“And what will I do for you? What will you get out of it?”
He shrugged. “I like to help people and I like to push women’s boundaries. In your case, I’ll get to do both.”
She absorbed this with the slightest twitch of her fingers. “I’ll try to do whatever you ask. Whatever it takes. I want to get better.”
“I want you to get better too.” I drew in a breath and stared down at our intertwined hands. “I can’t guarantee your issues will be worked out in a week or two.”
“So, how long do you think…?”
“I don’t know. We’ll see how things go. It’s possible this won’t work at all and you’ll have to seek professional help.”
“I’ve sought professional help,” she said with an edge of desperation.
“I know you have. But I’ve never attempted anything like this and I’m assuming you haven’t either. As much as I want to help you, I could just as easily fuck you up worse.”
We both fell silent a moment. I didn’t want to fuck her up. I leaned closer to catch her gaze. “Listen, Ash. Submission can feel threatening to the uninitiated. It can feel like something you have to do. I need you to remember, if things start to feel too difficult, that you always have two options. You can hold tough and stick it out, or you can leave this room and go downstairs to the living room. The living room will be our neutral zone. Our safeword, so to speak. I don’t ever want you to feel trapped or forced. I don’t want you to feel pressured to do something you don’t want to do.”
She looked at me sideways. “But—”
“I know. You’re afraid you won’t want to do anything. But if I do my job right, you will. If we’re patient and we work hard, you’ll figure out how to enjoy sex again. I have faith in you.”
“And I have faith in you,” she said soberly. “I can never explain to you how much I appreciate this.”
I opened my arms to her. “Come here and hug me before I lose my mind.”
She pushed back her chair and came to me, and I embraced her, this scared, vulnerable woman who’d insinuated herself into my life. I didn’t normally let people so close. Sexually, I did, but not emotionally. I wondered why I was doing it now.
“I think everything’s going to go fine,” I said against her ear. “I know you want to get better. Get ‘fixed,’ as you say…but there are a few things we need to discuss.”
I released her and crossed to the bureau, and opened the top drawer. I kept paper and pens in there for naughty subbies to write lines. I will not be a bad girl. I will not be a bad girl. I grabbed a couple sheets and a pen and returned to the table. I set them down and looked over at Ashleigh, perched nervously on the edge of her seat.
I spoke with a casual, forthright inflection. “I want to remember everything we talk about, so I’m going to take notes. No one is ever going to see them, okay?”
She blinked at me, once, twice. “Okay,” she said, but she didn’t completely sound okay.
“Come here, please. These aren’t the kind of questions I can ask you across a table.”
She’d been suspicious before. Now she knew what was coming—and she was going to balk. She was a second from bailing. I could see it in her face. “Don’t, Ash,” I said. “Don’t overreact. I just need to know what your triggers are before we start. Please power through this so I don’t inadvertently hurt you. I’ll keep it short. Just the basic things I need to know.”
The basic things. Such a stupid way to refer to what she’d endured. I only meant I wouldn’t goad her for explicit details. I didn’t think I could deal with hearing them.
“Do we have to do this now?” she asked. “I’m kind of tired.”
“Nice try.” I looked at my watch. “You stay at the theater later than this, and I doubt you go straight to bed when you get home.” I gave her my displeased-dominant look. It was a doozy. “You just lied to my face. If you were a sub of mine, in a scene, I’d punish you. The punishments for lying are the worst.”
She paled. “I’m sorry I lied. I just don’t want to.”
I waited, watching her.
“But…okay. I’m supposed to obey you in this room.” She came to me and buried her face against my shoulder. “I already suck at this.”
I pulled her into my lap and wrapped an arm around her. “Just don’t lie to me, baby. Tell me the truth. ‘I don’t want to. I’m afraid. I’m uncomfortable.’ It’s uncomfortable for me too. I wish we could skip this part, but I can’t help you without knowing what you’ve been through.”
She nestled her cheek against my chest. “I know,” she said. “But I haven’t talked about this in a while.”
I held her tight and asked the first question as matter-of-factly as I could. “Did he hit you or abuse you in any way other than sexually?”
She paused a moment. “No.”
“Didn’t hit you with anything? A belt, a paddle? A whip?”
“No. He hit me a few times with his hand.”
“A spanking? On your bottom?”
“On my face. Sometimes on the side of my head when I…fought him.”
Fucker. Fucker, fucker, fucker.
No trigger implements, I wrote. Watch hands around her face.
“You’re doing great, Ash,” I said. “Next question. Where did he assault you? Always in your bed? On the floor? Bathroom? Any other place?”
“Just my bed. In my bedroom. He locked the door.”
Bed only, I wrote. Don’t lock door.
“Did he restrain you in any way? Cuffs, rope? Duct tape?”
She shook her head. “He just…” Her voice was so quiet. “He held me down with his body weight.”
Restraints okay, I wrote. But this explained why she’d gone so crazy the two times I’d laid on top of her.
“How often?” I asked next.
She sighed. “Once or twice a week. Sometimes more. Sometimes he stayed away and I thought he’d stopped forever and then he’d come back.”
Fucker. “Was he always on top?” I asked. “Any other positions?”
“Sometimes he did it other ways,” she said. “No matter how he did it, it always felt…smothering. He never let me move or talk or say anything. If I did, he got angry and hit me. If I was still he just did what he had to do and left.”
I closed my eyes as she related all this to me. I could see it so clearly. I didn’t want to but I did. Little, petite Ashleigh and her fat fuck of a father, pressing her down in the mattress and forcing his worthless prick inside her.
“Did it hurt?” I asked, my voice strained. “Did he hurt you when he…entered you?”
It mattered because I was pretty big, and I didn’t want to remind her of him. I wanted him to be hung like a piss ant. She shook her head against my chest. “It always hurt.”
It always hurt, I wrote.
I rubbed her back and pressed my chin against the top of her head. “Hang in there, baby. I know this sucks for you.” As difficult as this was for me, it had to be a thousand times worse for her. I gritted my teeth and asked the next question. “Did he only assault you vaginally? Did he ever make you go down on him?”
“No.”
“Anal sex?”
“No. Sometimes he groped me there, but…”
Vaginal only, I wrote. “Did he use contraceptives?”
“No. Well, he pulled out a lot, I guess. Sometimes…” Her voice trailed off. “He came on me. I can’t stand that. The smell.”
“It’s good that he never got you pregnant. Or did he?”
“I didn’t have my period. Not until I was fourteen.”
Until she’d left home. I shuddered. I couldn’t help it. No facials, I scrawled, and underlined it twice. No cum play.
“Will you use condoms?” she asked, going tense in my arms.
“Of course I will. We’ll take tests too, just to be safe. I usually use condoms so it’s no big deal.” I gave her a squeeze. “Okay, we’re almost done. Did he talk to you when he was assaulting you?”
&
nbsp; She trembled against my chest. “He called me a bad girl. Please don’t call me a bad girl.”
“I won’t.” Don’t call her a bad girl, I wrote on the paper. Ever. I underlined that three times. “What about other names? Anything else bother you? Baby, honey, sweetcheeks? Honeymuffin? Twinkletoes?”