by David Archer
Cassie lowered her eyelids and looked at him suggestively. “Oh? Had a few kinky videos, did we? What kind?”
It took her more than an hour to get him to talk, but finally he admitted to a brief fling with S&M a couple of years back. Cassie laughed it off, and even admitted that she and Scott had tried a little spanking here and there. “It’s not that bad,” she said. “And, I don’t know, if it’s something you like…”
Mike stared at her. “You’d be open to some play?” he asked.
“Well, sure,” Cassie said. “I mean, you’re not into weird stuff with animals, are you?”
It was Mike’s turn to laugh. “No, not a bit.” He bit his bottom lip for a moment, then looked into her eyes. “It’s just—sometimes I like to play a little rough.”
Cassie shrugged and smiled. “Okay,” she said. “Like how rough? You’re not into cutting or that kind of stuff, right?”
He watched her for another minute before he finally got up his nerve. “Have you ever had a rape fantasy? Ever thought about having some guy just grab you and ravish you, when you weren’t expecting it at all?”
Cassie turned pink. “Well, yeah, maybe,” she said. “I think I read in a magazine once that almost all women think about that sometimes.” She looked at him from under her lowered eyelids. “Is that something you like?”
Mike swallowed. “I’ve never had a girlfriend who was willing to try it,” he said, “but I always thought it looked like fun.”
“Okay, then,” Cassie said. “I’m game. How can we do it?”
Mike’s grin spread across his face. “Well, the whole point is that you don’t see it coming. It’d be sometime when you weren’t expecting it, maybe when you’re not even expecting me to be home, and I’d just grab you and start ripping your clothes off. I’d wear a mask or something, just to make it seem more real, and when you try to fight me off I hold you down.”
Cassie raised her eyebrows. “Oh, you want me to fight? Are you sure you can handle me?”
Mike’s grin got wider, and Cassie felt a shiver run up her spine. “Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “I can handle you, no doubt about that. The question is going to be whether or not you can handle me. You sure you want to try this?”
“Hey,” Cassie said. “Part of the wife’s job is to make her husband happy, right? Well, if this makes you happy…”
SIX
Cassie spent the next few days on pins and needles, expecting Mike to suddenly jump out at any moment and drag her off to the bedroom. She had agreed not to discuss it any further until after it happened, but it was just about driving her crazy with anticipation. The thought that he would suddenly surprise her this way, ripping her clothes and taking his pleasure in her body, was turning her on in ways she had never imagined before.
Each day that passed without such an event, however, was causing her to wonder if she might have overstepped some kind of boundary by offering to play along. Mike was acting perfectly normal when he got home in the evenings, and only once or twice did she think she caught him looking at her in any way she might consider odd. Once, it was while she was setting dinner on the table in front of him, and she noticed him looking at her pants and thought for a moment that the time had come, but he turned his attention to his plate. The other time, if she didn’t imagine it, he had snuck up behind her while she was doing the dishes. She hadn’t heard a sound, didn’t realize he was there until his arms suddenly went around her.
The tension of waiting for something to happen was getting to her, and she screamed. Mike burst out laughing and spun her around for a kiss.
“Did I scare you?” He leaned down and kissed her again, then turned her back to face the sink once more. “Sorry, baby.”
It took her five minutes to get her breathing back under control, and another five after that to push away the fear that had coursed through her body. She couldn’t figure out why it had frightened her so badly, especially since she had given him permission to take her at any time.
And yet, there was something about the way he had just suddenly grabbed her that had absolutely terrified her for a moment. She spent the rest of the evening, as they were watching television and relaxing, trying to analyze the fear. The only thing she could come up with was the possibility that it wasn’t real, that what she had actually felt was the sudden release of tension when she thought he was making his move.
I just hope I can handle it when he does, she thought to herself. Of course, part of the fantasy for him is having me afraid and fighting, so maybe I can make it work for me. She ran the moment through her mind, over and over again, and every time she thought about the way he had flung his arms around her so suddenly, that sudden rush of fear struck her again. After a while, she started to welcome it.
Yes, she thought, I’m going to give him the night of his life! And maybe, just maybe, it will be one of the best nights of mine, too.
Another week passed by, and Cassie was having moments when she had completely forgotten about the planned fantasy. On one night, she had served him dinner and they had watched TV and gone to bed before she even realized that she hadn’t thought about it all evening. She reached for him when they went to bed, but he told her he was tired and just needed to get some sleep, so she rolled over and tried to relax.
It was after two o’clock before she finally got to sleep.
Two days later, she was sitting in a kitchen chair waiting for him to get home when her phone rang. She picked it up and saw his number, and answered with a smile. “Hey, sweetheart,” she said. “On your way home?”
“No, I’m afraid not,” he said, and she could hear frustration in his voice. “We just got a break on a murder case, and I’m going to be stuck here for at least a few hours. Uniforms are bringing in a suspect, and I have to handle the interrogation.”
“Aw, that’s too bad,” Cassie said. “I made pepper steak. Any idea how long you’ll be?”
“Probably at least three or four hours,” Mike replied. “Go ahead and eat, but save me some, okay, baby?”
