Holding the Cards

by Joey Hill

  She hoped the Salernos had made the bindings strong. This was no playful dungeon session. There was devotion here, and yes, intimacy, but there was also catharsis, purging and release. There was something painful in the room, and filled with rage, and it wanted its freedom.

  She hoped to God she knew what she was doing, because at this point what was happening had taken on a life of its own. The reward might be a leap forward in trust and love, a binding of the souls, or it could destroy them.

  They'd both been there, to that point of soul destruction. Now, whether they were fools or hopeless romantics, they were pushing the envelope again to see if they could find in each other what they had hoped to find the time before and failed. The result was going to be fire, but would it be conflagration, purification or resurrection?

  "God, you are so gorgeous." She slid the butt of the whip along the inside of his calf, the ticklish indentation behind his knee, trailed it along his inner thigh. She could almost feel the heat pulsing from his captured cock. She coiled the whip behind his leg, tightened the slack so it pressed into his thigh. She leaned in and bit him there, soothing the pain with a warm swirl of the tongue, savoring the warm taste of his skin, the quivering and bunched muscle under her teeth. Her ear brushed his cock. He rasped out her name, a plea. Her eyes lingered on the tight clench-and-release spasms of his buttocks. He could not stop his body from imitating what it wanted to do, the mindless instinct of a dog humping a leg. Instead of amusing or repulsing her, the image increased her own hunger, for they were rapidly leaving niceties behind. Responses were raw, primitive. She wanted those hips pumping, jackhammering himself into her until she screamed. But not yet.

  "Tell me, Josh. Why do you need to be punished? What did you do?"

  She eased herself back into a straight-backed chair Marcus brought for her, so she could sit closer to Josh, brush her heeled boot along the inside of his calf.

  His head lifted, his eyes and cheekbones masked to her, his lips moistening nervously, somehow appearing even more vulnerable for their solitary exposure on his face. "I can't," he repeated, desperately.

  She twisted her wrist and the snap end of the crop zapped his thigh just below the bound scrotum, a quick sting, meant to raise the emotional response. He jumped, swallowed, and the quivering in his legs increased. "Please, don't…"

  Marcus made a noise, and Lauren gave him a sharp, negative shake of her head.

  "Marcus is here, Josh, and I am here. But in the darkness of that mask it's just you, facing yourself. I will take care of you," she reminded him, and this time the whip's touch was a gentle caress, teasing his balls. "Tell me."

  His fists remained clenched against his bonds, muscles unconsciously resisting his restraints still, but she knew it was only a physical manifestation of resistance to the chains that held him in his mind. She longed to let him go, but he had to put it in the open between them. It was the sacrifice that all Masters demanded before they allowed themselves to be worshipped. Complete openness, no hidden corners. Come on, Josh. Let it go, so I can let both of us go.

  "She was a sub. She liked me to really take control." The first words were thick, clotted as if they had to fight their way free of the grip of a festering wound, choked with pus. His lips pressed together. "She wanted me to dress her sexy when we were out, make her expose herself. We'd go to a club and she'd beg me to make her lift her skirt when she was dancing, let other people see her bare ass. She'd usually have me spank it good before we went out, hard with a belt, so it would have red welts on it.

  "I liked playing with her, but I was afraid of being too rough. She could drive me up, make me get so savage with her. She wanted it that way, but… I enjoyed how much she got off on it."

  Marcus's eyes flicked to Lauren. A frown flitted across his brow, but she shook her head, putting a finger to her lips and he sank back down on the dais near Josh's feet.

  The mask would let him talk inside his head, temporarily push away his surroundings. The outside became the inside, and emotions not normally allowed the sight of day became irrepressible, because sightlessness and being helpless turned you inside out, made shields and controls impossible.

  Lauren had watched many subs fall apart. A slave was supposed to have no secrets, expose his or her fears, worries and longings to the Mistress, and the Mistress would address them as she saw fit. It was the way the game worked. It was that automatic vulnerability, impossible to avoid, that gave the Dom such a dangerous edge, that made D/s walk so close to the darkness.

