But kindly restaurant owners were few and far between, it seemed, because his luck hadn’t been repeated. He’d wandered, growing hungrier and hungrier, colder and colder, wondering what would happen to him next. And so here he was, heading for a group of trash cans outside a small, dilapidated house, hoping to find a few scraps to help tide him over a little longer.
Thirteen years later, Allen’s adult self screamed at the boy to run, to turn away. He had no idea, none, what kind of trouble he was about to get himself into. But as always happens in those kinds of dreams, the boy ignored the wisdom of his future self, toppling the first trash can with a clang like a hunter’s clarion.
The back porch light of the house snapped on, and in that small instance of time, Allen had had the chance to run, to save himself. But he didn’t. Instead, he’d turned as the screen door screeched open with a sound like a dying harpy, and found himself staring down the barrel of a 12-gauge shotgun.
“Who goes?” The voice was raspy, filled with ash and age, the owner hidden in the shadows just inside the doorway. “You leave them cans alone, boy.”
Allen watched, helpless, as the boy slumped, nodded, and started walking away, shoulders drooping in defeat. He wished, desperately, that he’d just kept walking, that he hadn’t paused when that creaky voice said, “Wait.”
But he hadn’t kept walking. And because he stopped, this was one of the worst nightmares that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
Allen turned, keeping his hands out from his sides as the owner of the shotgun stepped down off the porch and approached him warily. The grizzled old man had bluish-black skin, a slight afro, and age spots darkening his cheeks. His pate was bald, his prominent potbelly overhanging his belt underneath thin, stooped shoulders. He looked ancient, yet his deep brown eyes were fierce and bright, filled with a sick intelligence as they studied the boy waiting quietly for his approach. Allen knew now—intimately—how strong those scrawny arms were, how bruising those thin fingers could be. But at that time, he’d known nothing, just that an old man stood in front of him with a shotgun but hadn’t decided to pull the trigger.
Those dark eyes studied Allen from head to toe, silent. Then he lowered the gun and gestured over his shoulder. “You look done in, boy. Come on. M’wife’s making dumplings tonight. Looks like you could use a plate or two.” He stopped for a grin, revealing two missing front teeth. “Or three or four.”
Allen-the-boy had been so overwhelmed with the offer of food, he hadn’t noticed the glitter of anticipation in the man’s eyes, hadn’t seen the tremble of excitement in his shoulders.
If he had, would he have run? Probably not.
“Name’s Marcus,” the old man said, lisping on the last letter.
“Allen.”
He nodded, as if expecting the boy to withhold his last name. “All right, young’un. Come in, have a bite with us. Everybody needs a hand up now and then. Let’s see if we can feed you up tonight. Least we can do, since you went and knocked our trash can over.”
Allen followed him up the creaking porch steps, inside a tiny living room crammed with far more couches than one family could possibly ever need, and into a kitchen with a small dining room attached. Several people sat around the table, staring at him with open-mouthed astonishment as Marcus introduced him and explained he’d be eating with them tonight.
“And possibly sleeping here, too,” he’d said with a significant look at his wife. She’d turned away before Allen could catch her expression, but at that point all he cared about was the huge pot on the stove, the empty bowls set on the table. Marcus led him to an empty chair, introduced his seatmates as Alicia and Robert, his niece and nephew. The children were maybe thirteen, close enough to Allen’s age he didn’t feel strange sitting with them. When they did nothing more than nod in greeting, eyes and faces expressionless, he’d assumed they were just as hungry as he was and not interested in conversation, either.
If only it were that simple.
A wonderful, filling meal followed, during which Marcus held forth like a king in his banquet hall. Allen hadn’t paid attention to anything beyond getting as much of that delicious food into his stomach as possible. Not until Marcus made his offer.
“You can stay for a bit, boy,” he said with what was supposed to be a kindly smile. “We got extra room right now. Stay and get fed up right. Then we’ll see what we can see.”
Elated, Allen had expressed his gratitude profusely, completely unaware of the pitying looks from the others around the table. Even if he had been old enough and wise enough to heed the skittering unease down his spine, he probably would have ignored it just to have a place to stay for a few nights. If things got weird, he could always run again.
But the next few days passed uneventfully. He ate with the family, watched TV in the living room with the other children, and stayed out in the yard with them when Marcus’s friends came over for poker night. He actually had a room to himself, tiny as it was, with a real bed and a real mattress. There was only one bathroom in the house, and the water was only safe for bathing, not drinking, but by then Allen felt like he was living in a palace.
On the fourth night, everything changed.
He woke to pitch blackness, his shoulders aching with discomfort. Confused, he tried to lower his arms, which had somehow gotten stretched over his head. And that was when he realized he’d been tied in place, unable to escape. Just as panic started rolling through his gut, a shadow detached itself from the wall.
And the real nightmare began.
