Page 19 of P is for…

He’d practiced what he was going to say, but the long speech that touched on each of the many issues they faced evaporated as he looked at her.

“Next weekend, we play the game.”

Shock wrought minute changes in her expression. The slight relaxation of her lips, the faint lines on her forehead as her brows rose.

Benson let himself look at her for another long minute, and then he gently lowered her head and stood. With a nod of thanks to Mikel, Benson backed up.

Mal watched him walk away, and Benson held her gaze, walking backwards rather than turning around.

It wasn’t until Mikel used the crop on her thigh that Mal jerked her attention away from him and back to her current Dom.

Benson swallowed the urge to demand Mikel get away from her.

The urge to take over. To be the one wielding the crop.

The urge to show the club that Mal was his.

CHAPTER 5

A soft, sheer dress. Hair in loose waves. The look was romantic. Pretty…but not quite right.

Mal stared at herself in the mirror, indecision making her stomach clench and teeth grind. She hated feeling unsure or unprepared, and right now, she felt both.

She wasn’t soft curls and a long negligee.

She also wasn’t latex and leather zipped, laced, and cinched tight.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she was both. There was a time and place for both looks. The question was who she was going to be tonight.

The past week, waiting to come back to the club, waiting to scene with Benson again, had been torture. Emotional torture, not the much easier to handle physical pain.

Her compartmentalization was normally excellent, and though she carried the calm born of submission with her into her real life, she didn’t think about or reminisce on the specifics of past scenes outside these walls.

This week had been different.

It wasn’t the memory of the scene with Mikel that had distracted her. It was a combination of memory and fantasy. Old memories, vivid flashes of especially intense experiences with Benson. The daydreams and fantasies were a series of imagined possible future scenes.

More than once she had to jerk herself back into the moment, force herself to pay attention to critical negotiations, rather than letting her mind wander into a land of fantasies about what Benson would do to her, and with her, this weekend.

To lose one’s sense of self was both welcome and unnerving, and at this moment Malvia didn’t know if failing to truly identify with the woman in the mirror was a problem, or the end point of a journey she hadn’t known she was on.

Stepping back, she turned to the low bench in front of her locker, picking up the black and gold leather and vinyl outfit she’d had on originally. The corset had removable cups, giving a Dom or Master easy access to her breasts without having to remove the whole corset. Decorative panels of gold-tone leather gave the corset a vague feeling of armor. She’d bought it precisely because it looked powerful, yet when she wore it, she willingly relinquished control as part of the power exchange while wearing it.

A gap between the edges at the back mean the laces could be tightened, turning the corset itself into bondage play by cinching and compressing the stomach, belly, and ribs. Mistress Faith, in particular, was fond of compression bondage and of this corset.

Mal ripped off the sheer dress. The only reason she’d pulled it into contention for tonight’s attire was because she vividly remembered the way Benson had looked at her when she was wearing it all those weeks ago. She hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the way his gaze had dropped to her body… Or what happened after.

More than once, she’d slid two fingers over her clit as she relived that moment when he’d backed her up against the wall. She remembered the look in his eyes and the way he smelled as he loomed over her.

Naked except for a pair of black ballet shoes, she quickly pulled on the corset. Doing up the hook and eye closures along the front, she bent forward at the hip, adjusting her breasts into place.

She turned back to the mirror, rocking her weight from foot to foot.

Reaching back for the laces, she quickly untied them. Mal untangled the four ends—this was a proper corset and had two different laces, one coming down from the top, the other coming up from the bottom. She wrapped the ends around her fists and inhaled. As she exhaled, she pulled. The center of the corset cinched in.

The pressure was immediate and limiting, but something inside her relaxed. There was an entire subculture devoted to a form of everyday bondage that used tight clothing, or tight foundation garments, to provide the pressure and a feeling of security that many people sought. Mal had tried that, but it hadn’t worked for her. Layering several Spanx certainly provided an intense feeling of compression, but it hadn’t had the sexual overtones that she really needed in order for the feeling to become “bondage,” rather than simply irritatingly too-tight.

Taking shallow chest breaths—her chest rising up, rather than out—Mal closed her eyes, savoring the feeling of the corset as she wound the long laces around her waist, crossing them around to the back where she tied them off.

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