Dark Secret Love (15 page)

“You’re testing your boundaries,” he said, and his eyes unfroze for a second as he regarded me. “That makes sense. Something every good sub knows to do. So we’ll start with your first real lesson. Your lesson on how to behave for me.” He touched my face lightly, tracing over the ridge of my cheekbones. “I’m only sorry it had to be tonight.”

Out on the balcony, while waiting for Jack to rescue me, I’d had a fantasy. I’d seen myself on my knees, undoing Jack’s pants, opening the zipper, releasing his cock. I’d imagined blowing him, the cool night air around us, my wet mouth on his naked skin.

Now I was bound to his bed, and pleasure looked a long way off.

Jack regarded me with his stark blue gaze, reminding me for a second of blue-eyed Brock, my drug-dealer boyfriend with the stolen Harleys. Jack appeared to be an upscale version. As cold. As tough. (But if Brock had been in a condo like this, he would have been casing the joint, not living in it.)

“We’re going to play a game,” Jack said, and a shiver ran through me, although the room was comfortably warm. “I’m going to ask you a question, and you’re going to respond.” He shot me a warning look, “If you’d behaved correctly outside, I’d be fucking you right now. Remember that.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“If I accept your response, I’ll give you a pass. Otherwise …” he hesitated, head tilted as he stared at my body. “Otherwise, Samantha, why don’t you tell me what’s going to happen?”

I understood that this wasn’t really a game. And I also understood that we were already playing.

“You’re going to punish me.”

His smile was as cold as ice chips floating in a chilled martini.

“Bravo, baby. See how easy this is?”

I took a deep breath. This wasn’t easy at all. I wished I had my clothes back on. Even that filmy sundress would have offered me some semblance of protection. But really, I wished I had on jeans, a well-worn denim suit of armor.

Jack sat on the corner of the bed. He ran his fingertips along the soles of my feet, and I tensed and tried not to laugh. Laughter seemed inappropriate for the seriousness of the situation.

“I want you to tell me a secret,” he said. “Something I couldn’t possibly guess about you. Something you’ve never told anyone.” He glanced at the clock on his nightstand, an antique-looking silver clock. “You’ve got one minute.”

I didn’t need the ticking of the second hand to count the sixty beats. My heart did it for me. My life didn’t flash before my eyes. But my most shameful moments did.

Tick tick tick.

And then, before he could prompt me, I said, “I was born pigeon-toed.”

“What does that mean?”

“My feet pointed in. You can see it even in baby pictures. And as I got older, the problem became more pronounced. If I was sitting in a chair with my legs
dangling down, my toes naturally pointed toward each other. I walked on time, with no problem, but while most kids’ feet go straight, mine angled towards each other.”

He didn’t seem to know where I was going with this.

“The cure, at the time anyway, was to take little shoes and attach them to a flat metal bar that was about a foot long. The shoes would be fixed at an outward angle, pointing away from each other. At night, I’d wear this bar. If I slept on my back, my feet were pointed outward and upward, to the ceiling. If I slept face down, the shoes would keep my feet a bit off the mattress. Side sleeping was impossible, because my legs would be spread a foot apart and held that way.”

“Early bondage?” he asked, and I saw his eyes gleam.

“I don’t know why I thought of that,” I said, “but I hated the thing. It was awkward and uncomfortable, and if I had to go to the bathroom, I had to call for help. The shoes were always saddle shoes, and I have an aversion to them to this day.”

“You walk fine now.”

I shrugged. “Yeah. It worked.”

He liked this secret. I could tell. It was more shameful for me than I let on. When I was young, I had a difficult time running straight. Couldn’t kick right for soccer. Hid during P.E. And once another kid on the schoolyard had said I was retarded because of the way my feet pointed. I worked like hell to get over that.

“Another one.”

I licked my lips and thought hard.

“Thirty seconds this time,” he said.

“I’ve never come to pretty things.”

“What do you mean?”

I must have turned neon pink. I looked at him, then
looked down, away, around the room—anywhere else. “You’re supposed to come to beautiful things. To people kissing. To Jake Ryan giving you a birthday cake on your sweet sixteen. That’s never worked for me.”

Jack tilted my chin toward him and I saw that he was smiling. “And you feel bad about that.”

“Of course.” Couldn’t he tell?

“You’re still there, aren’t you?”

I didn’t know what he meant.

“The shame is so much a part of you that you can’t separate yourself from it. You know what you want, and what you like, and yet you linked yourself for years to someone who despised you for those very desires. The shame of what you wanted made you stay.”

There was no response to that. I’d told him about Byron at dinner, although I’d been so drunk, I couldn’t remember exactly what I’d said or how much I’d confessed.

“All right,” Jack said. “Another secret. Ten seconds.”

My thoughts whirled. I had no idea what to say. Jack was counting. Backwards. I looked at him, helpless, but he didn’t stop. He slowly counted down to one, then reached into the drawer of the bedside table and withdrew a handful of wooden clothespins. I sucked in my breath as he clipped two onto my naked pussy lips, and I could feel how turned on I was when his fingertips gently brushed my clit. I was beyond wet. Jack didn’t comment on my arousal, he simply gave me a little half-smile, admiring his handiwork.

“Another secret,” he demanded. I’d thought I was off the hook now that he had started playing with pain. But no.

“I cheated on my ex.”

“You told me that at dinner.”

“I told you I had an affair with Connor. But I cheated on him three times—with three different men. Starting six months before we were even engaged.”

“Tell me about each lover.”

I could confess this easily. “The first was when Byron was out of town. I went out with a friend I’ve known since I was sixteen. An actor named Van. I met him in New York while I was on vacation in high school, and we both moved to L.A. the same year. We’d messed around before every so often, but we never were actually unattached at the same time. And we’d never gone all the way. That night we went for it.”

