Submitting

by Rose de Fer

  Here, she was just Kristen. His Kristen. She made no decisions, except for the simplest ones. And when she didn’t feel up to those, she only needed to hesitate and Dillon stepped in, made them for her. Here, he was in control. She had no one to answer to but him and – best of all – no one who answered to her. No responsibility but obedience. Nothing to explain, nothing to clarify. No questions she had to answer, other than his. Here, Dillon gave her the answers. He was the answer.

  And the pain purified everything, clarified everything. With it, she paid for her imperfections; it balanced the scales of her life, restored her equilibrium, focused her on what was important, evaporated her worries, her stress. Here, with Dillon, all that was required was her submission, her acceptance of his will, his punishments. Her world was reduced to two things: pain, pleasure. There was nothing else. No one else. Two people, two things. It didn’t get much simpler than that.

  The first years they’d been together, when she was in college and Dillon was a resident, when she wouldn’t see him for days at a time and she had to go without his touch, never knowing when she’d next feel his hands on her, caressing her, punishing her the way she’d come to need, were torment. Nothing he ever did to her, no pain she’d endured before or since, came close to the torture of living without it, without him, his presence, every day. And nothing else worked – she’d tried. She’d slapped her own face until it was bruised; lashed her own back with floggers and belts; even tried cutting herself once – he’d really punished her for that – but it was no good. The pain was never the same unless he gave it to her. It had to come from him. The nights she’d come home to that empty little city-centre apartment, when he had to stay at the hospital for those long stretches, and she never knew for sure when he’d be back – those were the loneliest times she’d ever known.

  She remembered the night she’d had to call him at the hospital, had to ask him to come home because she couldn’t stop the bleeding from the too-deep cut she’d made in her arm. He’d raced to the apartment on foot, bounded up the stairs, out of breath, to find her bleeding into the sink, crying because she knew he’d be angry when he saw what she’d done, crying because she was afraid of how much blood there was and she didn’t know what to do to make it stop.

  He had sutured her himself, there in the apartment, with no anaesthetic so she could feel every stitch. She had begged him to do it that way, and he’d agreed, his face still frozen in fear and fury, knowing that this punishment was what she needed. Afterwards, even though he’d been in a rush to get back to the hospital, he’d whipped her hard, again and again, and then fucked her and put her to bed before he left.

  ‘I’m a doctor, Kristen,’ he had said to her that night. ‘Any cutting that is to be done from now on will be done by me, understand? I know where it’s safe to cut; I know how deep. And I have the tools to do it right. If you need to be cut, ask me. I’ll do it. But no more of this. Understand?

  ‘I’m sorry, Dillon,’ she had said over and over, weeping. ‘I’m so sorry. I’ll never do it again, I promise. I just can’t stand it when you’re away for so long. I don’t need to be cut, but I need the pain, Dilly. I just need it. And I need it from you. All that blood. All that blood, and it still wasn’t enough.’

  The next day they talked, and Dillon agreed that, on days he couldn’t make it home, nights he’d been away more than 24 hours, Kristen would come to the hospital on his meal break to see him. He’d take her by the arm to a dark corner of the parking garage and punish her there, using whatever she had brought with her for the purpose, leaning her up against a minivan with assorted stick figures on the back window, showing how many adults and kids and pets made up the family who rode around in it. Or maybe behind a truck or an SUV with bumper stickers advertising the politics or sports teams or vacation spots favoured by the people who drove it. It wasn’t the same as having him at home, wasn’t the same as spending an entire evening in their bedroom, but it allowed her to function, and she knew it kept him from worrying what she might do on her own. Until she had finished graduate school, and he’d become an attending physician, it gave both of them what they needed to live.

