I mean holy shit. We were talking the real deal, the full shebang: a lavishly furnished, luxury bondage dungeon complete with four-poster bed and implements hanging on the wall. God. So many implements. Cuffs, crops, spreaders, floggers, stuff I didn’t even recognize, gleaming softly in the mellow light. Everything was dark leather and dark wood, occasionally relieved by accents of burgundy and gold, opulent and forbidding and sexy as hell. And some of the furniture in there I couldn’t even look at for fear of insta-blushing. I hadn’t quite realized how many ways there existed to immobilize and expose someone.
Though, let’s be clear, I was up for all of them.
“Oh my God.” I spun back to Caspian. “I always guessed what you were into, but this is amazing.”
“It was built a long time ago.”
He sounded slightly distant. I guess he was worried I was going to freak out. And I could sort of see why, since a room like this suggested a commitment to BDSM that went way beyond a little bit of spanking and begging. Maybe I should have been scared, or at least a little bit apprehensive, but I wasn’t. I just wasn’t. I trusted Caspian. And I wanted to explore this with him. As much for my sake as for his.
“You know, you didn’t have to hide your naughty sex room from me,” I said.
“I wasn’t hiding it. I told you, I don’t come here anymore.” He wasn’t lying about that. The air smelled stale, and nearly every flat surface had accumulated a faint patina of dust. “I keep meaning to have it dismantled, but it seems unduly mortifying to hire someone for the task.”
“You must have hired someone to build it,” I pointed out.
“I…actually, that wasn’t me.”
Nathaniel? Except that seemed incredibly unlikely, given what Caspian had told me of their relationship. “So you tripped, fell, and landed on your very own home dungeon?”
“It was a gift. From…a mentor of sorts.”
We were getting off track. I went further into the room, running my fingers through the tails of a row of floggers, before perching on the edge of…well…I wasn’t sure what it was. Like, if a chair and a chaise and saddle had a threesome and covered the resulting offspring in dark purple velvet. One of those. Though it was only when I was sitting on it that I discovered it also had stirrups. And reins. Oh my.
“But”—I gave Caspian my best come bonk me on your outrageous furniture look—“we can still play, can’t we?”
He didn’t seem at all enticed, despite my blandishments. “No.”
“What? Why?”
“Because I didn’t want to bring you here in the first place.”
“You brought Nathaniel.”
Caspian made a convulsive gesture, his fingers opening and closing impatiently. “This isn’t about him.”
“How can it not be?” I cried. “When he got everything and I get compromises. When you can’t even spend a full night with me? How long did you make him wait before you let him stay with you? Or before you let him touch you?”
“It was different, Arden. I was different.” He gazed at me, almost pleadingly. “I’m trying to learn from my mistakes with him, so I can be better with you.”
“So…you won’t let me have fun in your sex dungeon as a mark of special favor?”
He glanced round sharply, almost as if he didn’t quite recognize where he was. Then said, in a strange, rough voice, “Can’t you understand? I don’t like being here.”
“Because it reminds you of Nathaniel?”
“Yes, but not in the way you think.” He took a step across the threshold, but almost immediately retreated, fine tremors running through his body. “All you see right now is a tawdry fantasy. What I see is the room where I hurt someone I loved.”
He’d said something like this to me in Kinlochbervie. At the time I’d been a bit too preoccupied with everything going on between us to get caught up in specifics about someone else. But I was finally starting to get it: if I wanted to understand Caspian, I would also have to understand Nathaniel.
“What did you do?” I asked. “Push him too far? Ignore his safeword?”
“It was always too far. Every single time.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh Arden.” Caspian put a shaky hand briefly to his eyes. I wasn’t sure, but I thought he might have been blinking back tears. “I was twenty-three when I met Nathaniel. The attraction between us was instant, and powerful. He was a light, when I thought only darkness existed. I’d never dreamed someone like him, so good and so unswerving in that goodness, could love someone as sullied as me.”
This was everything I’d been asking for. Truth. Openness. And it was fucking awful. Not so much the idea that Caspian had once been in love with Nathaniel. I knew that already. But the reality of it? Right in my face? Ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch. “Sounds great.”
“I was very…lost back then. Very twisted by the choices I’d made. I believed that love and pain were inextricable.” He swept an arm out to encompass the room. “Nathaniel didn’t want any of this. But he suffered it for me.”
“Wow,” I drawled out, in a voice I didn’t quite recognize, “must’ve been hot.”