“Okay, babe, I will. Come home as soon as you can, okay?”
“I will,” he said. “Love you, and I’ll talk to you later.”
“Love you,” she said, but the line was already dead.
Cassie got up and made herself a plate, then put the lid back on the big skillet. It would stay hot for a while, she knew, but she was actually getting pretty hungry. She sat down alone at the table and began eating, wishing that Mike were sitting across the table from her.
When she had finished eating, she washed her plate and silverware and put them into the drainer, then went to the living room to find something on television. This wasn’t the first time Mike had ever had to stay late, and she knew that it was a hazard in the life of any cop’s wife. It hadn’t taken her long to learn that Netflix was still one of her best friends.
She found a movie that sounded interesting and put it on, then hurried back to the kitchen to get a can of pop. She opened it over the sink—sometimes, for no reason she could figure out, the store brand she had been buying had a tendency to spray—and then walked quickly back to the living room.
She sat down in Mike’s recliner and then grabbed the remote to turn down the volume a bit. Mike had confessed that he suffered from a bit of hearing loss, something that came from his failure to wear earplugs a few times on the firing range when he had first joined the force. As a result, he had to keep the TV up a little louder so he could hear what was going on, but she always turned it down when she was watching it alone.
The movie was a comedy, and Cassie found herself laughing out loud in several spots. It was during one of these that she suddenly felt a shiver run down her spine, and she quickly grabbed the remote to mute the TV. Had she heard something? Was there some sound, something out of place that had just barely reached her attention? With the TV sound turned off, she listened carefully for a moment but heard nothing.
Probably something outside, she thought. She turned
on the sound again and settled back into the chair. On the screen, the actors were preparing to board a cruise ship for what was undoubtedly going to be a hilarious journey, and one of them was attempting to sneak on while dressed as a crew member. Cassie thought he would surely be caught, but the purser only seemed to think he was someone who had just been hired on.
The main group got to their stateroom, and one of them let the impostor slip inside. He was just about to change clothes and pass himself off as one of the passengers when the ship’s captain suddenly knocked on the door. There was a frantic flurry of activity as the impostor tried to hide under the bed and finally ended up climbing out the porthole to hang by his fingertips.
Cassie had been laughing so hard that she was sitting on the edge of the seat, leaning toward the television. As the captain entered the stateroom, she started pulling back, and that’s when the hand grabbed her by the hair.
The fear struck again, and she screamed as she was dragged out of the recliner and back against someone. A hand went over her mouth, and a gruff voice whispered, “Stop screaming, or you’re dead.”
Cassie tried to fight, but the man’s other arm captured both of hers and clamped them down against her chest. She was being dragged out of the living room and was trying desperately to turn her head, trying to reassure herself that it was Mike who had hold of her, that this was the game and nothing else.
She was dragged into the hallway and toward the bedroom, and she began to relax slightly as she realized that her assailant obviously knew his way through the house. It had to be Mike, it simply had to be, and she managed to take a breath through her nose. This was it, she was sure of it.
All of the anticipation for this moment hit her then, and she was ready. She mentally thanked her lucky stars that the clothes she was wearing were old, stuff she only wore around the house anyway, because she knew they were about to be ripped away. She was dragged to the bedroom door and it was pushed open, and then she was flung onto the bed.
He landed on her as she rolled over onto her back, and suddenly she was frightened again. This man looked bigger than Mike, and the stocking mask he wore distorted his features. He was dressed in black: black sweatpants and black sweatshirt, black gloves on his hands, and even the stocking over his face was black. The hair on his head looked very dark, but Mike’s was light brown, and his shoulders weren’t quite this broad…
Maybe it’s a wig, she thought, maybe it’s a disguise, but no matter how she tried she couldn’t see Mike in that twisted, obscured face. She screamed again, and suddenly she was struck. A fist caught her on the point of her cheekbone, and the pain flashed through her entire body. Her mind reeled, and she desperately fought to hold on to consciousness.
“I said shut up,” came that horrible whisper again, and then the hand found purchase in the neck of her old T-shirt. There was a tearing sound, and she felt it ripped away. The hand grabbed her bra and yanked hard, and she felt the hooks snap on her back, the straps ripping on her shoulders as it was flung across the room.
She stared at that distorted face with nylon pulled down over it, and her body and mind were racked with sheer terror. When the hand reached into the waistband of her shorts, it overwhelmed her completely and she fainted.
Consciousness floated just out of reach, but there were moments when she seemed to know what was happening to her. She felt him, this man who had invaded her home, who was violating her in ways she couldn’t have imagined before this, as he thrust repeatedly. She tried over and over to speak, to beg him to stop, but she couldn’t make the words come out.
Finally, darkness settled in again, and she welcomed it as it took her.
She couldn’t have been out for long, she knew. The man was off her, but she could still feel him on the bed and prayed silently that he would not realize she was awake. Maybe, just maybe he would simply leave; maybe he wouldn’t hurt her any further. That was all she wanted at this moment, just to have him go away and leave her in her misery.
