by Ann Jacobs
If Matt hadn’t had to attend minicamp, Keisha would have taken him along. Negotiating on behalf of the players she represented was getting tougher every year, and the general manager of the Chicago team had always been a bastard to deal with. Since four of her clients played there, the negotiations had resulted in four times the usual headaches. “Be sure to tell Dad hello for me. And come on home as soon as you can.”
“I will. Gotta go now, though. We’re winding up the minicamp with a team meeting. Coach Zanardi doesn’t much like guys comin’ in late. I love my Mistress.” He sounded okay, properly submissive as usual.
Keisha smiled into the phone. “I love you, too, slave. I’ve missed you, and I’ll see you when you get home.” After she hung up she wondered if she might not be all that okay. If she could be sick, not just awfully tired. She’d felt lousy since leaving the hotel in Chicago that morning. It wasn’t anything she could put her finger on—fatigue, she guessed, but she couldn’t recall ever having had so much trouble breathing. She shivered and that scared her. She’d never felt as cold as she felt now, at least she hadn’t when it was close to eighty degrees outside.
Maybe if I go on the porch for a few minutes and get some fresh air?
It couldn’t hurt. She saved the file she’d just opened and tried to get up from her desk. Couldn’t. Damn it, she had to get outside before she choked to death. She pushed herself up against the front of the desk with her hands, tried to get her balance. As she hit the floor she tried to reach for the phone but it was out of reach.
Matt, you get yourself home right now. I need you, she thought as everything went black.
* * * * *
Matt Rubin whistled a happy tune as he headed to their place west of Silk Hope as soon as Coach dismissed the players from the first minicamp of the season. He’d missed Keisha—a lot. It was crazy, but he felt naked because he’d had her collar off for ten whole days—five for the camp and five before that because she’d removed it before leaving on her business trip.
If anybody had told him nine years ago that he’d not only switch positions and become a star for the Savannah Rebels rather than a reserve player always worrying about being cut, but that he’d also become the 24/7 sex slave of the woman he loved more than life, he wouldn’t have believed them.
I wouldn’t have believed I’d be so comfortable in my own skin, either. A lot had happened to the twenty-two-year-old who’d taken out his aggressions on the football field but shied away from sexual relationships for fear he’d end up like his abusive father. He’d played football in the fall and winter, gone to law school the rest of the time until he got his Juris Doctor four years later.
What had changed him most, though, was Keisha. Bold, brash and unashamedly dominant, she’d made it clear from the first time he dared to ask her out that she’d be in charge. Even though he was a big, tough athlete—his teammates had nicknamed Killer—he’d realized she was big and strong enough that he’d never feared hurting her. What’s more she relished doling out the sexual punishment he’d always believed he deserved.
He could hardly wait to get home, feel the weight of her collar and bury his face in the hot, musky softness of her cunt. That thought made his dick try to get hard for the first time since she’d locked it up before he’d left for minicamp.
At first he’d tried to hide the symbols of his sexual submissiveness whenever he could, but every year since she’d collared him he’d grown less uncomfortable revealing it to new, vanilla teammates. This year he simply stripped off his jockstrap at his locker the first day of minicamp and strode naked to the showers, making no effort to hide his dick that Keisha always locked down when they were going to be apart for more than a few hours.
He’d just enjoyed his best minicamp since his rookie year. That made him feel damn good. The thirty-five pounds he’d lost since the end of last season improved his raw speed and agility without hurting his ability to pull opponents down. Matt liked the prospect of being the Rebels’ starting inside linebacker, the position he’d taken on last season after the team had lost its starter to a career-ending injury. He even had a chance now to be a defensive team captain, something that never would have happened if he’d stayed at the tackle position.
Matt patted his midsection. Keisha would be able to feel the outline of his ribs now beneath a layer of hard muscle. He’d gotten rid of the roll around his middle. By the end of offseason training he’d be down to two hundred fifty pounds—downright svelte compared with the three hundred plus that he’d been carrying around since college, weight a tackle needed but a linebacker didn’t. He laughed out loud.
