Page 73 of Filthy Dirty Dom
It had startled Leslie. But not for long. The man wasn't hurting the woman the way her father hurt her. This man was hurting the woman for her pleasure. She was in charge.
She’d fantasized about Alex doing that to her for a long time. But now the memory felt dirty. He'd made her feel wrong.
31
"What are you thinking?" Alex asked.
Leslie had been quiet for too long. A breeze swept in from the open balcony doors and raised goosebumps over her arms. She no longer burned.
No, that wasn’t right. She still burned – only with more resentment than arousal now.
"I'm thinking that you asked me to tell you what I wanted, but what you really meant was tell me only the acceptable things that I wanted," she said coolly. "I'm thinking that you don't want to know what I really want, Alex."
Leslie watched Alex draw his tongue along the front of his teeth.
"I'm not judging your fantasy," he said. "And I'm not telling you that you can never have it. That I'll never give it to you. Just that you need to trust me to know when you're ready," Alex finished.
All this talk about trust, Leslie thought bitterly. But why would she trust him over herself?
She felt a sudden distance from Alex that unsettled her.
"Leslie," Alex said, more softly now, "I had to work up to it, too."
"To what?" Leslie asked irritably.
"To flogging."
This drew Leslie's more focused attention.
"You mean to flogging someone?" she asked.
“That, too. But mostly, for me to accept it.”
Her breath faltered as her gaze trailed over Alex's chest, searching for evidence of his own dark desires through his clothes. "Is that something you want me to do to you?" Leslie asked in a voice hardly above a whisper.
Alex hesitated.
“It is,” she said.
Alex pinched the bridge of his nose. The action made Leslie want to scream. She wasn't a naughty student in the principal's office. Her fists bunched at her sides.
When Alex spoke he spoke quickly and savagely. "Listen, Leslie, sometimes I like it wild. Not a cocktail of pleasure with a twist of pain. Sometimes I like pain straight from the goddamn bottle. Sometimes I like to be whipped so hard I have welts so agonizing that I can't lay on my back for days. Sometimes I like to bleed and still beg for more. Sometimes I never want the pain to stop and if the woman I'm with even dares I never see her again."
His eyes burned with a dark fiery passion as he looked across the table at her.
"Shall we start then?" he asked. "Are you ready? When we get back I'll take you to my secret room and hand you the cat o' nine tails. Then you’ll whip me, harder and harder, maybe even until I bleed, without hesitation, right, because it’s what I’m asking for?”
Leslie was shell-shocked by Alex’s question, by the image of her wielding a cat o' nine tails so ruthlessly that she made him bleed. She couldn't even imagine the weight of the flogger in her hand, let alone the sound of it cracking in the air as she brought it down on Alex's back. She couldn’t imagine causing him such pain.
All to clearly, she remembered the scars she’d seen on Alex that hadn’t been completely covered by his tattoos—the silvery lines and ridges she’d assumed were battle scars. Based on the research she’d done, standard BDSM encounters involving whipping or impact play didn’t usually leave scars, but she suspected that changed when it involved the type of brutality that Alex was talking about.
“No,” she whispered. “I don’t know if I could do that, Alex. I don’t know if I could hurt you like that, even to give you what you want.”
Alex circled the table to kneel in front of her. His hands were warm against her knees. Looking up at her, he said, "It's okay, baby. I wouldn't want you to. Not to that extent."
Tears filled her eyes. “But that means I wouldn’t give you what you really need.”
"Here’s the thing. I know, Leslie. I know in my heart that I wouldn’t need that from you. Fuck, just being with you, I know it would be enough to quiet that restlessness, that dark need in me.”