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"Josh - "
"No," his face contorted. "Let me feel it. I deserve it. I became filled with so much rage; ten guys couldn't have held me. I rolled and kicked. I fought them with whatever I had inside of me, three years of unfulfilled passion, fueled up emotional fucked-upness. When I yanked the guy off her, I remember his eyes going wide, looking at my face, and he tried to say something, but I busted his mouth with my fist before he could. I was sticky, sticky, spraying blood on her, and then she was on my back, trying to pull me off, and then the police were there. . . the police were there. "
He stopped, breathing hard, tears dropping off his chin onto his heaving chest. Lauren shifted, rose.
"Don't take it off," he snapped out. "I don't want you to see my face. "
"Okay," she said softly, laying her hand against the side of his jaw.
"Don't," he tried to jerk away, but the bindings didn't allow it. "I don't want you to touch me. "
"Well, that's just too bad, because I'm going to. " She rubbed her hand along his jaw, stroked, kept stroking as her other hand laid along his rib cage, soothing the ulcer of emotions.
"Please," he choked out. "I'm not. . . that's not all of it. "
Lauren raised her head and she sensed his eyes searching for her face. She nodded, stepped back and let him hear her sit before him again. "Tell me all of it, Josh," she said sternly, though her throat ached with his pain.
"One of the guys was critical. " His voice was weary now, almost dead. "The other was pretty messed up. I had just knocked the third out. The messed-up one was still coherent enough to talk, and he did, because he didn't want to go to jail for rape, especially since he wasn't a rapist. " Josh swallowed, and his voice broke.
"He was just doing what my wife had paid him to do. "
Chapter 18
Cold insinuated itself in her vitals like a doctor's invasive instrument. "Josh," she whispered. "Oh God, Josh. "
Abandoning anything but her feelings, she sprang up and removed the mask, unbuckling it and pulling it off so she could see his anguished face. He turned eyes to hers that were overflowing not just with tears, but the black despair she had detected in small doses since they had met. Was it really less than two days ago? She snatched up a towel, wiped away his tears, blotted his running nose with tender fingers.
"Don't untie me," he said quietly. Marcus stopped in mid-motion. "I don't deserve the consideration. "
He leaned his head back, closed those hopeless eyes. "I didn't know that at first," he murmured. "They separated us. She told the police everything," his eyes opened, went back to Lauren, his chosen confessor, and the detachment in his eyes stirred her, so at odds with his exposed physical condition.
"She didn't want her friends to go to jail, or me. When the cops came in and started asking me questions about our. . . lifestyle, it floored me. Where the hell had that come from? Then I looked at their eyes and knew.
"It was a fucking game. A game she had engineered. She wanted to get off on me being helpless while she was raped, which of course wasn't rape. I didn't tell them anything, didn't make any attempt to defend myself. I wasn't protecting her or them, I just couldn't speak. Everything shut down and I was just inside my head, looking over our whole relationship, everywhere we had taken it, a spiral to hell. We kept going round and round the same subject that fascinated us, deeper and deeper into what had resulted in that dark alley. The police, the way they looked at us. The sick fantasies of bored yuppies while people got robbed or murdered out there, real crimes.
"One of them considered me a lowlife, perverted freak and it was obvious he considered the whole situation a waste of the taxpayer's money. Probably thought they should just shoot the lot of us. The other was more sympathetic, but it was all pity. He had this look, like I was some guy who had been sexually abused as a child, to explain why I was so fucked up now. Like I was some lost little kid that needed a mommy to take me home. And then she showed up to do just that. "
Lauren wasn't sure he was even in the room with them anymore; his gaze was so far deep into himself.
She could feel Marcus suffering, they both were, but Josh was not going to stop until it was done, now that it was out in the open.
The muscle in his jaw clenched. "Her eyes were shadowed and bruised, her lip split. She looked a little scared by it all. I don't know for sure. I was so messed up that night, I couldn't have said what she was feeling. She got me to the car, started to say something, I don't know what. I just handed her the keys, walked away, didn't look back. I felt like a worthless, dirty piece of shit. Everything shut down, you understand?" His head turned toward Marcus, focused. "I called you.
"When I got home," he said dully, "I stank of blood, sweat, the jail cell, and my own shame. Winona came over, of course. She followed me into my room, closed the door. We looked at each other then, and for just a moment, I had this pathetic glimmer of hope. There were tears in her eyes, and she was trembling. I thought, for just a second, she knows just as I do, that we went too far a long time ago. I cared about her. I didn't have much more than sex with her, but there was a basic attraction between us that could have been more. For just a second, I thought we were about to step on the right side of the line. Then she knelt in front of me and asked me to punish her.
"Jesus," he shook his head, "The rage just took over, and I couldn't control it. I threw her out of the apartment. When I was dragging her, she pushed against me, and her nipples were hard. It turned her on.
She couldn't see even then, she couldn't tell the difference between games and real life, or maybe she didn't want to. "
He swallowed, shuddered. "I came here. It was quiet enough, and simple enough, for me to put some pieces back together. The things that let you get up in the morning, go through the motions. Eat, drink, sleep, crap. But here I am, playing games again at the first opportunity. It's like, you don't go to hell, it just keeps chasing you down. " At Lauren's stricken look, he closed his eyes, shook his head. "No, that was wrong. I didn't mean that, not about you.
"I did the same thing you did. I questioned whether the cop was right, if we were just a bunch of sick freaks. If this wasn't a game, but a scream for therapy. But then, here, where it's quiet, and I could think, I saw it was just the same thing as being gay. "
His eyes opened, turned to a surprised Marcus. "There's too many who are, for it to be something unnatural. There are so many who are drawn to D/s. It's in the animal kingdom; you see it all the time.
Dominant and submissive is a way of life, and we are animals, we can't escape it, shouldn't want to. We would probably be a lot less fucked up if we acted more like animals, accepted things, and stopped trying to run the world. D/s is part of our instincts, part of what we are, but the question becomes, how far do you indulge it? We don't have 100% animal instincts, and nothing can fuck you up like half-assed instincts meeting overblown intellect.
"Is this okay?" he glanced down at himself, a slight trace of amusement in his tired, tear-streaked face. "It feels okay," he said thoughtfully. "But when is it too much? Will I enjoy this now, and then let you be raped in an alley, get off on it?" his attention turned to Lauren and the amusement disappeared. "Nothing she did changed that I had that thought, when I believed she was being raped for real. People playing D/s games are okay, but what I did, what I thought, was twisted. I took the step from sex to brutality without even blinking. Some people can handle it, some can't. You can, Marcus can, but I'm not one of them.
