“And what will I do for you? What will you get out of it?”
He shrugged. “I like to help people and I like to push women’s boundaries. In your case, I’ll get to do both.”
She absorbed this with the slightest twitch of her fingers. “I’ll try to do whatever you ask. Whatever it takes. I want to get better.”
“I want you to get better too.” I drew in a breath and stared down at our intertwined hands. “I can’t guarantee your issues will be worked out in a week or two.”
“So, how long do you think…?”
“I don’t know. We’ll see how things go. It’s possible this won’t work at all and you’ll have to seek professional help.”
“I’ve sought professional help,” she said with an edge of desperation.
“I know you have. But I’ve never attempted anything like this and I’m assuming you haven’t either. As much as I want to help you, I could just as easily fuck you up worse.”
We both fell silent a moment. I didn’t want to fuck her up. I leaned closer to catch her gaze. “Listen, Ash. Submission can feel threatening to the uninitiated. It can feel like something you have to do. I need you to remember, if things start to feel too difficult, that you always have two options. You can hold tough and stick it out, or you can leave this room and go downstairs to the living room. The living room will be our neutral zone. Our safeword, so to speak. I don’t ever want you to feel trapped or forced. I don’t want you to feel pressured to do something you don’t want to do.”
She looked at me sideways. “But—”
“I know. You’re afraid you won’t want to do anything. But if I do my job right, you will. If we’re patient and we work hard, you’ll figure out how to enjoy sex again. I have faith in you.”
“And I have faith in you,” she said soberly. “I can never explain to you how much I appreciate this.”
I opened my arms to her. “Come here and hug me before I lose my mind.”
She pushed back her chair and came to me, and I embraced her, this scared, vulnerable woman who’d insinuated herself into my life. I didn’t normally let people so close. Sexually, I did, but not emotionally. I wondered why I was doing it now.
“I think everything’s going to go fine,” I said against her ear. “I know you want to get better. Get ‘fixed,’ as you say…but there are a few things we need to discuss.”
I released her and crossed to the bureau, and opened the top drawer. I kept paper and pens in there for naughty subbies to write lines. I will not be a bad girl. I will not be a bad girl. I grabbed a couple sheets and a pen and returned to the table. I set them down and looked over at Ashleigh, perched nervously on the edge of her seat.
I spoke with a casual, forthright inflection. “I want to remember everything we talk about, so I’m going to take notes. No one is ever going to see them, okay?”
She blinked at me, once, twice. “Okay,” she said, but she didn’t completely sound okay.
“Come here, please. These aren’t the kind of questions I can ask you across a table.”
She’d been suspicious before. Now she knew what was coming—and she was going to balk. She was a second from bailing. I could see it in her face. “Don’t, Ash,” I said. “Don’t overreact. I just need to know what your triggers are before we start. Please power through this so I don’t inadvertently hurt you. I’ll keep it short. Just the basic things I need to know.”
The basic things. Such a stupid way to refer to what she’d endured. I only meant I wouldn’t goad her for explicit details. I didn’t think I could deal with hearing them.
“Do we have to do this now?” she asked. “I’m kind of tired.”
“Nice try.” I looked at my watch. “You stay at the theater later than this, and I doubt you go straight to bed when you get home.” I gave her my displeased-dominant look. It was a doozy. “You just lied to my face. If you were a sub of mine, in a scene, I’d punish you. The punishments for lying are the worst.”
She paled. “I’m sorry I lied. I just don’t want to.”
I waited, watching her.
“But…okay. I’m supposed to obey you in this room.” She came to me and buried her face against my shoulder. “I already suck at this.”
I pulled her into my lap and wrapped an arm around her. “Just don’t lie to me, baby. Tell me the truth. ‘I don’t want to. I’m afraid. I’m uncomfortable.’ It’s uncomfortable for me too. I wish we could skip this part, but I can’t help you without knowing what you’ve been through.”
