“You just need to make calls in case of emergency. Or to talk to me.”
“I guess?”
“What do you mean you ‘guess’? You going to put your pesto pizza on Instagram?”
“Is that what people do?”
He leans his forehead against the back of my head.
“I don’t know what to do with you.” When I try to turn, he holds me still, facing the phones. “I should send you away for my own fucking sanity, but I’ll go crazy without you.”
“Send me.” I grab a random phone and turn, pushing the package into his chest. “Just make sure I’m ready.”
“I’m not sending you anywhere.”
The promise is meant to reassure me. It’s made in a world where he’s the only one who can make my decisions. I don’t intend to live there forever.
He takes the phone to the front. He takes cash out of his wallet to buy it, then plucks a spoon with a key on the end from the counter.
“Put up a sign,” he says to the guy behind the plexiglass, dropping a hundred-dollar bill in the slot. “Bathroom’s out of order.”
“Yes, sir!” He snaps a Sharpie from a cup.
Dario pulls me outside and around to the back of the building, where a door that’s been painted in beige enamel dozens of times is cracked ajar. Broken brown floor tile and the edges of a white toilet with no seat are visible in the slit.
“I just went,” I say. “Do you need to go?”
He pushes me inside, follows as he slams the door, and flips the latch. The light flickers on automatically. With quick, feral glances, he checks every corner of the tiny room for danger, then turns to me.
“We have to talk.” He tosses the useless key on the sink.
“Here? It’s filthy.”
The sink drips. Halos of brown water damage radiate from the ceiling vent.
“The only time you listen is when my cock is inside you.”
My insides melt and my attention narrows. “Is that so?”
I don’t know what I did to earn his intensity, but I’ll do it again and again to keep it.
“Just so we’re clear.” He takes me by the shoulders and turns me to the sink, putting my left hand against the rust-pocked mirror. He puts his right hand next to it and asks, “These scars say you’re my wife. Period. Not Willa. You. You are my wife. That means I get to defend and protect you. I get to fuck you, and I get to punish you.”
He’s fought to bring me into the outside, and now he’s fighting to keep me from it. He could maintain my captivity if he wanted. Keep me sheltered, chained, ignorant of the world. But he’s not saying he won’t teach me how to live in it. The struggle is with himself now. My body gets the benefit of being the battlefield.
“Do it all while you can.” I lower my hand.
“Oh, my prima.” His face is obscured in the rusted mirror, but his movements as he yanks his belt open are unmistakable. “You’re playing a game you can’t win.”
“Maybe we both win.”
“You’re going to be sorry.”
“Make me sorry.”
He sticks four fingers in my mouth and pulls me close, his erection against my lower back. “You’re asking to be punished.”
I nod because he’s right. I need to be punished for wanting to win. For wanting the choice to stay or go.
“You’re asking,” he says low, lips moving against my throat, “to get fucked.”
When I nod this time, bubbles of drool drop from my chin.
“I can’t let you scream.” He takes out his hand and snaps his belt from the loops. “You’re going to shake your head if you want me to stop. Understand? Say it.”
“Yes.”
“Open your mouth. Wide.”
He straps the belt between my teeth, loops it tightly around my head and pulls back.
“Look at my wife.” He jerks my head back. “On a leash with spit running down her chin like an animal. Do you want me to fuck you like this? Gagged?”
I nod, tasting the leather.
“Of course you do. You know who owns you. Pull down your pants. Let’s see if you’re telling the truth.”
The position he has me in makes it hard to obey. That’s by design. What’s obedience worth if it’s easy? Would it send shocks of desire through my bones if I didn’t have to struggle to get the waistband past my hips? Even humiliation has to be earned.
“Gorgeous.” He caresses my bottom, and I sigh at the compliment, then suck a breath past the belt when he puts three fingers in my pussy. He takes them out to slap it. The gasp turns into an exhale of surprise and pain. “Show me how you tell me to stop.”
I look over my shoulder and shake my head.
“You want more.”
I nod.
“You want to show me why you can’t leave me.” He jerks my head forward and slaps my pussy again. I squeak in pain but stick my bottom out for more. He pushes my face against the dirty mirror. “My sweet little slut.” Again. And another slap. “Spread your cheeks apart so I can punish my property.”
I’m open now, and he slaps my ass, my wet lips, my thighs until I’m a sodden, whimpering mess with a chin slick with slippery drool. In the mirror, past the grime, I see him use his free hand to release his dick.
“You want me to fuck this sore little cunt?”
Yes. Yes, I do.
I’m so wet he slides right into me. He’s angled me up against the sink, so his shaft rubs against my clitoris as it enters blissfully slowly, stretching inch by inch.
“Here’s how it’s going to go, little princess.” He fucks me from behind at a leisurely pace, pulling on the belt. “When I teach you how to use a cell phone, it’s to call me. When I teach you to get around, it’s so you can get back to me. Everything you learn is so you can stay with me. Do you understand?”
I nod, in a state of total submission, stretched between degradation and ecstasy.
When he’s buried deep, he swats my hands away and pulls my ass cheeks apart, pressing his thumb against the hole. “What if I fucked your ass right now? Made you scream and cry?” He takes a slop of spit from my chin and rubs it against the tight ring. “I’m getting so hard thinking about my cock coming in your ass.”
Two fingers inside. I squeak and groan with the hurt, while the pleasure from his cock grows more intense.
He takes them out. “Not today then.” He yanks my head back by the belt. “But I’ll have it, my wife. I’m going to fuck your ass. My ass. I own it. I fuck what I own, and I own what I fuck.”
Nodding into the mirror, my mouth is cut by a leather line and my chin is slick with spit.
“Good.” He takes my hand and puts it between my legs. “Now, be a good little wife. Show me how you help yourself come.”
I hesitate. I’ve touched myself a few times. But I was alone, my shame hidden behind a closed door, furtively exploring what my husband would get to know.
He’s asking me to do something more debasing than anything he’s done to me.
“Do it, Sarah.” He takes me by the hips and drives deep. “Give it to me.”
There’s no threat. No or else. He fucks me as if I’ve already obeyed him.