Page 156 of Deep Cover

35

Annie

When I woke, it was to find Chloe still wrapped around me closer than the blankets. In sleep, she nearly looked like a ghost, she was so pale and slept so still. But the night before she'd been blazing hot.

Once Claude and Chloe led me from the formal living room, away from Cole and out of the view of the hideous Vincent and his broken bitch, they'd taken turns fucking me, Chloe with a strap-on and Claude obviously not needing one.

Since I'd dreaded every minute before the party actually happened, and after what happened with Kie and then with challenging Cole – because I had no doubt that's what I'd done – I'd expected the time with them to be more misery.

It wasn't. Claude put me over his knee, but it was more foreplay than punishment or spanking for the pure joy of it. His hand would circle and stroke and then lift and deliver a flurry of spanks, none of them really whamming down. There was no thud, only the sting, and I didn't hate it.

Before Mark came into my life, I was hardly a choir girl. Sex was something I enjoyed, relationships were something I sucked at. So I tended to hookup with people from various parts of my life, whether that was going to a bar after work with a friend and taking the bartender home, or going to black belt class and leaving with the best-looking guy there. I didn't fool around with anybody from PD, because that would be stupid – I'd spent far too much time trying to be one of the guys to remind them I wasn't.

I'd also never really been into girls. A few kisses here and there, a drunken grope or two, but I'd never so much as taken my shirt off around another girl. Chloe had been something of a revelation, how soft and smooth and giving she was. When she fucked me she was all business, holding me down and taking me from behind while Claude made me suck on his fingers and then on his cock. But they were clean and fun and they weren't Vincent and they weren't Kie. And Chloe's mouth when I kissed her, that was something of a revelation.

Since neither of them was awake yet, I had time to think. I'd gone back to the party when I didn't have to get out of a feeling that I had enjoyed too much the torture and punishment of a man I truly hated. I didn't know if that made me weirdly moral or just weird. I'd defied Cole to do it, so likely it made me stupid as shit, no matter what else.

I'd gotten up to twenty-eight with Cole, at least according to my last coherent thought about his count. Whatever that meant, I had to think it wasn't good.

But the time I'd spent with Chloe and Claude, approved of by Cole, that was – pleasant. Wonderful. Beautiful. I'd enjoyed it, all of it, even sucking on Claude and I wasn't big on blow jobs, giving or receiving.

So where did pleasure fit into the dynamic? I'd never stopped to think about it because my "master" was a sexual sadist. Because he could and had demanded I become his for the duration of my treatment, his pleasure was taken in all the ways he could break me and build me back up. I understood that, understood on some level that I needed to be broken completely before I could be healed, and that however weird and horrible and painful and humiliating, somehow it was still extracting positive change from me.

Pleasure had rarely crept into the dynamic. Even when I anticipated something in Cole's room where he punished me and hurt me and pushed me to my limits, it hurt once it was happening. That kept coming back to me, over and over, as if it were a lesson I couldn't learn.

It told me what kink had been with Mark, too; because he'd never hurt me. I'd never found myself in the middle of being handcuffed by him only to think I don't think I can do this this time. Please stop! We'd never even had a safe word because I'd never come close to needing one.

Did pleasure count as well as pain? If I learned to accept being pleasured, would that have an effect like pain in that I grew from it? It wasn't something I'd often offered myself in the Real World. Always it came at a price. Always I held myself accountable, held myself to answer for whatever I'd done that was wrong or wasn't good enough.

The same way I'd taken myself back to the party after Jason was punished.

Did that mean in some way the time with Claude and Chloe was a reward? Would I learn from it?

My next thought was one that sent ice flying through my system. That I had defied Cole. That I would be paying for that. Of all the things I could do to anger him, outright defiance was surely the worst. As I'd found out when I reached out to PD without his permission and –

I froze, going even more still than I had been.

When I'd reached out.

What was today? But I knew that, I knew it instantly, Valentine's Day plus one because that had been the night for the bloody stupid dinner party.

I was late. I was late checking in with my father. I was late with the calls that Cole allowed me with Mark so that he and my family would think I was still in rehab, some kind of real rehab, whatever my father told my mother, and if he told my sisters anything at all, he himself thought I was in rehab. He knew I'd fallen and hard and that it was partly his health that drove me even if he didn't and couldn't have known anything about Jesse.

I was late checking in.

They'd both think I was undercover again. They'd think I'd run and not told them.

I didn't know what they'd think but I'd only just put my life with Mark back together long enough to put it on hold. And I didn't want to ever frighten my father, he was a cop, he knew the risks I took.

I'd only just gotten enough privileges, as if I were in prison, to contact my father and Mark and to have limited contact with Tad Charles. The worst thing Cole could do would be to refuse to let me be in contact.

Fear made me go rigid. Until Chloe's hand snaked around me from behind and started lazily playing with my nipple.

"You've gone all hard and tense," she said, and kissed the back of my neck. "Let me do something about that."

And for a little while, I forgot about the outside world.

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