Page 30 of Salt in the Wound
He nodded, something moving in his eyes. He gestured toward the stairs. “Let’s get started then.”
* * *
Mark introducedme to bondage during that rehearsal. He cuffed my wrists and ankles but didn’t secure them to anything else, so I could get accustomed to the sensation of being bound without actually being immobilized. He tied my wrists together with a soft rope, and then later used the same rope to knot a harness over my sports bra.
I sincerely hoped he was writing off my goose bumps and pebbled nipples as something to do with the cool air of the loft, and not what they really were, which was a response to him cinching and constricting me. A response to feeling trapped and held.
It made my belly swim and my heart pound.
Stop,I wanted to demand of my body.Stop it right now. The kink was supposed to be yet another sacrifice, a necessary evil, something I did for an illusion. It was not supposed to captivate my thoughts day in and day out. It was not supposed to be the thing I fell asleep thinking about.
I was not supposed be catching my breath from the feeling of cuffs on my wrists.
Luckily, my fiancé didn’t remark on any of it, and only continued to explain how bondage worked, how he’d like our scene this summer to go.
* * *
I spentthe hours leading up to our next rehearsal in the karate school, running forms with the lights off. Two narrow windows let in the late spring sunlight while I flowed through the familiar movements, searching for peace. It was supposed to come; it was supposed to clear my mind and still my thoughts. When it didn’t, I did pushups until my arms gave out, and then when my mind still rushed and raced, I went home to my kicking post, covered in tire strips, and began kicking, nearly crumbling with relief as the pain thrummed up my legs and filled me like cold water in a well. Soon I would be still and dark and able to reflect the world back to itself—a perfect mirror, like my uncle had trained me to be.
But as I staggered back from the post, tears burning at my eyelids, Mark’s words from before Christmas came to me.
So you’ve never run until your legs gave out? Never kicked a post or bag until you were crying in pain?
I hated that he could guess that. I hated that anyone could guess anything about me, anyway, because I wanted to be unknowable, a forgettable doll in Manhattan’s glass and steel dollhouse, but that he could guessthatof all things…
He made me feel so powerless with what he could see sometimes. And if he could see that, then could he see that I was choosing this marriage for reasons that had nothing to do with my father? Would he be able to tell when I started handing information off to my uncle, sifting through Lyonesse’s vast troves of information for anything that could help the Church?
I got to Mark’s penthouse determined to shield myself better. He needed to see only what I allowed him to see—someone hesitant but open, someone slowly turning into a real partner for him.
A tense shiver ran down my spine and the backs of my arms as I reminded myself of that last part. Mortimer hadn’t said as much the last time we’d talked over the phone, but our conversation had made me realize that I would get more done with Mark’s trust than without it, and if that were true of only trust, then what could I do with affection? Infatuation?
I was hardly Mata Hari; seduction was probably past what I could do with an easy mark, and my future fiancé with his depth of experience and distinct tastes was hardly that. But I could give Mark something very few submissives could, and that was being his tabula rasa, his to mold into whatever he wanted. If I could parlay that into him feeling something for me—even mild attachment—it would prove far more useful than a transactional relationship. And there was also what he’d admitted at dinner that first night…
I asked for you.
I wanted you.
So the game was to make him think I was beginning to crave his kinky world, and him in it, to make him think that he’d accidentally acquired for himself the perfect wife by training me to pretend to be one.
And I wasn’t going to be jealous of his other lovers and play partners. And I wasn’t going to balk at whatever he asked of me. And I wasn’t going to lose sight of why I was here. This was my vocation now, my calling. My sacrifice and narrow way. Like Esther, I would scrawl out God’s will onto the world not in the light, not in the shadows, but in the faint glow of a king’s bedroom.
I could do it. I could make Mark think I was feeling one thing while I truly felt another.
Except the next night in Mark’s cool, dark penthouse, I couldn’t seem to find the certainty I’d felt coming here. I couldn’t untangle my body’s responses as he cuffed me and connected the cuffs to the leather upholstered platform in the middle of the room. I couldn’t separate pretending fromfeelingas he leaned over me, bracing his hands on either side of my head, and I was swallowed by the shadow of those wide shoulders and thick arms.
“We will try light impact tonight,” he said. “And some touching. I’ll do a mix of flogging and spanking during our scene this summer, and I want you to get used to how they feel, so we can be convincing.”
“How convincing will we need to be?” I asked. The research materials Mark had sent over last fall had contained several videos of kinky scenes, and impact play in particular seemed difficult to fake.
“I will pull my strikes as much as I can, but I’ll need to leave some welts and marks for it to be believable,” admitted Mark. “How do you feel about that?”
“I feel okay with it,” I said. It was strange to be talking so matter-of-factly about this while I was spread on a table and cuffed to its corners. While a soft buzz was starting under my skin, tickling my lips and the tips of my fingers and toes. I recognized it from the time I’d nearly fainted from crawling, and tried to push it back. There was no reason being bound to a table should make me feel like the world was falling away. No reason it should make me want to laugh and cry at the same time.
“You’ll have your safe word, and it’ll be choreographed in advance,” Mark said, all cool assurance as he straightened up. He reached for the flogger he’d set next to me on the table and explained its composition and function to me in concise, direct terms.
Cowhide, thirty tails, each twenty-four inches long. Suede was softer; oiled leather would paint me black and blue. I’d be struck with the lower quarter of the falls—sometimes the very tips, which would feel sharp and stinging—and sometimes with more length, for a thuddier impact.
I held onto myself and my earlier determination while I was cuffed to the table. Even as the buzzing under my skin amplified, even as he demonstrated what he was saying with flicks and quick, soft strikes to the tops of my thighs and my breasts. But when he moved me to the St. Andrew’s Cross, re-cuffing me so that my feet were spread and my arms were stretched above my head, the world started to spin too fast for me to spin with it.
