I was no stranger to keeping relationships a secret; I could relate.
“I was… he made me happy,” Luke said, staring into the golden depths of his apple juice. “And he was into the same stuff I was into.”
“Another Dom,” I put together. Not to be ageist or anything, but younger Doms were usually inexperienced and got too lost in the power trip. They often neglected to communicate to their partners properly and ended up being abusers in the bedroom rather than actors in a play about pleasure.
Luke nodded solemnly. “Like, that’s the only thing he would do. You and I have been… no offense, but we’ve been pretty vanilla so far,” he said. “And this guy… he would only ever do extreme role play.”
“No offense taken,” I encouraged. “What do you mean by extreme role play?”
He took a sip of his apple juice, and I noticed that his hand was shaking. Then he closed his eyes and said, “me, tied up or bound, always. Him smacking me with a riding crop, or blindfolding me, or making me say things to him…”
For a moment I was a little surprised. That sounded like a regular BDSM relationship. It was on the more tame end of the things I’d done in the past. Was he going to be okay with the things I would try to do to him? Was this light BDSM stuff he was describing too much?
“Don’t get me wrong,” he admitted, watching me carefully, “it was all stuff that I loved doing.”
I relaxed at hearing we were on the same page.
“But then… then things got a little… weird,” he said, looking down.
“Weird how?” I asked, sitting at rapt attention.
“Well, we’d been seeing each other for a couple months, like I said. And then he started asking me to do more and more things I wasn’t comfortable with.”
My eyebrows furrowed. “Like what?”
“Like… he’d want to do things that I’d told him were a hard limit for me. It started as little comments in regular conversation, but then he started getting more and more obvious about it.”
I sat back and crossed my arms over my chest. Luke was being vague, but I still didn’t like where this is going.
“He really, really liked the idea of having me… locked up. That was his ultimate fantasy — to have me in a cage and forcing me to beg him for food or to use the bathroom and stuff. All part of the act.”
I raised my eyebrow. I knew that some Dominants liked that level of control, but it wasn’t my thing. Everything that Luke was telling me about this guy sounded… it sounded off.
“He kept hinting at doing that, and trying to do other stuff to me that I didn’t like. But I liked most of it… like ninety-five percent of what he did to me. So I didn’t really have it in me at the times he’d slip in some stuff I didn’t like.”
“Like what? I need to know… in case… you know,” I asked, keeping my voice down.
He looked me square in the eye and said, “Well, choking is one of them. That’s probably the most common one I don’t like. I told him that multiple times. We’d be in the middle of one of our sessions, and he would put his hands on the back of my neck, as if he was bracing himself. But then, he’d lean over and right when he was about to finish, he’d move his hands around to the front of my neck and squeeze.”
I gritted my teeth.
Luke looked away from me, his eyes cast down at his bottle of apple juice. “Afterwards, I asked him not to do that, that it made me uncomfortable. He said he got lost in the moment.”
My jaw ticked. I was getting really pissed off hearing about this guy. “That’s not okay.”
“No, it’s not!” Luke said, “And it kept happening again and again, this ‘getting lost in the moment.’ He used it as an excuse to do whatever he wanted to me.
There was a buzzing that was filling my ears. But I sensed there was more that Luke wanted to tell me. To my horror, I was right.
“He kept doing that more and more, and I was just… bending to his will I guess. Since I liked most of the stuff we did, I let it slide. But before long, we were doing things that were mostly what he wanted, and he wouldn’t listen to me. It’s… it’s hard to explain.”
“The frog in boiling water,” I muttered.
“Yeah, it was like that!” Luke nodded vigorously. “You don’t realize how far gone you are until you’re already there.”
There was silence that hung heavy in the air. I was trying to restrain myself from figuring out how to find this guy and punish him myself.
Luke exhaled slowly. “Then there was the whole thing about the cage.”
I inhaled sharply.
“He begged me for weeks to let him do it. Just once, he said. He kept nagging me over and over. ‘Just for ten minutes,’ he’d plead. ‘It’s so hot picturing you in there, needing me so much.’”
Luke bit his lip and stopped.
“Go on Luke, there’s nothing to be ashamed of,” I encouraged. “You’re safe here. You’re safe with me.”
He took a deep rattling breath, and I reached across the table and held his hand. Through touching him, I was trying to absorb his pain and give him strength.
He continued, “Because I was so… lost in the relationship, I would have agreed to do anything. I knew that I could only get the types of things I liked from this one guy. Or at least, that’s what he led me to believe. My world started to shrink when I was seeing him, and I’d lost touch with most of my friends.”
I shook my head, trying to keep the fury out of my eyes.
“So I did it. I got in the cage— a large dog crate, if only for ten minutes just to make him happy. He did seem
