Make Me Cruel by Payne_Hall

Author’s Note: Okay, my stories are usually longer and I haven’t tried a short story yet. Feedback is always welcome for these, so feel free to let me know if the pacing seems skewed in places or, really, any other things that seem off :).I put this one under noncon, but there are also some elements of domination, like impact play and bondage. I hope you enjoy and have fun!

 

Sophie – The Cabin

Ethan had been my boyfriend for a few years and we had been talking about our potential engagement in increasing amounts for months now. The cabin got brought up when we were cuddled on our love seat together and he paused the Netflix show we were watching to kiss me, these long, slow romantic kisses. He only pulled back to stroke my hair and say, “You know my parents’ vacation house outside the city?”

I smiled, liking where this thought was going an awful lot after so many engagement conversations. “I’ve heard you talk about it.”

“It’s a little bit of a drive, but I’ll give you directions for the holiday weekend, so you won’t even have to miss any work or anything. I was thinking we should go there and get away. The nearest neighbor to that place is miles away and we’d have it to ourselves.”

I couldn’t keep from kissing him again for how thoughtful it was. He knew how much I hated missing work, so he’d waited for when I might not have to and it was a long holiday weekend so we’d have all kinds of time. But what was more important?

He was going to ask the question, that question. I just knew it. “I think that sounds like heaven.”

I tried to hide my excitement as best I could, but Ethan was my… I know people talk about being life mates or whatever and I can’t get behind that too much, but he was definitely the perfect fit for me. We met in my college classes, when I was an undergrad and he was my T.A., working on his Master’s degree as a financial analyst, while I was in his recitations for my Physics degree. And oh my God, I was hot for teacher from first sight. He had these eyes with this rare amber eye color that turned me on from the moment I met him. I had never seen eyes like Ethan’s. I could barely focus on his class content even though I looked for reasons to talk to him and it wasn’t just those eyes or his tanned skin or his dark, silky hair that looked like a dream to touch. Whenever I later found ways to run into him, he always talked back with me and was interested in the conversation. I figured out pretty damn quickly that he was a little into me, too.

It didn’t take long for us to date after that and we were the perfect couple. I started living in his apartment off campus quickly enough after I left his class, I introduced him to my parents who loved him, we started combining finances slowly when it became easier and more serious, we never fought, we loved all the same shows. Even better? Ethan was adventurous in bed, too, and he would talk with me about all of my fantasies, all of them, no matter how dark or strange. We would look for ways to turn some of those fantasies into something real together. When I told him my domination fantasies, he stroked his hand through my hair and kissed me with this horny hum. “Mm, let’s try it. We can start with a bad student who won’t stop eyefucking her instructor and needs a spanking.”

That’s exactly where we started. He pressed me over the bed and slapped my ass in these sharp, playful spanks, delighting to how aroused I got off of it. And he hadn’t played many domination games before, but we figured it out together. We got toys and we talked about all kinds of other fantasies to explore. Things weren’t always absolutely perfect, but we worked them out when they weren’t and it was wonderful.

I couldn’t wait to get off work for the holiday and go to the cabin. Couldn’t. Fucking. Wait. I wanted his last name more than almost anything.

————

“Oh, damn it, damn it, damn it.” I had been trying to leave work early to reach the cabin before Ethan did, so I could surprise him, but nothing went my way. Work had a couple of end things that took me longer than usual to wrap up and then traffic was awful. I had to get gas and then go home to change. I obsessed over how to style my hair for too long, then had to finish packing because I hadn’t finished the night before when I got too excited. I realized my perfect sundress was in the washer and needed to be dried still, then had to wait for that.

