Page 8 of Submissive Lies

I stopped cold, closing my eyes as I realized to whom the voice belonged.

Submissive Number Two.

What a perfect fucking metaphor for Ben. He screwed me over until he got caught, then fled without taking care of the one thing he absolutely should have. I’d thought him such a perfect Dom. The sound of her voice shattered that illusion in an instant, leaving me to feel even more humiliated at how gullible I’d been. Asshole. Fucking asshole. He’d bailed, and now I would have to clean up his mess. I turned and tiptoed back down the hallway. Coming up to the playroom door, I stopped and looked inside.

There she was, still suspended.

As I stepped into the room, her head snapped up. She twisted ever so slightly in the rigging. Her eyes were wide, looking at me with a just-was-in-subspace-but-now-possibly-facing-my-own-death stupor. For a moment, neither of us spoke, but we studied each other silently.

Her lips quivered. She took a gulp of air, then asked, “I… could you, umm… let me down? Please?”

I wanted to hate her. I really did. But even in that moment I understood it wasn’t her fault. I knew, at some instinctual level, that she didn’t have a fucking clue what was going on. What exactly had just happened here. No, this was all on Ben.

I said nothing as I crossed to the wall where the suspension ropes came together. I looked up at the lines, down to the cleat they were lashed to, and then to her.

“Okay.”

I pulled, taking up some of the tension. Gathering the lines together, I unwound them from the cleat and started lowering. I warned her, “Listen, I’m going to try to lower you slowly, but no guarantees…”

I could have been an ass. I could have let go. Let her fall. I didn’t. Being careful and going slow I got her down without issue. She came to rest on the floor of the playroom in a lump, still trussed up. Ben had prided himself on his ropework, and this Shibari was no different, so it took me some time to get her completely unbound. That gave us both time to talk.

“You know who I am?”

She nodded her head, eyes tracking my every movement. “Ben’s other sub.”

I grunted. “His other sub…”

She gave a suppressed yelp as I yanked on a knot. Maybe a little harder than was necessary.

“I’m guessing you didn’t know Ben lived with me?”

“Umm… he said that he had another play partner, but that you were both poly, and that you were out of town for a while and you wanted him to have fun….”

“Yeah, I’ll bet he did.”

There was silence for a while as I worked at the rope and got her arms free. Then I started working on the bindings crisscrossing her legs.

“That… that was a lie, wasn’t it?” Her voice was deflated recognition.

“Yeah, that was a lie.”

“Oh.”

As I finished untying the last of the rope, I gave her a condensed version of the relationship Ben and I had shared. At the end, she sat there, rubbing the marks on her legs, looking dazed and sad.

“I… I’m sorry. I didn’t know. That’s not what Ben told me when we first met.”

I nodded. “Yeah, I’ll bet it wasn’t.”

I found her clothes, scooping them up and handing them to her. As she dressed, she filled me in on the dynamic she had had with Ben. It seemed this wasn’t their first play session. Ben had met her at a munch, no doubt one he’d attended while I was away for work. He’d sold her a bill of goods on how we were a couple who had our own play partners, and that while we were committed to each other, when we were separated we could play with other people. ‘He said that was why he couldn’t be in another exclusive relationship.’

“This wasn’t my first time playing, so I really didn’t think anything of it.” Her eyes pleaded for understanding. “I’m really sorry. If I’d known…”

I made a dismissive motion with my hand. I understood what had happened here. It was a part of the lifestyle I knew a lot of people engaged in. Multiple partners. Ben had convinced her that our dynamic included that. I had nothing against nor judged others who engaged in it. But it was not—and never would be—a part of any dynamic I would be involved in. I had made that clear to Ben from day one.

“I understand,” I said gruffly. “Not your fault.”

Everything that Submissive Number Two—I didn’t remember her name, even if she told it to me at some point—had just told me should have enraged me even further. However, by that point I was feeling a sense of dislocation. Numbness. Ben had fucked me, and not in the fun way. He’d broken that most core concept of a D/s relationship: each partner must trust the other implicitly. What was clear the longer I’d listened to Ms. Number Two was that he’d broken that trust early on in our relationship. Violated that trust without much thought given to the consequences. I had made it clear to Ben from the get-go that I was monogamous. No one desiring multiple partners need apply. He had assured me he was of a like mind. That he would never think to be with anyone else while we were together. He was smooth, he was sincere, and the fucker played a well-run game. I never once felt the need to question him, never felt my trust misplaced, or suspected him capable of doing what he’d done.

---