Trust Me (Rough Love #3) (15 page)

She buried her head in her hands and bawled. Jesus, the fucking drama. It was so hard for her to admit when she’d been bad, when she’d done something wrong.

“I’m not going to punch you.” I touched her leg, trying to calm her. “I’m going to make this easy for you, okay? Listen to me. You’re not helping him. It’s not your job to save him from his past mistakes. You’re not seeing him again.”

“But he needs help. He seemed really upset, really conflicted.”

“He deserves to be conflicted for the things he did to you.” I narrowed my eyes. “It’s like you want to see him again. Like you want to become involved with him again. I don’t fucking understand.”

“I’m trying to exorcise my demons too,” she said. “I had a life before you, a very complicated one. I have feelings that don’t involve you. I know that’s hard for you to accept. Since I moved in here, my entire life, my emotions, my feelings, my friends, all of it has become this tiny little box that only has room for you.”

“You chose that. I warned you. You said you wanted that!”

“Simon is still sick, Price. He’s still struggling to stay sober. He needs me.”

“I need you,” I said, stubbornly clinging to my own guilt, my own past mistakes. “I need to protect you from being hurt by him again. I watched it happen once, and it sucked like hell. I’m not going through that again. No. You belong to me now. I get to decide. I get to protect you.”

The more I argued, the more she fought back. I liked her fighting spirit sometimes, but when she was fighting for her abusive ex-boyfriend, it fucking pissed me off.

“You’re smothering me,” she yelled. “You don’t want to protect me. You’re jealous of Simon just like you’re jealous of every other fucking man in the world because you’re such a fucking insecure wreck. You don’t trust me to be around any other human with a penis. Why? Jesus. It makes me hate you sometimes.”

I flicked a glance over her naked body. We hadn’t played hard in a while. There were no marks on her. Maybe I needed to leave a few marks to get her straightened out. “I think you better watch the way you talk to me,” I said. “You’re going to be punished for hiding your meeting with Simon. Don’t make me punish you for your manners too.”

“Fuck my manners. Fuck your rules and protocols and protective bullshit. You don’t love me, you don’t care about me. You haven’t changed at all. You still have no fucking heart underneath all your grasping, possessive, posturing bullsh—”

I stood before she could finish her sentence, and yanked her off the couch.

“Walk,” I said, turning her toward my bedroom. Toward the dungeon.

She started to resist, then thought better of it. Surely she understood she’d earned a punishment. If she’d decided to make it worse with more screeching and disrespect, that was her choice. Her misstep. Her own fucking mistake she’d have to live with.

“Please, don’t,” she said, trying to pull away from me. “Let me calm down first. I can’t. Please… Please, I’m so sorry.”

Nothing she said loosened my grip or slowed our inexorable progress toward the dungeon. I loved Chere. I loved her too much to let her lose her shit like this. I loved her too much to let her go backward, even if forward motion was about to cause her a whole lot of pain.

Surrender

O
h, shit, I’d
fucked up. The look in his eyes…

Shit, I was so scared. I resisted even though I knew I’d earned this. We had a dynamic to follow, a system of rules and expectations, and I’d broken every one of them. I felt awful and out of control, but still, I didn’t want this.

“Stop,” he said, halfway toward the bondage rack. “Stop fighting me. You’re going to get what you deserve. No more, no less.”

That’s what I was afraid of. Most of the time I loved coming to the dungeon with him. I loved the way he treated me like a sexual science experiment, a bundle of female nerves on which to practice pleasure and pain.

But I knew there wasn’t going to be any pleasure this evening. He got out the manacles, the ones I’d fashioned to his specifications, back when I had no clients and no prospects. He put them on my wrists in a quick, businesslike way, and hooked them to the chain and pulley system in the ceiling. At the push of a button, the chain moved upwards, and soon I was straining with my arms to the sky, barely able to dance around on my toes.

I felt horribly vulnerable in this position. It was hard to balance on the balls of my feet, and with my arms up out of the way, my entire body was exposed.
At least you’re not straddling the “bad girl” horse
, I thought. But I still felt pitiful and scared.

A set of nipple clamps came next, and shit, a clamp on my clitoris that bit hard into my sensitive flesh. The clamps were the heavy, painful kind that tightened when you moved, and I made whining sounds just to process the pain.

