Dark Secret Love (5 page)

“Please—”

He loved to hear me beg.

“Please what, Sam?”

“Oh, god, Connor. You know.”

“Say it.”

Cruel, he was. I’d been rebuked. I’d been put down. I hated spelling out what I wanted. And Connor loved every torturous minute.

“I want to hear you say the words.” His fingers traced
lightly over my ribs, making me squirm and pull away laughing. As soon as I moved away he’d be on me, biting my bottom lip, holding me in place with his body, still fully clothed. His voice whiskey-soft and dark: “Tell me. Tell me what you need.”

My eyes down, my hair falling forward, unable to look at him, even though I knew he already knew. Even though I knew he didn’t think I was broken, he didn’t think I was damaged goods. “Spank me, Connor.”

And he’d flip me over his lap and give my ass the lightest little patty-cake spanking. “Like this?”

I’d know better than to laugh, because all hell would break loose if I didn’t take him seriously. I’d know to turn my head to stare up at him over my shoulder, to meet his eyes and say, “No, Connor,” my voice a whisper. “Please, Connor. Spank me for real.”

And, Christ, I would feel his cock grow even harder as he’d hold me in place, getting ready for the first part of the evening’s punishment.

Sometimes he bent me over the hood of his car and striped me with his belt, taking the worn leather off my own waist first, his hands so rough, undoing the buckle, sliding the old brown leather free. Sometimes he talked to me while we fucked, his mouth pressed to my ear, saying the things he knew about me, things I tried to hide from the world. “Such a sweet girl,” he’d say, “That’s what everyone thinks. Right? But I could tell. From the way you walked. From the way you looked at me under those dark lashes, stared at me while you drank your gin.”

I always wondered how he had known. Can Doms sniff out a sub at twenty feet, like police dogs smelling for drugs? L.A. is a playground for the world’s most beautiful women. And Connor chose me. That’s how I felt when he
took me out to Griffith Park, pushed me firmly against a tree, and whipped me before taking my ass.

He chose me.

It made the job search less painful. It made the fact that Byron still would not let me into the house to collect my belongings more bearable. Connor made me whole. I was used to sleeping alone on a sofa, so that part of the equation didn’t matter. Lois and her two roommates actually spoke to me, which created a far friendlier environment than the silent treatment my world had become at home.

And then Connor arrived at Lois’s early one evening with the announcement that Byron had gotten him fired from the bar. (Jody was part owner of the building, and he had pull.) Connor was more than a bartender. He was a model. But the lack of a steady check was enough to make him reevaluate his world. Now, he told me, he’d had enough of L.A., and he was moving back home to Georgia. Did I want to go with him?

Georgia.

I looked out the window, at the fading light turning the bougainvillea a gold-tipped violet. I looked at Connor, with his blonde hair falling into his face, his clear blue eyes, his “I’m gonna fuck you in two minutes” expression. And I shook my head.

“Be ready for me,” Connor said over the phone. “I’ll be over in ten.”

“Ready?” my voice trailed upward, making a question of the single word, while my mind raced. Ready. I already knew what that meant. Connor had considered our last two weeks together as a sort of sexual boot camp. He spent his days packing boxes of belongings to ship home, saying goodbye to friends, tying up loose ends.

He spent his nights tying up loose ends, too. Pulling the ends of loose scarves until they tightened securely around my wrists. Fastening a blindfold over my eyes, capturing my ankles with his leather belt. He was determined to educate me, to make my fantasies come true. We took our opportunities wherever we could find them. This was our last weekend together, and we finally had a true place to play. All three roommates were gone until Monday—Lois to Santa Barbara, Nathan to Vegas, Garrett to San Francisco.

Connor and I had the place to ourselves.

The night before, he’d surprised me with a bag of supplies from a local sex toy store: a red-and-black paddle, a soft purple suede flogger, a set of silver cuffs. And there were more gifts, ones he didn’t let me open yet. He hadn’t used any on me. But he’d watched as I’d unwrapped each new toy, and when I looked up at him, he cocked a blond eyebrow at me and said, “Tomorrow night, you won’t have to be quiet.”

