by Sophia Reed
She went still during the actual exam, just collapsed into herself, probably going somewhere else in her head. If that somewhere else involved my death, I wouldn't be overly surprised.
Or concerned.
"You're going to feel a little pinch," I said, looking deep inside her and threading the tracker into place.
"Go fuck yourself," she said in a flat voice.
I realized she was crying. Medical play isn't my favorite thing. Lots of opportunities to cause pain and embarrass the masochist, but there were reasons I didn't go into medicine directly and the whole thing was only interesting from the point of view of what I can do to the sub. But if this was a step in breaking her, so be it.
I triggered the device to plant the tracker and she gave a short, horrified scream. "Please don't!"
"Shh," I said, not ungently. "It's over. That's it. You're finished. We'll get you cut loose and you can go have a bath. Or a shower or a nap or whatever you want. You can leave the cameras covered."
I actually felt bad. Whatever that had felt like, it had clearly hurt.
"Fuck you," Annie said. She seemed to be speaking to the ceiling. "Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you."
Well, okay. I didn't feel bad enough she wouldn't be paying for that later. I unbuckled the restraints and now that it was all over, laid a drape over her body to give her privacy. She pulled it around her like a Linus blanket and a cover, and turned on her side, curling into a fetal ball.
There was only one door she'd find open for her when she was ready to move, and it would lead her back into her cell. I left her there curled into a ball, crying quietly, and wondered if in trying to keep her safe, I'd finally found the way of breaking her that took everything one step too far.
41
Annie
I wanted to spend the rest of that day under the covers, with the pillow over my head. I'd gladly endure the headache that comes from breathing out your own CO2 or whatever it is, if I could just pretend the world beyond didn't exist.
Cole took me into his exam room while I was unconscious but it wasn't hard to figure out a way out. There was a locked door on one side of the cubicle and an unlocked door on the other. The only question was like the lady or the tiger – would I open the door that led me back to my cell? Or would this lead me somewhere I desperately didn't want to go, clothed only in a drape he hadn't seen fit to give me before he finished?
My body burned with the intrusions, the things that had been done to it. The invasiveness, the inability to cover up, the horror of something that for me was an infrequent event and only when I absolutely couldn't convince Mark to use a condom and couldn't talk anyone into giving me more birth control pills.
Cole had done that to me. He'd made it worse, and he undoubtedly knew it, by making the first part of it so pleasant I was off guard.
But the pain that had come and still flared up from deep between my legs - that I thought had been unintentional. He seemed almost as shocked as I was by it and I had no idea what he'd done. No doctor had ever hurt me like that.
Despite not wanting to move from my fetal curl and despite wanting to do nothing but curl in the bed and find some way to deny what had happened, I waited until all sounds of him had vanished and forced myself to sit up. My head swam a little with the aftereffects of whatever he'd used to knock me out. When I was certain I wouldn't fall – and angry because I didn't want anything about this day dragged out – I pushed myself off the chair that had become a table and wrapped the drape tight around me. Cold feet on linoleum reminded me of every exam I'd ever suffered through.
The door that was obviously locked was really locked but it never hurt to check every option. The other door led back into my cell down a short hallway passing, I thought, the room where he so often made other women scream and took me for corrections and whatever he called it when he enjoyed it and there was no other reason for it.
At that thought, my unfaithful body sent a twinge up from between my legs that wasn't pain. I felt both sickened and anxious. Wanting again. The same damn thing. Wanting Cole to take me and hurt me and make me come and at the same time, knowing enough by now to understand that pain was pain. There was no exception.
"You were less fucked up when you were high," I muttered and collected a pair of running tights, two pairs of sweatpants, a jog bra, a t-shirt, a second t-shirt with long sleeves and a huge hoodie. In the bathroom, I turned the water all the way to hot and waited until the steam was billowing up. It hurt to step into it but I felt too degraded, too betrayed for anything else. I wore the drape into the shower and dropped it at my feet once the curtain had rattled into place.
Showering, I cried, pain and burn and anger, and I used the scrub brush that was one of the implements he sometimes used to spank me, this time using it to scrub areas that like a little more gentle handling.
When I started to bleed and when the water had, on its own, regulated to a temperature that no longer ached against my skin, I stepped out and dried off. It wasn't easy dressing in all that steam. My clothes wanted to stick to me. But I put on everything before I left the bathroom and once I was out, I went back to the bed and curled there, all the covers over me, and tried to disappear out of my own body.
Cole came for me after lunch. His cook had delivered a surprise midday. I hadn't even remembered that I hadn't eaten since the night before, fasting for the bloodwork.
"I don't know who he thinks he's feeding," the cook said. She was a white-haired lady and had always been nice to me. Whatever she thought of what was going on in the compound and however much she might think it was my choice, she was non-judgmental. "You're one girl, not a hyena."
That was enough to bring me out of my stupor. I sat up and considered. "Why would you assume I was a hyena?"
