by Maren Smith
Back in his bedroom, he dug through his closet until he found his tool kit. Well, he liked to call it a tool kit. In reality, it looked like an old-fashioned doctor’s bag, the leather worn but still serviceable. For all he knew, it might actually have been one once. He’d found it at a local thrift shop back in his college and ramen noodle days. Most of the ladies he’d visited had liked his attention to detail and discretion whenever Dr. Love—yeah, that self-appointed moniker still made him wince—came a-calling with his tools of trade neatly packed in this bag. Back then, the sum and total of his “tools” amounted to little more than nipple clamps, a speculum, a double bardex nozzle, a worn length of horse harness that had taught more than one young lady the wisdom of holding still for the “doctor” and a pocketful of pre-lubed, ribbed-for-her-pleasure condoms.
He’d done a lot of growing up since then—in technique, toys and (he hoped) sophistication.
Dragging the bag out onto the foot of his bed, he opened it. He hadn’t used this since his last vacation over a year ago. He quickly went through the toys, pulling out everything not in unopened packaging and depositing it all in the garbage under the bathroom sink. Castle rules dictated every Master keep a mandatory toy chest, whether they played with clients or not. There was always an off-chance that Master Marshall might summon him with a teary-eyed submissive in one hand and a written request. In the last three years, Jackson had received maybe ten such summonses and had volunteered for a handful of others. Not once had he ever brought a client back to his apartment. Have bag, will travel; he always went to them. Still, rules were rules and right now Jackson was grateful for them.
Everything he needed was right here in his bedroom. In the bag, he had his restraints, lube, heating oils, Loopy Johnny, a hairbrush-sized heart-shaped paddle, his specialty "fun-ishment" gloves and a blindfold, among other things. From his toy chest (his top dresser drawer), he selected the rest: nipple and clitoral clamps, clip strings, two sizes of anal plugs, a progressive string of vibrating beads, fresh batteries, fingertip massager and a chastity device. He debated on that last one for a long, long time, but in the end he took it out of the drawer, cut the packaging open and quietly packed his bag.
It had been a long time since he had felt this kind of…anticipation. He was almost giddy with it. Patience, he told himself. He closed his eyes, brought in a deep and (hopefully) calming breath, and adjusted himself in his pants. She did this to him. Had done this for three very long years. If he could keep his head in the game, Sara was going to find out just how sexually frustrating payback could be.
And yet, once more at the foot of his bed, on the verge of closing up his bag and heading back out to the living room, Jackson hesitated. Six slow steps took him back to his dresser. He closed the top drawer and then eased open the next drawer down. He found the picture stuffed down under his stash of socks. Plain dark frame. Wal-Mart special. The only photo ever taken of the two of them together and it was awful—her in her hospital bed, swollen from all the IV fluids, burns and bandages, bald as bald could be; he, half perched on the side of her bed, his arm around the pillows behind her because there was no place he could touch her then that wouldn’t have hurt. His own head was freshly-shaven—solidarity, that was him, all the way—and tipped toward hers. She’d been in a lot of pain that day, but she’d still managed a smile for the nurse who’d snapped this shot. All the nurses had thought they’d made a cute pair.
So had he.
He could still remember how stupid he’d looked and felt the morning he’d shown up to take her home only to find she’d already gone. Without a word or a note. No sorry. No goodbye. No “Dear Jackson, please get stuffed, love Sara.” No nothing.
He brushed his thumb across her two-dimensional face. It was hard to count the number of times he’d tried to throw this picture away. He never could make himself do it. Harder than getting rid of it, though, was standing here looking at it. Turning the frame over, he stuffed it down deep under a loose pile of clean socks until it scraped the bottom of the drawer and his hand bumped what he’d really come for.
The collar was a simple leather band, decorated all around with a single line of small crimson hearts and three D rings evenly spaced along the front. He wondered if she would remember wearing it for him the one and only time they’d scened together. He closed his fist around it, feeling the cold of the D rings and the stiff edge of the leather biting into his palm. Unsure he wanted to explain why he still had it, he debated putting it back. In the end, however, he stuffed it down into his doctor’s bag and headed back down the hall to the living room.
Although still standing at the table where he’d left her, Sara had not obeyed him. She was staring down at nothing in particular, holding the nipple he had lightly pinched while the fingers of her other hand explored her side. She was pressing in at herself as if she were trying to echo the places he had touched.
Jackson dropped his bag on the table behind her with a whump of sound that was loud enough to make her jump. She dropped her hands, abruptly tucking the one in against her left side, hiding those damn scars all over again. He had no idea how to make her believe he couldn’t have cared less about them. He had no idea if he ought even to try.
He looked down at her; she stared straight at the floor, and for a long time neither of them moved. More than anything, he wished he could take a moment to hold and reassure her, but every instinct inside him was screaming that softness now wasn’t what she needed. He forced himself to harden instead—his heart, his gut, his expression. “What did I tell you to do before I left the room, Sara?”
