Page 35 of Salt in the Wound
The room roared its approval as I gasped. The pain was sharp and short, there and gone again, but it still sent adrenaline zinging through my blood. If this were a sparring match, I’d shake it off and put my guards back up to fight again. But this wasn’t a sparring match, or even a fair fight. I was consecrated to pain tonight. I was an offering to it.
Just like I’d hoped to do for God, I would hurt for my future husband. And hope that I could keep my head clear as my heart sang with joy for it.
Mark wrapped his hand around my braid and walked me over to the St. Andrew’s Cross in the middle of the stage. His expression was as cool as ever, but there was something different about him in front of his club, something a little more energetic. His strides were longer, his shoulders looser. When he cuffed me to the cross and then turned to ask the crowd if he should get his flogger, his voice was dripping with a smooth, seductive malice I’d only heard once before: at my father’s rooftop party.
He was performing for them. Their king. Their chosen devil.
And they loved it. As he smacked my bottom again before he stepped away to get his flogger. As he came back and used my braid to tilt my head to the side. As he ghosted his lips over my neck until I squirmed and then bit down hard enough to make me cry out.
Their cheers and calls mixed with the low, tugging bass of the music, and when the flogger’s tails licked at my back for the first time, the noise was deafening. There was another rush of adrenaline, and everything felt sharp, so very sharp. The noise, the lingering sting from Mark’s bite, the air brushing the underside of my bottom, it all reminded me that I was on display. That the people on the floor could undoubtedly see up my dress, see right through it under these bright lights. They could see me flinch as Mark struck my back again; they could see the flogger’s kisses surely rising on my skin right now.
Hyssop.
Hyssop.
Cleanse me with hyssop and I will be clean…
Mark’s lazy, exploratory flicks began to change. They came faster now, like needles dancing over my shoulder blades, all cutting heat and sting, and I was shifting on the cross without realizing it, trying to escape the feeling when it came, and then seeking it out when it left. I didn’t know what I wanted, if I wanted it to go or if I wanted it to come, and then the flicks changed again, no longer solitary strikes but a rhythm, a razor rain on my back. Unceasing, fast, relentless, and I couldn’t catch my breath, couldn’t find my center, couldn’t find anything except for him behind me and the pain burning like hellfire along my skin.
He stopped and I sucked in the cool air, dizzy from lack of oxygen. The crowd was quieter now, as if enthralled, and Mark paced behind me like a cat, patient and deadly.
It was only a handful of seconds before my thoughts cleared and I could lift my head—which was when he struck again. Fire upon fire, painting my shoulder blades red, giving me wings made of stinging, scarlet welts.
Needles under my skin, my center slipping away, breath long forgotten.
The heat was everywhere: my back, my throat, my chest. Swirling like liquid fire in my belly and simmering between my spread thighs.
Mark paused again, then paced patiently behind me again. There was a method to his pauses, but I couldn’t figure it out. I hadn’t moaned or grunted. I hadn’t collapsed against the cross or whispered for him to stop.
Maybe it was like music, with movements and lulls and crescendos. Or maybe itwaslike sparring, coming together in a flurry of strikes and then breaking apart again.
Whatever the method was, it matched whatever was happening inside me. The world had gone from sharply vivid to blurred to the point of abstraction. The music had sunk into my bones along with the heat from his flogger; I was breathing in time to it, breathing in time to his strikes; they were all the same thing now. Breath, music, pain. My breasts ached as if by proxy, craving the leather too, and my clitoris was aching even more.
Another pause, and then—
Mark lifted up the hem of my dress, a gesture entirely for show, given how short it was. The crowd screamed, and then the flogger snapped against my exposed ass, harder than it had on my back. I jumped in my cuffs, and the crowd screamed louder. Again I felt the leather, again I heard the screams, and it was all so strange, because they were screaming to see me played with for their amusement, for their pleasure, but it was almost like they were screamingforme, like their voices were my own, and they were sharing this with me, the highs and the lows, the burn and then the insidious heat that followed after.
Mark spared nothing, it felt like, giving me all his strength, all his cruelty, and I was crying, shivering, but something else was happening too, the same thing that happened when I kicked the kicking post at my school until I couldn’t stand anymore, the same thing that happened whenever I knelt on the cold marble floor of my church until I was numb…
The pain was tugging me under or pulling me up, I never knew which, and it was cold and it was hot, and it was sluicing over me and it was burning me alive; it was cleansing me with water and searing away my impurities. My breath was like a flower furling and unfurling in my stomach, the imperceptible stillness between each inhale and exhale beckoning like heaven itself. God was here, around me. Inside me, a fullness in my veins and a joy nestled in the close, wet chambers of my heart.
This—this was what I had begged my uncle for. The gift of feeling God through pain, of feeling my transgressions burned away, my heart cleansed and full. And here I was, ecstatic with it in full view of hundreds, sagging into Mark’s chest as he dropped his flogger to the floor and uncuffed me from the cross.
He swept me up into his arms, and I blinked up at him. In the bright stage lights, his eyes were a brilliant blue, almost aqua, a warm and clear sea.
“Are you going to spank me now?” I whispered.
That had been a plan—yes,theplan. The plan made a thousand years ago. Flogging, and then spanking. He would pretend to make me come after. I was supposed to fake my pleasure, and the subtler, the better, he’d told me. No Meg Ryan theatrics.
He looked down at me. “Yes,” he said so that only I could hear him under the music and the crowd. “Do you remember your safe word?”
“Yes. But I won’t use it.” My murmurs sounded dreamy even to myself; I sounded drugged. “I want you to hurt me more.”
Something moved behind his eyes, gone before I could identify it. And then he bent his head and licked the side of my face.
The crowd roared their approval, and I shivered as I understood what he’d done.
He’d licked the tears off my cheek.