  Marcus removed his hand from Josh's ankle, recognizing, as she did, Josh's need for an isolated dark void of space into which to spill the weight on his soul.

  "So she got off on you doing all this. Why does that make you a monster? It sounds like you were a good Master."

  "She didn't know anything about the clubs at first, just knew she wanted me to tie her up and whip her. It made her come all the time…in the beginning. She didn't really know about the other stuff you could do. I found out about those for her, because I knew she'd like them, and because, I liked them, too."

  "It made you hard, didn't it?" she murmured, bending forward and rubbing her fingertips over his constricted organ, eliciting a moan of pleasure, another whispered plea that she ignored. "So you did what she wanted."

  He nodded. "Anything. But some things I just couldn't…she wanted me to leave marks, permanent ones, and when she saw how much it bothered me, she wanted me to do it even more. And if I didn't want to do it, she'd take me to the clubs and make me watch while some other Dom did it, make me give her to another Dom."

  "Did you like that?"

  "Yes…no. It hurt, in a strange way, but it always got me off. It just felt…wrong. But I liked it," his fingers dug into his palms, so fiercely they left marks. She saw the flesh whiten and inflame around the puncture. "I fucking liked it," he repeated, not as emphasis, but as accusation. "It made me hard as iron. I wanted to pull her out of his hands and pound into her, but it was like rage…it felt wrong. I couldn't do it, though I was supposed to be in charge. It hurt," he repeated, confused, arguing with himself.

  Lauren swallowed, feeling emotions of her own rise up. A bad feeling was growing in her and she saw it reflected in Marcus's eyes. Did she really want to hear the end of this story? No, she didn't, but she would. She had to.

  She pressed her knee against his left leg. She laid her hand upon his thigh.

  "So what happened?"

  "I just…I did everything she wanted, but it never seemed like enough. I stopped working for awhile, because I was pouring all my energy into new things that I thought might turn her on. It was like…"

  "Being strung out on drugs," she finished for him, remembering.

  "Yeah…" he swallowed, and his hands eased, twitched a bit. "One night, we went out to dinner together. Just a regular thing, though I did the usual things. I made her wear something sexy I really liked, no panties so I could play with her pussy under the table. She liked me to make her flash the waiter, you know, lean forward over the menu so he could see everything, but she didn't push as much of that, not that evening. She seemed really affectionate, not real pushy, and I could focus on her, enjoy her. But I noticed that night…we didn't have much to talk about.

  "I realized we had gotten away from what it was that had brought us together and now it was all about sex. That night felt better, though," he added wistfully. "It was more like us again. I had my arm around her, and through most of dinner, she cuddled against me and seemed happy with me, like she was pleased with me, and that felt good. It had been awhile since I'd felt that way."

  Hadn't it been so similar for her, never feeling as if she had pleased Jonathan, always anxious, on edge, not caring about career or personal identity any longer, too keyed up to think about the destructiveness of it? It shamed her to think of it now, how she signed herself over to him, who she was, with barely a murmur or qualm. It was also frightening how she had done it, with no real sense of having done so.
She had just hungered for acceptance, self affirmation, because she lost the ability to give that to herself. She had let Jonathan take it away. She and Josh, two insecure people with low self-esteem, uncovered and stripped bare by two people who needed to degrade them to feel worthwhile themselves.

  It was pathetically formulaic and painful to see the mirror, but she was strong enough to look. She held the cards now, and had been holding them, since she became true to herself again and said the words that made Jonathan walk away. Now she just had to figure out what the winning hand would be for Josh.

  "Tell me what she did." Her spike heel slid against his instep, depressed slightly, just enough to cause another slight red mark, a warning. "Don't keep me waiting, Josh."

  The threat laced into the warm promise was a potent mix. His erection, waning a bit from the fluctuation of his emotions, jumped, began to swell so the straps bit into the tender skin again, and he groaned at the discomfort.