She shook her head. The soft sheen of tears flooded her eyes, turning them watery and too bright. “I can’t…”
“You can and you will.” Jackson caught her arm when she tried to shy away. He swung her around, putting her back up against the table, and gave her a single, firm shake. As far as reprimands went, it was the gentlest that he ever gave and yet it sent the first of her tears spilling past her lashes and rolling down her cheek. His thumb itched to caress it away. He caught himself barely in time. “You’re better than this,” he told her, but she was already shaking her head again.
“Not anymore.”
Comments like that made it easier to pretend he was hardened. Releasing her arms, he caught her by the throat. “Get your head up,” he snapped. “Back straight. Hands on your head.”
Her spine stiffened, but otherwise she made little effort to obey. “I can’t do this anymore, Jackson. I don’t want to play.”
“No?” His thumb shifted, gliding a single caress down the curve of her neck. “So say the safeword already. It’s the only way you’re going to stop me.”
Her mouth opened and in that moment, he thought she might actually do it. But something stopped her. She hesitated, a tremor shivering her when dismay crawled in the depths of her beautiful blue eyes.
“You remember what the Castle safeword is.” It wasn’t a question; he knew the answer just by looking at her. Onions; it was in all the brochures and damn near the first topic covered in every orientation. “You remember the safeword we use,” he continued. Again, not a question. She was trembling now, angling her chin just a little higher as if trying not to arch into his thumb’s next petting caress. Her eyes never left his. He wondered if she even knew she was doing it. “Use it, or submit.”
He gave her almost a full minute, driving it in one passing second at a time, just how completely she did not want him to stop. And still a flash of panic raced through her when he shifted his grip to her arm just above her elbow and dragged one of his dining chairs out from the table.
Once upon a time, Sara had confessed to him of harboring a love/hate relationship with spankings. She loved the hot, achy after-glow; she hated it while it was happening (her pussy translating each reverberation of every slap into sensual arousal), but that pain was still hard to bear. She said she loved being bent over things, but hated being taken across the knee (she couldn’t stand being made
to feel childish). Bending her over the table would have made his first choice of after-care comfort so much easier to access. He’d have been inside her, he knew, just as soon as the last swat of his hand bounced off her soon-to-be red-hot bottom. He could already feel her yielding to his thrust, hear her wanton gasps and cries, and see the undulations of her body as she arched and pushed to meet him. No, he wouldn’t have minded at all bending her over the table, but he wanted no part of this to be mistaken for a reward.
“Wait!” She locked her legs, pulling away from him when he sat down, presenting a very capable and authoritarian lap. “Jackson! Please, wait!”
Tightening his grip on her elbow, he slung his other arm around her waist and brought her crashing down across one thigh. He immediately locked her involuntary kicks in the vise of his legs, greatly limiting her struggles to the flailing of her hands as she sought something to grab onto. Not to fight, he recognized, but to grip. She caught the bottom rung of the chair and then his ankle, her small hand latching on tight. Once she was in position, she never tried once to break his hold. She accepted it the way she should and she held onto him, seeking comfort in his touch to help her endure.
His heart warmed, swelled, grew tender. But when he spoke, none of that tenderness made its way into his voice. “This is the last time you will use my name without respect.”
The soft, round curves of her naked bottom as they absorbed the impact of his first spank was a visual piece of art. Her flesh flattened, bounced and blushed a soft shade of wounded pink that was completely belied by the shrill gasp that burst past her lips. She let go of his ankle, her hand scrambling back to keep his hand from falling again. And it worked, but only until he caught her wrist, tucking it under her stomach as he locked his arm around her waist and held her steady.
He tried to tell himself that this was just for her disobedience. For breaking position after he told her to stay put, for resisting his authority after offering her submission and her lack of proper supplication. She was no green girl, new to the BDSM game. She knew the rules and she knew the consequences for breaking them. He tried to tell himself this had absolutely nothing to do with what happened three years ago. He had swallowed that anger, moved past it…yeah, right. And by the time he realized he was in trouble, the only coherent thought Jackson had time for was that split second of gratitude when he realized it was a good thing he’d left his belt hanging on the hook in that other room. Otherwise, he didn’t know if he could have resisted his need to use it.
As that old adage went, it all came out in the wash. This particular wash was as dirty as it got. His anger came pouring out of him, fueling the rapid rise and fall of his arm. He felt the burning heat of pain in his palm and the embarrassment that still tinged him when he remembered showing up that day at the hospital only to find she’d already left. He remembered how the nursing staff had looked at him as he’d stood there, too dumb for it to sink in right away that what she was running from was he.
Jackson tried to stop himself. At the very least he should have given her some kind of warm-up—she could have borne this easier with a warm-up—but he didn’t. He just spanked her. Harder and harder, faster than she deserved. And he knew exactly what she was feeling, because he could feel it, too, spreading through his naked palm, growing red and sore and every bit as hot as her poor bottom. She was writhing and bucking upon his knee, tossing back her head and helplessly yelping, then wailing, before finally bursting into pleading sobs, and he still could not make himself stop. Not until she was bawling, her pleas so garbled as to be incoherent. Not until all the soft flesh behind her was scarlet-red from the top of her ass all the way down onto the backs of her thighs, so swollen that the very summits of both nether cheeks felt hard to the touch.
