“Maxie, I wasn’t there. I don’t know how it went down. But if she didn’t use her safe word and didn’t seem distressed, then she was probably fine with it.”
“She said I keep second-guessing us. That I make her feel bad for wanting what she wants,” I tell him miserably.
“I can see that,” Mac says. “Was she distressed?”
“She was crying.”
“Yeah, afterwards, when you argued. I’m talking about during the scene. When you pinned her down, was she crying, flinching, lashing out at you to defend herself?”
“No, but I was holding her down. I probably outweigh her by a hundred pounds.”
“Focus on her. Think through what you saw and heard and felt. Was she in distress?”
“No,” I admit, as much to him as to myself.
“She’s an experienced little. She has a safe word. She wasn’t in distress. You didn’t do anything she didn’t want. If you can’t trust your own instincts, then be guided by her responses. She believes in you. Do you want to try again?”
More than anything. “Yes.”
“Then let go of your doubts. Trust yourself.”
I roll my water bottle between my palms, still not able to meet his eyes. “Sir, I need to know ... the worst you’ve done. Or seen. Whatever you can tell me. I need to know that what I’m doing isn’t wrong.”
“Stop calling me sir,” Mac says absently. “Worst thing I’ve done wouldn’t help you. But I’ll tell you one of the more extreme scenes I’ve done. Did it at a club in Florida, with a nurse monitoring. I had my sub lie in an ice bath for fifteen minutes, then warm up a little, then back in the ice bath for ten minutes. She was blue when she came out. Cold to the touch. I had her suck ice chips before I fucked her mouth. Then I fucked her with an ice dildo before I took her pussy. I had her lie completely still while I was fucking her and close her eyes. Closest I’d want to come to fucking a corpse.” Mac shakes his head. “It was an experience.”
I stare at him.
He chuckles. “Told you your fantasies were nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Thi-this was with your ex?” I ask, because I cannot see his poised, polished, bitch of a wife having sex for any reason other than procreation, much less simulating necrophilia.
“I’d rather not say. Part of the divorce. But I’ll say that it was while we were married, and I was never unfaithful.”
So that’s a yes. Mind. Blown. “Fuck, Mac.”
“Here’s the important thing: we negotiated that scene for weeks. We both knew how it was going to go, what to expect, what the risks were. She had two safe words. One in case she needed the nurse to check on her and one in case she needed me to stop. I checked her core temperature several times during the scene to make sure it never went too low. There were layers of safety built in that allowed us both to be comfortable and focus on the experience. You don’t have any confidence in your safety net, Maxie. You don’t trust your sub to use her safe word when she needs to, and you don’t trust yourself to know when you’ve gone too far. I’d say those things come with time and experience, but you’ve jumped right into the deep end with this girl. Unless she’s willing to move back into the shallow end with you, then you need to figure your shit out and fast.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Stop calling me sir.”
That’s never going to happen. I have far too much respect for this man, and I’ve been calling him sir for nearly a decade. I’m not sure I can reset my thinking.
Maybe that’s my problem. I need to reset my thinking about sex and I’m not sure I can. I’m too set in my ways. At thirty-one. How can I be too entrenched to experiment at thirty-one?
“I’ll try,” I tell Mac, but it feels far more like a promise to myself.
thirteen
Showingup on a girl’s doorstep with flowers was probably easier in Mac’s day. For me, when I realize I don’t have Cynnie’s address, it takes an hour of hacking and then calls to three different stores to buy everything I need to show up at her door.
Well, not everything. I can’t find courage either online or over the phone.
While I wait for everything to arrive, I stalk Cynnie’s social media. She works from home, and she’s told me she’s usually there during the day, but she does go out with friends occasionally. Not today, though. There’s a handful of those staged pictures: her outfit for the day which, now that I know her, screamslittle, a book she’s reading, the oatmeal and fruit she had for breakfast, some makeup arranged on a pink pillow. There haven’t been any pictures of her face since she left my apartment. The daily picture of her outfit is in a mirror, her face hidden by her phone. In the one shot of her hand holding the book, her nails are bitten down to the quick. I look back at the picture of her outfit. Looking closely, I see the strain in her posture.
My little’s suffering.
I close out her social media account and make the mistake of checking my email.
