As he took a seat in what felt like a nearby recliner, he cradled her against his body. She turned her face into his neck. She wanted the mask off, wanted to feel him against her face. He must have known, because he removed the lock and unlaced it, pulled it off. She kept her eyes closed, fearing any brightness. He used what smelled like aloe wipes to clean her face, the mucus from her running nose, her tears, the sweat. He combed her hair with his fingers.

She’d bitten her lip, and he smeared something that smelled like coconut lip balm there. He leaned away from her and she heard the sound of a mini-fridge. Then he was plying her with sips of water. Fed her peanut butter crackers as he had at the office, gave her some juice. With a near giggle, she wondered if he kept supplies in every room of the house, like a Red Cross station after a bloodletting.

“Master…” She wanted to say it, wanted to call him that. He kept stroking her head, but said nothing. “Ben…”

“I’m here, baby. Just relax and get your strength back. We’re not done. Not by a long shot.”

“I haven’t…made out a will. Tell Cass that Jess can have my clothes. But she gets…my birthday stilettos.”

His lips pulled into a curve against her temple. “I’d like to see you in those stilettos, and nothing else. I’d cross your ankles, tie them together, run the rope under the soles of the shoes so it keeps them on, part of the binding.”

“I’ll wear them…in my casket.”

He kissed her neck then, bit, earning a quiet sigh from her, a shudder as he clasped her breasts, gently massaged, pinched, toyed with the piercings. “Quiet now. Just feel. You’re a slave. You don’t speak unless your Master requires you to speak. You serve. Let everything else go.”

She wanted to obey him, but her mind was in such an odd place. “I’m so, so sorry. About Jeremy. About the things… I was so lonely in college.” She was sorry for everything she’d ever done wrong in her whole life. It was so strange, the desire to confess everything without choosing any one specific thing, just an overall purging.

He was silent a moment. “Jeremy wasn’t your fault.”

“It felt like it was. Why is that?”

“Because women are stupid about things like that.” But he said it without rancor. Closing his arms around her, he held her tight. “I forgive you for everything, you understand?”

“Even the things I might do tomorrow? Or the next day?”

He snorted, not unkindly. “I should know you’d try to hedge your bets. Whatever you do tomorrow, I’ll devise the appropriate punishment. But first, we get through today.”

She opened her eyes at last, looked at him. The top three buttons of the shirt were open, so she could lay her hand on his chest. She didn’t though. She kept her hands limp along her hipbones, out of his way so he could touch whatever he wished. There was simmering lust in his gaze, the banked embers of what they’d just done. He was hard beneath her ass, the size of him making a substantial impression in her buttock.

She wouldn’t change a thing, but she wished there were two of her, one who could stand to the side and watch those green eyes go to pure emerald fire, watch him grip that large cock and push it inside her. See that strong jaw tighten, flex, his lips stretch back as he released, spent his seed inside her ass.

“If you want, we can stop now, Marcie.” He drew her eyes back to his face. “You can clean up and go home.”

She was home. He was home to her. It was so difficult not to say it, an ache in her heart. A submissive’s honesty, her pure emotion, was what a Master demanded, a gift she could give him. But this Master wasn’t ready for that kind of truth.

“I don’t want to go. I want you to do everything you want to do to me. I’m yours.” Laying her head back against his biceps, she lifted her gaze to the pressed tin ceiling. There was an elegant black and gold fixture, a slowly oscillating ceiling fan. “You remember when we all went to the state fair? You won me that giant bear, at the knife-throwing booth.”

She’d expected Peter to have that skill, thanks to his military training, but Ben didn’t miss. Ten balloons, ten knife throws, his movements smooth and certain. Thunk, thunk, thunk. She remembered the steady focus of Ben’s eyes, the widening of the vendor’s. He’d won her the largest bear in the kiosk, a black bear with green eyes. The furry taloned paws had bumped her knees as she carried him.

The other children already had prizes. She’d been the only one without, because of course she and Cass made sure the younger children got any winnings that day. But when Cherry and Nate were going to fight over that bear, Ben shook his head, spoke firmly.

“This one is Marcie’s,” he said. He’d handed it over to her with a smile, and a tug of her ponytail. “He’s the safest boyfriend you can have in college. Keep that in mind.”

“Yes, I remember.” He spoke, bringing her back to the present.

“I did unspeakable things to that bear.” With her legs and one arm wrapped around it, she’d held it on top of her while she slipped a hand between them, masturbating, imagining someone else’s weight pressing her body into her mattress. Now she brought her gaze back to Ben. “I want you do unspeakable things to me. Please.”

