by Amy Valenti
“I’m just thanking my lucky stars that I don’t have to be a part of the scene.” He kissed me, his cock still buried within me, but he didn’t move.
“Maybe I should quote a few lines at you,” I taunted. “How did that one go? Something about, ‘I should want to put a stake through your heart, but I just want your stake in my—’”
He kissed me hard just to shut me up, and I laughed against his lips, loving the way he was trying to suppress his own laughter. “Watch it, little miss,” he said when he drew back. “I don’t know if I can stay hard enough to fuck you if you keep quoting that crap at me.”
“Oh, so you were planning to fuck me at some point, Sir?”
Callum narrowed his eyes in a way I just knew was theatrical. He was definitely still amused but trying not to show it. I was getting better at distinguishing between his acting and his real emotions. “You’re on thin ice here, Little Miss Badass—”
“I love you,” I interrupted, the admission out of my mouth before I’d even registered I was going to say it.
He blinked down at me as though he wasn’t sure if I was serious or trying to distract him from what he’d been saying, and I wished I could take the words back.
Then he brushed his lips against mine, and I sensed enormous restraint behind that one light kiss. Pulling back, he murmured, “If you’re just quoting that stupid script at me I’m gonna be really disappointed.”
“I think the script was a little bit wordier. And there were metaphors.” Despite the lightness of our words, there was a new intensity between us, and I tilted my hips up against his in a silent plea for him to finish what he’d started.
Callum drew almost all the way out of me, then slid back inside my wet heat to begin a steady rhythm that kicked my pulse rate up another notch. I braced my feet against the bed and met his thrusts, pulling against the ties that bound me yet again.
“In case you’re wondering,” he said between kisses, his words gruff with exertion, “I love you too.”
“Prove it, Sir,” I challenged, my breathlessness making the words shaky as he took me a little faster, a little harder. God, he was so good at this, and the added emotion just made things ten times better.
“Got any ideas how I can do that, little miss?” He shifted position, angling for my G-spot.
“Hurt me,” I whispered, pleasure making my limbs shake, an orgasm just out of reach.
The look on his face was almost enough to take me over the edge by itself—he clearly hadn’t expected that answer, but from the dark possessiveness in his eyes and the increased tempo of his thrusts, he really, really liked it.
He bit my lower lip like a snake striking, and I gasped at the sudden fire spreading over the delicate skin. Adrenaline surged through me, tightening my muscles and lending me the strength to slam my pelvis up against his every time he drove into me, hard and fast.
A flare of pain in my nipple tipped me over the edge, into a surging sea of intense sensation that carried my overheated body up onto a beach of tingling, exhausted contentment. Callum was there with me, his breath harsh and hot against my shoulder as we struggled to come down from the high.
The next thing I knew, Callum was undoing the ties that held my wrists in place. I lowered my arms around him carefully, relishing the ache the movements brought, then yelped in surprise as he rolled us so that I was lying on top of him.
“I’m too heavy to stay like this, surely?”
Callum grunted contentedly. “Not for me. You have your safewords if you want me to let go.”
I closed my eyes and let myself relax in fuzzy, post-coital bliss. I had no problem with staying bound within his embrace all night, if that was what he wanted.
* * * *
Callum
“Ready for a story?”
Kat handed me a mug of coffee, a humourless smile on her face. She sat down beside me, but shook her head when I raised an arm, silently offering her the protection of my embrace while we talked.
“I need to stay focused, Sir. If I can hug you, I’ll get distracted and cry.”
I reached out to squeeze her hand, wishing there was some way I could help her through this.
She shot me a brief but genuine smile now, then picked up her own mug and stared into it. “Don’t interrupt, okay? I just want to get this over with.”
“Take as long as you need, little miss. I’ll be here.”
We had most of the day to ourselves—the location shoots we were doing today would be after dark. It had been Kat’s suggestion to start now, and her courage blew me away.
She took a deep breath and began. “I read a book that was about a girl who was the sexual property of this high-ranking guy in this fantasy world, sort of a swords-and-sorcery type story. It wasn’t a book with safety measures or safewords or consent, but it didn’t come across as abusive, at least not to eighteen-year-old me.”
I was all of a sudden very glad that she wasn’t in physical contact with me, since I’d gone tense with fury. She’d been eighteen when this had gone down? Fuck, she hadn’t been old enough to drink and yet she’d been through such a horrible ordeal?
“I was just out of high school, but I was with a guy who was…older. Probably older than he’d said, and he’d told me he was thirty-five. I’d fought with my parents about him, and they’d told me I wasn’t allowed to date a guy so much older than me while I lived under their roof. Newbie parental mistake. I packed some essentials and went to live with him.”
This just got worse by the second. I stayed quiet, but it was a struggle.
“I’d already given him my virginity, and when I told him about the book I was reading, he offered to let me experience that stuff for real. Stupid, airheaded teenage me didn’t see any sort of problem with this, and for the first day or two it was fun to pretend he owned my ass and that he could spank me and make me do whatever he wanted, sexually speaking…”
She shrugged, her lips quivering as she got to the difficult section of her story. “After a couple of days, I wanted to stop. He didn’t. Then he got me to sign something. He said it was a tax document the IRS needed because I was living in his house with him, and I didn’t bother to read it.” She took a deep breath and let it out, her shoulders hunching. “It turned out to be a slave contract he’d typed up, or found on the Internet, or something. It was pretty extreme and detailed, and it also said it was legally binding.”
