Beyond Limits Ch. 04

And now I had no choice but to let her go, and let her go for good, because we never could be together. We could never be sexually compatible. It would never work out between us. It was as if she'd just found out she was gay. We were members of the same team now and couldn't play against each other.

Theoretically.

That was the theory. The reality was more complex. The reality was, that like April said, sub and dom are labels. A person is different depending on whom they're with and I couldn't feel any differently toward Lexi as we walked home in the February slush. She'd been my love, the love of my life, and then she'd thrown me over for the asshole and now I didn't know what to do. She was still the love of my life but she'd been with him and been defiled, and there was this stupid sexual issue between us now. She'd defiled my love and hurt me and I couldn't deal with that. I knew her and I didn't and I couldn't stand it.

The reality was, she'd grown some new part, some membrane that separated us, and as we walked along I realized that I'd always known she'd had this domme inside her, and that that's what had attracted me to her in the first place, my inability to break her, her resistance and backbone. That's why I'd fallen so in love with her and become dependent on her, and she'd attracted me even as she'd frightened me.

I had killed her lover because of what she'd done to me, not him, and it hadn't been his fault. He was a jerk and an asshole and he'd humiliated me and ruined my life, but I'd killed him because of what Lexi had done to me, not because of what he had done, and I waited for the guilt and the remorse, for the sudden, dramatic revelation of anguish and retribution to come falling out of the February sky as the enormity of my crime sank in, but I waited in vain. Lexi walked along, her breath steaming through her scarf. Cars passed us by, their tailpipes emitting clouds of fog. The world was dismal, wet and cold, but to my shame I felt nothing in that dour grayness. Nothing but the great hollow realization that Lexi and I would never be together again, and compared to that, Cormac's death hardly seemed to matter at all. Losing her was a great chasm into which his death fell like a pebble.

Not even Lexi blamed me, and I realized I had gotten away with murder that easily.

We stopped at the front of her building.

I shrugged my shoulders, looking for warmth. "I'm going to go," I said.

She took her sunglasses off and looked at me. "Russell, no. You can't. This is the first time I've been back here alone. You've got to come inside!"

"You don't need me for this, Lexi. It's going to be awfully awkward."

"Russell, please. I'm begging you. Besides. I need to talk to you. There's a lot I haven't told you yet."

The bitch. The one thing she could play on was my curiosity.

I went over and she took my arm and pressed herself against me and we walked up to her front door. The grieving widow. She opened the lock and we went up to their flat.

The window had been repaired and the shade replaced. Someone had paid to have the flat professionally cleaned and it had a stiff and formal kind of order about it. It smelled of wax and furniture polish, funereal. I got chills walking in there. I couldn't help it. It felt like a dead man's home. Lexi felt it too, and I wondered how she was ever going to sleep there tonight.

"I want a drink. You want a drink?" She took off her coat and walked into the kitchen.

"Sure."

She came out with two vodka and somethings and had me sit. We toasted life. She seemed nervous and very sad and more than a little angry, and I didn't have to ask to know it was Cormac she was angry with.

"So what else did you have to tell me?" I asked.

"In a minute," she said. "You know, Bud's making me take two weeks off the play. Barb's taking my part for the first two weeks, during all the reviews."

"Oh? No, I didn't know."

"Bud's got his own ideas how the play should go too. Throwing out a lot of Mac's work."

"No, I didn't know that either."

"You haven't seen it lately?"

"No, Lexi. I'm not really interested in it much anymore."

She seemed even angrier now and she took a big swallow of her drink then held her glass pressed to her lips. Tears welled in her eyes

"Jesus, Russell. You know he liked you. He really liked you."

"Did he?" I wasn't impressed. "You could have fucking fooled me."

"He did. Mac always said what a brilliant play it was. He loved directing it."

"A play and a playwright are two different things."

She seemed to think about that. "Are they? Mac didn't think so. His life was one big performance."

I nodded. "And yours is too now?"

She stared at her glass for a moment and said, "He taught me a lot. I guess that's why I fell in love with him. Because he directed me. He had plans for me. It was nothing personal, Russell."

"No. It never is."

She sighed and brushed her hair back. She seemed pale and fragile, but not that much the worse for wear considering she'd lost her lover. She still had her luminosity.

