Safeword: Mayday by Candace Blevins
Chapter 3
Marcus had to work hard to keep his jaw from dropping when Heather walked out of the changing room. Kyle’s girlfriend could be sporty, could be ultra-casual, could do the attractive grunge thing, or she could be elegant. Professionally, he had to look at every aspect of a patient, and noticing differences in hair, makeup, and clothing styles could tell him a lot about someone’s present state of mind. The habit had followed him into his personal sphere, and he hadn’t done anything to curtail it.
Today, she’d chosen casual elegance. Her four-foot ten-inch, eighty-five-pound frame looked five foot seven as her stylishly cut pants moved and swung with her stride. Of course, boots with an impossibly tall heel didn’t hurt the effect. Kyle had a thing for super-high heels, and Marcus had worried she fed his foot fetish and wasn’t as perfect as his friend described until he’d spent some time around the two of them together.
Her hair was ultra-short in the back — only a few millimeters to a quarter inch — but swung down to her jaw in the front. She usually parted it on the side so it swung nonchalantly elegant around her face, but today she’d done something so it swooped across her forehead, and looked like she’d stepped off the pages of Vogue or Cosmo. She’d also applied her makeup to accentuate her Asian features, and she seemed a completely different person than the one who’d just sailed him through the air on the wings of eagles.
Marcus wondered if she’d worked her makeup and hair this way as a form of mask, to make their talk easier.
He stood and walked to open the outer door for her, and told her, “You look stunning. I brought clothes to change into, but I’m underdressed next to you.”
She snorted. “Right. Like anyone can be underdressed next to you. You’re always perfectly put together. Perfect creases, clean shoes, even today when I told you to dress in jeans, you showed up in perfectly pressed army fatigues. Do you even own a pair of jeans?”
Marcus started to comment on how much attention she was giving his clothes, but stopped before saying anything because he didn’t want to create even a mild confrontation. He wanted to put her at ease, so he’d answer her question honestly and forthright. “I have jeans, but they’re old and no longer in fashion, and I don’t like the way the currently fashionable jeans fit.” He shrugged. “When the style returns to something that suits me, I may consider wearing them again.”
She clicked the remote to unlock the doors on her bright yellow Xterra and laughed at him, “You’re one of a kind. Most people who enjoy their first hang-gliding experience as much as you just did are comfortable being casual.” She shook her head. “You’re a contradiction — you dress like an uptight yuppie but you still know how to let go and have fun.”
Marcus decided it was time to change the subject. “Where would you like to eat?”
She opened her driver side door and waited until he’d opened the passenger door to talk through the vehicle, “Since you insist on paying, shouldn’t it be your choice?”
“How about The Flying Squirrel? I’ll call ahead and make sure we can get one of the privacy booths, so our conversation won’t be overheard.”
* * * *
Heather’s mouth watered at the mention of The Flying Squirrel, but she just said, “Works for me.”
Marcus made the phone call and it sounded like he knew the person he was talking to. When he disconnected, she asked, “I take it you eat there a lot?”
Marcus looked away a second and then back, and when he finally answered, his voice was soft. “Before Mira died, when she wasn’t eating much, there were a few meals I could get there that I could convince her to eat. I’d call and ask what they could put together, and then go pick it up a couple of times a week towards the end. They knew what she liked, and were great at coming up with dishes she could digest.”
Heather blinked back tears as they formed. “We can go somewhere else. I don’t want you to go somewhere with bad memories.”
Marcus shook his head. “She’s been gone three years. I have so many happy memories with her, and I was so blessed to be in her life for the time I was allowed. If I couldn’t go anywhere we’d gone together, I’d have to leave Chattanooga.”
“You haven’t had a serious relationship with anyone since she died, have you?”
“I’ve had...” He breathed out. “Look, I promise to answer your question later. It’ll take a lot of explaining, and you aren’t going to have the vocabulary to understand some of it until I’ve gone over the other things we need to talk about. If you don’t feel I’ve answered your question by the end of our evening, please ask me again. What you need to know now, before we get to the fun details, is that I’ve put myself through all the grief counseling and other therapy I’d require of a patient who’d lost a spouse to cancer. If and when I find the woman of my dreams, I’m not going to keep her at arm’s length because life and the fates royally fucked me and killed Mira. Life is for living, not for playing it safe.”
* * * *
“Before we get started,” Marcus said as they shared an appetizer, “I’d like you to tell me your understanding of how your sensory issues affect your life.”
“You’re a psychiatrist — you’re supposed to understand this stuff. Why do I have to talk about it?” Heather’s voice sounded confrontational and defensive even to her own ears. Marcus was trying to help and she needed to do better, but he’d hit kind of a sore spot right off the bat. Too many therapists and guidance counselors who’d wanted to help, and too many who hadn’t had a clue.
