With flowers in hand, I knocked on the door to let her know I was there, though I didn’t wait for her response to walk inside. Turning the knob I cracked the door to see her department head leaning over Savannah, nuzzling her neck. His hands were down her suit jacket, one on each breast. He barely pulled them away seeing me.
“Humph, you didn’t lock the door,” I said, acting unfazed.
“Michael?” she looked up as though I was the last person on earth she expected to see.
“I guess I’m a little early,” I said, perusing the situation. Inspecting her office more closely I saw no remnants of lunch. “Gee, I thought there’d at least be a few crumbs I could munch on.” I watched as Mack stood up and moved away from her. I refused to leave embarrassed because I’d intruded on their intimate moment. “I guess you have lovers standing in line waiting for your return?” I’d turned directly to her. “You said something about them lining up like sheep?” I fearlessly pressed on.
“Michael,” she said with an exasperated drone.
“I should think you’d watch yourself more closely,” I continued on, “seeings as I’ve already punished you once for falling off the wagon of this addiction.” I looked directly into Mack’s puzzled face.
“Who is this guy?” the professor asked.
“Mack, I’m sorry, you’re going to have to leave,” Savannah said. She’d risen from her desk in an effort to encourage her boss out the door. When he was on the other side, and the door was locked, I tossed the wilting flowers on her desk indicating my annoyance.
“So how far was it going to go?” I wondered aloud.
“It wasn’t going anywhere,” she replied.
“No? I’ve seen better efforts to fend off unwanted advances than that. You don’t suppose you were just horny and needed a sexual fix?”
“Michael, you’re being obsessive and paranoid,” she exclaimed.
“Am I?” I queried. Face to face with Savannah in heels we were nearly the same height, though I could still claim a slight advantage and used that to looked down sternly at her as if I were reprimanding a teenage girl. She looked that innocent. A good act; she was tough as nails underneath the veneer. “Wouldn’t you have had another office quickie with him? You would, wouldn’t you?”
She didn’t answer.
“You’d probably enjoy the naughtiness of it, come crying to me admitting to me your dreadful misbehavior. That’s if you didn’t decide to confess to Guillaume first, so he could send one of his curt missals, letting me know I should punish you.”
“I’ve never seen you like this,” Savannah said, her mouth dropping open in awe.
I was having a terrific time watching her squirm as she heard the truth so bluntly stated. “Is it a problem for you?”
“You’re unbelievably overbearing.”
“That’s what you want. Why else would you have a Guillaume in your life if you didn’t want to relinquish at least half of yourself to a man?”
She couldn’t answer that question. Not a word left her lips. I loved upbraiding her and the way that made her inner fire crazed with heat. I knew she wanted to attack me physically and fuck hard. I could see her lips, the delicious way they parted, moistened as if she were preparing to take an erection in her mouth. I wasn’t sure how long I would be able to string her along as I played the ‘wronged’ boyfriend.
“How can you conclude all this from one tiny little incident?” she finally said trying to defend her way out of the conversation. “Mack was coming on to me the way he always does, I would have pushed him off.”
“Would you?” I doubted her again. “I really don’t think things like that happen unless you’re giving the right signals.”
“Oh, that’s a chauvinist thing to say!” she retorted angrily.
“Have you ever thought of mentioning sexual harassment to the man?” I wondered aloud.
“That’s not going to work, not after the relationship we’ve had. And you, Michael Renz, need to be a little more understanding.”
“I understand it all, Savannah. Everything you want. Good thing I brought the baton,” I said. The thin cane had been hooked by the handle to the inside pocket of my jacket, quite conveniently there as though it was just the place to carry it.
“You what!” she looked at the cane terrified as I pulled it from my jacket.
“Might as well get it over with,” I suggested.
“You’re not going to punish me here!” she exclaimed.
“Oh, but I am,” I assured her.
“No, Michael, never! You can’t! Not here!” She shook her head at me angrily.
