Saving Sunni (7 page)

If sage’s mother had told my mother a bunch of nonsense about us being abused, I couldn’t exactly blame her for being worried. She had never believed that Randy had gotten violent. One of the reasons I was more than happy to leave the area permanently was her constant, “Was Randy really so bad? Couldn’t you give it another try? Don’t you think you might have done something to provoke him?”

So I looked around to make sure Geri wasn’t charging with her Taser and stepped out, motioning him to the side so he wouldn’t be visible through the window.

“What are you doing here?” I demanded, when I was confident we would be able to talk for a minute. “I told you I’m perfectly fine, and I don’t want you back in my life.”

“But I need to talk to you,” he said. “Something really important happened to me, and I need to share it with you.”

This didn’t sound good. I narrowed my eyes. “I’m listening. Make it quick. Geri’s going to notice soon that I’m not in there and come looking.”

“Okay. Listen. I know I’ve been into some bad things in the past, and I wasn’t a good husband, but that’s all over. I’ve found Jesus, Jessie. I’m a completely different person now. I’ve straightened out my life, and I’d like you to come back and give me another chance. We’re still married in God’s eyes, and I know he wants us to try again. We can make it this time, Jessie. I know we can. Jesus loves you, and he wants us to be together.”

I stared at him, not quite able to believe my ears. He must have taken that for indecision, because he stepped closer and grasped my shoulders.

I pulled away, startled, and backed up a few steps. He let go, looking sheepish.

“Come on, Jessie,” he pleaded. “I never hurt you that bad. And from what I hear, you are into being hit these days. Isn’t that true? Doesn’t that big guy beat you up?”

I was speechless for a minute. Did my mother tell him
that?

“First of all, that is a completely different thing,” I said, surprised I could talk. But the words were racing through my head, all trying to get out at once. “He is
not
‘beating me up.’ Our relationship is none of your business, and neither is what I am ‘into.’ I don’t care that you got religion, and I don’t believe or care that Jesus wants us to be together. What
I
want is for you to go away and have your own life and leave me here to have mine.”

“But what’s so bad about me if that other guy hits you too?” he demanded.

“That is a totally different kind of relationship. We have negotiated how he treats me, and how we relate to each other. I know he won’t do anything I don’t want him to, and we both accept our own responsibilities. You never understood anything about taking responsibility, or considering anybody else’s feelings, or thinking about anybody but yourself. And besides”—I was getting off track here and onto dangerous ground—“I love him, and I don’t love you. I am with him now, and I’m happy. I need you to accept that and go away.” Something occurred to me. “How do you know he’s a big guy? Have you been spying on us?”

“But you need Jesus,” he said, completely disregarding my question. “I can’t ignore the fact that you’re living in sin. You’re still my wife in God’s eyes and I’m finally taking responsibility for that fact.”

I was about to reply when the door suddenly opened and Geri stood there tapping the Taser in her palm, like a housemother surprising two amorous teenagers in a make out session.

“We’ll talk about this later,” Randy said, glaring and striding off down the sidewalk. Geri held the door open, and I slunk in, perfectly aware there was at least one lecture coming out of this.

“Why were you outside talking to him?” she demanded when we were back inside the shop, hugging me but staring at me reproachfully at the same time.

“I had to tell him that I’m happy and he needs to get over it and go away,” I explained. “I couldn’t call the cops. He hasn’t actually done anything. I didn’t want him just standing out there.”

“What did he say?” She sounded skeptical.

“He’s gotten religion. He thinks God wants us to be together.”

“Does he know what kind of relationship you’re in?”

I hesitated. “He seems to. I’m not sure what he’s heard. Definitely something about bdsm. He asked me why I let Sir hit me, but I left him for the same thing.”

She led the way into her office and folded herself into her chair. “And what did you tell him?”

“I told him it was a completely different situation. It was abusive when he did it.”

She cocked her head to one side. “Just to play devil’s advocate,” she said, “what
is
the difference?”

