"Stay put." His direct, piercing eye contact and gravelly tone made it very clear that this was a command and not a request.

A first order masochist, I sat back down on my hard chair and embraced the stinging burn, while I waited for him to shake hands and dismiss people at the door. I tilted my head down and closed my eyes as the room grew silent. The door clicked shut and the soft swoosh of the descending window blinds filled me with a confusing sense of combined dread and excitement. If I were about to be fired why did it feel so much like I was about to be made to kneel down on all fours and take a whipping?

I took a deep breath through my nose, shaking my head at how perverse my inner monologue had become. I lifted my head and opened my eyes to see Mr. Bellingham looking down at me in concentrated thought. Damn his quiet step! How long had he been looking at me like that?

"Do you always stay out so late on a work night?" His stern tone was belied by the upward tilt of his cocky smirk.

I blinked at him, eyes wide as my mind tried to conjure up a million different excuses, but deep down I relented. I knew he was confident in his appraisal of my train wreck of a first impression.

"You caught me," I mumbled softly with a nervous grin, "I'm really sorry, I won't let my personal life interfere with work again." I forced myself to sound more assertive in my apology, straightening my  spine and pulling back my shoulders into a confident posture.

His smirk only became more devilish, his hazel eyes sparkling with mischief.

"I'm afraid that will be impossible now that we're working together, Miss Landry - or should I call you by your screen name? PainSlutSummer?" He spoke each syllable slowly and with such precision I knew that I hadn't misheard him.

It felt as though the heat of his gaze would disintegrate me. Reduce me to a pile of ashes. The room grew ten degrees warmer and I could barely hear him over the sound of my heartbeat. He reached into the pocket of his slacks and pulled out a small tube of arnica ointment. Extending it toward me, he said, "You ran out on me before I could give you proper aftercare. Imagine my shock when I came back out of the bathroom to see an empty bed where I'd just had a little masochist squirming under my belt," he laughed, a soft, low rumble.

As my mind scrambled to work past the shock of his words, I began making sense of them. I'd always tried so hard to keep my work and personal life separate. I didn't bring my dark side to work. I left her in the shadows, an hour south on the freeway, on the profile page of a seedy S&M hookup site. I never brought her to work, but she'd stowed away with Christopher Bellingham and arrived here despite my best efforts.

It was my typical M.O. that had worked just fine until now. At least three days a week, I chain smoke Camel Menthols on the freeway for an hour, and I arrive home to see a pretty bottle of golden oblivion waiting for me on my kitchen counter. I'm so beyond needing a lime, I pull the cork from the bottle with my teeth, and sip my tequila straight while I wait for my laptop to boot up. I can usually get a decent buzz going before I check my private messages to see if anyone has agreed to the terms I've laid out in my forum post.

I never had trouble finding a vast array of weirdos - who fancied themselves as Doms - who would fulfill my needs. Let me arrive at their house and have a blindfold waiting for me at the front door. It was always the same drill. I step inside, strip, put on the blindfold, and wait.

In my forum posts, I would always write that I needed to be punished, or that the pain alone would get me off, or that I needed to be humiliated. I'd let my shadow self call the shots and write down whatever she wanted to put me through on any given night. But the basic rules were always the same - the blindfold remains on and I never see the guy, I never stay afterward, and I don't get to enjoy an orgasm. Aware that orgasms aren't always controllable, I always made damn sure I was put through the ringer before I came - if I came.

You need the pain. You need the release. This is how you stay sane. The words weighed down on me when I was feeling an itch for release the fateful night I would unknowingly meet Chris Bellingham for the first time.

Having failed to reach out and grab the tube of soothing cream he was offering me, he spoke again to break through my trance.

"Well?" he said, expectantly waving the tube of cream. "Are you going to take this or do you need me to apply it for it you? I know you never safe worded, but I did go beyond my own comfort last night. I know you've got to be hurting." His panty melting, mischievous grin widened slightly.

"I-I-I I'm sorry," I squeaked in mortification. “I'm fine, I don't need that. I really need to get back to work.”

I pushed his hand back toward him and stood up almost as quickly as I had spoken. Run. Get out of here. All I could think to do was flee. I wasn't used to feeling this level of shame at work of all places. Before I could make it five steps toward the exit, he snatched my wrist in a firm grip and yanked me back toward him. I yelped in surprise as my clumsy feet sent me careening into his chest.

