Recovery (Doctor Dom Volume 5) (A BDSM & Medical Play Novella)

by Tara Crescent

  Recovery (Doctor Dom Volume 5) (A BDSM & Medical Play Novella)

  By Tara Crescent

  Text copyright © 2014 Tara Crescent

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  I couldn’t have done this without the help and encouragement of Jim and Kathryn. My eternal gratitude to them for their editing, pre-reading and general hand-holding. I am a better writer because of their efforts.

  Cover Design by James, GoOnWrite.com.

  Chapter 1

  Patrick:

  Are you supposed to run from your girlfriend in horror, because she had deliberately chosen one day to refrain from using her safe word? I had run. But through it all, I couldn’t fight free of the feeling that I was making a mistake.

  I was probably being a jerk. A jackass. I wasn’t being fair to Lisa. But every time that weekend I reached for the phone to call her, I found that my hands were shaking.

  The first thing I did when I got back from her place Friday night was to call my therapist, Jackie Blackburn. Jackie wouldn’t answer her phone, of course – it was late Friday night, and Jackie was very clear about boundaries. But she’d pick up her messages Monday morning. I left her a message pleading for a Monday slot – as early as she could fit me in. Because without my therapist’s cool voice of reason, I was afraid I was going to do something stupid; that I would do something to shatter this beautiful thing between Lisa and me. Not because I wanted to, because I didn’t. I wanted her more than I had ever wanted anyone before. I needed Lisa.

  But I wasn’t going to pretend to myself that I was okay. There were too many shades of similarity between this incident and my relationship with Andrea, and my first, instinctive reaction was to run in fear.

  It was a difficult couple of days. There wasn’t even the usual distraction of work. My schedule left me clear on the weekend. The week ahead, I was just scheduled during the day, leaving my evenings free. Typical Murphy’s Law bullshit. I had all the spare time in the world when I wanted to be buried in work. I tried to read, to do other things, but my mind kept returning to Lisa.

  I remember well the day I fell out of love with Andrea. Or maybe I don’t. Memory is a funny thing. It plays tricks on you. When you look back on your past, you shape your memories to form a narrative. A story, with a convenient start, a middle and an end. But of course, that’s not exactly how things play out in real time. At the moment we are living it, life is messy and chaotic and random. It’s only when we think back that we arrange our experiences to fit the story we wish to tell.

  But still. When I think back, there is one incident that I will swear to my dying day that marked the beginning of the end for Andrea and me.

  Andrea was a runner. She ran marathons and when she was in the mood to take it easy, she ran 10Ks. I wasn’t as dedicated a runner as she was – I’d never have the desire to run a marathon, but I’d occasionally join her for shorter runs.

  Anyway. We played that night. I’d tied her up on our bed – legs splayed wide, ankles cuffed to the two corners of the bed. Arms cuffed as well, and tied to the headboard. I had flogged her on her inside thighs. Not particularly hard, my goal hadn’t been to cause pain. I’d hit her just hard enough to reach that place where every sensation was felt more deeply. Just hard enough so she was squealing and squirming with mingled pleasure and pain with each whistling stroke.

  When we were done a few hours later, when we both lay slumped, our needs sated, I removed the cuffs around her ankles to find one of them raw and bleeding. She’d had a few blisters from her socks around her ankles, and the cuffs had aggravated them so much that they had burst. She must have been in incredible pain the entire time we were making love, but she hadn’t said anything.

  It was so typical of Andrea. It was so in keeping with her fantasies about what a good submissive did or did not do that she hadn’t thought for one minute how I’d feel to see blood flowing from the woman I loved. Blood that I was responsible for causing. All she had needed to do was ask to be tied differently. But she would have viewed it as failure of some impossible standard that didn’t make sense in real life anyway.

  I remembered watching her bleed and feeling like a heel because I caused it.

  Through my childhood, I had felt responsible for being born, for causing my mother to forsake her dreams. Through my teenage years, I had felt responsible for not caring enough for the family business, for not being the heir my father wanted me to be. And that day, I had felt responsible for failing to ensure Andrea’s safety in a session.

  It took me a long and substantial time in therapy to realize that I was responsible for none of those things. But feeling responsible for things was a bad habit of mine. In some ways, it made me a good Dominant. I would always be responsible for the safety of my submissive. But there was a fine line, and it was easy and possible to tip over the line to the other side, where nothing was left except self-loathing.

  That day with Andrea – that day when she wouldn’t use her safe word to pause the session so she could be tied a different way – that day was the beginning of the end for the two of us.

  What Lisa had done was relatively unimportant in the greater context of our relationship. An honest mistake, she’d called it, and I believed her. But she had had no business playing that night, worried as she was by her mother’s trip to the hospital. I should have known better as well, but I wanted so much to be with someone that would be responsible for their own well-being. I had ignored my instincts that night and punished her.

  I had wanted Lisa to make that decision that night because Andrea had never made decisions. Doug had been right when he had expressed his disquiet about the way I thought of Lisa as the anti-Andrea.

