Removing her stilettos at the end of her workday was the highlight of Rachel’s day. As an ad executive for a Fortune 500 company, she worked long, hard hours and made what felt like a million decisions. She uncorked the bottle of Pinot from the counter and poured herself a glass of wine. Taking a sip, she willed the tension from her shoulders, removed her suit coat, and unbuttoned the top button of her blouse.
Carrying her wine, she moved across the maple hardwoods toward the master bedroom of her two-bedroom condo. The floor to ceiling windows highlighted the Houston skyline and urban sprawl, but the view didn’t interest her. She missed the space and privacy that came with a large property, like that of her family’s ranch.
On the way to the bedroom, she shed the remainder of her high-powered suit and searched for something more comfortable. She paused in her walk-in closet and rolled down her stockings. Lifting one leg, then the other, she slipped the silky black hosiery from her long legs, unclasped her bra, and pulled on her favorite Astro’s t-shirt. The shirt fell just below her hips, and since it was a warm night, she decided to forgo shorts for just silk panties.
Her ample breasts settled to their natural position. She jostled them and rubbed the pain and indentation marks from the underwire away. Her breasts were too large for the lacy bra she had worn, but she liked the feel of the slightly rough fabric against her nipples and so hadn’t been able to replace it quite yet. Grabbing her hairbrush from the vanity, she smoothed her long brown hair and secured the silky strands into a high ponytail. She then pumped a handful of her favorite lotion and soothed her tired feet and legs.
Settling into her favorite oversized chair, she sipped her wine and waited for her lover to return. Marcus was older—fifty-five to her forty years. He prided himself on his impeccable ethics and open-mindedness. He was a professor of literature, which required equally long hours as Rachel’s job and came from old money. He was handsome in a less than conventional way, with silver hair and sharp features. His body was athletic, they’d been introduced while participating in a recreational volleyball league and still played together regularly. Marcus was a deviation from Rachel’s usual type, but after her contentious divorce, Marcus has been precisely what she needed. Sophisticated, worldly, caring, and utterly uninterested in her money. They’d lived together for two years and everything was terrific, except for one thing.
Rachel’s ex-husband Robert was dominant and controlling, and while that had taken its toll in everyday life, it had awoken something deep within Rachel in the bedroom. She missed Robert’s firm hand, his ropes, and on some days, she thought she craved them as strong as an addict. Sex with Marcus, on the other hand, was fine. Not as frequent as she’d liked, but he could bring her to orgasm with the aid of her vibrator. She loved Marcus and tried not to focus on how much she missed being treated like a sex object—placed on her knees and made to serve her master’s every sexual desire. She’d been a natural submissive, eager to please and equally aroused by bondage and humiliation. She had taken to Robert’s hand and grown to love how just the sound of his command could cause her to convulse in pleasure. Robert had shown Rachel how close pain and pleasure could bleed together, and how much she’d sacrifice to ride the edge of that knife.
“You okay, hon?” Marcus called out from the doorway. He turned on lights as he made his way to the living room. “Why are you sitting in the dark?”
Rachel forced a smile. “Just thinking. You hungry?”
“I brought home Chinese. You’re favorite. Thought you might be too tired to cook.”
Rachel stood and joined Marcus in the kitchen to plate their meal. They chatted about their respective days and delved into Marcus’s plans for a new class he was developing on the Dark Romantics. Marcus loved works where humans were prone to sin and self-destruction, and he shared with her his choices for the syllabus. Rachel’s mind was fixated on Robert. Or not Robert, necessarily, but her time with Robert, and the sin he led her to. It had undoubtedly been self-destructive. She wondered if Marcus could be drawn into BDSM as she once had only this time, could they strike a better balance?
It started off innocently enough, and Rachel loved not having to make decisions at the end of a long day. She followed Robert’s instructions and was rewarded with some of the best orgasms of her life. But then the control crept into other matters—her finances, her clothes, her friends. She wasn’t permitted to spend time with family. It took an intervention to see she’d allowed things to go too far and that Robert wasn’t the kind of dominant she wanted.