I took a breath before I realised I was doing it, meaning to tell her that no slave contract was legally binding. She shot me a sharp glance—Little Miss Badass in full force. “I know. I know now that it wouldn’t stand up in court. But I didn’t know it then, and he took away my access to the Internet and my phone so I couldn’t check anything. He wouldn’t even let me out of the house.”
Oh, Kat… I wished she’d let me hold her as she struggled through this retelling, but she was resolute and I respected that.
“So yeah. I wasn’t allowed clothes, except he gave me underwear when I was on my period because that was ‘dirty’. He took me when he wanted, where he wanted and sometimes he’d even try to make it good for me, too, if he was ‘pleased with me’.” She took a nervous sip of her coffee and then shuddered. “Those were the worst times,” she admitted in a whisper.
I couldn’t even imagine the level of violation he’d made her feel. Fuck, it was a wonder she’d ever had sex again at all after him.
“Luckily for me, he didn’t want to complicate his new, exciting sex life with a baby or a trip to the abortion clinic, so he made me keep taking my pill, like, obsessively. That was about the only good thing about it. But…there was more than just the sex stuff.”
Her fingernails made tiny plinks against the side of the mug as she drummed them against it. Apart from that, the room was quiet. “He kept me in a dog crate in the kitchen for a lot of the time. Made me eat and drink from dog bowls. He let me use the bathroom, thank God, but I had to thank him afterwards in whatever way he decided was appropriate. A
nd when I started shouting for help, trying to get the windows open or make the neighbours hear…”
Her throat worked as if she were trying to swallow a lump in her throat. I couldn’t bear to watch her struggle. “He used the gag on you,” I said quietly.
Kat nodded, unshed tears in her eyes. She angrily dashed them away and stood up, as though remaining in one place was threatening somehow. “The same make as the one from last night. I choked on my own spit and nearly threw up one time, and he took forever to get the damn thing out of my mouth.” She gave a cold, triumphant smile. “Then I bit him, nearly took his damn finger off. He put the gag back in and went to the hospital and left me for almost a full day, hanging from a hook in the ceiling. I could touch the floor with my toes to take the weight off my arms, but standing on my tiptoes for so long hurt my legs, so I had to go back to hanging from my arms…”
In the right, responsible circumstances, the way she’d been hanging from the hook could have been a quality predicament bondage session. Under the circumstances she’d described, though, it would have been fucking torture. She could have ended up with dislocated shoulders or permanent nerve damage. With every word she spoke, the urge to hunt the guy down grew stronger.
I took a gulp of coffee, hoping the bitter flavour would distract me. It didn’t.
“So there was that. He made me call him ‘my Lord’ because it was what the girl in the book called her owner. Most of the time he was all about the sex and making sure I couldn’t get away, but sometimes he liked to tie me to the table and hit me with a cane. A couple of times he made me bleed but I don’t think it was intentional. Maybe he really thought he was being a good Dom. Whenever I screamed, he gagged me.” Her voice was robotic now, as though she’d pushed through some kind of emotional barrier and into numbness.
“Once, he hung me from that hook in the ceiling and threatened to cut me with his kitchen knives. He’d seen something on the Internet that looked really pretty, he said. He showed me a printout, and I guess it was pretty, if you like pictures of wolves carved into your back until you bleed.” She rubbed a hand over her face. “But when he tried, his knives were all too blunt to do more than scratch, so he got mad and took me down from the hook and kicked me around the floor for a while.”
I didn’t think I could take hearing any more, but she’d been brave enough to endure this; I would listen to every word she said.
“He burnt some food one night and had to open the kitchen window to let the smoke out, and he forgot to lock it again afterwards. He was asleep when I escaped. God knows how I managed to get out through that tiny window. I nearly broke my shoulder, I think. But somehow I got out and grabbed a blanket from a neighbour’s porch swing, and I ran until I felt safe to start knocking on doors to find someone to get me to the hospital.”
I set aside my coffee cup and took her hand. “Did you get the police involved?”
“Not at first. I didn’t even want to go to my parents. I thought they’d say ‘I told you so’. I only stayed at the hospital long enough to get checked out. I had a shoulder sprain, bruised ribs, assorted injuries from being beaten up when he’d had his temper tantrums. A couple of infected scratches from the knives. Some…tearing.” She gestured to her pelvis to indicate where the tearing had been. I gritted my teeth so hard my jaw ached.
“I guess I was lucky, thinking back. I don’t scar easily, and you can hardly see the scars I did get. If you’re looking for them, they’re visible, but none of the guys I’ve been with since it all happened have pointed any out and asked about them. Which I was happy about.” She somehow managed to smile, and it made my heart ache.
“Then I went to a shelter one of the nurses told me about. The woman who runs it, Trish… She helped me get my head together and get back on my feet. Then I went to my parents and they went to the police.”
