Page 17 of Wanted
“Don’t force yourself to eat when you’re full, even if I ask you to,” Marcus told her, feeding her another bite just as soon as she swallowed the last. “If your stomach hurts, I want to know. If you get sick, I want to know. If you feel you have to make yourself sick, I definitely want to know, and I don’t care what I’m doing at the time. You’re to tell me immediately. If I’m busy, disturb me. If I’m asleep, wake me up. That’s an order.”
She nodded, chewing and crying and trying so hard to pull herself back together. She was a horrible submissive, making this all about herself. If she were really grateful, she’d be doing everything she could to make this fun and sexy for him. As it was, it was everything she could do just not to be a snotty, sniveling mess.
Picking up a napkin, Marcus put it to her nose and told her to blow. Then fed her until her bowl was empty and her stomach was anything but hollow. It cramped, she was so full. She didn’t say anything. She wasn’t about to ruin this, not for anything.
“Do you want more?” he asked, scraping the last cheesy bite out of the bowl and offering it to her.
She didn’t, but she’d have kept eating for as long as he wanted to keep doing this. Did he want to keep doing it, though? Or was he only asking to be polite before moving on to what he really wanted to do? She hadn’t known many overtly polite Doms, but he had said please. To her, no less.
“No, thank you, Sir.” She really was horrible. Just saying that word had her belly warming in all those old familiar ways that once made the thought of being some man’s submissive the sexiest, most seductive thing in existence. She’d thought about it so very often, long before she’d attempted her first dungeon play party and met Ethen.
Though she tried to shut him out of her mind, something must have shown on her face.
“What were you thinking?” Marcus asked, leaning sideways as he set her empty bowl aside and checked her hands behind her back.
“Nothing, Sir.” Not wanting anything to stop this yet, especially not something as inconsequential as blocked circulation—she’d regularly suffered far worse than numb fingers in Ethen’s play scenes—she stiffened her spine. Pushing her shoulders back, she locked her hands so the edges of the cuffs weren’t quite so cutting, but Marcus had already stopped. Propped as far back as his chair would allow, he studied her with a flat, unsmiling mouth.
“You want me to believe you had that look on your face with absolutely no thought in your head? Did you just lie to me, Anna, or were you thinking about him?”
Pony flinched, not knowing how to answer in a way that wouldn’t automatically ruin both their fun. No dom wanted to be mentally compared to another. No dom wanted to be lied to, either.
“Were you thinking of him?”
She flinched, unable to hold his steady gaze. The tension in her own throat was choking her, she couldn’t swallow much less speak. She nodded, knowing that would be punished.
“Thank you for the truth. I expect you’ll be thinking of him for quite some time. Next time, just say so.”
Her mouth dropped. “Y-you… you’re not angry?”
“Do you want me to be?”
Definitely not.
She was still trying to figure out how to answer when he ordered her to stand.
She’d taken too long to answer. Now he’d be angry with her. Now she was going to be punished.
She stood up, relief that it was finally going to happen helping to balance her instinctive dismay at her inability to keep anyone happy.
He got up too and disappeared back down the hall. A few minutes later, he returned with a partially full black duffel bag. The contents made a heavy, clinking-clattering sound when he set it on the end of the table. The look he gave her when he unzipped it sent shivers dancing through her already rattled nerves.
He went through the contents, pulling out two neatly bound lengths of black bondage rope. “I know you like this, so these will be used.”
He put them on the table by his bag, then dug down into it again. He pulled out a medium-sized paddle. A good eighteen inches long and half an inch thick, she knew by experience how sharp and stinging that would be with every impact. She tried not to show any response, but relief tickled her nonetheless when he discarded it in favor of a smaller leather paddle. He set that on the table, then added a black and blue colored flogger with twenty or more two-foot-long falls, a stainless steel butt plug, nipple clamps, and lastly a vibrating wand.
“I’m going to go clean your floor. You,” he said, beckoning her close enough for him to remove her cuffs, “will clean the kitchen. Afterward, I want you to choose among these things, which you’d like to be rewarded with.”
She tried not to react, but she couldn’t stop staring. Raw electric need was humming under her skin right alongside stark, naked fear. He said reward, but she’d made a lot of mistakes tonight. Just being here with him was deserving of anything but a reward, and yet at no other point since she’d met him had Marcus done anything except exactly what he’d said he would.
Choose?
She looked at her options, utterly baffled because she didn’t know him well enough to guess what he wanted to do to her. Five options. That gave her a one in five chance of selecting the right thing, and four in five of screwing up. The stress of it knotted instantly.
“Just… Just one, Sir?”
“Pick as many as you want,” he said. “The only requirement is that you choose things you want to do. If you’re not comfortable with me using one of these items, then put it back in the bag. If you want to spend the night tied up, I’m fine with that. If you’d rather I not shove this up your ass”—he picked up the butt plug—”then put it in the bag, because if it’s still on the table I’m taking that as consent and shoving it up your ass.” He promptly exchanged the plug for the wand. “If you don’t want me to send you to bed tonight with explicit instructions to make yourself come, then put this back. If I find out later that you weren’t honest about this and submitted to something that left you feeling violated because you’re trying to give me what I want, I’m going to be beyond pissed off. I mean it, Anna. I want to know what you like. Got it?”
“B-but what if what I want is to give you what you want?”
