Page 29 of Tormented Dreams

"I don't want you to be sorry. I just want you to be there for me once in a while. I just want to feel as if I come first in your life,for a change, and not like some damn afterthought after you've finished prostrating yourself for everybody else."

Xavier sighed. "That's not fair, Grace. I appreciate I've been a lot busier than usual lately, and it's unfortunate that it's coincided with us taking our relationship to a new level, but it won't last forever. It's just a seasonal uplift. It always gets a little worse when the weather deteriorates and people aren't quite prepared for the changes. But I can't just turn my back on my patients. There are sick and injured people out there who need me too."

"Damn it, don't you dare try putting me on a guilt trip, Xavier!"

"Master!" he corrected with deceptive mildness.

"No!" Grace bit out viciously. "You do not get to pull rank on me right now."

"It's not about pulling rank," Xavier retorted with a frown. "This is supposed to be a 24/7 Master/slave relationship. That's what you agreed to, so it's more a matter of respect."

"Yeah? Well, you can stuff your goddamned M/s relationship. I knew I shouldn't have agreed to it in the first place. This was never what I wanted, but I was stupid enough to think it was something we could build on!" Grace shouted recklessly as she paced angrily back and forth across the expanse of the living room.

"What the hell does that mean?" Xavier demanded, stopping her in her tracks with his hands firmly gripping her shoulders.

Grace shrugged him off indignantly and whirled out of his grasp.

"It means, this was a mistake and I should have gone with my gut instinct when you suggested this ridiculous idea, insteadof believing that I could mould it into something a little more palatable."

There was a tense silence for several beats while her words hung in the air between them.

Grace winced, despite her anger. She knew that had come out all wrong.

"So, you were never really interested in this as a lifestyle choice, you just planned on manipulating the situation to suit yourself later on or…" Xavier sucked in a sharp, almost horrified breath as he realised the full implication. "What? You're telling me that even when we first started this thing, you had absolutely no intention of seeing it through?"

His normally well-modulated voice had risen with indignation and his accent was more pronounced.

"What was it to you, some kind of joke? Something to bide your time with until something better came along?" Xavier demanded, unable to quell his own rising anger at her seeming subterfuge.

"No! That's not how it was!" Grace defended, gesturing wildly with her arms. "You're twisting what I said and taking it all wrong."

"How else am I supposed to damn well take it, Grace?" he asked scathingly, his already dark eyes deepening to black with the turbulence that filled them.

"You just said outright," he hooked his fingers in air quotes as he repeated sarcastically, "'instead of believing that I could mould it into something a bit more palatable'. I'm not sure how I canpossibly have misinterpreted that. It's pretty straightforward and it's pretty damning!"

Grace spat out what sounded like a cross between a squeak and a growl from between her gritted teeth and clenched her hands into fists tight enough to turn her knuckles white. "Okay, so I didn't word it in the best way, but?—"

Xavier cut off her excuses. He wasn't sure he even wanted to hear them right now. They were both too tired and too highly-strung to take care with what they said to each other, and he knew there would probably be regrets tailing hot on the heels of the recriminations the following day if they chased this vicious argument to its conclusion.

But he also knew it had been a long time coming and Grace, in particular, was probably too far gone to shelve this dispute and come back to it when they were both a little calmer and level headed.

He did his best to rein in his own simmering anger at what felt like a complete betrayal.

"I was honest with you," he told her as evenly as he could, even though that meant having to talk through his own gritted teeth. "I told you what I was looking for, and I told you I wanted it to be permanent. I even told you there would be no bad feelings if you didn't think it was right for you, so it's not like there wasn't an easy out."

He sucked in a ragged breath and looked her right in the eye.

"Damn it, Grace, Didn't I ask you to think about it carefully before you agreed?" he implored, spreading his fingers wide. But exhaustion and disappointment quickly turned his words more derisive.

"So, please, do try to explain your side of things to me, because the alternative is that you must have known, right then and there, that you had absolutely no intention of making a genuine commitment to what I suggested."

"Look, I admit that when you first asked me, I wasn't really interested in the lifestyle you were proposing…" She seemed to falter, as if she realised just how badly her admission sounded, and her brief explanation dried up altogether, but she'd already said enough.

Every word out of her mouth jabbed into Xavier's chest like a knife, and he found himself rubbing at it like it was a physical pain, which he might be able to ease.

But there was no way to alleviate the ache he was feeling all the way down to his soul. How could he have read this so wrong? The thought left a bitter taste in his mouth and the very real power to undermine his confidence in himself.

He didn't like feeling like he was on the back foot and was driven to find out the answer, to work out just where things had gone wrong. Was all of this his fault?

---