Knowing the Ropes Read online

  It had never occurred to Selene that you could be a slave without a master. Could someone need to submit so badly that it didn’t much matter to whom she submitted?

  It seemed strange. Maybe it was just as weird to have chosen Nick as a dom without being in love with him, but that was different. Wasn’t it? She’d just been trying to learn.

  Nick was asleep almost as soon as he hit the pillow.

  Selene, on the other hand, lay awake, watching light fill the room and listening to Jamaica Plain bustle to life outside. Dealing with Natalie had shaken her on a deep level, and she wasn’t proud of her own behavior. Despite her experience as a domestic violence counselor, she’d slipped into anger with Natalie as much as with Derrick, found herself questioning whether Natalie was “really” abused.

  But even if Natalie had wanted a more extreme Master/slave relationship, Derrick had crossed a line into non-consent, into risking her health and safety. When Natalie had tried to confront him within the rules of their particular relationship, he’d refused. Every abused woman started out thinking she wanted to be with her abuser, and many of the ones Selene had worked with in Rochester were, like Natalie, torn between self-preservation and lingering, misplaced loyalty.

  So the problem wasn’t really that Natalie’s situation was ambiguous, but that Selene was having problems being objective. Maybe it was Natalie’s past with Nick. Maybe it was the way Natalie’s ugly situation seemed like a funhouse mirror of her own wilder fantasies.

  What did it all mean for her chosen career, or, for that matter, her relationship with Nick? BDSM wasn’t likely to lead her down the same dangerous path it had Natalie, but it could still screw her life up if she wasn’t careful.

  It might be smarter to run away, to go back to a vanilla world in which the sex might not be as good, but at least the line between right and wrong, play and abuse, consent and rape, was clear.

  The problem was, Selene didn’t want to run away.

  Because while tonight had raised a lot of tough questions about her vocation and her ability to be kinky and still do domestic violence advocacy, it had made one thing painfully clear.

  Nick was a genuinely good man, strong and caring and willing to go out on a limb for people he cared about.

  And God help her, Selene loved him.

  Which was not the thing to figure out on a night when everything she thought she’d figured out about herself seemed up in the air.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Selene got to Nick’s house that night before Nick did. She’d known he’d be a little late at work tonight, but he’d said to meet him in Jamaica Plain. Natalie should be home to let her in. It still seemed weird to think of Natalie being “home”, but she’d been crashing on Nick’s couch for over a month, temping whenever she could get work. It made sense from an objective point of view. Her mom lived in a small town where work was scarce, and the commute to Boston was too long to justify for a temp job. But in the one-bedroom condo, it wasn’t the most convenient arrangement. More often than not lately, Nick had been going to Selene’s place.

  When they’d been getting together at all. The fall semester had started a few weeks ago, and Selene had thrown herself into her studies, determined to find her way back to her vocation. Between that and the volunteer position she’d taken on at an abuse hotline, their dates had tapered off to once a week or so.

  Selene kept telling herself it wasn’t a totally bad thing. Okay, it sucked, but it helped keep her cravings for pain and control—and her feelings for Nick—in perspective, as a fun part of her life but not its center, nothing that should derail her work or her emotions.

  Most of the time it worked.

  Tonight, she was in JP because Kate from upstairs was doing a reading at the bookstore on Centre Street. Everyone from the house was going. And Natalie be damned, tonight she was staying with Nick.

  The door was unlocked when she arrived, so Selene breezed right in. Natalie sat folded up on the couch, doing something on her laptop. The laptop, it had turned out, had taken up most of the one small bag she’d had with her when she escaped Derrick. In a rare burst of practicality, she decided that since she’d bought it long before Derrick had claimed it, like everything she owned, as his, she was taking it back.

  Natalie emitted a muffled shriek when Selene entered. “Oh my God, I’m sorry. I didn’t… Oh, hi, Selene, it’s you.”

