by EdenBradley
When it’s over she’s panting hard, shaking all over, small spasms still wracking her body. And her very helplessness does something to me. I pull her upright, into my arms, into my lap, and hold her tight.
This girl…she touches me. And even though the catalyst is sex and kink, it doesn’t matter. It’s only a catalyst. The important thing here is that she’s gotten to me, gotten inside me. Inside my heart and my fucking soulless soul. But she’s too damn beautiful at this moment for me to be afraid of anything. I am filled with wanting—wanting to some raging degree. It feels like madness. It feels like everything I never knew I wanted. It makes me feel in some way like a different person.
Her head is on my shoulder as she catches her breath, her arms limp at her sides, which is the correct manner for servitude. I take her arms and loop then around my neck, both because I know it will comfort her, and because I need to feel her holding on to me.
Finally, I feel her relax in my arms, and I lay her down in the hay. That’s when I realize there’s blood on my hands—her blood.
“Hey. Stay right here for me. Okay? I’m going to get the first aid kit and clean you up.”
She nods, curling into a ball as I let her go and get to my feet. My head is still spinning, but I find the handlers’ room, which would have been the tack room in the horse stable, and open a cabinet, pulling out the first aid kit, blankets, and a few bottles of water. After cleaning myself thoroughly, I take it all back to our stall.
When I return she blinks up at me, her green eyes glazed and sleepy and full of slavespace, a small smile on her pretty pink mouth.
“Drink this.” I hand her a bottle of water and watch as she drinks it all down. “Good girl. Do you need the bucket?”
She’s too dazed to answer, so I take her by the hand and lead her to the metal bucket in one corner, steady her as she squats over it and pees.
There’s a certain eroticism in having your lover or your slave urinate in front of you, even if it’s not necessarily done for erotic play. It’s the vulnerability of it. She doesn’t even flinch—she simply does it, as though it’s the most natural thing in the world. And it feels natural. But even so, it’s fucking hot, making my blood boil. Any other time, it would make my dick hard, but currently it’s too spent to do more than twitch lazily.
She’s quiet as I clean the blood from her ass first, then using a handful of wipes, I clean her stomach, her thighs, the plump, pink flesh of her pussy. Then I use the wipes, followed by the antibiotic ointment, to treat the bite wounds, which are on her breasts, her shoulders, her ass, the back of her neck. My heart is hammering the entire time—with excitement, a deep pleasure, and stark emotion I don’t know what the hell to do with, other than to lie down next to her when I’m done and pull her into my arms, spooning her once more. Her lithe little body is warm, then gets warmer as I pull a blanket over us.
“How are you?” I ask her.
“Sooo good,” she says, drawing out the syllables, still totally gone from sex and pain and the D/s dynamic. “Wonderful. That was…wonderful.” She ends on a sigh.
“You’re in dreamland, prettiness.”
“Mmm…yes. I never want to wake up,” she murmurs. “I always want to be here with you, in this stable, with you commanding my body. This is perfect.”
I chuckle to hide the tightness in my chest. “You may change your mind about that once you’ve recovered, once you’re thinking clearly again.”
“No. This is the clearest I’ve ever been in my life.”
I don’t know what to say to that, so I say nothing. Instead, I bury my face in the back of her hair and inhale, rub my face in the satiny strands. Kiss the back of her neck over and over.
“Christopher?” she says finally. “May I… Is it okay if I turn over to face you?”
Rather than answer I turn her with my own hands, keeping my grip rough so she’ll get that I’m still in command, that the dynamic never stops with the sex. That it never will.
When she’s facing me, she snuggles right in, and I don’t know if it’s because she’s lost that sense of the power dynamic, if my being nice to her has diluted my dominance, or if it’s only because she feels that at ease with me, regardless. But it doesn’t matter too much at the moment. It feels too damn good. It calms even the rage of the beast that lives within me, which is no easy fucking task, and I sort of melt into her soft, sweet skin, the tender flesh of her body, finding comfort myself, which is entirely new to me. But what the fuck? Why can’t I be comforted? Does it have to mean I’ve been rendered weak? And fuck it. I don’t give a shit if I have been. I’ll be weak for a few minutes with her. I’ll be weak for the first time. And for the first time, it doesn’t fucking matter.
