Comfort Food (19 page)

Good for me.

“Just fucking listen to me!” My voice was stronger than it had ever been with him. I had nothing left to lose.

I wasn’t afraid of him anymore. I was only afraid of being without him.

I kept the candlestick raised. “Don’t you see how fucked up this is? You think it’s wrong to keep me? Well you should have thought about that shit before you took me! I’m your responsibility now. You created me. You made me this way. This is your fucking mess. If you suddenly care about morality, then don’t make me go. Let me stay. I’ll be your slave. I’ll be your whore. I’ll never fight you. I won’t disobey. Whatever you want, just don’t make me go back. Please. I can’t live in that world anymore. You know it’s true. I just want to be yours.”

Are you finished?

I nodded, deflated. He left me standing in the entryway, and when he returned he held the highest object of fear. A knife. He advanced, but I didn’t back away.

He gripped me by the throat and held me against the wall, the knife poised to strike. The cool blade was pressed underneath my chin. His eyes were hard and unrelenting.

“I don’t care. Do it. Kill me or keep me, but don’t you fucking dare throw me away again.” Then I added, “Please.”

I didn’t flinch or look away from his eyes. Finally, he flung the knife away and kissed me. His hands gripped my wrists tightly as he held them against the wall. His tongue delved deeper into my mouth, and I opened to him and submitted everything.

Then he stepped back from me and unzipped his pants before pushing me to my knees in front of him. I took his cock into my mouth without hesitation, sucking him until he came, and I swallowed.

Adrenaline buzzed through me like a living thing. I stayed on my knees at his feet looking up at him, waiting for his next order.

You’re going to be punished.

“For what?” For leaving him when he’d forced me to? For staying away so long? For coming back and making him face himself? The monster he was and the pitiable creature he’d turned me into.

For the disrespectful way you just spoke to me. If you stay, the rules aren’t changing.

I nodded, a hard lump forming in my throat. “Three weeks?” I asked. My voice was so small again.

It was almost as long as I’d been free. Three weeks was an unthinkable amount of time to spend in the bad cell.

You could leave.

I shook my head. It was only three weeks out of my entire life. I could make it.

“Do you still want me?”

If I didn’t, you wouldn’t have made it through the door.

I took his outstretched hand and followed him.

When we reached the cell, something passed between us. Perhaps it was the close bond we’d formed over the months coming back in full force, but it was like a telepathic link between us, and as I looked into his eyes, I could see the truth.

He’d never been sorry for taking me. He still wasn’t sorry. Not for one thing he’d done. It had been for his own sadistic pleasure that he’d made me make the choice.

Just as he’d forced me to choose to let him rape me or leave me in the cell forever. Just like he’d forced me to accept the riding crop, the whip, the cane, and everything else he’d ever introduced.

I’d just turned my back on any chance at freedom because he was never letting me go now. He smiled when he saw the realization on my face, and he turned to leave, the door sealing shut with deafening finality.

I had been free and I’d walked right back into my cage. I’d begged and fought to be let in, and the entire time I’d been playing his game exactly the way he wanted it played. I hadn’t convinced him to keep me. He’d always intended on me coming back to him. Just one more damning choice.

What the hell had I done? Was I truly this far gone? No textbook in existence could have prepared me for what I’d experienced.

I sat in the empty cell trying to think if the truth of it made a difference. Would I have come back if I’d been sure this was what he was doing?

The answer remained the same. Yes. No matter how desperately I wanted to, I couldn’t bring myself to hate him.

But it wasn’t love either. What we shared was deeper than love. It was a mad and unyielding obsession, and it was mutual. And the flames from it would likely kill one of us some day. Probably me. I couldn’t bring myself to care. I’d rather have this intensity with him than a hundred years of mediocrity with another.

I moved to my corner and waited. Minutes later the door opened as I knew it would, as if I’d called out to him with my mind to tell him I was sitting where I was supposed to be. But I knew the truth. His eyes had probably been glued to the video monitors from the moment he’d locked me back in here. He brought in my bathing supplies and fresh clothes.

