Kaden opened the door.
Inside, what looked like something out of a porn movie, only better quality and more tastefully decorated. A low, padded bench with leather cuffs attached at each end. An X-shaped frame. A large rack holding...
Holy fuck.
Whips, riding crops, and various other implements of torture.
The odd collection explained the keyless lock. During construction, Seth had asked him if he needed it because of his files.
“Something like that,” Kaden had said with a smirk. “Keys are a pain in the ass. I'd rather have a combo lock. I don't want people wandering in here when we have guests over.”
Seth hadn't questioned it at the time, knew Kade had a lot of high profile corporate clients. It made sense to him then.
Made perfect sense now, even if he was still in shock.
Kaden walked across the room to a bookshelf and pulled down a photo album. “Come here,” he said.
His legs numb, Seth walked over while Kaden flipped through the pages, finding what he wanted.
“This is Shibari.” He pointed to a page of pictures, of Leah trussed in intricate rope bindings, a ball gag in her mouth, looking...
Well, looking like she was enjoying herself.
Kaden flipped through page after page, naming the different rope configurations.
“She's my model and assistant during classes.” He smiled, his finger trailing over one particularly intricate looking configuration. “And at home, of course, she's my practice model.” He closed the album and put it back on the shelf, pulled down another one. This time he flipped to a page of pictures taken by someone else apparently, because Kaden and Leah were both in the shot. It looked like he was speaking to a gathered group of people. Leah was bound—naked—to a bench similar to the one in the room behind him.
Kaden wore jeans but was shirtless, and holding a—
“Is that a whip?”
Kaden nodded. “Singletail. Specially made. That one's my favorite, cost me nearly eight hundred dollars. This was a basic singletail class. Problem is, too many assholes think they can use one on a person when they really can't. I spend several hours a week practicing to get and stay as good as I am.”
Maybe that explained Kaden's naturally muscled physique despite never going to a gym. Kaden wasn't ripped, yet he was firm and trim while Seth had managed to gain about twenty pounds and go soft since his best days in the Army.
Kaden put that album away and turned to Seth. He dropped his voice. “Have you ever looked at her arms?”
Seth hesitated, nodded. He'd noticed the scars. Now he wondered if Kaden had done that to her. The possibility sickened him.
“She did most of that to herself before we ever met. Do you know what cutting is?”
“Not really.” But relief crept back in.
Kaden glanced to the open doorway behind Seth, as if listening for sounds from the kitchen. Leah was still cleaning up dinner, they could hear her singing to herself at the other end of the house. Apparently satisfied that she couldn't hear them, he lowered his voice and continued. “Some people, for various reasons, need pain. They use it. It's how they function, how they deal with their emotions. Some use it to help relieve intense emotional pain in an external way, some use it to feel like they're connected to life again. Some just flat-out get off on it.”
“There's medications for that kind of crap, dude.”
“When you're a fourteen year-old girl and being forced to give your foster brother blow-jobs and getting sodomized by him because he threatens to get you thrown out on the street, you don't exactly trot down to a shrink and ask for a pill.”
Seth blanched, sickened. What kind of hell had she been through?
“She didn't take the news well last night, obviously. I needed to give her a long session last night to get her to cry. She's had two more today already. I took the day off from work, I knew she'd need me.”
“She likes this?”
“She needs it. There's a lot I can't tell you tonight, you just have to see it for yourself. She's not a pain slut like some are. We have very specific routines and rituals we've developed over the years that help her stay calm and focused and deal with life.” He motioned Seth over to a chair in the corner. Seth walked over and sat, his mind reeling.
“When we were first dating,” Kaden continued, “she worked at a restaurant near USF. That's where we met. I went in after class one day. She was beautiful. I never believed in love at first sight until I met her. She claimed she was a klutz in the kitchen, always getting these weird injuries, mostly cuts and burns on her arms. She always had something. I had no reason not to believe her. Until I talked her into spending the weekend at my apartment and she got up to make coffee.”