He glanced over at me, visibly startled. “What the— Why would you say that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I don’t like hearing about how amazing and wonderful your ex is.”
“For God’s sake, you asked. Insisted even.”
I winced. “Yes, but…I didn’t realize how crap it would be. And, for the record, I think it’s really fucked up to submit to someone in order to prove you’re the better person.”
“It was what I thought I needed. So he gave it to me.”
“And how did that work out for you?”
“You know it didn’t.”
I swung my feet onto the…whatever it was I was sitting on. Ended up sprawled out and arched up like I was at the world’s lewdest psychologist. So much for looking cool and nonchalant as jealousy gnawed on my liver like Prometheus’s eagle. “Couldn’t he take it?”
“Actually,” said Caspian, very softly. “I couldn’t. He made me see this for what it truly was: cruelty from cruelty, and pain from pain. And it became unbearable, subjecting him to such…such debasements. I had to let him go. I didn’t deserve to be with him.”
“Oh my God.” I flailed upright, sheet flying. “Have you listened to yourself? Way to make me feel like absolute shit.”
“I’m not sure what’s going through your mind, but my previous relationship is—and should be—irrelevant to you.”
“But you do remember I like being subjected to debasements, right?”
“I…I”—he flushed—“I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”
“You broke up with Nathaniel the Martyr because you believe the fact you’re kinky and he’s not makes him too good for you. So what does that make me, Caspian?”
He drew in a sharp breath. “I’ve treated you with far greater care than I ever showed Nathaniel.”
“You mean by keeping me at a distance and refusing to believe me when I tell you that I’m comfortable with my desires, and yours?”
“The reason,” he snapped, “you are comfortable is because I have kept myself in check. I have set boundaries and maintained them and protected you from the consequences of both my nature and your naiveté.”
I stared at him, shocked momentarily into silence, and thrown into such turmoil I couldn’t tell if I was angry or upset or both or neither. Finally, I got my mouth working. “This is such bullshit.”
“What is?” Caspian, as he often did after an outburst, had turned to ice.
“You. This. Everything.” Or maybe I was just tired. Heaviness rolled over me like I was being dragged through the floor soul first. “You’ve only gone and Madonna-whored me.”
“I don’t—”
“You’re fucked up about kink because your last boyfriend was a judgmental prick. And you’ll never think I’m as good as Nathaniel until I’m as judgmental as him or as fucked up as you.”
I gathered my garment, and what precious little of my dignity remained, and pushed past Caspian. There was no game plan here. All I wanted was away. From him and the room where RACK went to die.
Probably there would be crying at some point.
But I didn’t actually get very far. Caspian caught up to me in the bedroom.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
It was a good question. “I guess I’m leaving?”
“Now? It’s five a.m. You’re in a sheet.”
I gave him a wild, senseless grin. “One of these is fixable.”
“Arden.”
“What?”
“I think, perhaps, we have both spoken too hastily tonight. Implied things we did not mean.”
“Is that…what the fuck is that? Are you trying to say sorry?”
He raised a fretful hand, then let it fall. “I don’t know what I’m trying to say. I can’t…think in that place. I’m not…I don’t feel…”
That was when I saw he was sweating. And not in a sexy glowing way. More just drenched, and almost feverish. He was trembling too. And looked—unlikely as it seemed for someone so beautiful—absolutely terrible.
“Are you okay?”
I started forward but he jerked away. “Don’t touch me.”
“I won’t.” I threw up the surrender gesture. “I promise. But what’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I mean”—he made a shaky sound—“I just need to breathe.”
“Um. Sit down maybe?” It was hard to help someone when they wouldn’t let you near them, but I managed to gently herd him, sheepdog style, toward the bed. “I think you’re meant to put your head between your legs if you feel faint.”
“No, it’s…it feels…It’s like being there.”
I was still super cross with him. But it wasn’t in me to prioritize my own anger over someone else’s distress. Not because I was amazing or anything. But because I wasn’t a psychopath.
He pressed his fingers against his eyes. “I can’t stop remembering. Can’t stop seeing. I don’t want…I can’t make it stop.”
“Oh God.” I dropped to my knees in front of him, trying to demonstrate closeness without impinging. “I think you’re…triggered maybe?”
“Maybe.”
Actually take that back about not being a psychopath. I wished I could whip out my phone and google what to do when you brutally traumatize your bildom non-boyfriend by trying to kinky sex him in a place full of horrible associations. What the fuck was wrong with me? I’d gone into free-fall in a void of my own insecurities. I mean, yes, Caspian had said some messed-up stuff that had made me feel hella judged. But how hadn’t I noticed how much he was hurting?
