Page 229 of Deep Cover

Something was wrong. Something more than what I'd expected. I had anticipated perhaps being caned, or whipped. I had thought he would be angry once the immediate reactions had a chance to settle.

But even for Cole he was acting strange. More rigid than ever, and as if the results didn't matter.

Not everything for a sexual sadist is sexual, for all the sense that makes, but Cole had taught me that. A good deal of what he did to me gave him satisfaction of some sort, but it wasn't sexual gratification from what I could see. He'd hang me from the cross or tie me to the things that still looked like monkey bars, and he'd hurt me in ways I had never imagined (and a few I had) and when he cut me loose, he would go back to work. Or sit down and talk. Or go to a meeting. So he wasn't going off to masturbate.

He simply enjoyed the control and the pain. Both were important to him, maybe equally so. I thought he got as much pleasure out of forcing me to kneel and stare fixedly at a spot on the floor as playing the ladder game up and down my ass and thighs with a set of canes, while making me count.

Suddenly everything he did felt rigid. Like a partner who has suddenly gone off sex. Like someone who knows this is something they've always enjoyed but now they don't.

It wasn't just that the joy had gone out of it for him. Everything had. He wasn't there.

He began rigid morning routines. He'd wake me at dawn and we'd run through the desert, returning for a complicated regimen I was never less humiliated by. After weights, after yoga, after marital arts, he'd gone back to the morning enemas, followed by a flush of water that had me peeing half the morning away. I think if he could have forced me to vomit every morning he would have but somehow he drew the line there.

There were saunas and showers and steam rooms. He cut my hair so short I sobbed, feeling he had all but shaved it. At his command I used mouthwash four times a day, until my gums hurt to look at the bottle.

He was cleaning me out, eliminating any trace of Vincent in me or on me. I wasn't against it. It mirrored the reaction of wanting to shower after having been groped in a club or used by someone in an undercover operation when I needed to stay deep cover and couldn't say no, not without tipping my hand. I wasn't against getting Vincent off me any way we could.

I just hoped whatever there was of Annie in me would still be there when he was finished.

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