by Sophia Reed
It would be my turn again soon enough.
35
Annie
When I woke, it was to find Chloe still wrapped around me closer than the blankets. In sleep, she nearly looked like a ghost, she was so pale and slept so still. But the night before she'd been blazing hot.
Once Claude and Chloe led me from the formal living room, away from Cole and out of the view of the hideous Vincent and his broken bitch, they'd taken turns fucking me, Chloe with a strap-on and Claude obviously not needing one.
Since I'd dreaded every minute before the party actually happened, and after what happened with Kie and then with challenging Cole – because I had no doubt that's what I'd done – I'd expected the time with them to be more misery.
It wasn't. Claude put me over his knee, but it was more foreplay than punishment or spanking for the pure joy of it. His hand would circle and stroke and then lift and deliver a flurry of spanks, none of them really whamming down. There was no thud, only the sting, and I didn't hate it.
Before Mark came into my life, I was hardly a choir girl. Sex was something I enjoyed, relationships were something I sucked at. So I tended to hookup with people from various parts of my life, whether that was going to a bar after work with a friend and taking the bartender home, or going to black belt class and leaving with the best-looking guy there. I didn't fool around with anybody from PD, because that would be stupid – I'd spent far too much time trying to be one of the guys to remind them I wasn't.
I'd also never really been into girls. A few kisses here and there, a drunken grope or two, but I'd never so much as taken my shirt off around another girl. Chloe had been something of a revelation, how soft and smooth and giving she was. When she fucked me she was all business, holding me down and taking me from behind while Claude made me suck on his fingers and then on his cock. But they were clean and fun and they weren't Vincent and they weren't Kie. And Chloe's mouth when I kissed her, that was something of a revelation.
Since neither of them was awake yet, I had time to think. I'd gone back to the party when I didn't have to get out of a feeling that I had enjoyed too much the torture and punishment of a man I truly hated. I didn't know if that made me weirdly moral or just weird. I'd defied Cole to do it, so likely it made me stupid as shit, no matter what else.
I'd gotten up to twenty-eight with Cole, at least according to my last coherent thought about his count. Whatever that meant, I had to think it wasn't good.
But the time I'd spent with Chloe and Claude, approved of by Cole, that was – pleasant. Wonderful. Beautiful. I'd enjoyed it, all of it, even sucking on Claude and I wasn't big on blow jobs, giving or receiving.
So where did pleasure fit into the dynamic? I'd never stopped to think about it because my "master" was a sexual sadist. Because he could and had demanded I become his for the duration of my treatment, his pleasure was taken in all the ways he could break me and build me back up. I understood that, understood on some level that I needed to be broken completely before I could be healed, and that however weird and horrible and painful and humiliating, somehow it was still extracting positive change from me.
Pleasure had rarely crept into the dynamic. Even when I anticipated something in Cole's room where he punished me and hurt me and pushed me to my limits, it hurt once it was happening. That kept coming back to me, over and over, as if it were a lesson I couldn't learn.
It told me what kink had been with Mark, too; because he'd never hurt me. I'd never found myself in the middle of being handcuffed by him only to think I don't think I can do this this time. Please stop! We'd never even had a safe word because I'd never come close to needing one.
Did pleasure count as well as pain? If I learned to accept being pleasured, would that have an effect like pain in that I grew from it? It wasn't something I'd often offered myself in the Real World. Always it came at a price. Always I held myself accountable, held myself to answer for whatever I'd done that was wrong or wasn't good enough.
The same way I'd taken myself back to the party after Jason was punished.
Did that mean in some way the time with Claude and Chloe was a reward? Would I learn from it?
My next thought was one that sent ice flying through my system. That I had defied Cole. That I would be paying for that. Of all the things I could do to anger him, outright defiance was surely the worst. As I'd found out when I reached out to PD without his permission and –
I froze, going even more still than I had been.
When I'd reached out.
What was today? But I knew that, I knew it instantly, Valentine's Day plus one because that had been the night for the bloody stupid dinner party.
I was late. I was late checking in with my father. I was late with the calls that Cole allowed me with Mark so that he and my family would think I was still in rehab, some kind of real rehab, whatever my father told my mother, and if he told my sisters anything at all, he himself thought I was in rehab. He knew I'd fallen and hard and that it was partly his health that drove me even if he didn't and couldn't have known anything about Jesse.
I was late checking in.
They'd both think I was undercover again. They'd think I'd run and not told them.
I didn't know what they'd think but I'd only just put my life with Mark back together long enough to put it on hold. And I didn't want to ever frighten my father, he was a cop, he knew the risks I took.
I'd only just gotten enough privileges, as if I were in prison, to contact my father and Mark and to have limited contact with Tad Charles. The worst thing Cole could do would be to refuse to let me be in contact.
Fear made me go rigid. Until Chloe's hand snaked around me from behind and started lazily playing with my nipple.
"You've gone all hard and tense," she said, and kissed the back of my neck. "Let me do something about that."
And for a little while, I forgot about the outside world.
36
Cole
When I found her, she was on the phone.