It was the worst night of his life. The very night he realized for the first time that his own parents weren’t the only monsters in the world. That night was why fear had skittered down his spine when he thought Sidri might be about to tie him up. Not because he feared she might hurt him—he knew, deep in his bones, that she would never, ever do anything to hurt him like that—but because he couldn’t bear to have that horrid memory brought to the surface right in the middle of the most mind-blowing sexual encounter of his life. It wasn’t her fault he’d been tainted, sullied. He didn’t want his own fucked-up memories anywhere near the ones she was creating for him that night.
Which was probably why he was having this nightmare, his older self mused. He’d shoved the memory away so forcefully, so deeply, it had had no choice but to resurface in his sleeping mind.
“Allen. Allen, baby, wake up.”
He tried. God, he tried. But Marcus still held him captive…
“Allen, honey, it’s all right. You’re safe here, with me. Wake up now, baby. Come back to me.”
Her voice was like a gift from heaven, a rope of pure goodness dropped from the clouds into the swirling miasma of his tortured mind. He grabbed onto it, pulled himself up, and finally burst out of the terrible dream with a gasp.
Allen sat bolt upright, chest and shoulders heaving as he sucked in air. For a long, wild moment, he couldn’t remember where he was, what was happening, where he’d just been. All that really registered was the nap of suede beneath his bare ass, the knitted afghan clutched into a ball between his hands, and Sidri’s soothing voice in his ear as she rubbed his quaking back.
“It’s okay,” she whispered, over and over. “It’s okay. You’re with me. Nothing can hurt you. You’re with me. It’s okay, Allen. You’re safe.”
It took a few minutes, but eventually his breathing returned to normal, and he remembered everything. Sidri touching him. Kissing him. Fucking him. With a groan, he flopped down onto his back, running both hands over his face before focusing on the naked woman who watched him with such concern.
“I’m okay,” he muttered embarrassed. “Just a stupid nightmare.”
She curled alongside him, one arm thrown across his chest as she rested her chin in her other hand. Allen wrapped his arm around her back, resting his palm on her hip as he held her close. He couldn’t look at her, so he concentrated on slowing his heart rate. “I’m fine, really.”
“I’m sure you are
,” she replied mildly, obviously not buying it. “Wanna tell me about it?”
Grateful the darkness hid his blush, Allen toyed with a tendril of her hair that had fallen across his chest. “Not really,” he admitted gruffly. “Just…talk to me. Help me forget about it. Please.”
She remained silent for a long time. Allen closed his eyes but immediately popped them back open when memories rose up behind his eyelids. Cursing inwardly, he clutched Sidri close and stared at the ceiling instead. Finally, she sighed.
“All right,” she said at last. “What do you want to talk about?”
Now there was a loaded question. Allen searched for a safe subject, anything to get his mind off that long-ago nightmare. “Tell me…” He paused. Thought. “Tell me how you knew all that stuff.” A swallow. “About the restraints.”
Fuck, that was still way too close. But he wanted to know, and hearing her deep, feminine purr would go a long way toward clearing the shadows from his mind.
“Hmmm, there’s a loaded topic if I ever heard one,” she said with a breathy chuckle, echoing his silent musing. Sidri started drawing little designs on his bare chest with one finger while she thought. It made his cock stir even as the rest of him began to calm at last.
She drew a heart on his pec. “You asked me earlier, why Tatum and I weren’t meant to be a couple. The answer is, we’re both sexual Dominants.”
He sucked in a breath, amazed to find himself becoming turned on despite being confused as hell. “Explain,” he whispered.
“You’re familiar with the concepts of Dominance and submission?” Her voice had dropped into that deep, sexy purr that did so many very bad things to his libido. Allen swallowed, trying to answer her honestly.
“Somewhat,” he said after a pause. “I’ve never understood how someone could want to be demeaned, treated like an object. Never understood the pansy-ass guys who want to be treated like shit, or the women who want to be hurt during sex. The whole thing’s never appealed to me.”
“Then you,” she replied with mild reproof, “like ninety percent of the adult population, have let TV and movies dictate what you believe instead of exploring the reality for yourself.”
That stunned him. “Say what?”
She sighed into the darkness. “It’s mass media’s fault, really. Makes for a better movie when the sexy Dominatrix comes strutting out in tight black spandex, wielding a whip and wearing thigh-high leather boots. Makes for better a TV show when you have a strong, virile male wrapped up in chains, held helpless while he screams with every crack of that whip.”
She shifted, resting her chin on his chest. He could just make out her eyes in the darkness, just see the expression of annoyance and disgust on her face. “What most people can’t, won’t understand is that all those images—which, I admit, are sometimes very real—are all surface images. For the most part, those things are all extremes—and they have absolutely nothing to do with the true expression of D/s, because it’s not something that you can actually see.
“Oh, sure, they can have a dramatic scene where they show the once-virile man being carted off to a mental hospital, show him talking to a psychiatrist about having been abused as a child, about having ‘mommy issues.’ But it’s all just surface imagery, couched in terms people take for granted.
“They show those things because they can be shown, and people think that because that’s all they’ve ever seen, then that must be all there is. But every single one of those instances is an extreme, a violation of the true meaning of being Dominant or submissive, and those extremes are considered just as fucked up to those of us who practice D/s as they are to the vanilla world. So, while both Tatum and I are sexual Dominants, neither one of us has ever dressed up in spandex or leather, and neither one of us has ever intentionally caused another person pain. And while I have enjoyed restraining a submissive, I have never used pain as a means to give pleasure, and neither has he.”
