“So if I asked for your love, you’d give it to me?”
“I can’t love you. You know that. But I don’t have to be mean.”
“You should have been.”
“Why did you ask? Isn’t that the more important question?”
He snorted. Then he turned serious.
“I really wondered what you’d do.”
“Now you know.”
“It was a moment out of time,” he said.
“Do you really love me?” she asked.
“Don’t do this,” he said.
“Do you?”
“You said I can’t. I don’t know what the word means.”
“I wasn’t entirely accurate. Maybe looking for love is a kind of love.”
“I thought you were supposed to be arguing me out of this.”
“I’m a woman. I’m inconsistent.”
“You’re neither.”
“Are you falling in love with me?”
He looked at her. “If I love you, then by your definition, I’d do what’s best for you. Which I have no intention of doing. I can never win if I play your way. My way, I can win.”
“How do you really win, your way?”
“You’ll end up loving me. Sort of. Needing me, anyway.”
“You know that’s not love.”
“We both know it’s the only way I can have you. Not with you in your right mind.”
“I just want it on record that you won’t really be having me. And it won’t really be love. And that’s something that you could have. Maybe not from me, but from somebody. If you let yourself change.”
“You know that’s not true.”
“No, I don’t know that.”
“I know it.”
“I’m just saying.” She kept pushing it. “What happened before. That was because you do want to be loved. Just like everybody else. And if you could believe it was possible, then it might happen.”
“You said you were going to argue against, but you’re not,” he said almost sullenly.
“I go where the facts take me.”
“Where they suit you.”
“Yeah. It could be win-win. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“You see?” he said. “This is what happens. I allow myself to be, only momentarily, vulnerable, and you pounce. You think I don’t see what you’re doing?”
She looked at him with her brow furrowed. “Whoever I am, whatever interests I have, am I just supposed to ignore the fact that there’s something in you that wants more than this? That can respond to something more? It’s no secret that I want out of this situation. Duh. I’m not pretending otherwise. But what I’m saying can still be true.”
“And I’m just a soul you think perhaps you can save?”
“I hadn’t thought about it like that. I guess that does make me some kind of a saint, huh?”
“That makes you mistaken,” he said. “And I’m tired of this conversation.”
He grabbed her by the cuffs and dragged her off the bed, down the hall to the living room, where his satchel was. Reaching in with his other hand, he pulled out a piece of material, pushed her down on the floor and held her there while he gagged her mouth. He didn’t say anything but he looked angry, not calm at all. With a series of light, little kicks, he chivvied her into a corner of the room, then he walked away from her and sat down on the sofa. He thought for a few moments. Then he got up and grabbed a fairly large dildo out of his bag. He approached her and, despite her attempts to cringe away from him, he pulled her forward and pushed her down on her stomach. Holding her down with his free hand and his legs, he shoved the dildo into her anus. He could hear the tiniest edge of a scream emerge from behind the gag. He continued to shove the thing in and out of her, roughly. He could see where he was ripping her some.
“Still think it’s love that I feel?” he taunted her in his usual, disturbingly calm voice. “Still willing to take pity on me?”
Her body was shaking, and she was crying.
“I think what you’re feeling right now is what you should be feeling. And what I’m feeling is exactly what I should be feeling. And love or need or pity have nothing to do with it. And that’s how it should be.”
He kept thrusting, as she tried fruitlessly to wriggle away. He smiled.
“And I think your literary criticism is wrong,” he added. “I think that book went right where it was supposed to go. Nice try and all. But old habits beat new feelings every time.”
He pulled her down the hall by the chain he had attached to her collar. He’d intentionally put the collar on her one notch too tight. When he had her in the bedroom, he dragged her up onto the bed and wound the leash around one of the brass spokes in the headboard. He took her hands and tied them together, tightly, above her head, to the same spoke. Then he knelt next to her on the bed and pushed his cock into her mouth, moving it back and forth, in and out, at a pace of his own choosing. When he pushed it all the way in, she gagged. He’d stop momentarily until she caught her breath, then begin again. If she struggled too hard, the collar choked her. Finally, he pulled out, dripping with her saliva, and ran his penis down her body, around her breasts, over her stomach. Moving to sit on top of her, he pushed it into her vagina. He used his legs to hold hers apart and down. He grabbed her breasts with his hands, roughly, his thumbs stroking her nipples. She wasn’t talking, just whimpering, as he pumped back and forth inside her. Suddenly, he stopped, pulled out, and turned her over. The twisting leash ground against the brass. He held her face against the pillow, but not so close that all her air was cut off, as he began to smack her ass with his bare hand. She screamed. She didn’t have a lot of padding there. Sometimes it felt like he was hitting bone, but he didn’t stop. Not until her butt was bright red and his hand was beginning to tingle. She was no longer screaming, just gasping. He lifted her hindquarters up, tilting her, and entered her from behind. This time he stayed, pressing the palm of his hand against her crotch, so that her clit would hit against it each time he rode in. It didn’t take long at all for her to come. He stopped pumping and collapsed on top of her for a moment, enjoying the feeling of her contractions, the tightness.
