AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“What we do. What I do to you. What we do in the basement.”
“Of course I do. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be here.”
“You wouldn’t just go along with it to please me?”
I frowned. “No, I’m not her.”
His face got hard then, angry. I would never have talked to him that way if I wasn’t so tired.
“Matthew,” I said, stroking his cheek. “Don’t be angry with me. I’m telling you the truth. I love the things you do to me.”
“Why? Why do you love them? Tell me why. Explain to me.” I don’t know was on the tip of my tongue, but he was already wrought up enough. Instead I said, “Right now?” to buy myself some time.
“Yes, right now,” he insisted. Okay, no time.
I looked into his intense blue eyes. “It’s hard to explain, but it makes me feel safe.” He looked at me like I had completely lost my mind. “Safe in what way?”
“Safe in a way that I’m completely under your power, but I trust you not to hurt me. Really hurt me.”
He looked at me a long time. I was so very tired by now.
“Matthew, may I please fall asleep again?”
“Okay,” he grumbled. “But no more screaming.”
“I’ll try.” I wanted to ask him to hold me until I fell asleep but I wasn’t brave enough, and soon he let me go and turned from me. I looked at his back and wondered what he’d do if I scooted over and pressed against him, but I just didn’t dare. I imagined myself snuggling against him, my arm coming over his waist to rest around his perfect flat belly, my fingertips tracing up and down his trail. Matthew, I wished I could say to him, I love you so much. But I didn’t dare. I didn’t dare do anything like that. It would have been the end of us. So I just lay there and thought about it, and wished that he would fall in love with me too.
I can’t really say why I loved him, and why I loved the things he did to me, why they made me feel protected and safe. I think some things you’d just rather not think about too deeply, and for me, that was one of those things.
* * *
I got pretty good at hiding my feelings from him, but it was never easy because he read me like a book. I tried to guard the things I said to him, and I never, ever looked him in the eyes, at least not for very long. Sometimes he insisted that I look at him, that I look him right in the eyes, and I hated those times because it was hard to keep my feelings to myself. Surely he realized I hid from him, but for both our sakes, I suppose, he didn’t press.
But while sometimes my feelings were allowed to be my own, one thing that was never my own was my body. I learned to be always, always available to him, and there was a kind of security in that arrangement. In fact, the most miserable times between us were when I struggled against him. I rarely did this, and when I did, I hated myself. Only now and again did I resist him, and those moments always made both of us hold our breath.
There were those moments when he asked me to do something especially coarse or intimate, something beyond what my mind was comfortable with. He searched for those moments, pushed me towards them, because I think he most loved to watch me struggle with myself. Struggle to persist, to overcome my fears and inhibitions, for no other reason than to please him and his lusts. Just as I lived to make him happy, he lived to watch me fight with myself to do as he asked. He lived to watch me try to make him happy, and to touch and own me, and feel me against his skin.
Therefore, nothing made him more furious than me withholding my body from him. Not my actual body, because he took what he wanted whenever he pleased, but my body’s reactions, which he felt he owned too. If I tried to own them, tried to control my own sensation and pleasure, a punishment was given, and I was quickly trained from such folly. If I tried to touch myself, to arch my body the way I wanted, I was slapped or pinched and told to behave. I was expected to do only what he wanted, and I was supposed to find pleasure in that, and not seek my own pleasure or let my mind wander from him. It was actually a lot easier than it sounds because he knew precisely what would make me thrill and burn even better than I knew myself.
I think in a strange way that was my only power in our relationship, that power to be aroused, to go wild from his hands and his cock and his mouth. It was a power I had that both threatened and excited him. I was expected to always very clearly express my pleasure, as well as my nervousness or pain.
Only once did I try to resist reacting to him, resist feeling the pleasure and pain he visited on me. He was already in fine form that night. He had stood me against the wall and wielded his belt until I screamed, then pushed me to my hands and knees and fucked me hard from behind. I thought he was so wild that night that even if I shut myself off, he was unlikely to notice. Wrong.
He knew the very second I left our dance, and he became enraged. I whimpered, stifled stubborn fear, and twisted away from him as he tightened his hands on my shoulders. He’d pressed against me, pressed my clit, pinched it hard.
“Come, damn you. You come.” But I couldn’t. Somehow, I had completely turned off. He pulled my hair hard. “Don’t. You don’t do this. I told you to come.”
“I can’t!” He was really hurting me. He let go of my hair with a frustrated exhalation and pulled out of me. He turned me over, spread my legs wide and pulled me under him again. He drove back into me, lifting me from the floor with the force of his thrusts.