  * * *

  A hard slap on her ass brought her suddenly back to the present. As her mind had drifted, she’d lost count of the strokes. Kristen always wondered how Dillon determined how many blows to give her by hand, how he knew when it was time for the next stage of her punishment to begin. For years, she’d counted the slaps, but there didn’t seem to her to be any pattern. How did he decide every night? Was there a formula she couldn’t decipher, or did he just go by his mood? Could he detect her need somehow, which did in fact vary from one day to the next, or was it purely arbitrary? Tonight, like every other night, when he decided that it was time and slid her off his lap, she went down on her knees before him, eyes on the floor, awaiting the exchange she knew was coming. They had repeated the litany thousands of times.

  ‘Why are you here?’ Dillon demanded, his voice cold.

  ‘To submit to you, Sir.’

  ‘Why do you submit?’

  ‘Because I am yours.’

  ‘Do you deserve to be punished?’

  ‘If you wish to punish me, I do.’

  ‘And this is my right, as your Lord and Master?’

  ‘It is your right, as my Lord and Master.’

  Kristen glanced at the front of Dillon’s pants as the recitation concluded, noticing how it had made him swell; it never failed to. ‘Do you know how many times you were late this week?’ he continued, his voice icy. She didn’t look up.

  ‘No, Sir.’ This was a lie. She knew exactly how many times she’d been late, by exactly how many minutes each day, and he knew that she did. But they both pretended she didn’t.

  ‘Three. Three out of five times. Really five, but you have a ten-minute grace period. You exceeded it three times.’ He sounded angry. He paused, let the tension build. She squirmed. Finally, he went on. ‘Make your request.’

  Kristen sighed as her pussy clenched, wanting more. This was always the hardest part – being patient, waiting for the punishment to go on. But it was time for her to play her part now.

  It could have been worse. Much worse. She knew she had earned ten strikes for each day she was more than ten minutes tardy. Luckily, she hadn’t been more than thirty minutes late on any day, or the numbers for the whole week would have doubled. Not that that mattered, really. When it came to Dillon’s punishments, less wasn’t more. More was. And she wanted more. Tonight, she wanted much more. It was a rare night that she didn’t.

  ‘Fifteen from a paddle, please; fifteen from your belt. Or a crop, Sir.’ Her voice lowered. ‘Very hard ones, please, from the crop or the belt. Very hard, please, Sir.

  ‘At your discretion, of course,’ she whispered. Her voice, so gently insistent, trembled as she begged.

  * * *

  Dillon loved hearing that tremble, loved hearing those words, her begging him to be harsh. He never knew whether she did this for him or for herself, begging for more pain, but it always aroused him so much when she did. He’d be happy to give her what she wanted. He could feel himself tight already against the front of his jeans.

  ‘Very well.’ Dillon returned to the closet and brought back a fairly new leather paddle they’d used only once and an old, worn crop that was one of his favourite spanking tools. He’d thought about using the tawse, but then, after taking it down, he’d changed his mind, deciding to save it for the weekend. Then, they would really have time to play; Dillon had Sunday off, and they’d spend hours in bed together. After he spanked her, he would use the tawse on her, then the cane. They’d push her limits yet again, see how much she could take. How much he could stand to give her before, his cock aching for release, he would have to stop and fuck her, or find what he ached for in her mouth. But it was only Thursday. This paddle, this crop, would both do fine for now.

  The anticipation always sent shivers of fear through her, and, as he looked at her
now, he could see her shudder before him. He knew that the waiting filled her with both dread and want. Just her saying the words ‘paddle’, ‘belt’, ‘crop’ to him, begging him to strike her hard, made her cream come faster; he’d seen it, felt it, more times than he could count. If he touched her right now, he knew he would feel the wetness drenching her lips, would feel it spreading onto her thighs.

  Dillon stood up, held out his hand to Kristen and steadied her as she rose. She still didn’t look at him. They both moved towards the bed, where he secured the cuffs on her wrists to a chain attached to a ring at the head of the bed. Then he extended her legs and tied her ankles down to opposite corners of the footboard. When he was satisfied with the way she looked, restrained just so, her soft white ass nicely pinked and waiting to be spanked further, he began with the paddle, whose loud slap made Kristen flinch with every strike.

