At Risk

With Daniel, she’d taken a hell of a risk. He was her first, and he’d been unhappy, to say the least, at his discovery of Diane’s little secret. They’d been involved in some hot and heavy petting. His mouth had been all over hers, and he’d licked her face, her ear, her neck. He’d given her a hickey, and he’d caressed and licked and sucked her nipples. Then, his right hand had strayed downward, over her firm, taut tummy, through the downy fuzz of her blonde pubes, and found her erect penis and the small, tight clump of her balls. His hand had jerked away as if it had encountered a red-hot flame, his eyes widening, his mouth gaping, and his whole contorted face expressing shock, followed by outrage.

He’d cursed her, calling her every nasty name he could think of, and hit her twice, hard, in the face. One blow had blackened an eye; the other had split a lip. “You’re lucky I don’t kill you, you freaky bitch!” he’d thundered as Diane lay weeping on her bed. He grabbed his clothes, almost jumped into his pants, threw on his shirt, and, barefoot, stalked from her bedroom. A few moments later, she heard her front door slam, and he was gone.

Diane had been hurt, physically and emotionally. Her eye and lip swelled, becoming sore, and, she would discover, when she looked in the mirror later, that she was quite a sight. She also felt betrayed and abandoned, humiliated and abused. On a deeper, more satisfying level, however, she was also turned on. She liked the pain that throbbed in her eye and lip. She liked feeling betrayed, abandoned, humiliated, and abused. Most of all, she liked the shock and revulsion and rage she’d seen on Daniel’s contorted face immediately upon his discovery of her secret.

At first, it had bothered Diane that she enjoyed such feelings, because she knew that the enjoyment of pain and suffering, like the enjoyment of feeling victimized, wasn’t normal. She knew that such things marked her as a masochist, just as her enjoyment of the shock and disbelief that she inflicted on men by withholding her secret identified a sadistic streak within her character.