“I’m on my period.”

I thought he might give me something, instead of making me go around naked, but he smiled and took the vile plain clothing away.

There was a time I would have questioned his smile, but our minds had worked to move in sync, thinking each other’s thoughts before the other had them. It was fitting that I should be reduced to this animalistic state once again. I’d been away too long in freedom, the ability to come and go as I pleased, to have privacy, to have modesty.

Now it was being stripped away from me all at once. But I don’t think he fully understood. He may have believed he knew, but he couldn’t possibly know what he’d unleashed within me. I was only free with him. He was the first person who’d seen me in every state imaginable and still wanted me. I’d never been so bare with anyone else.

I bathed and left my clothing by the door and went to sleep in my corner. It was still daylight I knew, early in the day in fact, but I needed a nap.

As I drifted off, I tried not to think about how time would all bleed together, the unsettling lack of knowledge about what day it was or what time it was, not knowing if the sun was in the sky or if it was the dead of night.

I dreamed of the good cell and the scented candles, the studio and old ballet records, the incense and rows upon rows of books. I dreamed of his face, his hands on my skin, his cock buried deep inside me while my unresisting body accepted each inch of him.

When my period was over, he brought me fresh clothes again. I didn’t try to fight or tempt him. I put them on and waited out my time. I didn’t want to make it four weeks.

Slowly the days were marked off. The chicken noodle soup came three times a day until I couldn’t stand the sight of it, until once again it was the vile punishment it had been intended as.

Finally, the three weeks were up, and he stepped into my cell. My heart thrummed with anticipation. I had sworn to myself I’d never give him any reason to lock me in the cell for three weeks, and I had broken that vow. Now I swore I would never be in the cell for four. I would never disobey or disrespect him again.

Even as I thought it, I knew it wasn’t true. I wondered how long it would be before I did something to send me back. I wondered if one day I’d be in the cell so long I’d lose my mind or forget what his face looked like. And I found that the second would be the worse punishment. I could handle being crazy if I could still look at him.

He held the blindfold out, and I stepped forward, allowing him to cover my eyes with the soft black fabric. I wondered if he’d ever let me roam the house freely, if it was something I could eventually earn. I would work up the nerve to ask him that someday, but not today.

Today, I allowed him to lead me out of the cell. My heart rate quickened as I heard the key code being punched in, first at the bad cell, and then at the door he’d brought me to. When he removed the blindfold, I knew this was where I’d find myself today.

The dungeon.

He approached me, but then backed away. Normally he’d done what he wanted, no communication but touch passing between us. He held my gaze, and then he signed.

Strip, slowly.

I’d been his willing toy for so many months, allowing him to play with me however he saw fit. I hadn’t seen myself as an active participant, not until now, when language finally broached our world together.

My fingers shook as I reached for the buttons of my top and undid them, slowly swaying to music I heard only in my head. Music he’d given me that I’d never heard until him. I stood naked, watching, waiting for his next command.

Do you want to be whipped?

The throbbing between my legs intensified as if he’d pushed a button. “Yes, Master.”

I looked down, suddenly shy and unsure. The fucked-up thing was that I did want him to whip me. I wanted him to do with me whatever would please him.

In two quick strides, he was in front of me. He gripped my chin painfully and forced me to meet his eyes. They were so stormy I couldn’t read the emotion in them. I felt for once the communication that had always flowed between us in silence had been shut down, broken through a more lazy form of speech.

You know I can’t talk to you if you don’t look at me.

“I’m sorry. It’s just so . . . strange. I . . . I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

He must have seen the fear in my eyes, that I was going back to be punished again for such a small offense.

I’m not putting you back in the cell, as long as you try to obey. You know that. I know you didn’t do it on purpose. It
is
strange.

