20. Talia

Chapter 20

Talia

I wake to sunlight on my face and a languor in my body so pervasive it’s a challenge to open my eyes.

Then recall hits.

I jerk upright, blinking fast as I take in the empty room, my empty bed. The air hums with stillness, the type of quiet I’m most accustomed to. I’m alone.

A weight descends on my chest, compressing my lungs. I don’t know why I’m surprised. Disappointed. No— devastated . He offered me one night, and that’s what he gave me. Not once did we speak of anything past the present. He didn’t ask me to date him again, didn’t try to convince me his feelings weren’t transference.

Maybe he realized they were, and last night was about the challenge. Dominating the dominatrix. Proving to himself and me how much I wanted him. How much I’d be willing to submit .

Does he know I gave him parts of myself I’ve never given anyone? I think he does.

Still, I’ll never regret it. Not the discomfort in my body right now, not my tears or my begging last night. He deserved it all. He proved himself worthy with the care he took. The tenderness he showed. Real or not, last night he acted like he was mine. Last night, my oldest dream came true.

Pulling my comforter to me, I curl into it and close my stinging eyes. Memories flood me, sensation following each winding path. A shower. His hands washing me, tender and thorough, then the ease with which he lifted me against the tiled wall. His laughter when I couldn’t hide my shock.

“You may be built like a goddess, but lucky for you, I’m built to worship one.”

Water misting between our mouths, our chests and stomachs flush. His eyes pinning me as surely as his cock and his hand on my throat. No words, just the silent language of our bodies. My orgasm, sudden and explosive. Then my knees against the tile, his cum painting my neck and chest. He hadn’t asked for it—I hadn’t given him a choice.

We slept for a while after. It was still dark when I woke up to his tongue on my clit and his fingers massaging my G-spot. He edged me until I was sweating and cursing him, then brought me to the deepest, most shattering orgasm of my life.

I didn’t mean to fall asleep again, but when he tucked me against the warm, hard planes of his body and stroked my hair, my mind slipped away .

It’s no surprise I don’t remember him leaving. The grogginess in my head and the stupor in my body signal I was probably catatonic. I wish I’d woken, though. Even if I have no idea what I might have said or done. Asked him to stay? Begged him for another night? I wouldn’t have.

But at least I could have said goodbye.

My phone buzzes once from the nightstand on the opposite side of the bed. I glance at it, momentarily indifferent, before my heart leaps to my throat. I scramble across the sheets and pluck it from its cord.

Sven Akerman.

My exhale is a pained wheeze as I swipe to read the message.

We’re on a plane to Galway. Back in two weeks. He’ll fire me if he finds out I told you, but I like you better than him. Take care of yourself, Dr. Stirling.

Swallowing a geyser of misery, I blink fast to keep tears at bay.

I guess I have my answer.

The summer of the trip to Galway, after we came home and my dad moved out, I put aside impossible fantasies and grew claws.

That’s how I like to remember it, anyway .

Not even Leo knows the full truth of the following two years. The closest I’ve ever come to telling someone who wasn’t a professional was after I met Charlie. After I discovered that fantasies themselves weren’t the problem—that as long as there were boundaries around them, I could stay safe.

The first months of Charlie’s mentorship were glorious. I was on Cloud 9, in love with exploring kink both physically and psychologically. I lost my virginity in exactly the way I wanted: to a gentle, beautiful man who obeyed my every command.

As my education and experience expanded, Charlie often shared that she’d never met a more natural dominant or a woman so free of shame.

I never corrected her, never told her there’s more than one type of shame.

The night I came close to telling her the truth, she’d invited me to join her in a session with one of her long-time clients. I’d never met him before and she didn’t give me any prep. A part of me will never forgive her for that, though I understand why she made the choice.

I knew by this point that serious pain wasn’t something I enjoyed providing, but it was part of the job. Even though I didn’t enjoy full-strength whipping, caning, or more extreme forms of bondage, I found immense satisfaction in mastering the skills. Even more in providing a safe space for those brave enough to explore desires that society deemed perverse.

The client that night, however, was a true masochist. His desire for sexual gratification was inexorably linked to his desire for pain. Halfway through the session—already a challenging one for me—Charlie unrolled a velvet pencil case. Instead of pencils, though, the thin slots were filled with plastic-encased scalpels.

The man started sobbing at the sight of them—sobbing in relief .

I froze in abject horror.

“So you do have a limit.”

Charlie’s voice was unexpectedly gentle, the most sympathetic I’d ever heard it. She whispered something to the man, who nodded, and then she guided me from the room. Once outside, I started shaking so hard my teeth chattered. She brought me to a couch and held me in her arms until finally, minutes later, I started to sob.

I could have told her. She would have understood.

But I didn’t .

When I turned off my fantasies at fourteen, I turned off my ability to hope. To dream. In some ways, it benefited me. I was able to let go of the need for acceptance from my family. I put my focus back into my education and excelled in my final two years of high school. I stopped caring that I had no friends, stopped seeking validation from anyone but myself.

My claws grew long and strong, but they had no outlet.

Their first victim was me.

College offer letters started flowing in during my senior year, and I felt nothing. I was merely going through the motions. Ticking off boxes on a sterile list of what I thought I should be doing. Even when I received an offer and substantial scholarship to UCLA, and my mother hugged me, I felt nothing.

While my future prospects grew bright, my inner world grew dark. I rarely saw my father, but when I did, there was invariably a phone call to my mother later in the week demanding she put me in therapy. She always refused.

“You’re overreacting as usual, Patrick. She’s exactly the same as she’s always been.”

I wasn’t.

Without fantasies, without dreams, without friends or real family, I was completely alone with my monster. As she grew, so did the pressure under my skin.

My mother was an esthetician at a spa in Beverly Hills, but she also went on house calls. Sometimes, if she didn’t have appointments outside the spa that day, she left her travel bag at home. A bag that included tools for the popular service of derma-planning.

Scalpels.

No one ever saw outward evidence of my inner torment. I was intentional about where I cut and used butterfly sutures to minimize scarring. My mother was disorganized to a fault and never noticed when a scalpel disappeared.

I was lucky. So very lucky. Before my addiction could progress from a weekly ritual to a daily compulsion, my father finally won the argument. The summer before I started at UCLA, I found myself in a therapist’s office.

That therapist not only saved my life but changed the course of it, finishing the job an Irish boy inadvertently started. She gave me a new outlet. A focus that became my life’s vocation.

At twenty-two, I used my savings from working with Charlie for plastic surgery to remove the scars. It was a relatively easy process, the scars themselves minimal due to my obsessive diligence. But even though my inner thighs are smooth now, there’s no surgery invasive enough to erase the marks my claws made as they matured.

If I hadn’t fought so hard to control my monster, would she have cut me so deeply? Would she be cutting me even now, slicing over and over again into my heart?

I don’t blame her. What wild animal doesn’t crave freedom? It’s not her fault she lashes out. I was the one who put her in a cage. Who took away the only thing that mattered to her.

Now, curled on my bed, my body empty and aching, I wonder what would happen if I freed her. If I finally let her have what she’s fought so hard for all these years.

Dreams.