Torment Me (Rough Love Part One) (17 page)

I didn’t scream when he applied it. It hurt too much for a scream. The sharp, biting pain went beyond screaming right to gasping for breath.

“Take it off,” I said shrilly.

“Hush.”

I bucked and flailed under him, but he was heavy and he had me pinned, and the second clamp went on, more painful than the first. When I cried out, he tugged the chain so they cinched even tighter, and jammed it up between my teeth.

“Bite this,” he ordered.

“No.” The pain was worse when I moved, so I’d gone still. My nipples felt like they were being gnawed off.

My refusal to cooperate earned me a slap to one of my aching breasts. “Bite the fucking chain. Keep it in your mouth. Otherwise
I’ll
keep hold of the chain, and you won’t like that.”

I snarled at him—and I’d never snarled at anyone in my life. The pain was that bad. But I opened my teeth and let him shove the cold metal chain between them.

“Good girl,” he said in a silky voice, staring down at me with elegant severity. I hated that my body responded to the approval in his gaze. Even through the pain and the helplessness, I felt some fleeting stab of joy. Which was quickly replaced by a fleeting stab of pain as I lifted my chin.

I dropped it back down and stared as he rose from the bed and returned to his briefcase. He reached inside and drew out a braided whip. It was only about the length of his forearm, but it looked sturdy enough to fuck me up.

I shook my head and moaned at the resulting nipple torture as he approached the bed. He grabbed my legs when I tried to kick him, and wrapped an arm around them, yanking them in the air. This, of course, left all my ass and pussy exposed, as well as the backs of my thighs. The marks from the bamboo rod had faded, but I remembered the pain.

“Don’t,” I begged through the chain. “Don’t. Don’t.” It sounded like
duh, duh, duh
, which was appropriate, because only a very stupid person would keep returning, week after week, to be tortured by this madman.

“Don’t lose your shit,” he said, looking down at me. “I can only leave those clamps on you for ten minutes or so before you start to suffer permanent damage. Your beating will be over before then.”

As he said it, he brought the whip down across the area where my ass met my thighs. I don’t know why it still shocked me every time, how much he could hurt me. My entire body arched in a panic. I jerked my hips and tried to escape his grip on my legs, but I only ended up hurting my nipples. Before I could come to terms with the slicing agony of the first stroke, he drew his arm back and hit me again, and again.

I started to keen against the chain, pathetic crying even as I fought to escape. He took such lazy pleasure in torturing me. He could have hit me harder, yes. He could have sliced me to ribbons, until I was a bloody mess, but he wasn’t a psychopath. No, just a pervert. He wanted my squirming and my panicked sounds and he knew this was how to get them. He wanted my features contorted in agony and my legs straining against his grip, and so he toyed with me, pausing between strokes, alternating hard ones and less hard ones. There were no soft ones with an implement like that.

After a couple dozen blows, I knew I couldn’t take it anymore. I spit out the chain and tried to explain it to him.
No, oh, no, you can’t, no more, no more, no more, please, please.
His response was to tug the chain until I screeched, and shove it back between my lips. I decided I’d better not do that again. How much longer until ten minutes? I felt the tip of the whip prod against my pussy.

“No,” I whined against the metal links.

“Yes. You need it, bad girl.”

He started flicking the whip’s tip right along the center of my pussy. I cried. I bawled.
No, no, no.
It hurt so bad, and I was so wet, and I hated him for reducing me to this groaning, terrified, needy creature. As I fought and strained, he started alternating his method of depravity. First I’d feel the hot, hard licks across the backs of my thighs, and then the
thwack
on my pussy.

“Do you want the clamps off?” he asked. “Listen to me.” I could barely focus through the haze of my agony. “Do you want the clamps off?”

I nodded frantically.
Yes, yes, please, off!

He put my legs down, spread them wide, and forced me back with his hands when I tried to sit up.

“Don’t,” he said in his evil voice. “Don’t you dare move. Don’t you dare get up. Keep your legs open for me. Show me how bad you’ve been, how badly you deserve to be punished.”

