Chapter14
Bradley stepped into the building where his office sat, smiling slightly to himself in anticipation of what the rest of the day held for him. He’d had to leave just before lunch to meet with some business partners, but he would have the rest of the afternoon more or less free--apart from specific tasks that needed to be done--so he would be able to enjoy himself with Jessica at least part of that time.
It had been almost a month since they’d started their new arrangement, three weeks since their first “session” in Jessica’s living room, and so far, it seemed to Bradley to be satisfying what she thought she needed from her partners. She had been as focused as ever, had not seemed as flustered or irritable, and she had--under his instruction--forwarded all of the messages her ex sent her to him. Bradley knew it made her uncomfortable to do that; it was easy, seeing some of the pictures, reading some of the messages, to understand why.
He had been working with some of the people he knew in certain circles to try and find out how to get Drake fully out of Jessica’s life. While the BDSM sessions kept her from “falling off the wagon,” so to speak, and while he enjoyed them more even than he had their original trysts, he didn’t like that someone could still make Jessica feel vulnerable, manipulated, shamed. She didn’t deserve to have the constant harassment interrupting her day.
She didn’t deserve some manipulative bastard trying to make her fall back into active addiction to serve his interests in degrading and humiliating her. “You’re a filthy little cum-slut who needs a good railing. Come over.” The things Drake messaged Jessica with--the things he called her, the pictures he had of her, or the “inspiration” he thought would trigger her, disgusted Brad.
It wasn’t the words or the images themselves; he knew better than many that there were normal people who got off on humiliation, and it was fine for that to be their thing. It was the fact that he could sense, even without knowing Drake, that it was meant to be abusive. It was meant to make Jessica feel like she deserved whatever bad treatment she was given.
So, he had focused on the sessions with her, on building up her self-respect, her sense of being a valuable, worthy person, as much as he could. As Bradley stepped onto the elevator leading up to the executive suite he occupied, he smiled more deeply to himself, remembering the last “punishment” session.
He’d known that Jessica had “misbehaved”--broken the sexual “rules” they’d agreed to--on purpose. Drake had been particularly aggressive with the messages he’d sent her earlier in that day, and she’d wanted for Bradley to actually humiliate her, to degrade her and make her feel like filth. So, she’d gotten herself off without permission, knowing he would find out.
He had spanked her, but he had made her make the decision of when she was sufficiently punished, and he had told her that if she lied, if she tried to make him punish her more severely than she truly believed she deserved, the session would end with no gratification.
She would go back to her desk, and she would spend the rest of the day not being allowed to get herself off. Of course, Brad knew that Jessica--after so long being abused and degraded by people who wanted to use her as a piece of meat--could endure a very harsh punishment indeed. But he’d watched her carefully. He had, after a few weeks, learned when she was reaching the edge of what she could tolerate, what she could actually enjoy.
She had endured his hand, the paddle, and then the riding crop he’d bought a few days before to change things up--to her breasts instead of to her buttocks--before telling him that she had learned her lesson--and Brad had known that she had stopped him short of what she could actually endure.
It was, he thought, better than her trying to use him to degrade herself. He’d rewarded her with a few more blows--with his hand--to, he said, “hammer the point home” before kissing her, holding her, soothing the reddened areas on her buttocks and breasts and allowing her to show him how grateful she was for his punishment, his correction.
He had finished in her mouth like she wanted, and then had gone on to get her off with his mouth and fingers and the vibrator she kept in her desk. “You are not allowed to use this toy on yourself for three days,” he’d told her, holding it in front of her face. “It will stay here in my office so you aren’t tempted. Only I can use it on you, until I trust you to obey the rules.”
It had also been thrilling, in its own right, to take up his new role; Brad couldn’t deny that to himself. As soon as he’d mentioned to his friend and sometime lawyer, Helena, that he was “seeing” a woman who he thought might be interested in exploring submission, she’d happily taken up the challenge of teaching him how to dominate: how to do it safely, how to take control, and--at his request--how to do it without debasing the woman he cared about.
“I’m assuming you’ll want to avoid epithets like ‘slut’, ‘whore’, and all that,” she’d said. Brad had confirmed her guess. “The role you’d want to take then would be an authority figure dealing with a recalcitrant underling. Headmaster and student, teacher and student--if she’s into that dynamic--something like that where you create a list of arbitrary rules that she has to follow. Then, you mete out punishment based on infractions. Add to the list, change rules, give her things to do--to herself, to you, and so on--and go from there. You can use a more generic ‘good girl’ ‘bad girl’ thing, instead of degrading her personally.”
