Page 56 of Bound by Love
He held out his arms and she moved into his embrace. She was crying but didn’t understand why.
Once Sir had her cleaned up and settled back in bed, he asked, “Were you dreaming?”
“Yes, I…I think so,” she answered hesitantly.
“What about?”
She looked at him with concern, shaking her head. “I don’t remember, but I woke up feeling like I was choking to death.”
Sir squeezed her tighter.
Brie looked at him sadly. “I’m sorry I pushed you away.”
“No need to apologize,” he assured her.
Brie settled back against him and closed her eyes, trying to fall back asleep, but knowing there was no hope. The unsettling feeling of choking had released a flood of memories centering on Darius and, in the darkness of the night, she was unable to keep them at bay.
There had been one incident in particular that she had never shared with a soul—not her parents, not her friends, and not even Sir. Reliving it now, even with the passage of time, filled her with a deep sense of shame and humiliation.
That secret had held her captive and tortured her for years. It wasn’t until the Submissive Training Center and her encounter with Baron that she’d been able to move beyond it.
Darius had been the sole reason she’d been so afraid of the kind-hearted Dom on that first day of training, and why she had to look into his eyes every time they scened together, even though Ms. Clark had punished her severely for it.
Baron’s gentle hazel eyes had been the anchor she needed when their scenes triggered old memories. Eventually, she stopped thinking about Darius when she was with the Dom, and eventually came to believe she’d overcome the trauma of the past.
However, today had sparked those memories she had kept hidden.
Darius had not only bullied her relentlessly—which her parents found out about the day he stabbed her with the needle—but just days after the incident, his actions managed to infiltrate the very core of her soul.
She had suffered in silence with the terrible secret ever since, and she knew it was the reason he still held power over her now. Her parents were not aware that their decision to move had saved her life back then.
At the tender age of twelve, Darius stole a piece of her innocence she could never get back, and it had almost destroyed her.
Getting out from under his brutal influence had allowed Brie to bury all memories of it. The small town in Nebraska proved to be what her spirit needed becausenothinghappened there. Bored to distraction, Brie often visited the theater house that played the classics in the afternoon. It was in that small, run-down theater that Brie discovered her love of film. She devoured the best of the best, never tiring of watching films likeDances with Wolves,Braveheart,Titanic, andAvatar. Luckily, the owner of the theater was a true lover of film and he introduced her to the classics, includingGone with the Wind—which became one of her favorites.
The small theater became her safe haven. There, she could completely lose herself in the worlds created on the big screen. What started out as a source of entertainment eventually became her inspiration.
On her fourteenth birthday, she asked for her first movie camera. Her parents, encouraged by her newfound confidence, indulged her in whatever used equipment they could find. Her father soon became a regular in the pawnshops in the surrounding towns.
To their credit, her parents never complained about her filming them on a daily basis. They put up with their privacy being invaded because every Sunday night, they would gather in the living room to watch the week’s events documented in film.
Her father would close the curtains while Brie got the projector ready and her mother made a bowl of popcorn. Brie called her clips “My Hilarious Life” as a joke, since living in Nebraska was anything but hilarious—being the snooze-fest that it was.
However, each week, along with the clips of her parents moving through their daily routines, she captured something simple and unique that other people often missed: a lone dandelion blowing in the wind in the middle of an abandoned parking lot; an adorable colony of prairie dogs popping their heads in and out of their holes; a hawk circling in the sky making its lonely call; or a determined ant on the ground dragging its impossibly large piece of food back to its colony.
Brie found that hidden beauty existed all around her whenever she looked through the lens of her camera. That was the magic of film for her—the ability to expose rare beauty in the ordinary.
By making weekly films, Brie caught those silly moments when her parents’ guards were down. There were even times when she caught raw emotion like the time she filmed her father answering the phone. The look on his face when he got the news that his grandmother had died in a car accident was something she would never forget. It was horrible, but that moment showed a side of her father that Brie had never seen. She replayed it in private, mourning along with the devastated little boy revealed in his face.
Brie believed there were times her movies made reality even more real. It was a gift, this ability to show a different perspective of the world and be able to share it with others.
On her sixteenth birthday, she wrote in her diary in the style of Scarlett O’Hara:
As God is my witness, I will become a filmmaker…
She had kept that promise to herself, knowing her father would consider it an impractical profession with an uncertain future. To prove that she had a true gift that needed his financial support, she continued to make her weekly films well into high school, even recruiting friends to play out her first attempts at movies. It was her hope that her father would agree this was what she was meant to do and allow her go to college to follow that dream.
Yes, Nebraska turned out to be a huge blessing to her…