Allen bit his lip, thinking hard. “I understand what you’re saying, mostly, but I guess I don’t understand what the differences are. Why would they show those things if they aren’t…part of that world?”
“Like I said,” she murmured, “they need surface imagery, something that can be seen and heard. But at its most basic level, Dominance and submission are all mental processes. Can you see inside someone else’s mind? Can you tell, with just a brief glace, the difference between someone crying because they are in pain and someone crying because they are extremely happy?”
He shook his head thoughtfully.
“No. You can’t,” she agreed. “And that’s where the disconnect between reality and visual media comes into play. The differences are all internal.”
“Help me understand,” he whispered breathily. He desperately needed to understand.
“While the individual expression of it can take many, many forms,” she said after a bated pause, “ultimately, the definitions of Dominance and submission are very simple. Being Dominant means needing to be in control of the motion during sex in order to come. Being submissive means the exact opposite. You can’t be in control, otherwise you can’t let go enough for an orgasm to take place. Most men assume they are Dominant, simply because it’s typically the motion of their hips that makes the ride happen, so to speak. But assuming you’re in control and needing to be in control are two very different things.
“And to tell the truth, most people are neither Dominant nor submissive—they can be either, as the situation calls for it. There are some people, though, who definitely lean one way or the other. Tatum and I both fall into the Dominant category. For the both of us, being able to come requires a certain amount of control. Otherwise, we can’t get there.
“The biggest misconception people have, though, is that there is only one type of Dom, one type of submissive. Nothing could be further from the truth. To make a claim like that would be tantamount to saying there is only one flavor of ice cream, only one kind of food in the world. Trying to pigeonhole Dominant and submissive personalities is like trying to put all the water in all the world’s oceans into a single shot glass. Can’t be done. Every person is unique—and that includes the way they express their sexual needs.”
“So there are different levels? Is that what you’re saying?” She nodded. Allen frowned in thought. “So if those examples you gave are all extremes, how do you define the other levels?”
Her fingers started playing in the dips and valleys of his six-pack. “The easiest way to explain is, ironically, the restraints we were talking about. Remember what I said to you? About taking choices away?”
He nodded.
“A submissive personality can have many different manifestations. For some, it’s as simple as being on top or on the bottom. Since the person on top typically controls most of the motion, it tends to be the Dominant partner’s preferred position.” She paused, and he could hear the wicked smile in her next words. “That’s why, in a gay male relationship, the partner that prefers to be the one doing the fucking is referred to as a ‘top.’”
Allen bit back a curse.
She chuckled but kept up her explanation. “For other kinds of submissives, it goes far beyond physical positions during sex. For some, the only way they can truly let go and feel is to have their own choices and actions completely removed from the situation. Given their choices, they become overwhelmed with the mechanics of things, worrying about what their partner is feeling, concerned they might be doing the wrong thing. They can’t enjoy themselves, because they are too distracted. Take their choices away, however, they can finally get past those mental blocks.
“That’s where restraints come in. They need their lover to have complete, total control, to know down to their toes that they have no choice but to go along for the ride. Restraining that kind of submissive isn’t done so the Dominant partner can have control—it’s so the submissive knows, body, mind, and soul, that their partner is in control.
“That’s what the TV shows and movies ca
n’t show you,” she said. “You can show someone wrapped up in chains, but you can’t show the stillness in their minds, can’t visually represent the emotions going through them. All people see is the chains—they don’t see the submissive is, in fact, being set free.”
Allen swallowed, his cock growing harder with every word she spoke. “And how do you know there is a difference?”
“I’ve been on both sides of it. I’ve seen and felt, with my own mind and body, what it’s like to both be set free as a submissive in restraints, and I’ve been the Domme who put the restraints on in the first place. And, after years of experimentation, I know which side I’m meant to be on.”
God, she was going to kill him. “And…Tatum?” The words came out in a hoarse, lust-filled gurgle.
“The same.”
He swallowed, heart pounding unsteadily. “So what does that make me?”
She wrapped her hand around his jaw, forcing him to face her fully. In the darkened office, he couldn’t see the color of her eyes, but he could feel the intensity of her expression. “That, Allen, is your decision to make. No one can answer that question but you.”
He closed his eyes briefly. “How do you know? I mean, how do you know what’s, you know, healthy? How do you know it’s really sexual submission and not…something sick and twisted?”
Sidri’s voice went soft, soothing. “Did it feel sick earlier, when I asked you to keep your hands above your head?”
He shook his head, grateful when she didn’t require a vocal response.
“And did you feel twisted or wrong when you were lying underneath me, naked, while I stood over you still clothed?”
God, she really was going to kill him. His cock jumped at the memory of seeing her like that, standing over him like a sex goddess. “No,” he whispered hoarsely.
Demons Within [For Love of Authority] (Siren Publishing Ménage and More) Page 13