Dialect by ThePsychoVamp

by TFN Tied Up In You

Two months after the night when everything fell apart, Jasper finds a distressed Edward on his doorstep, looking for release—or, more precisely, for a unconventional way to heal.

Title: Dialect

Summary: Two months after the night when everything fell apart, Jasper finds a distressed Edward on his doorstep, looking for release—or, more precisely, for a unconventional way to heal.

Pairing: Edward/Jasper

Rating: M

Word Count: 11 214

DISCLAIMER: Twilight and its inclusive material are copyrighted to Stephenie Meyer. Original creations, including but not limited to plot and characters, are copyrighted to the respective authors of each story. No copyright infringement is intended.

On the other side of the door was the last person I expected to see.

For a moment, it seemed as if my throat had folded in on itself, like all the words which I'd left unsaid, which had span around my head as I sat night after night on the window sill, had just crawled down into the back of my mouth, lodging themselves there.

"Edward," I muttered under my breath, as though I'd like to make sure that it really was him and not simply a figment of my imagination. The last time we'd spoken, everything had spiraled out of control, our own words whipping past us like they were caught in a speeding vortex, until we were both gasping for breath, our eyes wide and horrified as if we were seeing each other for the first time—like we were staring at a demon, instead of the person we'd been in love with for more than a year.

It hadn't been the first time I'd seen Edward angry, but none of our prior fights had been like that. None of them had offered either of us a window-wide view of how… destructive we could be when pushed past the limit.

It happened on a summer night—a night that would always be stuck in my head, not just because of the fight, but because Edward was part of the memory, and that was enough. Before I'd met him, my summer nights had always blended into another. They had always been drenched in a dizzying symbiosis of too much tequila and unwelcome memories—memories which I'd been desperate to cast out of my head, in fact, by centering my attention on rope knots and red handprints on warm, sweat-covered skin.

Back in those days, there used to be a vacuum in my chest, mirroring the great expanse of pure nothingness that, throughout my life, had acted as a backdrop for my relationship with my bastard of a father and with my broken, drug-addicted mom. When she'd died, the vacuum had deepened, plunging deeper into my gut, until I began to feel as if the only way to fill it in was by proving to some random stranger that I could bring them to the depths of despair and the heights of pleasure in one single night.

I'd been too weak to force my reasoning onto Mom's suicidal mind, and I'd been too… incomplete to ever be able to please my father. So, for a while, I'd been convinced that perhaps I could make up for all of that by purging other people's demons, until, eventually, I realized that the void inside of me still hadn't been sewn shut. If anything, it'd tore open even more, and the pathetic semblance of stability which I'd hooked myself on began to move suddenly, wavering beneath my feet like quicksand.

And then, Edward showed up.

Our first encounter paved the way for a strange, oddly tense relationship.

It was springtime. A light drizzle had been weeping onto the streets of Chicago all day long, and the wet soles of my shoes keened quietly against the wooden floor of the library near my house as I walked to my usual spot in the corner. I'd made a habit of going there late in the night, when there was nobody around to bother me, just so that my mind could worm its way into history books which I'd never had a chance to read back in Texas, where my education had crashed and burned before it could even rumble to life in the first place.

That day, however, I didn't get to sit in my usual spot. Someone—a guy—had already plopped down onto the cushioned chair behind the mahogany table that I'd claimed as mine months before, and he'd taken up all the space—open books were scattered across the maroon wood, creating a fort around his MacBook.

I remembered thinking that he was lucky he was so damn pretty. I couldn't quite find it in me to be mad at him, or, out of plain pettiness, to force him to rearrange the disposition of his books just so I could take a seat across from him. Still, a revengeful yen for mischief was unravelling within me, as I thought—despite the fact that I didn't own that spot and that he couldn't have possibly known I usually sat there—that he shouldn't simply be left alone there, unperturbed and...unpunished.

So, after taking a seat at another table nearby, I flipped open my paperback, took a pack of Tuc crackers out of my backpack, and allowed myself to crush them into tiny little pieces inside my mouth.

Soon, I had his full attention.

"Excuse me…" His voice was quiet, subdued, and his fingers were gentle—though also assertive—as they touched my shoulder.

My eyes darted up. His pretty face was closer than I expected. I couldn't help but remark inwardly that he had actually stood up to come speak to me, when he could've just called me from where he'd been sitting.

Why was that?

"Yeah," I replied, the volume of my voice towering over the memory of his hushed words like a sort of graceless giant. The quick, slight wince that tugged at the corner of his lips didn't escape my notice, and a vial of guilt trickled into the pit of my stomach.

"Could you maybe not… do that? I can't really concentrate."

"How come?" I asked, raising a condescending eyebrow. My guilt had been short-lived. I realized I wanted to keep prodding him. "I mean, I haven't had any problem concentrating, and I'm the one doing that."

I'd laid it on thick, a conclusion that was swiftly slapped onto my face when I saw his wide, slightly slanted eyes tighten in response to my tone. He'd obviously caught up with my attempt to purposely rile him up, and I felt as though that attempt in and of itself had been enough to coax a retaliatory reaction out of him.

"Well, I'm afraid whatever you're reading doesn't require as much concentration as the assignment I'm trying to finish."

I stole a glance at the paperback in my hands. It was just something that I'd borrowed from a friend—a worn, outdated book about Ancient Greece. My income didn't leave me enough of a margin to spend abundantly on the kind of academic works that he was obviously using, and I didn't quite trust myself to read stuff like that and fully understand it. Of course, he was evidently oblivious to those two facts, but a bundle of angry energy unwound rapidly inside of me, propelled by an undercurrent of what I was reluctant to identify as pure… shame.

"In that case…" I grated out, pushing my chair back and shoving the paperback and the crackers into my backpack. "I'll just leave you to it."

"I…" His green eyes widened, a tendril of guilt festooning the elegant curve of his bronze-colored eyebrows. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be condescending. You don't need to leave. I just… I didn't mean it like that."

A small, perhaps sadistic part of me was smiling, as he stumbled on his own words, but that wasn't enough to soothe the obnoxious ache that had suddenly swept over the void inside of me like a desert wind.

"Yeah, well… I heard it like that."

I'd flung the backpack onto my shoulders and disappeared out of the library, leaving him alone to mull over his own sense of regret.

