Forbidden: A Standalone (35 page)

When he was done, he let the belt go, and I dropped down on all fours. My pants were still around my thighs.

“I thought I wasn’t submissive.” I said it coyly, trying to be gentle. It was a lousy time to try to prove a Dom wrong, but I couldn’t help it.

“I smell the drugs on you. I only know one way to get the message across.”

My scalp tightened as he took me by the hair and dragged me, dropping me on the carpet near a wooden X set into the wall. Each end had adjustable cuffs, and I went liquid as he dragged my wrist to an ankle cuff and pulled it closed. He stood over me, belt still looped in one hand, looking down at his property. I hated myself for disappointing him, and at the same time, I felt safe in his care.

“Don’t cross your legs, and don’t come,” he said. “You sit there with your legs spread, and I’ll let you come after I break you.”

He walked out and closed the door.

deacon

T
here was a reason I didn’t fuck you for months when we met. I needed you to get control of yourself before I could control you. Otherwise there would be a lot of wasted effort. And you didn’t seem submissive to me. The perfect body type for knotting, and from working dressage, you knew how to control your legs and arms, but you didn’t seem truly submissive.

So I watched. I had control of you for that length of time.

The way you set your mind to it. The way you got on your knees for me. Fiona Drazen. We got all that coy sexiness stripped off you, and you were bare to me. Because of your public persona, you were more naked than anyone I’d seen before.

You blinded me like a bright light in the night.

I told you I was going to break you, and the night I did, I made the biggest mistake of my life.

Two years earlier

fiona

“Breaking a submissive isn’t an act. It isn’t a result. Breaking is a process.”

I
 looked at the floor. I was on my knees before him, hands behind me. I’d just seen my friend Earl at an afternoon birthday party that had seemed innocent enough. He offered me flake and cock. I had to run out like a schoolgirl to avoid snorting a line off his dick, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Couldn’t breathe from wanting it. Everywhere, the temptation to do things that would risk breaking what I was building with Deacon. I wanted it too badly. To be pushed off some kind of edge into controlled freefall.

“I still want it,” I said.

“It’s not something you want. It’s something that happens when you’re ready.”

I didn’t say anything. He put his fingers under my chin and forced me to look up at him.

“What’s on your mind, Kitten?”

“Make me ready. Please.”

From his face, I knew he would. I’d won. Whatever that meant.

fiona

I
’d gotten my back to the wall and my pants back up most of the way. Deacon had locked the cuff with a key and left me alone. He wasn’t finished with me, but he had left me nonetheless. I was overcome with sadness. The bottom dropped out of me, a black feeling made worse from the dopamine rushing out of my brain.

He had to go. I couldn’t deal with this all the time. This was the last fuck. He was out. Gone. Done.

I wanted him, and he gave me what no one else could, but he had to get out of my life.

Goddamn. After everything, I still wanted him to come back and fuck me.

My phone buzzed. I wiggled and got it out of my pocket with my free hand.

Elliot.

“What happened the day you left Westonwood?” His words were clipped, but the tones were a balm on my wounds. Any urgency surrounding Deacon went away in the smoothness of his voice.

“You stopped me at the door and chickened out.”

“I had sessions after I saw you yesterday. Warren Chilton implied something in his group session that I need to confirm before—”

My blood curdled, and I cut him off before it went solid in my veins. “What kind of something?”

I heard a
tap tap
from his side. Pen on the desk? Finger on the counter?

“That he took something you didn’t want to give.”

I couldn’t answer through my shock. He’d taken something I wasn’t willing to give. What a nice way to say rape.

Elliot continued before I could answer. “And he smiles like a cat whenever he mentions you. And he mentions you too often.”

I was tempted to deflect, just tell him Warren had gotten me sleeping pills and be done with it, but I didn’t want to open that bag of shit until I could get a handle on the outcome.

“Maybe he wants to fuck me.” I stretched out, wrist still bound to the bottom of the X. I was talking about Warren, but blocking him out with thoughts of my therapist made me purr.

“I don’t doubt that, but there's something more to it.”

He hadn’t gotten the message, and that annoyed me.