“That must have been an ordeal.”
Shrugging, she said, “No worse than what I’d already been through. He’d skipped town, gone to live in Arizona, of all places. Maybe so he could cross the border if things went south. Anyway, his trail was easy for the police to find. Dumb bastard hadn’t even tried to hide his tracks, or if he did, he did a really bad job of it. And he had another girl in his house. She’d only been there two days…but there were bars on all the windows.”
She sighed, reading the question on my face before I could ask it. “He was put away, and committed suicide in his jail cell four years ago.” Her lips twisted. “Guess he didn’t like being all caged in.”
Most of me was relieved, though an animalistic part buried deep down was disappointed that he wasn’t still alive, so I could find him and tear his head off for daring to hurt my girl. I pushed the thought away and reached out for her. “Come here.”
Her burden offloaded, she came into my arms, resting her head against my shoulder with a deep sigh. “I still don’t know exactly how long I was in there. Close to a month. Time sort of blurred, and it was the summer I graduated. No school or workplace to keep track of me.”
“It doesn’t matter now. You survived. It’s over.”
“Except for when things like last night happen,” she said, her voice slightly muffled against my shirt, as though she was trying to hide her tears.
“We’ll get through them together,” I vowed, holding her tighter.
She clung to me as though I were the rock keeping her from drowning. “You really mean that? Even now you know everything?”
“Kat…the only thing you could do to push me away would be telling me to leave. And even then, I’d try to change your mind before I went. Don’t you dare think otherwise, you hear me, little miss?”
She held her breath, a sure sign that she was holding in sobs.
“Cry if you need to. I understand.” I was close to tears just thinking about her in such a horrifying situation. Damn right I understood that she’d want to cry.
Her composure crumbled and she sobbed, her fingers twisted in my shirt. I swallowed the lump in my throat and held her, helpless to influence the past but determined that her future would hold nothing like it.
Chapter Twelve
Kat
Thursday evening came, and Callum was ready to fly back to California for his audition. He’d even asked me to come with him—since my meltdown and the confessions that had followed it, he’d been reluctant to leave me alone. But I resisted the urge to let him coddle me, refusing to let the incident from my past define me anymore. It had already led to me trying to push Callum away, and I wasn’t going to indulge the crazy any more than I had to.
Maybe I’d need some more therapy—my late teens and early twenties had been filled with appointments, and God only knew how my parents had financed that—but for now, I thought that working through my issues about submission with my Dom would be therapy enough. All I had to do was convince him I wasn’t totally breakable—in the couple of days since I’d told him about my abuser, he still hadn’t moved our physical relationship on from vanilla with sprinkles. He hadn’t even spanked me. I was starting to worry.
Callum dropped his overnight bag by the door, then took some papers from the coffee table. I’d noticed them before, but hadn’t given in to my curiosity and taken a closer look.
“Homework assignment while I’m gone, little miss. If you don’t think you can handle it, you tell me now, okay?”
I took the papers from him and skimmed through the text on the top page. It was a list of BDSM activities, with three boxes across from each option marked ‘green’, ‘yellow’ and ‘red’. “This is a lot of stuff, Sir.”
He sat down next to me and looked over my shoulder. “I need to know where your limits are before I can scene with you properly. You said that you’ve had…bad experiences…with ball gags, and I know now that you can’t stand to have one near you. But you also were spanked back then, yet when I did it to you, you didn’t react badly at all until your brain kicked back in afterwards.”
Looking at the list again, I could
see his point. “So spanking would be green, ball gags would be red…how about yellow?”
“Things that you want to try but aren’t sure whether you can take them or not.”
I skimmed the items on the list. “Like flogging. He never…with floggers.” Callum nodded to signify that he got my oh-so-eloquently expressed point, and I continued, “But I guess it might be a bit like canes, and those would be a red for me. So I don’t know yet.”
He kissed the side of my head. “We’ll find out when I get back, little miss.”
My heart skipped. “Really? A proper scene?”
“If you do your homework,” he said, and kissed me again, on the lips this time.
I eagerly returned the kiss, wishing he didn’t have to go. I knew I’d be nervous when the time came, but I couldn’t wait to get past this barrier that stopped me from exploring deeper submission.
Callum drew back reluctantly, desire plain on his face. “I need to go or I won’t make my flight.”
“Okay.”
I saw him to the door, and before he stepped over the threshold he gripped the back of my neck, making it very clear that he was speaking as a Dom to his submissive.
“You need me, you call. I don’t care what time it is, or what you think you might be interrupting.”
I rolled my eyes, putting on some badass so that he didn’t feel so bad about leaving. “Hope this audition’s for the part of a mother hen, because you’ve already nailed it.”
“You know your ass is gonna pay for that when I get back, right, Little Miss Badass?” His eyes sparked dangerously, although I could sense his amusement.
“Counting on it, Sir.”
He pressed a hot, hard, way too brief kiss to my lips and then released me abruptly. “Go do your homework.”
I stepped back and he shut the door behind him, leaving me more than a little aroused with no Dom around to beg for mercy. I’d just decided to head into the bedroom for some private time when my phone beeped with a text message.