by Maren Smith
She had no reason to be surprised that he would leave, and yet, the abruptness of it left her bereft. She held the shower head to her chest, twisting the handle between her hands, her eyes tearing because she had no one to blame for this but herself. She knew that, but why did he have to touch her side? Why couldn’t he, like she so often tried to do, pretend it didn’t exist?
She covered her eyes briefly, giving in to the first sharp wave of misery only to swallow the rest. She shoved the tears back with a hard swipe of her palm, sniffled once to keep from crying any more, and then hung the shower head back up. Gathering the soap and washcloth off the shower shelf, she scrubbed herself both listlessly and completely. There weren’t many tender places left from her spanking the night before, but every time she found one, she punished herself, scrubbing hard to make it hurt as much as possible, squeezing and digging her fingers in to make bruises if she could—it was a poor substitute for what she deserved and it didn’t make her feel any better. Finally, she had nothing left to do but shut the water off.
She thought she was alone, but when she pulled the shower curtain aside, she found Jackson hadn’t left the bathroom. He was standing completely naked, propped up against the bathroom sink with his burly arms folded across an equally broad chest, waiting for her with his belt in his hand. He’d folded the length and palmed the buckle, which left the rest of the remaining length to hang ominously free down from the end of his hand.
The towels had been removed. They were piled up on the counter behind him and the bathroom door stood wide open now. So was the bedroom window. The early morning breeze gently billowed the curtain. A whisper of cool air immediately stole away what little heat lingered from the shower, leaving her to feel each rapidly cooling drop of water as it slid down her into the bottom of the tub. Her nipples puckered from the cold every bit as much as from the tremor of uncertainty that bit down in her gut and gnawed there.
With the hand that held the belt, Jackson pointed to a spot on the floor just outside the tub. “Step out.”
Sara looked down. The rug that had been there when she’d got into the tub was gone. A thin, one-foot square of washcloth had been left in its place. Sara stepped over the lip of the tub and stood on it.
“Turn around.” Pushing off the bathroom sink, Jackson moved toward her.
Shaking, Sara turned around. She looked down to make sure she was still on the washcloth. Her fingers squeezed at one another fitfully. She gripped and twisted even harder when he took up a disciplinary position beside her.
“Bend over. Put your hands on the lip of the tub and don’t let go.”
She looked at the belt dangling from his hand, so deceptively innocuous for the bite she knew it could—and would—deliver.
Bending, she gripped the smooth edge of the tub. Her breath caught deep inside her too-tight chest. Her knuckles whitened against the cream-colored fiberglass.
“When I say look at me, what are you to do?” he demanded. There was no mercy or gentleness anywhere in his tone.
Her chest squeezed in, making it very hard to breathe.
“Look at you,” she answered in the strangest voice. It sounded hoarse, strangled even. It barely sounded like her at all. Her eyes and nose began to sting. It was as if her bent-over pose was forcing the tears she’d tried so hard to suppress right up to the very surface of her. They threatened to pour out all over again. She barely managed to swallow them back, right up until Jackson drew back his arm and struck—one…two…three hard times in rapid succession. The first brought her snapping up onto her tiptoes. The second made her knees buckle and her bottom dance, a tight little side-to-side wriggle that somehow failed to buck off the sting that was now chewing into her flesh. And with the third snapping crack, Sara lost her composure. Her gasp gave way to hiccupy cries. It almost sounded like laughter until the bawling wails broke free, and then she was sobbing.
Jackson stopped at three. He stepped back, giving her a full minute for the stinging pain to ease into a barely tolerable throb and for her to hiccup and gasp herself back into a shaky semblance of calm. He tapped her hip with the belt, and she reluctantly lowered her feet flat on the washcloth, straightened her legs and offered her bottom meekly up for more.
“Let’s try this again,” he said, calm but pitiless. “When I tell you to look at me, what are you expected to do? And this time, I suggest you think real hard about how you should answer me.”
She stared at her hands through the watery shimmer of her gathering tears. “I’m to look at you, sir.”
“Better.” Three more strokes, harder than before. The belt caught the entire width of her bottom. It hugged her; it loved her in a grip of pure hurt and slow-budding fire. She burst into wailing sobs all over again, but somehow managed to hold her pose. She even pushed her hips back, making her bottom a willing target for the pitiless wrap of the belt, though it took everything she had not to break her pose.
Again, he stopped after three. He let her cry until the fury of it had no choice but to ease. She gripped and re-gripped at the edge of the tub, sucking and gasping for air. Her bottom was in agony now, and so was the side of her hip where the length of his belt had wrapped around to bite at her.
“Spread your legs,” he told her, his voice as calm and as quiet as she had ever heard it. He didn’t sound angry. He didn’t even sound disappointed. She was disappointed enough right now for them both.
She repositioned her feet wider apart.
“Put your head down and push your bottom all the way out.” He moved back from her, giving himself more room to swing. It wasn’t going to be three this time. It wasn’t going to be easy to bear.
Sara tipped her hips, offering herself for all the punishment he chose to give.
“If you don’t want me to touch you, you have one option,” he told her. “What is it?”
