Page 32 of Brave
“Nobody made him mad like Piggy. Everything she said, he’d say she was challenging his authority. As far as his punishments went, this was one of the ones we’d hope for. If he was really mad, he’d make her sit in a mud wallow. Except it wasn’t, really. It was worse than that. It was like a composting puddle, filled with manure, rotting vegetables, and decomposing grass and leaves. It smelled horrid, and no matter how much she scrubbed, the smell stayed on her for days.”
“Did that ever happen to you?” Carlson heard himself ask. Try though he did to mask his fury, his voice came out strained enough for even her to notice.
Glancing up at him, she shook her head. “Only Piggy. He punished each of us in different ways. Whatever we hated the most, that’s what we’d get.”
The man deserved everything he got in prison. More than that, he’d better pray Carlson never met him face to face.
“I can’t believe you’d subject yourselves to that.” Angry with Ethen and now annoyed with himself for sounding as if he blamed her for what she’d been subjected to, he took her fork away from her. “Eat all your sandwich. You don’t have to eat the corn.”
Puppy stared at him. “He was the Master. We did whatever he told us to.”
“Is that the kind of relationship you want?” He flipped the page in the contract so he could check that section for himself. She’d written in service submissive, but in his experience that could mean anything and it usually took a lot of talking and a lot of honesty to delve beneath what a submissive said and what they actually expected when they gave themselves that label.
“Not really,” she surprised him by admitting. “In the beginning it was different, though. It was fun experimenting, you know… before he changed. I liked some parts, like the positions we used to have to practice before bed every night. I used to fantasize about that sort of thing, back when I was younger and reading the Gor books.” She flicked him a guilty glance, as if unsure how proper it was for her to complain. When he said nothing, she shyly offered, “I think I maybe like the idea of submission more than I actually like being submissive.”
Taken aback, he asked, “Why do you think that?” Because that was honestly not the vibe he was getting from her. He didn’t think she was a service submissive, but she absolutely was a submissive.
“It used to be fun, but…”
When she petered off into a shrug, he said, “Maybe it stopped being fun because it was taken in a direction you didn’t enjoy.”
“Or maybe I’m just broken,” she muttered, picking at her sandwich. “Maybe I don’t know what I want, or I’m too picky, or incapable of being happy—”
Carlson pushed his chair back, silencing her next ‘or’ mid-vowel when he took her wrist and drew her up behind him. Keeping his touch deliberately light, giving her plenty of chances to pull away if she wanted to, he led her across the living room and down the short hall to his office. Leaving her standing at his desk, he opened up the closet where he kept his secondary playbag.
Unzipping it on his desk, he dug through the contents, withdrawing a vibrating wand first and, watching her face startle, then a package of clothespins. Leaving her staring at both, he moved his secondary playbag out of the way. She was picking her fingers when he turned back.
“Questions, comments, concerns?” he asked.
Her cheeks tinged pink. “I thought you, um… said sex was, um…”
“Off the table?” Circling the desk back around to her side, he sat down on the edge with feet braced apart and hands cupped in his lap. “It is. It’ll continue to be off the table too, until such a time as I feel I know you, your likes and dislikes, as well as your hard and soft limits well enough to proceed without the fear of consent violations.”
She fidgeted with her fingers. “Oh.”
Though she averted her eyes to the floor, he still saw it when her eyebrows beetled in and worry tinged her expression.
He tipped his head, trying to read her better. “I saw in your papers that sex is something you would be willing to explore.”
Her cheeks pinkened and her head came up. She tried to smile, but it wasn’t a good mask for her embarrassment. “You don’t have to have sex with me if you don’t want to. I wasn’t saying that at—”
“Not wanting to,” he stressed, “is not the issue, honey. What is a problem, at least for me, is my submissive feeling like she’s nothing more than a booty call. I want to know what your needs are, so I can make sure I’m meeting them. I want to get to know you as a person, and frankly, I want you to know me too.”
“Oh,” she said again, the set of her shoulders easing a bit.
“I’m going to learn a lot about you when I read through what you wrote in the negotiation. So, before we get started, how about I tell you a little about me? I identify most strongly on the domestic discipline side of the BDSM spectrum,” Carlson said, not waiting for her reply. “I am what is called Head of Household. I make decisions based on what I feel works best for my household. I am a provider. In fact, I would say I identify most strongly in that one aspect over all the others. I am driven to provide whatever’s missing.”
And in that instant, he felt the click of why he felt so driven to help her. From the moment when she’d seated herself at his table and he’d taken her hand, he’d felt the subconscious draw. He’d never met anyone who needed as much as she did. Guidance, reassurance, self-confidence, and comfort—she needed all of it.
“I’m not a Daddy-Dom,” he cautioned. “I’m absolutely not a sugar daddy, either. What I’m looking for is a submissive who both needs and wants the kind of Dom I am, and I want to fulfill her needs in a way that also fulfills mine. Can I be a hard-ass sadist at Black Light, sure. I can tie you down with the best of them, gag you and go to town with flogger, paddle, cane, or crop. I can hit your clit or nipple with the tip of a signal whip without any problem at all. I can send you flying into subspace or reduce you to tears, and I can do it in a matter of minutes or I can take all night. But if you’re looking for someone who can do that 24/7, then you’re not going to be happy with me, because that’s not who I am. So”—he gestured to her—“who are you?”
She looked at him, a deer caught in the headlights. She didn’t even know.
“That’s all right,” he told her softly. “Let’s find out together. You have full use of your safeword from this point forward. It will be my discretion if we need to stop to talk it out, or stop altogether. Are you comfortable giving me that level of trust, or would you rather all play just stop the minute you use it?”
She picked at her fingers, her eyes still wide, still very much a deer in the headlights. “I can trust you.”
Neither her expression nor her tone held a single note of trust. Considering what he’d read in the papers someone at the club—he suspected Spencer—had slipped him, plus what he’d found regarding the trial on the internet in his searches at home, it would have been more surprising if he thought she did trust him. Trust had to be earned. The groundwork of that would start today.