She nestled her cheek against my chest. “I know,” she said. “But I haven’t talked about this in a while.”
I held her tight and asked the first question as matter-of-factly as I could. “Did he hit you or abuse you in any way other than sexually?”
She paused a moment. “No.”
“Didn’t hit you with anything? A belt, a paddle? A whip?”
“No. He hit me a few times with his hand.”
“A spanking? On your bottom?”
“On my face. Sometimes on the side of my head when I…fought him.”
Fucker. Fucker, fucker, fucker.
No trigger implements, I wrote. Watch hands around her face.
“You’re doing great, Ash,” I said. “Next question. Where did he assault you? Always in your bed? On the floor? Bathroom? Any other place?”
“Just my bed. In my bedroom. He locked the door.”
Bed only, I wrote. Don’t lock door.
“Did he restrain you in any way? Cuffs, rope? Duct tape?”
She shook her head. “He just…” Her voice was so quiet. “He held me down with his body weight.”
Restraints okay, I wrote. But this explained why she’d gone so crazy the two times I’d laid on top of her.
“How often?” I asked next.
She sighed. “Once or twice a week. Sometimes more. Sometimes he stayed away and I thought he’d stopped forever and then he’d come back.”
Fucker. “Was he always on top?” I asked. “Any other positions?”
“Sometimes he did it other ways,” she said. “No matter how he did it, it always felt…smothering. He never let me move or talk or say anything. If I did, he got angry and hit me. If I was still he just did what he had to do and left.”
I closed my eyes as she related all this to me. I could see it so clearly. I didn’t want to but I did. Little, petite Ashleigh and her fat fuck of a father, pressing her down in the mattress and forcing his worthless prick inside her.
“Did it hurt?” I asked, my voice strained. “Did he hurt you when he…entered you?”
It mattered because I was pretty big, and I didn’t want to remind her of him. I wanted him to be hung like a piss ant. She shook her head against my chest. “It always hurt.”
It always hurt, I wrote.
I rubbed her back and pressed my chin against the top of her head. “Hang in there, baby. I know this sucks for you.” As difficult as this was for me, it had to be a thousand times worse for her. I gritted my teeth and asked the next question. “Did he only assault you vaginally? Did he ever make you go down on him?”
“No.”
“Anal sex?”
“No. Sometimes he groped me there, but…”
Vaginal only, I wrote. “Did he use contraceptives?”
“No. Well, he pulled out a lot, I guess. Sometimes…” Her voice trailed off. “He came on me. I can’t stand that. The smell.”
“It’s good that he never got you pregnant. Or did he?”
“I didn’t have my period. Not until I was fourteen.”
Until she’d left home. I shuddered. I couldn’t help it. No facials, I scrawled, and underlined it twice. No cum play.
“Will you use condoms?” she asked, going tense in my arms.
“Of course I will. We’ll take tests too, just to be safe. I usually use condoms so it’s no big deal.” I gave her a squeeze. “Okay, we’re almost done. Did he talk to you when he was assaulting you?”
&
nbsp; She trembled against my chest. “He called me a bad girl. Please don’t call me a bad girl.”
“I won’t.” Don’t call her a bad girl, I wrote on the paper. Ever. I underlined that three times. “What about other names? Anything else bother you? Baby, honey, sweetcheeks? Honeymuffin? Twinkletoes?”
She giggled the way I hoped she would, and shook her head. “He never talked to me. He never said anything.”
“He had a dick the size of a pinhead, didn’t he?” I asked bitterly. “Literally, the tiniest dick on earth.”
She shrugged her small, tired shoulders. “I don’t know. I couldn’t really judge.”
Of course she couldn’t. Motherfucking fuck. “Is there anything else he did to you that I should know about?” I asked. “You can tell me anything. I don’t want to hurt you later because I’m not aware.”
There was a long silence and I realized she was crying. I held her against me while I folded up the paper and shoved it into my pocket. I didn’t think I’d forget anything she’d told me, not for the rest of my life. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry for all the things you went through. Someone should have helped you. Your teachers. Your mom. Why didn’t you tell them? Did he threaten you?”
