Right up to the moment I opened that playroom door.
Fucking bastard.
“I… I should go.”
I looked over to her, coming out of my reverie.
“Yeah, that would probably be a good idea.” I left the playroom, heading down the hallway to the front door. She followed me silently, and I shooed her out of the house. I should have been mad, should have been furious, but I just didn’t have the mental or emotional energy in me for it. I was exhausted. Drained. Once she was out, I closed the door, turned, and leaned my back against it. My mind was already slipping into damage control mode, working overtime to triage my emotional state and psyche, especially those that related to the parts of my life that in the last thirty minutes had been completely torn apart.
That was what began to consume me—trying to come to terms with what Ben had done. Trying to wrap my head around the what and the why. Why had he done it? What had I done wrong? What had I not given him that he needed, aside from the obvious?
I spent much of that day and night trying to figure it out. I didn’t. It took time. A lot of time. And many tears flowed before I formed my ultimate conclusions.
Ben was a narcissistic, cheating, lying, piece-of-shit asshole who had screwed me over royally.
I was done with BDSM.
The first was easy to come to terms with. Ben had taken me for a ride from day one. He’d had no intention of being true to me. He had used me, gotten what he wanted for three years, and had his little dessert side dishes to boot. I had trusted him. I had believed him because he had spouted off all the right things to me. Ben was my first true Dominant, and he knew the language of our kink so well. Knew all the right words, could spell out all the right RACK—Risk Aware Consensual Kink—and SSC—Safe, Sane, Consensual—phrases rote.
And I accepted without question everything he said. Believed him when he told me ‘Jennifer Boyd, you are the submissive I have been looking for my entire life. There will never be another for me, because you are perfection.’
Oh, God, I bought into that. I had wanted those words with every molecule of my being, and when he said them, I drew them in like smack to a junkie. And now I’d paid the price. A butcher’s bill settled with a shattered heart. For believing and accepting without question.
The latter conclusion was not as easy to process. It took time for me to come to a resolution with that one. My reasoning was neither rational nor cohesive, but while wallowing in the sea of pain I was in, it all made perfectly logical sense somehow. All of what had happened wasn’t just Ben’s fault. No. BDSM was equally to blame. Everything about our dynamic had been a sham. The entire lifestyle, and all the people involved in it, were bullshit. All of it filled with false ideals, unrealistic expectations, and people who were as deceitful and disingenuous as the day was long. If you looked at it that way, there was obviously only one logical course of action—I had to get out. I had to cast off anything and everything having to do with BDSM and the lifestyle surrounding it. And that meant I would no longer be a submissive. Submission wasn’t going to be a part of my sexuality, or any part of my life for that matter. I would be strictly ‘vanilla’ from here on out. The benefits were clear. Everything would be so much easier, so much less complicated. No worries about cheating, multiple partners, etcetera.
Yep. That was it. That was what I would do.
That quick. That easy.