If I ever love a sub, it’s going to be you.

Desperation was a terrible mentor. Desperation covered the pitfalls in soothing colors, made everything outside of itself look more sensible. Desperation pretended to be calculation, but it was terrible at math. Desperation denied it was desperation until it hit bottom.

I can’t love you.

“Your cheeks are red,” Chris said when he closed the door behind us.

He’d led me through the long hallway with the rug of naked bodies to the same viewing room I’d seen him in last time. It was smaller from the inside, dimmer, both cleaner and more run-down than it looked from the other side of the mirror. Cables ran from the back of a box to a beige power strip with a red light at the end. The door on one of the cabinets didn’t sit quite flush with the frame. The upholstery in the luxurious wingback chair had a tear that was shaped like an eye.

I felt close to you. Very close. And at the same time, I can’t, Diana. I’ve tried.

“I’m nervous.”

“Let’s take away as much of that as possible. Let’s set limits. One. You’re a married woman.”

“For now.”

“I’m not going to touch you.”

“Okay.”

“And you can keep your clothes on.”

“I want it hard,” I said, surprising myself. “Don’t waste my time with love taps.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that.” He slid a paddle out of a leather case. The same one he had when I’d seen him before. Light-color wood. Three holes. Worn leather handle. He placed it on the table. “Ten strokes.”

I nodded. “Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes, sir.”

When I called him sir, I was hit with the gravity of what I was doing.

Every time you submit to me, it’s like I’m waking up from a dream and the reality is that it’s just not there anymore.

“Lean against the edge.” He tapped the table. I did it. The height came right to my waist. “Now, bend.”

I did, getting my elbows under me. The paddle was right below my face. He crouched by my feet and fastened my ankles to the legs of the table. I had to stay on my toes to stay forward, creating a forward thrust to my posture.

When both were fastened, I got scared. I wasn’t supposed to be scared. I was supposed to be aroused in anticipation.

Chris came up and looked at me. “You all right?”

“Yeah.”

“We’re playing a game, Diana. It’s not more serious than that. And no matter how hard you say you want it, I don’t know you well enough to really get in there where it hurts.”

“Just don’t bore me, okay?”

He laughed again. I was torn in ten places. He wasn’t Adam, but he seemed all right. He was safer than my husband in a hundred ways, yet he was as dangerous as they came.

“Kiss that paddle,” he said. “And spread your arms out.”

I put my lips to the paddle and opened my arms. He pulled leather cuffs from under the table and tied down my hands.

“Now, if you want to stop, just say stop.”

“I can remember that.”

“Pick your head up.”

I did, and he slid the paddle out from under me.

“Back down.”

I put my forehead against the warm wood of the table. He tapped my ass with the paddle, and for the first time, I felt vulnerable and exposed. My heart pounded, and I took a deep breath.

“Count with me,” he said.

He tapped my bottom again.

“Count,” he said.

“You’re joking. I’m not even counting that.”

“Mister Adam Steinbeck has his hands full,” Chris said before thwacking me good and hard.

I grunted. “One.”

Again, harder. Whoosh-thwack

“Two.”

“You really meant it.”

“I got this.”

He hit the breath out of me, whoosh-thwack sending waves of pain from skin to core.

“Three,” I counted through my teeth.

“That’s your sweet spot, right there.”

Again, whoosh-thwack, a little lower. I let out a deep unh.

“Four.”

I wasn’t turned on sexually, but I was on fire with challenge. I could take this. I could take whatever he dished out.

I could finish. But that was all it was. He couldn’t break me. He couldn’t find me. He wasn’t my master, and I wasn’t his property. Not even for a minute. All he could do was test me.

On the wall above, a red light I hadn’t paid any attention to turned green.

“You’re doing great,” he said before he hit me again.

Multiple strokes made each one hurt a little more as fresh pain laid itself on top of old pain.

“Five.”

The next thwack came without a whoosh and the pain arrived out of cadence.

“Six.”

The sound of the last thwack hadn’t been a thwack at all, because it repeated itself. Deeper, more resonant, farther away.

Someone was pounding on the mirror.

“Well, well,” Chris said. “I suspect—”

“Don’t stop.”

Whoosh-thwack.

Harder. I curled my toes and strained against the cuffs. “Seven!”

“You sure?”

The pounding was accompanied by shouting, but it was all muffled a million miles away.

“Yes!”

Whoosh-thwack. Searing pain.

“Eight!”

Again. Tears shot from my eyes, but someone else was crying. Someone who didn’t care if she ever got to ten. A woman in the moment. I wasn’t that woman for the next stroke. I was the huntress, and completion was my prey.

The pounding on the mirror stopped. The green light on the wall went back to red. Had he gone away? Had it been someone else? Did he decide to stop trying to love me?

“Nine!”

So busy in my thoughts, the last stroke came as a surprise and I cried out.

“Ten.” It came out as a groan.

“Good girl.”

Chris laid the paddle down and came to the side of the table. Past my tears and the limitations of a head resting on a table, I couldn’t see much besides the full-sized boner under his trousers.

He undid a cuff then crouched to meet my eyes. “You’re really beautiful.”