  The issue wasn’t really that she had decided not to use her safe word that night, though that was a pretty major breach of trust. The bigger issue was that she really shouldn’t have been playing any D/s games in the mental state she’d been in. And I had let her. I had failed just as much as she had or more. I had needed Lisa to prove to me that she wasn’t Andrea, and I had put her in an impossible spot.

  I had thought I was finally ready to embark on another D/s relationship. After our conversation Friday, I wasn’t really sure of that anymore. I wasn’t sure of anything anymore.

  I sat on my couch, in my empty house, feeling entirely alone, trying to figure out where to go from here.

  Jackie really needed to have a spare slot on Monday.

  Chapter 2

  Lisa:

  My weekend sucked.

  The weather matched my mood. It was cold, grey and dreary. It drizzled most of the weekend, and the air was damp and chilly.

  I had stuff to do. Saturday night drinks with the crew at the Rose and Crown. Sunday lunch at my parents. But all I really wanted to do was mope around in my apartment and cry. But that was a comfort I couldn’t indulge in, because it wasn’t really comfort at all. All I did when I was by myself was replay Friday night over and over again in my head.

  A hundred times, I wanted to reach out and call Patrick. I yearned to seek reassurance that he still cared for me; that my mistake would not
doom us. But I stayed away from the phone. He had asked for space, and I owed it to him to respect his wishes.

  In any case, if we were breaking up, I would lose the right to call him every time I felt miserable and in the need of cheering up.

  I faked at being sociable with my family and friends. I cleaned my condo, which was a sure sign something was wrong. My condo was always spotlessly clean when I was bothered by something, and a cheerfully cluttered mess every other time.

  I existed in limbo, waiting for Patrick to reach out to me.

  ***

  Natalie had called in sick Monday morning. “I’ve the flu, I think,” she coughed on the phone. She sounded dreadful.

  “Rest,” I told her. There was nothing too pressing going on at work. We were done with Charles’ condo. There were a few other clients on my list, but I was waiting for city permits for most of them. Truth be told, I had very little work to do in the office. Just getting caught up on paperwork. Bills, invoicing and filing. The kind of tasks I’d do normally with my mind wandering as I worked. Not today. Today, I needed to be so preoccupied with work that I had no time to think of Patrick.

  “Do you want me to come around and bring you some soup? Or watch Emma?” I asked.

  “I’m good on the soup,” she said, sniffling into the phone. “But it would be amazing if you could watch Emma tonight?”

  I heard the hesitation in her voice as she made the request. Natalie had been an employee when she had started, but she was my friend now. But she was always very proper about boundaries at work. She’d told me that she knew of too many friendships that had been ruined because of work, and vice-versa, and she didn’t want any part of that.

  “I’d love to watch Emma,” I told her firmly. I’d watched Emma a few times before, and I knew what effective distraction a chatty seven-year old would be. It was exactly what I needed. “You need me to pick her up from school?”

  “Yes please,” she said. “I’ll let her know you’ll be getting her, okay?”

  We chatted some more about school logistics, bedtime, and snacking rules, and then I hung up, already feeling just a bit more cheerful than I had when I walked into work.

  ***

  I had a few hours to kill while I waited for Emma to be done with school. I stared blankly at the pile of precariously balanced paper on my desk, at the slight coating of dust on the few visible surfaces. I could no summon up enough enthusiasm for the tasks in front of me. Finally, I just gave up and went for a run, forwarding my work calls to my cell phone.

  About the only thing that was keeping me from falling apart completely was my conviction that I had done the right thing. I could have very easily not told Patrick, but he deserved the truth, especially given his past and his relationship with Andrea. I had known that there was a very real possibility that our relationship would be in trouble if I told him the truth, and I had done it anyway.

  I loved Patrick. He was perfect. Kind, generous, hard, dominant. We were good together. Fuck that. We were amazing together. It wasn’t just the glorious sex. It was everything else as well. It was the way we would reach out and call each other a couple of times in the middle of the day, and chat for a minute or two. It was in the way I wanted my parents and my friends to adore him the way I did. It was in his pleased smile when I got along with his friends. Everything we had been doing in the last few weeks suggested that we were both in it for the long-haul.

  And then I had confessed, and he had left.

  It was the right thing to do to tell him, Lisa, I told myself firmly.

  ***

  Emma was wonderful distraction. I picked her up from school, and she beamed at me. “Mommy said I’d be hanging out with you, Aunt Lisa,” she confided, tucking her hand into mine. “Are we going to take the subway?” Her eyes were very round and very wide. Natalie lived walking distance from Emma’s school, and a subway ride was a rare treat for Emma.

  I nodded, laughing. “You know, Emma,” I said, “there will come a time when a subway ride won’t be exciting.”

  She gazed at me with those beautiful brown eyes. “Why, Aunt Lisa?” she asked, and to be honest, I didn’t have a reply for her.

  Children. They were so great at restoring perspective.

