Chapter 9

nine

There was to be a club anniversary celebration that summer at Lyonesse, and the expectation was that Mark would scene publicly with his new, mysterious submissive.

“Something short, easy,” he said when he told me during our second rehearsal in his penthouse. It was the first time we’d seen each other since New Year’s Eve.

His eyes were on the snowy expanse of Central Park just beyond his windows. “They don’t need more.”

“Do you do public scenes often at the club?” I asked. It was a genuine question—I had no way of knowing—but there was a sharp hook in my chest as I awaited the answer.

It was an answer that shouldn’t matter, an answer I was pretty sure I could guess, because did I really imagine that someone who built a place like Lyonesse didn’t also indulge himself there? Didn’t make full use of it?

When his other alternative was a fiancée who knew nothing about what he liked and had barely even been willing to marry him?

He turned to look at me then, framed by Manhattan blanketed in snow, and his eyes were a brilliant blue in the gray winter light. “I do,” he said evenly.

“And that’s not—” I closed my mouth. I didn’t know what I really wanted to ask.

He seemed to know anyway. “It would be stranger if I stopped.”

“Oh.”

“Do you want me to stop, Isolde?”

And there I was, standing in my sports bra and bike shorts because I was too shy or too stubborn to rehearse without the Lycra reminder that everything between us was false. Because after that knee-quaking kiss on New Year’s Eve—even after my conversation with Sister Mary Alice—I wasn’t ready to admit how I was starting to feel. There was an instinctive need to wedge some distance between us, any distance at all.

We’d been engaged for over seven months, and I knew next to nothing about him other than that he was fourteen years older than me and had been a soldier before he was CIA. And that he usually drank clear alcohol on ice.

Conversely, he knew far more about me than I knew about him, and in that moment, him looking at me, that kiss last week lingering between us, I couldn’t bear for him to know this: that I wanted him to stop doing scenes with other people.

I couldn’t even bear for myself to know it.

Wasn’t it bad enough that I’d given up my vocation, my purity, my freedom in order to serve God on the darker, thornier path he’d asked of me?

Why did I also have to be drawn—snared? Coveting something so deeply unwise?

Why did I have to want Mark on top of everything else?

And what did I want from him, really? To stop fucking other people when we weren’t fucking either? When our engagement was a business decision and nothing more?

But now you’ve told him he can have sex with you, a tiny, petulant voice inside me said. So why won’t he just take you?

It felt like I’d surrendered something only to have it rejected, neglected. And he absolutely could never, ever know how much that stung.

“No,” I said calmly, meeting his gaze again. “I don’t want you to stop.”

He nodded, something moving in his eyes. He gestured toward the stairs. “Let’s get started then.”

* * *

Mark introducedme to bondage during that rehearsal. He cuffed my wrists and ankles but didn’t secure them to anything else, so I could get accustomed to the sensation of being bound without actually being immobilized. He tied my wrists together with a soft rope, and then later used the same rope to knot a harness over my sports bra.

I sincerely hoped he was writing off my goose bumps and pebbled nipples as something to do with the cool air of the loft, and not what they really were, which was a response to him cinching and constricting me. A response to feeling trapped and held.

It made my belly swim and my heart pound.

Stop,I wanted to demand of my body. Stop it right now. The kink was supposed to be yet another sacrifice, a necessary evil, something I did for an illusion. It was not supposed to captivate my thoughts day in and day out. It was not supposed to be the thing I fell asleep thinking about.

I was not supposed be catching my breath from the feeling of cuffs on my wrists.

Luckily, my fiancé didn’t remark on any of it, and only continued to explain how bondage worked, how he’d like our scene this summer to go.

* * *

I spentthe hours leading up to our next rehearsal in the karate school, running forms with the lights off. Two narrow windows let in the late spring sunlight while I flowed through the familiar movements, searching for peace. It was supposed to come; it was supposed to clear my mind and still my thoughts. When it didn’t, I did pushups until my arms gave out, and then when my mind still rushed and raced, I went home to my kicking post, covered in tire strips, and began kicking, nearly crumbling with relief as the pain thrummed up my legs and filled me like cold water in a well. Soon I would be still and dark and able to reflect the world back to itself—a perfect mirror, like my uncle had trained me to be.

But as I staggered back from the post, tears burning at my eyelids, Mark’s words from before Christmas came to me.

So you’ve never run until your legs gave out? Never kicked a post or bag until you were crying in pain?

