by Jaye Peaches
A couple of braver women tried to placate him, telling him to go, he was scaring the kids. We’d collected them up in our arms and stood around, helpless. I wondered how to stop the couple and their vicious slanging match. He hit her again, this time harder, snapping her head back. Too hard. Her lip swelled in an instant. Things had gone too far.
I slipped out my mobile phone and speed dialled Gibson, telling her to shift herself quickly.
Gibson didn’t wait to reply but dashed into the room in a matter of seconds. Before anyone reacted to the presence of another stranger or the irate man could land his fist again, my bodyguard flung him to the floor and sat on his back. She twisted his arms behind, and he cried out, trying to wriggle out from under her. A futile gesture against a formidable opponent. From her back pocket appeared handcuffs, and she slapped them on with speed that reminded me she was well trained in the martial arts.
“Calm down!” Gibson snarled.
“Get the fuck off me!”
He struggled, and she tightened her grip on his contorted arms. He ranted, and Gibson remained sat on him, unmoved.
The solitary child sitting on the floor ceased his repugnant tirade. With her big brown eyes, she gazed in a state of shock as her parents shouted abuse at each other. Her mum went suddenly quiet, as if to remember why she was there. Picking up the child, she rocked the baby in her arms and cooed words of comfort. The man’s mouth shut, and he lay still. The room fell silent.
“Do you want me to call the police?” Gibson asked.
“You’re not one of them?” said the woman.
Gibson shook her head but offered no explanation where she had come from or why she had handcuffs.
“No police. They’ll ring social services. I don’t want them involved.” She rocked her child again.
“Come on,” said another, stepping forward. “He thumped you one. We’re all witnesses.”
“Perhaps I deserve it.” She shrugged then kissed her child’s head. “How did you find out?”
The man lifted his head off the floor. “I came home early. He was in our fucking bed, Mel. Our bed, naked. You’d left him in our bed.” His cheeks remained flushed red, and sweat dripped down his forehead. It wasn’t hot in the hall.
Her forehead furrowed into deep trenches, and for several seconds, she stood stock still.
“But, Baz, I haven’t seen him for over a week,” she said.
Around the couple the other mums waited with open mouths to see how the little drama played out. A bizarre real-life soap opera enacted before a willing audience. The children squawked, but everyone’s eyes fixed on the couple. Gibson let him up into a kneeling position but kept a grip on his cuffs.
“He was in our bed. Terry. My so-called mate, Terry!” Baz growled. “Did you give him a key or something?”
“No! I never. I let him in...while you were at work. But I didn’t let him in today,” she insisted.
“Then who did?” he snapped.
The pair changed in their demeanour, as if someone had flicked a mental switch. Mel’s hand covered her mouth to smother a cry of alarm. The colour drained out of his face.
“Laetitia,” he whispered.
“Who is Laetitia?” asked Gibson.
“My daughter from my first marriage,” answered Mel. “She’s only sixteen. She’s been bunking off school a lot recently. The bastard! He used me, he fucking used me to get at her.”
“Oh God, oh God.” The man rocked on his knees. Sixteen years old wasn’t illegal, but age became irrelevant under the circumstances.
“Don’t go and do anything stupid,” warned Gibson. “If you end up in prison on assault charges, you won’t be there for your daughter, will you.”
“Too late, too fucking late.” His pallor managed to turn paler, and he rocked as if in physical pain. He shook his head. “Too late.”
“What have you done, Baz?” Mel moved, shifting around the kneeling man. “Baz, there’s blood on your shirt.”
“I thought he’d been with you. I got mad. We fought and I...I stabbed him.”
There was a collective gasp in the room.
“Baz! No, no, you idiot. Is he dead? Is Terry dead?” she shrieked.
“She could be there, Mel, don’t you see? She could have been in the house, hiding from me....”
The horror wasn’t worth describing. A bleeding man alone in the house with a teenage girl, who might also have been in her mother’s bed. I clutched the whimpering Joshua tight to me.
