Page 30 of For Real

“Yes”—my stomach twisted as I forced out the word—“master.”

Guilt stuck almost immediately. I had wanted this. I had. I had looked for it and made it happen. And this man had brought me here on good faith.

I rested my palms on my thighs and, squinting up at him through my still tear-burning eyes, I tried to see him. I wondered if he would see me back.

Or if there was nothing but…correspondence.

“Eyes down, boy.”

I obeyed without a thought, because it cost me nothing. Technically, I was kneeling to him too, but that didn’t matter either. Neither of us were here.

“By the time I’m done with you, boy, you’ll be begging for my cock.”

There was a time a statement like that would have likely made me feel…something. Defiance, anticipation, a kind of nervous longing to be so utterly overpowered. Robert and I had loved the struggle. And, although it had always ended the same way, with his blissful victory and my equally blissful defeat, it had never felt like a foregone conclusion.

Unlike this prearranged surrender.

My own fault, but somewhere down the years I had made it a choice, the when and how of my yielding. And now I lacked the strength, the trust, to not choose.

“Yes, master,” was all I said.

My lapse had not been intentional, but it was an excuse to punish me. “You like that, boy?”

I contemplated the complexity of the question. No and no and sometimes and almost. I wasn’t sure “like” even came into it anymore. Dimly, I realised I was probably…in some way…annoyed. At him, at me, at this. He’d done nothing wrong, but everything was wrong. I was wrong. I had been for years.

“I said, ‘Do you like that, boy?’”

“Y-yes.”

“Yes, what?”

I unlocked my jaw and delivered the required answer. “Yes, master.”

Satisfied, he dragged me up again—I felt leaden, hopeless, a mannequin—cuffed me, and chained me to a Saint Andrew’s cross, because it was always a St. Andrew’s cross. I leaned into its embrace, enjoying at least the peculiar combination of support and vulnerability it offered.

And then he flogged me. He was good at it. He warmed me up, which was more than I deserved, with something light and supple, until I was blood-flush and sensitive, suspended there on the softest edge of pain.

God. Yes. More. Deeper.

A kind of interior quiet, a sense of bodily peace, made me lean into the restraints. And a sense of waiting crept up my spine like the warmth of touch.

Touch.

If only he would touch me. In desire, as well as mastery, or from desire of mastery, or something, something. Something that would make this more than action and reaction, script and performance. Or maybe I was wrong. Maybe this was exactly what he wanted.

“Please…please will you…”1

But I didn’t think he heard.

He swapped to a braided cat, and, oh, that truly hurt. He had left me naked to its sharpness, its scrape and bite and sting, and the sear of my own sweat.

The air was full of noise. His breath, my breath.

Then my cries, though I did not beg for anything again.

He knew when to stop before it got too much. How to let the pain possess me but not break me. And when I was fully its creature, mindless and shuddering, he fucked me, one hand on my shoulder, the other on my hip. When his rhythm turned ragged, he reached round, twisted my nipples until I screamed, and came.

He was done. But afterwards, he kept me there, shoved up against the cross and still impaled on his wilting cock. I tugged on the chains—scene over, fucking scene over, please—but he wrapped his hand round me, forcing me through the pain and exhaustion, the loneliness and the sorrow, until I was hard for him again.

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