  She knew the torture of desolation and desire mixed. It tore the senses apart and the shields down. She hoped he didn't need a further push. Marcus was a still presence somewhere to the left of her, and she could feel his tension.

  "We left the restaurant," he said after awhile. "I had my arm wrapped around her. She nuzzled against me, then took my hand, pulling me into the shadows between two buildings so we could embrace. She was shy almost, where any other time she might have begged me into the alley in broad daylight and pleaded with me to use her where anyone could walk by at any moment and see her. But she wanted tenderness, and it…God, it was wonderful. I practically swallowed her, pushing her back against the bricks, but just to kiss her, hold her, feel her holding me.

  "I didn't think about how unsafe it was where we were. I was supposed to protect her, and I didn't even think about it. Something came at me out of the shadows. I was so stupid, not thinking about how we were in a not-so-great an area, though the restaurant was a nice enough one. Letting her pull me into an alley, for Chrissakes, and I was supposed to take care of her…" his lips curled in a sneer of self-loathing so bitter Lauren could taste it on her own tongue.

  "There were three men. They tore us apart and two of them grabbed me, knocked me around a bit, but mainly forced us deeper into the alley, forced me to my knees and held me there while the other one shoved her onto her back in the filth of that alley and yanked up her skirt. He hit her in the face, split her lip…"

  He pressed his head back against the cross, his jaw clenching. Lauren didn't move, fighting every urge she had to keep from touching him in comfort or speak soothing words. The wound wasn’t open yet. Blood had to be free flowing for it to cleanse itself.

  "She was crying, crying my name as he rammed into her. And I lost it. She belonged to me. I was supposed to take care of her, but, no, no, NO. That's not it."

  Lauren watched, her own eyes anguished, as moisture trickled from under the mask, curved under his jaw. His voice became brutal, unforgiving.

  "For the first few minutes, I didn't even try to do anything, because I was getting hard watching them do it. I was getting off on it, because it was so much like what we did. She liked the rape scenes."

  Lauren shifted, her eyes locking with Marcus's.

  "I was fucking enjoying it, as if I was watching a Dom get rough with her to torture me, for not being enough. And," his voice broke, "I thought…she's finally…finally getting what she deserves." He choked on a sob. "I fucking thought that, I remembered that like I was some kind of diseased redneck wifebeater. It was that, not her being raped, that tore it loose inside me. I lost it."

  A quiver ran through his shoulders, a tensing like a cramp.

  "Josh —"

  "No," his face contorted. "Let me feel it. I deserve it. I became filled with so much rage; ten guys couldn't have held me. I rolled and kicked. I fought them with whatever I had inside of me, three years of unfulfilled passion, fueled up emotional fucked-upness. When I yanked the guy off her, I remember his eyes going wide, looking at my face, and he tried to say something, but I busted his mouth with my fist before he could. I was sticky, sticky, spraying blood on her, and then she was on my back, trying to pull me off, and then the police were there…the police were there."

  He stopped, breathing hard, tears dropping off his chin onto his heaving chest. Lauren shifted, rose.

  "Don't take it off," he snapped out. "I don't want you to see my face."

  "Okay," she said softly, laying her hand against the side of his jaw.

  "Don't," he tried to jerk away, but the bindings didn't allow it. "I don't want you to touch me."

  "Well, that's just too bad, because I'm going to." She rubbed her hand along his jaw, stroked, kept stroking as her other hand laid along his rib cage, soothing the ulcer of emotions.

  "Please," he choked out. "I'm not…that's not all of it."

  Lauren raised her head and she sensed his eyes searching for her face. She nodded, stepped back and let him hear her sit before him again. "Tell me all of it, Josh," she said sternly, though her throat ached with his pain.

  "One of the guys was critical." His voice was weary now, almost dead. "The other was pretty messed up. I had just knocked the third out. The messed-up one was still coherent enough to talk, and he did, because he didn't want to go to jail for rape, especially since he wasn't a rapist." Josh swallowed, and his voice broke.

  "He was just doing what my wife had paid him to do."