“I want us to find a common vocabulary before I start. If you explain it to me, I can use your terminology. Also, if there’s something particular to your situation I’m not aware of, it’ll help me structure my recommendations to your specific needs. I have experience helping people enjoy sex — even people with severe sensory issues — but I need to understand you a little better before we get to that part of the conversation.”
Heather took a deep breath and dove in. “I was one month shy of my second birthday when my parents adopted me from a horrible little orphanage in Korea. I weighed sixteen pounds, and my mom says I was skin and bones. The medical information from my first doctor visit once they got me home says I was horribly malnourished.”
“You’ve seen it?” Marcus asked.
“Yeah. Mom kept records of everything, so she could explain it when I was old enough to understand.”
Marcus nodded for her to continue, so she kept going. “The only word I seemed to understand was the Korean word for no. I had zero language development, and I couldn’t sit up without being supported. I didn’t cry, I didn’t laugh, I didn’t smile. A few weeks after they adopted me, my hand got caught in a door and I didn’t react. At the time, they didn’t know whether I didn’t feel pain or just didn’t react to it, but my mom jumped into action to find out and try to fix it.”
She shrugged and looked at her plate while she recounted the worst of it. “From what I’ve been told, I’d been living with what was probably a long-term staph infection on my calf for no telling how long, and I had lots of nasty intestinal parasites. Food was in short supply and I was likely constantly hungry. There was no air conditioning or heat, meaning I was pretty much always hot in the summer and freezing in the winter.”
She looked up and met his gaze to see how he was taking it, and saw confidence in his eyes. He could handle whatever she told him without giving her pity, without seeing her as the poor little orphan.
“I appreciate you opening up, and I want to hear however much you’re comfortable telling me.”
He’d wanted to know how her sensory issues affect her life now, and while he likely understood what created the problem, she still needed to go through it before she could talk about what it did to her.
“Apparently, babies in this kind of environment often turn off their senses to keep from hurting and being hungry and cold and everything else. With no positive sensory input at all, I turned my senses way down to keep from feeling anything. Better to feel nothing at all than to be miserable. It’s a coping mechanism. Unfortunately, I was there long enough, my brain was hardwired that way. It could be altered a little, but couldn’t be rewired as if it never happened. So, I don’t feel physical pain or pleasure, it’s just the way I am.”
She stopped to take a breath and to figure out what else he needed to know. “Pain is supposed to tell you to take your hand off a hot stove, or to stop running before you do further damage if you break a small bone in your ankle, or to warn when you’re getting an infection. My parents had to work with me to teach me not to do things that can cause me harm — like jumping off a high retaining wall because it’s fun. The landing didn’t hurt, never mind I broke an ankle.”
“Have you ever felt pain?”
“I feel muscle pain sometimes, and I at least sense when something’s burning me, which makes me pull away to keep from getting burned worse. It doesn’t really hurt, but I know how it feels. I broke my arm at seventeen — a compound fracture with the bone sticking through the skin, and that’s the first time I think I ever felt actual pain. It was fascinating.” She grimaced. “For about five minutes, then I wanted it to stop.”
“How old were you when you jumped off the retaining wall? When did you learn how to give yourself sensory input?”
“Since my everyday life is basically a state of sensory deprivation, I was labeled a “sensory seeker” at a young age. My mom learned if she didn’t provide sensory input for me, I’d find it myself, and she rarely liked the things I did on my own. Once, I climbed on the roof to practice back handsprings. Another time, I walked the top of the neighbor’s fence like it was a tightrope, but it was a wooden fence and I got a million splinters in my feet. They didn’t hurt, but a bunch of them got infected and it ended up being a really big deal with multiple trips to the doctor. Apparently, until I was about eight, if I didn’t get enough sensory input, I’d pitch these two-or-three-hour-long screaming fits. She said it was like I was possessed or something, and there was no way to talk to the me inside my body.”
“I know about the gymnastics and martial arts classes your parents put you in. What else did you do?”
“I did something after school almost every day. I discovered a climbing wall at a friend’s birthday party when I was seven, and I begged my parents to take me back. Eventually they bought a membership so I could go a few times a week, and by the time I was twelve, I was helping the instructors teach in exchange for membership fees. I guess having a twelve-year-old girl the size of a six-year-old climbing faster than the adult student was an excellent motivational tool. I took up hang-gliding and the other extreme sports after I was eighteen.”
“How does this affect your life now? What do you do to compensate?”
“I fly planes and helicopters, I scale the sides of steep mountains, I kayak class four and five rapids, and have even challenged a class six and lived to tell the tale. I skydive and hang-glide. I have horses, and I train several for barrel racing, and one in particular for stadium jumping. A few people I hike and mountain climb with are aware of my issues enough they can watch out for me and let me know if I’ve hurt myself and don’t realize it. I cut my leg open on a sharp rock once and didn’t know it.” She shrugged. “Gave myself nine stitches and kept climbing.”