“Hush,” he said, slapping my ass. It wasn’t a playful slap. It was a hard, stinging slap that made me jump, which made the clamps tug, which made me cry out again. He shook his head and went for the gag I hated most in the world.

No
, I almost said.
No, no, no.
But I wasn’t allowed to talk in here, and he was angry enough. He forced my mouth open with his fingers when I started to sob, and shoved the hard rubber cock gag into my mouth. Fuck. I fucking hated being gagged and bound like this, and the punishment hadn’t even started. He buckled the gag behind my head as my clit and nipples throbbed. Sometimes wearing clamps made me feel like a sexual, erotic creature, but sometimes it just felt shitty and painful, and
owww
, I never wanted anything to touch my clit again.

He stood back and looked at me, and I made the saddest eyes I could. I felt sad. I felt fucking awful. I felt naked and endangered, while he was stern and perfect, still dressed in his designer sweater and pants. He took off his belt and doubled it over, and I braced for the first blow.

When I felt the stinging impact, I screamed behind the gag. This was punishment. It wasn’t supposed to feel good and it wasn’t supposed to be easy to take, so there was no warm up, just a hard, wicked strike across the ass. I pulled on the chain and bounced on my toes, and waited in dread for another blow.
Ow, ow, ow. Ah, God.
By the fifth blow, I was in tears. On the sixth, I tried to twist away, even though it was against the rules. He righted me and turned my face back to the wall.

“Don’t you fucking try to escape,” he said. “We’re just getting started.”

By the time he put aside the belt, I was a trembling, drooling, snotting mess of apology, but the paddle came next, an oval shaped instrument of torture that burned like a brand. Every time he smacked my ass, an almost unbearable sting would be followed by a deep ache. My nipples hurt, and each jump and jerk reminded me of the clamp on my clit. It was impossible not to squirm away when the pain was so hard and so sustained, but he only braced a hand at my waist and forced me to stand still while he paddled my ass with the other hand.

His closeness comforted me in some way, but it also made me more frantic, because now I was struggling against him and he was still hurting me, almost more than I could bear.

Through my cries and my drool, the cock gag remained fixed between my lips. In between blows, when he let me rest and suck air through my nose, I worried at the gag with my tongue, but I couldn’t push it out. I couldn’t take it out on my own. Only he could do that, and it involved so much loss of control that I was frantic with it.

At last he stopped, holding me while I heaved in my efforts to survive all the pain. The clamps came off, and then the manacles came off, so I could stretch my arms and rub the ache out of my shoulders. The gag stayed on, even though I begged with my eyes to be released.

But he wasn’t finished yet. I was hauled over to the bad girl horse, with the blunted triangular top. He made me straddle it and ordered me to keep my feet on the floor, even though that made the unforgiving ridge dig into my already hurting clit and pussy.

“Hands up,” he ordered, as I tried to push myself up off the horse and give my pussy some relief. “Lace your fingers behind your head and leave them there.”

He left and returned with a whip, the short, black, evil one he favored when he wanted to deliver pain on top of pain. He whipped my ass, my flanks, my back, my breasts, each stroke raising a pink, burning welt that felt too sharp to deal with. There was no rest in between, no time for me to concentrate on how much my pussy smarted as I jerked and jumped on the horse. A few times, my hands came down to shield my body. I was sorry afterward because he whipped me harder, until I put them back where they belonged.

Through all of this, he made me look at him. Every few blows, he’d stop and gaze into my eyes, and I understood why. I knew by now why he insisted on that rule. He was taking me as far as he could without breaking me. In some way it made me feel cherished, that he was being careful and closely monitoring me as he carried out this torture. In another way it made me feel like I was slowly going insane, that I was even allowing this to happen. Why didn’t I jump off the horse? Why didn’t I run?

I only wanted to help Simon. Why are you hurting me so bad?

But the hurt went on. He was hurting me for yelling at him, and hurting me for lying.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

There was no sex, not even a blowjob. I prayed for a blowjob. I would have given him the world’s most ardent and salacious blowjob if he would only stop, but no. I’d been punished before, but never this long and this hard, with no sex and no respite. My body heaved with sobs, not that I thought they might move him. I simply couldn’t hold them in. There was snot everywhere.