Sometimes I thought she was actually trying to get herself punished. Other times I thought she was just that hard willed, which was a good thing, but I wasn't going to let her know that.
Standing in the doorway to her suite, Chloe and Claude in the kitchen having breakfast, I took off my belt and wrapped the buckle end of it around my hand as I waited for her to finish whatever oh, so important phone call it was.
Annie was wearing my jacket again, though I couldn't remember if she'd been wearing it when last I saw her or not. It looked amazing on her. Made her look like she was all legs and those insane dark curls, big eyes and freckles on her nose where being out in the sun running had taken effect.
She'd look even better once I striped the hell out of her thighs for this disobedience. I settled against the doorjamb to wait, slowly realizing I wouldn't be punishing her for this particular behavior.
"No, Dad, honest. I'm so sorry I didn't call as usual. I haven't relapsed. I haven't even been outside the facility. But days and nights don't have as much meaning right now. I mean dates, I guess. One day carries on into the next. It's almost relaxing." She laughed. "Well, then, you know what I mean. But I'd like to point out even before your health stuff you were retired." She said it as a question, as if her father was likely to forget he wasn't a working cop anymore. "What have you told Mom, anyway?"
Her face as she listened was grave. I assumed her father had told her mother that she was undercover. The fact that he'd figured out her addiction wasn't a surprise. That he'd at least exaggerate to his wife if not outright seemed normal if nothing else.
"No, I haven't. I called you first. Well, fine, but – okay, yeah, I know. But Mark freaks out more than you do." Her eyes were on me now, judging whether or not she'd be able to call Mark. I nodded at her. "I'll call him. Unless you want to? … didn't think so. Well, yeah, he probably wouldn't marry you, either. Okay, okay. You're sure about your health? You're not lying to me?" And then she shut her eyes very tight
and said, "I'm sorry. I'm not. But please, Daddy. Please don't. Just – trust me. I'll be back as soon as I can, but I need the time." She paused, took a deep breath and met my eyes as she said, "Please don't try to find me."
There were a handful of I love yous after that, and a promise that she'd call Mark as soon as she could and she had no objection, of course she didn't, to her father sharing her phone call with him.
She hung up looking bemused and somehow tiny, wrapped in my jacket and sitting in the office chair, waiting for my decision.
"We forgot your phone call," I said. "Both of them."
Her expression was neutral. "Probably you can be more easily excused for it. But I should have remembered. Usually I'm so frantic to reach my father." She smiled slightly. "Maybe I'm finally learning he's okay."
"Are you asking me?" I tried – and failed – to sound severe.
"Yes, sir. I'm hoping you'll give me an excuse." She eyed the belt wrapped around my hand. "Or is that for me? I know I didn't ask. I just panicked and as soon as Claude and Chloe were – um – "
I felt a smile I couldn't hold back. "Finished with you?"
"Um. Yes, sir."
"Did you hate it, you little slut?"
She looked taken aback, and then like she was trying to figure out the safest answer for her behind. And then like she didn't care. "I didn't hate it, sir," she said, with the most confounding smile a woman's given since Mona Lisa.
I considered her for a couple minutes, then threaded the belt back through the loops of my jeans. "I guess just a maintenance spanking this morning then," I said, and dug into my pocket for her suppositories. "Followed by your dose."
Her face changed instantly. "Please, sir. Couldn't you go back to the liquid?"
I smiled. "Of course I could." Wasn't going to. "Get up." I took her place in the office chair and patted my lap. "Stretch over, grab the rungs. Don't let go."
Her ass under my hand was warm and lightly showing a weave pattern where she'd been sitting on the chair. I rubbed until it was a healthy, glowing red, then started spanking her, harder and harder as she moaned and thrashed and promised to be good and finally was ordered to be silent before I gagged her.
Her ass under my hand felt good. Her submission over my lap felt better.
It was going to be a very long maintenance spanking this morning.
37
Annie
February 15, the day after the disastrous dinner party, I waited for Cole to punish me. By the end of the day, I'd had what he called a maintenance spanking, and I had in no way convinced him to stop humiliating me and let me go back to an oral regimen of the opioid cure. But there had been no punishment.
By the end of the week, the lack of being punished was almost punishment in itself. I kept waiting for the shoe to drop and it kept not happening. When he came into the holding cell midway through the 20th and told me to pack for a couple days away, I was on pins and needles, waiting to see what he had in mind. My worst fear was this was the time he was finally going to honor Vincent's winning "bid" of 5.5 million dollars.
When we arrived at the airport two hours later, I was confused. I didn't ask, though. He was teaching me well. One of the things I was learning – along with don't ask because it's probably none of your business, even if it concerns you – was that private jets are faster than commercial.
So it was only a matter of hours later that we stepped off the plane in Seattle.
There's a feeling sometimes when I've been away, for vacation or, more likely, undercover, and I return home. When it's for the job, obviously I miss my own home. I miss my own hours, and I miss being easy about what I tell people about myself. There's no relaxing undercover. I miss my sweats, my bed, my own clutter and mess or my own clean apartment if it happens to magically be clean.
