Truth By His Hand

by Casey Cameron

  “I met a few people,” I said, tapping the pencils together softly as I struggled to remember names. “There was, uh…Dennis.”

  Mariah nodded. “I know Dennis. Big whip fan.”

  “There was Stacy-Ann and Bella, and I couldn’t figure out if they were a couple or not.”

  “Nobody knows. I think they like it that way.”

  “Then there was Robbie, I think? He seemed…pretty hardcore.”

  “Indian guy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ravi,” Mariah corrected. “He’s a good Dom, but definitely too intense for you. You should see his dungeon,” she said wistfully.

  “Is there anyone into BDSM around here that you haven’t slept with?” I said, raising an eyebrow.

  “Probably not.” Mariah shrugged. “I’m kind of a huge slut. So, did you manage to connect with any of them?”

  “None of those, no, but there was a guy I exchanged numbers with—Brandon.”

  “There we go,” she said triumphantly. “I don’t know any Brandon. What’s he look like?”

  Rather than explain, I pulled up a social media profile on my phone to do it for me. Mariah squinted at the photo, then her eyes widened in recognition. “Oh, Flamefisher—yeah, I know him from fire-spinning. Good choice—he’ll really rough you up, and he’s got a huge dick.” She gave me a knowing wink, and I couldn’t help but blush a little.

  Brandon sure looked like the kind of guy who could rough me up. He was tall and broad-shouldered, kind of beefy and stubbly and undeniably masculine in an “I do my own home repair and fix my own car” sort of way. He hadn’t balked when I’d told him how new I was at this, and he’d told me he’d love to give me a sampling of what the lifestyle could offer with no strings attached. He’d been very enthusiastic, almost evangelical in his way—like BDSM was something that made him really happy, and he just wanted to share it with the world. I could almost picture him going door-to-door on weekends to hand out pamphlets preaching the good news of whips and chains.

  “Anyone else catch your eye?” Mariah asked, and I had to wonder if she was somehow getting off on the way I was squirming in the middle of a—well, not a busy store, but not empty either.

  I chewed on my lip, the pencils in my hand briefly forgotten as I remembered an ice-blue stare and the heat it stirred in me. “There was one other guy. He was…intense. And kind of nosy—he was asking me all these really direct personal questions.”

  Mariah grinned. “About my height, dark curly hair, glasses, smile that can melt your panties off?”

  “That’s the one,” I said with a chuckle.

  “Ellison Fitch.” Her voice went a little distant, soft with something like awe. “He’s amazing. Did you two hit it off?”

  I swallowed, my throat tight. “I don’t think so. I kind of thought he was into me, so I asked him on a date, but he wasn’t interested because I said I didn’t want him to dom me.”

  “You…what?” Mariah rapped her marker sharply on the top of my head. “Do you have any idea what you just said?”

  “Apparently not.” I gently pushed her arm away to save my skull. “But I suppose you’re going to tell me.”

  “I thought the whole purpose of this was so you could find someone to dom the ever-living shit out of you. Ellison is, like…just about the best you could possibly ask for.”

  “He’s hot, and really intense and intellectual, which I totally get off on, but I want to be—” I checked around again to make sure we weren’t being observed. “—dominated. What could a guy like that realistically do to me?”

  Mariah gave me a long incredulous look, then shook her head, snickering quietly. “Oh, sweet summer child,” she said with a tone that may have been sincere pity, “this is why your message board is a war zone.”

  I let out an exasperated groan, gazing up at the decoupaged ceiling. “Boundless Fate is not a BDSM webcomic. My message board is a war zone because for some reason people are expecting realism and safewords in a story about demons and time-traveling wizards. It’s a fantasy, it’s not a primer.”

  “Yeah, but you chose to write about those themes,” said Mariah matter-of-factly, “and so you drew an audience who cares about them. You’re never going to keep that audience if you honestly think there’s nothing Ellison Fitch could do to you.”

