by Roxy Harte
I glance at the table and bite my lip at the nostalgia. A part of me feels like we dined here just yesterday.
“Stay and tell me about your daughters, if nothing else.”
I take the seat, to be polite … and perhaps I am a bit curious about the last two decades he’s spent without me. We sip hot coffee and eat sweet pastries. I tell him about my daughters and my career. I show him photographs of the twins. He reveals he moved back to his family’s châteaux in St. Emilion for a time after I left and stuns me when he takes my hand, admitting, “I couldn’t stand being so far away from you, not knowing if you were safe and well. If you were loved. Cherished?”
My lips part and I try not to gape. How does one respond to that? I swallow hard, making sure my mouth is not gaping with a hard press of my lips together.
“I moved back to wait for the right time; so I might reclaim you.”
“Oh.” My fingertips fly to my face, covering my mouth. He reaches for my hand and tugs my fingers away, tugging slightly at my lower lip with his thumb as he does so. His touch electrifies me. I want to grab his hand, kiss his fingers, roll my tongue around his thumb, but I sit there, no longer Cassiopeia. I am Charlotte Sullivan and paralegals do not lick men’s fingers in public.
I bite my lower lip before taking another sip of coffee.
I want to kiss him the way I once kissed him … all teeth and tongue and raw passion. Oh, God. I’m panting. I make excuses in my head: I want him so desperately because I haven’t had sex … that’s all. Really. It could be any man. It isn’t any man. It’s Frankie. Master.
Soccer moms do not pant with lust in public!
He asks me. “Remember when I told you I wanted to grow old surrounded by the vineyards and you at my side?”
I smile, remembering. I was so young and romantic then. I spent hours looking through books containing pictures of the French countryside and imagining moving there to be with my Frenchman François.
“After I returned, I would wake up there and want to share each simple moment with you. Early one morning I walked amid the vines while the dew was still glistening on the grapes and I thought: Cassiopeia should be here to see this with me.”
My smile slips as I realize my heart aches with the memory of the lost dream. I fight back tears, wondering what is wrong with me. I look away, clearing my throat, and trying to regain my composure. Damn him for sending that package. I blow out a soft breath, sure of my composure before I look back at him.
“Your daughters will go to France while they are in Europe?” he asks.
“Their first stop was London and I think their second was Paris,” I answer with a smile. “They were in Amsterdam yesterday.”
“And tomorrow?”
“Who knows,” I laugh, shrugging. “My parents…” I sigh and look away, thinking, before I seek his gaze again, “I wouldn’t know how to describe my parents. Hippies turned Republican as so many of their counterparts? Wandering souls who never look at a map but flutter like the golden leaves of autumn, falling wherever the wind takes them? Your guess is as good as mine as to where my children will be tomorrow.”
“That makes you crazy.”
“Yes, my parents make me crazy.”
He smiles. “And yet, you allowed them to go.”
It is my turn to smile and laugh. “I survived my parents, and this is a trip they’ve been planning since the girls were in kindergarten. I couldn’t disappoint them.”
“You disappointed me,” he reminds me, and the comment makes me uncomfortable. I bite my tongue, fighting the urge to say I am sorry because to do so would imply my regret in leaving him and I don’t regret that, because if I’d never left, I wouldn’t have my daughters. He surprises me by adding, “I don’t blame you. Your family is beautiful.”
“Thank you.”
He looks at me and I fight to look away and lose, being caught and held by his gaze. “You are mine.”
Am I?
I tremble beneath his scrutiny and my eyes fill with tears. Because I am? Because I don’t know that I am? Because I fear that I’m not?
“There is something you need to know,” he says. “Something I never once told you, and I regret I never did.”
I look at him expectantly, my heart kicking hard and fast against the wall of my chest. He takes my hand across the table, lifting my fingers to his lips, and with a single brush of his lips against my knuckles makes me feel what I have missed feeling for twenty years. I am the only woman in the world who matters to him.
“I love you, Cassiopeia. I have loved you from the moment we first met, and I will love you until the end of time.”
