“I am going to tell him that. I might tell him that right now.” Jason started to take his phone out of his pocket, but Simone stopped him by putting her arms around him and kissing him.
“Don’t, please,” she said. “He’ll think you’re making fun of him. We don't make fun of male submissives any more than we make fun of other kinky people for their kinks. Like male dominants who get very grumpy and possessive when other men talk about finding their slaves attractive. Which is very sexy,” Simone said. “Not that it should be. But it is.”
“I’m a big fan of your body,” Jason said. “I just gotta be at peace with the fact that I’m not the only fan of it out there. It’s none of my business. I’m going to keep telling myself that. None of my business at all.” He took another deep breath, a cleansing breath.
“Feel better?” Simone asked.
“Not a damn bit.”
She laughed, a bright bubbling laugh, like she had champagne in her soul. “I hate to tell you this, Jason, but there are a whole lot of sexy pics of you online, too. And I guarantee girls all over the country have stared at them and had the same kind of fantasies about you that men have about me.”
“I was in Levi’s ads and truck ads. Girls do not get like that over truck ads.”
“Girls do get like that over sexy cowboys in tight jeans with great smiles who win lots of trophies. There’s even a whole Tumblr devoted to your a…derrière. I found it this morning. It’s called ‘Jason Waters & His Chaps of Glory,’ and if you think I’m making that up, we’re getting on Twitter right now and clicking the hashtag #chapsofglory.”
“You are kidding me,” he said. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The Chaps of Glory? Seriously?
“Yep. At least two hundred gifs of you riding horses and bulls in slow motion. I counted because I have saved every last one of them to my hard drive.”
“That is totally different,” he said. He had his clothes on in those photographs, after all.
“You keep telling yourself that, sir,” she said, shaking her head and smiling. “But I know you are one sexy cowboy, and I’m not the only woman in the country who has noticed.”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “The Chaps of Glory?” he said, taking her sweet ass into his hands. “I’m never going online again.”
“Pages of pictures, Jason. Screenshots. Your Levi’s ads. iPhone pics from girls who followed you around at rodeo events just to get pictures of you from behind.”
“I was wondering what the hell those girls were doing back there,” he said. “Thought I’d split my pants.”
“Now you know. Do you feel better?” she asked.
“I feel mighty flattered. I didn’t know my ass was that good.”
“I’m a fangirl of it,” Simone said. “You want to see the Tumblr?”
“Never in a billion years,” he said.
“Fine. I’ll just go back to watching your YouTube videos like I’ve been doing all day,” she said.
“Oh Lord, how bored were you today?”
“I might have fallen down the Jason ‘Still’ Waters Google hole. I have to admit, it’s sexy watching you ride.”
“You see my wreck?”
“No, is that on there?” she asked.
“Might not be anymore. It gets taken down a lot since it’s not very pretty. I have it, though, somewhere on my computer if you want to see why I quit the business.”
“I admit I’m curious,” she said.
He took Simone into his office and fired up his computer. Took him only a few seconds to find the video.
“You really want to watch this?” Simone asked.
“I’ve seen it a dozen times. It’s pretty wild. I watch it and don’t even feel like it’s me, you know.”
With a few clicks, he pulled up the video. There he was in the chute, on the back of a bull called Demented, a legendary cowboy killer. He watched himself cinch his bull rope. Not once did he look at the camera. He hadn’t even known it was there. In that moment, in that zone, that place of cold zero and absolute concentration, no one existed but him and the bull. Then the gate flew open and they were out in the arena.
“There’s a vest we wear,” Jason said, “practically bulletproof. Protects your chest and back. They invented it after Lane Frost got killed in ’89. But this son of a bitch got his horn under the edge of the vest and just let it rip.”
In the video it happened so fast that only slo-mo revealed the sequence of events. As the slow-motion replay began, Jason watched himself make it eight seconds on the back of Demented before getting thrown off the moment the horn blew. Demented whirled on him, spinning on a dime, which a twenty-five-hundred-pound animal shouldn’t be able to do. The horned head went down and hit Jason in the hip; the horn slipped under the vest and Jason watched as he was flipped ten feet in the air. When he landed, half his side was torn open.
The video ended.
“The good thing,” Jason said, “is that even with the horn under the vest, that vest kept it from being a helluva lot worse than it was. You want to see it again? I can never believe how high he tosses me. I look like a damn rag doll.”
Simone didn’t say anything. Jason turned and saw her standing behind his desk chair with tears running down her face.
“Baby, I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“I’m not scared,” she said. “I’m just…I’m so glad you’re alive.”
He reached for her without saying another word and pulled her into his lap. She wrapped her arms around his neck and clung to him.
“I’m a damn fool. I shouldn’t have shown that to you,” he said. “I just didn’t want you thinking it was all, you know, chaps of glory.”
“You really thought you were crazy because you like kink?” she asked. “Kink is not crazy. Bull riding is fucking crazy.”
Jason laughed softly and didn’t even scold her for swearing. She might have a point there.