His Mistress had tried to diet and exercise with him, but for every pound he lost, she’d seemed to gain one, probably because she didn’t run and lift weights every day the way he did. Pretty soon she’d outweigh him if she didn’t, already. Matt didn’t care. He adored Keisha, loved every voluptuous inch of her. He wouldn’t change a hair on her beautiful head.
In a great mood, he turned off the winding asphalt road west of Savannah onto their gravel driveway, slowing down so he could appreciate the beauty of century-old oak trees dripping Spanish moss. Palmettos sprouted up out of blue-green grass on either side of the white-rock drive that rambled through the very private place he and Keisha called home. He pulled his truck up outside the garage next to her white Escalade.
Home. Twenty acres of privacy with a six-thousand-square-foot, white-brick house that could have come straight out of Gone with the Wind, complete with a porch held up by ornate, Grecian columns. Keisha’s dream house, its basement was complete with a well-equipped dungeon for nights when they wanted to play but didn’t want to drive to the BDSM club at Rebels’ Roost. Matt looked over at the paddock encircled with a white, rail fence. He couldn’t help thinking of how they used to use it when they’d first bought the property nearly three years ago.
He’d whined and begged whenever she rigged him up in his pony gear, hitched him to a cart and whipped him while he pulled her around in the grass until he’d be so exhausted he could barely move. But his rewards had been worth the effort and the pain, because whenever he’d done a good job, she’d unhitched him, braced herself against the paddock fence and let him fuck her from behind. Her stallion, she used to call him. Coming that way, in a dominant position he was rarely allowed, had felt good. Better than good, it had been fucking awesome.
Matt missed that. He’d found it incredibly arousing as well as humiliating as hell, knowing some visitor might drive up anytime and see him on all fours, wearing pony shoes and headgear and hitched to a cart. As he walked up the stairs to the house he thought about how long it had been since Keisha had wanted to play that way. Sure, she still liked to see him trot around the dungeon on all fours, a pony or dog tail swinging from the plug in his ass. She enjoyed having him lap her cunt while one of the club subs tortured his locked-down genitals, or fucking his ass with a strap-on in plain view of everybody at Rebels’ Roost.
Over the past couple years, he’d noticed her cutting back a little at a time on BDSM play that involved much strenuous effort on her part, even at the dungeon. He couldn’t recall the last time she’d striped his back with the cat-o’-nine or locked him onto a St. Andrew’s Cross or spider web so she could adjust his position to enhance her pleasure. The last time she’d put on a strap-on and personally given him a hard ass-fucking had been in January, right after last season had ended.
Matt frowned when he noticed their horses, Barney and Bill, munching grass at the far end of the paddock. Over the past few months Keisha had even quit taking morning rides with him, and she’d said something before he left for minicamp about selling Barney, the big chestnut gelding that was her favorite.
Is Keisha sick? If she is, I doubt she’d tell me. She’s the most disgustingly self-reliant human being I’ve ever known. I wonder, though.
He shoved that worrisome question to the back of his mind. Right now he wanted to get inside to his Mistress. She’d ordered him
to get home as quickly as he could, and he always obeyed her.
Wanting to greet her properly, he toed off his shoes and went down on his hands and knees as soon as he stepped through the carved-oak double doors, into the foyer. Crawling as fast as he could, he moved toward Keisha’s office, a former parlor where she did her legal work when she wasn’t flying off somewhere to take care of her clients. Sounds of the Eroica symphony, the somber second movement if his ears weren’t playing tricks on him, flowed from the stereo system as he crawled along in time with the adagio assai.
Keisha loved classical music. She’d even majored in piano as an undergraduate before deciding her real calling was the law. He’d learned to appreciate the classics from her. Before they’d gotten together, his idea of music had been hard rock and an occasional jazz piece. Reaching the office door that she’d left slightly ajar, he pushed it open and crawled inside, anticipating that she’d want him to strip naked for her pleasure the way she’d mentioned when she called him earlier.
