Page 37 of Valentine's Slave

I know that Mom doesn’t understand all the technicalities of what I tell her, but she’s asking more to see how I’m doing, not to know exactly what I’m doing at work, so I don’t get into the details of search engine optimization, lest I bore her.

“How about you?” I ask. “Have you been going to Pilates?”

Mom doesn’t have a ton of money, but she does get a small pension, as well as Dad’s life insurance and a good part of his pension since he was a firefighter. Pilates has been her chosen activity for the past five years, and she gets to connect with other women as well. She does like to talk.

“Pilates.” She looks confused for a second and then goes on. “Yes, I know I should try. Your dad always tells me I need to exercise.”

A pang goes through me. This is the hardest part, watching my mother lose her grasp on reality. But Hailey told me that if Mom reverts to another timeline, we should just play along. Trying to tell her the truth will only confuse her.

“Exercise can be fun,” I say.

Dad had always been good at making exercise enjoyable, and he got me into it when I was only ten. Dad was great at exercising and helping people and fixing things, but not so great at listening, so we didn’t talk much. There was also another reason that I liked exercise so much . . . Hailey was so jealous when she found out about mycoregasms, since she couldn’t do them.

“There was an exercise I saw once,” Mom says. “Your sister said it was called a ‘burpee’. I thought it was the wildest thing.”

I chuckle. That was shortly after Malcolm was born. One day when Mom was burping him, she referred to it as ‘giving him a burpee’, and Hailey explained what a burpee was, and Mom didn’t get it until we demonstrated for her.

We talk for a while—about burpees, about Malcolm. Mom thinks he’s still a baby, but that’s okay. The point is to enjoy every minute with her, even if it makes my heart hurt. Seeing her like this, so innocent and in the wrong decade, it reminds me of how helpless we all are, to time, to our own destinies. It puts everything into perspective in a morbid but defining way.

When the cookies are baked, Mom makes her favourite chamomile tea, and we continue chatting.

Valentino is in the back of my mind the entire time, and I feel like I’m only half present with Mom. She doesn’t seem to notice, though, since she’s only half present with me. I wonder if Valentino is outside watching me, stalking me. But when I leave, there’s no sign of him. A strange feeling begins to grow in my stomach, something like excitement and desire mixed with dread. I have no idea what awaits me back at his dungeon. Well, lots of sex. But exactly how, I’m not sure.

When I arrive, Valentino is decked out in nothing but boxers and a very sexy apron that keeps slipping, revealing his chiselled pecs. He tells me my uniform is in the bedroom, and I find a nasty little piece of black lingerie with a matching apron, except much shorter and smaller, leaving me nearly completely exposed.

He has us cook the meal together, chopping veggies, cooking up a stir fry. I try at conversation several times, but he shuts me down, bringing it back to a sexy, teasing game, taking every opportunity to turn me on. And it works. By the end of the cooking session, I’m hungrier for him than for the food, and hefucks me on the counter, legs spread, aprons thrown onto the floor.

I feel that with every encounter, he tries to both bind me to him with his seductive ways and sexy skills, but also to scare me away by pushing me to my limits to see how far I’ll go before I break. Does he want me to break? Does he find pleasure in that, too? Are all the acts of chivalry just manipulation for his sadism? His mix of cozy and almost cruel still boggles my mind, and it’s a ping-pong game in my head between warm fuzzy feelings and the throbbing recognition of reality.

This is nothing but sex, my mind keeps reminding me. But what’s confusing is the little things, like when half an hour later, when he bends me over the kitchen table and fucks me hard, and I gasp, feeling his dick too deep, too much, he pauses.

“What happened?” His lips are at my ear, and I know I should just play it off like a good little slave and pretend like everything’s all right, even though it’s not. I don’t always like sex so deep, and sometimes, even from one day to the next, my body can respond in completely different ways. It was something that Shawn never understood, how I could love something one day and hate it the next, why his limited techniques didn’t always cut it for me, and how he couldn’t always repeat the same strategy.

“Um, it’s nothing,” I say, losing courage at the last second, adjusting myself against Valentino, trying to angle him so that it doesn’t hurt. It’s not pain that I feel, but an uncomfortable pressure when he plunges so deep and rough at this angle. Right now my body just doesn’t want to take it.

But Valentino pulls out of me, spinning me around so that I’m back against the wall, staring into his eyes. He lowers his face to my level, and I can see that he’s still breathing fast from all the fucking.

“Above all, I require honesty from my slave,” he says. “Now, my dirty little Valentine, tell me what happened.”

His words are smooth and direct, not reprimanding, but a shiver goes through me. He actually wants to know. He actually cares.

I hate that tears sting the back of my eyes, and I start to blink faster, hoping he won’t notice. He’ll probably think I’m crying from fear or pain, not because someone has actually paid attention to me and put my needs ahead of his dick. I take a shaking breath, trying to calm myself.

“I . . . didn’t like it,” I say slowly. I’m not used to saying how I feel, not with Shawn, not with my family, not with anyone.

“You didn’t like what?” Valentino’s tone is soft, and he looks at me earnestly, those black eyes blazing with just as much warmth as hunger. He has one hand propped against the wall beside my head, and he reaches out the other hand to draw a strand of hair back behind my ear.

Fuck, now I can’t stop my eyes from leaking. My tears always give me away. Hailey used to make fun of me for it since she was the queen of poker faces. I was an open book, and in order to be less readable, I stopped crying in public. I turned off my tears. And with that, I think I also turned off my emotions.

“Are you hurt?” Valentino asks, leaning closer, concern lighting his gaze, his hair dark and wild.

“No,” I say. “The angle was just a little . . . too deep, I think.”

I expect him to roll his eyes or get mad, to throw me back down onto the table and keep fucking because, after all, that’s what he paid for. But his eyes are soft with tenderness now, and he reaches forward and wraps his arms around me, drawing me against his chest in a hug.

I close my eyes against his beating heart and try again to calm my breathing, to get myself together.

“You know you can cry in front of me,” Valentino murmurs in my ear, still holding me tight. “I’ve already seen every part of youon the outside. There’s nothing wrong with being transparent about the inside, as well.”

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