Kaden's gaze drifted, his mind's eye traveling back in time. “She didn't hear me get up. I walked into the kitchen and watched her take a knife out of the drawer and lay it against her arm. She closed her eyes like she was saying a prayer or something and when I screamed, she jumped.
“I wanted to haul her to the hospital. I thought she was trying to kill herself. She was so upset I'd seen her, she got dressed and ran out. I panicked, I couldn't find her. She wouldn't answer my calls, wouldn't come to the door at her apartment. I finally staked out her workplace and made her talk to me.
“She wouldn't tell me why. She broke up with me right there even though she was crying and ... it just felt like she didn't really want that. I can't explain it. I begged her to talk to me and she wouldn't. I knew I was in love with her and it was killing me that she wouldn't talk to me. I knew she'd had a crappy life but I didn't know everything.”
Kaden wiped his eyes. This wasn't easy for him. “I went in every day after class and would sit and try to get her to talk to me. When she quit a few days later, I finally got one of the other waitresses to tell me where she went. Then she told me something else. ‘She loves you but she's scared of people. If you want her to open up to you, you need to prove you're not going anywhere and won't hurt her.'
“I was losing my mind. After three weeks I waited for her at her apartment one night and begged her to let me talk to her. She finally let me in and she was like a fucking zombie, man. She looked like a dead woman. She told me she loved me, but that she couldn't see me anymore. I was sitting there on the couch trying to talk her into changing her mind when she got up and walked to the kitchen. Before I could get there, she'd cut herself.”
“Fuck!”
Kaden nodded. “Then she started screaming. She screamed and cried and she let me hold her. I sat there on the floor with her for an hour and she finally told me about her father and the shit that happened to her growing up. What she did to deal with it. She told me she wanted me to find someone ‘normal’ who could feel emotions without cutting them out of her flesh.” He studied his hands for a minute. “I told her I didn't care. I loved her. That I wanted to help her.”
He took his glasses off and laid them on the bookcase. “She tried. Man she fucking tried. I got her to move in with me. Every day I felt it building in her. Like a volcano. But the weird thing was, the more I felt it building in her, it's like the deader she got outside, right? She came home from work all happy one afternoon and I saw she had a new burn on her arm.”
He looked at Seth, his eyes glistening again. “I got so fucking scared and angry that she'd hurt herself. I just lost it. She'd promised not to do it anymore. I should have known better, that she couldn't stop herself. We got into a fight, screaming at each other. I grabbed her and hauled her into my lap, yanked her pants down and spanked the crap out of her.”
“Fuck!” Seth couldn't imagine Kaden blowing his cool. He'd never seen his friend lose it, ever.
He
was the hothead, Kaden always coming to his rescue.
Kaden smiled. “I felt like shit, like fucking dirt. Then she fell off my lap and she looked up at me and had this ... absolutely gorgeous smile on her face. My hand hurt like a sonofabitch. I knew I must have bruised her a little but she looked at me in a way I'd never seen her look at me before. She grabbed me and fucking kissed me and practically raped me right there on the couch. It was the hottest sex we'd had, and the sex was pretty damn good to start with.
“So I asked her after, when we'd finally made it to my bedroom a few hours later, what the fuck that was about. She shook her head and said she didn't know. It was like something had just sort of popped free in her when I did that. So I made her a deal.”
He frowned, working his hands again. “I told her if she could go the entire next day, just one fucking day, without hurting herself, and that I would check every inch of her flesh for a new wound, I would spank her again the next night.”
“Fuck!” Seth wished he could say something—anything—other than that, but that's all he could manage.
Kaden nodded. “Right. That's exactly what I thought. I was desperate. What the hell was I supposed to do? I didn't even know if it would work. So I get home from classes the next day and she gets home from work later and she runs in, I mean she's stripping her clothes off the second she gets through the door, asking me to look at her and check her over. I made her stand there and wait. She started to beg. I told her if she didn't behave, I wouldn't spank her.