But there's still a feeling when going home that everything is stale. Old, too familiar. Those things I've waited to see again, books or comfy clothes or my own bed or whatever, all of it now looked like leftovers from a life I was finished with.
This time being back in Seattle just felt wrong and strange and potentially dangerous. As long as I was in the Nevada desert with Cole, I had a feeling of impatient strength. That of course I could survive when I went back home, of course I could go back to my life and carry on.
Yes, I'd had some setbacks and yes, I'd fallen in the first place. But I was strong and I'd had my time out. Several months of it now as the seasons were starting to change toward spring.
Maybe that was the impatience. Just the feeling of everything being about to bloom, everything about to surge forward into fecundity.
But now that I was here, it felt dangerous. More than just the idea that if Cole said, "Well, okay, good to know you, I release you from the absurdity of the year and a day contract, clearly no one ever bought you, that was a fantasy to allow you to explore your dark side while we helped you heal, have a great life," I'd probably run screaming after the rental car and after the jet. I'd probably find myself wandering around the Southern Nevada desert within a week, hoping desperately he hadn't taken on another submissive and I could return.
That was a scary thought.
As was the thought that I couldn't return here.
Cole was watching me as he drove the rental out of the airport. "Look different?" he asked. "Not quite what you were so desperate to get back to?"
I was looking down the side streets we were passing and answered obliquely. "Have you ever seen the film Warriors?"
"Ye-es," Cole said doubtfully in that tone of voice that either means he's humoring me, he's convinced I've gone mad, or I'm taking liberties by acting like we're on an equal footing and I can just chat.
I chose to interpret it this time as meaning Please explain. Or maybe WTF.
"Remember how the guy from Xanadu – "
Cole coughed.
"Well, I can't remember the actor's name and he was in both. He was the main gangsta in Warriors. Anyway, he and his guys fight all night after the guy who theoretically was bringing all the gangs together for something – I don't know, overthrow actual government? It's been a while since I saw it. But what I remember is the Warriors are accused of killing the charismatic leader and they have to fight all the other gangs to get home."
"Coney Island," Cole said. There was humor in his voice.
"Right! That's where their turf was and they get there as dawn's coming up and it's all closed amusement park rides and litter from the night before and sandy beach and – just, nothing. And Swan – that was his name – Swan says, 'We fought all night to get back to this?'"
And then I was just quiet for a few blocks, wondering what we were doing here, what Cole had up his sleeve and how it will hurt or help. Or hurt and help. Like it or not, a lot of his methods of madness seemed to be working. I was clean and sober. But seeing my town, I wasn’t sure I would be if turned loose.
Cole was quiet for so long I was convinced I could have saved that little bit of reminiscing or complaining or whatever I was doing, when he said, "Does that mean you're going to stay with me?"
If there'd been anything remotely wistful in his voice I might have been undone. I might even have made stupid decisions and agreed to stupid things.
But he sounded mocking, like himself, and I was free to say, "No, sir, I just meant." I stopped and thought and then said, "I'm sure you know what I meant."
He breathed in through his nose, as if considering whether or not what I just said was actionable, then apparently decided not. "We've talked about what you're going to do when you're released. I have low friends in high places who can expunge your record until you're cleaner than you’ve ever been in your life. You could go DEA. You could go FBI."
"I'd need a degree for that, sir," I said thoughtfully, before remembering that was exactly what I was studying for.
Cole's response was to lean over and slap my thigh with the flat of his hand. It stung, and I instantly moved both hands on top of the place he'd hit.
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br /> That made him do it again, catching my left hand and making it sting and ache. I yanked my hands up and he hit me one more time.
So I wouldn't be asking what we were doing here. What I wanted to do was see my dad, and my mom, I supposed, though there was less chance she needed to see "her rock" as Mark insisted I was to her.
I didn't really want to see Mark, but mostly because I thought if I did, home would start fitting itself around me as home. There was no way Cole would let me out of my contract even a second early. He was enjoying everything he was doing to me, the head games and the body games.
So I didn't ask.
The day was overcast but bright. It would be raining later on. February in Seattle can be brutally cold and it can snow like it does in Northern Nevada. Southern Nevada didn't get snow and so far this year, I hadn't missed it.
Cole drove through a neighborhood that seemed familiar to me. Inner city, far from the water and the tech centers, far from the PD and even far from the apartment I shared with Mark. We drove past rundown bars and abandoned laundromats and I tried to figure out how a laundromat goes out of business.
Eventually Cole was cruising very slowly and I was automatically sitting back in my seat, looking almost asleep to the casual and not so casual observer but I was actually taking in everything around us. In a couple blocks time I saw two sales go down, one to a fat middle-aged woman who was probably buying for someone else. Given what looked like a hellacious bruise on her neck above the neckline of her sweatshirt, I'd bet on a significant other, male or female, somebody with a nasty habit and nasty habits.
Another street and things started to look familiar. This was Brotherhood territory. From other streets I could hear bikes roaring but there was never anyone in sight. The streets changed from rundown businesses to liquor stores and empty storefronts. Chain link fences hemmed in vacant lots. Graffiti decorated everything.