Tears fall over my cheeks, and I sob out the heartbreaking need I have longed to cry since the moment I opened the box. No. Since the moment I first walked out his door. He takes my hands and holds them to keep me from trying to hide my face, my tears, and demands, “Say it.”
I choke through my tears, “I can’t, not yet.” I pant, hating this show of emotion. “It’s been too long.”
He reminds me, “You just said yet.”
Chapter Five
He waits for me. He had insisted I take the train instead of driving even though driving would have taken less than an hour. It was to be a journey separating myself from all that I was in the moments before I checked my baggage and stepped onto the train.
I’m a wreck; I chew a fingernail nervously, knowing as the train stops that this is it. There’s no turning back now. I close my eyes. Thinking? Praying? Remembering? I wonder what in the hell I was thinking to board this train.
He stands at baggage, waiting for me, and as I cross to him I don’t give a second thought to the fact that God, security, and dozens of passengers are watching as I fall to my knees in front of him, tears streaming over my cheeks, my forehead bowed against his thighs. His hand wraps in my hair, pulling me to my feet, his lips gracing my forehead, whispering the words I’ve dreamed for two decades: “You have pleased me greatly this night, Cassiopeia.”
In the car his hand caresses my knee as he drives me to his home; the home we’d once shared. My guts clench as I remember the fully equipped dungeon hidden away in his basement. As if reading my mind his hand slides higher, cupping my tingling pussy, sending shivers and more up my spine. “Glad to be going home, love?”
“Home is in Glenview.” I answer softly.
“No.” His firm tone implies anger, though the look he gives me is soft, regret filled. “Home was never there—with him—you belong to me. You always have and always will. Do you forget you wear my mark?”
My thoughts fly to a night twenty years ago when he branded my right ass cheek with his mark: a filigree heart. Heat flares there as it always does when I consider it. Once, I belonged to François Rene de Hart.
“No, I’ve never forgotten.” I whispered, afraid of my own voice, adding even more softly, “Master.”
His smile tells me he is pleased with my answer and he pats my knee before reaching up to untie the belt cinching closed my camel trench coat. Parting the cloth, he reveals scant velvet and indecent swells of flesh. Damn those twenty pounds and then some … more likely thirty by the figure revealed in the mirror before I’d fled my bedroom.
Self-conscious, I scan the dark horizon beyond the car window, pulling my lip between my teeth in an effort to hold back my tears.
“Look at me, Cassiopeia.”
Hesitantly, I meet his eyes.
“First, welcome home.”
My mouth makes an “O” as I realize we are going through the imposing iron gates.
“Second, you are no longer the young girl I lost. You have grown into an incredibly beautiful woman. And third—”
His pause brings my eyes back around to his as he parks in the garage, the door automatically lowering behind us. Gentle fingers trace my jaw line and pull me forward into him for a painfully gentle, excruciatingly long, well-practiced kiss. When he finally releases my lips, I barely manage to croak, “Third?”
> “You will now be punished for running away.”
His answer is as short and abrupt as his exit from the car. Before I realize what he said, he is beside my door, opening it and helping me out, placing a firm hand on my elbow in case I harbor plans for escape.
Oh, hell. My mind races, my palms and armpits suddenly leaking buckets. Nervous chatter fills the air; me rambling. Arguments: “I don’t deserve this; I came running when you summoned me, didn’t I?” and “This was your fault! You knew my biological clock was ticking!” and the true moment of desperation, “Everyone has to grow up sooner or later! It was time for me to grow up and give up silly games.”
The last stopped him cold; we’d made it all the way to the final basement stair. He demands coldly, “Silly games?”
I stumble back a step.
His face, hidden in shadow, seems suddenly even more sinister with age than I’d remembered. It is the look he had once used to instill instant fear; but I am a mature woman now, and intent on standing firm. It is all a game and to pretend otherwise is insanity. Twenty years has made me too old for games. I should have stayed on Long Island; but then, here I am, toe to toe and eye to eye with the man who’d filled the starring role in every fantasy I’d invented over those same years. Frankie. My Frankie. My Master. The one man in my life who’d never harmed me; not mentally, physically, or emotionally.