  “I’m trying, okay? I’m reading books, I went to Kinky Bingo, I even got the phone number of a real, live Dom,” I said, gesturing at my phone. “It’s just that this doesn’t come naturally to me—it’s going to be hard enough to play along and keep a straight face even if I’m not thinking about how I could probably break my tormenter in half if I tried.”

  Mariah blew out a long sigh through tight lips. “Fine. So, you’re going to do a scene with Flamefisher?”

  “Yeah, I’m just waiting for Brandon to tell me when he’s free this week.” I’d be damned if I was going to call a full-grown man “Flamefisher.”

  “Good,” she said with a decisive nod. “You’re going to have a great time, and then you’re going to tell me all about it.”

  I didn’t bother to argue; I knew she was right. Turning my attention back to my pencils, I tried to remember how cramped the panels I had to finish this week were going to be.

  Mariah dragged her hand down her face with a groan. “They’re like two dollars—would you just stop waffling and get them both?”

  “There’s a sale this weekend,” I said, pointing toward the sign on the door. “I don’t want to spend more than I have to today.”

  “Two dollars, River. You can afford two dollars.”

  “I didn’t get where I am by not being relentlessly frugal,” I said, finally making my decision. I slid the left pencil back into the display and held up the right proudly.

  “Oh, thank god,” she sighed, bustling out of the aisle with a swish of her voluminous skirt. It was a hideous pink-and-purple affair printed with white Persian cat heads, and it clashed terribly with the yellow geometric pattern on the leggings she wore underneath, but somehow she made it work. “Time to check out the clearance table.”

  I heard a muffled shriek as Mariah reached the clearance table before me, and arrived to the sight of a very pricey set of colored pencils being thrust in my face. “It’s 40 percent off, and it’s only missing two pencils—want to go halfsies on it and share?”

  “I don’t use colored pencils,” I said, knowing full well she knew that.

  “Can’t blame a girl for trying,” she sighed, running her fingers across the top of the case with a longing look. “I really can’t justify getting these right now, but…” Suddenly she perked up and whipped out her phone. “One sec—this is just too perfect.”

  Mariah snapped a quick photo of the pencils and tapped out a message quicker with one hand than I could usually manage with two, then grinned at me. I knew that grin—it was the “ask me what I’m thinking even though we both know you’re going to regret it” grin.

  “Okay, I’ll bite—what’s too perfect?”

  “You know that new sub I’ve been seeing?” She leaned in and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “He told me he’s into financial domination.”

  Yep, I was regretting it.

  “What is financial domination?” Honestly, it seemed like every time I saw Mariah, I got some new term forcibly crammed into my head. This world was bigger than I’d ever realized.

  “Pretty much what it sounds like,” she said with a shrug. “I dominate him financially. Tell him to give me money, make him buy me gifts, drag him along on shopping trips where he foots the bill and I ignore him the whole time.” She must have caught sight of my disbelieving stare, because she shrugged again. “It’s a thing. People are into it. We’re just getting started, and I’m still learning how to cook up scenarios for him, but—”

  Her phone buzzed in her hand, and she thumbed it open with another bright grin. “Wow, that was fast—he transferred me the money already.”

  I shook my head as she typed out
another response. “I don’t get it at all. That doesn’t even sound real.”

  “Oh, it’s real,” she chuckled as her phone buzzed again. She spun it around to show me the exchange. Below her photo were a handful of texts.

  > MARIAH: Mistress demands a gift.

  > WORM: Is this enough, Mistress?

  > MARIAH: It’s a good start. Double it and I might deign to look at your worthless little dick.

  > WORM: Thank you, Mistress.

  “And he…likes that?” I said, incredulous.

  “He loves it,” Mariah said, sweeping the box up and tucking it under her arm. “He practically begged me to do it, and now that we’ve started, he’s going a little crazy for it.”

  “Do you like doing it?” Being on the receiving end of the gifts seemed at least marginally more appealing than having to give them, but I was still having a hard time wrapping my head around the idea.

