But I got the answer I was looking for. I got the point across, I think, without being too preachy. I hope this is still interesting. Let me know in the comments, would you?
Driving the Point Holmes
“Even
if there really is a bomb,” I say, in
case he’s recording things, “and I’m not saying there is. But if there is, I
promise that I would not set one off if you let me just walk away when we’re
done.” I smirk at him. “As long as you look at my ass while I leave.”
He
laughs a little despite himself, then sighs. “Okay. What do you want to talk
about?”
“I
want to know,” I say. “Honestly. Do you like submitting to me?”
“I
don’t like the situations you put me in.”
“That’s
not what I asked.” I cross my arms and rest my elbows on the table. “Assuming
that for some reason there wasn’t that added excitement. Assuming that
everything was calm and simple. Would you still enjoy submitting to me?”
He
takes a deep breath and stares at me for a long time. Long enough for a tiny
sliver of doubt to creep its way into my brain. Have I read him wrong all
along? Has he been hating it? Have I been forcing him to do things he actually doesn’t want to do? I mean,
stealing things and killing people is one thing. But forcing him to play with
me, forcing him to basically have sex with me, that would be rape. I don’t want
to think he isn’t consenting. I don’t mind him being a bit conflicted between
his weird notion of duty to the law and his desires as a human being. But if
there’s no conflict, if it’s just forced sexual attention… well, then I deserve
a grenade in the mouth.
“Yes,”
he says. That one word drains the tension out of my body, letting go the breath
I hadn’t realized I was holding. “I don’t know if I would have jumped into this
with you under normal circumstances. Probably would have wanted to date for a
while first. Get to know each other. Start slow.”
I
sigh. “How does that not sound boring to you?”
He
laughs. “I guess I’m just a romantic.”
I
shake my head. “No, it’s not that. You’re just so,” I lean back, searching for
the word, “constrained. By society. You think that you have to do this whole
long dance around the subject before actually trying something.”
“And
you don’t.” It’s not entirely a question.
“How
long do you think it would have taken before you were willing to even consider licking my boots, in a normal
relationship?”
He
shrugs. “A few weeks maybe. Depends on how you brought it up.”
I
raise an eyebrow at him. “And how long before you were okay with me beating
you?” I hold up my hand to stop him from answering. “I’d guess at least a
couple of months, right? And whenever we played, you’d need days to deal with
it, to process what had happened.”
“I
can’t say that isn’t true,” he says. “We’ve done some,” he takes a breath, “amazing
things. Things I never even let myself dream about.”
“Do
you think we would have done them anyway with a normal relationship model?”
He
laughs again. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone use the word ‘normal’
drenched in quite as much spite and hatred as you do, Molly.”
“Normal
is boring. It’s constricting. I’m not the one who likes to be tied down. Not by
men, not by morality, not by law.”
He
sighs and shakes his head. “That’s what it all comes back to, isn’t it?” He
takes another sip of coffee. “Your desire for independence from morality and
law means we can’t have a normal relationship. You had to make that impossible.”
“But
if I hadn’t, you think we would?”
“Eventually.”
“So
you do like the things I make you do?”
I know he said it already, but I need him to say it again. I need him to say it
without constraint. I need to be certain.
“I
do,” he said. “I don’t like some of the situations you put me in, but I do like
our play. It makes my life very complicated, and I wish you had just actually been Beth Skinner and gone about this
the right way. But yes, I really do have feelings for you. That’s what makes
this so hard.”
He
slides the cuffs towards me again. “Please,” he says. “Please don’t make it
harder.”
I
glance down at them, but don’t move to pick them up, or to slide them back to
him. I just look at them so he knows I see them, then pointedly ignore them. “Do
you have feelings for me, Leland?”
“Yes.”
He leans back and gives me a tired smile. “Lots of them. Very conflicting.”
“What
do you mean?”
“I’m
attracted to you, Molly. There’s no doubt there. You’re brilliant, you’re
gorgeous, and you’re sexy as hell. In some ways, you’re like the
personification of my fantasies. But you’re also a sociopath, a murderer, and
one of the most terrifying people I’ve ever met. You’re like the
personification of my nightmares.”
That
makes me smile. “So I’m the girl of your dreams?”
He
laughs, then nods. “The good and the bad,” he says.
“I’m
okay with that.”
“I’m
not.”
I
raise an eyebrow at him.
“Molly,
I don’t know if I can keep doing this.”
“What
do you mean?”
He
sighs. “Sooner or later, one of us is going to break. Either you’re going to go
too far, and make me kill you, or I’m going to lose my grip on sanity, and I’m
going to follow you down the rabbit hole.”
“I’m
not crazy,” I say, my voice a little cold. I hate it when people call me crazy.
Doctors who think they’re qualified to make the judgment, fences who think I’m
bluffing; it doesn’t matter. I hate it when they say that. "A sociopath has no
concept of right and wrong. I do.”
“Really?
You threatened to kill a building full of strangers just to get me to talk to
you.”
I
wave that away. I just implied; for all he knows, it’s a bluff. “I have my own
lines, Leland.”
“Like
what?”
