Sandy drew her hands back so that her fists were jammed hard into the mattress by her shoulders. She grunted with Mickey’s movement, and with other things he had no knowledge of, and at the end she was panting and gasping in the old familiar way, excited. Mickey raised up to grip her ass in his hands, rubbing the deepening redness with the balls of his thumbs, and he came into her hard, spurting heat and life and all the rest. She cried out, not with her own orgasm, but with his.
When it was over, he had forgiven her, even though she didn’t know it. He felt more tender and protective of her than he had ever felt before. And oddly, he felt strong. It was like they had been on a trip together, and then they had arrived, and now they could begin again on another trip. It was a deeply cathartic sensation, one that Mickey was suspicious of, but at the same time grateful to feel.
“Next time, I want to see your face,” he said, looking down into her eyes.
“All right,” she said, her first words since kneeling on the bed.
He kissed her, and it was very gentle and tender between them. “I love you, too,” he said to her, and meant it.
Chapter Twenty One
“I know you’re uncomfortable in public without a bra,” Mickey said in the morning. “Why don’t you start wearing them again?”
“Because you said not to,” she said in a low voice, and it was more syllables than she had strung together since the alarm went off. It was getting to be a very quiet kind of morning.
Sandy had a tendency to stand those emotional barriers up, because she got hurt easily, and Mickey had hurt her. Not emotionally, but physically, and there was a scant difference between one and the other in the aftermath of the hairbrush experience, as he thought of it. He wondered if his solicitude was traceable to guilt.
“I threw them away like you told me,” she said, as if talking about bad eggs from the refrigerator. “The trash man came yesterday. They’re all gone.”
“I’ll get you some more, and I’m going to take the two slips back, too.”
“Alright,” she said in a dead tone. “Whatever you want.”
She was stiff and very sore, and the bruises on her backside were beginning to darken and spread. The dark spots he had noticed while spanking her had each and every one swollen to the surface into blisters. Two of them leaked a thin dribble of body fluid and blood. She stood still with her lips compressed into a knife slit as he applied Band-Aids in six places on one side, and four on the other.
Mickey looked at her and then at his watch. Sandy had her back to the mirror, twisting to see the bandages. The two that had bled were already dark stained in the middle, and one on the other side showed spotting.
“You’d better stay home today,” he said.
“I’ll be alright.” She sighed. “Maybe if I wear a dark skirt...”
“You’re thinking you might bleed through the white ones?”
“Not if,” she said.
“I’m calling in for you.”
“But...”
“No argument. You’re staying home. I’ll take Cindy this morning, and I have that appointment at ten. You go back to bed.”
“Alright,” she said, resistance collapsing.
Mickey got Cindy ready and they went to kiss Mommy goodbye and left for school. He sat alone in the donut shop and drank his coffee and ate two old-fashioned donuts, thinking about things. He was very tired, having spent half the night poking around on the computer, trying to find things to help him understand what had happened with Sandy, and with him.
He ended up where he always ended up, on the BDSM websites, where his fantasies were played out in living color. Oddly, that had not excited him as it had once done. Eventually, he started keying in word combinations, and hit something interesting under ‘BDSM Lifestyle’. A lot of somethings interesting, in fact.
One particularly eloquent dominant had posted a list of things common to a submissive personality. Sixteen items, from a childlike persona, to the assumption of guilt, to a willingness, even a need, to follow aggressive or dominant behavior. Sixteen items, and Sandy qualified for every one of them. Not some, or even most. But every single one.
Mickey had never thought of Sandy like that. Oh, he’d sensed it, and responded to it by falling in love with her, not realizing at the time that it was the thing she needed most, the validation provided by someone else. What he had not realized was that all the little quirks and foibles were explainable. And he thought that she might really be a masochist. A real one. A person who finds pleasure in sexual pain.
He’d finally cleared the history files on their computer and slept until six, when Sandy’s absence in the bed woke him up. He assumed at first that she was in the bathroom, but she wasn’t. She was on the treadmill, striding along with a grim set to her face. She’d put her walking shoes on over the fishnet stockings, and had already sweated through the Basque. Her backside was livid with blackening bruises, but she was marching along as if she didn’t have another thing in the world to do or think about.
