Page 19 of The Dark Before Light

Lionel is finally grasping the seriousness of the situation. “I don’t know,” he says in a wavering voice. “I came on an hour ago and haven’t seen her.”

“Why hasn’t another Dom gone into the room and asserted control?” I ask, frowning. “The doors don’t lock.”

Lionel won’t meet my eye. “A few have tried, Mistress, but the door is blocked from the inside. Should I—should I get security?”

“You’re only now considering that?” yells Nate.

I sigh and stand up.

“Nathan, take a breath and put on your shoe.”

He freezes, then nods and does as I say.

I turn my attention to Lionel. “What’s the sub’s name?”

“M-Mandy, Mistress.”

“Both of you, follow me.”

There are consequences for stepping into our former selves. No matter how hard we try, our present-day feet can never perfectly align with the imprints we once made in the world. The result is dissonance. A jarring feedback loop between who we once were and who we’ve become.

When I finally get home at 1:00 a.m., I’m wrecked. I stumble through my dark house, shedding clothes as I make my way to my bedroom. I manage a brief detour to the bathroom before falling face first onto my bed and curling into the fetal position.

My consequence, my pain, is eerily close to what I felt when I was young—an innate sense of not belonging—which in my case formed a core belief that I’d never belong anywhere.

Finding my place didn’t happen overnight. It took years. Like Lewis Caroll’s Alice, I had to experiment until I found the correct door for me. Ironically, it took walking through the wrong door at UCLA when I was twenty. What I thought was an evening seminar on cognitive neuroscience was in fact an introduction to BDSM. By the time I realized my error, it was too late. I was frozen in my seat and riveted by the lecturer, a professional dominatrix named Charlie Rhodes whose magnetism enthralled me.

Charlie told me later I stuck out like a sore thumb that night. Not because I looked radically uncomfortable—though I was—but because I absorbed her every word like I was starving and had finally found a feast. She spoke about sexual dominance and submission. Safety, consent, communication, power, and pleasure. She had what I wanted: confidence, innate sensuality, and deep understanding of human connection and the intersection between the mind and body.

That was my true beginning; the following nine years, my history.

Donning the mantel of the Professor tonight was like walking into my childhood home and finding that even though all the furniture was the same, I was looking at it from an impossible angle. Although I played the necessary role—asserting control over the Dom in the playroom, soothing the sub and counseling her when she calmed down—I felt upside down in a right side up world.

I don’t fit at Crossroads anymore, in the first place I felt like I belonged, and it fucking hurts.

But something else hurts more. A truth that sneaks up in the darkness and silence between my muffled sobs and falls over me like a weighted blanket when my tears at last ebb. A twisted treasure unearthed in my very own psyche by tonight’s dissonance. Reflective and inescapable, it glows across all the footsteps of my past.

There’s a reason why the men I’ve always been drawn to look like Nate. Tall and slender and faintly untouchable. Because they resemble the first male who quickened my sexuality.

Eighteen-year-old Kieran Hayes.

All these years, I’ve been trying to make a memory kneel.

At least I finally understand the underlying reason I pulled away from Nate, from Crossroads. Because after so long searching, some part of me must have accepted I’d never find what I was looking for.

He isn’t real.

My heart has been hunting a ghost.

Chapter 6

Kieran

Despite my best attempts over the last four days to talk myself out of this appointment, at 6:59 p.m. on Wednesday, I knock on Dr. Stirling’s office door. When there’s no answer, Sven and I exchange a glance. Her car is in the parking lot. She even reminded me via an impersonal text service of the date and time.

Like I could have forgotten.

I’m about to knock again when the door opens. Slightly mollified that she didn’t summon me from inside again like I’m mutt begging for scraps, I open my mouth to make a sarcastic remark.

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