Wrecked (The Blackened Window)

by Corrine A. Silver

  Too late to be there now.

  “Back to Nest—”

  Already did that.

  “Back to Jason’s place—”

  Already did that tonight.

  “A late movie…”

  Too late and I want to see you.

  “Do any of those sound good to you?”

  No, what sounds good is tying you up and making you suffer a bit. Getting my hands on you. But I couldn’t let myself be that much of a dick, so I tried to make my words soft. “Baby girl, I wasn’t planning tonight, remember? You’re so sweet.” I stepped back, brushing the hair away from her face. “I want to go somewhere quiet where we can talk. I want to hear your thoughts about my control issues and your submissive tendencies.”

  “Well we could go to one of our apartments. Quiet there.”

  Really, little one? I felt one of my eyebrows cock up.

  “No. If we go somewhere private, I’m going to fuck you, and you aren’t ready.” While it was true, it probably wasn’t the right thing to say. She drew a quick breath, scowl marring her face.

  “Whoa! Holy shit, buddy! Firstly, you’re going to fuck me? Maybe I’m gonna fuck you. Maybe neither of us is getting fucked. Jesus, Xander! Secondly, you don’t decide when I’m ready. For anything.”

  She was so cute when she got mad and she didn’t get it. Of course I decided all that shit. Of course I would fuck her. In that moment, I made the decision that we wouldn’t have sex until she begged me to fuck her, like a good girl. I started laughing. Again probably the wrong response, but it was like a bunny telling a wolf what to do. It was just absurd.

  “Okay, baby girl. You’re so fucking cute.” That mollified her a little. “You know that’s not how it is with me. But this is exactly what I want to talk about. Give me the keys.”

  She gave me the keys and I walked her around the car to the passenger side. I took her to the Cat’s Meow.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Leda

  Goldfrapp, Strict Machine

  Once we were settled in a booth in the back of the restaurant, Xander took one of my hands and started tracing designs in my palm and over the inside of my wrist. “Tell me what made you so mad back there,” he said quietly, without looking up at me.

  “I don’t know. All of it, I guess. We can’t be alone now because you can’t control yourself? And I don’t get a choice? And you deciding if I am ready for it or not. I mean, that’s kind of fucked up, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t think it is, Leda. This is me. This is how I work. This is what I meant by demanding, and we’re barely scratching the surface here. What bothers me about this is that I really do think that you are a sub at heart. Tonight just really confirmed it for me. You decide to plan our date, and at least half of the night is left up to what I may want to do after the initial things you plan. You adjust your body to me all the time. You give in. You follow my directions. You accept what I tell you is going to happen. You accept the way the I touch you, in fact I think you really like it. You are submissive.” He paused, looking up at me.

  I felt stripped naked in front of him. Too bare. “Xander, I don’t know how to do this. Yes, I like… I like to take you into consideration when I think about things. I want to do things that…please you.” I was searching for the words and they sounded all wrong, so stupid, but they were the closest thing to being able to sum up what I was feeling for him. “I don’t want you to be disappointed in me or with the things I do.”

  My eyes watered a little and I felt my face twisting up in the pre-cry panic that always happened. The waiter brought our desserts with a look of concern on his face. He gave Xander a look, and Xander completely turned his body toward the waiter with challenge on his face, but never let go of my hand. They held each other’s gaze for a few beats.

  “Thanks. She will have another cup of tea in about ten minutes. Otherwise, we’re all set.” He said it coldly, with some amount of contempt in his voice, and the waiter seemed to shrink in front of him. Xander turned back to me, trusting the waiter to see to the orders. Xander’s voice and face were softer for me. “Finish what you need to say, Leda.”

  “I don’t know what else to say, but I’m freaked out by the idea that I wouldn’t be in sexual control of myself. But when you said you’d fuck me, I think that would have been okay with me. I think I would have let you.”

  “Why would you have let me? Because I wanted it or because you wanted it too?”

  “I think both, but then I feel like…we’ve just met! Seriously, we just met! What the fuck am I doing?” My tears had stopped and I pulled my hand away to brush them off my cheeks.

