could hold. They touched me, undressed me, undressed themselves. I was naked with those two gorgeous men, and they took turns kissing me, licking my nipples. Licking my clit. There wasn’t a part of me they didn’t touch, they didn’t own.
At nearly one in the morning, I lay in bed and listened as he said good-bye to Master Two. I wondered who he was, this other Master. I wondered what came next. I’d read some BDSM sites that talked about the Master wanting the sub to sleep on the floor or at his feet. That wasn’t me, and I realized just how foolish blind signing that contact had been.
The uncertainty I felt quickly brought back every one of my doubts I’d left in the living room earlier in the evening. I sat up, intending to dress, only to realize my clothes were in the other room. He appeared in the doorway then, jeans unzipped and hanging low on his lean hips, and sauntered over to me, before removing them as I watched. It was hard to think with him naked, and I wondered if he knew that.
He joined me on the bed and pulled me into his arms, my back to his chest, his lips to my ear. “Get some rest. That’s an order.”
All thoughts of leaving faded into the bliss of being held by him. “I told you, I don’t take orders well,” I murmured, but the truth was that I was exhausted. “I’m pretty sure that makes me a bad candidate for your sub.”
“You don’t take orders well, but I like a challenge,” he agreed. I almost thought I felt him smile against my hair, but he isn’t much on smiling, so surely not. And there had been no smile in his voice as he’d sternly added, “Go to sleep, Rebecca.”
I don’t remember what came next. Apparently, I did as ordered and went to sleep.
• • •
F riday had become Saturday at 2:00 a.m., or that’s when I remember looking at the clock next . . .
I gasped and then blinked awake to find myself alone in his bedroom, and it only took me seconds to realize I’d had one of my nightmares again. Every time I thought they were gone, they came back. I was shaking all over, and I sat up and tugged the blanket up with me, thick darkness consuming the room, feeling as icy as the San Francisco Bay water. This nightmare was different from the others, I realized. My mother wasn’t actually trying to kill me this time.
Instead of being on a trolley that loses control and slams into the ocean, I was already in the water, or I wasn’t really there. I was in the bay, only I wasn’t in the bay. I was me, and yet I wasn’t me. I know that makes no sense at all. I thought writing it down would make it more logical, but it isn’t working. How do I describe what a shifting, odd nightmare is like? It was like . . . like one of those movies where someone dies and they end up watching the hospital staff try to bring them back to life from above, wherever above is. That’s how this nightmare flowed. I could see myself floating facedown in the choppy waters, my dark hair spread out on the surface.
My mother was there, too, floating facedown just like me, both of us unmoving, lifeless. I figure the fact that she is already dead has some meaning; perhaps my mind is telling me I’m going to end up like her. I’m not sure if that means dead or unhappy. And I’m not sure where I was watching from. I never saw myself watching me, or rather us, but I felt the water, the ice, the emptiness. I was dead in the water, but the part of me watching was alive and I wanted to stay alive. I tried to scream and get to myself and my mother, but I couldn’t make a sound. I tried to move but an invisible box confined me. I was trapped, incapable of saving myself or my mother, though it was illogical to think I could. We were already dead.
What makes a person whose dead mother was never anything but gentle have these kinds of violent nightmares? Uncertainty? Uneasiness? A sense of being out of control of my life? Isn’t that what my mother always preached? Control my life, so