Chapter 15
Storm
I’d thought I’d known what to expect when I’d returned to his house after being away, when I returned openly, no longer hiding out.
Mostly, I’d been right, but a few things had caught me off guard.
The visual of my new five-inch heels on the Ionic Greek column, for instance, and how my clit throbbed and pulsed every time I saw them there, which was often, since that’s where they live when they aren’t locked onto me.
When he’d first slid the new, even taller shoes onto my feet and locked them around my ankles, I’d felt both terror and arousal.
He hadn’t checked in with me, of course.
He’d just bought the three sizes around what I usually wear, made me walk around in all of them while he asked questions, and then told me which we were keeping.
It’s the very definition of our power exchange — him authoritatively, arrogantly deciding things that affect me in every way possible without giving me any say whatsoever. And yet, he’d taken care to make them fit, right? I need to be owned; he needs to own me. We work.
Also, it wasn’t just that the shoes were new, it was that they look so damned good on the column.
Society’s fucked-up definition of femininity, of how women should look to please men (sore feet and aching backs bedamned) sitting on a chunk of fake Greco-Roman architecture, and the aesthetic sends blood throbbing into my clit every damned time.
Maybe someday I’ll analyze it, but for now, I don’t really care why.
I’d mostly decided to sell my house before our maintenance session.
Honestly, it was an either/or decision, leading up to it: Either I left the day before it was scheduled and we were probably finished, or I stayed and submitted to it, and this is probably the man I’ll spend the rest of my life with.
And the assfucking session had been terrible and awful, but also…
perfectly horrific. The dread before it started, while I’d prepared myself for it.
And then the godawful pain, the paralyzing terror, being trapped with absolutely no way to end it for the full hour.
But then afterward, snuggled against him, I understood that this isn’t supposed to get easier.
It was always going to cost me something, and that’s exactly as it should be.
It’s kind of a reset, more than a mere reminder of who we are to each other.
Like an image that goes soft or gets filtered, and this brings everything back into sharp focus.
I’d known the bikers had to be doing illegal shit because there was just too much money flowing, and I was frankly relieved to find out they were creating a safe working space for women who want to do sex work.
It doesn’t make them knights in shining armor or anything, but I looked into it a little after my conversation with Magnum, and from what I can tell, it’s kind of a best-case-scenario for the women until our lawmakers get off their asses and make it legal.
The club isn’t dealing drugs or selling weapons, and…
in a surprising twist, most of them are obsessively healthy.
It isn’t just Magnum staying away from processed foods.
Most of them won’t eat cheap fast food, much less tolerate illegal drugs.
Somewhere in the last two months I’d stopped being a guest at the clubhouse, and it started feeling like a second home.
I mean, they’d trusted me from the start, so I heard about budgets and illicit activities without anyone batting an eye, but this change was more about how I viewed them, rather than how they saw me.
I got used to the single guys using the sweetbutts, and how the prospects were treated.
I fell into the rhythm of how meals worked, how the parties happened, and I got to know the men in ways society doesn’t usually allow.
Not just things like hobbies and how each one reacts to violence, but also their various kinks, which were wide and varied and fully on display when they used the sweetbutts in the front room — and so much more.
It’s hard to explain, but being folded into the unglamorous parts of their life felt more important than any of the high-stakes moments.
But the biggest change wasn’t how I saw the men, it was how close I grew to the women.
I’ve always had friends in the lifestyle, women who understand extreme power exchange without needing it explained, but never the kind I can drink with.
Never the kind who are all-around friends.
Well, except for Nickie, but we’ve never been local to each other.
But now I have a whole motorcycle club full of friends who live close enough to just show up, and who hear me crying while he fucks me in the clubhouse every weekend.
Ember and Kitty even know the details of our maintenance agreement, and listen to me just before, when I’m terrified, and then after, when I’m thankful it’s in the past for a while, and also grateful he never backs off.
It’s nice, having kinky friends who know so much about not only my slave-status, but also about my career, my favorite drinks, my biggest hopes and fears.
I also know all of these things about them, too.
I’ve never had this before, and I’d never known I was missing it.
I wish I could say the same about my parents.
I’d taken Magnum home for a weekend, so my parents could meet him, and so I could show him the town I’d grown up in.
My mother loved him on sight, but my dad’s a cop, and he’s never going to be okay with someone in a one-percenter club.
Dad wasn’t openly antagonistic; he was mostly polite, thankfully, and I figure that’s mostly because he’s guessed Magnum helped keep me alive during those months I was in hiding.
I can’t confirm that to him, obviously, but my father is smart enough to put two and two together.
On the plane ride home from my parents’ house, I’d asked myself… If I ran a story about how much my life has changed since I met Magnum, how would I put it together? Would it be a hit piece, or a glow job?
I built my entire adult identity on not needing anyone, and now I have a 24/7 Master, with half our time in high-protocol, and unbelievable pain and terror on a maintenance schedule that just keeps marching along on the calendar.
I haven’t earned an actual assfucking-punishment yet, and I really hope my inner submissive never feels the need to see what will happen.
I’m giving up my independence and my fucking house to move to Alabama for a man who thrives on my tears, who wants to hurt me worse once I’m crying, not less.
And yet, he’s never, not once, tried to interfere with my job, my ethics, or the stories I choose to tell.
He absolutely owns every minute of our high-protocol hours, but the rest of the time he mostly only claims access to my body.