That’s what I’m telling myself, anyway.
Chapter Six
We sleep. When I wake up, the hazy amber light streaming in through the top half of the stall door, which has been left open, tells me the sun is setting. It occurs to me that there are probably other slaves in the stalls close to ours, that they heard us fucking, heard Aimée coming, sobbing, screaming. I know what it is to be in such a position, how it makes your body thrum with jealousy, with the need to come that can be so intense it feels like your skin is burning, as if you need to tear it from your body simply to get some relief. Or maybe that’s just me. I’ve done those things to myself. There were times when I needed it.
Aimée stretches, yawns, and I hand her the water bottle. She drinks obediently. She does everything obediently. Almost. There’s just enough fire in her to let me know she is no mindless sheep of a slave, which is something one often finds in this crazy, kinky world of ours. Some slaves have been in it too long, have lost themselves so completely there’s nothing left of them. Some Masters love this, but I hate it. The sheep are boring to me, devoid of interest, devoid of the spark that makes them a challenge. Yes, I love to see them hand themselves over, and I understand we have a need to lose ourselves. But you still have to be a person under all that—an individual—or what’s the fucking point? If you have nothing left of yourself, you have nothing left to give, or so it seems to me. But what do I know? I’m the one who doesn’t fit in, as Dominant or slave.
I run my hand down her sleek side, and she surges into my touch. Nice. I’m hard again, instantly, but that’s a condition of my life, and I can handle it, my nearly-eternal erection.
“How are you doing?” I ask her between the throbbing pulse-beats of my hardening cock.
“I’m good. A little sore, but fine. How are you doing?”
“What?”
“You sound surprised that I would ask.”
“I am.”
“My Master Graham threw his back out fucking me,” she says, a hint of amusement in her voice.
“Your Master Graham wasn’t me.”
There’s a long pause, then, “No. He certainly wasn’t.”
I look down at her and she’s biting her lip, those pretty white teeth coming down on the plush pink of her mouth, making me want to bite her, too.
“Christopher? I don’t want you to be him. I don’t even want you to be the Master—Master Damon. I want you to be whoever you want when you’re with me. Master or slave, or this heady combination of both that makes me… I don’t know, exactly. But it makes me drunk with the possibilities. Sub-drunk. Is that even a word?”
“It can be. It can be your word. Our word.”
She smiles. “Will you tell me something?”
“Tell you what, pretty?”
“Anything. Something about yourself. About what you went through before becoming a slave, when you were young.”
“Why do you want to hear about that?”
“Because that’s when you reveal yourself to me. Is that…is that okay to ask of you?”
I roll onto my back, pulling her with me, and press her cheek down on my chest. She curls in like the kitten she is. And suddenly I have an image of her lying on her back, fluffy white ears on her head, purring at me as I dan
gle a toy above her.
Fucking hot.
But what was she asking? Oh yeah. My sad past.
“What do you want to know?”
“Um… What about your addiction? I mean, if you’re okay telling me.”
“I’ll tell you anything—I don’t care. Fuck. That’s bullshit. I do care. I don’t tell just anyone this stuff. I’ve kept it to myself most of my life. I don’t particularly enjoy feeling like I’m burdening anyone with my crap.”
“It’s no burden. It’s important, don’t you think? To who you were, who you’ve become?”
“I don’t know that getting hooked on smack was as important to who I am now as getting off the stuff.”
“Of course,” she agrees. “Because that’s your strength.”
“It didn’t fucking feel like it at the time. Or…maybe it did.”
It comes back to me, then. The fear and the thrill. The dark and the flesh. The absolute goddamn powerlessness, and me taking my fucking power back, in grand form. I exhale, long and slow.