  Dillon had told his wife she’d be struck thirty times, but that was a minimum; they both understood that. Besides, the number was for punishment strikes, the good hard ones, not warm-up or teasing slaps. And this was Dillon’s game. He was in charge; he decided; he delivered. Her job was to absorb the pain, to endure. And tonight, with the paddle, he wanted to tease.

  The sound of the leather paddle was worse than the slap anyway, he’d decided – at least it was when he wasn’t hitting her hard. Fuck numbers – that was part of the game. He always gave her more punishment than she’d earned; otherwise, where was his control in all this? He wasn’t bound by any arbitrary system. She expected him to give her more – she wanted it – she’d admitted as much many times. In his head, he had already adjusted the number for the paddling from fifteen to twenty-five; now he doubled that to fifty. Fifty loud, hard slaps after the warm-up was finished.

  And he knew that she loved how he did that, how he teased her cunt with his manipulations. ‘Thirty’ was just a number, after all; a concept for her to wrap her head around; a distraction, really. Reality was something else entirely. Dillon knew what he was doing, knew how to play her, how to play her clit. The fear, the not knowing, was as much an aphrodisiac for Kristen as the pain, as his domination. She’d told him so many times – at his insistence, of course – the questions that ran through her mind as he punished her. How much would it hurt? How long would he test her? Would this finally be the night he took her beyond where she was willing to go? And what if he did? Would she really stop him? Could she imagine ever wanting to stop him, no matter what he did? (She was always quick to assure him she could not. She would never stop him, she said. Her entire being was focused on enduring, on taking everything, anything, he wanted her to have.) He knew that those questions made her clit throb as the paddle fell. And fell. And fell.

  As so often happened, Dillon hated to stop when he reached the end; he felt he could have spanked her with that paddle all night, until Kristen had blisters like those she’d gotten last summer, from that new pair of shoes she’d just bought that had rubbed on the outside of each foot, right under the ankle bone. The kind of blisters that leather will give you from rubbing, rubbing, over and over the same spot, on damp, sweaty skin. And she was damp now – he could see the sheen of sweat glistening on her back, her ass. He could blister her so sweetly with this paddle, if only he had enough time.

  When he finally switched to the crop, he gave it to her fast and hard, just as she’d begged for: fifteen sharp, swift lashes that made her cry out with each one, struggling against the restraints. Whipping Kristen did something to Dillon that went deeper than his cock. It shot into his belly, suffused his breathing, his thinking. He’d snorted cocaine once, years ago, in college. Whipping Kristen was like that – the rush it gave him flooded his system, sent him soaring.

  At work, it was eight, ten, twelve hours of pain, all around him; people struggling for each breath, or not breathing – bleeding, screaming, moaning, begging for help, for relief, if they could even form the words, if they could make any sound at all. And his job was to fix whatever hurt, whatever was broken, to make the pain stop. To undo what they’d done to themselves or what others had done to them – the shootings, the crashes, the beatings, the stabbings. To divert them from the cliff each of us is moving towards, that some of us are hurtling towards, each at our own secret, unknowable speed. The cliff over which each of us will someday plunge. They all wanted to be saved, needed to be saved. But he couldn’t save them all.

  When he was with Kristen, like this, the tables were turned. He didn’t need to fix anything, didn’t need to stop her pain. His job was to dispense it, to inflict it, to revel in it. And he did. Oh, how he did. It made him so hard, hurting her, listening to her moan in pain and pleasure when she felt his hand, his paddle, his crop on her. He made her cry and suffer, yes, but it was pain that she wanted from him, that she needed.

  Here there was no unspoken condemnation because he couldn’t make everything perfect, couldn’t take all the suffering away. Just the opposite; she begged him to hurt her. It felt good – so, so good – to hit her, to listen to her cry. She wept just for him, she wanted to cry, and he loved it, loved too that she wanted it. He was always able to save her. What he gave her, every night in this room – it saved her. He saved her. He never failed her. It felt so good. It healed him: hurting her, giving her just what she needed.