“My mom knew.”
I thought I must have misheard her. “What?”
She took a long, slow breath. “My mom knew. In the beginning she told me to ‘honor my father,’ that it said so in the Bible. Later she said it was my fault, that the devil was inside me tempting my father. She said if I told anyone what was going on, she’d say I was mentally ill or using drugs. That she’d yank me out of dance and have me sent to juvenile detention. She said I would get raped there every day.”
Bitch. Bitch, bitch, bitch, fucker, bitch.
“She didn’t…she didn’t want…she wouldn’t…” Ashleigh pulled away from me and swiped at her tears. “She liked my father’s money, I guess, but she didn’t want to sleep with him. So…”
“So she kept quiet while he came to you.”
“Yeah. I felt pretty trapped. There was only one way I could think of to get away from them. I had to win a scholarship to an out-of-town ballet school, and I did.” Her face was awful, driven.
“Who helped you?” I asked. “A teacher? Your dance teacher?”
“Yes. Miss Melanie. She helped me apply to a company school in New York, and helped set up the audition. My parents didn’t want me to go, but Miss Melanie wouldn’t take no for an answer. She flew me there herself when they refused.”
I had a sickening thought. “Do you still dance to get away from them? Do you enjoy it at all?” It horrified me to think she still danced from that survival compulsion. “They can’t touch you now, you know. You could quit tomorrow. Do whatever you want. If you needed money, I’d give you money to go back to school. Whatever.”
She shook her head. “I like it, most of the time. I don’t want to quit. But someday, in a few years, I might like to stop, get married. Have a normal life. And to do that…” She gave me a hopeful look. “I need to get fixed.”
I ran a finger down the side of her cheek, brushing away tears. How many of them had she cried as she soldiered through her hellish life? “I’m going to fix you,” I said. “Are you off tomorrow?”
“I’m off every Monday and Tuesday,” she said. “But tomorrow’s Christmas.”
“It’s as good a day to start as any. As long as you’re clear, it’s a good day for me. Every Monday we’ll work on things, you and me, until you’re better. Okay?”
It was the best I could do at that moment. What I really wanted to do was fly to Cowskull and choke the last of Joe Keaton’s miserable life from his lungs. Then I’d move on to Doreen. What was an appropriate punishment for a mother who’d sentenced her daughter to sexual abuse from the age of nine until she could escape her own family? I squeezed Ashleigh’s shoulders.
“Do you mind sleeping here tonight?” I asked. “I don’t want to send you home alone after the brutal conversation we just had.”
She looked surprised. “I don’t have any pajamas. Or a toothbrush.”
“All the toiletries you need are in the bathroom, and I’ll bring you one of my shirts.”
I waited on the bed for her to settle in, to make sure she wasn’t on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I lent her a shirt even though one of Mem’s would have fit her better. I wanted it to be mine, even if it hung off one shoulder and reached almost to her knees. I patted the bed beside me. “Come here.”
She crawled onto the covers and settled next to me. “Thanks for lending me your shirt.”
I eyed the gaping neckline. “It fits great.”
She laughed and yanked the collar up a little. After her tears earlier, that laughter was the most beautiful sound in the world. “Merry Christmas, Liam,” she said, staring at my chest. I was still wearing the goddamned deer sweater.
I put my hand over the garish design. “Merry Christmas to you too. When you wake up, go downstairs. Mem will get you anything you need. Coffee. Tea. Breakfast.” I touched her cheek. “What about tonight? Do you need some curtains to hang up around the bed? Some blankets?”
She gave a half-smile. “Are you kidding?”
“Yes.”
She sobered, tracing a finger along a seam of the comforter. “I tore all my curtains down tonight. The ones on the bed you gave me. One of them ripped.”
“Why did you do that?”