I thought about it. I wasn’t used to talking to vanilla people about any aspects of bdsm. I knew Geri wasn’t exactly vanilla, but this was probably good practice anyway.

“Well,” I said slowly, trying to work out in my head the best way to explain it. “When Sir hits me, it’s not because he’s angry or wants to hurt me. It’s because he knows it will create pleasurable feelings for me. He knows exactly how, where, and how hard to hit and when to stop. We’ve negotiated it and worked with it so we both get what we want. It may look like abuse, but it’s something completely different. It’s very responsible and completely consensual. Even when he hits me for punishment, I still don’t consider it abuse because we’ve agreed that he has the right to do that occasionally. With Randy, he was just drunk and mad about something stupid that didn’t have anything to do with me, and it didn’t benefit me at all. It didn’t benefit either of us.”

Geri looked at her watch. “Well, it’s time for you to get out of here,” she said. “You’re going to be a few minutes late, but I didn’t want you walking outside again right after he was here. Will you be okay?”

I didn’t tell her that I’d been okay when she’d come out to “rescue” me. I just nodded and gathered up my things. She hugged me again and looked into my eyes.

“Promise me you’ll tell your sir about this the second you get home,” she said, and again I thought of a housemother. I extricated myself from her grip, heading to the back door. She marched with me, still carrying the Taser, and calling to Dennis to come out of the back room and escort us outside. I felt like an idiot, having to be walked the ten feet from the door to my car, but I did look around furtively, which was what Geri was doing too, although not furtively at all. Dennis just looked like he was thinking he should be getting paid more for bodyguard services.

When Sir got home, he gave me an odd look but didn’t say anything about the meeting with Geri. I greeted him with sage on our knees by the front door when he walked in, and as he helped us up I said, “Sir, I need to tell you something.”

He nodded as he led the way into the living room. sage ran to get him a drink, and I positioned myself on a cushion in front of him as he settled on the couch.

“Randy came by again today.” I ducked my head down so I wouldn’t have to see his expression.

He was silent until sage came in and handed him his glass, then he pointed to the floor, and she obediently sat down, leaning against his knee. I still knelt in front of him, facing them both.

“And what happened?” He sounded suspiciously calm. Had Geri had called him after all?

“Well, it seems he’s gotten religion and decided that God wants us to be together,” I explained, embarrassed. I would have worried that sage was thinking what a hopeless redneck I was, except that we had had very similar upbringings and came from the same small town. Sir, on the other hand, was from a fairly large city in Austria. I didn’t know if Europeans used the term “redneck.” It probably wasn’t the right time to ask, though.

He pondered for a minute. “And what did you tell him?”

“That I wasn’t interested in his religion or whether God wanted us to be together and to please go away and let me live my own life.”

“What did he say to that?”

“Geri came rampaging up about then, and he left before we could finish the conversation. Hopefully he got the picture, though.”

sage glanced at Sir and then when he nodded, said, “How long ago did the divorce go through?”

I bit my lip. They both looked at me. Finally I admitted, “I don’t think it ever did go through, technically.”

sage’s jaw dropped, and Sir’s eyebrows went up farther than I’d ever seen them go.

“You’re not divorced?” sage’s voice was almost an octave higher than normal.

Sir automatically reached down and put a hand on her shoulder, but his voice was cold. “Why didn’t you ever tell us that you were still married?”

“I—I’m not sure. I guess I didn’t think it was important, and I hadn’t seen him or been around him in so long, and I…Well, I really just don’t like to think about it.”

sage gaped in astonishment and Sir gave me a look somewhere between anger, disappointment, and disdain. I stared at the floor, my face hot, feeling like a complete idiot. I wondered what Sir would do now. I had a wild vision of him picking up the phone and calling Randy to tell him to come and pick me up, since I legally still belonged to him, but I knew that was ridiculous.