It was the stupidest thing I could've done, though, in my defense, I couldn't have known just how deeply he'd been buried in his own self-loathing.

Even nowadays, I couldn't accurately grasp the depth of his feelings. I couldn't… understand him—not completely. Perhaps that was part of the reason why we'd ended up breaking up. Perhaps I hadn't paid enough attention.

And yet, when I saw him standing beyond my front door, it wasn't my own responsibility in the middle of all the fiasco which our relationship had turned out to be that made itself present in my mind. It was the memory of the crazed look in his eyes the night everything had fallen apart. It was the spine-tingling, glacial sound of his voice when he'd turned away from me and told me to get the hell out of his house.

"What the fuck are you doing here?" I breathed out, not quite able to inject my voice with the rage that still sat deep within my stomach, because, despite everything, the mere sight of him after two months of no contact had the back of my eyes stinging.

The worst part of it all had been the absence of a reason—at least one that could be spelled out. Night after night, when work couldn't distract me anymore, I had gone over every possible catalyst for our break-up. Had I pushed him too far at some point or another? Had something I'd done made him too uncomfortable? Throughout the past two months, I'd been plagued by the thought that I'd been the one to slowly chip away at what used to hold us together, while he'd just taken it all and silenced any words of protest until he couldn't hold them inside any longer and finally exploded.

Deep down, however, in the furthest corners of my subconscious, I was aware that those weren't good enough reasons.

Edward had always been right—I had a tendency to blame myself for things that were out of my control. He'd told me so just three months after we'd started dating, while we sat late at night on the marble edge of the swimming pool at his parents' house.

"I wish you'd stop doing that," he'd said. For some reason, the conversation had strayed to the lack of any actual communication between me and my younger brother Peter, and before he could even proceed, the muscles on my back had already filled up with tension, as if I would need to jump to Peter's defense any time soon. "Peter is a grown man, you know. He's older than me, actually. I don't think it's okay for you to put your own self-image on the line just to prevent him from being held accountable."

"Very well." I chuckled, and it was clear that the hint of sarcasm in my voice hadn't gone undetected. "Spoken like a true lawyer. Are you sure you don't want to follow in your father's footsteps?"

The slight furrow in Edward's brow, along with the subtle tightness of his lips, told me that he hadn't found anything remotely funny about my reply.

"I'm serious, Jasper," he muttered, dragging his eyes downward. The bright lights beneath the surface cast a ghostly glow onto our naked legs as they moved leisurely through the water, and it was that blurred-out vision I tried to focus on as he continued speaking. "He doesn't answer any of your calls, and when he does, he's always the epitome of evasiveness. I understand that Charlotte being pregnant makes it hard for him to schedule a trip to Chicago just to see you, but you already suggested going to Portland to visit them instead. He keeps making excuses."

"I think we should stop this conversation now, Edward."

Through the corner of my eye, I could see him pressing his tongue against the inside of his cheek, as if he was keeping himself from spitting out some sort of unnerved retort.

"Okay."

I lifted my head slowly. I hadn't expected him to give up so soon, because I knew that if it were the other way around, I would've simply went on pressing him until he eventually saw some reason.

"Okay?" I echoed.

"Yeah, Jasper," he huffed out. "If you don't want to talk about it, then we won't talk about it. If you want to keep blaming yourself for things that you obviously have no control over, it's up to you. It pisses me off, though, because anybody would be ecstatic to have a brother like you. You're the only one who thinks that Peter doesn't call you back because of something you said or did back when you two were just children, when in truth, it has nothing to do with that. Peter is the problem here, not you."

"Hey," I cut him off before he could say more. The protective older brother in me had finally stirred awake, and the more Edward spoke, the louder my heart thumped through the vessels leading up to my head. "I think you're out of line now."

"I'm really not," Edward said right away, and his eyes were wide and brimming with fire as he looked up at me. "You make a habit of feeling guilty for things that you're not at all responsible for. And I know that you know these things are not your fault—somewhere deep inside you, you know you're not to blame. But it's easier for you to think that you are, because then you don't have to change anything about yourself. You can just accept that you were born to be a failure or something."

All my wariness and annoyance suddenly withered away, giving way to a tired sense that still lingered in my stomach that I should contradict him.

So, I did just that, but my voice was quiet and hesitant, as if I didn't really believe in what I was saying.

"You don't know what you're talking about."

"Maybe I don't," he conceded, his shoulders drooping as though he, too, was tired of this whole debate. Figments of his former emotional state still remained in his green eyes, lingering, at the same time, over the chagrined curve of his mouth. "I mean..." he began in some sort of last effort. "Why do you have to feel like it's your fault your father doesn't speak to you? Why can't you feel guilty about eating my lactose-free cheese instead, or about leaving your clothes on the floor whenever you sleep at my house?"

I'd laughed out loud at the time, and the tension between us had quickly dispersed into nothingness.

Looking back on that moment now, I began to realize that I'd simply taken the opportunity to skirt around the subject, just so I didn't have to face it head-on. Our whole relationship had been scarred by moments like those, in fact—moments where, if one of us seemed to be making progress in getting the other to stare at their own soul with unblinking eyes, one of the two always recoiled and tried to shift the topic of the conversation to something a little lighter.

This time around, there was no space where either of us could retreat. Edward was currently standing right in front of me with his grey hoodie soaked through and his damp hair hanging over his eyes. Gleaming water drops had gathered at the tips of his thick, dark bronze locks, and as I waited for an answer to my question, I watched them drip onto the pale skin of his face like fast-flowing tears.

Just like that night by the swimming pool, his shoulders had eventually sunk at some point, but when he raised his bloodshot eyes to mine, it wasn't only tiredness that stared back at me.

I sucked in a breath. There was an odd, flickering determination to the green of his orbs which seemed to consume all the air in my apartment.

I recognized that look right away. It wasn't just the look of someone who was burning inside in despair.

It was also the look of someone who'd go to any lengths to put an end to that same despair, even if that meant completely handing over every single ounce of control over their own body.

"Ed," I rasped out, unable to recognize my own voice. "Are you sure?"

I'd never punished him for anything truly serious. All of our scenes had arisen from minor things—sometimes, he would tease me endlessly simply to seize my attention, or he would annoy me on purpose to get me to discipline him. I would also prolong his punishments during some of our scenes, whenever he'd deliberately disrespect my authority as his Master. At no point, however, had I punished him for something that he'd said to me as my boyfriend, nor had we ever played right after a fight, when we were still trying to regain our bearings.