“My safeword, sir.”
“In the absence of that word, whose choice is it how and where you should be touched?”
She wept. “Yours, sir.”
“Say it again.”
“It’s your choice, sir.”
“Don’t you ever hide your body from me again.”
The cracks of his belt filled that little bathroom like a fury of gunshot. Cry after braying cry echoed them, wordless and as shocking to hear as the pain was to feel. Each thwhap of leather jolted her back up onto her tiptoes, stole her ability to hold still, laved her backside in stripe after unforgiving stripe of fire and agony. She didn’t count; she just felt. Absolution should be suffered, endured, embraced. She surrendered to it, an anointment of tears that washed her sin away, a baptism of pain that swept her right to the very threshold of what she could endure and yet, delivered at the hands of the one person who in some ways probably knew her better than she knew herself, did not cross it.
He whipped her bottom until the hurt became easier to bear and then he switched targets, and lashed his stripes of fire down the backs of her thighs. Those were the worst, the hardest to stay still for, particularly since her legs were spread so wide apart that he whipped them both one at a time. He did a thorough job of it—first her left thigh, the one closest to him, letting her feel in exquisite detail exactly what the right would soon be forced to endure. Until, by the end, Sara was clinging to the edge of the tub by sheer force of will alone, sobbing so hard it was a wonder she could stand at all.
There was a puddle of her tears on the floor and pooling on the tub’s edge between her hands. Jackson sat directly in it when he took her arm and slid in under her. She needed little coaxing to settle on his lap. She went as if she’d been launched, throwing her arms around his neck and burying her face in the side of his throat, curling up in a tight fetal ball that forced him to hold all of her at once.
For the longest time, the only things that moved were her shaky, shuddering breaths as her tears slowed and eventually died away, and his hands, one softly stroking all the hot bare flesh of her thighs and hips that it could reach, while the othe
r smoothed unhurried designs up and down the curve of her spine. They were skin-to-skin, and breath-to-breath, and his penis under her was as soft and non-threatening as anything she’d ever felt, and yet it was the most intimately that any man had ever held her before.
She didn’t deserve it, but she couldn’t bear to let it go, either. So she closed her eyes, shutting out everything but his strength and his touch. She barely felt it when he picked her up and carried her back to bed. Curled in his arms, she lay beside him—became one with him—lost herself if only for a little while in his overwhelming ownership, the hurt of his hands when he gripped her buttocks and squeezed, the even hotter hurt when he finally rolled her onto her back, grinding her aching bottom into the mattress with each slow thrust of his hips in the cradle of hers.
“Come,” he whispered, when she didn’t think she deserved to. And for long hours afterward, she lay safe and secure in his arms.
She didn’t want it to end, but it eventually did.
All too soon, the gravel crunch of tires rolled up the long driveway, bringing with it the new day’s clients and heralding that inevitable moment when a subtle knock intruded at his apartment door.
“I hear you,” Jackson muttered bitterly.
It was time for her to go.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sara sat fully dressed at the dining table, slipping her stockinged feet into her shoes. Her bottom was a dull, hot ache contained in denim jeans. Her hair was brushed. The orange she’d forced herself to eat for breakfast felt like a brick in the pit of her stomach. She wanted to run to the bathroom and throw it up, but she didn’t. She just tied her sneakers on instead.
Her things were all gathered by the door. For some reason, Jackson couldn’t seem to stop messing with them. He kept organizing, rearranging and then checking the weight of the two bags.
“I’ll help you carry it down,” he said without looking at her.
“I can manage,” she replied, not looking at him either.
The longer she spent with him, the worse it was going to hurt to leave. Already it felt as if she were flaying away at her skin. No sense adding salt and lemon juice to the wound.
“Fine.” He dropped her bags where they were and didn’t touch them again. But he didn’t leave the doorway, either. He just stood there, hands on hips, so tall, so muscular, looking damn fine in nothing more kinky than jeans and a black wife-beater tee.
Sara made herself look away. This was ridiculous. She was just wasting time now, dragging out the inevitable. She should just go. Like ripping off a Band-Aid, some things were best when done quickly.
She stood up, feeling the brief flash of discomfort as her shifting weight changed where the chair pressed against her tender bottom. She welcomed the heat and the hurt that flared under her skin. She was going to need all the distractions she could get just to walk away from him.
Jackson turned away, facing into the room, when she edged past him to pick up her duffel and her carry-on. It was right on the verge of her tongue to offer him a quiet goodbye. It would have been good to leave on something other than a mountain of regrets and the argument currently sparking like a live wire between them. Try as she did, she just couldn’t think of what to say that might diffuse it.
“Okay,” was the best she could come up with, and it was an awful start that had absolutely nowhere to go.
She turned and simply headed for the door, and Jackson fell into step beside her. He started to open it for her, but only opened it partway before he slammed it shut again.
“Stay.”
One word was all he managed. Fiercely whispered, but it still rocked her with its intensity. There were so many reasons to go. Some of them were even good ones, but her resolve still wavered.
“One more day. I’ll let you go, I swear. Just give me one more day.”