It was dark before I managed to leave for the cabin, since the days were getting shorter, and I wasn’t on time to be early. I was on time for when he expected me there, though, so I guessed it wasn’t too bad. The drive there was soothing, too, and I had put on my favorite pair of shorts and a t-shirt. The weather where I lived turned beautiful when summer started to fade, so that it was the perfect shorts and sweatshirt weather and that night I didn’t even need the sweatshirt. I drove with the window down and enjoyed the scenery. Ethan’s parents’ getaway cabin was set out in this forested place that was so peaceful. There really was nothing around it for miles, except for the trees, so much so that you had to drive 20 minutes to get groceries or food. I had to smile when I got there and then broke into an outright grin when I realized Ethan’s car wasn’t there yet. It wasn’t unusual that he got held up late at his own job. We’d actually even been ready for that, which was how I ended up with a copy of the key to the cabin so, even though I hadn’t been on time to surprise him, I felt a burst of joy that I would still get to.

The place was gorgeous, something out of a fairytale, and I couldn’t stop from skipping when I got out of the car. I even left my suitcase in for the time because I was that excited to see the inside. It was set against a background of trees and it was a decent sized cabin, actually. It had two stories with a high ceiling living room, from Ethan’s de***********ions, and he’d laughingly said his family had put more time into their vacation spot than their house. To make it even more dreamy, a garden pathway led to the front door. I stopped when I stepped onto the porch, though, because the door was cracked.

My excitement before had been a calmer form, the kind you got for romance. It was the type that made me eager, but my heart wasn’t racing or anything. When I saw the door like that, it changed to the adrenaline pulse kind of excitement, a far darker, more sinister kind that was tinged with fear.

Ethan and I talked about every kind of fantasy we had, every single one, after a while and eventually he had gotten me to tell him about one in particular that I hadn’t told to anyone else because I’d always been terrified they would judge me or that I might get my wish. He hadn’t judged me, though. He had started to play games with me based around it and we had been playing all kinds of them for months, ones that got more elaborate the more we toyed with the idea. Like the domination thing, this one hadn’t started off as something you’d read in a story, but we definitely worked to those stories. After we got more intense with these games, I had started to think of the everyday Ethan as the good Ethan.

But then there was the other Ethan that I got to see more and more with the harder we got and I thought of this fantasy version of him as the bad one, the really evil Ethan, even worse than the domination one. Sparks of thrill made my wrists tingle and I could hear my heart in my ears. I had to take a deep breath and make myself press the door open, had to force every step because I wasn’t exactly sure what was coming, but I had some ideas that made me shake in no small amount of fear.

I had about a minute of light to take in the insane scene in front of me. Black strips of sheeting plastic had been hung from wires crisscrossing the wall, forming something like a loose nightmare maze that I was pretty sure had no exit. To make it even more disorienting, it covered the top of the wires to black out the ceiling, and that’s what all of this was really about, I was fairly sure. The disorientation.

Even if you know what’s coming, it’s somehow worse the more you’ve played these games, at least for me and my discovery. There’s a mindset that you start to fall into, in order to play out the fantasy role, and that mindset gets easier the more you practice it. The disorientation was all I needed for my heart to thunder with that surreal, pulsating terror you get from flight or fight response. It was so much worse that flight was obviously an option with this.

And then the lights cut off, replaced by strobe lights, and the thrash metal started from surround sound, loud enough to make me yelp and to increase my sensory confusion. The terror kicked into something I hadn’t imagined I could ever feel. For a moment, I couldn’t move from it, from how totally stunning it was. It was in the details, things like suddenly realizing I was out in the middle of fucking nowhere, where it was romantic as all hell. And where no one would hear me scream. It was in the buildup of having already played out fantasies like it, of knowing what was coming and how dark we could be sometimes because Ethan and I weren’t afraid to get depraved like that. It somehow made it even worse, made my breath shorten to pants, made my hands curl into half fists that I knew wouldn’t do me any good because I could never keep from running. It was one thing about this fantasy that I had never expected, how it only got more frightening and better the more you played around with it. When I had first confessed it to him, I had thought that the fright of shock would be the height of how bad it could be. It wasn’t.

I had that one minute to think through all of that in an adrenaline fueled rush, to feel so afraid that my body seemed numb and nothing seemed like reality. My body was taut and I realized my knees were weak in a way that romance couldn’t compare to. Then the door slammed shut behind me and I screamed, jolting forward so that a hand just barely brushed my shoulder in a quick, violent rush. Flight or fight? That was laughable.