Eating his morning donuts, it occurred to Mickey that he must be pretty stupid not to have seen it coming. He had a crush on her when they were twelve, and never really got over it. He still had a crush on her a dozen years later. And, damn it, he
knew
what she was like. The problem was that he had not learned from it.
When he thought about it, really thought about it, Sandy sneaking out to see Linus Davidson or whoever was not only rooted not in Linus’s weasel ways, but also in Sandy’s need for approval and the desire to please. Sadly, that came right home to roost. If Mickey had been doing his job, she would not have had to go to someone else.
Linus had said, “You ain’t done much of a job so far,” and laughed when he said it. And he’d been right. Mickey had spent most of his life taking care of Mickey, and giving Sandy and the baby and their future whatever was left.
He was ashamed of himself. It was disgusting, what an asshole he had been. How selfish and short sighted he had been. Hell, she had
told
him, flat out, talking about that self-defeating personality disorder thing that she had struggled with. Sandy knew, why the hell didn’t Mickey?
Without arguing the details, it was his own damned fault. He should have paid attention. And now, in spite of playing around for two weeks, they were stuck in a lie that threatened their entire marriage. Christ, how could he have been so blind?
Driving to the airport through nine-thirty traffic, Mickey wondered why he didn’t worry about everything like that disorder Sandy talked about. That was easy. There was no disorder. There was him, and there was Sandy, and that was it. She wasn’t sick or crazy. She was what she was, and he could choose to deal with it, or not. Like a flash, he saw the deep fright in her eyes. Of course! She was afraid that he would choose the ‘not’ option, and leave her. She was afraid that he would be disgusted with
her
, maybe as disgusted as she was sometimes with herself.
In truth, Mickey adored her, and always had. He could never feel that way about Sandy. But what he
could
do was to try to understand her, and to treat her with the respect she deserved.
“And just how the fuck do I do that?” he asked himself aloud, and knew the answer even as he spoke.
Salt and pepper, it turned out, was a reference to the skin color of John Willis’s security people. One black, one white. They did not introduce themselves, but were well dressed and fit looking. They took Mickey out to a beautiful little business jet on the tarmac and climbed aboard for privacy. It was the most ridiculously luxurious airplane that Mickey had ever seen.
“We know this is uncomfortable, Mr. McCord,” the white guy said.
He had an old fashioned flat top, with white sidewalls on the side like the military, and had a sympathetic face. The black guy was painfully handsome, and his eyes glittered like deep brown jewels. He said nothing.
“It’s okay,” Mickey said. “I’ve had a little time to deal with it.”
“Call me Teeter,” the guy said.
“Mickey.” They shook hands.
“Do you mind showing me what you have? Our...patron, told us that you took some things from the perpetrator.”
A cop then, or an ex-cop, Mickey thought. No one else said perpetrator. He unzipped the little shoulder bag and passed it over without looking at the contents. Teeter took out the sheaf of photographs and flipped briefly through them, looked at the camera data storage cards and the single memory stick, and then powered the Nikon up and ran through its memory, as well.
“I see,” he said thoughtfully, and then waved a hand toward the other man. “We’re at a sort of impasse here, Mickey. My friend says we should just go over and take your man down, hard.” He smiled. “Harder than you did. Do you understand? But I want to do something even meaner to him, and leave him around to suffer for his sins.”
“Loose ends are the problem,” the handsome black man said then, the first time he had spoken. “No blackmailer has just one victim to squeeze, and they don’t go away just because they have a broken leg.”
“That’s what I figure,” Mickey said.
“I have a loose plan,” Teeter said. “We’ll plant some things that this clown won’t be able to explain. Tip the police off, and let them deal with him.” He looked at Mickey. “You understand, this guy will go to jail? He’ll have a label on him for the rest of his life. And they will watch him. They always do.”
“What sort of label?” Mickey asked.
The black man shrugged. “Don’t know yet,” he said. “Sexual predator. Blackmailer. Child molester. Maybe all three. You got a problem with that?”
“Pretty severe,” Mickey said.