Then he opened the night table drawer and pulled out a latex glove. Putting it on, he stuck first one finger, then another one into her still-wet vagina. He moved his index finger onto her clit, beginning to rub it gently, while moving in and out with his two middle fingers. He stuck his pinky into her anus. She began to rock forward and back. She delayed as long as she could, trying to make it last, but before too much time had passed, she came again, even harder.
But he didn’t let her go then. Instead, he slid his index finger into her ass and began to move it in and out. Then he added the next one. It was starting to hurt so she tried to move her body away from him. Holding her immobile at the waist with his other hand, he added a third finger. He was stretching her, moving in and out a little roughly. She begged him to stop, the ecstasy of a moment ago subsumed by the pain of his latest maneuvers. He told her to shut the fuck up and to stop moving, and continued with what he was doing. She moaned. Finally, with his other hand, he grabbed a lubricated condom, then pulled his fingers out of her ass and replaced them with his cock. He didn’t stop until he came. It took a while. By the time he was done, she lay still, exhausted from the strain.
He pulled out, got rid of the condom, and twisted her back over until she faced up again. Bending over her, he moved his face toward hers and kissed her on the mouth, slowly, a deep kiss. She refused to cooperate at first, but he kept on, and gradually, she softened, feeling the comfort of it and the intensity of his longing, his need. After a while, he slowly moved his head back, away from her. Automatically, she followed it with hers until the leash would let her go no further. She looked at him as he moved his face back toward her then pulled it away again. She puckered her lips and tried again to draw his mouth to hers, but he was just out of reach. He put his lips on one of her too-sensitive nipples instead. He flicked it with his tongue. She writhed.
“You bastard,” she said, breathing hard. For a moment, he continued to lick her nipple, as she continued to try to wiggle away. Then he stopped and untied her hands, but left her neck secured to the headboard, still leashed and collared.
“Can you not once let me just have the pleasure without the pain?” she asked him, still breathless.
“’Everything must be paid for,’” was all he said.
“You bastard,” she said again. And they both laughed.
She pulled him to her, and he went, climbing back on top of her but gently this time and letting her kiss him as much as she wanted. His hands slid down her arms until they found hers, their fingers interlaced against the bedclothes. She could feel the wedding band on her husband’s ring finger, and he could feel the diamond on his wife’s. And they kissed and they kissed until he was hard and ready to fuck her and hurt her again.
It was fortunate, she thought, dredging up from her memory every last, precious detail, that she had already had some experience of sex with a pain chaser.
For most of her life, she hadn’t even imagined that she would like that sort of thing. She just did it the usual way with the usual suspects. And it had been just fine, sometimes even pretty great.
And then she’d met her husband. He was an angry man. Angry at things he’d seen. Angry at things that had been done to him. She used to look at his scars and wonder where he’d gotten them, but she didn’t ask. He wasn’t much of a talker. You can try to calculate the underlying, psychological motivations: abuse as a child (a) plus the desire to turn one’s own violent impulses toward good (d) multiplied by the frustration of never being able to trust anyone (t) divided by remorse (r) minus necessity (n). Maybe with the right formula, you could approximate the reasons. She guessed some people might mistakenly conclude that he liked to hurt women, but that wasn’t exactly true. He loved her, and he felt safe with her. And this was how he liked sex, not with her being unwilling, for she was plenty willing, openly willing, but with the element of punishment and unquestioned control.
Maybe inside he thought she needed to be punished for being willing to be with him. Or maybe he wanted someone who would love him no matter what he did. Or maybe he was a violent man, and that’s what it took for him to get hard. She didn’t know. They didn’t talk about it; they just did it. And she liked it. She was the center of the world, of his world,
and
she didn’t have to feel any guilt. Who felt guilty after a spanking? Nobody. That’s how your sins were expiated.
But the things
this
man made her do. It was like a photographic negative of things she had done with her husband. That was the hysterical part. Back during their marriage, when they had engaged in these sorts of activities, they acted serious – you had to act like you were taking it seriously – but deep down, they were kind of laughing. But this guy didn’t get the joke. He actually meant this stuff. He would
really
hurt her if she didn’t obey. In his own way, he was ruining it. Ruining sado-masochism. Quite an accomplishment.
There was no way she could explain to this man what it really meant, the things that they had once done, the actions that he made a mockery of. Or maybe it was reversed; maybe they had made a mockery of all these things long ago, and he just hadn’t gotten the memo.
There was something splendid about giving in to discipline, she had learned. It was giving over your very self to someone else because you trusted him. It was a test of trust the first time and a proof of trust every time after that. Like falling backward into a group of people who would then catch you. Only bound and gagged. And sometimes in leather underwear.
Maybe also, she thought, there had to be some place for the negative feelings generated when two people shared their lives. They never needled each other, they didn’t bicker, there was no teasing with an undercurrent of niggling irritation. They didn’t really argue all that often, in fact. They didn’t feel the need. They used to listen to couples’ conversations on the street, in cars they walked past, during dinner in a restaurant. How much barely sublimated anger did they hear, or even outright rage, far surpassing whatever the actual point of disagreement might be?