“Where?”

Even with the clips in place, I couldn’t help but smile because the scene was romantic. “We went to dinner, then started kissing, then drove to some secluded cul-de-sac and fucked outside his car. We were underneath a blossoming cherry tree, and white petals fell down on us the whole time.”

“Sweet,” he said sarcastically. “Did you come?”

“No.”

“Did you ever come with Byron?”

“Once.”

“In three years?”

I nodded.

“Did he know that?”

“No. I faked it. Then we stopped having sex at all.”

“Second affair?”

“Underwear model who worked at a restaurant I liked. We did it twice, at his house. He challenged me to seduce him, and I did.”

“Was he kinky?”

I shook my head.

“Is that what you were looking for?”

“I was looking for something.”

“Last one was Connor?”

I nodded.

“How many men have you been with in all?”

“I don’t know.”

“Better count quickly, kid, you have twenty seconds.” I watched him, now, as he headed toward a shellacked black cabinet in the corner of the room. When he opened it, his body blocked the interior, so I couldn’t see what he was getting. My mind reeled.

Brock, in high school

Robert, in college

Denny, the pervert on my floor who seemed to have memorized my monthly cycles

Jarred and Mark (my first ménage)

Byron

Joe, a boy I’d met while out with Byron before we were exclusive

Charlie (and Ava)

Van

Cole

Connor

Garrett

Nate

I confessed the list quickly, giving a tiny bit of information about each man.

“How did you pick up a boy while you were out on a date?”

“Byron asked me to a Dead show. We went with this other couple. And the three of them kept going on beer runs and making fun of the fact that I couldn’t drink yet.
Not legally, anyway. They thought it was hysterical for some reason. Byron was twenty-six, his friend Beau was thirtysomething, and Beau’s girlfriend was in her late twenties. They kept offering me juice. Even Byron. So at one point, this cute guy in front of me turned around to commiserate with me. He’d been listening. We started talking, and at the end of the evening he slipped me his card.

“Did Byron see?”

“Yeah. He said something about it in the car, something about how poorly I had acted on a date, and I said I didn’t think I was on a date, since he was gone nearly the whole time.”

Jack shook his head in disbelief. “I would have paddled you right there—”

“At the concert?”

“In the seat. I would have stripped your panties off, bared your ass, and spanked the shit out of you.”

I could imagine the scene.

“What did Byron do?”

“Not that,” I said, stating the obvious. “He didn’t call for a week, and I basically moved in with Joe. But that was a tiny fling, over practically before it started, and Byron and I picked back up.”

“Slut,” Jack said. “Have you always been a slut?”

I didn’t know how to answer that. I’d only been with Brock in high school. Most of my friends were far more experienced. And in college, I watched other girls do different frat guys each weekend, while I avoided the whole scene. I’d never thought of myself as a slut.

Jack seemed to be focused on my list, and I wondered whether he was memorizing my history. Learning everything he could about me. He was showing so much more
interest in me than anyone I had known in the past. Asking questions. Challenging my answers.

Suddenly, I felt a clothespin directly on my clit, and my breath started to come faster. I had been lost in my thoughts and I hadn’t been paying attention to Jack.

“I asked you a question,” he said. “We’ve already gone over this rule.”

What had he asked? Had I always been a slut? It was a trick question. Like “When did you stop beating your wife?”

“I don’t—” I stammered, confused as to what he wanted.

“You don’t think you’re a slut? You’re twenty-two and you’ve been with thirteen men. Most of them within the last four years.”

The blush on my cheeks deepened, but I was having a difficult time staying focused. Pulses of pain radiated through my body.

“So—” Jack prompted.

“I don’t know,” I whispered. “I was looking …”

“For what?”

I could answer this honestly. “For what I had with Brock. For what I had in high school.”

“And what was that?”

“A man who knew everything I wanted. Who understood. A man who would …”

“Take care of you?”

I nodded. “Yes. Yes, Sir.”

The clips were off with a wave of his fingers, and suddenly he had a flogger in his hand. With a gentle swing, he landed the first blow, softly, between my thighs. Then harder, and harder, gradually building in intensity. In pressure. In pain.

“And the whole time, you’ve had these warring emotions within you,” Jack said, not asking. “You’ve been looking for what you need, and you’ve been telling yourself simultaneously that you don’t need it at all.”

I turned my head to the side, embarrassed at the fact that my hips had risen up to meet the flogger, that my body responded so automatically to the combination of pleasure and pain.

“Is that so?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“But what’s the truth, Samantha? What’s the real truth?”

“Nothing else works,” I told him, somehow knowing now what he wanted to hear. “I can’t … I don’t … It has to be like this …”

Jack nodded. “And I’m going to make you say that over and over until it sinks in. Until you finally get it.” The whipping picked up again, those little strands of suede, of leather landing on my pussy lips—and between them—meeting wetness, meeting swollen skin. Jack was punishing me for failing him, but was confusing me with the pleasure it brought. He was giving me a reward after all.

“Tell me what you need, Samantha. Tell me what you know you deserve.”

I am such an accepting person when it comes to what other people want. Their fetishes. Their desires. And yet, when I turn inward, when I question myself, the shame covers me like deep water. It holds me down.

Tears streaked my cheeks now. And not from the flogger. I stared at Jack and saw him watching intently, waiting for me to answer.

“Samantha—”

“You have to make it hurt,” I said, my voice low.
“I don’t feel it otherwise. I can’t feel it.” Was that clear enough? Would he accept the answer?

No.

“What? What can’t you feel?”

“The pleasure. Pain has to come first. I have to take it. Earn it …”