The bed shook a bit as he moved, but she could tell that he had not left it. In her fear of what might be coming next, she felt herself open one eye, the one that wasn’t swelling shut, and she saw him. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, his dark sweatpants still down around his ankles, and she clamped the eye shut instantly. She didn’t think he had seen her, and could only pray that he would go ahead and leave.
She lay there for several minutes, just waiting for him to get up off the bed, but he didn’t. He simply sat there, probably looking down at her and congratulating himself for what he had done. That’s what these kind of men did, wasn’t it? Pat themselves on the back when they had raped and abused a woman?
After a few minutes more, she couldn’t help herself. She opened that one eye again and looked up at him.
“Baby,” Mike said, the mask rolled up off his face. “Baby, wasn’t that great? God, that black eye looks so hot on you!”
Cassie’s eye opened as wide as it could, the other one refusing to open at all. She stared at him for a long moment, taking in the shock of seeing his face after all. It was red and splotchy from the pressure of the stocking against his features, and she realized that the stocking itself was so dark that it had hidden his natural hair color.
At last she looked back at his eyes, and then her mouth opened and she began to wail. Mike looked at her as if he was in shock, and he reached out to pull her close to him, but she pushed him away. Her hands felt the padding around his shoulders—padding that had made him seem larger, made it seem he was someone else, a genuine intruder. He stared at her, his face registering complete surprise at her actions, but then she found her voice.
“What the hell were you doing?” She shouted the question, her one good eye still wide and staring. “I thought you wanted to play, I thought you just wanted to pretend… Oh, my God, Mike, what the hell was that?”
The expression on his face told her that he didn’t understand what he’d done wrong, that he had honestly expected her to enjoy what he had just done to her. “Baby, you said you wanted this, too,” he said. “You told me this was okay, remember?”
“You said a fantasy, Mike,” she shouted. “A game, just in play, not beating me up and terrifying me. Dear God, is this what you meant when you said you were into S&M? Is this the kind of thing you used to do?”
“What? No,” Mike said loudly. “No! I never did this before, I told you that. It was just a fantasy, and I thought you wanted to play along with it.”
“You hit me, Mike! You didn’t just play rough, you freaking hit me! What kind of man does that to the woman he’s supposed to love? Can you answer that for me?”
“Hey!” Mike suddenly shouted at her. “This isn’t all on me—you said you wanted it, too. Remember that? You admitted you have fantasies about being raped; I was just giving it to you. We talked about this, and you agreed to it. Hell, you even pushed me into it, do you remember that? I was ready to forget about it, but you’re the one who said it was okay, you’re the one who said we could do it, or did you forget all about that?”
She lay there, staring up at him, and suddenly the conversation came back to her. As terrible as it seemed at the moment, he was absolutely right. Cassie had been the one to tell him they could play out the fantasy. She had told him it was okay, and even agreed to putting up a fight. She suddenly wondered just what it was she had actually expected, and she couldn’t come up with an answer.
She swallowed hard and forced herself up on one elbow, then looked at him again. “Mike,” she said, more softly this time. “Mike, you’re right,” she said. “I did tell you that. You were trying to warn me that I might not like this, but I said it would be okay. I remember that, now. The only thing I’ll say in my defense is that I had no idea just how far you wanted to take it. I didn’t expect you to actually hit me, Mike. A little slapping, yeah, maybe I can handle that, but I didn’t expect you to hit me with your fist.” A sudden burst of humor struck her; she had no idea where it came from but
she found herself giggling. “And let me tell you something, buddy. You pack a wallop with that fist. One helluva wallop, in fact.”
Mike was slowing his breathing, getting himself under control, and he looked closely at her face. “Are you okay? Did I really hurt you?”
She touched the sore spot on her face and winced, but she tried to smile. Her lip was swelling, so the smile didn’t quite come off the way she intended, but Mike could tell she was trying.
“I’ll be okay,” she said. “But let’s not do this too often, okay?”
Mike shook his head. “Don’t worry,” he said, “we won’t do this again. I don’t want you to be that scared or mad, not again.”
Cassie swallowed hard and told herself she was doing the right thing. “No, baby,” she said. “I understand this is something you like, so—so I want to give you what you need. Just not too often, okay? And maybe you don’t have to hit me quite so hard? I mean, I bruise pretty easy, anyway.”
Mike stared into her eyes, and she could actually tell that he was becoming aroused again. “You mean it?”
Cassie smiled and leaned up to kiss him gently. “Yes,” she said, “but let’s not talk about it. Just surprise me.”
SEVEN
Cassie stayed in the house for a few days and let the swelling go down. She had always been one who healed quickly, so she knew it wouldn’t take too long before the bruises faded to the point that a little foundation would cover them completely. The swelling in her lips went down within a day, though they remained tender for a couple more.
Mike was going out of his way to be loving and sweet and attentive, and Cassie started to think that maybe it had been worth it all. He had brought her flowers and candy, and he had made dinner three nights in a row… Sure, it hurt when he had hit her, but he hadn’t meant to cause her any serious harm. It was all in play, although it might’ve gotten just a bit out of hand in her opinion.