Gibson spun the man around, and there they were—tiny flecks of blood on his T-shirt—the splatter marks. I looked away, blanking out the redness.
My bodyguard asked Mel for her home address and dialled the police. She alerted them to a potentially fatal stabbing with a juvenile likely on the premises.
“They’re already there?” Gibson kept her hand tight around the cuffs, not letting the man move an inch. “I see.”
Mel let out a small cry.
“She rang for help,” continued Gibson. “Is she okay? Good. She’s not eighteen; she’s lying. She’s sixteen. Because her mum is right here with me, and I have the attacker, her stepdad. He’s here, too.”
Gibson gave the address of the church hall. Soon the place would be crawling with police.
“Laetitia is all right, but I’m afraid Terry is dead. She found him and called the ambulance. She’d hidden in the cupboard under the stairs when her stepfather came home.” Gibson relayed the facts to a dazed and stupefied Mel.
Several mums wanted to leave. Gibson, in her capacity of ex-police officer, told them not to. We were all witnesses to his confession, and the police would need our names and addresses.
Whispered conversation returned to the hall. We perched on our seats with nothing to do but wait for the police.
I could not leave, so I did the next best thing. I made teas and coffees. Raiding the kitchen, with Joshua perched on my hip, I turned the urn back on and laid out a fresh batch of mugs. Somebody joined me, and together we served. A few took up our offer, and it passed the time.
The delay seemed eternal. Mel crouched opposite Baz, tears streaming down her face.
The young mother in the seat next to me turned towards Gibson. “Who are you, anyway?”
“I’m a friend of Gemma’s.” Gibson stock answer when we were trying to be discreet.
I watched from the kitchen hatch as Gibson phoned Johnson, her immediate superior in Jason’s hierarchy of security officers, requesting he send another car to collect me. Jason was out of contact, something to do with a government conference about taxation. I vaguely remembered him telling me weeks ago about meeting with an advisory committee.
Finally, the police came. There was much confusion as they tried to piece together the two events separated by time and place and determine who was who in the church hall.
“Laetitia?” Mel kept asking.
I gave my name and address, and the police officer tapped his pen on the notepad—my address wasn’t that far away, but it was a distinctive location, an exclusive one, and he eyed me up and down as if I was lying.
Johnson arrived and the police inspector shouted “Dave” across the room. Handshakes and more explanations ensued, and I heard them talk about me, but neither of them talked to me, leaving me looking aimless and inept. I lost interest in their conversations. The uniformed officers bundled Baz away. The church caretaker turned up, scratching his head at the sight of police on the premises and wanting to know when he could lock up.
“Take me home, Johnson.”
“Of course, ma’am,” Johnson murmured.
He took Joshua off me. My arm ached from carrying him, and my fractious son needed a nap.
I took one last look around at the church hall, I knew I wouldn’t be back there again. My attempt at normality had been doomed. Perhaps because there was no such thing as a normal existence. I had been kidding myself that I emulated anything typical or ordinary. Life was frantic, unpredictable, and idiosyncratic wh
atever the level of income or prestige. The thought depressed me and I refused to accept it: banality and ordinariness had to exist somewhere for me, whether I wanted it or not.
Clara asked what kept me. I gave her a brief run through of the afternoon’s events. She whisked Joshua out of my arms. “Have a bath or something, Gemma,” she suggested.
It sounded a good idea, so I soaked for ages in a fragrant bath of bubbles.
Clara stayed, as she usually did on a Monday, but I didn’t go to Zumba. I couldn’t face going out again, fearful a spectre of evil stalked me everywhere, waiting to pounce. At eight o’clock, I told her to go. Jason would be home following his evening function.
He arrived home at nine and found me in the drawing room, mindlessly watching television. I had forgotten to greet him, and I switched the quiz show off. My visions of my kinky marriage flashed through my mind, not the vanilla one. I remembered I should be focusing on him.