  Selene wondered briefly what she was apologizing for. Nice girl, but very weird. Then again, she supposed that after what Natalie had been through, she had a right to be weird, whether or not she’d been a bit odd to start with.

  The speed with which she’d shut down the laptop offered a hint. Probably she’d been watching a movie or playing a game or, for all Selene knew or cared, surfing for porn, not job hunting. Selene figured even the most dedicated job hunter had a right to take a break, but Natalie seemed to feel she’d been caught goofing off.

  Natalie actually blushed as she unfolded herself from the couch. Like a cat, she could get herself into seemingly impossible positions, and, like a cat, she seemed to find them comfortable. Selene imagined a man would enjoy watching the process, especially considering what Natalie was wearing.

  Or wasn’t wearing, more to the point—a tiny cotton-knit camisole in a baby blue that brought out her eyes but was too sheer to really hide her nipples, with matching boy-short panties.

  Hell, Selene enjoyed the view herself. She wasn’t attracted to Natalie, not the way she was to Alison, but other than still being too skinny, Natalie was nice to look at. Even the shaved head looked good now that it was a soft fuzz rather than a concentration-camp buzz, as if Natalie was some kind of cutting-edge artist or rock star.

  The blush made Selene curious. Natalie always jumped and apologized if she’d been “caught” taking a few minutes for herself, but the blush suggested the other woman had been up to something particularly fun and maybe even frivolous. It was a good sign that she could goof off again. “What are you up to?”

  “Got bored. A girl can’t job hunt all day, the house is clean, I don’t have enough money for retail therapy, and I’m joining the crew for Cambodian tonight, so there was no point in cooking. So I was just… Well, want to see?”

  Pleased at the friendly overture and admittedly curious about Natalie’s brain-candy choices, Selene nodded. Natalie opened the laptop cover, and the machine sprang back to life.

  Selene looked over Natalie’s shoulder, blinked slowly. Felt heat flare in the pit of her belly and rise up her body until she was sure not just her cheeks but her entire torso were flaming. “Please tell me that’s Photoshopped,” she said, looking at the picture of the intricately bound, intricately bruised and battered woman. It wasn’t the bruises that bothered her so much as the apparent blood. Bruises could be fun to get, but the model looked like a rope-wrapped road accident.

  “Don’t tell me Nick hasn’t used the singletail on you yet?”

  “N…no.”

  And if that was its effect, he wouldn’t be. Selene liked a few bruises, but something that seemed to remove chunks? Thanks, she’d pass. “That’s like something out of a costume drama. You know, where the hero’s flogged by the evil ship captain? Always kind of turned me on,” she admitted, “but not…for real, you know? I always figured that for real, it would hurt like hell in a bad way.”

  Natalie smiled dreamily. “Oh, you’ll love it. It’s the most beautiful kind of pain I know. Kind of like being stung by a thousand bees, only erotic. I can’t explain it right, because that sounds horrible.”

  “Yeah, it does. It looks horrible too.”

  “Too bad they have her tied so you can’t see her pussy. I bet she’s wet as anything, just off in a world of her own, waiting for her master to use her. I know I would be.”

  There was something odd in Natalie’s manner that Selene couldn’t quite put her finger on. She was so dreamy, clearly off in happy fantasyland, putting herself in the place of the bound and whipped woman, who, o
n second glance, was either a very good actress or was enjoying herself. At the same time, Selene sensed a challenge in her words, a kind of one-upsmanship. Damn it, they both knew Natalie was far more experienced. Natalie’s most recent experiences had been seriously nasty, but not all of them had been.

  Not the ones with Nick, for instance. Selene knew those would have been wonderful. Nick was very, very good at what he did.

  She took another look at the picture. Okay, it was hot in a purely theoretical way, but she was so not ready for that level of pain play yet, if she ever would be. The only time she’d be up for voluntary bloodshed would be if she needed surgery. The ropework, though, fascinated her.