“Thanks.”

He walked around the table again and undid my other cuff. “If it doesn’t work out with your husband, I’d really like to hurt you sometime.”

On the wall, the light went from red to green.

“I know where to find you.”

My wrist came free just as a crash deafened me. I twisted, wobbling to feet that had been paddled for ten strokes, to hear another crash as a garbage pail came through the two-way mirror, opening a three-foot-high hole.

Adam was on the other side of it.

My husband looked like a savage. Borderline feral with his jaw clenched and teeth showing. His jacket was open, exposing a chest that heaved with breath, stretching his shirt. His hair was askew, and his fists were clenched. The fire in his eyes was directed over my shoulder, at Chris, who I’d stupidly gotten involved in something that didn’t concern him.

“I asked him to,” I said.

“I’m going to kill him anyway.” Adam stepped through the hole in the mirror, swiping the cracked edge of the opening. A spray of broken glass clicked to the floor.

“She was lovely,” Chris taunted. “Too good to throw away.”

“Chris,” I said, turning slightly, “thank you, but can you go? Please?”

Chris backed away. Adam lunged at him in one fluid move. I put my hands on my husband’s chest and pushed as hard as I could. The moment when his body parted with my fingers was the moment I realized how sore my bottom was.

Chris grabbed his case and his paddle. He didn’t seem bothered at all. “Take care. And I mean that.”

He left. I pushed Adam as he tried to charge out the door after him.

“Back off,” I said.

Finally, he looked at me.

“Blame me,” I said.

“What were you thinking about?”

“My future. My life. What I want.”

“I won’t watch you become a whore.”

When rage surged from my glands, it bypassed my heart and mind, going directly down my right arm, which shot out and slapped his face with every bit of strength I had. His face moved with the velocity of the blow, but not enough. I swung again with the same force, but he grabbed my wrist mid-stroke.

“Diana.”

The rage wasn’t done flowing. It rerouted through my left hand, which caught him by surprise. I slapped him again. And again, when my left hand went to slap him a second time, he grabbed it midair until he was holding both of my arms up by the wrist.

I wasn’t done.

I’d been raised in privilege, but I was still a New Yorker. When I spit in his face, the aim was as perfect as the thrust, and a formidable mass of throat gunk landed right between his eyes.

“Stop it,” he growled though his teeth.

There were voices in the hall on the other side of the broken mirror.

“Fuck you, Steinbeck. Fuck you. You made me like this. You woke me up. You dragged me out of the darkness and now you don’t want me in the light. Well, fuck you.” I jerked away, and he let me go. “I don’t fit in that box anymore, and you don’t love me outside it. Fuck you. Either love me or set me free. And if you let me go, don’t think for a minute you can dictate how I live without you.”

He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face, and I took the opportunity to spin on my heel and walk to the back door, grabbing my coat and bag. I walked fast as I pushed my arms through the sleeves, into the back hall with the rug decorated with nudity. People looked at me, or I thought they did. I was a stranger, but for how long? Forever? Or was I already kin?

I was nothing. Nowhere, in the middle of a jump from one world to the next, midair, legs pumping at nothing above the chasm of in-between-ness. Neither-nor-ness. A yawning gape of indecision. A life without an identity.

The hall was a tunnel, soft and out of focus at the edges like a vintage portrait.

Only forward.

I had to make it to the other side. The other side of who I was. The other side of my life. The other side of the hall.

I clung to the million paths to success and came up with a chest full of anxiety. Go back to vanilla. Go full bore into kink. Get another Dom immediately. Remain faithful until death. Be present at the Cellar. Move to Tahiti.

Every path was a fantasy. A road not taken because it didn’t exist. I couldn’t decide what to do with my life based on how he’d react, but I couldn’t imagine doing anything without loving him.

He’d asked me for much more than I thought I could give. He’d asked me to love him when what awakened my love was the very thing that killed his love. There was no path to reconciliation. They weren’t just less traveled, knotty, bracken-blocked road. They’d been demolished by our crossed purposes, and we had so much work to do to find our way back. The thought of it made me tired.

Adam’s fingers hooked in my pocket, and when I turned, he looked so anxious I could feel the coil twisting around his lungs, squeezing out all the air. He was trying to get to the other end of something, but our paths were perpendicular. We’d cross once and never meet again.

“Please.” He took his hand from my pocket and held both out as if showing me he had nothing left to offer. “I love you.”

His words blocked my forward momentum, and the bucket of my heart filled with rage.

“Don’t you dare pull that trick. I’m over it, Adam. I’m over not knowing which end is up. I’m over letting you control me. I’m over being a puppy dog to your moods. I can’t play anymore. I’m done. Finished.”

He put his arms around my waist, his lips on my shoulder, then my chest, his arms around my thighs as he kneeled before me and held me still.

“I love you, Diana.”

“No, you don’t.”

In the hall of the Cellar, with his peers playing their parts as props on our stage, Adam knelt in front of me, hugging my thighs, wrapping me in his need.

“I’m sorry, Adam. It’s midnight. Day thirty. Time’s up.”