“Isn’t there some kind of rule about not talking about your patients?”

“I break rules with you. I’d break more. I’d break all of them.”

“Doctor,” I said, “you’re not yourself.”

“He’s an antisocial psychopath who’s fixated on someone I care about.”

“Someone you want. It’s different. You
want
me.”

I heard him breathing. I’d downgraded our whole relationship after Deacon’s exquisite humiliations, which was wrong. The light over Los Angeles was getting flat and grey in the late afternoon. Maybe Elliot and I were the only two souls awake in the world.

I waited for him to answer. Make up some lie about loving me or some bullshit.

“I want you,” he said. “And I’m concerned.”

“You want me?”

“You know that I do.”

“What do you want?” I asked.

“You. The you you hide from everyone. You’re under my skin. I can’t live with myself until I make your world right and share it with you.”

I lowered my voice so he’d get it. “That’s not what I meant. What do you want
to do
to me?”

Another pause. This one shorter.

“You want to do this?” he challenged me.

“Yes.”

“I want to fuck you.” He roared a little. Like a lion prince who could grow to be the king of the jungle.

“How?” I clicked the speakerphone on and put the phone down. “Tell me. I’m all alone here.”

“How?” His voice had changed, as if he’d made a decision to engage in this game. “By bending you backward on the kitchen table. By holding you down by the throat and pulling off your underwear. Spreading your legs so far apart. Then eating your pussy. It tastes like honey.”

I throbbed. His tongue on me, sweet flicking softness on my cunt. I put my fingers under the crotch of my underwear. I was soaked. Slick.

“God, yes. I want that.”

A laugh of relief escaped his throat. He’d taken a risk by engaging in this conversation, I knew that.

“I don’t let you come. But you get close. I can feel you tighten on my tongue.”

“Fuck me,” I said.

“Are you touching yourself?”

“Yes. Don’t stop.”

“I pull your knees toward the table. I can see your cunt. It’s beautiful. I slide my dick along it. You’re so wet for it.”

I heard him swallow. “Fuck me, Elliot. Just fuck me.”

“You’re so tight. And you look at me. You feel so good.”

“I’m going to come.”

“Yes.”

I tightened around my fingers, pulling against the cuff that held my wrist. It was a good one. A warm wave over my body. Just as I heard him groan, the phone fell, skidding away when my foot lost leverage and kicked from under me.

I stayed sprawled there, breathing hard, looking at the ceiling as it turned dark grey.

“Fiona?” Elliot called from the phone.

I twisted to get it but couldn’t reach. “Yeah.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m at Deacon’s. I can’t reach the phone.”

“What do you mean you can’t reach the phone?” he asked.

“He cuffed me to the wall.”

“What?”

“Take it easy. This is not a big deal,” I said.

“What do you mean it’s not a big deal?”

“It’s the kink, Doctor E. Like phone sex. Stop being a prude.”

“I’m coming for you.” Somewhere in his world, a door slammed. Keys jingled.

“You don’t even know where I am,” I protested.

“You underestimate me, and you underestimate what I’m willing to do for you.”

“I don’t even know what that means.”

“He couldn’t just take you past the gate without saying where he was taking you. You’re still an outpatient.”

“Please don’t come here,” I said. “It’s not going to be okay.”

“It is going to be okay. It’s going to be better than okay. I’m giving you permission to make it okay. And me, I can’t live like this anymore. I can’t settle anymore. I spent my entire life holding back. That’s why I almost entered the priesthood. And I love God. I do. My faith is real, but my vocation wasn’t. I used it so I’d have rules to follow to keep me in line.”

“You see what happens when there are no rules, Elliot. You end up like me. I’m not what you want to be.”

“I don’t want Yesterday Fiona. I want Today Fiona. Tomorrow Fiona. We can break the right rules together. I got through that session yesterday with you, and I beat off like an adolescent. And when I went over to Westonwood and heard what they were saying—I want to kill him.”

“You’re crazy.”

“I am.”

I didn’t answer but closed my eyes. I was used to being wanted by friends and strangers. Deacon protected me from those who wanted me by letting my world revolve around his, deflecting their desires and putting them under our control.

