My big leather sofa was still kept in there (it didn’t really fit anywhere else) and I slumped onto it, firing up the machine to get lost in another world for a few hours.

  The pizza slowly went cold, I didn’t notice time passing, then I heard Will struggling up the stairs. I knew if I offered him help he wouldn’t take it so I let him do it himself while I finished off the level of my game. If I waited for about twenty minutes he’d be in bed, pretending to be asleep when I followed him in there.

  We hadn’t discussed the fact that he was ignoring me and completely avoiding any kind of interaction as a couple. He didn’t hold me when we slept, and in the morning when I woke up he was already up and out of our room.

  .

  I was incredibly lonely, and it felt like all my attempts at intimacy resulted in Will pushing me further away. Even the thought of suggesting a session seemed ludicrous, though I was starting to crave the lightness and freedom that came with a couple of hours in the playroom.

  I missed him.

  All of the things that I had started to take for granted had disappeared, forcing me to accept that I could only see them in their absence. Things like a casual arm around my shoulders when we watched TV, or cooking together, or laughing.

  We spent Christmas with his family, like we did every year, although it was fairly subdued. Both Will and I were still taking a lot of painkillers, enough to mean that we didn’t drink at all. If his parents noticed that we were so distant from each other they didn’t mention it, although our poor behavior was discarded as being due to the pain. I let them think whatever they wanted.

  I hadn’t laughed in weeks. Not with Will. When I forced myself to think back, I had barely seen him smile.

  And then I reached my breaking point.

  On a Saturday afternoon, he was working again. I had gone grocery shopping with Cara while he worked. The restrictions that had been forced on me by my physical injuries had allowed me to get closer to Will’s mother, who often insisted on being around to help.

  She helped carry the bags back into the house and slipped into the living room to give her son a quick kiss before stealing back out into the afternoon.

  “Please talk to me,” I said, sitting on the coffee table next to a pile of Will’s paperwork.

  “Not now, Jesse, please,” he sighed. “I’m busy.”

  “You’re always busy,” I snapped.

  He looked at me for a long moment, then pushed his laptop away. “Okay,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

  “This is bullshit, Will,” I said and tried to keep the accusation from my voice. “I need you. You know the type of things that I need, and I’m trying to cope and I can’t….”

  Will sighed again and reached for my hand. “I’m sorry, I know I need to fix this.”

  “Take me upstairs,” I said desperately. “All the way upstairs.”

  He shook his head. “No. I’m sorry, Jesse, I can’t, I just can’t….”

  “What?” I said, taking his other hand in mine.

  “I can’t hurt you.”

  “Why not?” I demanded.

  “I can’t cause you any more pain.”

  “It’s different pain. It’s good pain.”

  His eyes held so much anguish I couldn’t argue any more. “Please, Jesse.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Being your boyfriend and being your Dom are two things that are too closely tied to each other,” Will said. “I don’t know how to separate them. I don’t want to… no, I don’t think I can be that for you at the moment, and I know you need it. So it shouldn’t be a problem if you need to go to someone else for what I can’t give you, but fuck, Jesse, thought of you kneeling for someone else makes me sick.”

  “I don’t want to kneel for anyone else,” I said dully. “I didn’t even think that was an option.”

  “Good,” he said, and the desperation in his voice was crystal clear. “But you need to submit to someone, to something.”

  I couldn’t deny that. I couldn’t deny that part of me. It was an ingrained part of me, something that had taken me a long time to embrace. Looking at him, I shrugged helplessly. “I can try and do without it.”

  “We don’t know what’ll happen if you do that.”

  “Will you be there if I fail?” I asked him in a small voice.

  “I don’t know how you can fail,” he said and opened his arms to me for what felt like the first time in weeks. I fell into them before he spoke again. “Leaving you to work it out for yourself is stupid and irresponsible of me. You should go back to Laura.”

  “Laura doesn’t want me.” I laughed but the sound was hollow. “She has Maddie now. And I don’t want to be with a woman.”

  “That’s a lie and you know it.”

  “Not in that context,” I argued.

  Will’s fingers tangled through my hair. “Try it,” he begged. “Let her do what I can’t. For me. For us.”

  Chapter 9

  Laura’s playroom was small but well stocked, located in the space above her garage. There was a small entrance hall and a heavy wooden door that concealed most of the sound from the outside world.

  My routine here was rusty, but following it gave me a sense of purpose, so I did, stripping out of my clothes and leaving them, and my inhibitions, in the hallway. The playroom had changed since I had been in there last, and I wanted to go and poke around, see what new toys she’d acquired in the time that Maddie had been her sub.

  But that was highly disrespectful, so I found a spot on the floor that felt right to me and knelt.

  Even though I’d not seen her at all on my way in, Laura joined me in the room within moments. With a crop in her hand, she looked imposing in long shiny PVC pants, a red lace tank, and blood-red shoes. Her hair was tied back from her face in a simple knot, and I wondered why I didn’t find her more attractive.

  With the crop leading the session, I took her instructions as she led me through a series of positions, and she certainly wasn’t light with her corrections when they came.

