Page 47 of Loving Luna

As soon as I was in position my stomach flipped, the weight of my decision heavy on my heart. Was I doing the right thing? Would Drake understand? I’d been taking care of him all week. I needed to take care of myself. And in a way I was still taking care of him by not adding more burden to his already very full plate.

I bit my lip as I waited for Maureen to begin, my brain racing with too many thoughts, but none I could quite pin down. All I knew was this didn’t feel quite right. I was seconds away from rearing off her lap and ending the whole thing when the paddle cracked hard against the center of my cheeks.

I didn’t even react. I couldn’t. My breath caught in my throat. What did I do now?

Thankfully, Maureen began to speak. “You’re not in trouble, Luna, and this isn’t just about getting a need met, is it? It’s about helping unblock your brain so you can communicate. So you are able to voice what you need, what you feel…” As she spoke, the paddle punctuated every couple of words.

And despite the blossoming pain that arose as she didn’t hold back, her words were the balm my soul needed. After only a dozen or so swats, the dam broke. The worries I’d been holding back broke to the surface. My breath left me in long, ragged sobs. The paddle kept falling, each swat igniting a fresh fire in my ass while somehow also clearing my mind.

“What are you feeling?” Maureen prompted, pausing her assault long enough to give me time to catch my breath and answer.

I desperately wrenched my body, pulling myself off her lap and wincing when my bare ass hit the fabric of the couch as I sat beside her.

If Maureen was shocked by my actions she didn’t let on. “I feel like…” I took a deep breath then blew it out, meeting her eyes. “I feel like I shouldn’t have done this, like it was selfish of me, but also like there was no way to not do this. I had to, in order to unlock my brain.”

It sounded stupid to my own ears, but Maureen just nodded, her expression holding no judgment.

“Drake and I…” I began, clenching and unclenching my hands in my lap, wondering where to begin, what she already knew, what I’d already said… “We’re together now… a couple. It was…” My voice cracked, and Maureen grabbed a tissue from a box on the coffee table, handing it to me. I dabbed at my eyes as I spoke. “It was probably a long time coming to everyone else who knows us, but I fought it pretty hard. I… I was really afraidto mess up what we already had and I thought I didn’t believe in love.” I scoffed. “Drake says I’m afraid of commitment.” I shrug. “Maybe I was. Maybe I am. Fuck,” I cried as my voice cracked again. Tears welled in my eyes.

Maureen grabbed my hand. “Go on.”

I shook my head hard.

Her brows raised and her head cocked to the side. “Are you sure you’re ready to talk? You could go back over my knee if that would help.”

It probably would, but it would also make everything worse. “I just…” My voice trailed off, and without thinking, I launched myself back over her lap.

Maureen picked up right where she’d left off like she’d never stopped. “Come on, Luna. Let it out. Something is wrong. You called me for a reason. Tell me what it is.”

She moved the paddle lower, focusing first on one side, then the other. I breathed in deeply, welcoming the pain. The thoughts were on the tip of my tongue. I knew exactly what they were but I couldn’t seem to let them out, almost as if I were afraid of them. Maybe I was. Once I spoke them, I’d have to figure out what to do about them, and there was really only one solution that I could see.

“I have to break up with Drake,” I cried, when the paddle cracked hard across my sit-spots. “And the timing, it couldn’t be worse, and I don’t want to, but I have to!”

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Maureen muttered under her breath. She began to spank harder, attacking the curve where my ass met my thighs with renewed vigor. “Why do you have to break up with him?”

“B-because! I can’t… I can’t go through what his mom is going through. I can’t give myself over to someone, so completely, so perfectly for so long and then wake up one dayand it’s just over. I can’t… I can’t lose him!” I screamed. “What if he dies?”

Maureen stopped abruptly. I heard, somehow, over the sounds of my own racking sobs, her suck in a breath. “Oh, baby,” she murmured. And then her hands wrapped around my forearms and she pulled me into a sitting position beside her and guided my head to her shoulder.

I cried, my tears soaking the silk of her shirt. “I can’t… I thought I couldn’t be with Drake because I was afraid it would go wrong and hurt too much. But…. Oh god!” I gasped for air, my lungs feeling like they were seconds away from exploding. “But what if everything goes right?” Tears, warm and wet, spilled down my cheeks. I pulled my face away from her wet shoulder. “I can’t…” I huffed and gasped for air, my lungs burning like an elephant was sitting on my chest. Images of the past few days rolled through my brain on repeat. “I couldn’t lose him,” I finally managed. “It would kill me. To… to take a chance on love, to go all in, knowing that it could just be ripped away at any moment.” I shook my head from side to side. “I can’t do it, Maureen! I can’t risk it!”

Maureen pulled me close, resting my head on her shoulder again, this time wrapping her arms tightly around me and cradling my head of her chest. “Oh, baby. Oh, sweet girl. Shhh. Shhhh, it’s okay.”

“It’s not,” I wailed, unable to accept her comfort. “It would hurt too much.”

“Loss hurts,” she agreed. “So does love.”

It wasn’t the answer I’d been expecting. “Wh-what do you mean?” I sniffled. I’d always thought love hurt, it was one of the reasons I’d been so afraid to give it a try with Drake in the first place, but not many people thought the way I did, so I hadn’t been expecting Maureen to agree with me.

She pulled my body away from her, to hold me at arm’s length and placed a hand on each side of my face, in a move she’d never made with me before. “Luna, listen to me.”

She waited until my eyes met hers.

“Love is a risk. Loss is a part of life, unfortunately. And when you love someone, loss is inevitably going to be a part of that. But it doesn’t mean you don’t take the risk.”

It took everything in me not to roll my eyes. “But…”

“Let me ask you this: If you broke up with Drake now, and ten years later, he passed away… how do you think you would feel? Do you really think your first thought would be ‘oh thank god I broke up with him all those years ago, so I don’t have to hurt now’?” She paused, seeming to give me a moment to mull over her question, but she didn’t press for an answer, instead, she continued. “Or, do you think that maybe, just maybe, it would hurt anyway?”

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