She paused to take a sip of water, and Marcus said, “Thank you, that was perfect. I won’t ask a lot of questions about your sexual history. I understand from Kyle that you say you’ve never had an orgasm, and you’ve been with enough people that if you were going to have one by normal means, you probably would’ve by now. Also, Kyle knows what he’s doing, so I don’t think it’s a matter of only having bad or inexperienced partners — but never fear, I have some suggestions.”
She tilted her head. “How do you know Kyle knows what he’s doing?”
“Because Kyle and I once shared a girlfriend. I’ve seen his technique up close.”
Heather reached for her water again as she digested that bit of information. Marcus had said it so calmly, like it was nothing, but this was a big deal, wasn’t it? She’d never enjoyed putting up with sex from one person at a time, let alone two — but the logistics of two men and one woman piqued her curiosity.
“Exactly how would that work? Sharing a girlfriend at the same time.”
Marcus lifted a brow, and if Heather didn’t know better, she’d swear he knew the idea intrigued her. “So many ways. The girl can give a blowjob to one partner while taking it doggy style from the other partner, for instance.”
Heather shook her head and crossed her legs. “And you think this would help me enjoy sex? I can’t enjoy sex from one partner, I don’t think having two people do two things I don’t like is going to help.”
“Here’s the thing,” Marcus looked serious and seemed to pause to make sure she was listening. “You see sex as a distasteful job now — something you must do to keep a boyfriend from calling you frigid and breaking up with you. That’s not your fault, but it means you may need to be given pleasurable sensations you don’t necessarily equate to sex. Once we find something that works, we’ll build on it until you can eventually enjoy genital stimulation.”
He seemed to want her to respond, but she was speechless. He said he knew what he was talking about, but she couldn’t imagine what it might entail.
“Look,” he said, as if he realized she didn’t understand. “You don’t enjoy the things most people do for fun. The activities you do for fun are considered extreme by most of society. You take kayaks over waterfalls. You jump out of perfectly good airplanes. You climbed Mount Everest, for goodness sakes! The things most of society deem fun are boring to you, so why should your sex life be any different? You’ve been trying to have normal sex and thought it boring. I think it’s time you tried extreme sex.”
That actually made sense, but what would extreme sex involve? And why was Marcus telling her this instead of Kyle?
“The weather wouldn’t let me get all the way to the top of Everest, so I can’t really say I’ve climbed Everest. Yet. Do you want to show me what extreme sex is, or do you want to show Kyle how to do this? Why aren’t Kyle and I having this conversation?”
He brought his hands together and laced his fingers, touched his pointer fingers together, seemed to realize what he was doing, and placed his hands back on the table.
He gave off an aura of calm. Marcus was always in control, as if he considered every move he made, every word he uttered.
“The simple answer is that I’m a lot more experienced with this than Kyle. The more complicated answer is...” he paused, looked around, and his warm, serious, chocolate brown eyes once again met her gaze. “Are you familiar with the term BDSM?”
“You mean like whips and chains?”
“It can mean that, but doesn’t have to. BDSM is a catch-all phrase that includes S&M, sadism and masochism, but also includes a whole host of other things. I’m an experienced Top, and have expertise in areas Kyle does not. Once we figure out what works for you, he’ll learn it and will enjoy doing it because it’ll bring you pleasure and he loves you — but I’ll be the one to figure out what works.”
Heather shook her head and Marcus assured her, “Kyle will be there as we figure out what sensations work for you, but it’ll go faster and easier if I’m the one giving you the sensations, at least at first. It might take Kyle twenty sessions to figure out what I hope to do in one or two.” He sighed. “From what Kyle has said, he thinks you’re losing patience with his attempts. If you like, we can start out with a ground rule that I never touch you with my hands or my body directly. I’ll only use tools and implements, while Kyle handles all skin-on-skin interaction. I’d prefer to be able to use my hands while Kyle does any kissing or caressing, but if you’re more comfortable with me only using tools, we can make it happen. Top priority is your comfort level.”
Heather acknowledged to herself his arguments made sense, but... “And Kyle’s comfortable with this?”
“Kyle is madly in love with you, and he’s confident I can help. He says you get distressed when he brings it up, and he hates seeing you upset when he tries and fails. He wants to help, but he’s a pansy-assed plastic surgeon and doesn’t understand sensory issues, though he’s learning.” Marcus shook his head. “Plus, he isn’t a Top. He and I’ve been friends a long time and we can talk about anything. I want you to understand he wouldn’t talk about this with just anyone.”
Heather gave a small nod. “He told me he’d be talking to you. He said you’re his best friend and he could talk to you about everything, but he didn’t want me to feel betrayed, so he told me ahead of time. Otherwise, I’d have blown a gasket on you at the airfield.”