  “See, honey girl? This is what I meant. You aren’t ready yet.” He brushed his fingers across my knuckles and went on, in a rush, “And that’s just fine. I love that you want to make me happy. All these things you’re talking about are part of your submissive nature. And the part of your brain that rebels against is the part that is trained to believe that men will devalue and degrade a woman who submits completely. And of course there are assholes out there that do that, but I’m not one of them. A sub is a treasure and should be cherished. Leda, I was serious. No harm will come to you from me. I may hurt you sometimes, but I think you’ll like it.”

  I got a quick mental flash of him biting my shoulder earlier tonight and felt a self-conscious warmth in my throat and pelvis.

  “The hardest thing for most submissives early on, is admitting that they are submissive and really owning it. Reveling in it…and the trust. That’s hard too.”

  The waiter brought more tea for me, but wouldn’t make further eye contact with either of us. The dessert was delicious. I had some sort of berry pie with a honey crumble topping and Xander had a fresh-baked chocolate chip cookie, a la mode. We were quiet for a time, just tasting our food and each in our own thoughts. After a few minutes, I spoke up to ask him to tell me more about the military and FBI life he had before medical school, needing to change the subject to something less intense.

  “After high school, I went to West Point and straight into the Army after graduation. I did that for a few years and left when my commitment was up. Then I got a job at the FBI for another three or four years. I took some time off before medical school. It really isn’t all that interesting.”

  “Where were you stationed after you left West Point? Were you a medic?”

  “Oh, no. I was stationed at the Pentagon as an underling in the Army offices there. I worked in a counter insurgency program, very much as an underling—note-taker, coffee lackey kind of position.”

  “Really, even as an officer?” He murmured assent and I asked him more about his work. “Counter insurgency sounds interesting—kind of scary, actually. I mean, that’s like counterterrorism, right?”

  “I wasn’t really involved in active operations. The commander I worked with was involved in counterintelligence and some preemptive neutralization scenarios. When I moved to the Bureau, I did similar work. Because I had some experience with it.”

  “Sorry, pretend you are talking to someone who doesn’t know what the hell you are talking about. What is preemptive neutralization?”

  He looked like his stomach was upset and pulled back from me, draping his arms across the back of the booth. “Basically, we generated ways to fuck with the bad guys and make it less and less worthwhile to oppose American interests.”

  “Oh. I think I understand. Are you okay? Does it bother you to talk about this?”

  He just looked so uncomfortable. “It is…a part of my life that…allowed the darkest parts of my psyche to flourish. It’s work that matters and it’s good that someone’s doing it, but it’s the stuff you don’t want to actually know about what the military does. Guantanamo Bay was one of the things people found out about. You just don’t want to know how those things happen. You know what I mean? It’s like hot dogs or plastic surgery—decent end results usually, but you really don’t want to know the process.” He looked up at me with unreadable eye
s. They weren’t really haunted looking, but they weren’t clear either. “Excuse me,” he said and got up for the bathroom.

  After a minute or so, the waiter came back to the table, speaking in a hushed tone, “Miss, are you okay? Do you need help?” He paused then added, “Is that man hurting you?”

  I was so startled that I was momentarily speechless. “What? No. I’m fine. I’m fine. I don’t need help.” I laughed uncomfortably and looked up to see Xander standing behind the waiter, anger plain on his face. There was a horrible slowing of time as the waiter turned and nearly walked into Xander, who had clearly heard at least part of the exchange. I held my breath, but Xander smoothly passed the waiter.

  “You okay, honey girl?” Xander murmured to me as he sat down.

  I grimaced. “Yeah, I’m fine.” It was the most uncomfortable I had ever been on a date, but Xander seemed unperturbed.

  He smiled at me before he glanced at the waiter. “Thanks, man. We’ll just take the check when you have a chance.”

  The waiter still looked mortified, but he answered, “Sure. My apologies.”

