“Don’t get smart with me, young man.” I tug at his elbow. “You were behaving so well.”
“You know, you still haven’t played with me in your dungeon,” he says, which has become a daily reminder at this point. “Or fucked me properly.”
“Properly.”
“In the ass.”
“Ah,” I nod. “And all the other sex we’ve been having?”
“Foreplay.”
He’s right in the sense that we are building. As our physical intimacy grows, so does our emotional connection with the stakes getting higher for him and me both. Perhaps that’s why I’m moving at a glacial pace, allowing him the opportunity to walk away at any time. Or run.
“At the rate you’re going, I definitely see a gag in your future,” I tease.
He smiles up at me with a twinkle in his eyes. “Promises, promises.”
“So how was your therapy?”I ask when we are seated in the museum’s café and dining on BLTs brought in from the deli down the street. I’m allowed to eat bacon once a month according to the nutritionist, and Giovanni by proxy, so I’m taking advantage. All this talk of poison has me questioning whether I should employ a personal taster prior to eating my food. But, if it’s my time to go…
“It was pretty good. Rebekah seems very matter of fact. Firm but fair.”
“Good qualities in a therapist.”
“And in a Dominant too,” he says, complimenting me in his own way. “She told me about her dog, Judicious. Jude for short. He’s a miniature poodle. He’s white and fluffy and sometimes badly behaved.”
“What does he do?”
“Chews on her shoes. Nice ones. Manolo Blahniks.”
“Judicious has a foot fetish.”
He smiles and I very nearly swoon at how attractive he is.
“So, she told me about her dog, and then I told her that I sometimes feel responsible. Like, if I hadn’t looked or acted a certain way, the boyfriend might not have raped me or sold me to his friends.”
“What did Rebekah say?”
“She said if I was handcuffed to a bed in a strange apartment by two very bad people, how could I be held responsible?”
“That sounds very logical.”
“Do you think I was asking for it?” he says.
“Is that what your mother told you?”
He nods. Rather than go off on a litany of verbal abuses against her, I tell him, “You never gave your consent to any of it, not to being kidnapped, not to being restrained, and certainly not to any of the terrible things they did to you.”
“But I did, eventually. For the drugs.”
“That’s not consenting, Giovanni, that’s surviving. You survived by doing what you had to do. That doesn’t justify or excuse anything they did to you.”
“She’s Jewish. Rebekah is, and so is Judicious. He only eats Kosher.”
I wonder if he and Rebekah have also developed a rhythm of switching between light and heavy topics. “He sounds like a pampered pooch.”
“Yes, he is. She said she’d send you a picture to show me, so please be on the lookout for that.”
Giovanni’s phone is a basic flip phone that doesn’t allow for photographs or internet access. He said it was necessary to help him stay sober, but it may also have something to do with his desire to sever ties with the people he once knew. He uses my phone when he wants to take a photograph or look something up online.
