by Sophia Reed
Evie was neither. She circled around again to watch my eyes, they lashed out with the cane and caught me across both nipples.
I screamed. I screamed and thrashed and tried to shake myself free. I was sweating like crazy. Why wasn't that enough to slip free of the restraints? But they were leather. They were leather, they were buckled on, they were tighter than anything Cole ever put on me.
Fast after that strike, she struck repeatedly between my legs while I thrashed and howled. The pain was worse than anything anyone had ever given me. Even Cole.
She circled again and laddered down from her starting spot, beginning at the spanker's sweet spot and continuing down to my middle thighs.
I hung, exhausted, still crying, Cole's name just barely off my tongue. If he had ever done anything like this to me, the aftercare would have been extraordinary.
The only aftercare I got here was that she stopped.
That was enough.
4
Annie
Too late. I'd caught myself too late.
Once upon a time when I was a cop in Seattle, good enough for them to let me go undercover at the age of twenty-three, young enough looking I could go into high schools and places teens might be running up against dealers, once upon that time in my life my commanding officer sent me to a shrink.
Nothing had happened, really. I didn't have PTSD because so far my assignments had been tame. The Lily persona who took down a couple gangs was in the future. The Annie persona was already a cop, daughter of a cop, a hardass of her own right.
They didn't tell me why they were sending me. I thought it was a pre-undercover thing. For all I knew I'd also get a round of shots like I was going off to Africa or somewhere they had diseases I had no immunity to. I was that naïve.
But the actual visit to the shrink – a guy, which was a bad choice to begin with if they wanted me to just do as I was told – was because my CO had decided I had an "anger management problem."
Gee, y'think? I was a cop. I was the daughter of a cop who raised me and my sisters hard. He was hard. I was hard. My sisters were a bunch of giggly, bubbly wives with children.
The shrink pushed me. He pushed me and pushed me and waited for me to explode and I obliged him, coming unglued at the tactics.
Then he made the mistake of trying to explain things to me. How I could control this. Get a handle on my behavior and myself.
Ha, ha and fucking ha.
I didn't break his jaw but I certainly bruised it.
Surprisingly, that's what my CO had wanted, even if it wasn't anything close to what the psychologist wanted.
Only now I wished I'd listened a little longer.
Because I'd lost it with Cole. I was just so confused. He didn't seem to understand that coming out to yourself as a twenty-five year old and suddenly understanding you've got the masochist gene is a surprise. It's a surprise and it's hard to get used to and admitting it to him and then telling him I kind of sort of maybe wanted all the things he'd been doing to me? Damn! And he didn't seem to get that.
Alone, untouched, I hungered for the slap of his hand on my ass. Or the belt across my breasts. Or his cock in my mouth, no questions asked, no protests accepted. I dreamed of things I didn't think he'd ever do. I loathed the things he did to me that were purely control – fish for breakfast, fish any time of day or night, fish ever – and a tiny curling sneaky part of me, it still hated the fish. But it loved being forced to eat it.
Or suffer the consequences.
Only now I was here and the consequences were coming and what the fuck, Annie, are you mental?
There were times I saw red and there was another time, sort of a pre-red, because seeing red is a real thing. I think it has something to do with capillaries in the eyes breaking from – I don't know, blood pressure sailing up too fast? The rage itself?
It wasn't that I felt most of the time. It was a need to push and push and push, a need to needle at someone who wasn't going to let me win.
With Cole, I had the option of walking away. Even back when I was a strung out junkie he had purchased from a dirty cop, really I could have walked away. I was locked into the suite back then but there had been times he'd flat out told me I could go.
There'd even been one time I had.
And I came back.
No. More than that. I didn't just come back. I searched through dungeons and my own demons to get back to hm.
The fact that I could walk away now made me all the angrier. Because I felt like we were working together and we should be on some kind of different footing now. He should be my partner, albeit one who could sometimes order me to strip my clothes off in the middle of the desert.
Cole didn't see it that way.
Sir doesn't see it that way, a part of me tried to remind myself.
But I was still angry. This was my world. Law enforcement. Undercover. I'd kept him from getting taken down in that first Clean UP Sin City sweep. I knew what I was doing. All the research he was paying people to do, all the stuff I'd read upside own on his tablet that he hadn't shared with me yet? I could be and should be doing all of it.
So I sparked anger. Like a shock I'd find myself going from the girl running through the desert mostly naked and being switched for fun (his), and accepting it (because I wanted it, just a little) to a furious spitting rage where I spoke loud and fast before I could tell myself not to.
I wanted it all. I wanted him to take me in hand, to control me and force me to new experiences I'd never have the – gall, balls, honesty? – to ask for. I wanted him to hurt me, at least before and after he was doing so.
At the same time I knew what I had to offer. I knew I was smart and good at my job and there was a trafficking ring right here in the city and I'd had two shots at them. How many more before the either packed up and went to some other big city or they figured out who I was and did something about it?
I should be part of Cole's planning.
He was keeping me out of it maybe because he wanted to keep me safe.