“That’s the idea,” Teeter said calmly. “He’s an unpleasant son of a bitch, Mickey. You can’t treat them nicely. There’s just no way to explain the error of their ways to people like that in any meaningful way.”
“He fucks people, they got to fuck him back,” the black man said. “Be easier we just sign him off, but that’s not what the boss wants.”
The two security men looked at each other, and some sort of understanding passed between them. The black man reached into an inner pocket of his tailored coat and pulled out an envelope. He passed it to Mickey.
“Fifty-two hundred out of the man’s safe,” he said. “Figure you deserve a reward for dropping the dime on this dick weed.”
“I don’t want his money.”
The man shrugged. “Buy your wife something nice,” he said. “Put it in a college fund. Whatever. You don’t take it, it goes to waste.”
“Meaning?”
“Mr. Davidson won’t need money where he’s going,” the black man said.
The man called Teeter zipped Mickey’s nylon bag closed and passed it back. He looked sharply at Mickey and said, “You’re out of this now, Mr. McCord. You need to understand that.”
“I get it,” Mickey said.
Mickey looked back at them, not knowing what to say. The black man took a breath and straightened in his sleep. “Be time to go, Teet,” he said. The man called Teeter nodded and motioned to the doorway. The black man stayed on board while Mickey and Teeter stepped back into the rising morning heat.
“There might be some fallout,” Teeter said, putting a hand on Mickey’s arm. “We’ll check some things, the guy’s house, maybe a safe deposit box. It’s hard to say. The problem is that this kind of thing has a tendency to get around.” He nodded to the bag slung over Mickey’s shoulders. “Your wife doesn’t know, does she?” he asked gently.
“No.”
Teeter looked sympathetic again and said, “If we’re lucky, then what you have there is all there’ll be as far as your wife is concerned. I’ll try to make sure anything else disappears when we...ah...do what we do. But just in case, you might want to think about getting Mrs. McCord ready, just in case.”
Mickey sighed. “I know,” he said.
Teeter gave him a sharp look. “Are you okay with this, Mr. McCord? I don’t want to hear you went and lost your temper with her. Lot of people hurt already, and more coming, maybe. Don’t make it worse.”
“I won’t,” Mickey said. “She’s the light of my life.”
“Good to have a beacon like that,” Teeter said, and smiled. “Sometimes this kind of thing eats at a man. Don’t let it, that’s what I’m saying.”
“Woke me up, is what it did,” Mickey said. “We’ll be okay, me and my girl. I’m sure of that.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Teeter said, and shook his hand.
Chapter Twenty Two
Mickey left the airport and headed home, ignoring the almost overwhelming urge to stop at the hospital to see Linus Davidson. There was too much conflict to get near the man, and he knew it. What had happened between Sandy and Linus was over. Maybe she even started it. But what Davidson had done afterwards to someone like her was unconscionable. He’d taken advantage in a potent and unforgivable way.
Driving up the turnpike, Mickey had a clear image of strangling Davidson with his own intravenous tubing. It would feel good, maybe. He didn’t want the man dead, but he wanted to kill him, which made for some pretty tough choices. Better to just stay clear and see what the two very tough looking boys from John Willis did. Better to get on with life.
Sandy was asleep when he got home. He got her some Tylenol, and woke her to take it, and then put ice in two zip lock bags and took a towel to the bedroom. She rolled on her stomach when he told her to, and he spread the towel across her backside and lay the ice gently onto her.
“It not too bad,” she said into the pillow.
“The ice will help,” he said. “You need to rest. Put a pillow under your hips to elevate the area. Here, I’ll help.”
She groaned, pushing herself up. He arranged two bed pillows so that she lay across them, and then rearranged the ice packs.
“Thank you,” she said, whispery voiced.
He kissed the back of her neck. “I’ll be back,” he said. “Fifteen minutes is about all you need, then off for fifteen, and so on. It’s going to be a long day. Maybe two days.”
“I’m alright,” she said quietly. “I want you to know, Mickey. I really am alright.”
“I know.” He kissed her again between the shoulder blades and covered her naked body with a sheet. “We need to talk,” he said. “Not now, but soon.”