“Price—”
“And I’m not going to give you some poem to remember me by, because you’re right, that’s shitty. It’s someone else’s words and feelings, not mine.” His lips tightened. “I’d give you my words and feelings if I knew what they were. But you’re right. I don’t fucking know. I don’t know what’s inside me, especially when it comes to you.”
He let go of my hand, kissed my forehead, then opened the door with inexorable words of parting, his own blunt poetry.
“I just know it’s not enough to make you happy. And that’s not okay.”
Price
When I was little, I had all these dreams of power and force and good and evil. I wanted to fight dragons. I wanted to be heroic and save princesses. I pored over the pictures in my fairy tale books, fetishizing the women, so different from my autocratic mother and my nagging nannies. I stared at drawings of lonely Rapunzel locked in her tower, or Cinderella crying by the fire, and my little-boy heart felt full and strong.
When I got a little older, my fairy tale fantasies transformed into superhero daydreams. I wanted to be both the villain and the rescuer to my adolescent crushes. I wanted to hurt women and save them, and be worthy of them. As I aged, I developed very specific fantasies, of towers and dungeons, cages and rope, and tearful, traumatized victims. I masturbated endlessly to imagined scenes of torment and abduction.
Then I grew into an adult, and realized that my needs skirted the edge of what was socially acceptable. Failed relationship followed failed relationship, and I finally gave up. I realized, well, no one will ever allow me to live out these fantasies without coming to hate me. I’ll never find a modern woman who’ll crave force and slavery, and be willing to surrender to so much pain. I’ll never find a woman who will accept this dark, unhinged side of me.
Then I found her.
And then, a few years later, I realized fairy tales rarely came true.
Not that we’d ever been a fairy tale. An insecure ex-hooker and a sadistic commitment-phobe were never the stuff of happily ever after. Still, it hurt to hear her say that I had nothing inside me.
Nothing? Nothing but three years of worry and angst and desire for you, you raving bitch.
She hadn’t just bruised my soul with those words she flung at me. She’d raked her claws over the only part of my psyche that wasn’t confident and strong. She’d dug right down to the part of me that wanted to love, but was afraid of being hated again, and again, and again. Yes, I was a fucking coward when it came to love. I didn’t need her to point it out to me. I knew.
As she had stood there railing at me, our roles were reversed, and she was the one mindfucking and hurting me, and trying to make me cry, only she wasn’t doing it for sexual titillation. She was doing it because she honestly, literally believed I didn’t care about her, that I was only interested in using her for sex. There’s nothing inside you but selfish emptiness, and money, and violence.
Maybe she was right. Maybe beneath my rich, successful outward appearance, there was only a sniveling asshole who needed things his way. Maybe that was all I had to offer her, not love, but jealousy and desperate, pathetic scrabbling.
I’ll buy you. I’ll pay for you. I’ll lock you in my dungeon. That will make you stay.
It didn’t escape my notice that I’d spent thousands of dollars outfitting a dungeon I’d never allowed her to see. She needed a happy life, not a slave collar. She needed a good man, not me. I was selfish, empty, violent, and not enough of what she wanted.
Now I didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t fair to string her along, and I couldn’t survive another shakedown like the one she’d subjected me to today. If I didn’t walk away from her and eventually manage to forget about her, I’d slog through the rest of my life losing my fucking mind.
I’d just have to distract myself for a while. Block her number, delete her contact information, stay close to home. I had work projects I could concentrate on. Those were great for distraction, and eating up mental energy. I had books for when all else failed.
As for the physical, I could create profiles on BDSM dating sites, and find women to fuck and beat on, women desperate to surrender to men like me. There were plenty of them, the majority willing to subsist without love, only to have some dominant guy’s attention.
Or I could try to write poems for Chere, or paint some fucking painting, exposing my soft, cowardly insides to try to win her back.