We'd agreed that it was too dangerous. The tenuous line between our connection as a couple and our relationship as dominant and sub could easily blur over at a certain point, and the consequences for our life together wouldn't sit well with either of us.

But now he was asking me to take control of his body—to force him to kneel before me and strip him of all his defenses—when we were both in a hazy sort of headspace.

It'd been two fucking months. Where were we now? Where were we supposed to pick up from?

At the same time, it was as if no time had gone by at all, because… I still loved him.

I loved him so fucking much.

And I could still sense every shift in his demeanor. I could still feel every swoop and climb of his mood like a set of undulating drafts of hot air on my skin. At least when I allowed myself to step into the role of a Dom, I was certain that the recesses of Edward's mind were within my reach—not all of them, of course, but enough to grant me access to his true needs.

Right then, I was sure that this was what he really wanted. I could see it in his bright, resolute eyes as he stared up at me, just beneath the canopy of his long lashes. He'd thought this through before he'd come here, and the delectable shape of his parted lips, through which the tension-charged air in my apartment fleeted in and out in tempo with the heaving of his chest, offered me a decisive glimpse into how scared he was that I would tell him to turn back around and leave.

It'd been so long. I wanted to envelop his slender frame in my arms and hold him to me. I wanted to feel his skin against mine and breathe in the unmistakable scent of his hair. My chest throbbed ever more painfully the more I looked at him, taking note of the shadows under his eyes and the rumpled state of his clothing.

This man had changed everything for me. He'd poured his own life force into the old vacuum inside of me, and now that he was here, my insides ached with the need to make sure that he was real and that he wouldn't slip through my fingers ever again.

But right now he needed his Dom, and I was unable to place anything else before his silent, urgent request.

In fact, I didn't really want to.

"Step inside," I said, noting with a pang of nostalgia the sudden difference in my own voice. "Go to the bathroom and dry yourself up. I'll meet you there soon, and I expect you to be naked and on your knees when I do." A wave of heartbreaking relief rippled over his face as I spoke, while a shiver billowed through his entire body, but instead of allowing him a moment to breathe out another sigh at the realization that I hadn't rejected him, I quickly grabbed his chin with two nimble fingers. "Did I make myself clear, Edward?"

Suddenly, his pupils pushed the celadon-green of his irises backwards, desire flashing like a dart of firelight through the abysmal darkness of his eyes. My own stomach stirred under the rush of heat that coursed through my body, and I couldn't contain myself any longer.

Wrapping my hand around the back of his neck, I brought his mouth to mine.

Jesus fucking Christ.

His lips tasted like dried-out tears and fresh raindrops, but underneath all that, the feeling of his mouth moving under mine was just like I remembered, only this time I could also taste the feverish sort of agony that had built up inside of him throughout the past two months like a trickle of blood dancing on his tongue. It merged fluidly with my own painful longing—the kind of longing that seemed to reach deep into the bottom of my soul and rummage through all the wreckage there.

It was the kind of longing that felt like homesickness.

I was suddenly reminded of the first time we'd kissed, as though, by reminiscing on that, I could put together the different pieces that had brought us to this very moment.

We'd been cruising the Chicago nightlife, jumping from bar to bar as if we wanted to see what it was like to dance and laugh together in each one of them, until the moment we had decided to come to a halt—to bump into another, just to feel each other's bodies through our summer clothes and truly understand what had made it impossible for us to simply breeze past one another like the strangers we'd once been.

I remembered the amber glow of the streetlamp above us beaming off his disheveled hair in shades of copper and red gold. My fingers had threaded through the strands like they were plunging into a treasure chest, pulling slowly at them and then pushing them back again into their rightful place. Gently, gingerly, I pressed him against the wall, as, in the distance, the sound of laughter and muffled rock music vibrated through space in the form of a faint echo.

And then, without thinking about it, I kissed him.

I did it on an impulse, but there wasn't a single trace of urgency in my movements. My mouth inched closer and closer to his until I could feel his warm skin on mine and the aftertaste of the white wine he'd been drinking on my own tongue, and my fingers trailed up his sides until they found his long, pale neck.

I would never forget how we'd kept our eyes open. His were glazed over with a thin film of tipsy wonder, the green in them bright and peaceful all at once, like an expanse of coastal water under broad daylight. Mine were most likely dark with lust, the light brown irises eclipsed by a pair of booming pupils.

It was as if we wanted the moment to be printed in vivid color onto our minds, or maybe as if we'd like to gauge each other's expressions. Either way, I was so caught up in the moment that, before I knew it, my hand had begun to close in on his neck—not squeezing it, but pressing lightly against the skin, just so I could feel his throat moving underneath my palm with each one of his sharp breaths.

His quiet groan told me that something about the gesture had more than pleased him.

A devious smile tugged at the corner of my mouth.

"What's that?" I teased him, my thumb rubbing over his Adam's apple.

"When you do that…" Edward whispered, and my hand stilled upon the strange layer of… honesty to his voice. He was still an enigma to me—the college boy from the library who always spoke very quietly for some unknown reason and who listened more than he spoke. Right now, though, I thought that maybe the alcohol had managed to wash some of his inhibitions away, and my mind centered right away on the hypnotic sound of his voice. "When you do that, Jasper, everything falls away."

His eyes fluttered closed, as his head tipped back, and suddenly, the entirety of his neck was right there—an expanse of overheated, goose flesh whose very existence seemed to depend on me alone.

"Yeah?" I mumbled, my voice thick and laden with a strange emotion which I couldn't really identify.

When I glanced up, his eyes had reopened, and they looked like two pools of infinite darkness.

"Yeah…" He nodded slowly. "It's like… Like you could squeeze at any moment if you wanted, but I know you won't. I know you wouldn't, Jasper."

I came back to the present with a quiet gasp.

My hands had already drifted down his sharp shoulder blades and moved towards the small of his back, pressing him into my body like I'd been yearning to do for months. It was obvious that he'd lost some weight, but that didn't prevent me from feeling the solidness of his defined torso against mine, nor did it stop my fingers from wandering towards his ribcage and pushing against the bones as I tried to memorize every dip and every ridge…

I missed you so much, Edward.