  Chapter 18

  Cold insinuated itself in her vitals like a doctor's invasive instrument. "Josh," she whispered. "Oh God, Josh."

  Abandoning anything but her feelings, she sprang up and removed the mask, unbuckling it and pulling it off so she could see his anguished face. He turned eyes to hers that were overflowing not just with tears, but the black despair she had detected in small doses since they had met. Was it really less than two days ago? She snatched up a towel, wiped away his tears, blotted his running nose with tender fingers.

  "Don't untie me," he said quietly. Marcus stopped in mid-motion. "I don't deserve the consideration."

  He leaned his head back, closed those hopeless eyes. "I didn't know that at first," he murmured. "They separated us. She told the police everything," his eyes opened, went back to Lauren, his chosen confessor, and the detachment in his eyes stirred her, so at odds with his exposed physical condition. "She didn't want her friends to go to jail, or me. When the cops came in and started asking me questions about our… lifestyle, it floored me. Where the hell had that come from? Then I looked at their eyes and knew.

  "It was a fucking game. A game she had engineered. She wanted to get off on me being helpless while she was raped, which of course wasn't rape. I didn't tell them anything, didn't make any attempt to defend myself. I wasn't protecting her or them, I just couldn't speak. Everything shut down and I was just inside my head, looking over our whole relationship, everywhere we had taken it, a spiral to hell. We kept going round and round the same subject that fascinated us, deeper and deeper into what had resulted in that dark alley. The police, the way they looked at us. The sick fantasies of bored yuppies while people got robbed or murdered out there, real crimes.

  "One of them considered me a lowlife, perverted freak and it was obvious he considered the whole situation a waste of the taxpayer's money. Probably thought they should just shoot the lot of us. The other was more sympathetic, but it was all pity. He had this look, like I was some guy who had been sexually abused as a child, to explain why I was so fucked up now. Like I was some lost little kid that needed a mommy to take me home. And then she showed up to do just that."

  Lauren wasn't sure he was even in the room with them anymore; his gaze was so far deep into himself. She could feel Marcus suffering, they both were, but Josh was not going to stop until it was done, now that it was out in the open.

  The muscle in his jaw clenched. "Her eyes were shadowed and bruised, her lip split. She looked a little scared by it all. I don't know for sure. I was so messed up that night, I couldn't have
said what she was feeling. She got me to the car, started to say something, I don't know what. I just handed her the keys, walked away, didn't look back. I felt like a worthless, dirty piece of shit. Everything shut down, you understand?" His head turned toward Marcus, focused. "I called you.

  "When I got home," he said dully, "I stank of blood, sweat, the jail cell, and my own shame. Winona came over, of course. She followed me into my room, closed the door. We looked at each other then, and for just a moment, I had this pathetic glimmer of hope. There were tears in her eyes, and she was trembling. I thought, for just a second, she knows just as I do, that we went too far a long time ago. I cared about her. I didn't have much more than sex with her, but there was a basic attraction between us that could have been more. For just a second, I thought we were about to step on the right side of the line. Then she knelt in front of me and asked me to punish her.

  "Jesus," he shook his head, "The rage just took over, and I couldn't control it. I threw her out of the apartment. When I was dragging her, she pushed against me, and her nipples were hard. It turned her on. She couldn't see even then, she couldn't tell the difference between games and real life, or maybe she didn't want to."

  He swallowed, shuddered. "I came here. It was quiet enough, and simple enough, for me to put some pieces back together. The things that let you get up in the morning, go through the motions. Eat, drink, sleep, crap. But here I am, playing games again at the first opportunity. It's like, you don't go to hell, it just keeps chasing you down." At Lauren's stricken look, he closed his eyes, shook his head. "No, that was wrong. I didn't mean that, not about you.

  "I did the same thing you did. I questioned whether the cop was right, if we were just a bunch of sick freaks. If this wasn't a game, but a scream for therapy. But then, here, where it's quiet, and I could think, I saw it was just the same thing as being gay."