And definitely because he wanted to keep me in my place.
And now I was. In my place. Or in his. I waited in his play room, my hands loosely open on their backs, resting on my knees. My legs were spread, open, my already punished ass resting on my heels. My head was up but my gaze down and I knelt on the cold, hard floor.
Naked, and waiting.
5
Cole
She knelt seething on the floor, waiting for me.
But she waited. Naked. Kneeling.
6
Annie
He made me wait. Hard to say how long. With no way to tell time and nothing to do but kneel and anticipate, it probably felt a lot longer than it was.
By the time he came into the play room, I'd gone somewhere else. Cole once called it subspace and I came unglued. I was thinking. I was deep in myself. I might even be meditating.
Subspace somehow felt degrading. Cole hurt me and punished me, made love to me and kissed me, he exhibited me and once sold me in an auction, he'd sent me to live with other sadists only to discover they weren’t safe. But he didn't degrade me. He didn't call me bad girl or slut, didn't tell me I was nothing. Everything he did seemed to have intent and when he called me anything it was to order me to accept whatever he was doing, or to order me to do something myself.
So not subspace, but I'd certainly been missing during the last few minutes and couldn't say where I'd gone. All I knew was suddenly he was there in front of me. I was staring stupidly at his running shoes and my heart had started pounding again.
Abruptly everything came back to me, not just calling him Cole at the table and furiously insisting it was all a fucking game we were playing and that when the important stuff came up he ought to knock it the fuck off. Not just bratting out on the trail only to discover at that moment that he was the one who wasn't playing.
But all of it. My anger. My rebellions. My refusals and insistences. My stomach clenched tight.
Between my legs, another part of my body also clenched. Waiting.
If I had it to do over again. The last hour, two hours. If we were running in the desert again and the worst I had to contemplate was fish for breakfast.
He reached down and bunched my curls into his fist, pulling ungently. "Get up."
I stood because the alternative was to get my hair yanked out. I stood because in that moment I understood that nothing had changed. I had come back to Cole thinking we'd renew our contract without having a contract, that I wouldn't run because I had the option to run. That was true. But I'd also thought that Cole would change. That he would see now that I was going along with everything I was his partner. Or equal. Or something to be valued.
Maybe he thought some of those things in some situations but he was much better at compartmentalizing than I was. Cole didn't accept that there was a reverse safe word situation, and maybe that wasn't a thing, but it made sense to me. The idea that he could say my name in the right tone of voice and I'd drop into being his submissive. The rest of the time I'd be me, Annie Knox, adult. Partner.
Even though it made sense – after all, most of the time when I was alone in my suite or the gym or the shower or wherever, I wasn't his submissive, at least not in my head. I was Annie Knox. Then he'd come and get me and I'd be calling him Sir and what was the difference?
The difference was, it made my submission to him a game. Which maybe it was to me. it wasn't a lifestyle choice yet. If something dramatic happened, some emergency, I wouldn't wait for him to okay what I planned to do in an emergency situation. Or maybe I should say when, because there'd already been emergency situations.
What we were doing, his contracts he'd had with me and now my willing submission to him, all of it was a construct. Not a game, maybe. But a – fantasy? An augmented reality? It was something that wouldn't stand up to the real world when it all came down. In my mind, it was like a job. You follow the rules and you're at your desk the hours you're supposed to be. But if the roof of the building you work in begins to come down, you leave without standing around asking your supervisor if you can. Once out, you determine if you're going to go on working once the building gets done collapsing.
I wasn't sure how Cole saw it. Did he think I would ask permission to leave the falling building? I never had. Did he think another sub would? Or should?
I had never done this before. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it couldn't be done that way, being a normal person with an ordinary life – it that's what I was here where I was – and snapping to attention at the sound of my master's voice.
To me, that was a reverse safe word. Kind of Abandon all hope, Sir is coming!
Then again, it wasn't like my own safe words, the ones that I only used when we played, always had an effect.
Because those other times they weren't my safe words. When he was punishing me, I was his. When he was punishing me unless he told me otherwise, red and yellow were just colors.
I was confused because there was so much to be confused about.
Except this. Whatever he was about to do. I wasn't confused about this. I didn't want this. The same anguished cold gripped my belly, threatening to double me over despite the handful of hair Cole still held. Now that it was here, now I'd brought this down on myself, I didn't want it.
I was insane to think I had ever wanted this.
Cole didn't speak. He simply led me by the hair, forcing me in front of him. We bypassed the cross, which should have given me a moment's relief. Instead, I simply started looking for what was next. The bars that formed a cage around me and looked like a jungle gym? The benches that separated my legs so he could take or hurt anywhere he chose? The spanking benches? The rings that hung from the ceiling, shackling my wrists so he could pull me up to my toes and watch me dance?
Or the bed, the four poster where he'd wrap my wrists and ankles in leather, face up or face down, didn't matter. He did what he chose. Or on the massage table, pure black with the hole for the face augmented with a strap to hold the head there and restrains for arms and legs and if necessary, waist.
I started to buck against him and he said my name, one time.