But she wasn’t at her desk as she’d said she’d be, putting the final touches on a couple of clients’ new contracts. He stood and hurriedly scanned the room. No Keisha. He stepped past her desk to look out the window, thinking she might have stepped out on the porch as she often did on warm spring days like today.
Then he saw her. Deathly still, she was lying facedown between the desk and credenza. Matt went back to his knees beside her, panicked when he didn’t see her chest moving up and down. No! He brushed her long hair away, searched for the artery in her neck. Only when he felt a faint pulse did he let out his breath. Her smooth skin, usually warm, felt clammy. “Mistress? Keisha?”
When she didn’t respond, he reached in his pocket for his phone and dialed 9-1-1. Terrified for the woman he practically worshiped, Matt’s breath caught in his throat, so much that he was barely able to answer the dispatcher’s questions. As he waited for help, his gaze locked on his Mistress—his wife under the law for a little over three years. That vow had just been a formality necessitated before they’d bought their house, and was not more important than the first promises they’d made to each other in their earlier commitment.
He prayed. Nothing formal, just simple words that he spoke directly to God, pleas to make Keisha well. Prayers punctuated by memories of what she’d told him about the music that was building to a crescendo in his head. Tragedy without redemption, was what he recalled her saying this movement represented. He raised his hands, covered his ears. He didn’t want to believe the music she’d chosen was prophetic—an omen. That thought turned him icy-cold from the inside out, made him want to scream above the dark adagio he never wanted to hear again.
* * * * *
He hadn’t left Keisha’s side, not on the helicopter ride to the hospital and not in the emergency room, even though a doctor and several nurses had tried to make him leave. Not until they’d moved her to the CCU had he stepped away, and only for long enough that her dad could see her after he arrived.
The fact she hadn’t regained consciousness terrified Matt, who found himself burning off nervous energy by pacing the long, narrow corridor outside the CCU. The tiny waiting room made him feel as though the walls were closing in on him.
He hated hospitals. He’d hated them since he was twelve years old and watched helplessly while his mother lay battered and dying in a dingy room at a soot-stained Brooklyn hospital. Fuck, he’d never forget the sucking, whirring sounds of the machines or those sickening smells of antiseptics and disinfectants. Cries of grieving family members around the trauma unit still rang in his ears, and the picture of his mom’s bruised, torn features stayed with him now, twenty years after she’d passed away.
This place, a new, white-brick hospital set in the middle of lush grounds, at least looked clean. Green grass, bright flowers and stately oak trees provided a more cheerful view from the windows than the tired industrial buildings and run-down businesses he remembered staring at from the small, sooty window in his mother’s room. With its determined neutrality, stark white walls and gray and black furniture, this small, Southern hospital reminded Matt of an oversized mortuary. Come to think of it, he hated funeral homes, too. He associated both places with pain and death and loneliness.
“Mr. Rubin?”
He whirled around and saw the slim, gray-haired female doctor who’d been snapping out orders to the nurses taking care of Keisha in the CCU. His breath caught in his throat when he tried to talk. “Yes?” he finally managed.
“Your wife has regained consciousness.” She held up her hand when he started to charge back into the unit. “Don’t panic. She’s resting well for the moment, but we need to talk. Shall we go to my office?”
* * * * *
Candace Stein, MD, the placard on her door said, told Matt to sit down and then leaned over her desk, her hands steepled in front of her as she focused intense brown eyes on his face.
“I assume you’re aware your wife is killing herself,” she said bluntly.
Matt blinked, unnerved at the doctor’s words. “I certainly wasn’t until you told me. She seemed fine when I spoke with her on the phone. That was less than two hours before I got home and found her passed out on the floor.”
“Has Mrs. Rubin always been so heavy?”
Dr. Stein, whom he noticed was skinny almost to the point of anorexia, asked that question as if it were an indictment, and Matt didn’t like her attitude one bit. “Keisha has been voluptuous ever since I’ve known her, and that’s been more than six years. I guess she probably has put on a few more pounds in the past year.”