It was then that I noticed that a painful lump had gathered at the back of my mouth, like a faithful companion to the hot dampness swimming around beneath my closed lids, and the memory of his bloodshot, pleading eyes crashed into the forefront of my mind. I remembered that there was something that had to be done first—something that couldn't be avoided—, and immediately, an odd noise rumbled through my throat as I put in the effort to detach my lips from his.

"Go," I growled, leaning my forehead against his and noting distractedly that my voice had both a guttural and wounded sound to it, like the voice of a captured animal.

I didn't need to say it twice. My commanding tone had set forth an unmistakable change in the surrounding atmosphere, and Edward responded to that same change in the mere blink of an eye, as if the pattern of our scenes had been ingrained into his most basic instincts. His gaze immediately shied away from my face, only to be raised again if I ordered him to look at me, and his hands quickly retreated behind his back.

"Yes, Master."

My blood sped like lightning towards my cock.

I'd missed hearing him call me that.

I'd missed being able to bring the turbulent waters of his complex mind to a standstill and to offer him a way out of the maze of excessive, self-reproachful worry that he would so often lose himself in. I knew that was what would happen in just a couple of minutes, but as was often the case, I was clueless as to the deeper, underlying reasons beneath his sudden need to submit to me.

There was a lot that Edward had always refused to tell me, and as I watched him disappear into the bathroom down the hall, I took a moment to revisit a particular moment during our relationship where his unexplainable secretiveness had fought its way into the cocoon of intimacy we'd buried ourselves in and put our whole conversation under siege.

We'd been together for almost a year by then. Edward had invited me to go visit his uncle Carlisle and his wife Esme in Forks, Washington.

The amount of admiration he held for those two people was crystal-clear, and I couldn't help but imagine the kind of person he would've turned out to be if they'd been the ones to raise him. Everything about Esme gave off an aura of motherliness, and Carlisle was a successful doctor who'd already become known in Forks for his bedside manner and his kind, patient eyes.

They treated us like close family during our stay at their house, and my own chest throbbed with an ancient sort of ache as I also considered what my life would've been like if I'd had a set of parents like them.

Neither Edward nor I had had much luck in that department. His parents had graced him with all the material comfort anybody could expect to receive if they were the heir to a fortune like Edward was, but they'd obviously failed to spare him even a tiny amount of their attention. Edward Senior had been on the phone with someone from his law firm throughout the entirety of the dinner that his son had purposely arranged for me to meet him seven months into our relationship, and his mother had been literally absent.

Edward had never really talked about her, in fact.

The reason why our time together on the West Coast underwent an odd sort of disruption had nothing to do with his parents, however.

The day before our return to Chicago, we decided to hop onto one of the motorbikes in Carlisle and Esme's garage, which only their adoptive daughter, Rosalie, who was studying in New York at the time, used to ride. Motorbikes had always been my weakness, and I always rode one back home, but that day I decided to urge Edward into taking a hold of the handlebars.

"What's the matter?" I asked teasingly, seeing the hesitant look on his face. "Are you scared?"

"I'm not scared." He rolled his eyes. "I'm apprehensive."

I leaned back against the leather seat, watching his green eyes swing between the pedals and my black leather boots. I knew that he wasn't all that concerned about falling off the motorbike at some point. For one, he'd learned how to ride shortly after getting his driver's license, and I was sure that he wasn't all that concerned about his own well-being, because… he never really worried about that, which frankly unsettled me.

He did worry about me, on the other hand—perhaps a little too much, in fact—, and right now, he was afraid that, for some reason or another, he would end up messing up and putting me at risk.

"It's all right, Ed," I said. "I trust you."

In a flash, his gaze snapped up to my face, and I was somewhat saddened to see a heartbreaking sort of surprise beaming off his eyes, as if I hadn't made it obvious that, just like he didn't mind transferring all control over his body to me during our scenes, I wouldn't hesitate in allowing him to be the responsible one in our relationship, because I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that he wouldn't fail me.

Throughout most of my life, I'd never had anybody to take care of me. My mother had tried to do so, but her depression had caught up with her before she could really show me that she was someone I could always rely on, and my former boyfriend, Riley, had been too focused on perfecting a Bohemian kind of lifestyle to really come down to Earth when I needed him.

Edward, though, made me feel, for the very first time, like I was not alone in the world after all. Every so often, he would pick me up from work in his Volvo when it was raining without me even mentioning it to him that I might need a ride. He'd leave homemade food in the fridge when he knew my shift at Garrett's bar would end later than usual. When I had come down with the flu, he'd dropped everything to come to my house and nurse me back to health.

He was so much more than my boyfriend or my sub. He was my emergency contact. He was the one person whom I could count on to look out for me at all times.

It didn't surprise me, therefore, how carefully he handled his cousin's motorbike as he rode us around town, scrupulously mindful of the speed limit.

"You almost gave me a heart attack there," I huffed out once we'd stopped by a clearing just off the road. "I felt like my hair was about to be pulled from my skull from how fast you were going."

"I'm just rusty." He chuckled, stepping away from the motorbike with his hands buried in the pockets of his rain jacket. His eyes drifted slowly towards the cluster of trees in the distance, which stood on top of a cliff that overlooked the ocean. I hadn't realized it before, but there were people there, and it was with a hint of panic hovering over my stomach that I watched one of them run towards the edge and jump off.

"What the fuck?" I muttered.

"They do this often," Edward explained. "I mean, I think it's kind of stupid, but the truth is that nobody's gotten hurt yet."

"I see… Wait." My eyes darted in his direction. He seemed almost contemplative as he watched the boys leap from the edge of the cliff one after the other. "How do you know that?"

Before I'd so much as finished speaking, his head had turned sharply, and his green eyes had gone as a wide as those of a deer caught in headlights. After a moment, he pressed his lips together and lowered his stare to the unpaved ground, and a wave of trepidation rippled through my stomach, accompanied by the sense that there was something in my boyfriend's life that we were always meant to contour—like a hidden bump on the road which I couldn't see but whose existence was just…obvious.

Why won't you tell me what happened to you, Edward? Is it because you don't trust me the way you say you do?

"I lived here for a while," he finally admitted, and my jaw dropped slightly.

"What? When?"