  He looked at her now, lying there, weeping, panting with lust. He knew her pussy was soaked, her clit throbbing. But Kristen still owed him, and she needed to pay up. His cock felt as if it would burst if he didn’t get into her, if he didn’t complete what he’d started. Whenever he whipped her to punish her, he had to finish inside her ass; she liked it that way, too. They both craved that completion, that push into her, that stretch that always made her whimper, the hard thrust through the tight ring that took him all the way in, and then the relentless pounding that came after. They both needed the feeling of his pelvis hitting her stripes again and again and again, the tip of his long, hard cock thrusting as far into her as it would go, the pain and the lust attaching him to her, sealing their bodies into one. They both needed to complete the dance this way, to watch the film through till the credits had ended, till the last note of the score – her last sob – had sounded.

  Dillon freed her legs, and slapped her whipped ass hard, just once. She cried as she pulled herself up to her knees and spread them wide for him. Next, he unlocked the cuffs that bound her hands, and she wiped the tears from her eyes, then reached back and held herself open. He knew that, after the beating he’d given her, her pussy would be aching for him, but he knew too, she wanted this final part of the punishment even more. When he poured the lube over her and thrust in, Kristen wailed, a sound that always pushed him right to the edge, but he forced himself to hang on for as long as he could. He felt himself swell inside her – she must have felt it, too, because she reached down just then to touch her clit, and she came with tight contractions around him, crying out his name. When he felt her clenching on him, he let himself go, shooting deep into her.

  * * *

  Kristen looked over her shoulder at Dillon, tears staining her cheeks, flushed with her orgasm. She looked into his face for the first time since they’d entered the bedroom together. The cold look in his eyes, the look he wore whenever he punished her, was almost gone now, washed away by the pleasure of his release. His face was relaxing, as hers had already done. The tension in the room had evaporated. She saw him glance at the clock, and she followed his gaze: eight thirty-three. She could see his mind working – there was still time for a quick blowjob before his shower; a blowjob and the pussy-fuck he knew she still needed.

  While Dillon went into the bathroom to clean himself, Kristen lay in the bed, her breath and her heart-rate returning to normal. When he came back, she would take him in her mouth. And when she had him really hard, he’d slip the clamps onto her nipples, take her doggy-style the way she loved, and fuck her until she came. Then she’d throw on a robe and go clean up the kitchen, finish packing his lunch while he showered, dr
essed. He’d lay out her clothes for tomorrow morning, carefully choosing the lingerie, the dress, the shoes he wanted her to wear. At the door, he’d hold her close for a moment, kiss her tenderly. He’d ask, ‘You good now, baby? Did you get enough?’ and then wait for her to smile at him and nod, the way he always did, before he left.

  Afterwards, after she took her own shower, she’d rub herself with lube and push a clean plug into her ass, holding on to the soreness of the sweet, hard fucking he’d given her. She knew he liked when she did that, liked when he’d come home in the morning to find the plug, washed and laid on a clean towel in the bathroom to dry. On nights he was here, he’d cuff her, too – the same soft leather cuffs she’d worn since the first night they’d slept together, when she was a college freshman and he was a first-year resident – more than eleven years before. She loved those cuffs – the very first night, they’d marked her as his, the same as if he’d slipped a collar around her eager, adoring throat. The plug would make her feel like he was still in her; it would stretch her, make her feel less alone in the big empty bed where she’d curl up, clutching the pillow that smelled like him. Some nights, when she couldn’t fall asleep right away, she’d suck on the dildo he’d bought her that looked and felt like his cock. She’d close her eyes, the thick, veiny pacifier in her mouth, the plug stretching her, and pretend he was in her ass, in her mouth, at the same time. She’d fall asleep sucking on that cock, sucking like a baby at its mother’s breast.

  While he was at work, trying to stop the bleeding, to make sense of the chaos, bring the dead back to life, her chest would be rising, falling, here in the bedroom, where he saved her life every night. One of them conscious, the other dreaming, they’d both be waiting for the following evening to descend on them, when she would come through the door as she always did, to find him waiting for her on the other side.