There were lies people told you to get you to cooperate. This won’t hurt. It will be over soon. He didn’t bother with those. No. As far as I could tell, he’d told the truth every step of the way. Then again, there were plenty of things he hadn’t told me, and a lie of omission was still a lie.
He moved to my feet, and when he hit me again, he used some kind of implement. Something thin and reedy. It felt like the sole of my foot cracked in half, split with a wicked knife. But then he pulled back and the pain faded. And I knew it would come again.
It did. He used that goddamn horrible stick on my feet while my body jerked. It was the most painful thing I’d ever felt—on my feet. When my legs were moving spastically, out of my control, he held them down with one hand and hit them some more, picking up the pace. They would be broken, I thought dimly. They would be cut into ribbons.
But then he stopped and in the seconds that passed, the pain in my feet faded to a dull ache. It was a sharp and fleeting hurt, one that took my breath away and left before I reclaimed it.
The next slap was with his hand again, on my thigh, and I had to sigh in relief. One, two, three. Even without his words describing it, I knew he found the same places. I wasn’t the one obsessed with my bruises—he was. He moved to the other side. My body jerked away, and somehow toward him. It was confused, mistaking the pain for pleasure and the pleasure for affection.
The blindfold and my muteness served as a barrier between us. They were obvious signs of bondage and my captivity. But in another way they allowed me to pretend I was somewhere else. At home, maybe, and I’d finally found a date who could give me everything I wanted. One who’d spiked my drink and pushed me inside my own door. One who’d held down my hands and taken what he wanted. That date had never happened, because no one had ever hurt me.
But he did.
The skin closer to my cunt was more sensitive, and I couldn’t help but cry out. I moved constantly, a puppet on leathery strings. My toes curled in alternating pain and anticipation, and every time they did, I felt an echo of pain from my feet. A warm, lulling fog descended over my mind, hiding before and after, so there was only now, this moment, and all the ways he could make me hurt.
Here, too, he struck me the same way a lover might kiss me. Along the insides of my thighs to start. Then inward, closer. Finally, he moved up and down the lips of my cunt. He reached down to spread those lips and delved deeper with each stinging blow. When he snapped the wet leather against my clit, I screamed.
He hit me there again and again, until all the breath left my lungs, all the thought left my head. I was nothing but sensation, nothing but lights under the tunnel, flashing bright on each new burst of pain. My mouth was open, my body strung taut. I wanted to beg him to stop. But even when he unclasped the gag and pulled it way, my mouth remained open and mute. Accepting this. Needing it. He laid the damp strap across the most sensitive part of me, the only organ built solely for pleasure, and he made it pain.
I choked on my sorrow, my guilt. My moan mingled with his grunts, his low animal sounds on every strike. The strange thing was I sounded like a person being pleasured. The stranger thing was he sounded like someone in pain.
I wondered when he’d stop hitting me, hurting me, but maybe he never would. We’d be caught in a web of our own making, turned monster by a poison we’d created. There was no escaping the trap we had set for ourselves, no believing our own lies. This place was stripped of decorum and manners. All that was left was rawness and blood. My blood. It squeezed through tiny strips made in my skin on my breasts and thighs. I could feel it where the salt of my sweat burned.
Was he waiting for me to come? It would never happen. A sensual tension held me in its grip, but I would never let go enough to enjoy it. There was only pain for me, and that was all I wanted. To enjoy it would have been much worse, and I didn’t have to. My body had been played like an instrument. Like an object. And objects didn’t come.
Only then did I realize the mockery he’d made of sex. Using the flogger to mimic a lover’s exploration. Blocking my senses. Using an object on an object, like making a doll fuck another doll. Was that how he saw himself too, as a thing? Or was he a god, the one orchestrating us all? I knew the truth. Somehow I knew, the same way I’d known he hated the cold. And I knew because even something as cruel as this formed a bond of intimacy between us. The real reason he orchestrated this crimson dance was because it was all he could handle.
He was Mr. Hyde, and if he stopped being evil for just a moment, if the haze of violence cleared, he would see what he’d done. He’d turn into Dr. Jekyll again and then he’d hate himself. He’d kill himself, and in that twisted logic, he hurt me in order to save himself.
“Please,” I murmured, exhausted and spent.