by Amy Valenti
Beneath me, Callum sat up, grabbed the back of my neck once more, pressed his forehead to mine. “Stay with me, baby.”
A warm glow built in my chest, so different to the urgent heat farther down my body. Opening my eyes again, I held his shoulders for support and continued to take him, a moan escaping me as he cupped my breasts in his hands and pushed them together, then trailed kisses and licks from one nipple to the other, squeezing my flesh. With every flick of his tongue over one of the sensitive peaks, my internal muscles rippled against his cock and I tightened my grip on his shoulders, panting now, my thighs shaking.
Callum took my lips again in a brief, scorching kiss, squeezing my ass, helping me move up and down. Holding my gaze, he commanded my attention by whispering beautiful, filthy things against my lips, barely loud enough for me to hear. The words made my skin tingle but hardly registered in my mind, my orgasm within reach if I could just…
I forgot how to breathe, spasming hard around his cock as I stared into his eyes, hardly registering what I was seeing as the climax took me. I clutched his shoulders and rode it, finally letting out my breath in a half sob, half yell of pleasure as the tension flooded from me in strong, rhythmic waves.
Finally registering Callum’s focus on me, the way he was drinking in every last nuance of my reaction, I found myself smiling as I leaned in to kiss him. He turned it into something more, as intimate as the way our lower halves were joined but infinitely more sensual, making me quiver.
He drew back, and… Oh, God. He was still holding back his own release, his gaze ravenous, full of a dark need to take, take, take.
It was so primal that my body responded in kind, the craving to be taken hard rolling through me once more. I lay back, pulling him over me, and bit down on his shoulder the second he got close enough. “Your turn.”
With a purely animal growl of pleasure, he took what I’d offered and more, pinning my wrists over my head with one hand and slamming into me so hard that my body jolted and my mind short-circuited. I lost my senses within thirty seconds, my previous climax paling in comparison to the amazing, intimidating force of this one. I screamed something, digging my nails into Callum’s back, arching up against him as he drove into me a few more times, slow and hard, his release shuddering through him.
We didn’t move from where we collapsed afterwards. I was too physically and emotionally wrung out to even think about getting up, and my brain wasn’t working enough to figure out what Callum was thinking.
After a few dazed minutes, he pulled slowly out of me and kissed my forehead. “Bathroom?”
I frowned—the answer to the question was just out of reach. “Down the hall…somewhere…”
He laughed softly and got up. “I’ll find it.”
I’d jump-started my brain by the time he got back, and as he sauntered back to the bed, naked and carrying a wet washcloth, I was able to fully appreciate the view. He was way, way hotter in real life than on TV—but he probably heard that all the time, so I kept quiet.
Callum stretched out beside me and pressed the warm, damp cloth between my thighs to clean me off. The barely sexual sensation was so good that I murmured something incomprehensible but appreciative, spreading my legs farther, watching his beautiful body with heavy-lidded eyes.
“Did I fuck you hard enough?” he teased.
Mortification swept through me at the memory of my words. “I can’t believe I actually asked you to do that.” I hid my face against his chest so I didn’t have to look at him. Mercifully, he let me. God, how embarrassing.
“Glad you did,” he told me. “I needed to hear you say it. And it was fucking hot.”
I shook my head, smiling. “Can’t argue with that.”
He was quiet for a while, setting the washcloth aside, then drawing me close and stroking my hair until I was lulled almost into sleep. Then he said, “I noticed some things.”
“Hmm?”
“Things you did when you were close to coming. No, don’t tense up,” he added, when I steeled myself for criticism. “They were hot. They told me more about what you need.”
I waited, unsure what to say.
“You loved it when I held your arms in place so you couldn’t move.” He took hold of one of my wrists and kissed it. A shiver of need slipped down my spine. “And when you came…you called me ‘Sir’.”