“Would you be willing to let me try some different sensations on you? With Kyle present, of course.”
“What kind of sensations?” She’d never felt an actual whip — could he hurt her and make her feel it? Would she want him to try? The idea made her a little warm, and she wasn’t sure why.
“I’ve come up with a bit of a short cut to figuring that out. I have a twenty-minute video I want you to watch. Kyle and I will hook you up to something similar to an EKG machine, so I can see your physiological reactions to the things you’re seeing on the screen, which will give me an idea of where to start. We’ll have to do it at my office, but we can do the rest at your place, or mine, or Kyle’s. Wherever you want.”
“What’s on the video?”
“People doing different extreme things to each other.”
“Like?”
“If I tell you, it’ll change your physiological response when you watch the video.”
She sighed. “Can I watch the video and talk to Kyle, and then decide about your involvement?”
“You may back out at any time. You aren’t in any way obligated to start or continue with anything. If we do this, I want to teach you and Kyle how to give your body pleasurable sensations. They may look like painful sensations to someone on the outside, but all that matters is how they translate in your brain. We’ll keep safety paramount, and the goal will be sensation without injury. I saw how safety-conscious you were with the hang-gliding stuff — I’ll be just as safe with this.”
“Nothing sex related has the danger potential of hang-gliding.”
He chuckled. “Hang-gliding and mountain climbing appear crazy to most of our society, but you do them safely, so they aren’t crazy. I want to teach you to look at sex the same way. It can be an adventure.”
She shook her head. “Isn’t this more the realm of, I don’t know, a psychologist instead of a psychiatrist? Or maybe a sex therapist? I thought you deal with the physical problems of the brain more than the mental problems.”
“That’s not exactly right. I can prescribe medication where a psychologist or a therapist cannot, and I can deal with physical issues where they normally don’t, but I can also deal with everything else. However, I don’t really do this — the sex stuff — as part of my practice. I’m the director of a private mental health institution and spend two to three partial days a week overseeing those patients, and sex related things almost never crop up there. Even in my regular office appointments, it’s exceedingly rare for a patient to venture off into alternative sex practices.”
He leaned forward, his gaze penetrative, as if his next words might sink into her psyche. “Our relationship, mine and yours, is not a doctor-patient relationship. I won’t be treating you, and you shouldn’t consider me your psychiatrist. I’m what’s known as a Top or a Dom in BDSM circles, and I’m helping my friend show you the ropes. My profession will help because I’m familiar with sensory processing disorder, but…” He sat up, ran a hand through his hair, and shrugged. “I’ll need to explain more of the BDSM basics before we get started, but you have enough to think about right now without adding to it.”
Heather looked at her watch — almost three o’clock. She took another bite and thought things over. Kyle’s last patient appointment was at one today, so she should be able to get him on the phone. She pulled her cellphone out of her purse and called him.
Marcus smiled when he saw what she was doing, and she gave him a lopsided smile in return.
Kyle answered on the first ring. “Hey babe, I take it you and Marcus are both still alive and well?”
“Yes, we’re both safe. Sorry, I should’ve let you know before now.” She usually texted him when she was back on solid ground and not going back up, but Marcus had messed with her usual routine, and she’d forgotten. “He had a blast and wants to learn to go solo now, but you probably know that’s not why I’m calling.”
“It’s okay, he texted me while you were breaking everything down. I’m hoping you aren’t too pissed at me. I wanted to be there for your conversation, but Marcus said this would go better with just the two of you. He was worried you’d feel as if we were ganging up on you if we tried to explain it together.”
Heather sighed. “He was probably right, but this is weird, isn’t it?”
“So is jumping out of perfectly good airplanes, but you do that all the time.”
“If I do this, I’ll be doing it for us — because I love you and I want to make this work.”
“If that’s what it takes to get you started then that’s fine, but at some point you’ll need to be doing it for you, too. If it doesn’t switch over to your pleasure, something you want to do, then we’ll need to step back and take a look at things. I don’t want this to be about me. I want to make you fly, and if we need Marcus to help us make that happen, I’m not too proud to ask for help.”
She was glad they were seated a good ways from other patrons, but she still kept her voice low. “He says the two of you once shared a girlfriend?”
“It was an unusual situation, but it worked out great for all three of us. I’ll explain it to you from beginning to end if you want, and I’ll answer any questions you may have.”
“Yeah, I have questions, but they can wait. Where are you now? Are you in the middle of something?”
“I’m still at the office, taking care of some paperwork, and then I have an article to read about a new way to handle a procedure. Nothing I can’t break away from. Why?”
“Marcus has a video he wants me to watch. I want to see you, talk to you, first.”
“Tell me where and when, and I’m there.”
Heather looked up at Marcus as she told Kyle, “He wants me to watch the video at his office. If I call you as we’re leaving here, can you meet us there?”