I smiled and he smiled back. It was the smile that didn’t scare me, the one that made me feel inexplicably safe despite everything. He led me to the velvet bed and positioned me on my knees, locking the chains around my ankles. My stomach tightened as he scanned the row of whips and floggers before settling on one.

He was behind me now and everything felt normal again without words in the way. The whip cracked across my back, the pain searing deeper than I remembered, but it felt like something, and it was immeasurably better than the nothingness I’d felt when I was free and when I’d been in the bad cell.

He stopped when he drew blood, then his cock was inside me, pounding into me so hard I could barely catch my breath. I felt my muscles contract around him, and then wave after wave of mindless pleasure crested over me as I let the tears flow freely down my face.

His hands skimmed across my flesh, cupping my breasts, stroking my back where the blood was slowly pooling. His touch was like heroin in my veins, and I was a grateful addict.

EPILOGUE

Doctor Blake sat in her office with the worn and well-read letter clutched tightly in her aging hand. Donna Vargas sat across from her, blissfully calm in a drug-induced haze. The letter had arrived that morning. Mrs. Vargas had used up her old prescription and was there for more.

If not for the strong effects of the still-potent drugs, Mrs. Vargas would no doubt have blamed Doctor Blake, and Doctor Blake would have felt it well-deserved. She’d known the state the daughter, Emily, had been in, how precarious it was.

She stared at the words scrawled on the paper, not really seeing them. The script in Emily’s handwriting was obviously rushed, written in those last moments before she became just another statistic of one sort or another.

Like many doctors, she blamed herself. Knowing what she’d known, why hadn’t she just broken her own damned rule and given the poor girl drugs the first week when she’d asked for them? Anything that would make her stable enough not to do this. If only she’d had more time with her; they’d barely begun her therapy.

She read the letter again. It was probably the fifth time she’d read it, but she knew even if she’d read it a hundred times, Mrs. Vargas would have read it more:

I know this letter will come as a shock, but please try to understand. I should have stayed buried. The moment I saw my name on the tombstone, I should have understood it was true.

I’m dead to you, and you were right to bury me. At first I was angry about it, but now I understand. I understand the need to erase me, and that’s okay.

My only regret is that I came home. I don’t think there is any way I can explain this to make it easier on you, but I’ll try. You see, I’ve never been free. Not one day of my life. I’ve always given in to the wants and needs of those around me. My confidence has always been a social mask and my success as a motivational speaker was because my mask was just so damn convincing. At times, even to me.

But I’ve never followed my own will. What I wanted. It was always what you guys wanted. Or what society wanted. Or what college wanted. Or what anyone else who wasn’t me and came into my life wanted. I had almost fallen for it again. I almost did what you all wanted.

I almost took my pills like a good little girl, had my cathartic trauma moment, and put the pieces of my world back together so everyone could say how brave and good I was. Almost. But I couldn’t.

As I write this letter I can’t decide whether I’m acting from strength or weakness, but I know that I’m acting for the first time from my own will. Yes, I know that’s hard to accept. It wouldn’t be my will if that monster hadn’t taken me like he had, right?

You likely believe he’s bent and twisted me to his liking, and now I can’t get out of that mold. Perhaps. But I’ve been free for a month, and it sure as fuck doesn’t feel like freedom, just a larger cage.

I don’t see how pretending I’m free solves anything. I didn’t want to leave him. I know. Stockholm Syndrome. Blah blah blah. I know. I know it’s true, but I wasn’t prepared for what it would mean for me. You see, I don’t feel crazy. So I wonder who came up with these arbitrary labels. Who gets to decide?

Am I to be sane and miserable in a world of somebody else’s creation or am I to be crazy, and in my own strange way, free?

He made me leave him. I cried and begged not to go, but ultimately I went because it was what he wanted. But this is the one order from him I just can’t obey.

I suppose I could have done what I plan to do now, stayed and waited however long it took until he accepted me back. Until whatever guilt complex he may have developed, abated. Or until I passed whatever test he was giving.