Page 47 of Crushed
But they couldn’t stop it. It was already too late.
“They crashed?” I asked.
Scarlett sighed. “That’s what the records say. At first, they thought someone ran them off of the bridge. But they never found the other car, so they decided it was drunk driving or some kind of substance abuse, even though there was nothing on the toxicology report.” She rolled her eyes. “My parentsrarelydrank. I highly doubt that’s what happened.”
It sounded suspicious, but life was so often strange. “How did you get over it?” I asked.
“I mean, do you ever get over something like that?” she asked. I wasn’t sure. But there were ways I could prevent Rose from dying like that too. I had to focus on what I could control.
“How do you live with it, then?” I asked.
She thought about it for a moment, then straightened, tucking the blanket around her legs. I handed her an electrolyte drink and she sucked it down greedily, suddenly realizing the toll the activity had taken on her body. I was glad; she needed the energy.
“You can’t wonder about what might have been,” she finally said. “If you do that, it’ll eat you alive. Because that’s not what’s happening now.” She reached over and squeezed my hand, and it shocked me, this moment of kindness when I had basically tortured her with her worst fear. “You have to experience what’s around you, make sure you’re present for it.” She lifted her shoulders. “But that’s, of course, easier said than done.”
The only way I moved on was by burying myself in work, making myself too busy to think about what had happened. To force myself into these relationships where I yearned for a power exchange that would never be achieved. Because pushing for those extremes was easier than facing how I had failed her, and how I could fail again.
The only way I truly survived was by finally understanding that I had to do what was right by Rose.
“Thank you,” she said. Thanking me? I should have been the one thanking her for enduring the torture and giving me advice that seemed real for once. I furrowed my brows and she continued, “I don’t think I’ll have those nightmares anymore.”
“It wasn’t meant to be exposure therapy,” I said. “Quite the opposite, actually.”
“But it was enough.”
I wasn’t sure that I believed her. What she had gone through was an experience that was unforgettable, but one experience with water torture didn’t mean you were cured of crippling fear.
But I was glad that she thought so. Maybe with enough time, those nightmareswouldgo away.
But I wasn’t in the habit of curing nightmares. I was in the habit of fostering them.
If I had known the full story, aboutwhyshe was afraid of water, would I have gone through with torturing her? Perhaps I wouldn’t have. She was already scarred from those experiences; I didn’t need to nurturethatkind of fear.
Come to think of it, it irritated me that she hadn’t told me the full story. That she was willing to keep secrets when it came to her own well being. That kind of behavior didn’t help a total power exchange relationship grow.
But we weren’t in a total power exchange dynamic anyway. There was far too much to explore before we could go there. I needed her complete trust, which I was gaining slowly, but didn’t own yet.
And I needed to trust her completely too.
So Scarlett kept secrets. What else was she hiding? Had she found what her employer sought, or was she still searching, still trying to seduce me?
I shifted back to the positive. There would be time to focus on what we needed to do next. On how I needed to be careful around her.
“I should be thanking you,” I said. She tilted her head. “Most submissives back out before getting through something as extraordinary as that.”
“You think that was extraordinary?”
Extraordinary didn’t do it justice. “What you went through was nothing short of torture.” I grabbed her shoulders, making her look me in the eyes. “But you let me do it. For none other than the fact that I wanted to. What you did was incredible, Scarlett. It was a gift that I will never forget.”
She blinked, staring into me. What did she see?
“You admit it was torture,” she said. “But also a gift?”
“Something irreplaceable.”
She leaned into me. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever experienced?”
Her question caught me off guard. How could I answer a question like that? Was she implying that what I had done to her was the most horrendous thing she had gone through?
No. She wanted to know what had tortured my soul. In enduring water torture, Scarlett had bared herself to me, in more ways than one. It was hard to fathom that kind of honesty in return.
But I owed her that much.
“Knowing that I could have prevented my wife’s death, had I known her medical history before she gave birth.”
A huff came out of her nose, and I looked away. I had to experience the present. The only thing I could do was hold Scarlett and prevent anything from happening to her. I could show her that her fears weren’t as bad as they seemed, and that she was stronger than them.
And she could show me that she was stronger than I could have imagined, that she was stronger than me.