“You have a problem mixing business and pleasure?”
She was livid, eyes flashing sharply, while I remained perfectly calm. I’ve never had a problem battling a woman. But I’d never had one quite like this and I was truly enjoying the returns. She was going to lose and we both knew that. “This is where I work,” she said, glaring at me.
“And this is where you get punished,” I informed her calmly.
“But people might hear?” she cried disbelieving.
“The cane hardly makes much noise, Savannah. If you don’t make any, then there won’t be anything to worry about.” I moved to the CD player in the corner and fished through a stack to find some music worthy enough to use as a background for a caning. One with operatic arias seemed perfect. Good drama didn’t come any better than this. “Bare your ass,” I ordered.
“You’re really going through with this?” she asked, her eyes mesmerized by every movement I made. As the strains of some soprano lifted into the air, and then some guttural baritone shook the ethers with his hearty fire, the feel of the music swam through me. Though Savannah trembled with fear, I knew she’d obey me. It took some minutes of an eye-to-eye stare down, before she moved to her desk. Once she’d hiked her skirt and bent over, I knew that I’d gone beyond even Guillaume’s ability to control her. This was immediate, intimate and very real, when I sometimes had the feeling that Guillaume was just some figment of her imagination.
“Twelve,” I announced.
She shuddered, but said nothing.
Rearing back with the baton, the thin reed whistled through the air and struck her behind in the center, leaving a thin red welt rising to the surface in just seconds. I peeled off a good half dozen more before I paused again. Each cut was greeted with her anguished gasp, but I could tell that she was holding back. The walls in the old building were far too thin for her to make a scene. After the seventh cut, she slumped a bit, and I allowed her to regain her poise.
“Please, Michael, can’t you stop now?” she pleaded with me.
“No,” I answered simply. “Get back in position.” She craved the ruthlessness. And ruthlessness was what she’d have. The last five cuts I laid with equal intensity against her stripped behind, the effect to crisscross the red lines, leaving an interesting pattern of woe on her poor ass. Though I knew she was in agony, gritting her teeth against the building pain, I sensed that there was still the bizarre sexual sensations racing through her, that heat she loved so well. The twelfth cut delivered, Savannah instantly stood up and lowered her skirt. She came up from the desk still spitting mad, hardly holding back the tears, though there was a knock on her door, just as she stood to face me.
“Who is it?”
“John Kaiser, my conference, ma’am?”
“Just a moment, I’m finishing up,” she called to the student. She turned back to me. “I never want to see you again, Michael,” she said, her steely words intended to cut like a knife.
I could see what effort it took to pull herself from the moment of painful pleasure, but she’d managed quite well. “Really?” Though I doubted her sincerity, I didn’t dispute her complaint.
“You heard me. The game’s over,” she said.
“Oh, it’s only been a game?” I observed, eyeing her carefully for all the things she didn’t say. “Well, at least now I know. But for the life of me, I can’t understand why yo
u just put yourself through the torture, if you really didn’t want exactly what you got.” Savannah didn’t reply, and I really didn’t give her time to. Swiftly returning the cane inside my coat, I left the office. I was afraid I’d called her bluff and lost. She was so quixotic that I couldn’t be certain if I’d just executed our relationship and buried it for good. But I had to believe that, in time, she would be back for me.
Chapter Eleven
Michael Renz didn’t hear from Savannah for nearly two weeks, and he wasn’t about to call her. He’d taken on a role and it wasn’t sensitive and compassionate; it was solely dominant.
Savannah was in agony those weeks, vowing with her competent professorial self that what Michael meant to her could not be important. But every other part of her psyche told her she was lying. She refused to write Guillaume and tell him what had happened, even though she was bound by the unwritten agreement with the dominant to do just that. She ignored the promises she’d made, ignored her heart, her loins and the desires that floated to the surface of her every day life. She’d pushed the caning from her mind, pushed the image of an angry Michael from her thoughts, and yet, she still felt the familiar sexual pulse between her legs, happily asking her to relent to the need that possessed her.