So why am I suddenly shaking in my four inch heels? It was never a game. It was our life together.
My mind flies back to the first time he led me down this same staircase.
“I’m afraid.” I whisper, same words, same trembling voice as then. “I don’t want any pain.”
Master’s face softens and I know he is remembering also.
“I promise I won’t do anything you don’t want me to do—anything you don’t need me to do.”
It is an echo, almost word for word of the promise he’d made the night he’d introduced me to His World. His very real world. To him it was never a game at all. Suddenly, a lump fills my throat and tears are again streaming down my face. I fall to my knees for a second time in less than an hour; this time, clutching his hand, pulling it to my lips. I kiss his fingers over and over again, sobbing, blubbering apologies, smearing tears and snot and spit over his knuckles until I can barely breathe.
Kneeling beside me, he pulls me into his arms.
“God, I’ve missed you, Cassiopeia.”
I nod, not chancing words. In a heart pounding, brain spinning, sub-space madness moment, I know I will agree to anything.
“I have to punish you. You know that don’t you? You understand you need me to punish you?”
I nod, burying my tear streaked, snot covered face into his shoulder. The twenty year veteran wife worries for an instant the mascara stain will be hell to get out of his tailored linen shirt; then, I beg, again in sub-space, promising to be good—if only—if only he won’t cane me.
In that instant, he knows and I know: Cassiopeia is back. Begging, pleading, bratty Cassiopeia.
“Ask me to punish you, Cassiopeia.”
I bury my head deeper, shaking it for all it is worth against the fabric of his shirt. Fabric saturated with his scent. I inhale deeply, savoring the moment, a brain tease for me.
Unfooled, he pushes me back, claiming my eyes. “Ask, Cassiopeia.”
I tighten my jaw, shaking my head. Oh God, it is going to be so much worse on me now. Oh goody! It is going to be so much worse!
Master doesn’t miss a beat, slapping my arrogant little face, not hard enough to bruise, just enough to get my full undivided attention. Then his hands slide down my bare shoulders to the cups of the bustier. Rending fabric signals it was not only the first but also the last time it will ever be worn. An equally hard pull on the matching thong sees it torn off and flung to the ground.
Naked, I stand before him, a little less arrogant but still stubborn.
“Go home, Charlotte. I’m sorry I’ve wasted both our time tonight.”
What? Whoa! This wasn’t the way the game was played before! My foot stomps at his retreating shoulders as he takes the stairs two at a time.
He isn’t coming back.
New choices: retreat and go home, or face Frankie and admit he’s right, it isn’t a game. It’s his way of life or no way—at least not for us—and if I face the truth: the reason I ran in the first place, so many years ago; it was because his way of life was quickly becoming my way of life, too: I got scared. Scared I might never be a normal person again.
And twenty years later, just as scared, just as sure his real life can never be my real life, our real life, because normal is what people are supposed to be. And deviant isn’t part of normal. My life flashes before my eyes, a series of snapshots: the birth of my babies; a night of shed tears when I discovered the first of the co-eds; more tears as I faced the loss of my sexuality; soccer games; PTA meetings; lonely nights lying next to a man I could barely still call friend let alone husband. I close my eyes, admitting to myself, “I am so done with normal.”
I sigh, opening my eyes, looking at the door handle to the dungeon. I let my face fall into the door. “I don’t know how to do this any more.” Hell, how does a mother of two face being a sexual deviant?
