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5
Annie
He made me wait. Hard to say how long. With no way to tell time and nothing to do but kneel and anticipate, it probably felt a lot longer than it was.
By the time he came into the play room, I'd gone somewhere else. Cole once called it subspace and I came unglued. I was thinking. I was deep in myself. I might even be meditating.
Subspace somehow felt degrading. Cole hurt me and punished me, made love to me and kissed me, he exhibited me and once sold me in an auction, he'd sent me to live with other sadists only to discover they weren’t safe. But he didn't degrade me. He didn't call me bad girl or slut, didn't tell me I was nothing. Everything he did seemed to have intent and when he called me anything it was to order me to accept whatever he was doing, or to order me to do something myself.
So not subspace, but I'd certainly been missing during the last few minutes and couldn't say where I'd gone. All I knew was suddenly he was there in front of me. I was staring stupidly at his running shoes and my heart had started pounding again.
Abruptly everything came back to me, not just calling him Cole at the table and furiously insisting it was all a fucking game we were playing and that when the important stuff came up he ought to knock it the fuck off. Not just bratting out on the trail only to discover at that moment that he was the one who wasn't playing.
But all of it. My anger. My rebellions. My refusals and insistences. My stomach clenched tight.
Between my legs, another part of my body also clenched. Waiting.
If I had it to do over again. The last hour, two hours. If we were running in the desert again and the worst I had to contemplate was fish for breakfast.
He reached down and bunched my curls into his fist, pulling ungently. "Get up."
I stood because the alternative was to get my hair yanked out. I stood because in that moment I understood that nothing had changed. I had come back to Cole thinking we'd renew our contract without having a contract, that I wouldn't run because I had the option to run. That was true. But I'd also thought that Cole would change. That he would see now that I was going along with everything I was his partner. Or equal. Or something to be valued.
Maybe he thought some of those things in some situations but he was much better at compartmentalizing than I was. Cole didn't accept that there was a reverse safe word situation, and maybe that wasn't a thing, but it made sense to me. The idea that he could say my name in the right tone of voice and I'd drop into being his submissive. The rest of the time I'd be me, Annie Knox, adult. Partner.
Even though it made sense – after all, most of the time when I was alone in my suite or the gym or the shower or wherever, I wasn't his submissive, at least not in my head. I was Annie Knox. Then he'd come and get me and I'd be calling him Sir and what was the difference?
The difference was, it made my submission to him a game. Which maybe it was to me. it wasn't a lifestyle choice yet. If something dramatic happened, some emergency, I wouldn't wait for him to okay what I planned to do in an emergency situation. Or maybe I should say when, because there'd already been emergency situations.
What we were doing, his contracts he'd had with me and now my willing submission to him, all of it was a construct. Not a game, maybe. But a – fantasy? An augmented reality? It was something that wouldn't stand up to the real world when it all came down. In my mind, it was like a job. You follow the rules and you're at your desk the hours you're supposed to be. But if the roof of the building you work in begins to come down, you leave without standing around asking your supervisor if you can. Once out, you determine if you're going to go on working once the building gets done collapsing.
I wasn't sure how Cole saw it. Did he think I would ask permission to leave the falling building? I never had. Did he think another sub would? Or should?
I had never done this before. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it couldn't be done that way, being a normal person with an ordinary life – it that's what I was here where I was – and snapping to attention at the sound of my master's voice.
To me, that was a reverse safe word. Kind of Abandon all hope, Sir is coming!
Then again, it wasn't like my own safe words, the ones that I only used when we played, always had an effect.
Because those other times they weren't my safe words. When he was punishing me, I was his. When he was punishing me unless he told me otherwise, red and yellow were just colors.
I was confused because there was so much to be confused about.
Except this. Whatever he was about to do. I wasn't confused about this. I didn't want this. The same anguished cold gripped my belly, threatening to double me over despite the handful of hair Cole still held. Now that it was here, now I'd brought this down on myself, I didn't want it.
I was insane to think I had ever wanted this.
Cole didn't speak. He simply led me by the hair, forcing me in front of him. We bypassed the cross, which should have given me a moment's relief. Instead, I simply started looking for what was next. The bars that formed a cage around me and looked like a jungle gym? The benches that separated my legs so he could take or hurt anywhere he chose? The spanking benches? The rings that hung from the ceiling, shackling my wrists so he could pull me up to my toes and watch me dance?
Or the bed, the four poster where he'd wrap my wrists and ankles in leather, face up or face down, didn't matter. He did what he chose. Or on the massage table, pure black with the hole for the face augmented with a strap to hold the head there and restrains for arms and legs and if necessary, waist.
I started to buck against him and he said my name, one time.
I calmed. His home was in the middle of nowhere, Nevada desert, rural as fuck. I could run all the way to the center of Las Vegas but it was a good 15 miles of so and those miles were all desert, all stones and thorns and the occasional cranky animal. It was cold out, maybe only Southern Nevada cold, but cold enough if I had no clothes and where would I go? Even after Cole's tutelage I wasn't an exhibitionist. I'd have to steal clothes and then I'd have to hope to hell I found the right people who would help me rather than dragging me somewhere worse.
Or finding myself "helped" by the kind of police who worked with the judges who were part of the ring.
All I'd wanted was to know what he'd found out and when we could act, what Judge we'd be going after and how I'd slide undercover, how much help Cole's hackers could give me in formulating a cover.