Savannah was obsessed with calling Michael, even though she could think of nothing to say to him. She hating being obsessed with her guilt, especially when it led right to some of her most potent passions.
Sometimes a few drinks made the urgency go away. One evening, she found herself in a bar downing several vodka martinis and being hustled by a decent looking guy who introduced himself as Ryan. Sandy blonde hair, medium build, nothing special about his appearance except that he was pleasant. Savannah might have easily shrugged him off except for the demand between her legs that required she do something. She’d never sleep as aroused as she was, and for her own reasons she preferred not to masturbate. That would only draw her back to Guillaume—and Michael.
She and Ryan talked for nearly an hour, exchanging effortless smiles. Connecting on a primal level, it didn’t feel at all unwelcome when Ryan’s hand began to move on Savannah’s bared thigh.
“You wouldn’t want to take off, go somewhere private? There’s a place up the street that rents rooms?”
She flirted with him, just for a few minutes acting coy as if she really had to give his proposition a lot of thought. “Do we really want to make it that formal?” she finally asked.
“You have something else in mind?”
“My car’s in the parking garage,” she told him.
“That simple?” He looked a little disappointed.
“Too tawdry?” she wondered aloud.
“Not at all. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a woman in a back seat.”
“Then maybe for old times sake,” she said with a little laughter as she rose from her seat.
The pair walked hand in hand out the door of the bar and down a block to the garage where Savannah’s blue sedan was parked on the third floor, decently out of almost everyone’s eyesight. She thought of Michael taking photographs of her in the parking garage on the other side of town. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea choosing this locale for a promiscuous moment. Then again, she was already committed to something.
“It’s going to be cramped,” Ryan commented as he looked into the back seat.
“Then we’ll get creative,” she replied, unlocking the door.
Inside the confining space, Savannah leaned over and took Ryan’s cock in her mouth. Once decently erect, she lay back, maneuvering enough so he could penetrate her in the middle of that raging furnace between her legs. She was glad it was dark, face to face with a man she hardly knew. It was easier to think of nothing but her body and the orgasm that was about to strike. They were swift, both of them. The roar, the rage, the sudden jerk and the collapse, all in the space of minutes, and it was over. This screw couldn’t possibly be defined by anything but that single erotic idea being fulfilled. They hardly cried out and were duly relieved once it was finished.
“You always so loose?” Ryan asked, as he was putting himself back together.
“No,” she replied, pulling her panties back up over her hips. He’d undone the buttons on her blouse, though she didn’t know when he’d had the time. They had to be buttoned again. “It’s a long story,” she added to her reply, seeing that Ryan was a little confused by the last fifteen minutes.
“Maybe you could tell me?” he asked. “I’ve always liked sex stories.”
She shook her head. “And maybe not,” she sighed. “I’m really tired, but thanks.”
They exited the back seat together, awkwardly eyeing each other for some moments before they said good-bye.
“My phone number,” he said, drawing a business card from his pocket.
She took it from him with a smile, and then waved to him as he walked off. Back behind the wheel, she tossed the card into her purse where it would land on the bottom and lay for several months until she fished it out, dirty and tattered. Forgetting who Ryan Bidwell was, she’d throw it in the garbage with bits of old Kleenex and empty gum wrappers.
By the time Savannah arrived home that evening just twenty minutes later, she was more sober, and wracked with as much sexual need as she had when she took Ryan to her car. To make matters much worse, Guillaume’s ready judgment of this event clawed at her insides. The thought of Michael once again acting as Guillaume’s surrogate disciplinarian made it impossible to sleep. At one a.m. she finally called the photographer.
“What time is it?” she heard his growling voice inquire, once she’d identified herself.
“About midnight, you’re in bed already?”
“You’re lying, it’s ten after one,” Michael countered. “I can see the clock.”