I knew what that meant. I was always quiet. Practically silent. Connor had been trying to get me to open up, to feel comfortable enough to let loose. The most I’d managed so far was a husky moan. I’d never been a screamer. I internalized everything. Tears might streak my cheeks, but I would not cry out. I could not. Connor had plans to change that.

While I waited for him, I paced the apartment, clad in an outfit we’d bought together: a short black-and-white plaid skirt, silky black T-shirt, fishnet stockings, knee-high Docs. I walked into Lois’s room, where I’d set out all the toys Connor had given me. Then I paced again. He’d used his belt on me, but never a paddle. I stroked the flat side, tentatively touched the wooden handle. It was in my thoughts to try the thing on myself, to see what the pain would feel like, when I heard Connor knock.

Feeling guilty for no reason, I hurried to the front door and let him in. He had flowers with him. And a crop.

Jesus.

He looked me over, head to toe, then nodded his approval. The flowers were left to die a slow death on the cracked blue Formica kitchen counter. There wasn’t even time for filling a wine bottle with water. Connor grabbed my wrist and led me back to Lois’s room, a girly
boudoir with pink walls and a brass bed. She had angels on her dresser and her nightstand, and they looked odd as background to the various sex toys. Gargoyles would have made more sense.

Connor sat on the edge of the bed and looked at me. I knew what to do. I understood his expressions by now, could practically read his thoughts, but the crop kept me from coming forward. The way it leaned against the dresser made me want to run and hide. Not because I didn’t want to feel the sting, but because I did—and that scared me to death. I’d confessed all of my secrets to Connor over our months together. I’d told him every little fucked-up fantasy I’d ever had. I couldn’t hide from my truth, but I had a difficult time facing the reality head-on. Be careful what you wish for.

“Get the paddle,” he said. My legs threatened to give out as I walked to the nightstand and gripped the new toy. “Over my legs, girl. Now.”

I bent myself into the proper position, felt his warm hand lifting my tiny skirt, felt him watching me. He pressed the paddle against my panty-clad ass, letting me feel the weight before he landed the first blow. I sucked in my breath, but remained silent. The sting was different from the belt, but not worse. He began spanking me more rapidly, pausing only to pull my black satin bikinis down my thighs, leaving them on me, but baring my ass. The pain intensified immediately, and tears wet my eyes, but I still didn’t cry out. I wasn’t trying to test him. This wasn’t a game. I didn’t know how to do what he wanted. Not without sounding phony. Not without being fake.

“What did you think about today?” he asked, taking a break to pull my panties off completely and then herd me to the full-length mirror on the back of Lois’s door,
to show me my scarlet rear cheeks. He held my skirt up for me, so I could see, and he grinned at his handiwork, clearly pleased.

“This,” I said. I’d gotten a temp job in an office on Wilshire, and my day had been busy, but every time I’d had a breather, I’d thought of Connor and his bag of toys.

“And this?” he queried, cupping my bare pussy with his hand and giving me a stern look, no sign of a smile now.

I wanted to melt into nothing. Disappear into a silver mist. Over one midnight confession, I’d asked him if he’d spank me … and then, unable to actually voice the request, I had simply put his hand over the front of my panties. “Spank me here …?”

For some inexplicable reason, I was always waiting for the moment when I’d go too far. When he’d give me the disgusted look that Byron had shot me after my drunken night of spilling secrets. I didn’t realize that Connor’s own fantasies were darker than my own, went farther than I’d dare to dream.

He’d laughed, not mean, not cruel, but still, he’d laughed at me. As if it went without saying that he’d do what I asked. “Sam,” he said softly, “I have no problem punishing your pussy.”