“Can I get you anything? Something to drink?” I asked as he loosened his tie and observed me belatedly greet him. If I was giving off the wrong messages to him, I remained oblivious. I did what I was expected to do and what mattered.
Jason gave me a sniff as he bent to kiss my lips. “You’ve had a bath?”
“Yes.” And? I waited for him to ask how I was coping.
“I’ll have you, then, since you smell divine.” He brushed against my cheek, nuzzling his nose into my hair, while his roving hand wandered over my breasts. I should be clenching below, sensing the pulsating heat, but his words and actions had no effect on my suppressed libido.
He did not refer to my unusual day. Perhaps he didn’t care to mention it. I decided he planned to distract me, refocus my thoughts from violence to sexual delights, his usual tactic for helping me forget bad things. We rarely did scenes on a Monday. Maybe being in the seat of government had activated his domination gene—the hardness jutting out in his pants and his hurried demeanour illustrated his intentions.
With a sense of resignation, I followed him up to the bedroom. I didn’t trudge upstairs, but neither did my feet skip to the beat of my heart. He stripped me, neither hastily or sweetly, a simple divesting of unnecessary hindrance. In the middle of the room, he edged around me, trailing his fingers about my flesh. I tilted my head back and closed my eyes, waiting for him to step up a gear.
He scrunched my breasts in his hands then shook them. I gritted my teeth together, masking a cry of discomfort. I felt like a floppy doll—unemotional and drained. I was being submissive, very submissive, at least in respect to doing as I was told. I didn’t question or talk to him. My meekness came across in the form of being receptive and obedient. However, the truth be told, I couldn’t be bothered to be anything else.
I squeezed my eyes shut and concentrated on deep breaths and acceptance. Why hadn’t he said anything about today? Not a word about what I had witnessed. No putting me down about mixing with ‘the wrong types’. He had never complained in the past about my choice of mums’ group. Jason had been the one who had insisted I go to one after Joshua was born. I’d assumed Jason was all right about the location and the company I’d been keeping.
Having backed me against the bedroom wall, he left me for a few brief moments. Flattening my hands against the cold paintwork, I banged the back of my head on the wall and tried to shake myself out of my morose state. What next? How to find the right attitude for his play? He returned with the bucket of clothes pegs and a ball of string.
A zipper! What! I wasn’t in the mood for string and pegs pinging off me.
Instead of flirting or swinging my hips at him, I gaped—horrified at his idea. Finally, and after an unusually prolonged display of insensitivity, he twigged my responses were far from typical of those I showed when faced with a kinky game.
He tossed the string on the bed and eyed me, twitching his nose, his lips pursed, and hands on his hips. I rested against the wall and tried to slow my thumping heartbeats.
What did he expect? He’d offered me no words of comfort not even a cuddle. My attitude had been “get on and do it and be grateful I am yours to do with as you please.”
“Gemma? What’s going on?”
“Probably the shitty day I’ve had,” I snapped.
He hadn’t shown the slightest interest in my day. Frankly, nor had I in his.
“Too boring for you?” he sneered.
Boring! After the day I’d had, a zipper might have been the ordinary aspect I’d been searching for and failed to find. Why didn’t he know about the unusual event in my otherwise tedious daytime routine? Surely, there had been some email or text to him from Johnson or Gibson?
“Haven’t you checked your emails today then? Sir.” I added with a little irreverence in my tone.
“I’ve been in meetings all day, and having a mobile switched on in the heart of Whitehall seemed inappropriate, so, no, I haven’t. I didn’t see any point in being swamped with emails last thing at night.”
Oh crikey! I swallowed and cursed under my breath. Suddenly, everything had a different perspective layered on top of it. Jason hadn’t been indifferent to my needs or distracting me with kinky overtures. He’d expected me to be his eager submissive and nothing else.
He picked up his mobile from the bedside table, waited to connect to the network, before scrolling down the list of incoming emails.
I waited, preferring he read about my day, rather than have to make the effort of telling him.
