Submissive Desires

Twenty Three

I don't think I'd ever seen that much honesty in a room at once. Sy was right. It was like alcohol on a wound. It stung like fury, and you gritted your teeth, but it was good. I was very angry, but at least it was obvious to me that some of that anger was directed at myself.

Stefan did have a hold on me. He'd said he loved me. It didn't matter how angry I got; that confession of love trigged a little smile in me every time I thought about it.

Sy and I got down to cooking for the mighty hunters, which was a somewhat mixed metaphor, I realized, because we were also the prey. So in a sense we had cooked our own gooses. I started chucking at myself, and Sy looked at me, clearly worried. I just grinned at her, maybe a little manically.

Sy handled the bacon and eggs. I worked the waffles, drinks and toast. I realized now that Sy had never made toast, that mainstay of study breaks. The glowing toaster elements would be terrifying; even electricity hidden in a wire was bad, so that had to be much worse. And her diligently mixing the brownies by hand, refusing to use the electric mixer... it all made sense. I resolved suddenly that somehow I would help her with this.

As an example of how you can know someone, even live with them, and never understand what happens in their heads, Sy stood alone. But as I thought about this, there was another case of the same phenomenon here. I saw it in the mirror every morning.

I wanted Stefan. I wanted to please him. I could rant and rail at his foreign backwards culture and his impossible arrogance and his casual disregard for the rage he could trigger in me, but he fucking had me. I didn't know how and I didn't even know why, but I was caught like a bird in a trap, and I could flutter my wings and chirp all I wanted, for all the good it did. All he had to do is press his hand against me and I curled into it, wondering how I could please him. It was as if he and I knew two different Clarissas – but he knew the true one. And she was eager to please, just a little shy, and had a dark sexuality that I had yet to touch bottom in.

I was going to be spanked after breakfast. Not for fun. Simply because I'd hurt someone's feelings. It was something you might do to a child, and that comparison should have enraged me, but deep down, where my railings and logic and cursing wouldn't reach, I knew it was not the same. A parent spanks a child and the child squeals in rage and shame and something like terror. A man spanks a woman and there may be shame, and there is a thrill of fear, but it is above all humbling. When I lay myself across Andrei's lap, under Stefan's command, I would not be a child who was forced to accept it. I was a woman who chose to accept it. It was powerful and devastating and sexual and if I dared look down as deep as I could, at places within me I never visited and sometimes pretended didn't exist... I wanted to be spanked. I wanted to humble myself. The Clarissa I didn't know said "Yes, Sir" - and shivered in gladness.

I had become a submissive. Submission isn't gritting your teeth and doing your miserable unpleasant duty. Submission is understanding that you want to feel another's power and focus, that it frees you from the fears you didn't know you had and the lies you didn't know you were clinging to. I could be as furious as I liked at that shiver of gladness, hiding deep, deep down – but my fury was the froth on waves on a shore, and the gladness was the deep ocean. You can't cling to froth no matter how hard you try, but you can always go another step deeper into the sea. I was being made to understand myself, and sometimes it was horrible but it was honest, it was at least true, and the sting of that was a good sting. Sy kept talking about honesty and I'd thought she'd meant mere honesty to others, but that was only a tiny part of it. It was honesty to yourself, that was the prize. I knew now I'd never have gotten there on my own, and the girl I had hated had done this for me.

We joked over breakfast, just as a release from the intensity of the living room conversation. Stefan had me repeat phrases in Romanian in the sexiest voice I could, and then Sy would translate what I'd just said (including any mispronunciations that changed the meanings.) "Tie me up with Stefan's smelly socks" was bad enough, but I'd mangled a word and it came out "Keep my smelly socks, Stefan" and it was five minutes before anyone could breathe normally again.