long can you go?”
“Long.” I gently pushed his shoulders.
“I don’t think so.”
“Back up.”
“I’m going to take you away.” He kissed my cheek before backing away just enough to satisfy me. “I got us a week in Hawaii.”
“When?”
“Whenever you want. I don’t know what to do for you to make this all right. I thought this would be a step in the right direction. If you want to leave me here and take Jenn, that’s fine. But”—he held up a finger—“if you take me and that other guy, I get the sex.”
“You’re…”
Out of your fucking mind.
He was thinking of me. Caring for me. He saw how hard his split was on me and did everything he could. It was inadequate and wrong, but at least he tried.
“You’re all right,” I finished.
“I love you so much.” He grabbed my hand again. “So much that when you hurt, I hurt. When you’re stressed, I am. I hate that I’m doing this to you. You’re my life, and if anything’s breaking you, it’s me. I should be the one suffering, but I’m just inflicting it.”
I squeezed his hand. “It’s not your fault.”
“Whose fault is it?”
“I don’t know, but starting now, we find out.”
He nodded and kissed me gently at first, then went in for more.
I pushed him away. “I’m tired. Get outta here.”
“All right.”
After one last kiss on the cheek, he left, closing the door behind him.
* * *
I wasn’t having any kind of sex with my husband, day or night. It took all my strength to sleep in the guest bedroom. Seeing him in the morning with his cold, rigid expression and his bedclothes stretched across his beautiful body was as hard as seeing him in the soft lights of nighttime, over dinner, at a party, with a gentle touch I couldn’t walk away from.
“Just once,” he whispered in my ear at the tail end of a dinner with hospital administrators. “I’ll just make you come.”
We were at Bob Abramson’s penthouse on the Upper East Side. An inappropriate and somehow arousing place to flood my underwear. I was a mess of frustrated desire, but I shook my head and sipped my wine. He ran his fingers along the back of my neck and down my shoulder as if he thought he could wear me down.
He didn’t know who he was dealing with.
Tina was on my left. Over dessert, she leaned into me. “Is now all right?”
“Now is great.”
Tina stood and clicked her teaspoon against her water glass. “Ladies and gentlemen. Doctors. Paper pushers.” Laughter. “As you know, we’ve done an exhaustive search for someone to head up the military division of our mental health unit. I’m proud to announce that from a field of highly-qualified candidates, we’ve convinced Dr. Greyson Frazier to join us.”
Applause. Caden took his hands off me to join them.
Tina spouted my qualifications, but Caden held my attenti
on because for a flash I may have imagined, he wasn’t half a man. He was fully himself, and when he looked at me, he did so with a deep admiration that was more than the sum of two broken parts, a synthesis of everything he was, everything I married and everything I loved.
Then it was gone.
* * *
Dr. Kawaja wanted to see me alone first. She’d seen dissociative cases before, but this one?
“Different.” She had reddish-brown hair over her shoulders and big, brown eyes. “They have an extraordinary knowledge of each other, and the sharing of past memory is unusual.”
Behind her were the customary framed photos of her, her husband, and two children on a camping trip. We were off Park Avenue, just across town. She felt like family already.
“And the timed switch from day to night?” My legs were crossed, one foot bouncing with excitement. We were going to get somewhere. I knew it.
“Very unusual. But I think what makes him uncommon also makes him easier to work with. It takes out some of the surprise elements.”
“True, true…”
“What about you? How are you coping?”
I let out a nervous laugh. I’d been wine-soused when Jenn and Colin asked how I was doing. Sober, I felt as if she was the first person to bother with my troubles. “Poorly. Shit, I’m going to cry.”
She handed me a box of tissues. I plucked one out and dabbed my eyes.
“How am I coping? Well…” I balled the tissue in my fist. “I feel stupid for marrying him so quickly on the one hand. And on the other, I love him so much I don’t feel like I had a choice.”
She nodded. I hadn’t told her how I was coping. I was a textbook case of a woman who needed to talk to someone.
“I love him,” I said it again because I hadn’t said it just for the sake of speaking a truth. I’d said it defensively to him, to others, and to myself. I’d used it as a reason to stay with him and a reason to protect him, but the words had the most power as a statement of fact. “I love him.”
“I can see that,” she said gently.
“I’m coping by just loving him. And seeing my friends. Paying attention to my work. Mostly, I think, telling him no when I have to say no.”
“I’m glad to hear you’re setting boundaries.”
I nodded and sniffed. The tears had left as quickly as they’d come.
“I want to ask you one question,” she said, leaning forward.
“Of course.” I uncrossed my legs.
“Between day and night husbands, which one do you prefer?”
I crossed my legs again, clasping my laced fingers around one knee, the emerald glinting off the evening light. “Prefer? Like how?”
My foot stopped bouncing, and I could tell she noticed. I saw myself through her eyes. My defensive body language. My deflective answer to a direct question.
“However,” she said, throwing the ball back in my court. I would have done the same thing.
“I didn’t think I’d have to choose.”
“You don’t.” She flashed a comforting smile, but she didn’t retract or narrow the question.
“For sex?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“Rough Caden. He brought something out in me I needed. And Night Caden, he’s softer. It’s fine. It’s the sex I thought I wanted until he introduced me to something else, but it’s fine. And I like the romantic part of him. I like that he bends for my needs. But he’s manipulative and tricky. I can handle it, but I have to keep on my toes.” I shrugged. “I can live with it. But I miss the whole man.”
She nodded. I could read her thoughts because if I had been on the other side of the desk, I’d have been thinking the same thing.