When I started to choke on the gag, he took it off and wiped my mouth, and made me lie face down on top of the padded bondage table. He cuffed my wrists, waist, and ankles so I couldn’t move. I gritted my teeth together so I wouldn’t start pleading
please, no, no, no more.
My whole body felt bruised and bloodied, even though I knew there wasn’t any blood. He was an expert at keeping hurt on the surface.

He flogged me with a heavy leather flogger all over my back, until everything hurt the maximum amount possible. Ass, shoulders, calves, thighs, back, everything burning, and then he turned me over and bound me again, and made everything on my front hurt. Breasts, hips, stomach, thighs. He made me spread my legs and brought the flogger down on my pussy in a fiery punishment that made me arch in agony.

I wept for mercy. I couldn’t talk, but I wept, and finally, when my pussy felt like one big center of throbbing pain, he put the flogger and everything else away, and let me rest.

I lay just as I was, arms bound over my head, waist bound, legs bound apart with my pussy on display. For all I knew, he might begin again. If he did, I’d have to accept it. That was our deal. I belonged to him, to cherish or to hurt, to nurture or destroy.

At the moment, I felt destroyed.

When he returned from putting everything away, he checked over me, touching all the places he’d hurt me. I knew he enjoyed examining the welts and bruises. He released me and made me stand while he inspected my back. Then, finally, after he’d touched and caressed all the marks, he pushed me to my knees to assuage the hunger my pain and suffering had created in him.

He was rock hard, straining at the front of his pants. When he undid his fly, his cock flopped out and whacked me in the face. It was something we might have laughed at in other circumstances. Now, I clutched at him and opened my mouth, and sucked him with frantic concentration, my eyes fixed on his face to make sure I was pleasing him.

Because when someone had just punished you that severely, you pretty much wanted to do whatever they demanded. As he pushed into my throat, yanking my hair, banging my tonsils over and over, I felt myself relax. My body still hurt, but my punishment was over, and I could take this violent blowjob if that’s what he wanted. I was his, absolutely, one hundred percent his to use, which I supposed was the outcome he’d hoped for after beating me for almost an hour.

He came in my throat with a growl, jamming himself into me as I choked and tried to swallow. As soon as he released me, I coughed and collapsed on the floor. I hurt everywhere. I didn’t want to move.

“Look at me,” he said, pulling me back to my knees.

I stared at him, biting my lip.
Please, no more punishment. Please, I feel like I’m about to die, and if you’re still angry with me…

“Who owns you?” he asked.

“You do,” I rasped through my sore throat. “You own me, Sir.”

“Who makes the rules in our relationship?”

“You, Sir.”

“I do, and I punish you when you break them. I punish you when you treat me with disrespect. You don’t get to sleep in my bed tonight. That’s a privilege for good slaves who obey and show respect.”

I pressed my face against his hand, but there was nothing to say. He wasn’t asking a question. He wasn’t asking my opinion. He was telling me I had to sleep alone tonight, in the guest room, the horrible room that made me feel conflicted and isolated. It pretty much meant the punishment was going to continue all night.

A few tears squeezed from my eyes, but when he led me out of the dungeon, I went to the guest room as I’d been told. He didn’t bother with a chastity belt. There was zero chance of me touching my clit after everything it had been through, and I was too depressed to feel sexy anyway. Orgasm denial was only fun when you wanted to orgasm. I would rather have died.

I took a shower even though the water pressure hurt my welted skin, because I needed to wash this day off me. After that, I crawled into bed, eager to find refuge in sleep. I still didn’t know what to do about Simon. I didn’t know if Price would forgive me. I’d reset our already negligible levels of trust back to zero. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Price and I had plenty of happy moments, but at times like these, when everything looked bleak and frightening, I would start to think,
I can’t do this anymore.
I liked the good, sexy pain we shared most nights, but the punishment pain slaughtered me. Not the marks on my body. Not the manacles and clamps and drool and snot and shame. I mean, those were bad, but what really killed me was the loneliness, the rejection, the feeling of failure, when all I ever wanted in life was to succeed at something and be proud of myself.