Page 9 of Wanted
She couldn’t remember the last time someone had asked her that. It was surprising how much she disliked it.
Without waiting for an answer, he turned the volume on the television up to a comfortable level. “You will eat every bite and you may not get off the couch until the movie is over.”
She looked at the sundae. This was punishment?
He patted her on the knee. “Don’t mind me. I’m going to go clean something.”
That hit her surprisingly hard too. Like twin boring drills straight to the stomach. It hit her in shrill shocks of sensation that instantly tangled her and made her legs tense with the need to vault up off the couch and follow him back into the kitchen. He only got halfway before he suddenly veered toward the bathroom to fetch a box of tissues.
“Almost forgot,” he said, tucking it up against her hip. “You’re going to need those.”
To watch Chicken Little, eat a sundae, and sit on the couch? She watched him walk away, wanting with all her might to call after him, “Don’t make me laugh!” Except she wasn’t laughing. She wasn’t crying, either, but there was no denying the awfulness of the tension vibrating in her knotted stomach. The knots were stranglingly tight as he took a clean cloth from a drawer, wet it in the sink and then began cleaning countertops.
Pony clutched her bowl. She hadn’t been able to clean anything since Master went to prison. She hadn’t so much as made her own bed when she’d stayed at Puppy’s house. It had felt so wrong, as if there was no point. This… watching Marcus do what she couldn’t and hadn’t been able to do in so very long, and which she yearned to do with all the passion in her breast, hit her hard.
“Eat,” Marcus reminded, turning his attention to washing the cupboard doors next.
She looked at her ice cream, just now beginning to melt in her bowl.
This was stupid. Marcus was not her master and his was not the house she wanted most to take care of, as if it were an extension of the man she’d loved with all her heart. That man was gone. So was his house, for that matter.
This was really, really stupid.
She fixed her attention on the television with its animated chicken running around on the screen. Her stomach was hollow in that empty-pinching way she had long ago come to like because nothing tasted as good as obeying Master felt.
Except he was gone now and she’d never feel it again.
Marcus wasn’t her Dom, but he had given her an order and he was expecting to be obeyed, and surely that was better than this limbo of abandonment that she’d been living in for the past eight months.
She tried to eat, but it was awful. It tasted like failure and incompetence. It tasted exactly the way it ought to for a sub who was sitting on her ass, tucked into a blanket on the couch while someone else was busily working around her.
He was sweeping now, the whispering brush of the broom over the floor tiles scratching all the way up her prickling spine until she couldn’t bear it. She would never, ever have just sat by while Master cleaned. Not that he would have, the house was her responsibility. Failure to keep it up to his impossible-to-achieve level of standards resulted in punishment every time, and God knows Master was the king of terrible punishments. Piggy had her wallow—that cold, filthy mud hole that he’d made her kneel in whenever she’d displeased him. Puppy had her kennel and Kitty that claustrophobic cage under his bed where she used to wail, kick and cry, and sometimes even piss herself before he’d let her out. But she—Pony shuddered—she was easy. For her, he had never needed anything more creative than a whip-thin crop and a bondage bench to secure her over.
Pony hated pain. She couldn’t take much of it without breaking down completely, not that that had ever tempered Master’s hand or saved her from the full measure of his wrath. It hadn’t tempered her own hand either. Each time he’d condemned her to whip strokes to punish her inability to keep Puppy under control, she’d dealt them using her own leash and she’d beaten her own back or legs just as hard as she could. She’d done it until she’d convinced herself that there was comfort in the pain—it meant he still wanted her enough to try to teach her to do better.
Where was that comfort now? Gone, that’s where. And this was what she was reduced to. Sitting on a stranger’s couch, watching TV with ice cream melting in her bowl and the taste of it lingering like ash in her mouth.
She couldn’t hold still. Kicking out of the blanket, she tried to get up but she couldn’t think what to do with the bowl taking up her hands. She had a choice—the coffee table, the end table to her left with its vintage multi-colored Tiffany lamp, or the floor.
“Butt on the sofa,” Marcus said, his tone and expression both stone-hard. “This is a punishment and you will stay right there until it’s over.”
Pony stayed, hunkered on the sofa, melting ice cream in hand, unable to eat, unable to disobey, unable to just sit here, listening in growing franticness while he did her jobs. He dusted when he was done sweeping, moving silently through the living room around her, making careful effort not to obstruct her view of the show but certainly not hiding either. And it was killing her.
“You may not help me,” he said when he got to the end table and she tried to lift the lamp so he could dust under it. “You’re also not eating. I expect that bowl to be empty by the end of the show. You’ve got forty minutes.”
Or what, the defiant part of her brain fought to demand. He’d make her cookies? She’d have to watch another cartoon? This was the stupidest punishment she’d ever heard of!
She glared at her bowl, her eyes stinging with the threat of unshed tears until he came and sat down on the coffee table directly in front of her.
“I will not be topped from the bottom,” he said flatly. “When and if I decide you require discipline, you can bank on the fact that I will not spank your naughty bottom until you’re a sorry little girl. I won’t wash out your mouth with soap, or send you to the naughty corner, or make you write ‘I will not’ lines until your fingers fall off. I am not your Dom. You are not my sub. You will obey me because you are living in my house while I try to help you out of the mess you’re in. If you decide not to obey, then I will force the issue, but I promise I will find a way to do it that you will not like. It won’t feed the fantasy. It won’t feed your soul. If you wait until your sundae is a melted mess, it won’t look or taste appealing and I will still make you eat it. Do we understand one another?”
She hated him. She hated this place. She hated her inability to just get up and march out of his house. She couldn’t think as far as what consequences were sure to follow that—from court, to hospital, to him, to the sweatpants she had to hold hiked up around her hips or they’d fall down—nothing mattered. Nothing made sense.
She was breaking inside, splintering cracks that were cutting her to pieces and releasing the tears she was trying so hard to fight back. Covering her eyes with her hand, she hung her head.
“Every bite,” he said ruthlessly. “Eat, Anna.”
She would sooner drop the bowl on the floor in front of him, making the biggest mess she could, which she would then have to watch him clean up—this was horrible.