He’d watched her with some of her submissives, taking in the way that she took the time to comfort them and soothe them after intense sessions, watching how she read how her partner was reacting. It was easy with Jess, having already learned her reactions, having already gotten to know her, when things were getting too intense for her, when she was edging towards more than she actually wanted to tolerate.
He knew when she was trying to manipulate him into actually harming her, actually pushing her limits and overstepping her boundaries--and he checked himself, knowing that she was still, even after weeks, in the mindset where she couldn’t entirely trust herself.
As he stepped out of the elevator, Bradley looked for Jessica, seated at her desk in front of his office door. She was right there, her cheeks flushed--and he grinned, remembering what instruction he’d given her before he left. It was, as Helena had described it to him, a “self-control lesson,” where he’d given her permission to bring herself to the edge of orgasm as many times as she wanted while she was away, but she was not permitted to get herself off.
He’d given her a toy he’d bought the day before--a completely silent vibrator that clipped to the inside of her panties, with a remote control that looked as nondescript as anything else that might be on her desk--and he’d told her that he trusted her not to get herself off without permission. Brad knew that she wouldn’t overstep--not this time.
“How’s the morning going, Jess?” He paused at her desk and looked down at her, amused and already desirous of rewarding her good behavior.
“Been very busy,” Jessica replied, giving him a slightly strained smile. “I’m hoping we’ll have a chance to meet and go over the morning’s work.”
“Order lunch into the office,” Brad told her, letting some of his dominant tone creep into his voice. “We’ll go over everything then. Choose what you want.” Jessica nodded.
“Yes, Sir,” she said quietly, the flush in her cheeks deepening. Brad looked at her desk and spotted the remote he’d given her. It had a range that would let it control the vibrator from the opposite ends of a house--he could definitely manipulate it from within his office. He picked it up and pressed the button to turn up the vibrations. Jessica half-gasped, her eyes widening for an instant.
“I’ll just hold onto this,” he told her, meeting her gaze. “Remember the rules, Jess.”
“Yes, Sir,” Jessica said, her voice cracking slightly. Brad smiled.
“If you’re good, you can keep it on during lunch,” he told her in a whisper. “And we’ll see how many times you can...finish...in an hour.”
“Thank you, Sir,” Jessica murmured. “I’ll be very, very good.” Brad continued on towards his office door and played with the controls on the remote, bringing the vibrations up to a fever pitch and then cutting them off in rapid succession as he triggered the locking mechanism and opened the door. He brought the vibrations back up to a level that would keep Jessica stimulated but which wouldn’t bring her to the edge and glanced over his shoulder.
“I do expect you to have plenty of work to show me, Jessica,” he said before stepping into his office.
Brad thought about what they’d agreed to in the contract--what Jessica had listed as being hard limits, things she never wanted to do, things she maybe wanted to do, and things she definitely wanted to do. The things she definitely didn’t want to do, he had never intended on doing with her in the first place.
Some of the things she had marked as “maybe” he hadn’t really considered, but now that their relationship as dominant and submissive had deepened, he was starting to feel curious about them on his own.
Bradley sat at his desk, turning up the vibrator just a tiny bit, and considered. He knew that Jessica’s experiences with anal play had all been with people who had used it to debase her; she had marked everything in that category as a “maybe,” and Bradley wanted to test her a bit, to make her put up boundaries, without giving her the chance to force him to violate her boundaries.
He wanted to give her an experience of anal--something he’d only done with one or two women in his sexual career so far--that wasn’t intentionally degrading, that was for her pleasure.
He began to think about how he could go about doing that, and took his phone out to do a little private research on the subject. It would be good, he thought, to feel her trembling in relief and to hear her pleasure--and it would be good, too, to watch her take control of the situation within the context of the dynamic they’d set up. He texted Helena a brief sketch of what he wanted and waited for her response.
While he waited, he checked his email. The new hire he’d approved of in the IT department was--it seemed--performing well, but the man was behaving a little strangely. There had been an HR complaint, but it was, on the surface, nothing that a little retraining wouldn’t solve. Bradley replied that he wanted updates on the situation.