I calmed. His home was in the middle of nowhere, Nevada desert, rural as fuck. I could run all the way to the center of Las Vegas but it was a good 15 miles of so and those miles were all desert, all stones and thorns and the occasional cranky animal. It was cold out, maybe only Southern Nevada cold, but cold enough if I had no clothes and where would I go? Even after Cole's tutelage I wasn't an exhibitionist. I'd have to steal clothes and then I'd have to hope to hell I found the right people who would help me rather than dragging me somewhere worse.
Or finding myself "helped" by the kind of police who worked with the judges who were part of the ring.
All I'd wanted was to know what he'd found out and when we could act, what Judge we'd be going after and how I'd slide undercover, how much help Cole's hackers could give me in formulating a cover.
And at the same time, I knew better. A tiny part of me, buried under the anger and unacknowledged, maybe not even there, honestly not there in the first few minutes that I fought him, that part knew there was more to my outbursts. I was just as angry and spitting in the playroom as during the moments at the table when the anger sparked so hot I could shout out against him despite knowing what would be coming. That was real. I was really mad. I didn't like being shut out. I didn't like the idea he thought he could formulate what I was going to do undercover without me.
So that part was honest anger from a person who still considered herself a person and that the construct of Master/slave or Owner/slave or Master/sub, whatever it was we were doing, would be put aside when the real, grownup stuff started. Under that, under the honest anger, a part of me had been pushing him for just this reason. To make him act. To bring on what I craved and couldn't ask for because pride and embarrassment and common sense and self-preservation stopped me. Because once here, I was terrified. Once he started, it hurt.
It was going to hurt.
It was going to happen.
I went limp and let him guide me.
He took me to the bed. His silence was almost more unnerving than anything else. When I glanced back over my shoulder to look at him, his mouth was a straight line that almost looked like pain. As if he truly regretted what he was about to do. Or as if I had actually let him down.
Both those things might be true. But so was the light in his eyes that gleamed with anticipation.
He took my left wrist and wrapped it in a leather cuff, snugging the thing tight around me and giving it a tug, then slipping his fingers between my flesh and the cuff, checking for circulation. My pulse banged hard against the backs of his fingers and I knew he could feel my excitement as well as my fear.
He didn't say anything about it, though. He clipped a snap hook through the ring on the cuff, then looped leather through the other end of the hook and tied the restraint to the top of the poster at the end of the bed, drawing my arm up above my head. He repeated his actions with my right wrist, pulling hard to spread my arms wide. An ache started up under my arms and between my shoulder blades where I was stretched.
He knelt at my feet to fasten cuffs to my ankles and secure them to the legs of the bed. When he stood I waited for him to trail a finger between my legs, to tell me how wet my sex was.
He didn't. He moved directly to the cabinet across the room where he kept many of his implements and unlocked the door. He left it open, swung wide so I could see the canes and misery sticks, the crops and paddles that hung there, the hairbrushes and canvas firehose straps, the leather slappers and straps. Sometimes I thought it looked like a dungeon had exploded into his house.
Other times I just shuddered.
There was more. There was always more. He'd left the door open so I could look in. Even determined that I wouldn't, I did. There was no way to stop myself.
He'd made his selection. I hadn't realized I'd stopped watching. My mind had turned
in on itself, thinking through what was real and what was fantasy. That could almost make me laugh. Because it didn't really matter if I believed it or not. It definitely wouldn't matter once he started.
Cole didn't bother with redundancies or rhetoricals. He didn't ask me if I understood what he was doing or ask my permission to punish me. He sometimes would order me to beg him to start.
He didn't seem to be in a mood even that playful today.
"Annie."
I'd thought I was back. But his voice seemed to come from a long way away. Like I was in a dark room somewhere, dreaming, maybe.
"Sir."
"Are you ready?"
Fuck, no, I'm not ready you sick son of a bitch! One or both of us is crazy and one or both of us needs help and I'm not ready!
"Yes, sir."
He made a sound a bit like a laugh. I wasn't sure what it was in response to. "We had an agreement, Annie."
I didn't run! I'm still right here. Only it's ME that's here. Damn it.
"Yes, sir."
"You enjoy your freedom from addiction and your ability to move forward with your life."
He didn't mention my having a life. I might not have if he hadn't given me his rainforest opiate cure.
I didn't respond because it didn't seem to be required. I tried to stand still, but even after all this time, being stripped naked was humiliating. Knowing that he could look at me, probably was looking at me as he stood behind me. Knowing all he had to do was run a hand between my legs and he'd know exactly what I was feeling.
Not exactly. Did the sadist ever know all about the anxiety and fear, the dread and the rethinking that went on before the first blow? Because after the first blow, it was all regret. All bargaining and begging and twisting and trying to make it through.
Probably not for every sub. I imagined there were couples out there where the Master demanded, "Are you ready?" and tacked on "Honey" without meaning to and where she shivered within her silk-scarf bonds and squeaked out Yes before he began to flog her with a butter soft flogger, her skin pinkening only because of the repetition and –