“Because I was tired of being scared. I was tired of being scared of you. I’m glad I came over.”
I took her hand. It looked so small next to mine. “Thanks for hanging in there this evening. I know it was uncomfortable for you.”
“I’m sorry I lied. I won’t do it again.”
“I know.”
She stared down at our hands. “If I was your sub, what would you have done to me for lying? If we were, you know, in a scene?”
“Do you really want to know? It might scare you.”
“I really want to know.”
I took a deep breath. “Since it was a first offense, and I kind of understood why you did it, I would have been somewhat lenient. I would have tied you to this bed on your stomach, wrists and ankles, and…” I looked into her curious eyes and stood up, and crossed to a long, low bureau on the far side of the room. I opened the middle drawer and sorted through until I found what I wanted. I carried it back to the bed and handed it to her. “I would have used this strap, probably. It’s not the heaviest one I have, but it hurts. I would have given you twenty good strokes with it. Enough to make an impression.”
She stared at it, blinking, turning it over in her hands. “Will you… Will you show me what one would have felt like? One stroke?”
I narrowed my eyes. “Show you? Right now?”
“I’m curious.”
Even as she said it, her voice quavered a little. “I don’t know, Ash.” I took it away from her. Bad, bad idea to bring out a toy tonight. She looked scared, yes—but she also clearly wanted to know how it felt. And I wanted to use it on her. “Like I said, it really hurts.”
She stared back at me, biting her lip. I wasn’t made of iron.
“Okay. Lay on your stomach.” I got up from the bed to walk around to her side. By the time I got there she was on her tummy, her arms clenched beneath her. “I don’t accept that position,” I said. “It’s defensive. If I was punishing you, I’d make you open yourself up to it.” Because you’re mine. The words came from nowhere, echoing in my head. She looked up at me in question, still scared, still curious. I laid the strap beside her and took her arms in a gentle but firm grip. I spread them to either side of her, then I made her open her legs—not as much as I would have for a real punishment, but enough to feel an acute loss of control.
“Are you sure you want this?” I said. “We can stop now.”
“No. I want to see. I deserve it anyway for lying.”
I sat down beside her. “Already topping from the bottom, are we?”
&nb
sp; “What does that mean?”
I stroked her hair, only to keep myself from molesting her more alluring body parts. She lay so my shirt covered her panties, but the outline of her ass was temptingly obvious. “It means that, as the dominant, I should decide what you deserve, and I should decide when, where, and how to punish you. That’s how it’s supposed to work.”
“I shouldn’t have asked you to do this, should I?”
“It’s a little early in the game for rules and punishments. But if you really want to know what it feels like…”
I stood and picked up the strap. She wanted to feel one hard stroke. Okay, I’d give her one. “You can’t move or turn,” I warned. “I’m going to put a hand on your back to keep you still.”
She made some strained sound of agreement. I noticed her hands creeping in again. “Arms out,” I said. “Over your head and still.”
She obeyed, her entire body vibrating with tension. I could feel it under my palm. I drew my other arm back and landed a solid whack across her ass cheeks. It wasn’t that hard. I wasn’t going to deal a full blow to a newbie submissive who wasn’t even warmed up, but I wanted it to be hard enough to impress her. It left a mark, although it would be gone by morning.
She didn’t make a sound.
“Well, that’s one,” I said. “What do you think? Could you take twenty?”
She turned to look at me, rubbing the place I’d strapped her. My cock was instantly hard as hell. I walked away from her to put the strap away, and also to put distance between us. “It still burns,” she said when I got back. “It tingles.”
“After twenty good ones, your ass would be on fire. You’d have trouble sitting down for a while.”
“But that’s the point, isn’t it? To remind me of the bad thing I did?”
I gave her a look. “You’re learning a lot tonight. But right now, you’re supposed to be heading off to dreamland.” And I need to go somewhere and masturbate. Furiously. I leaned down and kissed her on the forehead. “Is your butt okay, brave and curious one?”
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