Make sure to forward me his retraining notes and whatever else is going on with him, he wrote back to the manager. We want to make sure that we aren’t fostering an environment where any kind of sexual harassment is acceptable.
He thought of the irony of that, considering the fact that--technically--what he was doing with Jessica could, in theory, be considered harassment. He did, after all, have sex with her on the clock, among other things. But he hadn’t made it a condition of her employment, and he had made it clear that he would still keep her as an employee if she decided not to have sex with him ever again.
Bradley delved into his work, setting an alarm for every fifteen minutes so that he could play with the remote to Jessica’s vibrator at random between then and the time that she would be in his office again.
By the time she came in, he was determined to make sure she was utterly on edge, her knees weak with the need to get off, and he wouldn’t be punishing her at all, that session. It would be all reward. Bradley grinned to himself, reflecting that there was something immensely gratifying about being able to reward someone for helping themselves to heal.
*
Jessica could feel the slight, subtle itch along her spine, under her skin, as she browsed the aisles at the Fred Meyer near her apartment, trying to focus on the task at hand: getting her groceries for the week. She was supposed to meet with Bradley again that evening, at his place, and the knowledge that it would be a “training” session made her tingle all over.
It was almost holiday season, and she’d made it clear to her boss and Master that she had no real plans to go home; she didn’t have parents to visit, no siblings, and she wasn’t all that interested in most of the friends she had left behind in Atlanta outside of recovery--besides which, those friends would be busy with their own holiday plans.
Bradley had suggested tentatively that they might do something together for Thanksgiving, and he’d left the whole end of that week empty on his calendar. Whatever he might have planned, it was a secret from Jessica, and she hoped that that meant that he would be spending the time with her.
She consulted the label on one of the packages of oatmeal, using the necessity to cover her need to regain her composure. Jessica and Bradley had what he called a “progress meeting” a few days before, where they’d talked about the contract, about what they’d been doing together and what they wanted to try--maintenance for their non-professional relationship.
They’d had dinner at RingSide on Burnside Street, and Bradley had reiterated that he would never degrade her; that was still one of his hard limits. He’d encouraged her to talk about going to meetings, about the progress she was making in controlling and examining her desire to be treated terribly, and Jessica had found that while the messages that Drake kept sending her still rattled her a little bit--being reminded of her seedy past still brought up more than slight feelings of shame--she no longer felt the same pull, the same need to indulge a craving.
In truth, her interactions with Bradley had more than satisfied her needs, though Jessica couldn’t entirely understand why. Every session they had together ended with not only the best orgasms of her life but a lengthy period where Bradley held her, comforted her, treated her as if she were made of the most delicate porcelain, as if she were precious.
Even as she zoned out, she could--absently--hear him telling her how good she was, how wonderfully she’d obeyed, and it warmed something inside of her more and more. While Jessica was far from cured--she would still push him a bit, try and find ways to make him debase her by going beyond what her limits actually were--she didn’t get the instant, gut-wrenching hunger to give into what Drake demanded of her.
He’d gradually decreased the number of messages he sent her after weeks of no response from her, and Jessica wondered also if maybe Bradley had had something to do with it, if he’d gotten in touch with someone like he’d offered to do when she’d first come clean about what was happening.
If he had, Jessica was glad for it--even if she was better at withstanding the temptations that Drake represented, she didn’t like the way he had of rattling her, of constantly messaging her from new numbers so she couldn’t block him once and for all.
You could get a new number, she thought, but then she would inevitably lose people she’d been trying to maintain a connection with--some in Atlanta, some in the groups in Portland--as well as having to update everything wherever she had her contact information listed. Besides which, how was it fair that she should have to make such an effort not to be harassed? She’d made it clear to Drake that she wasn’t interested in having anything to do with him; why didn’t he back off already?
Because--and she knew this was the reason--he wanted her. The perfect victim. The one who wouldn’t object to the things he did to abuse her, because she was willing to do almost anything for a fix. But you aren’t that person anymore, she reminded herself. She wasn’t the person who would run to his place--or to meet him at a gas station, or wherever he demanded--to get what she wanted from him.
She had Brad. She had a good job, a good life, and more than a year and a half of sobriety. She was good, but Drake didn’t know that. He had kept tabs on her enough to know she’d moved to Portland and had apparently been dedicated enough to follow her there, but he didn’t know that she was a better, healthier person than she had been. And he thought he could get what he wanted from her. Apparently, he had given up.
