Читать книгу For Her Pleasure - Kyoko Church - Страница 4

‘Sweet –’ Mistress started. But he saw her flinch. And his heart died a little. ‘Paul, there’s no such thing as truth,’ she said.

He didn’t disagree. He remembered, now, his place. He kept his subbie mouth shut.

This is what she’d been teaching him. In the human psyche there is no such thing as truth, only perspective. She understood that a person can have a secret, something he thinks is ugly. So he hides it from view, tucks it away, only visits it in secret, on weekends and then only to torture himself, like picking at a scab. But she saw the glimmer of it. So she plucked it out, dusted it off. Turned it a hair to the left. And stood back for him to see. Waited for him to realise: the thing he most hated, he could actually love.

She taught him that. She gave him that gift.

And then he betrayed her.

‘Take these keys and unlock that cabinet.’ Her emerald eyes flashed with a thousand storms behind them. Only yesterday they shone with her laughter. That he was responsible made him want to crumble to the floor.

Obediently he took the keys. The cabinet she was motioning to was in the corner, mahogany to match the other furniture in her office. He’d never noticed it before.

He opened it. And gasped. But then he knew. And suddenly, unaccountably, shockingly he was consumed with want, with need. A new need. A dark one.

‘You pick which one –’ her voice, coming from behind him, was taut with barely contained rage ‘– slut. And bring it to me.’

Knees trembling, he chose a wooden paddle. Its wood was also dark and polished to a high sheen. It looked like an oar with most of the handle cut off. There was a leather tie running through a hole in the top of the short handle from which it hung in the cabinet next to other tools.

When he was naked, when he was prostrated over her desk, when he felt the first blow come down on his bare ass, heard the smack, felt the wind rush up as her arm was raised again for a second one and the heat and pain sprang from his reddening skin as the breath was sucked out of him, only then did the hammering of his breaking heart begin to still, to slow. He turned slightly to see her face. It was a mask of calm. But for the glassy sheen of tears welling in her eyes.

And he willed her: harder. Hit me harder. It’s not enough. It will never be enough.