Stay. Everything inside her wanted to, but in the back of her head, she knew there was nothing to stay for. This was all still make-believe. So what if they played well together? Playing wasn’t living. There was no permanence here. Jackson was her greatest friend and maybe he’d missed her for a while after she left, but despite what he’d said—either last night or this morning—he didn’t want want her. How could he? He was like a god among Doms. He not only physically looked the part, but he had the attitude, the mannerisms and he knew how to make her body respond even when no other part of her wanted to. He was so sexual, so dominant. With the crook of one finger, he could have had anyone in this Castle. No living, breathing submissive in her (or his, for that matter) right mind would have been able to resist. What hope did that leave for someone as damaged as her? It was three years ago all over again, only this time it was worse. Leaving felt harder somehow. She could have put her hand on his and pushed it off the door, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. She couldn’t make herself move that much.
“Stay,” Jackson murmured again.
“You’re going to hurt me.” She hadn’t meant to say that out loud; hearing it somehow made it feel more real.
“Never.”
“I’m going to hurt you then.” That was real, too. She felt that knot tighten in her chest all over again.
“Never.” His hand caressed hers just before she felt a gentle tug on the cloth handle of her bag.
This was such a bad idea. She had to leave, but her feet refused to move. He tugged again and she weakened. Her fingers let go when her legs should have walked, and the next thing she knew, her duffel bag was on the floor beside her, the heat of his body was moving in closer, and the tip of his finger was under her chin, tilting her face up to his.
“Never,” he said again, and kissed her.
Kisses like this should be illegal. His mouth was so warm and soft. When he nibbled at her lips, coaxing her to open to the first sweet invasion of his tongue, her toes curled up tight inside her shoes. She made the softest sound, a faint moan, but it made him shudder. Funny, how someone as small and slight as she was could shake someone as big as Jackson.
The next thing she knew, the door was at her back and Jackson’s hands were on her ass, molding and squeezing and lifting her hips up hard into his. The rampant bulge of his growing erection ground against her sex. There were two layers of denim between them, but she could still feel the furnace-heat of him burning into her body. His fingers dug into her, seeming to find every tender spot his spankings had left behind, and when she gasped, his tongue and hips began a synchronized thrusting rhythm that sent every other thought she had scattering to the clouds.
The thrusts of his hips grew in time with the hungry stabbing of his tongue. It bumped her up against the door, rattling it until it almost sounded like knocking.
No, wait. It was knocking. Someone was knocking on the door at her back.
Breathing hard, Jackson ceased his plundering of her mouth. He raised his head and glared at the wood panels above her head. “Go,” he growled. “The fuck. Away.”
Sara clung to him, her senses spinning, dancing, feeling something akin to frenzy, all the way down to where she could feel his cock digging against her.
“Master Marshall has arranged an open seat on an outbound bus. He wants to know if Sara is interested in taking it.”
It was a woman’s voice and there was laughter in her tone. She wasn’t hard to recognize either. It was the same woman who had led Sara out of Master Marshall’s office yesterday after Robert so callously disassociated himself from the relationship. What was her name? At the moment, Sara could barely remember her own.
“I’m fine,” she called, her voice shaking so badly it was a wonder she could speak at all.
“Go. Away,” Jackson repeated, dark warning underlining each sharply bit-off word.
“I have to hear it from the client, Jackson,” the woman in the hall airily replied. “You know the rules. I have to verify she’s not being coerced—”
“You’ve verified it, now get lost!”
“It would be better if I saw her with my own ey—”
Jackson heaved Sara off the door and put her down. She stumbled at the abruptness with which she was released, but managed to catch the wall and didn’t fall.
“I’m not going to count to three,” Jackson snapped, ripping open the door. “I’m not even going to count to one—!”
The woman was already gone, though. Sara could hear her laughing as she fled swiftly back toward the stairs. Jackson did not pursue farther than the step or two that carried him out into the hall.
“Come bother me about that again and I’ll bust your skinny little ass!” His scowl switched targets almost immediately, and a few seconds later another Master came into view. He had both hands held up in a gesture of wordless surrender and did not look directly at Jackson until after he’d unlocked the door of the apartment directly across the hall from them. He turned then, staring back at Jackson as he held the door wide open. Like a line of little ducklings that followed, a string of three barely-clothed “barbarian” girls scampered giggling past him and disappeared inside. The last one in got a sharp smack on the bottom by the Master holding the door. He smiled at Jackson.
“Life is good,” he said, and for the first time, and only for half a second, his gaze dipped past Jackson and settled on her. Faster than she could blink, his eyes returned to Jackson. “Are you done with her? Want to pass her over? Conan’s always on the lookout for another Valeria.”
“Say that to me again and you’re going to lose all ability to eat without a straw.” Jackson was as far from smiling as she had ever seen him.
“I’ll take that as a ‘no.’” Chuckling, the Master disappeared into his apartment. Just before the door swung shut behind him, she heard him say, “There are three women in this apartment and not one of them is sucking my cock. Someone is going to get a beating.”
Jackson stared at the door for several long seconds, then the now-empty hallway, and finally, he looked back in at her.