“It's like she became a freaking statue, just waiting for me. I finished what I was doing and told her to go lie in bed. I get there and she's waiting for me. I start looking her over, taking my time, trying to be seductive about it, and I realize she's fucking wet. I mean, like you wouldn't believe. I asked her what was up with that, and she said she couldn't stop thinking about getting spanked all day.”
“Did she ever hurt herself again?”
“A few times early on. After that, no. Not intentionally. We had a deal that if she got hurt, she would immediately tell me so I would know it wasn't intentional. I haven't had to worry about that for years now. That's because we have this. Usually she doesn't even need it every day, or just something light, not a full session. The deal was I would take care of that for her, I was in control of that. She began to beg for more. One day I had to threaten her again that if she didn't behave, I would make her wait another day before her next spanking. That made her even hornier.”
Kaden smiled. “We'd been married for about a year when I found out about the local BDSM club and got hooked up with others. Learned a lot more. She was like a changed person since we'd started the spanking but she wanted more. I wasn't doing it because I wanted her to feel pain. I was doing it because she wanted me to do it, she trusted me enough to let me into her life and take charge of that for her. She literally turned control of her pain over to me, not just physical but mental. Once we started doing that, it's like she was able to move on. It all progressed from there.”
He met Seth's eyes. “You and me, we deal with emotional shit. No problem. She never had that, never learned it. She didn't have a family she could go to, someone to teach her safe and healthy ways to process her emotions. She was in survival mode for most of her life, and at the hands of the fuckers who were supposed to take care of her. I was literally the first person in her life she could trust not to hurt her. Well, I mean, you know what I mean. She went through a lot. Yes, I could have forced her into a shrink's office and made her go through years of therapy and medicated her out of her mind and maybe accomplished the same thing. What we do, she enjoys it, it helps her cope, it keeps her happy. I love making her happy. Who am I to force her to do something we don't even know will work when we've got something we can do together that she loves?”
Seth looked into his friend's eyes. He would be the first to deck anyone who accused Kaden of not loving Leah. He'd seen their relationship first-hand all these years. Well, thought he'd seen it.
“What do you want me to do?” he quietly asked.
Kaden cocked his head to the doorway and listened, then called out. “Love, are you finished with the dishes?”
“Almost, Master. I'm wiping down the counters.”
“Very good, love. Come here when you're finished.”
Seth noticed something else, the term of endearment. He didn't remember hearing Kaden call Leah “love” before, although he'd heard him call her many other equally sweet things over the years.
“We have a sort of code,” he explained to Seth. “You'll learn it. That's another reason I need you to move in. It's easier for you to learn it when you're living here. She's going to need you.”
Leah appeared in the doorway a moment later. She stopped at the threshold and looked at the floor.
“Come here, love,” Kaden said.
She walked over. He made a hand gesture. She dropped to her knees in front of him.
Seth felt weirded out, yet his cock throbbed in his pants again.
“Love,” Kaden said, “I've told Seth we'll give him a demonstration.”
“Yes, Master.”
“Is that all right with you?”
“Whatever Master wants me to do.”
“That was not my question.”
“Yes, Master. It is all right with me.”
“Prepare for me.”
She stood, her entire body flushed. Seth first thought it was embarrassment then realized it was arousal.
She quickly undressed. Seth realized she wasn't wearing any panties under her skirt. She neatly folded her skirt and shirt and laid them on a nearby shelf, put her shoes on the floor underneath. When she wore nothing but her collar she turned and looked at Kaden, waiting for instructions.
Kaden was unbuttoning his shirt. “Are you all right, love?” he softly asked her.
“Yes, Master.”
“Where are we, love?”
“Green, Master.”
Seth wordlessly watched their exchange, his jaw slightly gaped. Her shaved pussy looked swollen, like she was...
Fuck.
Kaden draped his shirt on a hook apparently there for just that purpose. Seth had never paid attention before to how fluidly smooth his friend could move. And now he definitely saw the tattoos were matching.
“Love,” Kaden said to Leah, “I'll let you choose this time. You pick what you want me to use.”