Total pages in book: 102
Estimated words: 93751 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 469(@200wpm)___ 375(@250wpm)___ 313(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 93751 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 469(@200wpm)___ 375(@250wpm)___ 313(@300wpm)
Retrieving her laptop case and purse, she slung the duffel over her shoulder and hurried back downstairs. Leaving her things beside the front door, she returned to the slave quarters to wait.
Her romance with The Enclave was over.
It was time to go home.
Part Three
Chapter 29
“How many times do I have to say it? I’m fine. Just fine,” Mason snapped. Mark’s third-degree interrogation about how he was really doing was getting old. Why couldn’t everyone just leave him the fuck alone?
It was the first week in October. Hannah had been gone for two weeks, not that Mason was counting. Mark and he were sitting on the veranda that morning after breakfast, despite the chill in the air. Mark had been noodling on his guitar, as usual. Mason was ostensibly working up his shopping list for later that afternoon, though all he’d written so far was fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
Mark snorted. “You’re such a lying sack of shit.”
Mason bristled, affronted. “What the fuck do you know about it?”
Mark shook his head. “What I know is that you’ve been a total asshole since Hannah left. Even worse than when Ashley moved out.”
Mason chuckled bitterly. “This is the real me, bro. I’m basically an asshole. Ask anyone I used to work with in the food industry.”
Mark ignored this. “You want to talk about it? About what happened with Hannah?”
“Not especially,” Mason said irritably. “There’s nothing to talk about. Hannah was never right for The Enclave. She’s not slave material. I knew that going in. I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking, wasting my time with her. End of discussion.”
“I’m not talking about that,” Mark countered. “I’m not talking about Hannah’s potential fit as an Enclave slave. I’m talking about you. The two of you. I’ve heard it second-, third- and fourth-hand, but I want to hear it from you. What exactly went down? And more importantly, what do you plan to do about it?”
“What went down? You really want to know?”
“Uh, yeah. That’s why I asked.”
“Fine. I’ll tell you what ‘went down.’ I let my dick do my thinking for me. I got excited by the idea of taking a newbie and molding her into my ideal slave girl. I thought all she needed was the right man—the right Dom—to help her discover her true potential.”
He snorted derisively, the derision directed at himself. “Talk about arrogance. She’s not some eager twentysomething who doesn’t yet know her own mind. She told me in a dozen different ways that she wasn’t comfortable with some of what was happening. I was convinced I knew better. I let her down. I let us both down. Especially that last day…”
He trailed off, shaking his head. He’d relived that botched scene a hundred times over, cursing himself every time. It was still painful to think about, much less talk about.
“Forget it,” he said, pushing back his chair and rising from the table. “There’s no point in rehashing this. I fucked up. End of story.”
“No,” Mark said, placing a surprisingly firm hand on Mason’s arm, effectively pushing him back onto his chair. “Say what you were going to say. Tell me about that last day. Tell me what happened, and why you think it went wrong.”
“Why I think it went wrong? Are you suggesting there’s room for interpretation here? A sub under my care used her safeword, something that hasn’t happened to me in at least a decade. Then she peed herself with terror and ran screaming from the room. There’s no think about it. It went horribly, terribly wrong. And it’s one hundred percent my fault.”
Mark looked unimpressed. “Okay, so you fucked up. Welcome to the human race.” A thoughtful look moved over his face. “You know, back when I was in the band and we were on top of the world, I became a total asshole myself. All the attention, the money, the free drugs and the girls throwing themselves at us after every show. I treated those girls like toys to be used and tossed aside. I let the fame go to my head. I thought I was entitled to whatever the fuck I wanted, whenever the fuck I wanted it.” He sighed, his expression clouding. “I’m not proud of my behavior back then. We were all in over our heads. Poor Bobby paid the highest price, but it could have easily been me.”
Though Mason didn’t listen to pop music, preferring jazz, he was, of course, aware of Mark’s band, Planck Time. Mark had been the lead singer in the very successful group, which had famously imploded when the bass player had OD’d on heroin while onstage.
“It wasn’t until just this past year, with Jaime’s support and encouragement,” Mark continued, “that I went back and made amends to some of the people I fucked over during that time. I hope it made some of them feel better, but it wasn’t just about them. It was about me, and how I felt about myself. What I’m trying to say is, it’s not so much the fuckup. It’s what you do about it. You know how important communication is in a D/s relationship, even if it’s just a trainer/trainee scenario. That’s when amends are made—when lines of communication are reopened. Have you talked to her? Have you apologized? Have you discussed how things could work better going forward?”