But Elliot was different. We’d met without Deacon’s protection. He’d spoken to me in a way no one else had. I believed him. He may have been misguided or wrong, but he meant what he said.

“I don’t know how I feel,” I finally said. I’d committed myself to putting Warren down, and that goal precluded me from getting closer to Elliot, phone sex notwithstanding.

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

Deacon’s voice cut through the room. “You’re going to get an eyeful, doctor.”

He entered in trousers and a button-up shirt, carrying a wooden paddle over his shoulder.

Without missing a beat, Elliot answered, “Let her go.”

“See you later.” Deacon scooped up the phone and hung up, then he slipped it in his pocket. “Well, Kitten. How was your afternoon?”

Deacon was in fine form, dropping the paddle to his side and tapping his knee. It had three large holes in it to cut air resistance.

“Fine, Master.”

He tucked the paddle under his arm and unlocked me. I could smell his soap. He’d showered for me.

“You touched yourself,” he said as he turned the key. He didn’t say how he knew—he just did.

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t supposed to.”

“You never touched yourself before. That place did you more good than I anticipated.”

I was on the floor, and he stood above me. I was afraid, and it was the fear and the anticipation of pain that turned me on. I was wet all over again. Yet it seemed too soon for the paddle. The paddle was the end of the line for me, and he was starting with it.

“Put your back to me. Hands over your head.”

I did it, holding two thoughts in my head at the same time: that I was worthy of Elliot and that I was a piece of meat for Deacon to use.

“Master?” It felt weird, slipping back into that role. Part of me wanted to curse him and tell him to fuck off, which was how I knew he was right. In his eyes, I needed to be broken again.

“Yes?” He pulled my pants down just below my ass.

I was going to ask him his intentions, but that would have been out of line. I’d forgotten that in the space of an afternoon. “Where do you want me?”

He pointed the paddle at a white painted picnic bench. “Knees straight. Hands on the seat.”

I did as he said, putting my ass in the air, and I wondered, despite all agreements to the contrary, could I just get up and walk away? As long as my mouth was free and I could utter my safe word, would he still do this?

“What did the doctor want?” he asked.

He pressed the wood to my ass.
Tap tap tap
, warming me up.

“To fuck me.”

“Did you let him?”

“Over the phone.”

The paddle landed on the backs of my thighs, and I bit back a scream.

“I could tell you’d climaxed as soon as I walked in. Thank you for being honest. But you didn’t ask me first.”

He hit me again. So soon after the previous smack, with no break between, no chance to breathe, my skin was on fire. I locked my jaw closed and grunted.

“You’re out of control,” he said, paddling me a third time.

My knees bent under me, and tears flowed. “Yes, sir,” I grunted.

“We’re getting it back. You and me. Count to twenty.”

“It’s too many!”

“Twenty-five then. And keep it quiet. Willem’s here.”

The paddle landed with an explosion of pain. My knees buckled, and I counted.

Two years earlier

fiona

O
nce I’d decided to let him break me, it didn’t get any easier. I didn’t understand the concept. Didn’t internalize it because I wanted it.

Number Two Maundy was packed to capacity. It was the heyday before the accident that killed Amanda. Before Deacon left that time, when he was still as committed to getting me under control as I was.

I was naked, face down, swinging three feet above the floor, legs spread below me, hands twisted behind me. My ass was up, and my ponytail was knotted behind my head, forcing my face up. I saw myself in the mirror, little tits making wide Vs under me. Some of the guests watched, some didn’t. Some were in their own humiliations. But I was in the center of the room, drooling around a ball gag, taking the paddle, and crying. The bottom of my face shone with snot and spit, and Deacon had rolled up his shirtsleeves.

“One last, Kitten.”

I barely heard him. The last
thwack
was all I heard as my vision broke into fragments from the pain. When I came back, I saw him. Mister Rugged, from my first trip to Maundy, was rolling whiskey around the bottom of his glass.

Deacon came in front of me and faced me. I was at crotch level, and he bent to look me in the eye.