The palm of his hand was a burning agony to match and still he wanted to keep on, to punish her longer, but he had already taken it past the point of abuse. A good Dom gave his sub what she needed; but nothing in this was about her needs. It felt too much like revenge.
It was that realization that finally stopped him. Jackson held himself frozen, his aching hand poised high and shaking to deliver another crashing cadence of slaps to a bottom well past the deserving of it. He was breathing hard, both from having to hold her down and from the rigors of the paddling that had driven her to thrash and writhe in the first place. He had never beaten any of his subs before. And that’s exactly what this was—it wasn’t a spanking; it was a beating.
With Sara, he lost all perspective. His hand shook harder. He had to stop.
“Get up,” he said, barely recognizing the harsh voice that was coming out of him.
She crawled upright, somnambulistic and sobbing, backing off his lap with each gradual degree that he was able to let her go. He released her legs last and she stumbled, her knees buckling in and out. Holding her arm until she grew steadier, he stood up and pushed her ahead of him, marching her into the nearest corner. He left her facing the wall between the mantle and the window, and then he retreated. He had to get distance between them. He had to.
Stalking down the hallway, he shut himself into the bathroom before releasing a deep and shaky breath and sinking down to sit on the edge of the tub. He stared at his bright red hand, then rubbed at it, though whether to soothe the pain that slight touch caused or to grind it in, he didn’t know.
He needed to call Marshall. Needed to tell him to summon Kade to come and take Sara. He couldn’t—shouldn’t—Top her when his emotions were this uncontrollable. Hurting her wasn’t what he wanted, and yet that was exactly what he’d done. Shaking his head, he closed his eyes. Up until now, he hadn’t even thought he could hurt her.
A soft tap at the door made his eyes open again. He could hear soft, shaky gasps and sniffling on the other side.
She was going to leave tomorrow. In the grand scheme of things, what good was one more day going to do him anyway? How stupid could he be to think he could cleanse his need for her and learn how to say goodbye in the little bit of time they had left. He had to let her go.
“M-Master Jackson?”
He could hear the tears thick in her voice. She sounded hoarse, raspy, but then, she’d done a lot of yelling and crying while he’d been blistering her ass. Jackson shook his head again, and then he stood up. He made himself open the door. Harder still was the effort it took to look at her, but he made himself see the damage he’d done in all its ugliness—her disheveled hair, her red-rimmed eyes and nose, her flushed cheeks streaked with the tracks of more tears than he cared to count.
For a long time, they simply looked at one another. Then, she bent and knelt at his feet. Reaching for his hand—the hand he had spanked her with—she pressed a tender kiss into his palm before tucking her cheek against it.
“Please, Master Jackson,” she whispered, and began to cry all over again. “Please don’t be angry with me. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
Jackson knew better, but he couldn’t stop himself. One soft nudge of his hand brought her close enough to lean against his thigh. She shifted to hug it with both hands, his pants leg absorbing her tears.
“I’m sorry,” she wept again, and he closed his eyes, lost in the fragile sensation of her touch.
One more day. That’s all he had.
He refused to give it up for anything.
CHAPTER SIX
They stood back-to-back in the kitchen at opposite countertops, each at their own cutting board: she, cutting bell peppers and onions; he, chopping chicken breasts. The air between them held an odd mixture of first date, get-to-know-you jitters and comfortable familiarity. Fully intending to be a selfish sonuvabitch, he didn’t want to share so much of an ounce of her attention tonight. Sadly, his decision to cook dinner in was stymied by the revelation of what a bachelor cliché he really was. Although he had a fridge in his apartment, he spent way too much time eating either at the daily buffet in the long dining hall or at the Castle’s infamous Supper and Show—a nightly choreography of discipline and desire
, where anything could and often did go, and which was sometimes enacted behind a thin paper screen that hid identities but left little else to the imagination.
Tonight, the Sultan was bringing his harem down to service the diners and, if he played true to his usual end-of-the-month form, the “eunuchs” were going to get their chance to play. Now that was a show. Floggings and fellatio would most certainly abound, but it wasn’t some nameless harem girl he wanted to feed from his cock. Not when he had Sara, dressed in nothing but the collar he’d bought for her and primed to wait on his every command.
No. No, tonight he wanted dinner to be a simple and intimate affair. Just the two of them. Unfortunately, when he opened the fridge, the entire contents amounted to little more than a half a case of beer and a bottle of ketchup eight months past its expiration date. Until tonight, he hadn’t known ketchup had an expiration date.
Taking a client off Castle grounds was a job-terminating event—no excuses, no exceptions—and since taking her grocery shopping would have meant he had to let her dress, that was out anyway. Out of choices, Jackson did the next best thing. He called down to the kitchen and requested food be sent up. He also asked that the courier swing by Sara’s old room and bring up his belt, along with anything else that might have been left behind. When he finally heard that knock at the door, he’d opened it fully expecting to receive a supper tray, already prepared and ready to eat. Cook Connie must be in one of her “peculiar” moods. She’d sent up fajita fixings, complete with flour wraps, jalapenos, spices, a bottle of tequila and a hastily scribbled: “Too busy. Do it yourself.”