She raised her brows at me and uncovered the food. I started laughing before she stopped uncovering. Cole had clearly put his medical knowledge to work, giving me a selection of things that would help build my blood back up after he'd taken – all of it, essentially, that's what it felt like – and also was something of a reward or apology, perhaps. Because he'd sent a carafe of coffee with real cream and sugar, and ice cream along with all the healthy things but the centerpiece was a Round Table pizza. Disbelieving, I flipped the top of the box and discovered a large pepperoni with pineapple and extra cheese.
I couldn't help it. I laughed. "Would you and about 15 of your closest friends like to join me?"
"I know, right?" she said, which didn't answer the question but made me feel slightly more sane than the amount of food did.
It was a feast and while it in no way mitigated what he'd done to me, I was less likely to try and stab him with my ice cream spoon when he appeared.
He showed up late afternoon when I'd had time to digest. I'd eaten the salmon and to my own surprise, the spinach. Maybe my body knew better than me what it needed for recovery. I'd eaten the ice cream, because ice cream, and the pizza because there will never be a day when I don't eat pizza.
Then and only then I'd considered taking off some of the clothes but in the end I didn't. I just lay back down on the bed, curled under the protective covers, and slept until Cole showed up.
"Wake up."
I woke instantly with no disconnect. Something had reset in my head while I slept or maybe in the ritual after-exam shower, the one that put me back on my feet and back to feeling I had control of my own body and wouldn't be violated again for another couple years. So without consideration, I slid from the bed onto my knees, eyes cast down, hands behind my back.
"Good."
"Sir."
"What you went through earlier was unpleasant. It was meant to be. You're mine. I paid for you. I saved you. I own you."
He gave me space to hang myself out to dry.
I wasn't that stupid.
"I know who you are. I know what you are. I know you're strong and I know you fight. But you do not ever say to me the things you said to me."
You hurt me.
"Come with me."
No!
He pulled me up by the arm. I went willingly.
If he had tried to take me back to the exam room, I would have done my best to kill him.
He didn't. He took me to his pain room and he stripped every inch of clothing off me, ordering me to stay still. When I was naked again, somehow not as vulnerable as I had been, he took me to one of the benches and bent me over it, my arms stretched out in front of me along its cold surface, my ass tilted up by the positioning of my body on the bench, my legs straining up onto tiptoes as he moved the bench into position, making it just a little too high for me to stand flat-footed.
He showed me the crop before he started using it. It was one of the lighter ones, one that swung easily and hit with a biting sting that echoed through me like an electric shock.
"You may count," he said and the crop sliced down and hit the outside of my thigh. I jumped and screamed. It was sudden and white hot pain. He wasn't fooling around. "And when you fuck up, we will start over."
Start over to what number?
But maybe it was better not to know. There had been thirty the day of the dinner party. I didn't think he had forgotten that. And how many did my litany of fuck yous cost me?
I screwed up in the thirties.
The next time in the teens.
And the time after that was over fifty before I lost count and simply cried, hanging on to the bench while behind me Cole threw down the crop and his pants and stepped up behind me, sliding hard into me and fucking me relentlessly, his hands coming round to stroke and pinch and pummel and drive me until I came as hard as he did.
And he collapsed over me.
And we just stood there. Breathing.
42
Annie
In like a lion, out like a lamb. Isn't that March? It's either stormy at the beginning or at the end, generally reversing itself throughout the month.
March blew in two weeks after the Valentine's Day Massacre as I’d started thinking about it, and ten days after the Seattle trip and all the weirdness that followed. Wild winds blew across the flat of the Southern Nevada desert, making anything not nailed down on the compound rock and rattle and crash. Rose bushes pounded against the windows. Something came loose outside the holding cell suite and banged periodically into the wall. I'm a sound sleeper, but if I'd been trying to sleep, that would have kept me awake until I called the main house and asked somebody to fix it.
Not for the first time I wondered what Cole's contingency plans were if there was an emergency in the compound. I'd seen the response from an ambulance when Jason needed to be taken for medical treatment. But what if there was a fire? The desert floods every year – there had been a couple days of flash flooding at the end of January while it stormed, but flash flooding outside is dangerous. The ground is flat and hard and unforgiving in Nevada and water runs across it with no way of sinking in. The most that could have happened to the compound and my holding cell would have been inches on the floor and when it was built, someone had the bright idea of building the foundation up. The flash flooding in the compound ended up just being a lot of rain.
As March blew in, it was basically just a lot of wind. There was rain, too, lashing against the walls, and I wasn't trying to sleep. The violence of the storm entertained me at the same time it made me lust after new things. I wanted to start new projects and go after new goals. Sitting out there by the window, watching the plants bow and weave in the wind, listening to the violence as gusts blew up and hammered and died down and blew up again, I wanted to run and run and at the end of the run, I wanted to start everything in my life all over again. There seemed to be some big, bright gold shiny promise out there waiting for me and I wanted to go claim it.