His long arms wrapped tightly around me, he bent his head down and brushed his lips over my ear and in a low gravelly voice he murmured, “As your new boss, I suggest you do as I say, Summer. I'm going to sit in this chair, and you're going to lay across my lap and be still while I rub this ointment on your ass.”

Tears welled along my bottom lash line and threatened to spill over as my body trembled in response to his command. I don't know for sure what it was – humiliation, fear of him, fear of being fired, or fear of being taken care of. Maybe it was all of that, or maybe it was mostly the latter. It was why I ran from his place, after all. As soon as he untied my wrists and went into his en-suite bathroom to grab “after-care supplies,” I'd torn off my blindfold and sprinted down the stairs he'd led me up earlier. I slipped on my dress without bothering with bra, panties or shoes. Instead I jammed them into my purse and bolted to my car. The endorphin high from the pain kept me from a panic attack on the drive back to my apartment. I walked inside and collapsed into bed, exhausted.

I dreamed that night of Damien. My Master, my disciplinarian, my sadist. We met during my undergrad years. Although harsh and demanding, he'd saved me from the brink, found my sanity, and I only ever let him down. It was my fault he was gone, dead from a car accident on his way to my house. I'd lost my mind all over again. I would keep punishing myself until either the guilt left me, or I collapsed in on myself like a magnetar – dead, but continuing to destroy everything that came too near.

In my dream, I was in one of Damien's favorite positions: bent over his desk, legs spread wide with my ankles tied to the desk legs. My torso was stretched across the desk top and my arms were spread, wrists secured to the opposite desk legs. Head turned to the side, my cheek pressed against the cold desk top.

I reflected on myself as I waited for Damien to return with his bag of implements. My anxiety ran high, not because I was nervous for my session with Damien, but because that was my normal state of mind. Crippling anxiety. That goddamn mental illness that had driven me to wild nights of binge drinking and casual hook ups all over campus. When Damien took me home from a house party one night, I'd already racked up two alcohol violations from the college administration and was unwelcome in an entire dorm building due to my reputation. I was one violation away from expulsion and was already whispered about from the backs of classrooms.

Damien taught me that I was getting nothing from the casual hookups. That sex with drunk frat boys would never help me. I needed something extra. A bigger release to wash away the anxiety and center my mind. 

The floorboards creaked as Damien approached. He ran a smooth, thin rod along my spine. He leaned over me and lay his body down so I was pressed heavily onto the hard desk. I could feel his already half-hard cock pressing into my ass. His hot breath hit my ear as he spoke, “Are you ready, Summer? I could tell how awful you feel as soon as you walked in, you know. I'm glad you came. Give your pain to me. Take everything I give you and let it release your anxiety. You need the pain. You need the release. This is how you stay sane."

I nodded and closed my eyes, whispering, “Yes, Sir.”

Damien stood up swiftly and the whistling sound of the cane slicing through the air barely registered before the explosion of pain seared across my sit-spot right where my thighs meet my ass cheeks. I let out a strangled, throaty yelp followed by a sharp inhale and then a whimper.

“Give me everything, Summer. Let yourself go. Take it." He spoke in a low growl. 

My whole body began to tremble as burst after burst of white hot pain lashed across my ass and thighs. Whap! Whap! Whap! I sobbed and groaned low, clenching my fists as I lost count of the strikes.

“You need this. Let me help you. Let the pain wash it all away.”

Harder than ever, he hit my thighs in rapid succession. The pain radiated so strongly, my head began to swim and I could no longer process articulate thought. It broke my controlled resistence. My fists unclenched and my body slumped helplessly limp against the desk.

“Good girl. Shhh...” he crooned as I hiccuped and sobbed against the desk top.

I barely registered the sound of him unzipping his fly. I was so out of it that the pain of him entering my ass without lube faded into the background as the skin on my cheeks and thighs screamed red hot. The burning and stretching sensations inside my asshole were just starting to creep into my consciousness when he grunted loudly, pulled out, and released sticky, hot ropes of cum over my welted, burning ass...

The alarm clock sounded next to my head and I woke with a start. I reached over to silence it and glimpsed the time, realizing I'd slept through the first alarm and was late for work. My ass stung and I was still wearing the dress from the night before.