“It paid the bills,” he said.
“So does literally every other job that doesn’t involve riding angry bulls with giant horns.”
“I wouldn’t make much of an accountant,” he said.
Simone sighed and shook her head. “At least you retired while you could still walk,” she said. “And fuck.”
“You are really pushing it, Spanky.”
“Sorry, sir,” she said, sounding almost genuinely contrite. “I got a little freaked out there. You could have died.”
“I could have died, yeah.”
“And I never would have met you.”
“Would that have been so bad?” he asked. “We only met twenty-four hours ago.”
“True,” she said. “But it’s been such a good twenty-four hours.”
He didn’t argue with that. He might even say it was about the best twenty-four hours of his life. He’d pursued his bull riding career with focus and determination, and as much as he’d relished the challenges and enjoyed the victories, his injury, bad as it was, had almost come as a relief. Now he had a reason to walk away with his head held high. But there’d been no joy in bull riding for him. Pleasure, yes? No twenty-something guy hated getting all the female attention and adulation he’d received. But real happiness? That was this morning, getting a pony ready for a brave little girl. Happiness was holding Simone in his arms when she lost her footing after jumping out of the saddle. It was right now with her in his arms, wiping her tears on his dirty shirt because she’d been heartbroken to see him getting hurt. And it was last night with her on her knees in front of him, calling him “sir” and making every last one of his most private fantasies come true.
“All right, enough crying now,” he said. “You’re gonna make me feel bad for showing you my video.”
“Don’t feel bad,” she said. “I’m glad I saw it. I want to know you better, and that was a big moment in your past.”
“All in the past,” he said. “Old news. I only showed it to you because I was trying to impress you. Did it work?�
��
“No,” she said, and he swatted her ass. “Only because you already impressed me so much that nothing else you could do would impress me any more.”
“That’s a big statement,” he said.
“I should be the one trying to impress you," she said.
“You got any bull riding videos?” he asked.
“Nope, but I got videos. Want to see one?” She sat back and grinned wickedly at him. He wasn’t sure he trusted that smile.
“I don’t know. Do I?”
“I think you do.”
“All right. Now you got me curious.”
Simone put her foot on the floor and spun his swivel chair around so she could reach his keyboard while remaining on his lap. And that was fine by him. She could leave that sweet ass of hers on his thighs all day and all night.
“This is stuff your friend Luke is not going to see online. It’s on my private Kinklife page. Only a few people have access to it.”
“Kinklife?”
“Yeah, I’d highly suggest clearing your browser history before your sister comes to visit again,” she said.
“Good Lord.”
She tapped rapidly on the keys and in a few seconds she’d pulled up a video of her own.
“You know what Florentine flogging is?” Simone asked him.
“New one on me.”
“That’s when you flog with two floggers at once,” she said. “One in each hand. It comes from a style of fencing where the fencers fight with two swords at once. It’s pretty hard to do, apparently. I’ve never tried it, but this is me on the receiving end. What do you think?”
Simone hit play on the video and Jason leaned in to watch.
“I think…” he breathed, “I think I like your video better than mine is what I think.”
Thirteen
Simone wasn’t trying to show off or anything—not really, well, maybe a little bit—but she desperately wanted to get the image of Jason being tossed around by a giant angry bull out of her head. What better way than watching some playful kink to clear their heads? And maybe Jason would get over his fear of hurting her if he could see the sort of S&M she did on a regular basis. The video she showed him was a few years old, filmed back when she still had her rainbow-striped hair, but she’d kept it up on her profile because it had been such a fun night at her club.
“So that’s Mistress Nora,” she said to Jason when a beautiful black-haired woman in a red corset and back carnival mask turned and smiled provocatively at the camera. “She’s my friend I texted about you earlier.”
“Pretty lady,” he said. “Not my type, though.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Hair’s not pink enough.”
Simone grinned. “And that naked girl is obviously me.”
“Yes, I can see that,” he said. “Does your momma know you do this online?”
“My videos are all private. You have to get my permission to view my page. And even if Mom did see them, what can I say? You go to a website called Kinklife, you’re going to see kink. Not my problem if someone goes looking for trouble and finds it.”
Simone pointed at the scene again. “That’s one of the dungeons at the club I work at sometimes.”
Jason leaned in to get a closer look at the screen. Simone was pleased by the look of rapt attention on his face.
“What’s that?” he asked pointing at the screen.
“That’s a St. Andrew’s Cross,” she said. “You tie people to it and flog them or cane them or whatever.”
“You get those with Amazon Prime?” he asked.
“Never looked. I wouldn’t be surprised if you could, though.”
“Who’s doing the filming?” Jason asked.
“Mr. King. My boss,” she said. “Or he was before he retired and moved to New Orleans.”
Simone studied Jason as he watched Mistress Nora cuff Simone’s wrists high up on the cross. Then she picked up her floggers—one red and one black—and began a light flogging up and down Simone’s entire backside from her calves to her shoulders.
