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But Bryce didn’t come for me that day.
I don’t know how long I laid there on the rough carpet, spent condoms littering the floor all around me.
Hours. Maybe a whole day? I passed out at one point. Not sure I would call it sleep. When I finally got up, the apartment was dark. Bryce was out.
And to my everlasting shame, I didn’t leave right then.
The only thing I had strength for was a bath and then to fall into bed, where I stayed for a week.
Bryce only bothered me when he wanted to fuck me. I just laid there and took it, no matter what he did to me.
“Jesus, I guess that finally broke you.” He laughed as he said it, the whole time still fucking me. “I was wondering what it’d take. Well, if you don’t want to get kicked out on the fucking street you better get some life back in you cause you’re fucking boring like this.”
He pulled out and left the room.
I finally crawled out of bed and made my way to the bathroom.
I poured the contents of a bottle of some prescription sleeping pills into my hands.
I poured a glass of water.
I dropped my head back and shoved all the pills in my mouth.
… and then I dropped to my knees in front of the toilet and spit them all out, every last one of them.
I flushed and went to the sink to scrub at my tongue.
And then I pulled on a robe and left Bryce’s apartment. I didn’t take anything other than my phone. I didn’t even change or put on any other clothes.
Bryce was wrong.
I wasn’t broken completely.
But I was close.
So very fucking close.
If I didn’t leave then, right that very second, I wasn’t sure I’d have the guts to later. So I walked out in my robe.
I dialed the number of an old friend from college. The fact that Paula even picked up the call after I’d completely ghosted her months earlier speaks to what a good person she is.
When I broke down and confessed my situation through tears, she came and picked me up. She let me stay at her place for the weeks it took to find another job and start piecing my life back together.
Bryce didn’t have the influence he would have a couple of years later, so he wasn’t able to blacklist me like I’m sure he wanted. I was able to find another good job.
I tried to have normal relationships. But it turned out after Bryce, I couldn’t cum without pain. I tried. God knows I tried. With a couple of very sweet and earnest men, I tried so hard.
When that didn’t work, I looked in other places. BDSM clubs. There I could find men who would hurt me and please me at the same time.
I sought out Jackson Vale, who Gentry had also wronged so badly. I thought we could heal each other. For a while I think it even worked.
But Jackson never genuinely wanted to hurt me. He humored me with light spankings but he never would touch the whip.
Even other Doms I played with throughout the years… there was always something missing. A couple of them genuinely enjoyed inflicting pain but it was always so controlled.
Where was the menace? The manipulation? The mindfuck?
Was that why I really sought Dylan out? Because I hoped he’d be more like Bryce? No matter the research I’d done on him, had I deep down hoped he’d hurt me just like Bryce used to? That he’d tear me down day by day and try to break me?
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I whisper as I grab the soap and start to scrub at my body.
God, am I so desperate for sensation, to feel fucking anything that I was hoping to find Bryce 2.0 in Dylan?
But I didn’t. Dylan is the antithesis of Bryce. He doesn’t want to hurt me.
I stop scrubbing as I stare at the wall.
Because that’s not true, is it? Dylan does want it. He just hates that he does. He fights against it.
But does that really matter at the end of the day?
Over and over I’ve told Dylan that it does matter. That it’s okay to want it because he never steps a toe past the line.
But you’ve never given him a line.
Really, we’ve never even come close. All we’ve ever done is play. Fucking play.
I throw the bar of soap in the water and pull the plug, standing up angrily and grabbing for a towel.
I’m done playing it safe.
Fourteen
DYLAN
I scrub my hand down my face and sit back in my chair after hours of staring at my damn computer screen coding to fix the bug that had halted testing.
We knew the transition from the old processors to the new might create some kinks in the systems but even I thought we were fucked for a couple of hours there. I was finally able to do some creative rewriting of the code to fix it. In the end it was a matter of reordering some of the divides to maintain precision.