I hated that he could guess that. I hated that anyone could guess anything about me, anyway, because I wanted to be unknowable, a forgettable doll in Manhattan’s glass and steel dollhouse, but that he could guess that of all things…

He made me feel so powerless with what he could see sometimes. And if he could see that, then could he see that I was choosing this marriage for reasons that had nothing to do with my father? Would he be able to tell when I started handing information off to my uncle, sifting through Lyonesse’s vast troves of information for anything that could help the Church?

I got to Mark’s penthouse determined to shield myself better. He needed to see only what I allowed him to see—someone hesitant but open, someone slowly turning into a real partner for him.

A tense shiver ran down my spine and the backs of my arms as I reminded myself of that last part. Mortimer hadn’t said as much the last time we’d talked over the phone, but our conversation had made me realize that I would get more done with Mark’s trust than without it, and if that were true of only trust, then what could I do with affection? Infatuation?

I was hardly Mata Hari; seduction was probably past what I could do with an easy mark, and my future fiancé with his depth of experience and distinct tastes was hardly that. But I could give Mark something very few submissives could, and that was being his tabula rasa, his to mold into whatever he wanted. If I could parlay that into him feeling something for me—even mild attachment—it would prove far more useful than a transactional relationship. And there was also what he’d admitted at dinner that first night…

I asked for you.

I wanted you.

So the game was to make him think I was beginning to crave his kinky world, and him in it, to make him think that he’d accidentally acquired for himself the perfect wife by training me to pretend to be one.

And I wasn’t going to be jealous of his other lovers and play partners. And I wasn’t going to balk at whatever he asked of me. And I wasn’t going to lose sight of why I was here. This was my vocation now, my calling. My sacrifice and narrow way. Like Esther, I would scrawl out God’s will onto the world not in the light, not in the shadows, but in the faint glow of a king’s bedroom.

I could do it. I could make Mark think I was feeling one thing while I truly felt another.

Except the next night in Mark’s cool, dark penthouse, I couldn’t seem to find the certainty I’d felt coming here. I couldn’t untangle my body’s responses as he cuffed me and connected the cuffs to the leather upholstered platform in the middle of the room. I couldn’t separate pretending from feeling as he leaned over me, bracing his hands on either side of my head, and I was swallowed by the shadow of those wide shoulders and thick arms.

“We will try light impact tonight,” he said. “And some touching. I’ll do a mix of flogging and spanking during our scene this summer, and I want you to get used to how they feel, so we can be convincing.”

“How convincing will we need to be?” I asked. The research materials Mark had sent over last fall had contained several videos of kinky scenes, and impact play in particular seemed difficult to fake.

“I will pull my strikes as much as I can, but I’ll need to leave some welts and marks for it to be believable,” admitted Mark. “How do you feel about that?”

“I feel okay with it,” I said. It was strange to be talking so matter-of-factly about this while I was spread on a table and cuffed to its corners. While a soft buzz was starting under my skin, tickling my lips and the tips of my fingers and toes. I recognized it from the time I’d nearly fainted from crawling, and tried to push it back. There was no reason being bound to a table should make me feel like the world was falling away. No reason it should make me want to laugh and cry at the same time.

“You’ll have your safe word, and it’ll be choreographed in advance,” Mark said, all cool assurance as he straightened up. He reached for the flogger he’d set next to me on the table and explained its composition and function to me in concise, direct terms.

Cowhide, thirty tails, each twenty-four inches long. Suede was softer; oiled leather would paint me black and blue. I’d be struck with the lower quarter of the falls—sometimes the very tips, which would feel sharp and stinging—and sometimes with more length, for a thuddier impact.

I held onto myself and my earlier determination while I was cuffed to the table. Even as the buzzing under my skin amplified, even as he demonstrated what he was saying with flicks and quick, soft strikes to the tops of my thighs and my breasts. But when he moved me to the St. Andrew’s Cross, re-cuffing me so that my feet were spread and my arms were stretched above my head, the world started to spin too fast for me to spin with it.

I was dizzy, already leaned forward against the padded cross for support, and when he flicked the flogger across my back for the first time, my eyes slid closed without me meaning for them to. He was narrating what he was doing, explaining where he’d strike and the places he’d avoid, and it was only the rough coldness of his voice that kept me somewhat tethered.

Otherwise, I might have floated right up into the air.

You cannot, I tried to remind myself. You have to keep a clear head.