“Well, she needs to take off considerably more than a few of those pounds if she wants to stay alive for long. This episode can be just a warning, or it can be the first of many, one of which will certainly kill her.” The doctor went on to explain that the decreased blood oxygen that had caused Keisha to pass out was just one condition that frequently accompanied what she called morbid obesity. “She’s diabetic, something that apparently wasn’t diagnosed until now. Her blood pressure is out of control. And I imagine you may have noticed her suddenly gasping for breath at night when she’s been sleeping.”
“Some.” Though Matt was a pretty sound sleeper and Keisha usually made him sleep on a yoga mat beside her bed, he’d been wakened several times lately by her labored breathing. “When I asked her about it, she shrugged it off, saying she’s allergic to the spring pollen. Come to think of it, though, you’re right. What she’s been doing lately sounds more like gasping than the wheezing she’s always had in spring and fall.”
The doctor nodded. “You said she’d gained more weight recently. Has she been depressed?”
Depressed? Keisha was the least depressed woman he’d ever known. “Not at all. I’ve noticed that she’s cut back lately on a lot of the activities she used to enjoy, though. We’ve been dieting together during this offseason, but I’m afraid she may have gained as much weight as I’ve lost.”
Dr. Stein gave him a strange look, as if she thought he was blind. “I’ve ordered some tests. Unless the results tell me something I don’t expect, I’m going to recommend bariatric surgery, since from what you say, I doubt diet modification will help your wife. With her out-of-control hypertension and uncontrolled diabetes, she isn’t a candidate for appetite-suppression medications, and she’s in no condition to undertake a regimen of strenuous physical activity. If I’m not mistaken, tests will show she’s also suffering from sleep apnea.”
“You’re serious. You think Keisha’s going to die, don’t you?” Matt’s chest felt tight, as though someone had tightened a noose around his heart.
“I don’t think it, I know she will unless she changes her lifestyle, although I can’t give you an accurate estimate of when she’ll have a fatal episode. What happened today was a stern warning that she can’t go on as she has been. You realize she’s more than a hundred pounds over her optimum weight, don’t you?” The doctor sat back in her chair and gave him the once-over. “You’re a b
ig man, yourself, but you look as though you’re in pretty good condition.”
“I play football for a living. I have to keep my body conditioned. I also have to carry what would probably be too much weight for the average guy. What does that have to do with Keisha?”
“You live with her. You eat what, five or six thousand calories a day, which you burn off in the weight room? Am I right?”
Matt didn’t like Dr. Stein’s accusatory tone. “During the season, yes, but I’ve cut back this offseason, and I’ve lost over thirty-five pounds. Keisha’s been dieting with me.”
“And she’s also cut down on her physical activities and gained some weight. Right?”
“Yes.” Matt hadn’t thought to relate the two facts, but the doctor made sense. “What do you propose I do about it?”
“I spoke with your wife briefly about her condition, but she wasn’t receptive to my suggestions. I propose that you talk Mrs. Rubin into having a gastric bypass or laparoscopic banding as soon as it’s physically feasible. I’m going to call in Dr. Carl Sheldon—he’s one of the best bariatric surgeons in Savannah—to take a look at her and make his recommendation.”
When Matt walked out of Dr. Stein’s office, his head was reeling. He was Keisha’s slave, not her Master or even her husband in the sense the doctor probably assumed. He couldn’t imagine she’d take well to him suddenly telling her he wanted her to make any changes in her lifestyle, much less a change so extreme as to require surgery.
* * * * *
Matt ran into Charlie Harris, the Rebels’ defensive coordinator and Keisha’s dad, as he was coming out of the CCU.
“What’s the matter? What did Keisha’s doctor say?” Charlie grabbed Matt by the shoulder and propelled him into the tiny waiting room that mercifully was empty for the moment.
“I have to go talk to Keisha,” Matt said, resisting his father-in-law’s effort to shove him into one of the gray plastic chairs that lined the walls of the little room—one that sat next to a corner that held a small, black-lacquered table. A stack of out-of-date magazines sat beside a chrome-and-steel gooseneck lamp, as though anybody waiting for word about a critically ill loved one might want to read about fashion, football or home decorating.