"I was sixteen at the time. My dad decided I should stay with Carlisle and Esme just for a year." Suddenly, he plastered a smile onto his own face, as if he'd like to distract me from the evident discomfort in his eyes. "Honestly, Jasper, it doesn't matter."

"It doesn't matter?" My eyes widened. All of a sudden, I felt all the frustration that had brewed inside of me each time he'd shut me out begin to simmer beneath my skin. "We've been dating for almost a fucking year, Edward. I'd say it matters some."

"It was just a year, Jasper," he said, before his lips parted and he sucked in a quick breath, realizing how that must have sounded. "I mean, I only lived here for a year. Our relationship… Damnit. You know what I mean."

Suddenly, the frustrated energy that had been travelling through my veins drained away, and my shoulders sagged at the sound of him stumbling over his words just like he had done the night we'd met.

"I don't know anything about you," I muttered on a tired breath. "Even simple shit like this… Honestly, I think that if something really fucked up were to happen to you, I wouldn't be able to help you at all, because I wouldn't even know about it."

I'd been wrong. Edward himself had just proved me wrong. His tendency to forego his own pride and apologize aside, it was pretty unlikely that he had just showed up on my doorstep after having some sort of epiphany.

Something had happened. I was sure of it. And, unlike I'd thought, even if he wasn't expressing in actual words what he was feeling, he was here.

He'd come to me.

A rush of warmth slid through the gaps in my ribcage at that thought, as I went into my bedroom to retrieve what I needed from my closet.

Obviously, I didn't have a special room for our scenes. I was an unconventional—and definitely not wealthy—sort of Dom, but Edward had never minded that. Anywhere was a good enough place to play out our darkest fantasies, including his car, my kitchen, even his father's office… We privileged the dynamic between us to our surroundings, like two foreigners speaking their own special dialect in a strange land where they had instinctively learned to make do with what they had.

And what we have is enough, I thought, taking hold of the coil of black nylon rope inside one of my closet drawers. The material felt smooth against my skin, but I knew that once I'd wrapped it around Edward's body, it would press into his skin every time he moved, leaving behind an intricate pattern of red marks.

My hands gripped both the coil of rope and the handle of the safety scissors—which always sat nearby during our scenes—as I strode out of the bedroom and into the bathroom, my back straightening with each step I took.

Edward had followed all my instructions, which was unusual—normally, he would intentionally ignore at least one small detail, so that his punishment could be either prolonged or made more intense. He did it so often that, at some point, it'd struck me that he had as much power over me as I had over him. My other subs had relinquished almost all measure of control over their own pleasure, and consequently, I had never really learned to step up my game.

With Edward, though, I'd always felt like I could be better—without ever being ashamed of my performance as a Dom. The fact was that Edward had never instilled a sense of failure within me. He'd simply pushed me to discover for myself how much of a confident, open-minded Dom I could be if I trusted my own capacities a little more.

The first time he'd disrespected my authority as his Master just to get me to punish him more severely, I'd fallen right into his trap.

We'd decided to play at his parents' house that day. I had kneeled behind him on the carpet of his living room and told him to keep still while I freed him of the leather cuffs around his wrists, but the moment my hand trailed up his neck to cup his cheek, the first signs that he wasn't about to comply with my basic command began to show.

"Edward," I said in a warning tone, as soon as his head tipped back and his face leaned languidly against my hand. For any of my former subs, that would've been an effective enough warning, but apparently, that wasn't the case for Edward, something that dawned on me pretty quickly, when, with an idle, unhurried inhale, he opened his mouth and then closed it around my thumb.

My cock twitched, even though I'd come inside of him less than a minute ago. A part of me—the most animalistic, irrational chunk of it, to be more precise—roared in rage at his leisurely display of defiance, but overall, I was frozen in place as I watched him hollow his cheeks and bring my finger deeper into his hot mouth.

I could feel his tongue lapping at my skin. I could sense the presence of his teeth around the base, and I knew he could bite down on it if he so desired, but I also knew that he would never hurt me, no matter how slightly.

His green eyes blinked open, and there was a liquid sort of invitation in them—a provocative, determined brightness which seemed to flow through space and drip onto my own eyeballs. Slowly, he let my thumb slide out of his mouth, his teeth grazing my flesh all the while.

His eyes were still boring into mine when he spoke.

"I guess that was out of line," he whispered against the pad of my thumb.

"Yes, it was," I replied, and my voice was thick and distant, as if I'd just dived too deep into my own stupor.

"Well..." he said with a slow smile. "What're you going to do about it?"

The spanking I'd given him shortly afterwards had answered that question pretty fast.

It occurred to me the next day that, in that exact moment, as strange as that could sound, Edward had beaten me at my own game, or at least he had underhandedly reversed our positions until I was the one whose movements were being controlled.

Something about that paradox was inexplicably… erotic. It made my blood whip past the walls of my veins in anticipation as I thought about what my next tactic would be in the midst of all this tacit power game.

By the third time Edward had provoked me on purpose, I had already come up with the key to winning that game. This time around, he was trying to rile me up by cursing almost every time I pulled on the nipple clamps I'd bought for him, even though I'd told him that he wasn't allowed to speak at all.

"Ah," he whimpered. "Shit!"

I took a step back, dropping the chain that held the two clamps together. It fell against Edward's stomach with a loud, rattling sound, and suddenly, his eyebrows lifted above the edge of the blood-red tie that covered his eyes. For a moment, I remained silent, and our breaths were the only noise that pervaded the ample space in his bedroom, until I could finally see his shoulders tensing and his chest stilling for a second or two as he held his breath.

"Do I have your attention now, Edward?" I said quietly, and his lips parted in reply to the deadly seriousness in my voice.

"I…" he stammered. "I mean—Yes. Yes, Master."

"What did I tell you?"

"You told me not to speak," he said quickly, and I took note with some amusement of the thin layer of excitement that blanketed his tone, as if this had been just a brief wake-up call.

Crouching beside him, I let my hand ghost over his neck, until there was only an inch between his skin and mine, and he sucked in a breath through his teeth, his cock twitching in my peripheral vision.

"I would tell you to apologize, Edward," I whispered in his ear, my fingers chasing after the reddish-brown happy trail leading down to his member, over which my hand suddenly froze. I knew he could sense the warmth of my flesh hovering over the blood-filled, circumcised head. "But it's too late now. I don't really want to hear anything from you right now."