But I wasn’t an actress, and even if I were, maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. Something about the things Mark did—it was more potent than any liquor Sister Mary Alice kept in her desk, as heady as the most euphoric, agonized prayer. Even through my bike shorts, the flogger bit me and pushed me. Reached into a place in my soul that I normally only let God see.

“After a good deal of this,” Mark said after several minutes of flogging my shoulders, backside, and thighs, “a submissive would be lost in their own world. Limp. Docile.” He wasn’t flogging me anymore, and I could hear him as he came closer. He was close enough now that I could feel his breath on my neck, ruffling the hair that had escaped from my twin French braids.

“You could flog them more,” he said, his voice low, “or get something worse, a crop or a cane. You could get them to beg you for it. You could get them to beg you for anything.”

His words were as seductive as the flogger tails had been. Maybe more.

You could get them to beg you for anything.

“What do you do?” I managed to ask.

A low noise, like a hum. “I like the begging. But now is also when a sub is the sweetest to touch.”

His hand came to my waist, large and warm, and then slid to the front of my stomach. My skin was exposed between my sports bra and my shorts, and goose bumps trailed behind his fingers.

“Of course,” he went on, “since we’re only putting on a show, I’ll only make it look like what I’d usually do.”

“And what’s that?” My voice was a whisper now.

His fingertips found my navel. Drew circles around it. “I’d reach between your legs and check to see if your clitoris was erect, and if it was, I’d begin toying with it.” His fingers echoed his words, rubbing a spot just above my navel. “I’d then see how wet you were for me. Wet enough to take my fingers, perhaps…”

Those same fingers swirled at the rim of my belly button, making me suck in a breath. I couldn’t move, I was cuffed to the cross, and anyway, Mark was behind me, a wall of Italian cotton and tailored wool and low words.

“Or maybe wet enough for a cock. Not that I’d give it to you; you’d have to show me you’d been good enough for it.”

His fingers dipped into my navel now, and I made a noise, a barely-there moan. I prayed he didn’t hear it.

“I’d make you come until that cunt was nice and flushed for me, and then I’d uncuff you from the cross and carry you to the table. I’d spread your legs so that everyone could see between them and see what you’d done.”

I could barely breathe. “And then what?”

His hand dropped from my stomach, and I wanted to cry. “It’s hard to say,” he said, his voice sounding farther away, and also a little more detached. “I suppose it depends on the sub. And the scene.”

I was too dizzy and dazed to push away the images that came to mind: Mark with his hand between my legs, Mark forcibly pushing my thighs apart for the pleasure of others. Him allowing them to touch me…use me…

“You may feel some pins and needles when your arms are lowered,” Mark warned as I felt his hands on the cuff of my right wrist. He sounded oblivious to the effect all this was having on me. “That’s normal. I won’t keep you in a position like this overlong; once a sub starts getting dosed with neurotransmitters, I find they start to sag in the cuffs, and that’s when I start worrying about circulation.”

He was talking as if everything were normal, as if everything were the same.

As if I weren’t about to topple over sideways from dizzy, delirious sensation after he uncuffed me.

Get it together, Isolde. I wanted him to think I was succumbing to all of this, but that wasn’t permission to fall over dead when the man touched my belly button—

“I think we’re ready,” Mark said, unlocking my final ankle and then standing up. I stayed slumped against the cross. “We didn’t rehearse any spanking, but I trust we’ll be able to pick it up in the moment. Do you have any questions for me, Isolde?”

I’d always been a good student, a diligent one, but I couldn’t bear to be in the lesson any longer. I shook my head—still dizzy— refused his offer of water and toast, and then practically bolted from his penthouse.

When I got home, I locked my bedroom door, laid flat on my back, and with only a second’s worth of shamed hesitation, spread my legs like someone had made me do it. My entire life, I’d thought masturbation was bad, a sin, but maybe that didn’t matter for me anymore. If I was willing to fuck a man, kneel half-naked on the floor for him in front of his friends and employees…surely this was the least of the sins I’d be committing in the name of service and sacrifice.

Not that it mattered. There was no stopping my hand as it swirled a long touch around the rim of my navel and then slid into the tight stretch of my bike shorts. I closed my eyes and tried to think of nothing as I found the small pearl of my clitoris.

But I didn’t think of nothing. I thought of large hands prying my thighs apart. And of a cold, cruel voice asking me if I’d been a good enough girl to earn it.