“You’ll do as I say,” he said, and his voice both scared and aroused me. He fucked me hard, like the sheer force of it could snap me back to him, back under his power. “I can fuck you like this for two hours, Lucy. You fucking come, or else.” And he knew how to make me come. He did exactly what he had to do. The exact pressure, the quick tug on my nipples, the press of his hips. He knew, he knew. I did finally come for him, even distraught as I was. I realized then for the first time this bizarre dynamic between us. If I didn’t enjoy what he did, he was lost.
The realization of that fact terrified me. The fact that I could hurt him, that I had a way to cause him distress. After I came, he fell away from me, and he gave me a look that threatened annihilation.
“Go to bed,” he growled, and in tears of misery and shame, I ran from the room. I was still sniffling and sobbing when he came up nearly an hour later. “Just go to sleep,” he’d sighed, and that had made me cry harder still, because his disappointment and true displeasure was the most painful punishment he ever doled out.
The next morning he had been cold to me still, and distant. I was afraid he was thinking of the words he needed to end us. Instead he asked, “Will I see you on Thursday?”
“Yes, sir,” I replied, and what my voice said was, I’m so sorry, I’ll never do that again.
And on Thursday, I climbed out of his car with my bag in my hands, nervous and breathless as always. He met me at the door, pulled me close and rubbed his cheek against mine and said,
“I’m glad you came. You ready?”
* * *
That Matthew cared deeply for me was never in question, even when his lovemaking pushed my limits. Even when his eyes seemed to both caress and revile me, I knew he cared. Some nights he flat out worked me over. Those nights were always a jarring shock. Almost always, those nights were followed by something akin to coddling, subtle rewards for being brave and steadfast.
Then there was one strange night that confused and unnerved me, a night when I’d taken a hard fall at practice and been laid up in my apartment. I let him know I’d be unable to play, that I couldn’t come over. An hour later, he was knocking on my door.
I’m sure he partly came by to be sure I wasn’t lying, to be sure there wasn’t another man in my life, but I hoped he came to check on me too, to be sure I was all right. And to be honest, I wasn’t all right. I was lonely, and scared like any dancer nursing an injury, no matter how small.
“Matthew!” I was shocked to open the door and find him standing there. He’d never been to my place. It was a mess. I looked like hell in my ratty pajamas, my eyes red and swollen from crying. “I really can’t play.”
“I know.” He breezed into my apartment, a market bag in his hand. “I haven’t come to fuck you.”
He reached into the bag with a flourish, like a magician about to pull a rabbit from a hat.
Instead he pulled out a pint of ice cream. I burst into tears.
“I swear I’ll throw this at your head.” He turned his back on me. “Get into bed.” He rooted through my kitchen drawers until he found a spoon and returned, crawling under the covers beside me. It was just a twin, which made him seem even larger than usual, and he had to scoot close to me to not fall off the edge. He looked out of place in my tiny, messy apartment, and yet, right at home. Thinking about that, how easily he adapted to my squalid little surroundings, made me burst into emotional tears again.
“Enough. Quit your crying. What happened?” I think he thought I was crying about my knee. I explained how I’d fallen, that I wanted to stay off my knee as a precaution. He was highly suspicious even then of my injuries, the pain he suspected I felt.
“How long will you be off?”
“Just tonight. Long enough for it to rest. To make sure there’s no serious damage.” He looked at me still, hard and assessing, and then decided not to speak. Instead, he pressed the freezing pint of ice cream to my nipple, and smiled broadly when I shrieked.
“Are you hungry?”
“Yes,” I said, although I wasn’t. He ended up eating most of the ice cream himself. Ice cream wasn’t something dancers ate before bed, but I took a few small bites to mollify him.
“Look at you. Take a real bite!”
“I am!”
He scooped a huge spoonful from the bottom of the carton. “Open up.” I laughed as he brandished the spoon at me. “Matthew, stop!”
“Open your fucking mouth.” He fed me the spoonful, letting me lick it off slowly instead of shoving it all into my mouth the way I think he wanted to. I teased him a little, using my tongue to do things to that ice cream that I usually only did to him. He chuckled. “That’s right, you eat it all, you little fuck.”
“You’re trying to make me fat.”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing.”
We laughed there together on my small, lumpy bed. I looked over at him, Mr. Matthew Norris sitting in my pitiful apartment, and I thought I would just die. I was so hopelessly in love with him. I looked away, because his blue eyes were bright and burning. Don’t look at me.