A small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

"Are you going to use the gag on me now, sir?"

"No," I murmured against the skin on his jaw, and his whole body froze. "I'm going to walk out that door, and you're not going to know where I actually am, or what I'm doing, because you're going to be a good boy and wait for me here for as long as I see fit."

It was a test. We hadn't played enough times for me to know for sure that he would be okay with me toying with his mind as well. This was a chance for him to offer me a glimpse into how committed he was to our relationship as Dom and sub, and judging from the torn expression on the lower half of his face, it was unlikely that he would use his safe word and bring the scene to a halt.

The only question was how long he would endure the lack of any stimulation whatsoever.

This time, however, neither of us was about to engage in another power game, nor was I about to leave him alone to stew over his own mistakes.

The fact that Edward had basically foregone an umbrella or even a rain jacket on his way to my house after two months of not speaking to me at all was strong enough evidence that his need for release was not of a physical nature—he was here, because, for some reason or another, some switch in his brain had just been flipped, and he'd decided that he couldn't take whatever he'd been going through anymore.

This was about… atonement—I could see that now, while I dropped to my knees in front of him and levelled my eyes with his.

"You remember your safe words?"

"Yeah," he rasped out, and my eyes tightened upon the jagged sound of his voice, as if his throat had been scrubbed clean with sandpaper. Unwittingly, I reached for the drying hair on his temple, my fingers petting it back like the first time we'd kissed.

"Good." I nodded. "Because I'm going to need you to use them the moment you feel like stopping or slowing down. Do you understand that, baby?"

Suddenly, his mouth stretched into a grimace, and the ache in my chest resumed its pounding, as soon as the amount of guilt in his eyes became truly visible to me.

It was as if all the feeling of shame that had flared up inside of him each time he'd been a little less than perfect had congregated into a flammable mass of self-hatred, and I was certain that by the time his punishment was over, that mass would catch fire and devour him until there was nothing left.

And yet, I knew that was exactly what he needed—to be torn to shreds, so that he could build himself back up.

"Yeah, I understand," he whispered at last, and all of a sudden, I was sure that the grimace that had pulsated through his face at my words had been a fractured reflection of the thought that he didn't deserve my gentleness—that he was unworthy of loving epithets and caressing gestures.

Fucking hell, Edward, I thought, wanting to shut my eyes tight in anger, because it wasn't possible for someone to flagellate themselves that much of their own volition. Someone had drilled into him the stupid idea that the only alternative to being flawless was being a failure, as if there was no in-between.

Someone had made him think that it wasn't okay for him to just be human—to be vulnerable and fallible, just like everyone else.

"I'm going to tie you up now," I told him gently, not ready yet to allow the Dom inside of me to rise up to the surface. "Is that okay?"

"Yes."

It didn't take long for me to do it. The point this time was not to attach his limbs in such a way as to give me full access to all his sensitive spots. It was simply to make him feel like there was really nowhere he could retreat into—like he had, in fact, been deprived of his freedom to make choices, good or bad.

Soon, the pale skin of his wrists had vanished out of sight, hidden by multiple loops of nylon rope which came together in a tight, thick knot, and his arms were wrapped in crisscrosses that were attached to the handiwork on his back and chest.

This time, his hands would be kept in front of him, so that he could hold his head up throughout his punishment—what I had planned for him required as much.

Once I was finished, I pushed myself up on my feet, something inside my stomach curling in on itself at the sight of him on his hands and knees. The curve of his ass dipped sinuously into the vale at the bottom of his back, and as my eyes travelled upwards, I gulped quietly, seeing the lines of black rope dig into his flesh.

"I'll be back in a bit, darling," I said, my fingers brushing a lock of copper hair away from his forehead. It was just as soft as I remembered, and I had to fight the urge to bend down and breathe in its familiar scent as I took a step back and walked out of the bathroom.

There was a still something that I had to get from my closet.

Before I'd met Edward, I had limited myself to using multi-tailed floggers and paddles during my spanking sessions. Finding out that he was pretty much a natural submissive had made me reevaluate my options, however, and it hadn't been long before we began to make use of other items.

There was one particular item, though, which I'd never had the opportunity to use on him-a single-tailed leather whip that I'd been practicing with for a month when our relationship suddenly went up in flames.

My heartbeat thrummed through the artery running up to my head as I held it in my hands. It was like holding a black snake—four feet of tightly braided leather that tapered down to a string-like end. At first glance, it seemed like any other whip, but the truth was that it was particularly flexible, which meant that, once the end cracked down on someone's skin, it would be at a high enough speed to figuratively set the victim's skin aflame.

It definitely wasn't for beginners. I'd been lucky enough to get a job at an animal farm back in Texas when I'd dropped out of high school, so I'd learned how to handle bullwhips. The technique that was meant to accompany the use of the snake whip in my hands, however, was one which I'd had to perfect.

The secret lay in holding the handle with my fingers and allowing my wrist to do most of the work. And it was that particular detail which made my heart speed up—the fact that with a mere flick of my wrist, I could cause someone so much pain.

I steeled myself as I returned to the bathroom and crouched again in front of my sub.

"Do you remember me telling you about this?" I asked him, showing him the whip. His green eyes widened at the sight, and a finger of ice-cold fear poked my stomach, the thought that perhaps he would think it was too much invading my head.

"Yes."

"Do you want me to punish you with this? Be honest, Edward."

His gaze snapped up, untangling itself from the alluring vision of the whip, and my breath caught in my throat at the resolution that shone off his eyes like a sunbeam glinting off a pair of jade stones.

"Yes."

I stood up again, my tall frame towering over his tied-up body on the tiled floor.

"Turn around and crawl towards the door," I ordered. "I want you to watch yourself being punished. I want you to watch me punishing you."

His quiet gasp didn't slip past my senses, but it didn't mellow out my determination to carry out what I had in mind. From now on, if something didn't sit well with him, he would have to put his safe words to use.

It didn't seem as if he was inclined to do so, though, because, in a matter of seconds, he was facing the wall beyond the open bathroom door, his elbows pressed against the maroon carpet of the hallway as he watched himself—and me—through the floor-to-ceiling mirror that stood against that same wall.