My hand closes over the door latch of the dungeon. It clicks open and I am standing inside before I realize I am “in” and not only in but breaking cardinal rule number one: never enter the dungeon without Master. Candles blaze from their wrought iron holders, hundreds of candles. Wax, leather, old sweat … the scent of my dreams … and my nightmares, waking to find I really am very far from home. My feet carry me to the display rack of floggers, horse whips, and rattan canes. Some I remember but most are unfamiliar toys. The irritated thought that Master has managed to keep busy over the year’s creeps through my brain…
Knees shaking, I reach for a cane I recognize, notched at one end for each time it had been used on me for true crimes. Twice: once for embarrassing him in front of other Doms at a New Year’s Eve party, and once for not willingly using a safe-word when I should have and ended up slightly injured by accident because of it. A whoosh of dizziness finds me grabbing to hold onto the wall as the intelligent thought, “God, this baby hurts,” parades through my brain.
“What are you doing, Charlotte?”
His voice echoes behind me and I know he still stands in the stairwell. Reaching beyond the toy rack, I retrieve a wicked looking blade from a black satin covered table. Stage prop, but it serves its purpose as I hack notch number three into the cane.
“Charlotte?”
Less echo, threshold maybe.
Eyes adjusting, I force myself to search the dancing shadows for what I know is in the room. Somewhere. It has to be here. The only problem being my collar isn’t in plain sight.
“Come on, Charlotte. I’ll drive you home.”
“No.” I turn to face him then, seeing what I hadn’t noticed before: the barest edge of my collar, peeking out of his slacks pocket.
“My name is Cassiopeia. I belong to Master François Rene de Hart. See? I wear his mark upon my hip.” I pivot and wiggle one hip, hoping I sound as seductive as I know I did so long ago. Turning back around I catch his appreciative glance before he shutters away any emotion that might have peeked through. Stalking toward him, I state the facts. “I have been a very bad, bad girl. And now it is time to face my punishment, not as a bratty girl who has to be forced, but as a grown woman who knows what she wants … and what she needs.”
I am close enough to touch his cheek and do so with the edge of the cane, lifting his chin with the notched end. “The problem is I am not sure my Master can handle a grown woman, the last time I saw him I was still a girl, easily managed, easily led.”
His grinding jaw does little to hide the glint of humor escaping his eyes.
“I need to be punished, Master.” Okay, I admit that was said way too sarcastically. I can’t help myself.
“I am your Master, Oui?”
&nb
sp; Oh yeah. Definitely hit my mark.
“Yes. You are my Master.”
His fingers snake into my hair and he pulls me into a painful kiss, reclaiming what was his, raping my mouth with his teeth and tongue. My scalp screams under the pressure. I taste blood. A second later I feel leather cinching around my throat. Blessed leather. My collar.
I am yours, Master, I am yours.
“On your knees, Cassiopeia, hands in front, forehead down.”
Yeah, yeah, I know the drill. God, this is going to hurt.
“Lift your ass, bitch. It hasn’t been that long. Do I have to re-teach you everything?”
The first strike draws a wide welt, just as I knew it would. I can’t see it but pain shoots through my flesh, nerve endings screaming from twat to tit and I know it will leave a mark. My knees shake.
“Have you missed me, Cassiopeia?”
“Yes, Master.”
I want him inside, reclaiming all of me, but it will take nineteen more strikes, one for each year I’ve been away before he stops. He runs his finger along the welt he made. “This is going to leave a beautiful mark, Cassiopeia.”
“Yes-s,” I hiss.
“You used to like it very much when I marked you,” he comments.
“Yes-s.” The anticipation of the next strike is killing me; I feel myself growing wet with need and he is toying with that need.
He taps my ass and thighs lightly with the cane. None were as devastating as the first. These are shadowy taps meant to keep me on edge, waiting for the next hard one. “Oh God,” I moan. “I can’t take this.”
“But you will take this and more for me, won’t you, Cassiopeia?”
I wiggle my ass, wanting the punishment to be completed. Nineteen welts for me to count, nineteen more welts that will turn to dark purple bruises. And over the next week, every time I sit, it will be with some discomfort … discomfort, which will remind me I am his.
I imagine myself going to work on Monday; pulling my pantyhose over these marks, hiding them beneath a knee length skirt, and sitting behind my desk. No one else will know, but as I cross and uncross my legs, as I fidget in my seat, trying to get comfortable, I will be thinking of Master and grow wetter and wetter with need.