Ah, fuck me—

He carried me back to the bed, spread me out, and tied me to Lois’s bed frame like the bondage pro he was. He cut my skirt off, cut my T-shirt away, undid my boots and pulled them off, then ran his fingertips over the shaved skin of my pussy. I had only my thigh-high fishnets on now. Nothing to protect me.

“You know you’re a bad girl,” he said, “don’t you?”

I nodded, then immediately whispered, “Yes, Connor.”

“And you know tonight I’m going to make you scream.”

Tears started running down my cheeks, but I managed to say, “Yes, Connor.”

He reached for the violet suede flogger and then he looked at me fiercely and said, “And you know you need this.”

I did. I knew it. I’d known it for years.

“Tell me why.”

I pleaded with my eyes. I couldn’t. I didn’t know.

“Try.”

“Because—” was all I could say. “Because.”

The flogger was light, a gentle caress at first. And then the weapon began to sting, the many tails landing faster on my tender skin. I closed my eyes and clenched my fists. But it wasn’t until Connor dropped that soft, sweet toy, replacing it with the very lip of his leather belt, again and again on my pussy, putting power behind the blows, that I started to give him what he wanted. I could hear the wetness as the leather connected, and I could feel the lake of juices under my ass, and I started to cry for real.

“Open your eyes,” Connor insisted.

My eyelids fluttered, and he doubled the belt and landed a blow on my upper thighs that made me gasp.

“Don’t test me, girl,” he said, not a faux threat. “You obey when I give a command.”

He did what he said. He punished me between my legs until I came, crying out so loudly, repeating his name over and over like a mantra, knowing that it didn’t matter if he was leaving. Tonight, I was his.

I mentioned that snapshot I have of Connor: black jeans, no shirt, after a night of no sleep. I took the picture myself.
I think we spent nearly forty-eight hours in bed, but that photo is from a two-AM run for coffee, the two of us sex-drenched and half naked as he headed to the closest drive-through. I had his shirt on. That’s why his chest was bare. His shirt and my boots, and nothing else. He has that picture of me.

At some point during the weekend, he introduced me to the crop, and the weapon was as mean and frightening as I’d thought it would be. Later still, he grabbed clothespins from the bathroom where Lois used them to fasten her stockings to the twine strung across the shower. Connor had completely different uses for them. Oh, Christ, did he. I was humble and quiet when we were out of bed, as loud as he wanted me to be when we were on that queen-sized mattress. He’d broken that inhibition of mine, demolished my reservations to nothing.

On Sunday night, his last night in town, Connor took me up to the Sunset Strip Tattoo parlor and explained to the man behind the counter exactly what he wanted. As if he were the proprietor, Connor led me to the back room and lowered my jeans, and I dropped my chin to my chest, mortified, not only because Connor was baring my ass to strangers but because I sported bruises from when his silver buckle had caught my skin, magenta stripes from his belt, those fine thin welts from his crop. On a fair space of skin on my right hip (had Connor intentionally left that patch alone?), the tattoo artist transferred the cherries that Connor had chosen for me. Connor held my hands in his, and I looked into his eyes and stayed totally still. This was not my first tattoo, but it was the first one given to me.

“I can tell she’s a naughty girl,” the man said casually,
as we got ready to leave. “But keep that bandage on for at least two hours, and then rub lotion in.”

We fucked one last time on Lois’s bed that night. We fucked until dawn, when Connor took off the bandage and touched me so softly, so tenderly, that it made me shake more powerfully than anything else we’d done. I’d taken pain for him. I’d been marked for him. I’d done everything I set out to do.

I’m pathetic at goodbyes. Connor packed up his Chevy as the first golden light hit Hollywood. I remember the scent of the morning dew on the concrete sidewalk, the chill in the air as he gave me one final kiss … and his leather belt.

As I watched him drive away, tears streaked my face.

Should I have gone?

I don’t know.

We didn’t have love. We had lust. And lust is enough for midnight fuck sessions and X-rated fairy-tale fantasies, but it wasn’t enough for me to move to Georgia. I slid his belt through the loops of my jeans and headed back into the triplex.