“This will have to be taken care of,” he finally said in an icy, quiet voice. “You will call Geri in the morning and tell her that you are taking off a couple days to sort through the situation. You will go and get any paperwork you need for the divorce—assuming you do actually want to divorce him?” He gave me a frosty glare, and I nodded miserably. “And then you will get a restraining order against him so he cannot enter the store when you are there. We will not go into why you were talking to him, but you are absolutely not to speak to him in person again. If he contacts you, I will talk to him. Your self-defense classes will start next week.” He looked at sage, who gave me a resentful glance. “Both of you will take it, partly because I do not want sunni to go anywhere by herself for a while, and partly because, as I already told you, it will be an excellent thing for you as well.”

“But, Sir, Geri’s counting on me—”

“Geri is a lunatic.” I could tell he was on the verge of being very angry. “But she seems to be able to run the store perfectly well without you, and she can do that until we get this taken care of. If she attempts to use that Taser of hers, I have no confidence that she won’t injure an innocent bystander—like you—and I don’t want you either getting hurt or being implicated in a lawsuit. Is that clear?”

I nodded again. I was surprised how disappointed I felt about having to give up The Fringe Element, even if it wasn’t for very long.

Sir went on. “It was going to be your night for private time, but I think as punishment you will lay on your cushion and watch as sage and I have a scene. No puppy gear. And take off that ridiculous scarf.”

sage and I both got up and went to finish dinner. He didn’t tell us to get undressed and I, for one, didn’t particularly feel like serving him in just my apron, something I usually enjoyed. sage didn’t say anything to me as we dished up the food. I tried asking her about her day at school, but she just shrugged and went to get the drinks.

After a very quiet meal, Sir sent me to my cushion, pushed over against the wall so that I felt like a child being put in a corner. I thought about making a sarcastic comment about dunce caps, but I bit my tongue. There was no point in pissing him off any more. Part of me really wanted to show him that I was a little angry at him, too, but I struggled with it, knowing it would only make matters worse.

He brought out a massage table and set it up in the living room. He told sage to get undressed, which she did slowly, the way he liked. She stood in the middle of the room, dropping each piece of clothing in a little pile by the couch as she removed it. She knelt in front of him, and he looked down into her eyes, gathering up handfuls of hair and tugging at them with one hand while gently stroking her cheeks and neck with the other. It was really interesting watching this from an “outside” kind of position. Normally I would have been next to her waiting for instructions, but I found it was actually kind of fun watching as he bent to kiss her and whisper in her ear, reaching down to stroke her breasts and pull harder at her hair. Her head was tilted back and by the way she nodded slightly, I knew the words he was whispering to her: “You are mine, sage. You belong to me.”

I knew exactly how she felt. Whenever Sir said that to me, I always got wet immediately. There was something about the way he leaned in close and spoke in a soft, deep voice, almost a growl, that was overwhelmingly sensual. It was like being wrapped in a thick, soft, warm blanket. I always felt protected and loved and enfolded in heat. There wasn’t anything quite like that feeling.

He stood back and held out a hand to help her up. She got onto the massage table, face down, and he quickly secured her hands above her head at the top of the table, passing the rope underneath and attaching it to a point I couldn’t see. This wasn’t to keep her from moving. It was because being tied gave her—and me—a strong feeling of security, of being owned and protected and loved. It might look more like abuse than affection to outsiders but just the feel of the ropes on my arms could send me into subspace, a kind of altered, dreamy state.

As I watched, part of my brain analyzed the scene the way it might look to someone like Randy. I didn’t know if he knew that I considered myself Sir’s slave, but I was sure he had no idea what that meant if he did. Our Master/slave relationship was much more logical and durable than most “vanilla” relationships. We had a written contract that detailed, as I’d tried to explain to Randy, exactly what responsibilities each of us had, and also how we were to treat each other. There were none of the kind of power struggles I’d seen in my parents’ marriage, or the kind of resentments there had been in my marriage to Randy. The power exchange was more structure than most people thought they wanted, but it was the structure that made it strong. It provided a framework for the relationship. If the contract had been agreed on, neither could say, “I do more for you than you do for me.” There was no ground for complaining—or at least there shouldn’t be.