Total pages in book: 101
Estimated words: 93482 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 467(@200wpm)___ 374(@250wpm)___ 312(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 93482 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 467(@200wpm)___ 374(@250wpm)___ 312(@300wpm)
I didn’t think it, but I missed it.
Who was I? That was the question that had been running over and over in my head for the last several hours. Thomas, for better or worse, had broken the gilded shackles off my wrists and I was now free to do whatever I wanted. But what was that?
Part of me screamed to go back to him. Whatever that looked like, be the mistress of a priest. It wasn’t like I didn’t love him, or that my body didn’t already belong to him. When we met, he had mentioned keeping me chained to his bed naked and ready for his use, and I’d be lying if I said my knees didn’t weaken at the thought. That was what he wanted from me. But was that what I wanted for myself?
No. I didn’t want to hide in the shadows.
I didn’t want to have to live some double life protecting these dark secrets. Mother had forced me to do that my entire life, even as a child using concealer to cover bruises or making up stories about me being clumsy, to hide her rage.
I could have stayed there, in the house I grew up in. Never going back to church but socializing in the same circles. Finding a nice husband who would take care of me and keep me in the lifestyle I wanted. But then I would be subject to his rules. Much the same as I would be subject to Thomas’s rules.
Finding a good husband, a good match that would support my father’s business, would be what my mother expected. That would have made her happy. Well, as close to happy as she ever got.
I wondered if that was what I owed her to do. No matter how poorly she’d treated me and abused me all my life, part of the blame for her death was on my head, so maybe that was how I redeemed myself. By doing what my mother would have wanted me to do. Being the daughter she tried to raise.
One glance back at the mirror and I knew that wasn’t possible, either. I could never bind myself to a man who couldn’t do the things to my body that Thomas did. Knowing what I knew now, knowing how amazing sex could be, how much I desired a man who could control me sexually the way he did, who could bend my will to his and take away the responsibility of deciding in the bedroom, the guilt, the ramifications… everything.
How did I go back?
How did I settle for a man who couldn’t take enough control that I could shut off my brain and just feel? The few friends I had who were in contract marriages have murmured about what it was like on the wedding night. What they told me in giggled whispers was nothing compared to what Thomas had done to me.
So what did I do? What did I want?
Tears burned from my eyes as I clawed at the dried wax on my chest, chipping it off bit by bit. I couldn’t have him unless it was in secret. I refused to hide behind lies. Just like I refused to be with any man who didn’t make me feel the way he did.
Maybe that was my answer.
Maybe for the first time in my life, I had a genuine opportunity to live it on my terms. I just had to figure out what those were.
More and more tears poured from my eyes as I ripped the wax from my body. It felt transformative, like I was removing the layers of other people’s expectations for my life. With each bit that was peeled off, there went another mask that had been shoved onto me by someone else. Another role I didn’t want to play, stripped from my skin.
I wouldn’t be an Upper East Side socialite.
I wouldn’t be the dirty secret of a sinful priest, hiding in the basement of a church.
No one was going to tell me who, or even if, I was going to marry. No one was going to dictate how I lived the rest of my life.
No one was going to decide for me anymore.
Finally, when my body was free from the wax, I stepped into a shower, running the water as hot as I could and scrubbed every inch of my skin. Picturing more and more of the expectations other people put on me, the assumptions they made about my future and my life—washed off. I scrubbed it all away.
My mother’s training, to be a well-behaved doormat that took a beating without complaint and then went to do whatever it was my mother wanted me to do. Gone.
I scrubbed off the training Father Manwarring gave me. The expectations for me not to make a sound while he punished me with his cock. The demands for me to be his good girl, his whore, to swallow whatever he gave me and take what little kernels of attention and affection he deigned to give me at any moment and never expecting more than that. Gone.