Chapter 59 Elliot #4
Even though it’s true, I’m acutely aware it’s not the only thing that’s true for me.
Far from it. Pain sparks, sensors react, messages are urgently sent.
The trouble is, somewhere along the line, somewhere between my butt and my brain, the message is scrambled.
The coding is fucked. Pain swells, turning, simmering, changing from something sore and unpleasant to something quite different.
I think the same thing over and over. I repeat it to myself like a mantra.
Don’t groan.
Don’t moan.
And for the love of all that is holy, don’t come.
The blows end abruptly.
“There,” he says softly. “You’ve been punished.
” He finishes me off with a prim little pat on each cheek.
A much-needed period at the end of a long run-on sentence.
“I’m going to give you ten minutes in the corner to think about what happened tonight and what you can do to ensure it doesn’t happen again. ”
I struggle to my feet, dizzy with an overload of emotion.
I stand before him, swaying slightly and using both hands to pull the front of my shirt down to cover my dick.
A thin ribbon of precum spills from my tip and slithers down my inner thigh.
I screw my eyes shut and pray he can’t see it, then I lean forward, clumsily attempting to pull my pants up without toppling over.
It shouldn’t be hard, but it is. My fine and gross motor coordination has gone straight to hell.
He shakes his head almost imperceptibly, stopping me mid-action, raising his hand and indicating to the wall separating the dining area and the kitchen. “Shuffle.”
I do. I hobble, or limp, or whatever you’d call the gait a person uses when their pants are knotted around their ankles and they’re moving bow-legged in a desperate attempt not to let anything touch their dangerously hard cock.
As soon as I get to the corner, it occurs to me that I don’t know how to stand in a corner.
I think it might be one of those things they taught during the week of school I missed.
How close are you supposed to get? Do you lean forward?
Is there something special you’re supposed to do with your hands?
“Park your nose,” he barks when he sees me dawdling. It’s not all that helpful, but I do as he says, or at least I think I do. I press my nose into the corner until my face touches the wall. The cool plaster is a welcome relief to flaming cheeks.
It takes exactly one and a half seconds for the gravity of my situation to hit me.
Holy fuck
I’ve had the daylights spanked out of me. Not because Stuart’s a monster. Not because of some awful misunderstanding. Because I asked for it. Now I’m here, shoving my face into a small space with my toasted ass on display for the man who did this to me to see.
My humiliation is complete. It’s like a perfect sphere, big and swollen in my chest. It reminds me of one of those paperweights I used to see in stores when I was a kid.
The ones made of clear glass with bubbles or butterflies or swirls of color in them.
Heavy and so expensive that my mother would come rushing over yelling, “No touching!” if she saw me anywhere near them.
My shame is like that. Pristine. Perfect.
Heavy and unbearably fragile. It expands and expands in my chest until I can’t breathe around it.
I can’t breathe through it either. I start shaking, overly aware of a hideous sob stuck in my throat, as waves of shame crash into me.
They wash over me from head to toe, soaking me.
Drenching me. Getting hotter and hotter with each wave.
My eyes sting until I’m shaking, and my chin is quivering so ferociously I hear the soft tap of enamel on enamel.
I press myself deeper into the corner so hard the wall digs into my cheekbones.
I do it until it hurts. My ass hurts too.
It hurts so much it has its own heartbeat.
A dull, painful reminder that suddenly feels so hard to live with that I inch my hands away from my sides, moving surreptitiously so Stuart won’t notice.
I move them until they cover my cheeks, until the backs of my hands are pressed against me, soothing feverish skin.
“Hands at your sides!”
I jump, bumping my forehead and dropping my hands quickly, making a firm decision not to move again.
Just chill, I tell myself. It’s only ten minutes.
How bad can it be?
Turns out it can be bad. Very, very bad.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if it was ten normal minutes, but it isn’t.
Time has stopped. It hasn’t slowed. It hasn’t drawn out.
It’s stopped completely. The backs of my knees start to ache and so does my lower back.
My arms start feeling a little odd like I might not be completely in control of them.
They seem hell-bent on trying to cover my ass, and it takes every ounce of my strength to stop them.
I flick through emotions one after the other.
There’s shame, of course. There’s oodles of that.
There’s utter humiliation. So much humiliation I don’t know what to do with all of it.
There’s so much I could probably fill a whole warehouse with it.
I could probably bottle it and sell it on Fetlife and make a nice little profit if I knew how to handle the tax situation.
There’s something hot too. Something hot and tight, almost like anger.
It zips through my limbs, bouncing from joint to joint, not stopping until it’s draped elaborately in a heady cloak of injustice.
These feelings ravage me. They flow freely through me. Gushing. Flooding. Blending together into a rich, sugary concoction.
Wait. Euphoria, is that you?
Before I have time to sit with the implications of that, it changes again.
It spins out. Everything around me falls quiet.
The soft clatter of crockery and cutlery being packed into the dishwasher has stopped.
There’s a white wall in front of me, so close it looks gray.
There’s throbbing behind me and silence all around me.
The second I become aware, it consumes me.
He’s gone.
The room is empty.
I’m on my own.
“Stuart,” I whisper inaudibly, suddenly deathly afraid of everything, including the sound of my own voice. He doesn’t answer.
Alone.
Alone.
I’m completely alone.
Suddenly, the weight of it is too much to bear. It’s crushing. Devastating. A single defining feeling, my greatest fear has come to life. It’s taken hold and amplified. It grows and grows until I cry, “Yellow. Daddy, yellow.”
He’s there before I have time to draw a breath. His hand is on my shoulder, heavy and hard, bringing me back into my body. “Elliot, what’s wrong?”
“I-I don’t know, uh…don’t know how to explain it.” I press my face as far into the corner as possible.
“Would you like to come out so we can talk?”
I feel silly now. What was I thinking? Why was I panicking like that? He’s right here. He didn’t leave me. He was with me the whole time. The feeling is gone, obliterated, vaporized by nothing more than his touch.
“No! I need to be here.”
He kneads the thick, tense muscle that joins my neck and shoulder. “Can you tell me what happened?”
“I just…I, uh…” I think of a hundred excuses. A million explanations. Maybe more. I land on something almost bizarre in its simplicity. The truth. “I got scared. I couldn’t hear you. I thought I was alone.”
“You’re not alone.” His hand is open now, palm flat, rubbing big, slow circles through the shirt on my back.
A warm puff of air hits the back of my neck.
“You’re not alone.” He says it over and over.
Both hands are on me, finding tension that’s been there since God knows when and releasing it.
Hard touches that remind me in no uncertain terms where I start and where I end.
Soft touches that make me feel like I’m floating.
When the timer he set finally goes off, I move my face away from the wall and drop my head back against the immovable solidness of his chest. There’s a phantom of lips against skin. A whisper. “Daddy’s here.”
Pure, warm liquid relief envelops me. It circles me, wrapping around me.
I think of all the stupid things I’ve done in my life.
It’s not that I haven’t been trying. I have.
I’ve been trying my hardest. I think how hard it’s been to rein myself in, to manage myself.
Despite how limited my success has been, I think of the effort it’s cost me to watch my words, my actions, my thoughts.
I think of how much pressure I’ve put on myself to be better, do better.
Stuart circles my waist with one arm, steadying me, and I feel a rampant, ecstatic, giddy sense of relief.
Certainty.
Conviction.
I’m his problem now.