Page 54 of Dance for Me
Bodie huffed. “Not a pleasant or forgiving one. I’m the black sheep because I haven’t shirked the law and become one of them. I should’ve done; maybe they’d leave me alone if I was one of them. They’d still blame me for Alicia’s accident, but I’d be one of them.”
“Aren’t you just a fascinating rabbit warren of turmoil? I don’t know anything about this accident or your family, Bodie, but my guess is if they treat you like shit now, being one of them wouldn’t change anything but you. Would you really want to be someone capable of selling a woman’s virginity against her wishes, knowing she’d be raped? Could you sacrifice another, just to fit in with monsters?”
Bodie didn’t need to search her soul down to the nooks and crannies to find the answer to Connie’s questions. She’d grown up with those monsters, watched her parents turn her sister into one after the accident that changed both Alicia’s future and her own. She’d seen the devastation of what born and bred monsters could do to a girl with her own eyes the night she’d gone to the Callahan’s house so many years ago. “No, I’m not that person.”
“Damn fucking straight, you’re not.” The vehemence in Connie’s voice took Bodie aback; if she was this powerful as a Domme, Bodie was surprised subs throughout the club didn’t automatically drop to their knees when Connie walked past. “Beneath the anxious mouse façade you hide behind, there is a robust core of strength, Boadicea. We need to find a way to mine it, teach you how to utilize it. Being raised by monsters doesn’t mean you are one.”
“No? I don’t have friends—aside from Liam. I don’t have a social life because I don’t know how to interact with people without turning into a raging bitch.” The faucet on her emotions flipped onto full, and things poured from her mouth at high speed, fast enough she tripped up over most of them. “I live in an apartment with no furniture because I had to sell everything I owned to pay the rent. Even though I have money now, I can’t buy any fucking furniture because if my family come around, they’ll take it. They’ll take every last cent I have and more besides.”
The water fountain of secrets just kept bubbling. “I don’t know how to deal with what Braun wants from me. I saw...I witnessed something when I was younger that scared the shit out of me, and I don’t know how to get past that and give him what he wants. Am I not a monster if I let him believe I can be what he expects me to be?”
A slim hand clamped over her mouth to stem the next surge of verbal vomit. Alarmed, Bodie trembled as Connie shook her head slowly, a flash of temper in her steely eyes. “What you’ve told me in the last thirty seconds would be enough to send most people into deep depression, sweetheart. You’re not a monster, trust me. You’re just so conflicted with everything going on around you, there’s not a lot of room for you to breathe.”
Wasn’t she breathing now?
“I would like you to think about two things, very carefully. First of all, I believe you should consider sitting down with me a couple times a week. Just like this, no pressure, but regularly. We can steal Braun’s office a few times a week or meet somewhere else.” Connie removed her hand slowly. “Don’t dismiss it immediately. Give it some thought.”
Bodie chewed on her lip. She should be hearing herself saying no emphatically, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She’d already told the woman more about herself than anyone else knew about her—more than even Liam. While it hurt, deep inside her, to spill secrets, Bodie found some of the strangling pressure tying up her chest was relieved.
Could she commit to spending predetermined amounts of time discussing her shitshow of a life, pulling it apart and exposing the rotten core? She hated the idea, not only because it would disrupt her rigorous self-management, but because it seemed cruel to unload it all on someone else.
On the same hand...could sharing the weight bring an end to her pain?
“I...maybe once a week?”
“If you’re comfortable with that, we can organize it.” Squeezing Bodie’s fingers lightly, Connie sighed. “The other thing I want to talk about is a little more complex. You need to contemplate how you’re going to break the news to Braun.”
“No.” There, she’d finally said it. “I can’t.”
“Why not?”
Because he’ll go fucking mental and never want to see me again. Shaking her head adamantly, Bodie dug her heels in. “Can you imagine how that conversation would go? Oh, hey there, we haven’t been properly introduced, Master Braun. I’m Bodie, your submissive, the fucking virgin. Please, oh please, would you fuck me even though I’m terrified and haven’t got any idea what to do.”
Connie’s eyebrow shot up. “Well, if you tell him like that, I doubt he’ll be best pleased. Mistakes can be forgiven, Boadicea, if you own up to them. Errors made in fear won’t be held against you. If Braun doesn’t know and he does something to negatively impact his dynamic with you—tonight is a damn good example—he will not forgive himself or you. It’s unfair to put him in this position when he has no idea you’re innocent.”
“He doesn’t have to know. Once it’s over, once he’s fucked me,” Bodie said awkwardly, her brain flashing back to images from a darkened garden and the atrocities she’d seen, “there won’t be anything to know. It’ll be over and done with, and Braun won’t be any wiser.”
“And that, right there, is what will shatter your dynamic into splinters. Irreparable shards of what you could have with him. Honesty, trust, communication. The tenets of the lifestyle. Blunt deception is...Jesus, if any of my subs pulled a stunt like this, I’d kick their ass to the curb and walk away without looking back.” Connie’s voice was hard, the Domme in full swing. “Being scared is no reason to deceive him, Bodie.”
“If I tell him, then what?” Bodie almost shouted. This time when she pulled on her hand, Connie let it go, and she lurched to her feet, swaddled in the blanket he’d bought for her. “He’ll treat me like I’m fragile!”
Connie laughed lightly, a contrast to her dark Domme tone. “Sweetheart, he wears kid gloves with you now. The manner in how he treats you won’t change—the way he claims you the first time will be the only difference.”
“Then what does it matter? Rough or gentle, does it actually fucking affect him if he doesn’t know?” A little freaked out by the fact she was actually discussing losing her virginity, she paced like a rabid wolf, biting her index finger. “If I’m going to have sex, I just want it over with, goddamn it.”
Connie shoved onto her feet and crossed her arms over her chest. The look in her eyes—when Bodie dared meet them—was intimidating. “And if he hurts you in the process? That not only affects him, Boadicea, but be damn sure it will have lasting and damaging consequences for you. One bad experience can sour sex for you for the rest of your life, instead of opening possibilities.”
Screwing her eyes shut didn’t stop the memories assaulting her like fists raining down on her head. That one awful night when she’d dragged herself to the Callahan’s house to turn herself into the whore her father told her she was. Standing in the shadow of the house, her insides freezing with the depravity of what she was seeing, and the soul-consuming fear that the girl bleeding and strapped down on the picnic bench could have been her if she’d arrived just a little bit earlier.
Three teenaged boys she’d known for years—more through their father’s connection to hers than through actual interaction with them—tormenting the petite blonde no more than a couple years older than Bodie had been. Coarse blue rope tied around her wrists and ankles, rubbing her pale skin until blood stained both.
The edges of a dirty rag stuffed into her mouth visible around the duct tape muffling her frantic screams, reducing them to incoherent grunts.
Bodie remembered gagging once, swiftly, as the youngest Callahan—Robert, named after his asshat of a father—stripped off his clothes and stood bathed in the murky yellow light of the security lights. His brothers had slapped him on the back, cheering him on, and he’d gleefully climbed onto the table, on top of the girl, and...
Bodie had already had her one bad experience and it hadn’t even been hers. She was still paying for her cowardice now, the moral weight of running from the gruesome tableau instead of trying to help the girl still crushing Bodie into the ground eleven years later.
Bodie’s parents had brushed it off when she told them what the Callahan brothers were doing—because after all, boys will be boys. They’d threatened her with the same experience, complete with the Callahan boys doling out the punishment, if she dared breathe a word to anyone else.