As though I’d been thrown out of bed onto a block of ice, I shuddered and struggled to sit up. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want to—”
“Kat.” He sat up with me, cupped my face in his hand and turned me to look at him. “Calm down.”
Angrily, I punched him in the shoulder. “Why do you always have to push in that direction? Didn’t we have a good time without any of that bullshit? Why are you ruining it now?”
“What is it about submission that scares you?”
The hated images flashed into my mind. A familiar face, twisted with rage. A fist flying towards me. The floor rushing up to meet me through a dizzy haze. The hook. The cage.
I’d gotten so good at suppressing the memories, but now I couldn’t hold them back. A full body tremor of revulsion hit me, and I hugged my stomach protectively.
Callum’s voice was compassionate. “A past experience went wrong?”
“It was years ago.” And what the hell did he know about it, anyway? It wasn’t as if he’d ever been abused by someone he’d thought loved him. No, Callum was a Dom. He did the overpowering and beating.
I grabbed my robe from the end of the bed and covered my body, feeling too vulnerable to stay naked. “I was young and very stupid. I read the wrong book and told the wrong boyfriend how it had made me feel, and before I knew it I’d had the control taken from me, just like I’d fantasised about.”
I’d struggled to voice this even to Trish, but anger lent me the strength to finally make him understand. “It was hell. It was nothing like what I’d read about. It took me nearly a month to find an opportunity to get away. And I am not going back to that bullshit.”
“Kat…” The look on his face was indecipherable. I couldn’t tell what he was feeling and I didn’t like it one bit. I stepped back the second he reached towards me, and turned my back so I didn’t have to watch him pity me.
“No! Don’t even try, Mr. Connors. The same day I heard you were guest starring on the show, I requested the time off. I’d read that interview where you hinted at being a Dom, and I already had a stupid fangirl crush on you before that. I knew that if I met you, there was a chance I could end up feeling like that again. Like I wanted to be ordered around, to be hit. To be used. And I didn’t want to risk it. But it happened anyway.”
My voice broke, and the righteous anger I’d been running on evaporated. I wanted to ask him why I felt the way I did. How he could bring out these forbidden cravings when all I wanted was to leave my dark past behind. What he got out of hurting a woman that way.
I couldn’t speak.
“I’m so sorry, Kat.”
My vision was too blurred by tears for me to see if his expression matched his voice. He sounded sincere.
“We need to talk this through. Will you please sit down for me?”
Even though it was a request, it felt like doing as he’d asked would be a step into submission. I shook my head. “I’m going to the bathroom. Please be gone when I come back out.”
* * * *
Callum
I stared at the empty doorway where I’d last seen Kat, my limbs refusing to obey my commands to move, my brain stalling.
She was right. I shouldn’t have pushed, not before we’d at least gotten some sleep. I was fucking up left, right and centre with this woman, and in retrospect it was hardly surprising. The things she must have been through…
The worst thing that could happen now was for her to find me still naked, still in her bed when she got back from the bathroom. I pushed back my emotional tornado and dressed quickly, then took a final glance backward at the bed where we’d finally connected
before heading through the apartment into her living room.
Really looking around me for the first time since I’d stepped into the apartment, I noticed small details of disarray in an otherwise tidy space. An e-reader and a plate scattered with crumbs on the coffee table. A small stack of folded laundry over the arm of a chair. She didn’t appear to have any pets, just a few plants here and there.
I sat down on the couch to wait for her, not wanting to appear threatening by lurking, but with absolutely no intention of just leaving after what she’d shared with me. Anger boiled up within me again as her words came back to me. It was hellish. It took me almost a month to work up the courage to get away.
I wanted to find the fucker who’d treated her so badly and throw him into a vat of boiling oil, then pull him out and dump him in a barrel of salt. Simply shooting him was way too good for him. I knew there were some wannabe Doms who abused women and called it BDSM—it had been the reason I’d turned down the role in a movie adaptation of the most recent BDSM book women were going crazy over. I hadn’t wanted women to show my scripted portrayal to their men and say that was how BDSM was really practised. The script had been irresponsible; I hadn’t read the original book to see if that was any better.