“Isn’t it interesting that the sex you like comes from the man who appears during the day, and the man you can live with appears at night?”
* * *
Many of the patients I had in private practice could move to the hospital practice. Some were referred to other providers. Some didn’t need me anymore. The phase-out would be gradual for my practice but hard on my schedule. I’d have to work weekends and nights.
There was a relief in keeping that busy. I hadn’t shared my body with my husband in ten days. I had a constant, heavy throb between my legs. When I was hungry, I found myself longing for the taste of his cock or for the pressure of it stretching me open, breaking skin, ripping me to accommodate him.
Three days after my first appointment with Dr. Kawaja, I rushed home from the hospital in the afternoon to make a closing session, then I went upstairs to eat before starting the evening’s paperwork.
Caden was in his office. I hadn’t seen the dominant side of him in a week, but there he was, in a jacket and open shirt, slashing open an envelope with a confidence that was code for fuckable. The ACE bandage was off his wrist.
“The realtor came by today,” he said before blowing into the envelope. “If the house had a leg, she would’ve humped it.” He opened the paper inside and tossed it in the correct pile.
“Good. How was Dr. Kawaja?”
Slash. “Fine.” Blow. The single syllable carried a fifty-minute hour’s worth of irritation. “She wants me for an afternoon appointment.” Open. Toss.
“You know why.” I leaned on the arm of a chair.
The second to last envelope was on top of a big Express Mail envelope. Slash.
“Sure.” Blow. Open. Toss. “So she can speak to the Jerk-Off King of 87th Street.”
I laughed. He picked up the Express Mail envelope and smiled as if he got the humor but wasn’t inclined to find it funny. He ripped the tab.
“The question is…” He took out a smaller white envelope. “When am I getting inside you again, Grey? How much longer?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ve done everything you asked.”
“I’m not trying to bribe you into doing what I want. I’m trying to protect you from yourself. Literally.”
“I know you’re not sleeping with him. You know how I know?” He flipped the envelope around. The front had the army seal on it. “You haven’t been satisfied in a week and a half. When I touch you, your body hums. You lean into me. Your breath gets quicker, and blood flows to your cheeks. You want it so bad I’m starting to think refusing me is your way of getting control.” He poised the opener at the edge of the envelope, tucking it under the flap. “Look at you now. You’re wet.”
Slash.
“If I told you to come right now you wouldn’t have a choice.”
I was wet. I was hard and raw and aching for him. I didn’t know how much longer I wanted to stay away. Every part of me longed for every part of him. I watched his hands on the letter opener as he placed it on the desk. I remembered the way he put the fingers inside me, the way they tasted in my mouth, the way they squeezed the pain out of my skin.
“Open your legs,” he said, then blew into the envelope with a mouth that kissed and sucked and bit.
I hadn’t walked into the office to release my pent-up desire, but I found myself resting on the arm of the chair, setting my feet apart, hungry for his approval. “Like this?”
He put the envelope down and stood in front of me with his crotch at eye level. “Like that.” He put a hand on my jaw, and I leaned into the caress. “Greyson. I don’t feel much. But without you, I feel nothing. You’re the only thing keeping me human.”
His thumb ran over my lower lip, and without thinking, I opened my mouth to suck on it. My body obeyed a part of my mind running on fumes and heat.
“I’ve lost everything,” he said. “My family. My house. My sanity. I’m drawing a line around us, and we’re staying inside it. Outside the wire is madness.”
I let his thumb go, and he drew a wet line across my cheek as I looked up at him.
What about that moment convinced me it was time to stop withholding? Was it the sweet scent of coffee beans? The low timbre of his voice? The promise that his humanity breathed because of me? Or was it his eyes, blue as the noo
n sky when the rest of the world lived in twilight?
All of it. The package. All the traits that gave me pleasure stood over me, and right then, my body didn’t give a shit about anything else.
“It’s us, Captain. You and me.”
“And him.”
“There is no him.”
He bent over and put his nose to mine. “As long as you’re having orgasms I don’t remember, there’s a him.”
“I give myself one every night thinking of you.” Our lips were kiss close, brushing against each other when I spoke. “Our wedding night. I hadn’t seen you in months. You spread my legs like you owned me.” Remembering that moment, I shuddered.
“I do own you.” He put his hand up my skirt and fingered past my underwear. I was open, wet, engorged with suppressed needs.
“Take what’s yours,” I groaned.
Hooking his fingers on the crotch of my underwear, he pulled them off. I wrestled my skirt up as he undid his pants and got out his glorious cock.
God, I’d missed it.
I wanted to hold it, suck it, worship it. But Caden wasn’t interested in my devotion. He kissed me and picked me up before he got on his knees with my legs wrapped around his waist. Placing me on the floor, he ran his head along me and thrust in.
I was so needy I nearly came, pushing into him as if I could force him through me. Three thrusts, and he was buried inside me. He put his hands on my shoulders, putting his weight on them so he could hold me down and hold himself up at the same time, pumping his hips to mine. Immobilized, legs spread for him, I didn’t need pain when I was this fully dominated. Every muscle submitted to him, relaxing into pleasure.
“Give it to me.” His words were hard breaths. “Come. It’s mine. Give it.”
“Take it,” I croaked before going rigid under him. I bent around the orgasm, twisting and crying as he held me still. At the height, my limbs went slack, and my legs bounced with his thrusts.
“Stay still while I come inside you.” He grunted, pushed in, and came with an exhale. His hands slid off my shoulders and he rested on top of me, his orgasm going on as he drove deeper.
“Thank you,” I said when he picked his head up to kiss me.