He saw the key one, probably from Johnson. A major frown developed on his face, and he tossed the phone down.
Over he came, planting his hands on either side of my head, leaning on the wall. “Gemma. Do you think that the only way I should find out what is going on in your life should be through my security reports? Do you think emails are the way we should communicate?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Normally it’s how it works. I assumed—”
“You assumed I’d had an email, telling me that you have been in the same room as a murderer, and that I couldn’t be bothered to talk about it with you. More to the point, neither could you!”
Why hadn’t I queried the scene? The pinching, the rough tactile exploration of my sex, the proposed zipper of pegs stuck to my soft flesh, those things were typical of Jason in a Dominant frame of mind, not a concerned husband.
I blinked back a wave of tears. “I was just a bystander. I’m not going back there.”
“Damn right you’re not. Communicate openly with me, Gemma, about your concerns. That is what I ask you to do, that’s what we agreed. This,” he cocked is head towards the pegs, “doesn’t work unless I know exactly what you’re thinking, how you’re coping. How could you think I wouldn’t want to know about what happened today from you, my wife, not a bloody email. Jeez!” He moved away from me and kicked the bucket of pegs, which wobbled, almost toppling over.
Jason rushed at me, encasing my naked, vulnerable form in his arms. He crushed me, and his heartbeats rang in my ear. “God, Gemma, why do you bottle things up so much? Bury them. I thought you were being subbie on me, and all you are doing is hiding your emotions from me. Babe, don’t do this. Don’t make me think you’re okay when you’re not.”
“Jason, please, I didn’t hide from you. I thought you were distracting me, taking me somewhere, and I was being obedient to please you.”
“Obedient? This isn’t obedience. It’s acting. You were playing at being submissive.”
I sniffed, blotting my tears on his shirt. “I was willing. You could have put me there. You’ve done it loads of times before.”
“Only when I know the reason why you’re not there in the first place.” He tilted my chin up. “I’m not a mind reader.” A soft smile slipped across his face, displacing the displeasure.
Most days, Jason read my moods perfectly. I had to remember he was a busy man, exceptionally so, and he preferred concise spoken messages, not subliminal ones. I gave a small shrug. “I wish you were because telling you how I feel is so hard when
you’re Dominant. I’m used to the control, both expecting it and not fighting back.”
“Being a submissive doesn’t abdicate you from communicating with me. It doesn’t mean you submit or let me control you in a void, especially when you’re hurting inside. A scene is not a substitute for resolving bad days.”
“I know. I really thought you’d been told.” I had come home with such a need to please—my ideal kinky marriage rooted in my mind—I’d forgotten what an ordinary marriage was about, too. Communication was important in both types of relationships. “Sorry.”
“So am I, babe, for not reading you well. It’s been a long day, and I should have spotted the signs better. Things…there’s lots going on in work at the moment. I shall have words with Johnson. I should have been contacted in person straightaway, not via an end-of-day briefing. Important meetings don’t negate priorities, not when it comes to my family.”
Apologies done with, he put me to bed, covering me with the duvet.
“You don’t want a fuck?” I still harboured a sense of failing him.
“Not tonight. No fucking. Because I want to make love to you. When you’re ready, let me know, and I will be here for you.”
I watched him undress, eager to touch his skin. The moment he joined me, I couldn’t help myself. I lay in his arms and dredged up my unachievable wishes. I told him about my aspirations for normality: the life of an ordinary person, without the trappings of wealth. I told him I missed day-to-day mundane conversations about simple things. Not being at work, without the contact of people, had made me lose my way. He understood, not that he empathised. He’d never had that kind of need.
“There is no average life, though. You’re grieving for something that doesn’t exist. We have our this-thing-we-do lifestyle, but so do other people. Maybe not kink, but there are affairs, other perversions, secret habits and practices. We’re not alone in our extraordinariness. So stop seeking a life you don’t need or desire. You have me. I have you. I own you to keep you safe and happy. Keep giving yourself to me and you won’t want for anything else. You know that.”