Fuck. No wonder Kat had tried to run from me. Her whole terrible experience had started with the wrong book and the wrong guy. And I’d trapped her in a temporary job that must have brought everything back, though she hadn’t taken the opportunity to leave when I’d given her an out.
If I could just go back to the first day I met her…
“I thought I told you to get out.”
I hadn’t heard Kat come out of the bathroom, and her quiet, dispirited voice startled me. I almost stood up, then decided to stay sitting.
“I’ll go, but there’s something I need to say first.”
“I don’t want to hear it.” She was hugging herself and staring fixedly at the wall over my head, so obviously hurt that I ached to make everything better for her, somehow. “I want you to go, Callum, before you lose control of yourself and do something horrible.”
Wait. She was making this about me? When I’d been so careful not to do anything she didn’t want? I’d tiptoe around as many of her triggers as she wanted, but I wasn’t gonna let her demonise me as an abuser when I wasn’t one.
“Hang on just a damn second.”
Kat must have known that she was out of line, because she didn’t flinch at my sharp tone. Her lips trembled a little, but she stayed quiet.
“You were taken advantage of by an asshole calling himself a Dom, and you have no idea how angry that makes me. How much I want to hunt him down for what he did to you.” I tried to keep my tone level and emotionless, with questionable success. “But he’s the exception, not the rule. I am not that kind of man, and I know that somewhere inside you, you know that.”
She scowled, putting an extra layer of badass between us. “Do I know that? I told you what I needed and you played nice, but right after you got laid you started right back in where you left off when you promised you wouldn’t—”
I was on my feet before I could stop myself, too restless to stay still as she aimed low blow after low blow at my personality. “A good Dom will push a sub’s limits, but not blast right through them without consent. Do you really think I’m capable of harming you? Ignoring your safewords? Raping you?”
Now she flinched, her eyes filling with tears again. Her tone stayed harsh, though. “It doesn’t matter what I think, or if I trust you. I can’t trust myself. Last time—the only time—I submitted to a man, I thought I knew what would happen. I thought he would take care of me, that he loved me. But I was wrong then and I’m not going to be wrong again, so get the fuck out of my apartment before I call the goddamn cops, Mr. Connors!”
She spun and ran back into the bathroom, and the click of the lock engaging was like a punch in the gut. I could refuse to leave again, but she’d been perfectly clear, and despite how badly I wanted to make everything right I couldn’t ignore her wishes.
I laid my hand on the smooth, varnished wood of the bathroom door and hoped she could hear my words.
“Take the next couple of days off work, Kat, and take care of yourself. If you need to talk, you have my number.”
Silence—but I hadn’t expected anything else.
I let myself out, shutting the door firmly so she’d know it was safe to emerge from the bathroom, and returned to my hotel without really registering anything about the journey.
Was there even any hope for us? If she truly believed me capable of things I could only imagine, there was no way I could convince her otherwise. Anything I did would just scare her farther away. I’d been so sure there was something significant between us, something more than just an electrifying one-night stand with a disastrous ending, but maybe I was just deluding myself.
Chapter Eight
Kat
Callum slammed the front door as he left, and the silence in the aftermath of his visit was oppressive. I sank down on the edge of the bathtub and buried my head in my hands, taking a deep, shuddering breath. My skin still smelled of Callum, of sex, calling to mind the wicked, forbidden acts that I knew were on offer. All I had to do was accept, and he’d take control, hurt me the way I ached for him to.
And look where that had gotten me last time.
I sighed and tried to gather my thoughts. ‘Last time’ was a period in my life that I had hoped never to revisit, but lately all people seemed to want to talk about was the naughty book they’d been reading or the film adaptation or who might play the sexy hero who featured in all their fantasies. And now this had happened.