My arms ached from being tied behind me. My nipples felt like they were going to fall off, and my pussy and thighs throbbed from the damn whip, but I lay back, my eyes locked on his, and opened my legs, baring myself to whatever horrible thing he might do next. My chest rose and fell in frantic pants, and a noise leached out of me, a warbling, fearsome sound I couldn’t control.

“Jesus,” he whispered, staring down at me. “You’re magnificent like this.”

I expected him to whip my pussy the way he’d done earlier. I lay there waiting for him to whip it to shreds, but instead he reached out and started to stroke me. I was
so wet
. I think that’s why he did it, to show me how wet I was.

He fucked me with one finger, two fingers, three fingers, and it hurt and felt good, two feelings at once. He half knelt, down on one knee, and shoved my legs so wide open that my muscles strained. His fingers dug into my inner thighs, each fingertip a point of domination. As soon as his tongue touched my clit, I knew his goal was to make me die.

I thought he would be rough, like his fingers were rough, and his whip was rough, but he ate me out with the delicacy of an expert. He used the perfect pressure, the perfect teasing variation of taps and strokes and fluttering caresses. I wasn’t groaning and crying from pain now, but from pleasure.

Without stopping, he reached up and undid the nipple clamps. They hung, forgotten, from my mouth. I was too distracted to spit out the chain. Blood rushed to my poor, blood-deprived nipples, resulting in a burning frenzy of feeling. All it meant to me was more of his power, more of his torture. More of him.

His fingers rested on the whip welts, intentionally, I was sure. I hurt and I burned, and his tongue was miraculous. He was a silent, intent predator and I was the prey animal tossing in his grasp. Dying, slowly but surely. My hips jerked in time with his tongue and then the orgasm broke wide, making me tremble with a complete loss of control. The bliss of it felt sharp as a whip stroke. The chain slithered from my lips as I gasped through my open mouth. The death throes, escaping through the lying hole in my head.

I didn’t move. I couldn’t. He left and put on a condom, and came back to the bed. He pulled up my limp body and turned me over, and arranged me face down. The tie binding my arms made a nice handle for him to grasp.

He thrust inside me, and even as wet as I was, he felt big and scary. He pounded into me, jerking me back against him. I was still sensitive from the orgasm, not to mention the whip. My nipples hurt from scraping across the comforter, soft and luxurious though it was. The bedside lamps seemed like spotlights, intensifying every humiliation.

Ow, ow, ow.
I’d had my pleasure. This excruciating finale was
his
pleasure. He fucked me and fucked me and fucked me until I chafed, until I started to go dry, and then he finished with even more force than he’d started with.

Somewhere in the middle, I’d started crying. There was a big wet stain under my face, smeared with makeup, foundation and eye shadow and mascara. I blinked down at the stain as he untied my arms. He was still inside me, even now that he’d come. I had this thought that maybe my body would never be mine again.

I had another thought: he wanted me, literally. He wanted my body
to be his
. Not only had he insisted on an exclusive arrangement, and stalked my personal life. He was also methodically and intentionally ruining me for other men by making sure they could never be as perverted, as passionate, as forceful as he was. He was devouring me with his desire, his charisma. He was taking from me until he had all of me and I had nothing left.

And he gave me none of himself in return.

“Get out of me,” I said when he finished, using my limp arms to push myself up.

“Stop.” He grasped my hips with enough force to still me, and pushed himself deeper. “Stay there.”

“Get out of me,” I said more loudly.

He slapped my ass. Hard. “Don’t fucking order me around. I’ll get out of you when I fucking feel like it.”

Escorting wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t supposed to be violent and antagonistic.

“I’m not seeing you again,” I said, and this time I meant it.

His fingers moved a little on my hips. “Did you learn anything just now?” he asked. “Anything at all?”

“I learned that we hate each other, and that you’re a stalker.”

He made a gruff noise that sounded like disagreement and pulled out of me, and got up off the bed. He went in the bathroom and started the shower. I stayed where I was, too heavy with self-loathing and depression to ever move again.

“Chere,” he yelled, when I didn’t join him. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t spend any more time with him right now.