“I know you’re not that interested in the nutrition facts,” a voice--chillingly familiar--said from behind her. Jessica felt her guts clench as she realized whose voice it was: Drake’s.
“Go away, Drake,” she said without even looking at him. A crazed thought entered her head: was she just imagining it? Shouldn’t she at least look to confirm that it was her stalker, standing behind her? No.
She felt, rather than saw him move close to her, almost touching her back. “Why should I go away when I know you’re so horny almost anyone could practically smell it?” His hands closed on her waist, and Jessica tensed up all over, feeling nothing more than revulsion.
“You need to go away before I scream and get the manager here to throw you the fuck out, dickhead,” Jessica said quietly.
“Do you think anyone would do anything to me? You stupid little slut...if you scream and get attention, I’ll just show whoever comes to your rescue what a little fucking whore you are, and tell them you get off on being ‘caught.’ I have plenty of evidence.” Jessica put the container of oatmeal down and tried to force her panicked brain to think.
“If you don’t take your hands off of me right now, I’ll hurt you,” Jessica said, feeling a chilly kind of confidence steal over her, trickling down her spine like icy water, reinforcing her anger at what Drake was doing.
“Oh--that treatment center you went to taught you to be feisty, didn’t it?” Jessica clenched her teeth. “But we both know that all this time all you’ve wanted was to get dicked like you used to.”
“What I want is for you to stay the hell away from me,” Jessica said. “Second warning. Get your disgusting hands the hell off of my body, and never speak to me again.”
“And what are you going to do if I don’t?” Jessica took a quick breath; she knew Drake would feel it. She turned around quickly to face him, relying on the adrenaline that was already surging through her body to carry her through the fear of the moment.
She broke free of his grip and brought her foot--covered in a boot with a two-inch spike heel--down on Drake’s sneaker-clad foot, heel-first. When he shouted in pain, she reached for his head and grabbed at his hair, sticky as always with the product he used, and pushed down at the same time that she brought her knee up to meet his face.
She felt the impact of his nose against her jean-clad upper thigh and heard--faintly--the slightly crunching sound. She might not have broken anything, but she had definitely given him plenty to think about as he shouted again in rage and pain.
Jessica looked around to see that there was more than a little interest in the scene she and Drake had caused. She remembered that he kept his phone in his right pocket, and as he was still reeling from the injuries she’d dealt him, she reached into his pocket and found the phone by touch, pulling it out.
Jessica threw it onto the ground as unobtrusively as possible, thankful that Drake had been stupid enough not to put a more substantive cover on it, and pretending like he was trying to grab at her again, she swayed, bringing her heeled foot down on the phone’s screen again and again.
“Get away from me, you turd!” She knew that the supermarket cameras would tell a very straightforward story: a man accosting a woman in a grocery store and being dealt with when he wouldn’t leave her alone. Without his phone, Drake wouldn’t be able to show the manager of the store anything at all. Drake was still too distracted by the pain in his face and foot to realize that she’d taken and destroyed his phone, and instead was roaring out cuss words, lurching, clearly no longer interested in touching her. “If you ever touch me again, I will use a goddamn knife next time,” she told him, dropping her voice to almost a whisper.
By then, some of the onlookers had made up their mind to intervene, to hold onto Drake while they waited for the management to arrive and assess the situation. Jessica answered a few absent, harried questions, saying that he’d just come up to her and tried to assault her.
She didn’t answer whether or not she knew him, she avoided the difficult questions in the instant from the curious people who had come to her aid, and Drake was too injured to mount any kind of defense of himself. Jessica’s heartbeat began to slow to a rate closer to its normal one, and she took a deep breath. I need to call Bradley, she thought. He might not be my boyfriend, but I think he’ll want to know what happened...and worst-case scenario, he could probably help me out here if things get weird.
She stepped back and found her phone in her purse, taking another breath to steady herself. Jessica found Brad’s phone number in her contact list and rapidly tapped out a text message to him, not wanting to share any details with the people who were gathering in larger numbers to detain Drake and ask what had happened. Drake assaulted me in a Fred Meyer near my house. I beat him up. There might be kind of a scene. Can you come?
She didn’t know if she expected a response, or what she thought that Brad could do--or would do--to help her, but Jessica knew that she wanted him there, if he would come. Her phone buzzed just as the manager arrived with one of the bigger, broader store clerks, asking everyone what was going on.