  “I like the bondage,” she said, surprised to catch such a wistful note in her voice. “It’s so pretty with the different colors of rope, and I do like being restrained. We haven’t tried anything that elaborate yet,” she added. It must take a lot of time to rig someone up like that in a confining but elegant gown of rope that accented the breast and waist so temptingly. Time and attention. How would it feel to be the center of that much focus, that kind of artistry? “I’d like to.” She caught the dreamy tone slipping into her voice.

  “The fancy stuff’s not Nick’s favorite thing. He mostly likes simple restraints,” Natalie said, as if that settled the matter.

  “But if I asked him…”

  Natalie’s jaw dropped, as if Selene had calmly suggested flying to the moon under her own power. “You can’t just ask him for things. Don’t you know anything?”

  Apparently not, because she had been asking for things—and more often than not, Nick was delighted to try anything she suggested.

  “Slaves don’t get to ask, except maybe once in a while when we’ve pleased our master.” Selene could hear the capital M. “We exist to please our masters. It’s not about us. We get our pleasure from pleasing.” She had an evangelical quality to her voice, someone who had Seen the LightTM and wanted to share it with anyone who was willing to listen or didn’t get out of the way fast enough. She put one small, bony hand on Selene’s arm, very gently. Even though it was warm for September, Natalie’s hand was like ice.

  “It’s all right,” Natalie added, and again Selene was reminded of a passionate preacher, except the one actual preacher she knew, Molly, was a lot more discreet about it. “It takes a while to understand it deep in your bones. Learning not to want is the hardest part of being a slave. Because we do need and want. We can’t help it; we’re human. Slaves just have to learn to fight it, to focus on our higher purpose.”

  At this point, Selene had to correct the misapprehension. “I’ve told you before, I’m not a slave,” she said, not sure why the admission embarrassed her when it was a simple statement of her truth.

  “Oh. Right.” The missionary had just been told no, thank you, we’re happy with our own religion. “That’s different. Perhaps that will be all right for both of you. I thought Nick wanted a slave, but perhaps he’s changed. Nothing wrong with just being a sub if that’s what you like.” Her tone suggested the opposite. “It’s good to take the time to figure out what you are, what you and Nick are together. But it’s a hard balance. I know he let me go when he started getting too attached. It’s hard to be a partner and a sub at the same time, and it almost looks to me that that’s what you guys are trying for. Neither fish nor fowl.”

  Selene swallowed a sudden lump in her throat—tears, queasiness, some combination of both.

  She and Nick were just friends and play partners, right? She’d known how he felt about love and kink, known this wasn’t a forever relationship. She’d thought she was okay with that, really she had.

  So why did she feel like a little kid who’d just been told Santa didn’t exist?

  Then a fierce determination took hold of her.

  Relationships were made up of people. They weren’t things unto themselves, with inalienable rules of their own beyond those created by the people involved. What hadn’t worked for Nick and Natalie might work for Nick and her, because she wasn’t Natalie. She already knew that some of the problem with Natalie had been Natalie wanting to be too much the picture-perfect slave, to the point that she stopped being her. Well, at least Selene wouldn’t need to worry about that particular mistake.

  But she did get a bit of a shiver—okay, more than a bit and more like a clench, a surge of heat and wetness—thinking about being more under Nick’s control. Not like Natalie’s last crazy relationship, but like Alison with Garth, loved but controlled, with status and respect but with rules and rituals to follow.

  Alison could answer a lot of her questions, and Selene couldn’t imagine her red-haired friend putting the fun into dysfunctional with the same gusto that Natalie could. On the other hand, Natalie was here, and at the moment, Selene’s curiosity was piqued enough to risk asking the potentially dumb questions. Natalie might be a bit out there, might have made some mistakes—even before she wound up with a toxic man—but it was important to know what didn’t work too, right?

  “So,” she asked, screwing up her courage, “I’m new to all this. I’m still trying to figure out where I fit, and the idea of being a slave is scary. Sexy but scary.”

  Natalie smiled like a punk Mona Lisa. “It’s supposed to be scary. Giving up your control, your independence, giving all of yourself to a man… If that doesn’t scare you, it should.”

