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Her hands were shaking.
Malvia curled up on the bunk bed, tucking her trembling fingers between her thighs. Las Palmas had a large dorm style—or perhaps it was hostel style—building for those who needed somewhere to sleep, but hadn’t booked either a playroom with a bed or one of the more traditional hotel-style rooms one building over.
Submissives dozed quietly around her, and nearly every bed was full, thanks to the mandatory meeting that turned out to be a game announcement. Almost everyone was here.
Everyone, including Benson.
Elegant and expensive bunk beds with top of the line mattresses and high-quality linen offered a comfortable night’s sleep. But they were still bunk beds, and sleeping here was often part of the play. Another way of being controlled. Of experiencing the power exchange. Nothing like spending the night in a twin extra-long bunk bed with thirty other submissives to humble someone.
Although she was one of the last people to come to bed, Malvia was wide awake. It was three minutes shy of 7 a.m. The exceptional type-A personalities of the club membership might, in their normal day-to-day lives, wake up at four-thirty to be at the gym by 5:00. At Las Palmas, getting up before ten a.m. was an early start. The majority of scenes lasted well into the night.
Malvia only slept four hours, but now that she was awake, there was no hope of getting back to sleep. Not after the confrontation last night.
Remembering the scene with Faith and Benson, she couldn’t decide if she wanted to curl up and die from embarrassment and shame, scream in rage, or walk away from the club all together. People who didn’t want to play could relinquish their memberships. It might come to that for her.
But she didn’t want to. She’d worked, and sacrificed, to become the version of herself she’d found here.
After all, you deserve to be punished.
Those words cycled through her head, battering against her mental walls.
Faith was wrong.
Mal didn’t deserve to be punished. Even her submissive side agreed that the word “deserved” was a big fucking problem. Life, and people, were messy. That messiness didn’t mean someone deserved to be punished.
Her hard-fought journey to find her submission, to understand her own needs and kinks, had been both long and, yes, messy.
Some of that mess had included Benson. Maybe saying it splattered all over Benson would be a better description.
Still, she didn’t deserve to be punished.
But part of her wanted it.
Rolling onto her back she stared at the ceiling, at the creamy white paint and dark exposed beams.
Tempted to shove that realization down, to bury it deep, with all the other dangerous emotions and needs that—despite her current coping mechanism of deep submission—she hadn’t processed, Mal made a quick decision. She wouldn’t take the easy route out.
Malvia rarely allowed herself the luxury of denial.
She and Benson had parted ways. They hadn’t just burned a bridge as they did. They burned the bridge, poisoned the river water, and salted the earth on the banks so nothing could grow.
But the irrevocability of their separation had not muted, let alone erased her feelings about him. About them.
Anger, hurt, embarrassment… those were the simple feelings.
The guilt and shame were harder to live with.
She didn’t deserve to be punished, but punishment could mean resolution.
Lying there, she forced herself to make an explicit statement about what she was thinking.
She wanted Benson to punish her because she wanted absolution.
Maybe if he took his pound of flesh—and of blood, because Benson was nothing if not thorough—she’d be able to release some of this dark guilt.
Part of her recent (messy) journey deeper into submission had included researching and testing domestic discipline. It had all been role play, since she didn’t have even a casual romantic partner, let alone a domestic romantic relationship. One thing that had called her about the domestic discipline kink was the idea that it definitively forgave mistakes when the physical punishment, usually a spanking, was done.
It was probably a completely fucked up concept for an adult to find appealing, but she’d learned to accept that her needs were abnormal, maybe even aberrant, and move on.
