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11
Cole
The call had come in while I was working out and putting Marilyn through her paces. At the end of two hours she'd gone to wash the sweat and a little bit of blood off and I had gone in the other direction to shower.
Very often when everything is over, I want nothing to do with the sub.
Annie hadn't been like that. After the first time I beat her, all I wanted was to hold her in my lap, my arms around her, let her put her head against my shoulder and cry.
Only she didn't cry. And I didn't hold her. Annie had a tremendous amount of stress and a gigantic addiction to kick. I couldn't give in to anything easy with her.
I wouldn't have checked a text message until I’d had my own shower, but a phone call always feels more urgent now that everyone does their best not to call.
"Mr. St. Martin, I'm calling from The Rack in San Francisco. The girl you're looking for came through this morning but she wasn't playing. Someone said she was in a few days ago and she did play. I'm sorry, I wasn't working that day."
I quelled the temptation to push through the personal blather and get to the point. I might miss something. But people had lives. None of them actually worked for me in the traditional sense. I just had them on retainer. Whoever this girl was that was calling, she was allowed to have a day off. She'd already brought me more information on Annie than I'd had since she left Seattle.
I listened to the message all the way through three times before deleting it. Annie had been spotted in a BDSM dungeon in San Francisco. The time the girl saw her she wasn't playing, though apparently she'd attended a gathering some time earlier and participated.
That surprised me. Annie was disconnected from her own life. She undoubtedly called it compartmentalizing or keeping everyone she loved safe.
I called it being dissociated from her own life. She wanted so much to do her job, to be strong and use whatever she had to do whatever she had to, that she put everything at arm's length.
That wasn't right. Some of it was quite upfront and personal. Hard not to be when she was fucking the gang leader. But she buried her feelings under protection, like encasing a bomb under blast blankets. She considered herself safe because nothing was going to hurt her, so when something did, she was shocked and didn't know what to do about it.
Plus, you're safe when you're dead, too.
I sent an automatic payment to the informant's bank account. Anonymous, buried under so many levels of shell companies it would never get back to me. Even if it did, so what? What billionaire wouldn't want to know that some half-disgraced cop from another state was showing his or her photo around in some definitely dodgy circles?
Marilyn was kneeling in front of the bathroom door when I headed back that way. I no longer cared about my own shower.
"Stand up."
She stood obediently, her head bowed, hands clasped in front of her. Her naked sex gleamed in the light. Her breasts were lightly stripped from the cane. I sometimes enjoy Marilyn's charms too much to work her over the way I think we both want.
"Turn around."
She turned, lowering her head even further. Her backside was black and blue, her back stripped from floggers and crops. Critically I checked the marks, making sure I hadn't wrapped a whip when I didn't mean to, hadn't struck near kidneys or tailbone or along the hip joints.
The marks were perfect. There was blood along the edge of some of the double cane tracks again.
"I won't see you again for a month."
She turned without permission, her mouth an O of distress. I could punish her for that, tie her up and use ice on her or just tie her up and leave her. That probably hurt Marilyn more than any implement I ever used on her.
I wouldn't.
"I can't break you. You know that." My code of ethics didn't permit serious and permanent harm.
It was pretty wide open otherwise.
She dropped her head again. "Yes, sir. Thank you. May I – " she hesitated for a split second before plunging on, because I hate it when people start to speak and then second guess themselves. "May I service you before I go?"
But I had Annie in my head again and Marilyn, though standing in front of me, was already gone. "No. But you can come back in six weeks." By then, if I had Annie – because I would have Annie, I had to get her here, I had to test the remedy and the reward, not that she'd see it that way – by then there was no doubt Marilyn would only be icing on the cake.
Or a memory. Either one.
After she left, clutching her clothes, because I didn't allow her to dress on the premises, I went into the room I was preparing specifically for Annie. She was the first for whom I'd ever created an entire room.