"Do you hate me?" she asked.

I sat back and looked at her. "Of course I do. But I don't think 'hate' is quite the right word. What do you call a mixture of love and hate?"

She looked at the floor and shrugged. "Love, I suppose."

"Yeah. I love you that way."

"I still love you too, Russell. You know that? I never stopped loving you."

I smiled. "Is that right?"

The funny thing was, I knew it was true. She did still love me, but not in that way. Not in the way I needed. She'd left me. First for the play, and then for Cormac, chasing some vision of herself, but she'd never stopped loving me, because she'd loved who she was with me, someone I idealized, both of us poor and full of promise, someone I wrote plays for.

"How's April?" she asked suddenly. "You two doing okay?"

"Oh, so-so."

She paused for a while, then said, "She's not the one for you, Russell. You know that, don't you?"

"Yeah. I do. She's nice, and I guess I love her, but she's not the one. She doesn't put up enough resistance. Doesn't have enough presence."

Lexi nodded once. "I'm glad you can see that. I really like her, but she's just not right."

"Do you really think that's your business, Lexi?"

"No. I'm sorry. I suppose not. I'm sorry."

She looked down and took a sip of her drink. It was very quiet.

"Look, I'll come out and say it," she said. "You're good friends with Bud. Could you ask him—please, Russell—to put me back in the play? He thinks I'll be too upset to perform, but I'm not. Really. Look at me. Do I look like I'm falling apart? The first two weeks—those are when the reviewers will be there, the critics. It'll make or break the show. You wrote that part forme, Russell. For me. Just talk to him. Tell him I'm ready to go on. I had some words with him about the changes. Tell him I didn't mean them. He'll listen to you. He respects you—"

"Tell me what happened with Cormac." I said.

She stopped in her tracks and looked at me. She sat back in her chair..

"What do you mean?"

"Why did you leave me for him. What did he have that I didn't?"

She considered. "It was nothing, Russell. It wasn't like that, like I left you. I fell in love, totally unexpected. I was as shocked as you were, but he just pushed all my buttons. He blew me away. I can't explain it and I'm sorry it hurt you. You don't know how sorry I am, but sometimes things like that happen. Really, baby, that's all there was to it."

"No. Lexi. I don't think so."

"Then what?" She looked at me flatly, a hint of fear in her eyes.

"You were scared of me. You got frightened of me and so you went to Cormac. He was someone you knew you could handle, so you played into his hands. You played sub for him until he showed his true colors, and then you took over and you ran him. You ran him and you ran me. You let me think he was domming you to make me hurt and cripple me while you were domming him and then you sat and held both of us in your hands and you ran us both. I think that's what really happened."

She shook her head in disbelief. "Oh, Russell! Baby, you're paranoid. Don't you think I know what I was doing and why? Do you really think I'm that much of a sadistic bitch?"

"It doesn't take a sadistic bitch. I think you resented the hell out of me for trying to dom you and you saw your chance for revenge and you took it."

"I'm not a vengeful person, Russell."

"Tell that to Cormac about the smack you gave him," I said.

I regretted it as soon as it was out of my mouth, but Lexi hardly seemed to notice. She sat back, slumped in her chair, lost in thought.

"I've changed a lot since we've been apart, Russell," she said. "I'm not scared of things that used to frighten me."

I didn't know what I was supposed to say to that, so we sat in silence for an embarrassingly long time. I thought maybe she was talking about my bone-headed blackmail attempt and I felt totally chagrinned. Lexi finally got up and walked into the back of the apartment, and I thought that was it. I thought I'd insulted her so much that she was walking out on me and I was being dismissed.

It was kind of hard for me to believe that she'd consciously chosen not to tell me she was domming Cormac, like believing someone you knew and loved was an axe murderer, but it made too much sense. This is how we scheme after all, not consciously according to well-laid plans, but with blurred motives and hidden agendas, hunches and feelings and patterns we're never aware of. I knew that Lexi never consciously faced the fact that she was afraid of me or she wanted to get revenge on me and make me suffer. She just suddenly found herself bored with me and madly attracted to Cormac, and then concealing the true nature of her relationship with Mac from me, and letting slip things about the two of them that hurt me deeply when she really thought she didn't intend to, secretly enjoying the way I squirmed.

