Page 20 of Salt in the Wound
The floor felt very, very far away all of a sudden.
And then I wanted to slap myself. I’d sparred with men twice my size, I’d battered bags until my knuckles bled, I’d waded through ballrooms of people who had the power to end lives. Why was this such a big deal?
“I’m going to blindfold you,” he said. “And then your job will be to trust me. To obey me. Again, only for the sake of this lesson, and if you silently hate me in your heart the entire time, it makes no difference to our purposes, so long as you can school yourself to keep it hidden. That said, I would like to touch you tonight, if that’s permissible.”
He wanted to touch me.
My face burned. All of me burned. “I—not my—”
I couldn’t finish.
“Cunt?” he suggested. “Ass? Tits?”
I nodded.
“Noted. Is everywhere else okay?”
I needed to think about this, but my thoughts were fragile threads that snapped the moment I grabbed hold of them. “Where else would you even want to touch?” I finally asked, and his hand twitched around the blindfold.
“Where indeed,” he said enigmatically. And then, “We’ll need a word for when you’d like to me stop.”
A safe word. Yes, I’d read about those, had assumed I’d need one, even if it would just be used for show.
“Hyssop,” I said, the one thing I was sure about tonight.
“Hyssop,” he said, and those dark gold eyelashes dropped down and back up. He was surprised, I thought. Something about it had surprised him. “My sacrifice, O God, is a contrite spirit,” he quoted, citing the same Psalm I’d been thinking of when I had chosenhyssopfor my safe word. “A contrite, humbled heart, O God, you will not scorn.”
Cleanse me with hyssop and I will be clean.
“Say it when you need to stop. A submissive of mine would have their limits pushed; I would do it on purpose. Concurrently, I would also expect any submissive of mine to be extremely vocal about their limits and boundaries.”
“You would push limits on purpose?” I asked doubtfully. That seemed to defeat the entire purpose of limits, according to all I’d read.
“A hard limit, most likely not. But a soft limit? Yes. Entirely.”
“Why?”
He lifted a shoulder. “Because I want to. Isolde, if you have been trying to comfort yourself with the belief that I must secretly be a good man—that my transparency so far has proven that I must somehow care about fairness and kindness—then I must ask you to stop. Tonight, if you can.” Without waiting for me to respond, he lifted the hand with the blindfold. “May I?”
I licked my lips. After that speech of his, nodding took more effort than anything else I’d ever done. But I managed it. “Yes.”
Mark’s eyes were the same color as the night sky as he lifted the blindfold to my eyes.
“Since this is only us pretending,” he said, wrapping the silk around my head and tying it, “I’m only going to train you as to what I like, and what I would demand from someone who was mine. This won’t be a comprehensive education in kink, so if you sense gaps in your schooling, that will be why.”
He’d tied the blindfold perfectly, without catching my hair and also without any looseness or remaining visibility. It gave me no physical discomfort, but the disorientation and panic that followed were arresting. I couldn’t see—anything.
Not him, not the loft, not any hint of light.
He could kill me, and I wouldn’t be able to stop him. He could slap me, kick me, push me down the stairs—
I jumped back as warm fingers found my wrist, but they held me fast, catching my movement before it had even gotten started. His grip wasn’t painful, but it was definite, pressing into my skin, and I realized he was measuring my pulse.
“Breathe, Isolde,” he said. His voice was firm. Calm. “Breathe.”
I didn’t think I could. I’d never been this exposed, this helpless, not since I was twelve and walking around not knowing my mother could die at any second. I’d been ambushed by grief, by the jagged shock of disillusionment, and ever since, I’d made myself as aware, as safe as possible.
“Isolde,” Mark said, “I’m taking both your hands now. I’m lifting them. Feel what I make you feel.”
