Clara stayed, as she usually did on a Monday, but I didn’t go to Zumba. I couldn’t face going out again, fearful a spectre of evil stalked me everywhere, waiting to pounce. At eight o’clock, I told her to go. Jason would be home following his evening function.
He arrived home at nine and found me in the drawing room, mindlessly watching television. I had forgotten to greet him, and I switched the quiz show off. My visions of my kinky marriage flashed through my mind, not the vanilla one. I remembered I should be focusing on him.
“Can I get you anything? Something to drink?” I asked as he loosened his tie and observed me belatedly greet him. If I was giving off the wrong messages to him, I remained oblivious. I did what I was expected to do and what mattered.
Jason gave me a sniff as he bent to kiss my lips. “You’ve had a bath?”
“Yes.” And? I waited for him to ask how I was coping.
“I’ll have you, then, since you smell divine.” He brushed against my cheek, nuzzling his nose into my hair, while his roving hand wandered over my breasts. I should be clenching below, sensing the pulsating heat, but his words and actions had no effect on my suppressed libido.
He did not refer to my unusual day. Perhaps he didn’t care to mention it. I decided he planned to distract me, refocus my thoughts from violence to sexual delights, his usual tactic for helping me forget bad things. We rarely did scenes on a Monday. Maybe being in the seat of government had activated his domination gene—the hardness jutting out in his pants and his hurried demeanour illustrated his intentions.
With a sense of resignation, I followed him up to the bedroom. I didn’t trudge upstairs, but neither did my feet skip to the beat of my heart. He stripped me, neither hastily or sweetly, a simple divesting of unnecessary hindrance. In the middle of the room, he edged around me, trailing his fingers about my flesh. I tilted my head back and closed my eyes, waiting for him to step up a gear.
He scrunched my breasts in his hands then shook them. I gritted my teeth together, masking a cry of discomfort. I felt like a floppy doll—unemotional and drained. I was being submissive, very submissive, at least in respect to doing as I was told. I didn’t question or talk to him. My meekness came across in the form of being receptive and obedient. However, the truth be told, I couldn’t be bothered to be anything else.
I squeezed my eyes shut and concentrated on deep breaths and acceptance. Why hadn’t he said anything about today? Not a word about what I had witnessed. No putting me down about mixing with ‘the wrong types’. He had never complained in the past about my choice of mums’ group. Jason had been the one who had insisted I go to one after Joshua was born. I’d assumed Jason was all right about the location and the company I’d been keeping.
Having backed me against the bedroom wall, he left me for a few brief moments. Flattening my hands against the cold paintwork, I banged the back of my head on the wall and tried to shake myself out of my morose state. What next? How to find the right attitude for his play? He returned with the bucket of clothes pegs and a ball of string.
A zipper! What! I wasn’t in the mood for string and pegs pinging off me.
Instead of flirting or swinging my hips at him, I gaped—horrified at his idea. Finally, and after an unusually prolonged display of insensitivity, he twigged my responses were far from typical of those I showed when faced with a kinky game.
He tossed the string on the bed and eyed me, twitching his nose, his lips pursed, and hands on his hips. I rested against the wall and tried to slow my thumping heartbeats.
What did he expect? He’d offered me no words of comfort not even a cuddle. My attitude had been “get on and do it and be grateful I am yours to do with as you please.”
“Gemma? What’s going on?”
“Probably the shitty day I’ve had,” I snapped.
He hadn’t shown the slightest interest in my day. Frankly, nor had I in his.
“Too boring for you?” he sneered.
Boring! After the day I’d had, a zipper might have been the ordinary aspect I’d been searching for and failed to find. Why didn’t he know about the unusual event in my otherwise tedious daytime routine? Surely, there had been some email or text to him from Johnson or Gibson?
“Haven’t you checked your emails today then? Sir.” I added with a little irreverence in my tone.
“I’ve been in meetings all day, and having a mobile switched on in the heart of Whitehall seemed inappropriate, so, no, I haven’t. I didn’t see any point in being swamped with emails last thing at night.”
Oh crikey! I swallowed and cursed under my breath. Suddenly, everything had a different perspective layered on top of it. Jason hadn’t been indifferent to my needs or distracting me with kinky overtures. He’d expected me to be his eager submissive and nothing else.
He picked up his mobile from the bedside table, waited to connect to the network, before scrolling down the list of incoming emails.
I waited, preferring he read about my day, rather than have to make the effort of telling him.
He saw the key one, probably from Johnson. A major frown developed on his face, and he tossed the phone down.
Over he came, planting his hands on either side of my head, leaning on the wall. “Gemma. Do you think that the only way I should find out what is going on in your life should be through my security reports? Do you think emails are the way we should communicate?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Normally it’s how it works. I assumed—”
“You assumed I’d had an email, telling me that you have been in the same room as a murderer, and that I couldn’t be bothered to talk about it with you. More to the point, neither could you!”
Why hadn’t I queried the scene? The pinching, the rough tactile exploration of my sex, the proposed zipper of pegs stuck to my soft flesh, those things were typical of Jason in a Dominant frame of mind, not a concerned husband.