Of course, there was the other possibility: that I was totally paranoid and misreading the entire situation. But if so, I had nothing to lose. This interpretation at least assuaged my ego and was as legitimate for me as hers was for her.

I put down my drink and stood up. It was dark out by now, and looked cold out. I got my coat and was about to put it on, and then Lexi walked into the room in a black robe with leather cuffs on her wrists and the cuffs clipped together. She wore a black collar around her throat.

"I want you to take me, Russell," she said. "I want to be your sub. All right? That's what you wanted, isn't it? Well that's what I want too. I made a big mistake and I see that now. I want to be yours. Can I make it any clearer than that?"

I stared at her in utter shock. Even when we'd been together she was not one for negligees and dramatic entrances. She'd taken off her clothes and underthings and put on a thin silk robe and brushed her hair out, cuffed her hands together and put on this collar and a pair of black heels—the kind of outfit she'd always laughed at as cheap and ridiculously cliched—and she stood in front of me with the robe almost open and her hip cocked provocatively.

"Okay, Lexi. Wait a minute—"

"How else can I prove to you that you're wrong?" she asked. "Wrong about me, wrong about what happened, wrong about everything."

"I thought you were a domme now."

"Sub. domme, they're nothing but labels. They don't describe what we really are. I'm anything I want to be, and right now I want to be yours."

Months of pain, months of wanting and humiliation welled up stupidly inside of me; I wanted so much to believe her. I could feel the dumb animal in me getting up from his knees like a bull in the ring, bloodied, wounded, tossing his horns She raised her wrists and offered them to me and the robe fell open and there was her body, still with the marks of Cormac's bites on her, the man I'd murdered, dead now as if he'd never existed. The bites were already fading and forgotten to her, scars from another war.

I knew what she was doing. It was embarrassingly obvious. She wanted her part back in the play but she also wanted her part back at the center of someone's heart, to be the center of their obsession, and so who did she have but me? That's what all this was about. With Cormac dead she wanted to come back to my bed as sub, as domme, as anything, she didn't care. That's what this had always been about for her, ever since she'd got a taste of my obsession and the fame the play had given her and now she couldn't stop, even though she knew how transparent she was.

And me, I was still hurting enough. through all this time and all she'd put me through and all the scars I'd developed, she was still Lexi to me, the girl I'd killed for. I knew I was being used. I knew I was being topped from the bottom, but at the same time I didn't care. She owed me. She still owed me, and in all this time I'd changed too.

I'd forgotten her body. She was nowhere near as ripe as April but she was private, darker and more intimate, her secrets more guarded and profound. Her breasts, sculpturally perfect; the saddle of her hips, cocked back like a loaded gun. Take me, she said, and I didn't care what was behind it.

I took her wrists and pulled her to me, unclipped them and put them behind her back and refastened them, then took her in a kiss, her mouth opening aggressively as I bent her back. She was surprised at my force, not used to being kissed by a man so demanding after her time with Cormac and I made her take my tongue. Instantly it was five months before and I remembered the geography of her mouth, the topography and politics, her secret places and sensitive spots.

There'd been changes, subtle changes in the way she kissed that came from her being a domme, a kind of impatient uncertainty as she tried to adjust to her new role. I held her with one arm around her and with the other I held the clips that fastened her wrists together, held them away from her body. She was a mistress trying to play a sub's part now and it wasn't familiar to her. I knew she didn't enjoy it, but I reveled in the way she had to stifle herself. I loved it. I grabbed her breast and squeezed and she had to take it with a sharp intake of breath. I took her nipple between thumb and forefinger and twisted; rolled it between my fingers till she broke the kiss and gasped into my mouth, her hands pulling impotently at her cuffs.

If she wanted to play sub, I'd take her. I'd take her as far as she wanted to go. I had no problem with that.

She swallowed her pride now and laid back in my arm, her hands limp behind her as I pushed her robe open and took possession of her body, running my hand over it, her warm, smooth skin of her tits, soft and vulnerable. I stared at her, the fading bites, the marks of his teeth on her breasts and arms—what he must have done to her, what she must have let him do—and she closed her eyes and gave herself as I kissed her and raped her mouth with my tongue and tortured her tits, first one then the other. Her nipples reddened and slowly filled with blood, stiffening and growing broad and erect.