At the same time, I had no idea what that promise was. It was like wanting to set a bunch of new goals but first choosing the shiny, pretty journal to write them down in and looking for the perfect pen that wouldn't bleed through the pages and wouldn't clump and leave big dark spots of ink. And finding the perfect day when there's a couple free hours and nobody else home… and realizing by the time all the component pieces are in place, there's no way to remember what those exciting, this-is-going-to-change-everything goals were. Not sad, exactly, but all that new! Soon! Change! goals are now – huh? Well, maybe this could be changed…
Maybe because when I looked at new, looked at what I wanted to change in my life, it felt like first I had to finish my time with Cole in the Southern Nevada compound. That no longer had that much to do with fentanyl. The cravings had ended. I think Cole could have let me have Advil again and I wouldn't have taken half a large bottle in too short a number of days. Not that there weren't aspects of life I wouldn't have gladly found a way to bury and hide myself from. The medical exam, for one. If it was possible to have PTSD from something like that, I had it. Intrusive thoughts of the things he'd done to me hit me several times every day and there was nothing much to do with them but let the shame and horror wash through me like heat, leaving me damp with sweat and not with desire. Fury accompanied those thoughts, at what he'd done, at being stuck with the memories.
But the rest of the time, I'd become aware that I was there voluntarily. Maybe I always had been. Or maybe it was something I was sensing with Cole, that more and more he was tacitly acknowledging that I could leave. Contract or not. Maybe the damn thing would hold up if challenged – it had been drafted by attorneys, no matter how sick the bastards had to be to conceive of such a contract – but it didn't matter. I seemed to have set making it through this period with Cole as my own goal, my own ticket back to my own life.
And the longer I was there, the more I questioned what that life would be. PD was still covering me on sick time and since I had no expenses, that money was just building up. My father raised me to be self-sufficient and to work for the things I got. I'd have been slightly horrified of getting that much sick time covered and being paid when I wasn't working, but undercover had been 24/7 and eaten my life. I had no problem being paid back for that.
So as the night banged against the shutters and the plants in the desert bowed to the power of nature, I let the wild longing for something new fill me and tried to take comfort in knowing some time in the fall I'd figure out what that new life looked like. Until then I had battles to fight with Cole and runs through the desert and the dullness of yoga and the vileness of spinach and the things that Cole did to me that I hated.
And the few things he did to me that I liked. Even if most of those I couldn't admit to liking.
Cole woke me at dawn. The storm had washed through somewhere around three and the sun was coming up right around six a.m.
"Did you sleep here?"
I blinked up at him. I was covered with a quilt I didn't really need, bundled into sweats, and tucked up on the loveseat under the window. Sunlight was just creeping across the sky, which was full of wild silvery and salmon colored clouds.
"The storm, sir," I said, but I met his eyes. The excitement of the night still filled me.
Cole smiled. "Did it keep you awake? Looks like there's some loose roofing and some siding to be fixed. How are you with a hammer?"
That sounded good to me, the idea of working outside for a little while. "My Dad taught me. I can do home repairs and I can probably nail siding back up. What's the job pay?"
He pretended to scowl at me, hands on his hips. "How about no spinach for a week?"
"Or broccoli or Brussel sprouts," I said.
"You drive a hard bargain."
"Damn straight."
"Damn straight, sir."
I shook my head. "Some things don't work with sir at the end of them."
"Well, you're not one of them," he said. "Get up. It's time to run."
It was. The desert was swept clean and the sky was sparkling clear. The clouds were glorious in the sunrise and I kept almost tripping over my feet because I wanted to look up. Midway through our run we spotted a pair of coyotes jogging across the
desert maybe 100 yards away from us, heads and tails up. They stopped to take in the crazy humans out in their desert, then continued on until way off in the distance they found the rest of their pack. Their yips of greeting came back to us on the clear air.
For a while we played, just jogging easily. And then for a while we raced, picking cacti and other landmarks to run to, challenging each other and arriving breathless and laughing.
We went out something like six miles, a little more than an hour heading out which meant an hour coming back, but I didn't care. Running felt fantastic. The things Cole insisted on, the running and lifting and maybe even the dreaded yoga were all making changes to my body. I'd been in shape before, but nothing like this.
Finally we stopped. This was already going to be a 12 mile run, somewhere in that vicinity. Right then I didn't feel any need for it to end but I knew about mile 10 I'd be cursing myself and cursing Cole and hating life. Ten miles was one of my walls.
"Ready to head back?"
When he asked me things like that, I always wondered if I was supposed to answer with the yes, sir thing. It felt like we were just two people, out doing something together. Maybe he wasn't someone I'd have ever met in real life, but that didn't change how it felt at those moments.
So I just nodded even as I felt him come up behind me. I tensed, not knowing what to expect. Would he make me strip down to just my shoes and carry my clothes until we were very near the compound? Would he think this was a good teaching lesson, that I had gotten a little too confident, a little too sure of myself and it was time for a bare ass spanking out in the middle of the desert?