I wantedhim to really look at himself. I wanted him to stare at his own demons in the face.

"Don't look away, Edward. Keep your head up. Always. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir," he said, and there was a trembling edge to his voice which was sure to intensify soon—especially considering the strain on his neck from keeping his head up while his arms were still tied up.

"I also want you to count the lashes, Edward, and I want to hear you loud and clear."

Thank fucking God for the large bathroom, I thought as I prepared to swing the whip around my head, watching my own muscled arm hardening in the mirror, while my chest expanded underneath the fabric of my black tank top.

The first lash made a spine-chilling sound—like a small bullet being fired off a hunting rifle. It echoed through the whole apartment, drowning out everything else, and I suddenly felt as though we were encased in a soundproof room, away from the rest of the world. My heartbeat pounded in my ears as I watched his skin erupt in a blast of red in the place where the tip of the whip had cracked.

Then, I heard Edward heave a ragged breath and saw his eyes brimming with a mixture of pain, despair, and resolve.

My brave man.

"One!"

I didn't allow him to wait very long before my wrist sent the length of the whip flying through the air towards the flesh of his ass.

"Two!"

This time, there was also a current of anger flowing like a sea tide through his voice, piling up on top of every other emotion, and when I glanced up at the mirror, I realized that anger was directed at no one but himself. It was as if he was revisiting his presumed mistakes while he stared at his own reflection—as if every strike of the whip against his skin was a well-deserved punishment for how undeserving he was of even the smallest trace of affection.

A slight lump gathered in my throat. I was suddenly reminded of the turbulence that had emanated off his eyes the night our relationship had crumbled into a mantle of debris.

That was the same night when I'd put the pieces together and come to the realization that, four years before then, Edward's mother had passed away. It was the same night when I had confronted him over him keeping that hidden from me—when I'd tried to understand why he'd thought that I didn't deserve to know he'd suffered a loss like that.

"Because it's nobody's business," he'd said, stepping out of the same shoes he'd worn to visit his mother's grave just a couple of hours before.

"That's really funny, Edward," I retorted sarcastically, my gaze following his movements as he rummaged through his closet. "Because I found out through my fucking boss, who, for some unknown reason, knows more about you than I do."

His head suddenly flipped in my direction, and my eyes widened upon the strange rawness of his voice as he replied.

"Everybody knows my mom's dead, Jasper! You think your boss found out today, because we just happened to stumble over each other at the graveyard today? He's always known. Everybody knows. Elizabeth Masen, the heir to one of the greatest fortunes in the country and the wife of the notorious Edward Masen, had a car accident and became brain-dead, and her young son had to hear all about it at school, at business events, even at fucking dinner parties… Maybe if you would just come to your senses at some point and realize that there's a whole world outside of your own fatalistic drama, you'd see that you're the only one who didn't know."

"Jesus fucking Christ," I cursed, an incredulous laugh bubbling up my throat. "My fatalistic drama? Okay. I like how you just shifted the focus of the conversation to avoid having to speak about yourself. That's really mature."

A spark of guilt flashed through his eyes, but this time, it wasn't enough for him to give in and change his whole demeanor.

"I'm sorry I said that," he said coldly. "That was unfair. But my point still stands, Jasper. I don't think it was necessary for me to tell you that."

"Why?" I pressed. "Because it doesn't matter, apparently? Or is it because everyone else built an image of you as the sad kid who lost his mom and you didn't want me to slap that same image onto you again?"

It was clear then that I'd struck a chord.

"Oh, God, just stop!" he huffed out, his fingers pulling nervously at his bronze hair. "You're making a big fucking deal out of nothing."

"That's it, isn't it?" I continued. "You wanted me to keep thinking of you as this perfect, infallible man who likes being tied up just for pleasure and not because of some underlying baggage. What? Did you think I fell for it? Because if you did, Edward…" I let out a humorless chuckle. "Goddamn. You can be so condescending, sometimes."

"What—" His brow furrowed, and I thought I saw a hint of panic swirling amidst the green of his eyes. "What does that mean?"

"It means you're unexplainably convinced that you can control everything. You think you can control how I see you, what I do for you, how much affection I give you, even how I punish you—"

"Oh, fuck you!" He said suddenly, and I was pretty much speechless. Neither of us had ever told each other that in such a serious tone—it was as if there was an invisible line between us which we had implicitly agreed not to cross, and now… someone had just crossed it. "I am so sorry, Jasper! I'm really sorry that I don't know how to open up about my feelings. I'm sorry that I can't be all cozy with my own flaws like you are."

My lungs stilled. A sharp ache vibrated through my chest like the aftermath of a sucker punch, and for a moment, I couldn't speak, like my voice had just recoiled into the recesses of my stomach.

The air around us was a heavy with a fizzling sort of energy, pushing every other sound besides that of our harsh breathing outwards.

"That's what you think about me, huh?" I finally muttered. "That I'm comfortable with my own flaws? Well… I wish you didn't think that, Edward, and I also wish you weren't such a control freak."

It was his turn to flinch as if I'd hit him, and suddenly, I began to feel like I had done just that, before a bitter sort of frustration gathered like bile at the back of my mouth upon the mess we'd just embroiled ourselves in. It dawned on me that we'd both just clawed at our relationship as though it were something that we'd been wanting to tear down for a while—like a burden that was easier to set fire to than to drop off our shoulders.

I could barely believe what we'd done to ourselves, but the reality of it sank down to my bones when Edward turned around, the vision of his hunched shoulders stealing the air from my burning lungs.

"Get out," he said, and the coldness in his voice was crushing enough for me to understand that the connection that we had kept alive for more than a year was truly and irrevocably over.

The thin, cobweb-like cracks in it had spread slowly throughout time, until it couldn't stand on its own anymore and it'd just...caved in.

I'd messed up. At the end of the day, Edward had been right—if he was an uptight perfectionist, I was a self-indulgent fatalist. I'd gotten used throughout the years to conforming to certain situations like they were beyond my control, when, in truth, by taking a quick step outside of my comfort zone, I would've been able to change their outcome. If I'd just told him then to sit down with me and talk things through like a couple of adults, I might have been able to save our relationship.

Instead, I'd simply added the beautiful connection that'd grown between us to the pile of things in my life which had supposedly been doomed from the start, convinced that I was doomed from the start.