  Before the waiter could turn away, Xander responded, “None needed. It took courage to ask.” Once he was gone, Xander turned back to me, his smile fading from his lips even as his eyes twinkled with some sort of deviant lust. “Now, this is a good chance for a little lesson.”

  “A lesson?” Was I in trouble? Already?

  “Yeah. Because this whole thing touches on consent and the community approach to avoiding consent violations.”

  I had had it. I was lost. “What the fuck are you talking about right now? That guy thought you were hurting me.”

  “And someday, I might. But not like he thinks and definitely not if you don’t want it. Not if you don’t feel taken care of. And it’s probably likely that you’ll get asked a question like that again. There will be people that don’t understand what we’re doing. And you’ll always be free to answer however you want. But it obviously made you uncomfortable, so I think it would be reasonable to think about how you want to answer questions like that.”

  I murmured my assent, but had no response.

  “Some subs might say something like ‘I appreciate your concern, but I’m very happy where I am, with him’. How would that feel for you?”

  “Oh, okay. But isn’t it kind of… I don’t know, weird to have to answer these questions?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter if it’s weird. What if we were some other couple and I was abusing you and that might have been your chance out? I don’t want people to think they shouldn’t ask when they’re concerned. But I don’t want it to fluster you or ruin your night.”

  “But aren’t you pissed? He thought you were hurting me.”

  “It’s a reminder to me that no one in public consented to be part of my play. But what really matters to me is what you think.”

  The waiter had the manager drop the check off and we had a brief conversation about how good the dessert was. We stopped at the cashier by the door to pay, but Xander turned to me with a couple of twenties in his hand.

  “Why don’t you go find the waiter and give him his tip? It’ll give you a chance to clear the air if you want. I’ll wait outside. This is all you, girlie. Whatever you want to say to him.”

  I took the cash and found the waiter near the back of the restaurant, folding napkins in a booth.

  “Hey, thanks again.” I handed him the cash and glanced back at Xander, who nodded at me and walked out of the front door.

  The waiter looked confused and started to apologize again, but I cut him off. “Look, I really appreciate that you checked with me, but it’s good. I’m happy with him. I’m safe.”

  As the words crossed my lips, the bone-deep truth of them hit me. Xander was so different than anyone I had ever been with. So completely different. It was navigating something new every step of the way with him.

  When I found Xander in front of the restaurant, he smiled warmly and pulled me into a hug. “How’d that go?”

  I shrugged and smiled as another wave of contentedness washed through me. “It was fine. I don’t think he understood, really. But I did.”

  “Good girl.”

  A fucking flood in my panties.

  We strolled slowly around the block. It was an upscale section of town with high end boutiques and restaurants. There were people, in couples or larger groups, coming and going from various bars and restaurants that we passed. Some had live music that spilled out of the doors, punctuating the evening. As we walked, we continued our earlier conversation about his life before medical school.

  “After I left the Army and joined the FBI, I worked in a similar department. Again, I wasn’t high up in the department, but I learned a lot.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “The psychology of it, you know? The psychology of crime and terrorism, the psychology and physiology of interrogation.”

  “Wait.” I paused on the sidewalk as a realization hit me, “You have professional, government-level training in mind-fucking people? I mean, that’s what you’re saying, right?” My stomach did some flip-flops and I felt, more than ever, like a mouse dangling from a cat’s paw, so completely overmatched that there was nothing to do but accept what was coming. And I just started giggling.

  “Yeah, yeah, I guess you could say that,” he answered me, laughing back.

  “Weeeellllllp, I’m fucked,” I said, throwing my hands up in the air as my giggles settled. Moving on, I asked, “So what happened? Why did you leave the FBI?” I started walking again, trying to regain my composure.

  “There were a few reasons. One, I wasn’t totally satisfied. I didn’t love the work, even though I was pretty good at it. My parents had pulled strings to get me the interview and I never really knew if I got the job on my own merits. Two, I was already feeling like I wanted to learn more about medicine and do something positive with it. I would read about the physiology of sleep deprivation for an assignment or something and would just be way more interested in the science of it than whatever the actual project was. Three, I committed career suicide at one point, so it was easy to leave then.” He chuckled as he said that last part.

