She Was Bad

She was bad, like in the songs.

She was also brilliant. Her mind was his playground. He’d make some abstract argument or obscure joke; she’d catch it overhead with her back turned, spin it and wing it back at him. She easily followed the most technical aspects of his lawyering.

She wielded words and her past trauma like a marshall artist. She withheld everything, failed to show up, abandoned plans and it was “setting boundaries.” She declared him to be untrustworthy (but trusted no one.) Trauma rendered her an eternal innocent victim, bereft of agency. She chose nothing, desired nothing, set no goals for herself. Instead, she tore down all that he built. She judged him. She ignored his needs.

His passion never got the message that this whole thing might be a bad idea. To the contrary.

They had always been explicitly D/s. He was successful in his career and almost everything he had ever set his hand to. A real cliché. Despite everything, his submission grew and grew. She never collared him, but by the fifth year he was cooking and cleaning on top of supporting her financially. Every night he would worship her feet and tell her how he as grateful for her superiority. He consciously participated in his own submissive conditioning, in part because he could and in part because it made him so very, very hard.

After a day of serving her, he would be breathless with desire, driven out of his mind by his humiliating capitulation. He loved humiliation.

She often rejected him when he tried to initiate sex. Not wanting to risk that pain and the specter of lying next to her naked body in a state of distraction, he would take care of things himself.

He’d take the dogs out at night. There was an old chair in the side yard, square and upholstered with blue-green wool, where no one could see. He would lean back on it and jack off, remembering his debasement. He was transgender, which is relevant due to the plumbing situation. He best got off while lying on his stomach. When he couldn’t stand it anymore, he’d climb off the chair and lower himself onto the walkway, his face pressed against the cold concrete, smelling the dogs and the mud while he finished himself off. One of the dogs would invariably try to lick his face just as he got close. He knew sometimes the dogs had peed there where he panted and stifled his screams, but he was beyond caring. Or sometimes, he’d admit how hot it was to observe his own desperation.

Other times, he’d go out to the hot tub. After soaking, he would step out in the dark and throw his old terrycloth robe down on the patio. He would lie naked on top of it, his face smashed into the redwood leaves and sticks while he jacked off. Afterwards, standing up, wobbly, he would brush the dirt and debris off his face with a hand smelling of sex. He would think, “This is good, this is far hotter than what most people probably have.”

He never told her.