He tries to intercede when he thinks I might not be safe, but he almost always still lets me have the final say, and even when he insists on coming with me, he watches from a distance without intruding.
It’s the best of both worlds — an owner who takes his pleasure on a predictable routine I can count on, and a boyfriend who doesn’t try to dictate my career.
Even more, a boyfriend who picks up the slack when I’m so involved with a story I’d probably forget to eat if I was still single.
Often, when I open my office door after a ten-hour research binge, I can smell whatever yummy meal he put into the slow cooker, or has on simmer, waiting for me.
Somehow, he knows what I’ll want that day — Mexican, Italian, Asian, American.
But more than that, he knows when I need comfort food, and he always seems to know exactly which.
Mac-n-cheese, clam chowder, fried potatoes, baked beans from my mom’s recipe, or the simplicity of a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.
Love doesn’t always have to be about the fireworks; sometimes it’s about remembering the love of your life hates cilantro.
I make the foods he loves, too. He says my chicken and dumplings are closer to his grandmother’s than anyone else has ever managed, and the way he demolishes my johnnycakes warms my heart.
We take care of each other, despite the labels of owner and owned.
Domestic care as evidence, not performance and not kink, but genuine love and intimacy.
Which brought me to the safeword, because the logical part of me still wasn’t on board with giving it up, but the kinky part of me had won that battle.
I tried to look at it from the reporter’s point of view, because this was absolutely a heavy topic, but it all came down to trust. I trust him to take me farther than I think is safe, but not farther than is actually safe.
He hurts me every day, but he’s never caused true injury.
And I love that his response wasn’t to just, “Tell me if you change your mind,” but to put a date far out in the future, so I’m stuck with this for long enough that I can’t just withdraw it because I don’t like the way a particular scene goes.
Also, the knowledge that, when I test him — and I know I will — he’ll hold strong to the rules… it’s a comfort. I need a Master who holds the boundaries firm. Who won’t let me move them back and forth. So yeah, asking him to take my safeword away might seem insane, but it was grounded in logic.
I realized the reporter would dial in on the decision to sell my house, and I considered my questions…
and my answers. The hardest part hadn’t been deciding to sell it, it would be standing in the empty living room just before the movers came, looking at the dent in the carpet where my reading chair had lived.
Selling my home was tantamount to giving up my autonomy.
Moving in with him, giving myself to him 24/7 for the rest of my life…
or at least until I move out, which I hope to never do, because I want to grow old with this man.
I’d more than proven I can survive on my own, now it was time to see if I can survive as the owned slave of the man of my dreams. And yet, I was probably going to cry when I lock my door for the last time, but that’s healthy, right?
One door closes; a better door opens. You mourn the old while celebrating the new.
And he is completely, one-thousand percent supportive of my work.
He’d told me, early on, “Your career brought you to me, so how can I wish it away? But it’s more than that.
It isn’t just that it defines you, but it’s who you are.
It gives you an outlet for how much you care about people, for the way you want to change the world and make it better, and…
it’s like you once told me — it lets you bring your mother and father into the same person. The cop and the newsperson.”
I was working on several stories at once, following the threads from the fight-ring, diving into the missing scientist, and a handful of smaller stories.
Through it all, Magnum arranged our high-protocol hours around my schedule.
He gives me exactly what my inner submissive needs while making sure the reporter parts of me can do my job.
And so, I’d never tell my own story, but if I did, I’d end it with…
Parts of Storm’s story were difficult to wrap my head around, and yet, in the end, I’m a little jealous of her.
This fiercely independent woman who was looking for a Master she thought she could never have, because surely the perfect Dom would make her choose between her job and the kind of slave-status she craved…
This woman lucked into a man who saw her as an entire person — the investigative reporter and the submissive desperate for the strictest form of high-protocol slave rules.
Instead of the relationship costing her the parts of herself she was most afraid to lose, it gave her everything, even the masochist hiding inside her she’d never even recognized.
He gives her structure and pain, he forces her to completely surrender on a daily basis, and yet, he gives the reporter free rein to do her job.
He even helps her with the spying and hacking bits.
It’s a win-win, all around, and I couldn’t be happier for her.
Okay, yeah, that’s a little corny, but whatever. When I look in the mirror, I recognize myself and I’m happy. It all boils down to that, right?
I mean, yeah, the friends, the man, the damned waist cincher and plug and shoes — and how they look when not on my feet, on the damned column — those are important facts.
But as I sat across from him on the boat and watched the last of the late-October light slide across the water while the conversation settled around us, what I felt was love and stability. That’s what he’d brought into my life.
When he’d come to my house the first time dressed in khakis with blond hair, he’d told me I’m here to simplify your life, not complicate it.
At the time, I’d had the idea that meant he wanted to make it easier and not harder, but that wasn’t it at all.
As always, he’d said exactly what he meant.
Life is hard for a slave, and he doesn’t try to soften that.
And yet, when my waist is squeezed tight, my feet are burning in the shoes, and my asshole is stretched wide by a plug — my life is simple.
Follow the schedule, obey orders. That’s it.
He makes the reporter parts of my life easier, too.
A simple phone call, and a pilot is waiting at the nearby airstrip, his or her plane fueled and ready to take me wherever I need to go.
When I need a hacker, he’s often in the next room, willing to drop what he’s working on to dig into someone’s privacy for me.
So yes, he’s simplified my life in ways I never dreamed.