I heard him get in the shower, heard the change in the water’s patter. I got up and dressed in record time. My eyes fell on his briefcase.
What was his name? What did he do?

If I went digging through his briefcase, and he caught me, what would he do to me? I was afraid to find out.

Anyway, I knew he wouldn’t leave any identifying information in there. If there was anything in that briefcase I could use, he wouldn’t have left me unattended with it. His wallet was with his clothes in the bathroom. That might have provided some identifying information, and I could probably go in there and grab it before he could stop me, but then I’d be no better than him. A dishonest, aggressive stalker. I wasn’t sure I cared about his name anymore. I didn’t want to care. I didn’t want to see him again.

I made sure I had all my shit, and then I whipped open the curtains with the same snapping flourish he’d used to draw them closed.

“Chere,” he yelled from the bathroom. “Get your ass in here.”

The water shut off and I ran for the door. I didn’t check to see if our session had timed out. If he didn’t want to pay me because I left early, he didn’t have to.

Sometimes running like hell was more important than money. Sometimes saving yourself was more important than sticking around for the payout, and this qualified as one of those times.

The whole way home, I looked over my shoulder, like W might be coming after me. He wasn’t, of course. He might be angry, but he’d have to hash things out with Henry, not me. I wasn’t seeing him again. I’d let Henry straighten everything out.

When I let myself into the loft, it was almost a relief to find Simon passed out, snoring, on the couch. I couldn’t handle a blowup tonight, or some drug-fueled drama. He’d probably be a mess later though, when he woke up. I’d sleep in the spare room, with the door locked.

What had happened to me, that I was sleeping behind locked doors? Why was this my life now?
Because you’re weak, and a loser. Why don’t you change?

Maybe walking out on W was a start. Maybe it was the first step in figuring out my shit. Getting Simon under control was the second part, but that wasn’t all me. He had to get to the point of wanting to change too. Maybe this upcoming show would do it. I hoped so. I hoped so desperately hard.

I tiptoed through the living room and kitchen, past my snoring partner, into his artist’s studio. I looked at all his works-in-progress while I had the time and privacy to do it. I wondered if they were good enough to bring him back, to revitalize his career. The thing was, they looked crappier than his earlier works. Sprawling, messy, unfocused.

I was so tired. I needed a shower. I stood under the hot water, but it didn’t wash away the soreness of my nipples or the welts on the backs of my legs. My pussy was still wet and my jaw was still sore from the blowjob, and I didn’t even get any poetry or kisses to make it better. That was my fault, but first steps required sacrifice. Getting better required sacrifice. I stayed in that shower and washed W off my skin until the water started to run cold, and I still didn’t feel like I’d gotten rid of him.

I ate a little bit of leftover Chinese from the refrigerator, and I would have made coffee, but I was afraid the smell would wake up Simon. I grabbed a bottle of water and a self-help book about codependency, and went to hunker down in my locked room.

It’s Your Life: Recognizing and Overcoming Codependency.
I’d been trying to get through the book forever, but it wasn’t helping much. It wasn’t giving me any practical steps, just warning signs to look for, which I absolutely recognized by now, and goals to strive for, which still seemed so far out of reach as to be ridiculous. There was a whole section missing out of the middle, namely explicit instructions on how to reach those goals.

It is unhealthy to rely on other people for happiness.

It’s better to have no love than to have dishonest love.

It is okay to be alone.

Fuck you, dumbass author. You don’t know. You don’t understand my struggles and my problems, or anything about my life. I closed the book and rested my cheek against the cover, emblazoned with bold primary colors to compel me to take action.

I tried to think about Simon and how to help him, rather than enable him, but my mind kept drifting to my date with W instead. There was something so sad and unfinished about us, some lack of understanding that had probably doomed us from the start. I didn’t understand how he could make me feel sexy and wonderful, and so horribly devastated at the same time. He’d given me more than any other client, and yet refused to give me anything at all.

I had to walk away. I had to stop thinking about his passion and energy, and all the attractive things about him, and remember all the ways he made me hurt.