  “I’ll be honest with you, I wasn’t sure at first. I like humiliating a guy as much as the next girl, but the money stuff…it seemed a little skeevy. I don’t get much out of it directly, but I get a lot out of his response to it, you know?” Her smile went a little soft and dreamlike as she idly caressed the box of pencils. “He’s just so grateful when I make him do these things, like I’m the one granting him a gift, not the other way around. And that definitely makes my kinky little clam happy.”

  “Plus you’re getting expensive art supplies out of the deal,” I said, nodding to the pencils she was getting a little too intimate with.

  “Well, yeah,” she said, dropping her hand like she just realized she was acting out some very niche pornography in the middle of a store. “Even if I wasn’t getting off on his reactions, it makes him happy, and it’s not like there are any downsides for me.”

  Try as I might, I couldn’t form a picture of what that might feel like in my mind. I mean, I wasn’t any stranger to enjoying a partner’s enjoyment. I loved going down on people for just that reason. When I was going down on someone, I wasn’t distracted by my own cock—I could enjoy every little noise the other person made, and try everything I could to draw out as many different sounds as possible. It was satisfying in a way to know I had that much of an effect on someone.

  But the thing was, going down on someone was a full sensory experience. There was taste and texture and friction to enjoy, not just the psychological thrill of pleasing someone whose company you enjoyed.

  This financial domination thing—domination in general, really—was a different animal entirely. The idea of exerting control over someone like that, of humiliating them and forcing them to do things for me…it didn’t appeal at all. I supposed it was something I could do if I had to. If I fell in love with someone and found out it was something they needed in order to be happy, then sure—I could call someone a worm and make them buy me dinner. I just wouldn’t be enjoying it.

  So much of the activities that fell under the “wide umbrella” of BDSM, as Ellison had called it, seemed that way to me, especially the painful ones. I didn’t have a high pain tolerance—I would whine for days when I got a paper cut feeding pages into my scanner—and while, again, I could put up with some amount of it if I happened to get involved with someone who desperately wanted it, it would be something I would grudgingly tolerate, and sure as hell wouldn’t welcome.

  “I really don’t understand kink,” I mumbled under my breath, but Mariah’s sharp ears caught every word.

  “You know you don’t have to do this,” she said, fixing me with a serious look. “I mean, fuck your readers. It’s your comic—you can tell whatever story you want to tell. Besides, you can study this stuff without any hands-on participation. Pushing yourself to do something you’re not comfortable with is a sure way to have a bad time.”

  “I know,” I said with a quiet sigh. “I am interested, though. There are a lot of aspects of this that—” I carefully lowered my voice. “—turn me on, but I don’t understand why. I don’t understand why some things work for me and others don’t. I want to understand, and I don’t think I will until I try, you know?”

  Mariah gave me an understanding nod. “Believe it or not, I started out feeling the same way. And look at me now.”

  I took in the sight of her posing for my inspection, her hand raised imperiously in the air and trailing the wispy fabric of her peasant blouse that really, really shouldn’t have gone with the rest of her outfit (but it did).

  Mariah had always been…well, a little weird. I’d met her in the last year of college, and we’d connected right away over art, tattoos, and our taste in local craft beers, but back then she’d been much more timid and soft-spoken.

  A year or so after I met her, she started getting involved in the free-wheeling community of sex-positive kink aficionados around here, and the transformation it had sparked in her was akin to a butterfly emerging from its cocoon—in more ways than one, considering her colorful plumage. Something about the lifestyle had called to her, and by exploring her sexuality, she’d told me, she’d learned to explore other aspects of herself. These days she liked to tell people she was living as her true self for the first time in her life, and her only regret was that it had taken until her early 30s to get there.

  I wanted what she had—that understanding and that shameless, hedonistic existence. I knew that the crazy world of BDSM wasn’t the only way to find myself, nor was it necessarily the most efficient, but I’d had more than enough quiet, introspective analysis to last a lifetime, thank you very much. Maybe this was a way I could learn more about myself and have some fun getting laid at the same time. Maybe I’d find my true self under a Dom’s firm hand.