  Emma put her token solemnly into the slot at the train station, and pushed the barriers to enter. Natalie had done such a great job raising her. I knew some seven year olds who were bored and jaded, but Emma looked at everything with wide-eyed wonder. She had the same look of wonder as a young man who clearly had had too much to drink entered the subway, and lurched and shambled all over everyone standing near him. “Aunt Lisa,” she leaned in and whispered to me. “His fly is open.” I suppressed my laughter with difficulty, and told her not to stare.

  At home, we played board games and she helped me cook dinner. I had her pour oil and vinegar and spices into a jar to make salad dressing, then set her shaking it until the dressing emulsified. I had some premade bread dough in my refrigerator, and so we rolled it out and made pizza, and she asked for cheese and mushrooms and peppers on hers. “Do you like olives?” I asked her, and watched her scrunch up her tiny little nose in displeasure.

  When she finally was tucked into bed, I realized that for the space of a few hours, I hadn’t thought about Patrick at all.

  But now, in the quiet of the evening, as I sat on my couch and tried to read, memories of him came raging back. He had said we would hang out on Friday. I had survived Monday without calling him. I only had to survive three more days. I could do that. One day at a time.

  Chapter 3

  Patrick:

  Jackie Blackburn’s office called me Monday morning. “She can see you this evening, if you still need an appointment?” her assistant asked me.

  “Oh yes,” I said. “I still need an appointment.” That had to be the understatement of the year. All weekend long, I had wanted to call Lisa. To hear the sound of her voice, the throaty gurgle of her laugh. And all weekend long, I found myself too afraid to reach out and pick up the phone.

  I said all of this to Jackie that evening. I sat there and poured it all out; how we’d met, how our relationship had evolved, her prior experience with D/s, and finally, the night of the unused safe word.

  It was terribly cathartic to let everything out. I had friends, of course, that I could talk to about my problems. But I wanted Lisa to stick around for a long time, and I didn’t want to talk about our problems to any of them. It would have been like airing dirty laundry, and I wouldn’t do that to her.

  Jackie listened to me, taking an odd note or two here and there, then she looked at me for a long time when I was done talking. “What would you say the problem is, Patrick?” she asked.

  I started talking, and then stopped. Many, many times in the course of the years I’d been seeing Jackie, she’d do this. She’d ask a question that made me annoyed at her, wondering if she’d even heard what I had said. But then, I’d come to realize she had always heard what I said.

  This time, I didn’t know what the problem was. Or rather, I couldn’t identify the problem in a clear sentence or two. I just had feelings. Vague feelings of unease and disquiet churned around in me. A nagging sense that something was wrong. From prior experience, I knew that my personal path to healing lay in the clear identification of the problem.

  “My brain tells me that Lisa can be trusted,” I started. “And, honestly, so does my heart.”

  She kept quiet. There was a ‘but’ at the end of that sentence, and she was waiting for me to continue.

  “But that doesn’t make me less afraid.”

  The obvious question was to ask me what I was afraid of. But she didn’t ask me that. Instead, she fixed me with a steady gaze. “What do you want to do next?”

  “Book another session,” I replied. I wasn’t answering her question. She had clearly been referring to what I was going to do next with Lisa.

  “Well,” she quipped, “my kids could use the contribution to their college t
uition. But that’s not what I meant. Do you want to end things with Lisa?”

  “No.” My reply was instantaneous, and I paused in surprise. I didn’t want to walk away from Lisa. I had said that with conviction. I was still afraid. I still needed time. But the fact that I was utterly certain that I didn’t want things to end – this was massively reassuring to me.

  “I just need time,” I elaborated, taking a sip of my water.

  “Time for what?”

  “I don’t know.” My reply hung there in the air. “I’m afraid, Jackie. I’m afraid that I’m not ready for another D/s relationship. I’m afraid she’s not ready either. And now the genie’s out the bottle, and the horse is out the stable, and there’s no going back from here.”

  Jackie kindly ignored my insane metaphors, and concentrated on what I had said. I had no secrets from Jackie. She knew all about my sexual preferences, my kinks of choice, the role it played in my marriage. I never held back with Jackie. She wasn’t my friend. She was my therapist. If I was ready to be helped, Jackie would help me.

  “Talk to me some more about the day in question. The day she didn’t use her safe word,” Jackie suggested. “You said you feel guilty that you punished her.”

  I nodded.

  “Why?”

  “When I punish Lisa in a session, it is more play than punishment. The safe word is part of that. It keeps the dynamic between us consensual.” Another sip of my water. “Without a safe word, it tips into abuse.”

  “And you think you abused her that day?”

  I shrugged. There were two responses. One came from my head, and the answer there was No. I’d spanked her with no greater intensity than any other play session. I hadn’t known she’d been unprepared to use her safe word. I’d been annoyed that she’d been ignoring my phone calls, but when she walked into my house, I’d let the anger go.

  However, the other response came from my heart, from the place in which I always felt far too responsible for things. Like the day Andrea’s ankles had bled after a session. And there was only guilt in that place.