Prologue
I had run out of time. It was high noon at the Richmond Airport; Gayle’s flight left in an hour. We sat facing each other in the sunlit central rotunda outside security, holding coffees, Gayle’s face impassive, expectant, waiting.
How had I let every opportunity to speak to him slip by?
I sensed Gayle pulling away, growing distant, perhaps already thinking about a renewed search for a more suitable partner. Someone undamaged.
Now or never. I put my hand over his. He flinched but didn’t pull away. “Gayle . . .” His name was the only thing that came out. Why was this so difficult?
“Sara Jane, I’m sorry, but we’re running out of time,” he said impatiently, glancing at his watch. “I have to get through security and to the gate. If you have something to say, please say it . . . now’s the time.”
“I don’t know where to begin.”
“Begin with the moment things went wrong last night. Say the first thing that comes to mind.”
I squeezed his hand, and looked up at him, eyes imploring. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
He nodded. “I know that, but something happened, and you called your safe word, red. Please tell me why.”
Now or never. I swallowed hard. “It was the cane.”
“What about the cane?”
“I was afraid you were going to beat me with it.”
“Beat you with it?” Gayle said incredulously, a sharp edge to his voice. “I was going to make you cum with it . . . You know, as in, have an orgasm?” he added bitterly.
He was angry. I shrank back and looked down at my coffee.
“Who is Dieter?”
“What?” I said, looking up.
“You heard me. Who is Dieter? You said that name last night, right when things went awry.”
I blinked. “He’s someone who hurt me.”
“Hurt you during kinky play?”
“Yes,” I replied in my little girl voice.
“He hurt you with a cane?”
“Yes,” I croaked, feeling like I had just been stabbed in the throat with a dagger.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t know you were going to use it,” I responded. “I think I wrote caning was a hard limit in my survey.”
“Everything was a hard limit in your survey,” he said with a sardonic smile. “Well . . . almost everything.”
His smile, however tepid, emboldened me. This was Gayle Gentry . . . my friend and mentor. My Gayle.
I was an alpha woman, an ER physician, for God’s sake. How had I become so timid? I knew if I didn’t communicate now, this would be the last moment I ever spent with him.
I summoned all my courage and told Gayle the story, starting with messages from TanzMeister on kink-cage.com, our dinner, the dancing, the hotel room; tied to a chair and savagely beaten with a cane by a man who blacked out and claimed to remember nothing. It took me ten minutes; when I had finished we had precious little time left.
“This happened when?” Gayle asked, his face a grey mask, drained of blood.
“Last May.”
He stared at me. “And you started back up after that, only three months later?”
“I felt like if I didn’t, I would never try again. You know, get back up on the horse? I’m tough, you know.”
Gayle shook his head. “You’re tough but foolish, angel. You may have buried it, but what happened to you is still lurking in your subconscious. You had a post-traumatic stress episode last night. You know . . . PTSD?”
I closed my eyes, unable to breathe. He was right. I had buried the trauma of that awful night in the garden behind my house. I spent the entire summer burying it. All to no avail. Starved of oxygen, my lungs forced me to take a breath. The air rushed in with a choking sob. I began to softly weep, tears streaming down my cheeks.
Gayle took my hand and squeezed it. “You’re going to be okay, Sara Jane.” He reached into his coat and pulled out a handkerchief, and handed it to me.
I looked at him uncertainly, dabbing tears. “I haven’t ruined everything?”
He sighed. “Not necessarily. Do you want to continue? Do you still want to be my submissive?”
“I . . . I don’t know. Yes! . . . but I don’t know if I can, after what’s happened.”
“Sure you can. But you have work to do, healing I can’t help you with.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re going to have to work through this, Sara Jane. You need help. You’ve been traumatized. It’s no different than an accident victim or a soldier coming back from war.”
I stared at him blankly, thinking I would never be able to sit across from a therapist, spilling my guts, divulging my awful, kinky tale of woe . . . Never.
As if reading my mind, Gayle said, “There are new therapies.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. I have friends who’ve been helped by something called ‘TRE’—Trauma Release Exercise. I know it sounds weird, but it seems to work . . . you should look into it.”
I wondered what friends of Gayle would need PTSD therapy. I still thought he was some kind of quasi-spy, an intelligence operative, architecture his cover. He knew too many languages, knew too many important people.
Gayle checked his watch. “I have to go. You still haven’t answered me. Do you still want to be my sub?”
I decided I didn’t care if Gayle was a spy. I didn’t care who he knew. “Yes—yes, I do,” I said.
“Then tell me who TanzMeister is—this Dieter fellow. What’s his last name?”
I blanched. “I shouldn’t tell you.”
“You don’t have a choice. If you want to be in a D/s relationship with me, you will tell me.” He stood. “Well?”
“His name is Dieter Wolff,” I coughed up the name. “He’s a famous developer—does big inner-city projects.”
I saw Gayle’s mind working, trying to place the name. Then it came to him. “I’ve heard of him. When exactly?”
“When what?”
“When did this bastard hurt you?” Gayle demanded in an anguished voice. “Tell me exactly when and where.”
“I don’t know . . . sometime early in May. At the Willard Hotel, in Washington, D.C.”
I wondered what he would do with this information. He put out his arms. “Come here . . . let me say goodbye.” He lifted me into a hug, squeezing the air from my lungs.
Teary-eyed, breathless, hopeful, I looked into his eyes. “Is this goodbye for now, or goodbye forever?” I blurted out anxiously. “Will I see you again?”
“You can’t get rid of me that easily, Ms. Spencer,” Gayle said and kissed me savagely.
I kissed him back desperately. “You . . . you should know that I’m falling in love with you, Mr. Gentry.”
He smiled and let me go. He picked up his carry-on bag and started to walk away, but then stopped, turning to face me. “I was hoping you’d say that,” he said, and then spun on his heels and strode off purposefully. A few seconds later he rounded a corner and disappeared from sight.
I sat back down, my heart threatening to burst in my chest. After sitting numbly for several long minutes, staring at nothing, I pulled out my phone and sent him a text:
I already miss you. When can I come to visit?
The reply didn’t come until later, as I rode home in the back seat of a taxi, Gayle winging his way to California:
Come when you are healed. I will be waiting. Expect to be spanked. Love, Gayle.