  Or maybe I’d just spend a lot of time getting whipped and wishing I was watching TV instead. But at least I’d know.

  My phone buzzed, and I took it out to see a text from Brandon. I must have blushed when I read it, because Mariah immediately tried to look over my shoulder to see it. I hurriedly stowed my phone before she could snoop and said, “It’s Brandon. He wants to have dinner on Thursday to discuss my limits and, uh…maybe test them.”

  Mariah clapped her hands together, practically squealing with glee. “I’m so excited for you! You are going to have such a great time.”

  “I hope so,” I said, my stomach churning with half excitement, half terror. “I kind of miss normal dating.”

  Mariah glared at me, and I realized my error in time to fend off her lecture.

  “Sorry—vanilla dating. There’s no ‘normal’ in sex.”

  “Much better.”

  “Well, I still miss it. That at least I understand, to some extent.”

  Mariah’s eyes flicked to something across the room, and her face lit up. “This day is just full of beautiful serendipity—get over here, I’ve got to introduce you to someone. You’re going to love them.”

  The “someone” she led me over to was tall and slim, with sharp cheekbones and blue ombre hair that swept gracefully over their forehead as they leaned over a display case and gazed at the expensive fountain pens. Despite being absorbed in ogling, they barely jumped at all in response to Mariah’s sharp tap on the shoulder. If you’re friends with Mariah, you’ve got to get used to being ambushed at any moment.

  “I haven’t seen you in almost a month! I should have known I’d find you here,” Mariah said, grinning. “River, this is Tea. Tea, River.”

  “Tea?” I said, not sure I’d heard correctly.

  “Like the drink,” Tea confirmed with a smile. It was a stunning smile, warm and open, and I had a hard time looking away.

  “River is a friend of mine from college. He used to date Dan J.”

  I saw Tea’s nose wrinkle almost imperceptibly and I sighed. “I assume you didn’t like him much.”

  “Nobody did, baby,” Mariah said, patting me gently on the shoulder. “Anyway, Tea, I was just telling River about you,” she lied, throwing her arm around my shoulder, “and here you are—what are the odds?”

  “Slim,” Tea sai
d with an amused smile. “What were you telling him about me?”

  “That you’re a total charmer and a pleasure to date, and that he should definitely ask you out. River desperately needs to get back into the dating pool, and I think you two would be a really good match.” Turning to me, Mariah said with assurance, “Tea doesn’t have a kinky bone in their body, so you should find them very unintimidating.”

  “Thank you, as always, for broadcasting everyone’s sex life to the world,” Tea said with an unruffled smile. They held out a hand for me to shake and said, “It’s lovely to be bludgeoned into a date with you, River. How does Monday sound?”

  “I—I’m sorry, you don’t have to—that’s really okay,” I stammered, giving Mariah a look that was trying to be angry but probably just came off stunned and terrified.

  “I’m not sure we have a choice here,” Tea said, then leaned in and stage whispered, “We can just cancel when Mariah’s not looking.”

  I let out a weak laugh, scrubbing a hand across the back of my head (and checking the top quickly—still there). I was getting the impression I liked Tea’s sense of humor, and they were certainly attractive. Maybe a date wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. “Sure, Monday sounds good.”

  We exchanged numbers, and Tea said goodbye with one last wistful look toward the fountain pens. “You are the absolute worst,” I said to Mariah when they’d gone.

  “Oh, come on, you know that’s not true,” she said dismissively. “I just got you a date with someone awesome—in fact, if you count the fact that I made you go to Speed Kink Night, I technically got you two dates.”

  I sighed. “Fine, you’re not the worst, you’re only in the top five.”

  “I’ll take it,” she said with a triumphant grin. “Now for the important question: what are you going to wear on Thursday?”

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