I
tent my hands together and take a breath, reminding myself that this is Leland,
the man who loves me, not some smug shrink who thinks he can label me. “Let me
put it this way,” I say. “I have no problem making you suck on a strap on after
I’ve fucked your unlubricated ass, then beating you into unconsciousness and
carving my initials into your shoulder.” I smirk as I see the way his body
betrays his attempt to keep a straight face at the thought. “But I wouldn’t do
it here in front of all these people. And I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t think
you liked it.”
“Why
not?”
“Consent,”
I say. “You like the things I make you do. You said it yourself. You’d do them anyway,
if the situation was different. Right?” He nods. “So you’re consenting. But
these people here, they aren’t. If I do it in front of them, then I’m involving
them without asking. It’s like rape.”
“And
rape is something you won’t do?”
I
glare at him. “Rapists have given up their right to be human,” I say.
He
nods. “What would you have done if I had told you that I wasn’t consenting to
any of this? What if I had told you that you
had been raping me all this time? Would you have let me arrest you?”
“Yes.”
I say it without hesitation. And it’s true. Well, half true. He’d arrest me,
but it wouldn’t be me. I wouldn’t be me anymore. I’d just be trapped inside the
body of someone I wanted to kill. And the first opportunity I had to change
that, I’d take.
He
nods and looks a little impressed. “Okay,” he says. “So you’re not a
psychopath.”
I
take a deep breath and interlace my hands to stop them from shaking. “Please,”
I say. “Let’s not talk about that.”
He
looks pointedly at the handcuffs again. I don’t.
The
silence stretches out a little bit. Then he smiles at me, and my stomach drops.
“So you’d make me suck it after
fucking me?”
I
nod, even though it isn’t true. This is the kind of thing that Leland loves to
fantasize about, loves to talk about, but wouldn’t want to actually do. “You’d
be on your knees,” I say, “your ass still burning from the brutal fucking I’d
just given you, your cock still dripping from the orgasm I’d given you with
that fucking. You’d look at the rubber dick in your face, you’d wonder if there
was any of your shit on it. You’d be convinced there was about the time my
hands grabbed your hair and pushed your mouth onto it. You’d be sure you were
tasting shit as I forced it all the way down into your throat. You’d probably
think you were going to throw up, but you’d fight the urge, knowing that I
wouldn’t let you off the cock even if you did. Knowing that if you puked on my
boots, I’d make you lick them clean again.” He shifts in his seat, and I smile.
I
don’t mind talking about this sort of thing. I don’t think either one of us
would want it to actually happen. But the fantasy is plenty humiliating, and
that’s what he likes. “There’d probably be tears. Mascara running like on a frightened
whore.”
“You’d
be crying?” he looks honestly confused.
I
smirk at him with my customary half smile. “No,” I say. I don’t explain that he
would the one in mascara. I’d rather him come to that conclusion on his own.
And after a second or two, he does. His mind isn’t as quick with all that blood
down in his erection. That’s okay; it’s a failing in all men.
He
takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly. “I love your mind,” he says. “I just
wish you’d use it for good.”
That
makes me laugh. “Are you implying that I’m evil?”
“You
don’t think so?”
“No
one thinks they’re evil, Leland.”
“And
how are you good, then?”
“Do
you know about the law of the excluded middle?” he nods. “So why does it have
to be one or the other? Why do I have to limit myself to standard moral
definitions?”
“And
there we are again,” he says. “Full circle. We always seem to come back to this
point. It’s why we wouldn’t work. Why we can’t work.”
“You
said that you might snap and follow me down the rabbit hole. Do you mean you’d
be my slave full time? Serve me with all of your heart and soul?”
He
sighs, then nods. “I’ve considered it more than I want to admit,” he says. “If
you can’t beat them, join them, right?”
“So
why don’t you?”
“Because
life isn’t just about sex, Molly. There has to be time outside the fantasy.”
“Why?”
“Because
without life outside fantasy, you lose touch with reality. Then you really
would be insane.”
“So
the bitter makes the sweet sweeter?” I roll my eyes. “That’s such a crock of
shit. It’s something people who aren’t happy all the time tell themselves to
make the sadness easier to handle. What if there really was a way to be happy all the time? Would you really care that it
never ended, that you lost touch with reality? You’d be happy.”
“Are
you happy?”
I
ignore the question. And ignore the answer. “Whenever people talk about heaven,”
I say, “they talk about it being a state of permanent bliss. But you call that
insanity. Are all the people in heaven insane?”
“Do
you believe in heaven?”
I
shrug. I could tell him I’d never really thought about it, but obviously I
have. Not a comfortable subject. “Could you be happy as my slave?” I ask him. “Forever
broken, kneeling in front of me and serving my ever whim? Suffering delicious
torture at my hand, being humiliated and degraded beyond the wildest dreams of
mice and men, fucked so passionately that you’d float on the endorphins for
days at a time. Would you be happy living a life that made the most depraved connoisseurs
of pornography turn green with envy? Could you do that?”
He
sighs again. “I’d like to say that I would,” he says. “But I can’t. I don’t
know. And we’ll never know.”
“Oh,
I think we will,” I say.
“You
can’t be right all the time, Molly.”
I
shake my head. “Now you’re the crazy
one.”
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