I’d been so glad Callum—my most crushed-upon actor—had turned down that role, yet in doing so, he’d turned my world upside down by telling the world it was too close to the way he lived his own life.
I’d just had sex with an admitted Dominant. He’d been here, naked in my apartment, and the way he’d held me, touched me, taken me…it had been glorious. And I’d wanted more. Wanted him to hurt me.
Trish’s warnings came back to me easily, and I reached up to turn on the shower, needing to remove the scent of temptation from my flesh and get my head back in the right place. Was I crazy? Did I want to end up in the shelter again, or worse?
Yet as I shed my robe and stepped into the shower, soaped myself down to wash my sweat and his from my skin…I realised I’d been unfair. I trusted him, at least enough to let him into my bed, and he hadn’t forced anything on me. He’d just told me what I’d done when I’d been out of my mind with pleasure, and I’d freaked out.
Something about him radiated safety, even as other things made me feel endangered as hell.
He’d asked me if I thought him capable of rape, and I hadn’t answered him directly. He’d looked as though I’d slapped him in the face.
God, I’m a bitch.
If he’d wanted to tie me up, beat me, then rape me when I’d been scared and helpless…he could have done it. I’d asked him there, let him carry me to my bedroom, begged him for everything he’d done, and if he’d wanted to turn my elation to terror and my moans to screams, he could have used his superior strength to restrain me.
And what was that phrase he’d used? Safeword? It only rang a vague bell, and I’d been so determined not to go near anything related to BDSM ever again that I hadn’t looked up what the meaning was when I’d heard it in conversation.
When I got out of the shower, I Wikipedia-searched for it.
A safeword is a code word or series of code words that are sometimes used in BDSM for a submissive (or ‘bottom’) to unambiguously communicate their physical or emotional state to a Dominant (or ‘top’), typically when approaching or crossing a physical, emotional or moral boundary. Some safewords are used to stop the scene outright, while others can communicate a willingness to continue, but at a reduced level of intensity.
Tears stung my eyes, and I drew my knees up to my chest, pressing my lips again
st them to muffle my sobs as I rocked back and forth.
Where the hell had my safeword been when I’d needed it?
I hadn’t even known such a thing existed when I’d approached him about dominating me. It hadn’t been in the book I’d read, and I hadn’t wanted to use the Internet to search for sex stuff in case I put viruses on my parents’ computer.
If I’d have known more about safety, and told him about it, would things have gone so wrong? I’d been a stupid, woolly-headed teenager and he’d been an older, experienced guy, so probably not. But I couldn’t help but feel ashamed of myself for not becoming more aware before leaping in with both feet. I should have informed myself with real information, not fictional fantasies.
Well, no more. My chest ached and my eyes were sore from crying, but a new determination filled me. Scrubbing away my tears, I grabbed a notepad and pen, then opened a new search page, the memory of Callum’s anger and hurt strong enough to drive back my trepidation. I had to know the facts, not just rely on Trish’s opinion. Of course she hated the idea of BDSM—she worked with female victims of abuse.
I had a brief moment of terror when an extreme image flashed up on one of the pages I clicked, and I closed the page hurriedly, trying not to hyperventilate. I could read about these things, but having pictures come up unexpectedly was just too much.
After a few minutes, I screwed up my courage to start my quest for information anew.
Image blocker. Vaguely remembering something about being able to turn off images, I did some investigative searching and came up with an add-on that disabled images on every page I looked at. Now I could read about safe BDSM without giving myself a heart attack.
As I read more about safewords, silent alarms, the ‘safe, sane and consensual’ creed and RACK—’risk-aware consensual kink’, my tears kept flowing. There was a whole network of BDSM practitioners communicating safety measures out there, many messages stated and re-stated: don’t leave a bound submissive alone, don’t constrict circulation, keep EMT shears nearby in case of emergency, don’t strike the area of the kidneys when doing impact play…