I picked her up, just picked her up in my arms, naked as her robe hung down from her shoulders like a cape that almost tripped me as I carried her into their bedroom, the place where she and Cormac used to sleep and I laid her down on the bed. She didn't say anything though she must have known how wrong this was, how blatantly cruel and callous. I was making a whore out of her, a betrayer, but she couldn't say anything, not if she wanted to pull off this "make me your sub" act, so she said nothing. And for me, the cruelty felt good.

I laid her down in the middle of the canopy bed and I went to the nightstand where they kept their bondage gear and dope paraphernalia, where I'd seen it after she'd called me to help with Cormac's body. The dope stuff was gone of course, every trace of it. I'd seen to that, but there'd been no sense in hiding their BDSM gear, so I'd left it just where it was and it was still there. I got out some things—some rope and cuffs and a flogger—things I now realized Lexi had used on Cormac—and dropped them on the bed. It kind of creeped me out, thinking of him tied to the bed and her whipping him, but I didn't have time to think of that now, of who she'd been then, of who she really was now. Turnabout was fair enough play, turnabout and revenge, whatever it was I was doing. Lexi only watched, lying there, her chest rising and falling.

I unclipped her wrists and took her robe off, then tied her hands to the corner posts of the bed. I put ankle cuffs on her and tied her ankles to the lower bed posts as well, and pulled them tight and I had her. I had Lexi naked, tied to the bed, the place I'd wanted her for so long. She stared at me calmly, patiently, her face betraying nothing, so I loosened her ankles and pulled them even tighter and tied her off again. I wished I'd had her on a rack so I could have pulled her even tighter, just to hear her moan. Her stomach pulled tight against her ribs but she didn't make a sound

I got more rope and threw triple loops around her thighs and tied those off to screw eyes they'd conveniently mounted in the sides of the bed. She didn't like that. She didn't like when I pulled her thighs apart and left her lying there with her legs wish-boned apart, spread wide, lewd, obscene, naked and defenseless, her pussy glistening with moisture. She didn't like that at all.

I turned the lights off. The gray February streetlight came in the bedroom window.

"I always wondered what you'd do if you had the chance," she said.

"Did you?" I smiled at her. "Did you think about me, Lexi? Did you dream about this moment?"

"You don't have to believe me. I know what's true."

I rummaged around in their drawer. A lot of penis-shaped vibrators, butt plugs, cock cages, nipple clamps, pumps. I found a plug-in wand vibrator with an extension cord. That would do.

I tied another length of rope around her waist, doubling it over and tying it to the same screw eyes that held her thighs, fixing her lower body so she couldn't move, then I plugged the vibrator into the wall and threaded it through one of the joists that supported the canopy. I adjusted it so it dangled down on its cord from a spot in the canopy right above her chest down against her pussy and I turned it on.

"Oh! Russell! Fuck! FUCK! Oh God!!"

The thing hummed against her clit, hanging like a piece of fruit on an extra long stem, bouncing softly against her mound as she humped and twitched at it, trying to push it away with her hips.

Lexi hated vibrators. She hated anything, I realized then, that threatened her sense of control. But stretched out on the bed with her thighs and waist tied, she couldn't move away from it, and each time she managed to push it away, it just bounced slowly back, following the natural funnel of her thighs to its position against her cunt and buzzing against her with blind mechanical indifference.

"Oh! Ohh!"

She was starting to moan now, her toes curling against the soles of her feet, the clips on her wrist cuffs clinking as she pulled at the head board. The vibrator hummed against her and the muscles in her legs stood out as she flexed them in an attempt to escape. She bit her lip and clenched her eyes shut and whined. Her hips began to hump and pitch against the maddening vibrations and she began to fuck the air, looking for relief.

I don't know what she'd thought, if she expected she could get off with a quick blow job or whether she'd thought I'd let her off the hook or maybe even fall at her knees like Cormac had eventually done. But no. I'd given up on the idea of making her a sub. She'd never give it to me. Shed given it to Cormac, I realized that now. She'd given it as a domme, on her own terms and in her own way, but she had given it.