“You know what got me to stop using heroine? One night when I was sixteen—I’d been using about a year—I was hustling at Balboa Park. This trick comes up to me, we negotiate my price to blow him, then I have him follow me to my favorite bush, and three other guys show up and fucking gang rape me. But you know what? The problem wasn’t being gang-banged against my will. The problem was that I liked it. And I knew I had to get my shit under control to figure that out, that I had to get off the drugs—out from behind the mask—to feel that again. That’s what really living is, you know? The shit with the fucking sparkle. You can’t have one without the other—not anyone I ever knew. Those people who think life is one or the other? They’re the ones who are missing out. Not us poor kinky fuckers. We have it all.”
She curls hard into my side, her hands grasping at my chest, then hanging onto my shoulder, and I feel her hot tears on my skin.
“Don’t, Aimée. Don’t you fucking feel sorry for me,” I growl, unable to keep the fury from creeping into my voice.
“I’m not. I don’t. It’s not pity. But it’s still terrible, a terrible, hard way to grow up. And perhaps selfishly, it makes me think of my own childhood. We were both lost children, weren’t we? Even if it was in very different ways. When you’re a kid, it all amounts to the same thing—not having anyone to protect or care for you, not having that safety net. I suppose that’s part of my need to be a slave, too—having someone care for me. Or, taking care of me, even if all they want is for me to serve their needs. But I’ve been lucky, for the most part. It sounds like we both have, as far as our kink lives are concerned. Well, maybe me more than you. But don’t you find you get that out of it, at least at this point? No? Please don’t scowl at me—I didn’t mean to make any assumptions. I’m sorry.” She stops, sniffling, then another tear drops onto my skin, hot and melting its way into my chest. Into my heart, whether I like to admit it or not. “But Christopher,” she goes on, her voice so soft I can barely hear it, “I can still feel sad for what you’ve had to go through, can’t I?”
“I don’t know. No one else ever has.”
She lets out a breathy sigh, her fingers smoothing tentatively over my skin. “No wonder you’re so angry,” she says, still quiet.
But I’m fucking pissed. Pissed at my past. Pissed that I feel like a goddamn victim having to talk about it, or maybe because someone is actually sympathetic to my fucking pathetic lot in life. I don’t like to feel pathetic. Anything but that.
“Yeah. Fuck it. Whatever. It doesn’t matter.”
She sits up suddenly, looking down at me, her green eyes gleaming softly in the twilight bathing our little stall. “Don’t,” she pleads. “It matters. It does. It matters to me.”
“Why?” I still don’t have the rage under control. It’s not her. It’s simply there, an ancient part of me, like the rings on a tree, except those rings may as well be steel cables wrapped around my body, holding the deeply fermented ire in place.
She’s watching me again, her brows furrowed, her lovely face all soft, elegant lines. “I don’t really understand it—why you make me feel the strange things I do. Things that are so new to me, so different, I don’t even know how to process it. All I know is, this feels important, meeting you, being with you. I have to ask myself, is this what I’ve been missing with my Masters, with my Mistress? With the men I’ve tried to have relationships with outside of kink? There’s always been this awful, glaring hole, and I’m constantly trying to fill it. I feel as if I’ve come close a few times—close, but never quite enough. Never quite right. And then you come along and…you feel right. Forgive me, but I can’t not tell you. You rip me too wide open, and I can’t allow that to happen and still have anything left to fight it with. No, that’s not right. I couldn’t fight it to begin with. Not with you. I have no desire to do anything but give myself to you, no matter what it does to me. It scares me to tell you, but I have to. I have to.”
I don’t know what to say, my tongue frozen in my mouth. Emotion builds, knotting my chest, my gut, threating to burst in some spectacular explosion. And when it does, that shattering sensation tearing into my skin, all I can do is fist my hand in her soft hair, push her down into the hay and kiss her and kiss her, as if my life depended on it. Maybe it does.
Her body is so damn soft, her mouth even softer, and the way this woman yields to me is powerful. Intense. She makes me want to own her—something I’ve never done before, never wanted. Sure as fuck never needed, the way I do right now, with her.