  “Sounds like being in love to me. You give up something of yourself, and it’s scary but worth it.”

  Again that smile. “Like and not like. The scary-but-worth-it part, yes. But it’s not giving up something of yourself. It’s giving up just about all of it.” She shrugged. “Of course, some masters—Nick was like this—will give a lot of it back to you, let you make decisions about everyday stuff that doesn’t matter much to them. Not everyone is like Mas…like Derrick, wanting to control every bite you eat, every time you pee, how you think, how you pray. He took it to an extreme that was hurting me. I know that now. But being a slave means someone has the option of that kind of control, and you hope they’re careful with it, but they don’t have to be. After a while, you can’t imagine doing certain things without their permission, including coming. And you have no idea how strong that makes your orgasms.” She grinned dreamily, and Selene wondered which master she was thinking of, Nick or Derrick.

  “We’ve played that game.” And God, it was hot. A couple of days of directed playing with herself, without orgasm, and when she saw Nick again and he let her come, it was like a nuclear detonation.

  “It’s not a game. That’s the difference. For you, now—for a part-time sub—it’s a game. A really great, intense game.”

  “And how!” Selene laughed, fanning herself, making a joke out of it so she didn’t let on how hot the memory was making her, how deliciously moist and open and tender she felt, how much she regretted that Nick wasn’t home yet and that it might be in poor taste to drag him off to the bedroom immediately with Natalie there. Not that Natalie had any illusions as to their chastity and propriety, but they’d been trying not to be downright rude about it.

  “As a sub, you still have the ‘fuck you’ option. You can always say, ‘Fuck you, that’s not fun.’ Might get into a fight about it, might get ‘punished’”—she made air quotes—“but it’s not a deal-killer.”

  “But you can always safe-word if things are going really badly.”

  “No.” Natalie’s voice was uncharacteristically firm. “You can. A real slave can’t. I mean, Nick was nice about saying I should let him know if anything was dangerous, like if my circulation was getting cut off. But that’s optional, your owner’s choice. Otherwise, you don’t get to stop scenes. You can only stop the relationship.”

  “I’m not sure I understand. Why would you want that setup?” And why would Nick, or any dom, set up rules like that? Control was one thing, but that was way too much responsibility for someone else’s life and safety, like having a perpetual toddler. How could the dom ever relax?

 
“That,” Natalie said pityingly, “is because you’re not a slave at heart. If you’re meant to be a slave, submission isn’t a game, isn’t something you do in the bedroom when it amuses you both. It’s a state of being. You’d hear this and know you’d found your way home.”

  Half of Selene felt like smacking the smugness out of Natalie’s voice, except she might enjoy the smacking. As far as Selene knew, Natalie was straight, but she was bored too and had obviously recovered enough from her ordeal to be horny again.

  The other half felt something click in her brain. It was partly anger, the implication that she was somehow lacking, not good enough, incapable of being a slave.

  And partly recognition that she wasn’t nearly as appalled by the concepts Natalie presented as she’d like to be. She’d toyed with the idea of being someone’s helpless plaything—treasured property, but property, for most of her adult life. But it didn’t seem like a feasible fantasy, too much trust to put in one person. After seeing what had happened to Natalie in her eagerness to fulfill what she seemed to feel was her destiny, talking about it in general terms was damn scary. There were dangerous people out there, and others who might not mean any harm but shouldn’t be trusted with the responsibility of a goldfish, let alone another person.

  But Selene was weighing the idea of being Nick’s slave, and that was an entirely different story.

  And if that level of yielding was what it took to make their casual relationship into something more committed, she could learn to do it.

  “Tell me more,” Selene begged.

  “I’m not the most articulate,” Natalie admitted. “I get too emotional. Let me point you at some websites.”

  Nick heard a murmur of female voices as he reached the front door. He couldn’t make out any words, but it was definitely Selene and Natalie, chatting away.