Debt

"It wasn't," I said, leaning forward and resting my head on his shoulder, burying my face in his neck. He told me aftercare was important, that I could take whatever I needed from him. So I was going to. My arms folded across his back and tightened. His slid down my back and did the same. "I think it was just the ah..."

"Asphyxiation."

"What?"

"Asphyxiation. Breath play. Makes you come harder than you knew was possible."

I felt a strange laugh build and bubble out of me. "That about covers it," I agreed, my legs still feeling weak.

He squeezed me slightly then released me, reaching up for the shower head and pulling it down, running the stream down my back then, pushing me back, my front, over my breasts, between my legs, then back up again to wet my hair. My eyes went up to his, wanting to see if I could read his face. Because everything about the way he was handling me suggested something more than what he had shown me before.

His eyes went down to find mine as well, holding my gaze for a long time and, try as I might, I couldn't interpret the depth I found there. But then he bent forward and planted a sweet, chaste, three second kiss on my mouth before putting the shower head back and pulling me close.

And it was right then that I had a sneaking suspicion that maybe, just maybe, I was starting to matter to him. Maybe not in the same way, the same caliber as I cared for him, but more than I had expected from him, more than he probably even thought capable.

It was that night, wrapped up in his sheets with him, that I didn't fall to sleep with a swirling of misery coursing through me.

What I felt instead was hope.

But, well, you know what they say about hope.SIXTEENPrueI expected things to change. Not overnight. Not fantastically. I wasn't naive. People didn't change. Men like Byron St. James certainly didn't change. But I had figured he might soften toward me maybe or show me a bit of the softer side I had started to realize was underneath all the cocky, bossy, douchecanoe-ishness.

Hope, the begger. A-freaking-gain.

Apparently I would never learn.

See, I was basing all of my hope on the idea that Byron embraced or even acknowledged the fact that he had softened toward me. And, well, that was apparently asking for too much.

I woke up the next morning to him already long gone. So I changed the sheets and I did the laundry. Then I brought his coffee and barely got a chin jerk. I was able to (mostly) convince myself that he was just busy. He was on the phone after all. So when two more refills were met with similar chin jerks and he hadn't even been on the phone, yeah, I started to feel the hope slowly bleed away.

But that was simply the way it was. During work hours, Byron St. James was Byron St. James and I was some lowly servant or whatever the hell I was. But when dinner was done and most of the house staff was gone, he was mine. Maybe only for a few hours. Maybe just in my imagination in some ways, but he was mine. And I was his. Fully. Completely. Down to my bones. He leeched into my skin. He sank into my marrow. He was a part of me. His name was branded on every inch of me in a way that no one had ever done before.

It was another week and a half later when I was startled awake from a early evening nap I had taken because Byron left for work in the afternoon and I knew he usually came back late and in a mood. Meaning, an experimental mood. So far, he had shown me being bound, the flogger, the paddle, hot wax, and butt plugs. And so far, I hadn't found one thing that I didn't like. So when I heard raised voices from far off, I jolted up in bed, my heart slamming hard in my chest.

Byron's house, almost as a rule, was quiet. Strangely so. You very rarely walked around to find a stray, abandoned TV set playing or a stereo blaring. The staff generally kept their voices relegated to very 'indoor' ones, even the men outside. So to hear raised voices a floor below me was not only odd, but a little freaky. I tip-toed out of bed and inched into the hallway. The voices were still muffled, like from behind a door.

I knew at that point that I really should have gone back to bed.

Whatever was going on, if it was behind a closed door, was obviously none of my business.

But curiosity had me silently going down the stairs, stopping at the bottom one to hear Byron's voice boom out, "I've had e-fucking-nough of this shit," as he ripped the door to his office open.