I pull back. It almost hurts to do it. “Aimée, I need to take you out of here,” I tell her in a rush, and maybe I’m not even certain of what I’m saying.
“Take me out of here?”
“Yeah.” I nod, the plan formulating as I talk to her. “I can get to some clothes, and I have cash stashed here. We’re going away together. I don’t know where we’re going, not yet, but I’ll figure it out by the time I have you dressed.”
She’s staring up at me, her eyes wide.
Laying my palm on her cheek, which is burning with a hot, lovely blush, I tell her, “I need your consent. You know that’s the only way I can do this. Fuck, I shouldn’t be doing this at all, violating your contract, as well as mine. I do it all the time, but I know this isn’t something you’d do without my bad influence. Still…” I have to pause, chewing the inside of my lip, trying to ground myself. It’s not working. All I know is a sharp-edged desperation that’s going to make my guts spill all over the damn floor if I can’t do this. “I need you to come with me. I can’t stay here anymore, and I’m not leaving without you. But if you can’t do it, I get it. I do. Just fucking tell me…”
She raises her hand and strokes my face, her gaze locked on mine, her pale little brows drawn. So serious, and so damn pretty, I can’t stand it.
“Christopher. Please promise me you won’t leave without me. Please. I’ll go anywhere with you. I have to.”
I nod, turn to kiss her sweet palm. “Wait here. I’ll be back within an hour.”
She nods, smiles. Her eyes are shining, brilliant.
Getting to my feet, I flex my fingers, then ball them up into fists. And there I am, naked and unchained, when I hear the stall door swing wide behind me, and the high-pitched chuckle of fucking Jonathon as the handlers grab me and throw me to the floor.
“God fucking shitting damn it!”
There are four of them on me—big, beefy guys—and they overpower me too easily, pissing me off. I kick one of them, manage to bite a hand, but there are too many of them. In seconds they have me bound in rope and gagged with the damn stuff—the spiky jute I usually love and hate simultaneously, but which I only hate right now. Not as much as I hate Jonathon.
My vision is blurred with red—the unadulterated color of raw anger—and through it I see my beautiful Aimée, hands over her eyes, tears streaming down her cheeks. And fuck, I will hate myself if she’s punished on my account. I will hate them. I will bu
rn the goddamn place to the fucking ground!
But they hustle me out so damn fast, I hardly have time to think, to tell Aimée I will get out of this and come back for her. I’m still struggling as they drag me down the center aisle of the slave barn, but my arms are laced tightly behind my back, my ankles shackled with rope, and I can’t even fucking walk by myself. I don’t mind the humiliation so much—at almost any other time, I’d love it—but I don’t know where they’ll put me, or how long it’ll take me to escape. And fucking shit—what will they do to her? What if they send her away somewhere? Someplace where I can’t find her?
But I will. I’ll do whatever I have to in order to track her down. I have my connections in the kink world, and in the underbelly of the kink world—and yes, even our world, which is an underbelly of sorts in itself, has its own anarchists. I know them, of course. I’m one of them, aren’t I? And I can find out anything I need to.
All of this is spinning through my head at a thousand miles an hour, and I barely noticed that the goons have hoisted me onto their shoulders. But suddenly, we’re out in the cool evening air. Even now I notice the scents of rolling fog on green leaves, see the color of the sky overhead: a deep, deep blue, starless as the sun makes its final, glimmering descent over the horizon.
They’re carrying me on my back, so I can’t see where they’re taking me. But even before I’m tossed face-down onto the boards in the back of a wagon, I hear the jangle of harnessing, then the crack of a whip as the driver starts the human ponies moving down the road. Eventually, we stop, and the goons are back, grabbing me by the shoulders and pulling me out of the cart, only two of them this time, but I need to get my bearings if I’m going to make a break for it.
Am I? They’d come right after me, set off the alarm, and the property would be crawling with handlers and obedient slaves, like a pack of hounds scenting a fox. Fuck. When they tilt me upright and set me on my feet, I can finally see where I am. My blood runs cold.