“Nice,” Jason said and she could tell he meant it. He’d lifted up the back of her shirt and his hands drifted sensually over her lower back and sides. “You in the habit of making movies?” he asked.
“Not really,” she said. “But we did sometimes on request. This was for a very important client of Mistress Nora’s. He loves FemDom/femsub.”
“And that is?”
“Female dominant, female submissive.”
“I can see the appeal,” he said. “You and your friend Nora seem pretty cozy.”
Jason said that as Nora, in the video, ran her hand over Simone’s body—her back, her front, her breasts, and even between her legs.
“She and I were…um…close,” Simone said. “We played together a lot.”
“You like women?” Jason asked.
“I’m very attracted to dominance,” Simone admitted. “Dominant men and dominant women. I don’t have crushes on women as a rule but when she’s a dominant and a sadist like Mistress Nora, I get a little gooey. That bother you?”
“Bother me? That you been with a woman? Hot and bother maybe.”
Simone laughed. “When a beautiful woman tells you she wants to tie you to her bed and force you to have orgasms until you faint, what are you going to do? Say no?”
“I’d be hard-pressed to decline that offer myself,” Jason said.
“The good Mistress has very talented hands,” Simone said.
“She’s pretty tough with those floggers, too,” Jason said.
“Nora doesn’t pull her punches, that’s for sure,” Simone said. “Not that I’d want her to. I know it’s hard for people to understand why submissive masochists like what they like, but there’s just something incredibly sexy to me about submitting to someone dominant and powerful. Mistress Nora could have ordered me to clean her dungeon or polish her boots and I would have loved it. But the beatings are even more fun and special. It’s very intimate to let someone hurt you. And then there are the marks on you afterwards. They’re like prizes.”
“Prizes?”
“You ever make out with somebody super sexy and end up with swollen lips and a hickey on your neck the next day?”
“Once or twice,” Jason said.
“Did you like it?” she asked. “Having a little love bite on your body to remind you of how much fun you had when you got it?”
“Been there,” Jason said.
“The marks on a submissive from a beating are the same thing,” she said. “Only times a hundred. Or a thousand.”
Simone was glad to see Jason nod, and she hoped he was starting to truly understand her love of pain and dominance. She didn’t want him hating himself every time he left a mark on her while they were playing. She wanted him to find the welts and bruises he left on her as sexy as she did.
Back in the video clip, Mistress Nora was in full-flogging mode, striking Simone over and over again from her ankles to her shoulders.
“You can see she skips over my kidney area,” Simone said. “You don’t want to play hard around there.”
“Makes sense,” Jason said, still staring at the screen. “How much does that hurt?”
“The pain from a flogging really depends on a lot of things,” Simone said. “Certain types of floggers will hurt worse than others. If the falls are narrow—”
“The what?”
“The tails,” she said. “Those dangling leather things on a flogger. They’re either tails or falls. If the falls are narrow, they’ll sting. If they’re wide, they’ll thud. And the sensation also depends on how the flogger is being used. In Florentine flogging, it feels like you’re being slapped over and over. When the flogger is thrown…” Simone held up her hands and demonstrated how to hold the tips of the tails and snap them, “that can really sting. It can even break the skin if the thrower has a good arm and good aim. So for you, maybe you should think about learning to Florentine? Since you don’t like breaking
the skin. Or a deerskin flogger. You can put a lot of power into it and you probably won’t break the skin.”
“I like the sound of that,” Jason said. “What’s she using?”
“Not sure what the material is. But those are narrow falls, probably oiled leather, so they sting like fire ants. Mister S, her master, he uses buffalo floggers a lot. You have to be insanely strong to use buffalo. It’s big, it’s heavy and it packs a wallop.”
“How big a wallop?”
Simone paused the video and pulled up a photograph on her profile. A picture of her, naked, kneeling on the floor in front of the fireplace at Mr. King’s Manhattan townhouse.
“You see those black and blue bruises up and down my back?” Simone asked. “That was the day after a scene with Mister S and his buffalo flogger.”
“Hmm…” was all Jason said.
“It’s fun,” she said. “And I heal fast.”
“That’s a lot of bruises,” he said. “You really liked that?”
“With him? Yes,” she said. “When you really respect your master, the bruises he gives you during a scene feel like badges of honor. That’s why I like taking pictures of my bruises and saving them. But only the really good ones.”
She flipped back to the video where Nora was flogging her with a new flogger, brown leather and thuddy.
“That’s her elk flogger. It’s good for a cool-down flogging. Little bit softer.”
“What’s that?” He pointed at her feet in the video.
“That’s called a spreader bar,” Simone said. “It’s an adjustable metal bar, and you attach it to cuffs with hooks. That way I can’t close my legs.”
“Can’t close your legs?”
“Not even if I tried,” she said.
“I need to start a shopping list,” Jason said. “We’re gonna need half a dozen of those, a St. Andrew’s cross, ten or twelve sets of floggers. Where’s my credit card?”
Picture Perfect Cowboy: An Original Sinners Novel Page 11