  “What do you mean—career suicide? What did you do?” His story was fascinating.

  He cleared his throat and looked kind of bashful, which seemed so out of character for him that I was even more intrigued.

  “I fucked the boss’s daughter. And we got caught.”

  My mind flashed back to his conversation with his mom that I had overheard, something about someone still being pissed and it made sense. Xander kept going, “I got caught with the boss’s daughter, who was younger than me. And I was fucking her the way I like as she was bound over a desk. Oh God!” He half yelled it at the sky, laughter in his voice. “I can’t believe the shit I get myself into!” He seemed so relaxed suddenly, like the tension had drained out of him at his admission.

  But I was kind of horrified. “Did your parents hear the details?” The thought of my parents ever hearing anything about me being tied up and fucked like that was horrifying.

  “Not the details, thank God. He had the grace to be discrete, but then again, it was his daughter’s reputation as well. She was adamant that he keep it quiet too. And anyway, it’s Washington DC. There’s more fucked up shit going on there sexually than anywhere else in the country. It seems like everyone is a complete freak. Most of them are very, very closeted about it, but a few of them are a little less so. My kink was nothing to some of those guys, but it’s all about image, you know.”

  By this time, we were back to my car and it was about midnight. We got in the car, Xander in the driver’s seat again, but he didn’t start it.

  “I don’t want to say goodnight yet.” I blurted it out before he could say anything.

  “I’ve got just the place.”

  He drove to the edge of town and turned into a wooded lot with a long, winding dirt and gravel driveway. At the end there wa
s a turn around, but no house, just a drop-off from right beside the road. There were no other cars and he parked in the middle of the round-about. We got out and he led me down the drop-off embankment, steadying me and ultimately lifting me and carrying me down to level ground.

  We were on the edge of a small, still lake. The moon and stars gave enough light to see decently well once my eyes adjusted to the dark. We started walking around the edge of the water. The ground was soft but not muddy. My shoes weren’t great for the terrain so I took them off anyway. About a quarter of the way around, there was a small row boat on the shore and we got in, but didn’t push out into the water—there were no oars and it didn’t look particularly sea-worthy. It was just a nice place to sit together. I sat in the bottom of the boat leaning back into his legs and we kept talking. I asked him what made him want the things that he does.

  “I don’t know. I’ve just always felt like this. I think lots of people think something must have gone wrong in someone’s childhood if they get into BDSM. I just know that when I was in high school and at the Academy, I always felt like something was missing in my sex life. I met plenty of girls and had plenty of sex.”

  Sidebar—don’t tell me that shit.

  “But there was something flat about it. You know, it was still good, but it never totally satisfied me. I was always hungry for more. It was actually when I got back to DC, one of the guys I worked with at the Pentagon took me to a club where people were doing things I had only read about or seen in porn. I remember feeling like this was a whole new alien world that I couldn’t believe existed. My friend was into being tied up and stuff with a dominatrix, and while that was hot and he definitely loved it, it was not for me.”

  “Wait, I can’t imagine you ever being dominated by someone else. It just seems…unnatural.” I kind of screwed up my face in a grossed out expression and laughed, glancing at him over my shoulder.

  “One time, early on when I was going there, there was a couple playing in a public room. They had a little audience crowded around them and I wanted to see too, and that was it—it was like the world stopped for a beat, and I knew. There was a girl—I mean she was legal, just young—standing in a clearing in the room, with her arms tied and hooked to something coming out of the ceiling. Her man was walking around her, pinching her skin in all different places, whispering in her ears, licking her—and she was in the sweetest, hottest agony—and that was it. I knew what I wanted, I wanted to make a woman squirm in agony because I made her feel something that was overwhelming, and I wanted to know that she was doing it voluntarily, that she wanted it as much as me. There’s something about controlling a woman’s body that triggers something in me that makes me feel like an animal, something less than and more than human, all at once. I feel my heart beating in my chest and it just inflates me. Do you know what I mean, Leda?”