  When she instructed me to rise and position myself over her spanking bench, I took a deep breath and decided to go with my gut. “Red, Ma’am.”

  Her fingers were soft as they ran through my hair. “I know, Jesse. I know. Get dressed and meet me in the house, please?”

  I nodded, feeling like I was on the verge of tears again. For someone who wasn’t prone to great displays of emotion, I sure got upset quickly these days.

  Laura left first, and I took a moment to compose myself, then slowly got to my feet and dressed.

  Back in the house, Maddie was waiting for me with a cup of coffee. “Laura is in the living room,” she said softly. “I can keep the girls out for now if you like.”

  “Yeah,” I started, then cleared my throat. “Yeah. Thanks.”

  She nodded and gave me a tentative smile.

  I wrapped my fingers around the white ceramic, warming them when I hadn’t realized they were cold. Laura was indeed waiting for me in her living room, holding an identical mug, her feet tucked up underneath her in a wide armchair.

  “Sit down, Jesse,” she said, indicating the sofa next to her.

  “I’d prefer to stand. Or sit on the floor.”

  She sighed heavily. “Cut the crap, Jess. Sit the fuck down.”

  I sat, uncomfortably, on the edge of the sofa.

  “You never had any intention of going through with that session,” I said, trying to keep the accusation out of my voice.

  “No,” she said, her voice even.

  “Then why did you even take me out there?”

  She sipped her coffee contemplatively. “Because you needed to realize for yourself that you don’t need submission, you need Will.”

  I started to protest, but she held up her hand.

  “You need Will,” she repeated. “And since you sometimes need to be reminded of this fact, like we all do, from time to time, I thought I’d hammer the point home in a wholly unsubtle way.”

  “I also need to submit to Will,” I argued.

  Laura nodded. “I know. You need to get back on track, you need to make changes. The two of you need to work this out together.”

  I nodded as she hammered the point even further. “I know, Laura, I know.”

  “Any ideas just how you’re going to do that?”

  “No,” I retorted.

  “Didn’t think so. Good job I do then, hmm?”

  Two weeks later, Will and I stood at the doorway to a shrink’s office. I wanted to hold his hand, but I wanted to appear as an adult, independent of my relationship. That, and we had been arguing again.

  The plaque on the door read Dr. Amanda Smith.

  According to Laura, Dr. Smith was a woman in her fifties who had, for the past ten years, periodically taken on patients who were members of the D/s community. Her association had started by accident when she had met a woman who was a submissive and had been beaten almost to death by her Dominant.

  The case had gone to court, and she had served on the panel for the prosecution. Laura claimed it had given her an insight into our community that very few mental health professionals could claim to have. We had been assured that this woman would not judge us.

  Dr. Amanda Smith was short and had elegantly styled hair. She wore a cream blouse, a pair of tailored gray wool pants, and a string of pearls at her throat. I decided immediately that I could not tell her about my desires to be tied up and fucked in the ass and that Laura needed to be shot.

  “Good afternoon,” she said in a warm voice. “Please, have a seat.”

  We sat.

  “There’s no need to look so nervous. I’ve been doing this for a long time. I’m Dr. Smith.”

  I accepted her handshake, introduced Will and myself.

  “So. Laura asked me if I would see you both for a few sessions to try and work through some issues you’ve had since a car accident, is that right?”

  “Yes,” I said softly.

  “Okay,” she said. “Talk me through what happened.”

  We shared the story, filling in each other’s spaces as had become natural to us over the course of our relationship. Even while we were mad at each other. Even while I couldn’t quite say why. When we were done, Dr Smith carefully scanned the notes she had made while we were talking.

  “Well, firstly, I want to reassure you both that your reactions to the accident are perfectly normal.”

  My head snapped up to meet her steady gaze.

  “Honestly, Jesse. I understand that you are having problems in the two distinct sides of your relationship, and I would like to reassure you that I have experience in counseling both.”

  “You’re happy for us to talk about our D/s relationship with you?” Will asked.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Oh.”

  She smiled and folded her hands over her lap. “Will, in the past ten years or so, I’ve met with well over twenty-five people from the Seattle and Vancouver BDSM communities. That’s in addition to the regular relationship counseling I do. Compared to some of my esteemed colleagues, I assure you I have a good grasp of the type of people who enter into domination and submission relationships.”

  “I just,” Will started. “I can’t hurt him any more. Not since the accident, not since….”

  “Do you feel responsible for the accident?” Dr. Smith asked.

  “I am responsible for the accident,” he corrected her, wringing his hands.

  She nodded calmly. “Jesse, do you blame Will for what happened?”

  “No,” I said. “Not at all. It wasn’t his fault. Even if I had been driving, we still could have hit the ice. The weather was crappy, there wasn’t anything he could have done.”

  “We should have pulled over. Waited for the storm to pass.”

  “And then what?” I demanded. “There would have been more snow on the road. More ice. More chance of losing control of the car. We were lucky that there wasn’t anyone else involved. Imagine what would have happened if we were hit by a truck or something.”

  He looked sick, so I stopped talking.