“This guy tried to grope this lady, and she beat the shit out of him,” someone said. “It was pretty epic.”
“Is that true, ma’am?”
“He came up behind me and grabbed me,” Jessica replied.
“She wanted it,” Drake said. He’d begun to recover finally from his injuries, at least enough to put on the act. “It’s a game we play.”
“It isn’t. I told him twice to let go of me and to stop touching me, and he didn’t, so I defended myself,” Jessica said firmly.
“You’re going to believe that cunt over me?” Jessica saw the instant effect of Drake’s words on the small crowd gathered around them; nobody even wanted to believe him anymore, no matter how little they might know of what was actually happening.
“I think we need to bring this to the office,” the manager said. “The police are on the way.” Jessica nodded. Drake didn’t have his phone, so he couldn’t show any kind of incriminating photos; she watched as he reached into his pocket, not realizing what she’d done, and found that his phone wasn’t there. His eyes widened, and he looked around and saw his phone on the floor, the screen smashed and the case dented from Jessica’s stomping.
“That bitch busted my phone!” Drake shrieked. Jessica resisted the temptation to smile. “Aren’t you going to do anything about that? She busted my phone!”
“There’s a phone in the manager’s office,” the clerk said firmly.
“I have evidence on my phone.” Jessica rolled her eyes.
“Evidence of me agreeing to let you grope me here in this grocery store?” She crossed her arms over her chest, knowing full well that Drake had no such evidence but that he’d intended to humiliate her as well as destroy her credibility by showing what pictures he did have of her.
“Bitch!”
The clerk obviously had enough of Drake’s attitude; he grabbed Drake by the arms and started half-hauling and half-dragging the man away from the scene, while the manager stayed behind.
“I’m going to need to ask you to stay to give a statement to the police, ma’am,” the manager--a mid-forties looking man with thinning hair and wire-framed glasses--said. Jessica nodded.
“I have a friend who might be coming to lend me emotional support, is that okay?” The manager nodded.
“As long as your friend doesn’t interfere, it should be no issue at all,” he said. “And of course, we can hold onto your groceries while we’re waiting for the police. Are you in a hurry to be anywhere?” Jessica shook her head.
“I’m okay,” she said. Her phone buzzed in her pocket, and she gestured for the manager to lead the way away from the aisle, towards his office. As she followed him, she took her phone out and saw that Bradley had, in fact, replied. Give me the address, I can be there probably fifteen minutes.
Jessica felt a flood of relief and hadn’t realized until that moment that she’d been worried that Bradley wouldn’t reply at all, that he’d leave her to take care of herself. But there he was, living up to everything that she had ever had as an impression of him: supporting her, ready to be there where she needed him.
Whether he would actually be able to help her in any way other than lending the support of his presence, she didn’t know. She sent him the Google Maps coordinates for where she was and shoved her phone back in her pocket, content to wait for either him or the police or both to arrive. There was nothing on the store cameras that could possibly counter her story, and she had gotten rid of what power Drake had to make her seem untrustworthy.
The clerk had obviously sequestered Drake somewhere away from the main office--maybe in some kind of security room--when Jessica went and sat down, taking a slow breath to steady her lingering nerves. There was still something in her that said that somehow, Drake would find a way to show the cops that she was a dirty slut, the exact kind of person who would love to play some kind of weird power game where she got groped in a grocery store.
She wanted Bradley to show up, and as the minutes crawled by, she thought of dozens of ways that things could go south with the law enforcement officers on their way to the grocery store.
It’s going to be fine. Bradley will get here first, and he’ll support you, and there’s no reason they could have to even want to believe Drake. He doesn’t have anything to hold over you right now. You’re going to be fine, she told herself again and again. Her phone buzzed again, vibrating against her leg, and Jessica checked it quickly.
It was Bradley, letting her know that he’d arrived. Once more, relief flowed through her veins, loosening everything tight inside of her, and Jessica wanted to cry from how glad she was that her boss, her master, was there. She gave into it, letting the tears flow, knowing--in the manipulative part of her mind, as well as the common-sensical one--that a crying victim would be much more sympathetic to the police than a raging, angry perpetrator would be.
If she could just get through the next hour or so, she could finish her grocery shopping, and then she would be able to see Brad in private and let him know how grateful she was to have him in her life.