That jaw flexed, gaze heating. When she reached up to touch his mouth, he grasped her wrist before she made contact, held it between them. “You weren’t supposed to speak without permission,” he reminded her. “I think it’s time for me to bind these hands again. Your ass was a pretty color from the spatula, but a red blush like that needs some caning marks.”

She trembled under his intent scrutiny. “Yes sir,” she said.

* * * * *

He was as good as his word. During the long hours of the night, she lost count of how many times she thought, This is exactly as I imagined it, fantasized about it.

Physically.

She’d had no idea what it would do to her emotionally. Her strange desire for confession was just the tip of the iceberg. She cried, she sobbed, she came, she pleaded, she said things against the replaced gag that were visceral, animal-like. Time and again, she thought she couldn’t bear more, that the strain on mind and body had become too much, but then he’d wring another sensation out of her she couldn’t resist. He’d murmur, “One more minute,” and she could do another minute. The craving to be the most perfect slave he could ever want would rise to the top again.

She let go of things in those dark hours she couldn’t give to anyone else. She wanted to tell him everything, things she couldn’t even tell herself. He had her soul chained down with her body, helpless to him. As he tormented her, a sensual, ruthless inquisitor, she gave it all to him. He was so much more than she’d realized. She wasn’t just in over her head, out in the middle of the ocean. Her life was literally in his hands, her right to breathe, to exist. All of it was at his mercy, and she would gladly stop breathing if that was what he wanted. She’d do anything to please him.

It was crazy, irrational. It scared her to death, because she couldn’t stop feeling any of it. And he made it worse with every new thing he did to her. After her brief respite, he’d replaced the mask, put her over what felt like a spanking bench. Her nipple barbells were attached to a chain he threaded through a ratcheted buckle on the back of the collar. Each time he pushed that metal hasp left then right, it cinched in the chain another inch, increasing the pull on her nipples. He put her chin in a metal rest directly before her that he raised up until she felt the strain in her neck and more pull on the barbells.

Placing a slim dildo in her ass that was covered with a blissfully heated balm, he’d then slid a vibrator in her pussy with a clit attachment. Since that part of her had been achingly empty throughout their first session, it sucked on the vibrator greedily, earning a fervent expletive from him she treasured for the fascinated expression of male lust it was. As he changed the settings on that vibrator, he commanded her to clench her ass rhythmically over the dildo, working out those muscles, until she came again.

Next she was on her back. He strapped her to a table, buckled her calves in stirrups that kept her legs upright at a ninety-degree angle, increasing her sense of vulnerability. Her hands and waist were cuffed to the table, and then he positioned a thick dildo in her pussy. One that was connected to a fucking machine. She heard the muted whir of it as he started it. The dildo had a clit piece that hit her there with each slow thrust and retreat. That wasn’t enough, however.

He fitted electrode pads on her areolas, holes to allow room for her nipples, and then those pads unpredictably sent low-voltage stimulus to them as the fucking machine did its thing. “I have some email to check,” he’d said, as he teasingly brushed her lips stretched around the phallus gag. “I’m going to sit over there and answer it, rub my cock and enjoy watching my toy being fucked.”

He had a remote control for both electric devices, a convenient addition provided by Jon, she was sure, since he was their mechanical genius. The electrodes were activated at unpredictable moments, and the fucking machine increased or decreased its rate without any rhyme or reason. It didn’t matter. By the end, she was writhing and screaming at every level of stimulus. Then he let the machine pump into her like a jack hammer, and she came and came and came.

After that, he decided they both needed a late-night meal. He put her on all fours on his dining room table, with the mask still in place, but he removed the gag. He used a rope suspension system to bind her above and below her breasts, at the waist and curve of her hip.

“Not only for support,” he told her. “I want you displayed the way I’d do it if I was entertaining business associates and wanted you as the centerpiece. I’d put the serving dishes around your knees and hands, let them decorate you if they’d like. Eat the food off your body.”

As he told her that, he attached an additional hook to the crown of the hood mask. A tether attached to it tightened, forcing her head to be held up. She couldn’t stop making noises at all now, so the guttural moan as he inserted the steel bulb of an anal hook into her rectum was just par for the course. He fastened a line to the eye hole of the anal hook and to the two lines that crossed her shoulder blades from the breast bondage. When he drew all of it taut from a ceiling hook, her head, shoulders and ass were held up at pert angles from the diabolical joining point.