But then, Edward hadn't done anything to salvage our relationship either, which was strange. He'd been the one who'd gone out of his way after that first incident in the library to apologize to me once more, paving the way for an ever-growing friendship, just like he'd been the one to lighten up the mood during some of our heaviest conversations.

Why hadn't he stopped me from leaving that night then?

What had made him think that there was no way we could work together anymore?

"Sixteen!" Edward cried, as the string-like tip of the whip bounced off his abused skin. A sheen of sweat had gathered over his hairline the longer he watched himself in the mirror, and my own determination to take the count of the lashes up to twenty began to slowly unravel.

It wasn't even the sight of his welt-covered ass that was dragging down my willpower, no matter how excruciatingly painful those welts looked.

It was the way his body shook—like a tight string about to snap in two.

The whip swiveled around my head again, before coming down on him with a deafening crack.

"Sev…" Suddenly, he lurched forward, as if his lightly muscled arms couldn't support his weight anymore. I dropped my hand by my side immediately, my heart drumming against my breastbone in worry as I wondered if we'd taken it too far. Soon, however, he raised his head again, and the image that looked back at us in the mirror made the bundle of concern in my stomach curl deeper on itself. "S-seventeen!"

"Edward—" I started to say, my eyes centering on the trembling grimace that had replaced the normal shape of his lips.

"Green," he cut me off. "Green."

I pulled in a breath through my teeth, remembering that he was the one asking for this.

My arm moved again, and with an agile flick of my wrist, the whip rushed through the air and snapped against his flesh at a speed that evidently caught him off guard. His cry mingled with the echo of the whiplash seconds afterwards, before the two sounds together were drowned out by the ragged breaths fleeting in and out of his heaving chest.

I hadn't deemed it possible, but he was shaking even harder now, and when I brought my gaze up to our reflection in the mirror, I felt like my heart had dropped into the recesses of my body.

His eyes were brimming with tears, and when he opened his mouth to count the eighteenth strike out loud, a loud sob tore through his throat.

"Eight…." My fingers tightened around the handle of the whip in anticipation, as I watched a wave of sobs begin to rip through his shoulders. Tears rolled down his cheeks like small salt stones tumbling off his high cheekbones, while he tried to keep looking at the mirror, and it was in that precise moment that his soul suddenly revealed itself to me, as soon as I saw the full spectrum of his pain.

I could see it all reflected in his eyes—the sadness, the smothering guilt, the feeling of self-disappointment, the bitterness of his anger at himself, the agony of always trying to be enough, but never managing to get there…

"Edward," I repeated.

"Jacob!" he suddenly cried, his head dropping forward onto the carpet, and I found myself frozen in place, wondering if I'd maybe heard him wrong. For a while, neither of us made an attempt to catch each other's attention, and my own chest began to heave the longer I stared at his kneeling, shaking form as he muffled his cries against the carpet. "H-his name…" he gasped out. "His name was Jacob… And…"

"Jesus, Edward," I muttered, the sound of him struggling to speak coaxing me out of my stupor. I threw the whip behind me and rushed to get a hold of the safety scissors, my movements blending into another in my hurry to get him out of his restraints.

"And he squeezed, Jasper."

"Baby, stay still," I said gently, my hand pressing against his back as the scissor blades tore through the rope.

"He squeezed until I couldn't breathe," he continued, his voice cut by a series of violent sobs. "He pushed me against the wall of my bedroom, and he wrapped his hand around my throat, and I couldn't breathe."

My movements faltered for a moment, as his words began to sink in. The idea of someone hurting the man I loved like that burned into the forefront of my mind, pushing a current of fury through my veins and making it eat at my insides like wildfire.

I had to remind myself that Edward's hands were still tied together and that he needed my aftercare, not a display of anger.

"Breathe, darling," I murmured in his ear, the sweat and tears on his face rubbing against my skin as I drew back and focused on unknotting his restraints.

"I loved him, Jasper," he continued, and a pang resonated through my chest, the walls of my throat tightening at the thought that he'd been someone else's at some point. "But I wasn't… Everything I did was bad. Everything. Nothing I did was good enough for him."

At last, his hands were free, and in less than a second, he was in my arms, his legs wrapping around my wrist as he sat on my thighs. It was the strangest position, but in that moment, I couldn't give less of a damn.

"It's all right, Edward," I muttered against his hair, my lips puckering into a gentle kiss. "It's okay. I'm here."

"I'm so sorry," he said on a broken exhale. "I'm so sorry, Jasper. I should've told you. I shouldn't have told you to go. I should've just… fucking admitted to myself that I needed you." He leaned back for a moment, wincing when the battered skin of his ass rubbed against the denim of my dark wash jeans. A strange sort of intensity swam underneath the tears in his eyes as they stared into mine. "I love you so fucking much. I am so sorry."

I was sorry, too.

I was sorry that his parents had been so strict with him throughout most of his childhood—that they'd put him up on a pedestal and pressured him into being perfect. I was sorry that, of all people to fall in love with, Edward had chosen some asshole named Jacob, who—I soon discovered—had become his boyfriend when he'd gone to live with Carlisle and Esme after his mother's death.

I was sorry that, instead of valuing what was right in front of him, Jacob had mistreated this beautiful man by calling him every name in the book and then guilt-tripping him, by knocking him around and then making it seem as if the bruises on Edward's skin were his own fault…

That wasn't love. That was abuse.

Love required respect. It required each person to know for sure that they wanted to be with the other.

Indeed, it was also about feeling things—things that pulsed through our bodies and overflowed into the other person's veins—, as much as it was about speaking a common language—a dialect replete with knowing glances and silent exchanges. That was what BDSM was for us. More than a private space for our darkest fantasies, it was our own piece of no-man's land, where we could win over our own demons.

It was the language of catharsis.

But underneath all that, both love and a Dom/sub relationship were about letting go. They both implied the ability to untangle ourselves from the fear that we wouldn't be respected unless we maintained a façade of self-control at all times.

Edward had forced himself to detach his fingers from one another and allow that fear to slip through, and as I held him to me in the hallway of my apartment, remembering all the times I'd let him take care of me as well, I knew that we could finally start anew—to build what we had back up after we'd destroyed it.

And this time around, I knew I would do all I could to keep it from crumbling down ever again.