  Dr. Smith took over. “I’m interested, Will, if there was a moment when you knew that you couldn’t inflict the type of pain on Jesse that he’s used to. Was there a trigger point or a gradual realization?”

  Will was quiet. Breathing deeply. I took his hand and laced our fingers together.

  “I always used to think about our sessions together a lot. They take a lot of planning, and I like exploring our limits and coming up with new things to try. And I was thinking about flogging him, and… I just… I can’t. This is the man I love, you know? He’s the most important thing in the world to me. I nearly killed both of us.”

  “But you didn’t, Will,” she said, calmly but firmly. “No one was seriously injured. You’re an experienced Dominant who has—as far as I can tell—an extremely good grasp of both his own limits and those of his submissive. At this time I’m not sure I understand what the link is between the car accident and your BDSM dynamic.”

  “Pain,” he answered.

  “Okay,” Dr. Smith said and wrote a few words on her notepad. “Why don’t we discuss that a little bit further. Are you a sadist?”

  “That’s a very difficult question to answer,” Will said carefully. “Do I want to hurt a random person on the street? No. Do I want to hurt someone who causes me a small inconvenience—cutting me off on the freeway? No. Do I want to cause someone I care about the sort of pain that takes them out of their own head, by spanking them or hitting them with a paddle? Yes.”

  She wrote another little note on her pad then turned to me. “Jesse, do you identify as a masochist?”

  “Yes, in the circumstances that Will just described,” I said. He shot me a small smile at my response.

  “Okay. Do your sessions together always involve a level of corporal punishment? Wait. Before you answer that—do you have a system of punishment and reward, and is pain part of your submission, Jesse?”

  As I’d never been asked to analyze my own desires in this way before, her questions threw me slightly at first in their directness. It took me a moment to consider how to answer. In that time, Will started to talk.

  “I do use CP as discipline, yeah, but we don’t have a domestic discipline relationship. There’s not a system set up so if he leaves out dirty dishes, he gets a spanking for it.”

  I must have made a face, because Dr. Smith turned to me. “Jesse?”

  “I don’t know. That seems just… wrong to me.”

  “In what way?”

  “It sounds fucked up, but he hits me because he loves me. And because I get off on it. To make it about dirty dishes just turns it into something… I don’t know. Almost clinical. It’s not clinical, it’s about intimacy and fulfilling a mutual desire.”

  “And is pain part of your submission? Can you submit to Will without there being an element of pain involved?”

  “Yes, of course,” I said immediately. “We’ve been having sessions together for years. It doesn’t boil down to him hurting me and nothing else. That would get boring.”

  “And you would both still fulfill a mutual desire for domination and/or submission if there was no element of pain play in the session?”

  “Yes,” Will answered cautiously.

  “Then, gentlemen, why don’t you try that?”

  When we left I felt rather effectively talked and backed into a corner, and I wasn’t so sure how helpful that situation was. However, I couldn’t really argue with Dr. Smith’s logic, and if she was trying to impress on us that our relationship was about more than just the exchange of pain, then that point had been well and truly made.

  That night I knelt for him in our playroom, a hot, squirmy sensation in my stomach telling me that it wasn’t right, but I wanted to try. I really, really wanted to try to be whatever he needed me to be for him, so I pushed it down and did my best to ignore it.

  He twisted me up in a mess of rope, his face stoic and set and focused on his task. He bound my hands behind me and pressed a large gag between my teeth, one that pushed my jaw to its limits, stretching my lips and pressing my tongue down. I rolled my shoulders as I tried to find my balance, and Master spread my legs impossibly wide and held them there with a spreader bar.

  Before a blindfold covered my eyes, he showed me a red handkerchief and duly pressed it into my closed fist.

  We rarely played with full sensory deprivation, and he was one set of earplugs away from taking me there. I could just about handle the dark and the loss of speech. And the ropes.

  But when he stepped back and left me there, alone in the silence of my own mind, alone with my thoughts and fears that only seemed to grow with every second his hands weren’t on my skin, the doubt started to creep out of my stomach and into every other pore in my body.

  I could feel it, this insecurity pricking at my skin and the panic that gently swelled inside me, consuming the rational knowledge that of course he wouldn’t leave me like this. It didn’t matter to the panic. The panic took over anyway.

  The red fabric fell from my fingertips, and I waited for Master’s calming hand on my shoulder as he undid the knots, but it didn’t come.

  My mind screamed at me that maybe he had left after all; the door was behind me now, and I couldn’t see; maybe I’d missed the sound of the door while lost in the hazy beginning of my subspace and God only knew how long he’d leave me here for.

  I was being punished.

  The grunting and drooling and moaning was part of wearing a gag of this size, but he never buckled it too tightly around the back of my head, not since that one time when I was left with angry red marks at the corner of my mouth that caused questions at work the next day. He always left it a bit loose after that.

  I was grateful for its looseness as, with a supreme effort, I worked the round ball of rubber over my teeth and bottom lip, then twisted my head back to let it drop to hang around my neck.

  “Will!” I screamed for him in my panic. “Will!”

  “I’m here,” he said from behind me. “I’m right here, Jesse, what’s going on?”