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?”