Fuck. Okay. I could fix this.
I shuffled forward a tiny bit. “Caspian? That’s the past. It’s over and done with. You’re here now. In the present. With me.”
No reaction.
Shit. Shit. Shit. This was beyond difficult.
“Just, y’know, keep breathing. And…like…sort of…feel where you are? The ground under your feet. The bed if you just reach out and touch it. My voice talking to you. And if you open your eyes, you’ll see me. Waiting for you.”
It took forever. But eventually he lowered his hands. Looked down at me with this strange mixture of wild animal fear and desperate trust. I was pretty sure I was on the verge of a heart attack myself. But I gave him my best calm, here, and incredibly sorry I made you hang out somewhere damaging for you face.
“See,” I whispered. “All safe.”
He did actually seem to be doing better. He wasn’t trembling anymore, and there was color in his face again—although he’d gone kind of red. “Yes.” He cleared his throat. “I’m…I’m fine now. And I’m sorry you had to see that.”
“Jesus. That is not something you have to apologize for.”
“Well, I’m hardly proud of it. And I have no cause to react that way.”
I almost could see him trying to put himself back together. Except it was the emotional equivalent of that scene in Bambi with the icy pond. “You’ve lost me.”
“I was not the one to endure torment in that room.”
“You know”—the words were out before I could stop them—“I’m really not sure about that.”
For a moment he stared at me with this terrible emptiness. And then, “Arden, go if you must, but I can’t talk about this anymore right now.”
I nearly lost my temper again. How could he think I’d leave him after what I’d just seen? Except he must have felt vulnerable enough without being reminded, and the last thing I needed was him mistaking my care for pity. And actually, in that moment, it cost me nothing to sacrifice a little of my pride to salvage his.
“I’d like to stay,” I said softly. “If you don’t mind.”
He shook his head. And most likely I was imagining it for my own benefit, but I thought I saw relief in his eyes.
I gave him a tentative smile. “If it would make you more comfortable, I could sleep in one of the other rooms. Or on the floor since I’d much rather be near you.”
“I’m not going to make you sleep on the floor.” He sounded a little bit more like himself—which was to say, faintly exasperated with me.
“Will you really be okay sharing, though?”
“I don’t know. But I’m”—he swallowed—“quite tired.”
I’d never seen anyone struggle over such a basic admission of humanity. “Then get into bed, doofus.”
He managed a laugh, and half crawled, half dragged himself up toward the pillows. Landed in a vaguely vertical sprawl, his face shadowed by the crook of his arm. “I should shower,” he mumbled. “I’m disgusting.”
“You’re fine.” I untangled the sheet from my body and settled it over him, then drew up the duvet and—
Okay. It’s weird to say I tucked in Caspian Hart. But I did. Before slipping in beside him, top to tail, just like in Kinlochbervie. I felt him tense, then relax. He said something I didn’t catch, though it might have been nothing more than my name, and was asleep in minutes.
Annoyingly—despite me also being quite tired—my brain wouldn’t leave me alone. So I ended up lying there, restless but trying not to move in case I disturbed Caspian, hamster-wheeling through the carnage of our evening. And to think we’d started out so promisingly. Although, actually, in some horrible demonstration of beware of what you wish for, I’d got everything I thought I wanted: the truth about Caspian. Though probably not in any way he would himself have chosen to share it with me.
And, God, that was a bitter prize.
It didn’t help that my feelings for him were a total mess, as if someone had ripped open the sofa cushion of my heart and scattered the stuffing all over the living room. I was hurt by him and hurting for him. And I wasn’t all that impressed with myself either. A lot of my behavior tonight had sprung from a toxic combination of ignorance and my own shit. But, for fuck’s sake, it was sexing 101 that you didn’t make people do stuff that made them uncomfortable.
Even if you were the one ostensibly surrendering power.
Even if you were a nobody and they were a billionaire.
And even—especially, in fact—if you thought their reasons for being uncomfortable were a big pile of crap.
Most likely, from what Caspian had said, a lot of it came back to Nathaniel. And, obviously, for both selfish and unselfish reasons, I wished he could find peace with his desires. Believe that they weren’t the consequence of cruelty or perversion. But who the fuck was I to decide whether his choices were valid not?
It was the first time I’d ever been able to see Nathaniel as something other than my opposite or my enemy. After all, we had a lot in a common.
Since neither of us really understood the man we claimed to care about.