A role of dominance that I am not used to in a personal situation, but right this moment, I feel so empowered by her submission that I can’t do anything else but step into it.
“Please,” she begs as she closes her eyes.
“What you feel isn’t torture,” I say as I lift up her chin, still holding my gun in the other hand. “What you feel is…love.”
A single tear runs down her cheek.
“I cannot love you,” she whispers, her voice shaky.
Her head twitches. The shoulders roll back—her strategy for removing sensation.
“You will not push the feeling away,” I order her. “You will feel. You will feel all of it. You will feel the pain of loss. The grief.The guilt. I am here with you, and you will do as I say. Do you understand?”
Her eyes flash at me. They shimmer, and another tear runs down her cheek.
She nods.
“Good,” I say. “Because after you feel all that’s chewing on your insides, you will be able to feel the joy. The love. The desire. The beauty. Feel, Avery. Feel it all.”
A scream explodes out of her as she removes herself from my grip and crouches onto the floor. It touches me somewhere so deep that I have to fight back tears. It rips my chest apart seeing her like this.
Of all the things that I believed possible, if someone had told me that Avery Zayne would be kneeling in front of me one day, I would have declared that person completely crazy.
A shiver runs through her as she crouches on the floor, sobbing heavily with her face hidden in her hands
“What do you need?” I ask her. Because, while I do know her, I don’t know this version of her. Maybe she doesn’t even know it herself.
She stops sobbing.
Comes back up.
Her mascara is smeared underneath her eyes.
“Fuck me,” she says.
I stare into her eyes.
The way she looks at me.
She is trying to numb the pain with the only strategy she has and knows.
“No,” I say. “Not like this.”
“Please,” she begs me.
“No,” I say again, place the gun on the sideboard next to me, and then squat down to be on eye level with her.
I grasp her face.
“I want you to trust me first,” I say.
“I trust you,” she says.
“No, you don’t,” I say. “You don’t even trust yourself right now.”
She sucks in her lips as more tears flood her eyes.
“Come,” I tell her, get up and pull her up with me.