“Then why did you ask?”
“Because my eyes hadn’t adjusted.”
“And they are now?”
“What do you want?” he asked, “I thought you never wanted to see me again?”
Savannah hedged. The world around her was spinning. Something inside her was impeccably honest, making confessions as easy as waking up in the morning. It made her good to feel naughty, then confessing. Even if it defied common sense, it would be a delicious terror spitting out the truth in the middle of the night to a man she wasn’t sure loved her anymore.
“I did something really stupid tonight?” she said.
“This a confession?” Michael asked.
“You read my mind?”
“Maybe I’m beginning to understand how you work. Are you confessing to me in lieu of Guillaume?”
“He’d have me do it, but actually this time is on my own.”
“So out with it,” he said, remaining annoyed. “And make it fast, because I have a damned long day tomorrow and I’d just as soon get back to sleep.”
“Maybe I should call tomorrow?”
“Savannah,” he barked at her sternly, “you’ve already awakened me. Don’t make me wait.”
She took a deep breath, then finally blurted out the words, “I picked up a guy in a bar tonight and fucked him in my car.” She waited anxiously for his reply.
“You did what?” he asked after a long pause. She could sense his shock. “And you’re okay?”
“Oh, I’m perfectly okay, he was safe.”
“You really know that?” Michael probed, sounding a lot less sleepy and a lot more awake.
She paused. “No, I guess not, but he was a very regular sort of guy.”
“Rapists often are,” he droned, that edge to his voice startling her in a strangely pleasant way.
“Well, I’m okay and now I’ve confessed,” she said breathing a sigh of relief.
“And you feel better?” Michael asked.
“Much,” she replied.
“Sounds good to me,” he replied. “Now if it’s all the same to you, I’m going back to sleep.”
Michael didn’t leave her time enough to reply before he hung
up the phone. She was in shock. It was hardly the way she imagined he’d respond. Yes, she expected him to be grumpy and pissed at her; but nothing more than a slammed phone in her ear? If she expected him to run to her with a cane in hand and punish her, it certainly wasn’t going to happen tonight. She assumed it was useless to try and sleep, but found herself dozing off just minutes after she lay down in bed.
Chapter Twelve
Savannah was consumed with anger aimed at herself. It would have been far better to have confessed to Guillaume than waking an indifferent Michael from his sleep. What did she expect when she’d stupidly ordered the man from her life less than two weeks before? Maybe it was the liquor that made her think that Michael would be overjoyed to hear she was initiating a reconciliation.
Maybe it was time to rethink her life. Things were getting out of hand. Plans she’d made were going awry. Rarely had she ever been this loose with her life, leaving odd ends to fall around her as though she was walking through her days with her purse hanging open, and all the most intimate treasures of her life were aimlessly falling to the ground kicked and battered by her own feet. Perhaps the gods were casting her out of heaven and making her exist in a purgatory of her own making. She had no one to blame but herself.
Savannah hadn’t thought about Guillaume and the cottage for some time; but now her mind was going there as if that was a magical place where she could save herself. It was a useless effort however. The magic of her odd correspondence with the dominant and his strange requirements just wasn’t enough to thrill her anymore. No, it was only Michael she wanted, and she’d botched that relationship, taking a jackhammer to it and shattering it into irretrievable fragments.
She had two classes to teach and papers to grade. Her mind was hardly in her work, but that was the only solace she had. Maybe if she was lucky the hapless Mack Brundage would happen into her office and she could alleviate the immediate sexual tension. Unfortunately, that thought turned her stomach. She couldn’t imagine why she’d ever made love to that scum—charming scum that he was. The last thing she’d heard, Mack was on to some little secretary in the English Department. He’d used up most of the women in his own department, and had become such a scoundrel, no woman who’d heard about his womanizing wanted him. That she’d been a victim, so willing to succumb to his wit made Savannah feel cheap. If only she were still pleasantly ignorant of the blackguard’s schemes.
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