Page 14 of Submissive Lies

Just go on doing what I’ve been doing?

-Hey, don’t ask me, friend. You created this. I thought you had a plan.-

I did.

-Seems to be working out great to me. Well done. Keep up the good work!-

I rubbed my eyes, grabbed my robe and slipped it on. I sat there, hands clenched in my lap. Fuck my self-loathing. I had to do it. Sit Thomas down, talk to him, clear this up. He needed to know the truth. That no, no I wasn’t sore, because he hadn’t fucked me rough. He’d just fucked me in a different position, and that was not what I had been talking about yesterday morning.

No, he needed to know who I was. What I was. Because it was the fair and right thing to do.

As I walked towards the kitchen, I could hear him moving around, smell the coffee brewing. Each step I took made me more determined. I was strong. What was it Loren had said? I had the warrior spirit. Hell yeah! I was a warrior! I was a badass warrior who would march in there and get this shit sorted out right now!

Right up to the moment I rounded the corner.

He was so cute. It wasn’t the first time I’d thought that, seeing him puttering around the kitchen in his sleep pants, the tight black tee shirt he wore stretched nicely along the vee his muscles made down the length of his back. I bit down on my lower lip as a flood of blissful warmth poured through me while I watched him make breakfast. For me. His lover.

-Yep. Some warrior…-

Fuck you. Soon. Tomorrow. Just… not now. Not… right now.

-Sure.-

Thomas grinned at me as he went about finishing breakfast while I sat down at the counter. He put my coffee mug in front of me and I took a sip. Perfect. Just the way I liked it. I cupped my hands around the mug, sipping slowly and thinking.

For the six months Thomas and I had been a couple, it had been good. No, that wasn’t fair. In the beginning, it was more than just good. It had been incredible. Life affirming, rejuvenating, inspiring.

And the sex had been great too!

Thomas was an incredible guy. In those first months I was not only happy, I thought things were finally turning around for me. I was starting to put Ben behind me, I’d stopped thinking so much about the damage he’d done because I realized it wouldn’t define me forever. Therein lay the problem though. The day eventually came when I realized that since my decision, what I had in fact been doing was trying to redefine who I was. What Ben had done to me got parsed out in simple terms: the path to recovery was for me to step away from the submissive part of myself entirely.

It seemed so rational then.

Thomas came to the counter and set a plate in front of me. I wasn’t a breakfast person during the week, but this cooking for us on the weekends had become a little ritual that Thomas had created in our time together. It was sweet, romantic, and I loved him for it. It was things like this that I didn’t want to give up. Why couldn’t these moments be enough? Why did all those other things need to come into play?

Why can’t you be something that you aren’t?

For a time, the idea of submission, of being a submissive, was so distinctly associated with a period in my life of such terrible pain that I determined I would no longer allow it to define my sexuality. Instead, I pushed it away. Denied it. Buried it. The thought of being in a relationship, of trusting and being intimate with someone that way triggered so many emotions, all of them negative, that I couldn’t even consider it. Then Thomas had come along. He’d showed up at my office, taken me to lunch, and then taken me to his bed. Those wounds had started healing, and that had been a good thing. But it came with consequences. The most significant of which was that, gradually, as time went on, those submissive tendencies that had been such a large part of how I identified before began to creep back in. I had thought pushing them away, shoving them into neat little boxes and slamming the door closed would be simple. A way to drive out a pain center that Ben’s cheating and dishonesty had created.

-But then you discovered a little flaw in your grand plan, didn’t you, Jen?-

Yes.

Ben had lied to me. And of all the things he’d done, his lies hurt the most. My solution to the pain those lies had inflicted on me was to create a lie of my own. A lie which I then imposed upon myself. I am no longer a submissive. Once Thomas came along and the hurt began to fade, the pain healed, those parts of my sexuality so integral to who I once was began to creep back in. Slowly, insidiously. The solution was no longer working. The lie was coming undone.

-You thought you could just walk away from it all. Easy-peasy…-

It was supposed to be simple.

It wasn’t.

“You haven’t finished eating.”

I started at the sound of his voice, my head coming up from where I’d been staring down at my plate, lost in this miasma of self-loathing and doubt. “Oh, God… sorry.”

Thomas leaned on an elbow, staring at me with mild apprehension in his frown. “Everything okay?”

“Just thinking…”

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