There are times, when I look at her, and I marvel at how far we've come.

Then there are times, when I look at her, and I flinch at how little I've changed.

I am still the man she ran away from all those years ago. I am still the man who spends his days fighting his most basic and primal desires, convincing himself with an unsatisfactory degree of conviction, that the playroom and all the memories that go with it, no longer apply to me. I do not need it, I've told myself that over and over again, but the man who looks back at me in the mirror always wears a slight smirk of scorn. Can a man truly reinvent himself? I don't know, I don't think so. But can he supress those deep and dark desires for the sake of the one he loves?

Yes.

But for how long?

Again, I don't know.

She's sleeping now, and I still love to watch her slumber. Her dark hair is splayed across her pillow and her pale face is at rest. I owe this woman my life, my everything. She is my life, my everything. But there's a darkness within me, a spreading malignancy. I am used to this creature that lives inside of me, to the point where I contrived a system of self-medication.

My submissives.

They were the unhealthy tonic to my incurable disease. They kept the creature at bay, they stymied his force in my life. I could breathe, I could cope. I let the darkness out in little black puffs of smoke by becoming master of all things, of all people. My playroom was my clinic, my hospital. Or hospice, depending on which way you look at it. It was the space in which I could truly shed myself of the many masks I wear and bare myself in the truest reflection of my disturbed individuality. It prevented the build-up that now cripples me, now consumes me. The creature has claws now, and it tears at my insides with swiping snarls. It's so extreme that at times, I have to disentangle myself from sweet Anastasia and lock myself in a cold bathroom or a crowded closet.

For I fear I will hurt her.

I fear that if I were to continue to hold her in my arms when the creature thrashes against its bonds… that I will break and she will be the outlet of my sickening sickness. Her scent is my trigger. Her sweet, summery scent. The aroma of goodness, of purity. Of all the things I am not. I have loved Ana for a long time, loved her in a way that I never thought possible. She is my morning, my noon and my night. She is also the prime instigator of the pain I carry, the burning needs I deny and the cloying calamity of repressed want that clings to my every fibre.

It's technically New Year's Day.

The bright red LED of the alarm clock beside our bed tells me that it's three-thirty AM.

January first.

A new day, a new year.

A new start.

The same resolutions plague me. The same ones I've laid awake and chewed over every single New Year's Day since I met and fell in love with Anastasia Rose Grey. The promise to never lose control, the determination to keep the creature at bay, away from her. She is so good, she is so pure. She is worth the sacrifice a thousand times over. But the fear still plagues me, as it always does with its most profound bite on this day of the year… what if I can't keep it up? It's been five years and we've lived a life of blissful normality, with a side-order of kinky fuckery. We do all the things that the previously dubbed normal couples do. We go to dinner, to the movies, to the park on a Sunday morning. We even have a dog; his name is Ralph.

And I love Ralph.

Another startling self-revelation of a previously disparaged capacity.

The capacity of love.

I love Anastasia and I love Ralph.

But I still hate myself.

That's the crux of the matter, I guess. Ana's love for me, her intense and long-lasting love… it befuddles and beguiles me, it makes no clinical or behavioural sense. But she does, I see it in her eyes and feel it in her touch. I do not doubt her deep-seated love for me, nor mine for her. But as the clock spins forward another hour, I continue to doubt my ability to keep it all in. I would never, ever cheat on Ana. The thought disgusts me, infidelity is something I despise. But… I cannot deny that on my darkest days, on the days where I am so consumed with the need for release… that I wish infidelity wasn't something that disgusts me.

Just one time…

Just one session…

Just one scene…

I know I will never do such a thing. I know I never could do such a thing. But I also know that I will never stop wishing or hoping for Anastasia to wake up one day and suddenly want to kneel before me and surrender her will in totality. I know she never will, that is not who she is, that is not how she was born. Shame floods me as I work the memory of submissive after submissive through my mind. The high, the serotonin and dopamine surges, the thrill. The dizzying high of stepping bare footed into the playroom, flogger in hand and seeing whomever happened to be servicing me at the time… naked… on bended knee…

Mine to do with as I wished.

And as it always does, the pleasurable memories of those playroom exploits blur and bleed into the painful memory of Anastasia barrelling from the room, tears in her eyes, right before she leaves me and in doing so, breaks me. My chest constricts with the panic of that memory and I push the melted images from my mind. There's no point in trying to sleep, I never sleep on New Year's Eve or Day. Because those are days for contemplation and reflection, and every single fucking time I do that, the darkness within me grows and grows to the point where it's physically painful.

Like now.

Anastasia has no idea of the turmoil I sometimes suffocate under. How could I put that on her? I know how she thinks. If I tell her that the needs that nearly tore us apart still consume me, she'd blame herself. She'd think she wasn't good enough, she'd agonize and theorize. How could I do that to her? She has put up with every single facet of my fifty shades of fucked up shit. How could I make it even harder, ask even more?

I couldn't.

I can't.

I won't.

I love her and that's all that really fucking matters. My desires… they're just sexual. Flynn tells me they're not, that I'm doing extreme damage to myself by denying my base needs. Flynn can fuck himself. I've lived without rules, without action and reaction, consequence and punishment for years now. Ana challenges and defies me on a daily basis, and I truly love that. Really, I do. And I've come this far… I can keep going. We have an amazing sex life, even by my standards. And we have an amazing life in general, by anyone's standards.

My New Year's resolution affirms itself, as it always does, on this day.

I know that I will never truly be able to let go of the man I once was, or truly be the man she thinks I am, but I can live between the two and appreciate her every breath and blink in the interim. I am not cured, there is no cure, but Anastasia… she is my lifeline. My medication. And I am not going to threaten my treatment by relapsing into old ways, by forcing her through emotional blackmail, however unintentional, into something she's not comfortable with. I am still a Dominant, I have to accept that, that is something that is intrinsically embedded into my DNA.

But I also have to compartmentalize.

I am a husband.

I am a dog-father.

Those things come first, they are the only things that matter. Those are the boxes I can work with. The box that I shove my Dominant status in, that can never be opened again. I know it's there, I can't dispose of or destroy it, but I also cannot open it. I pushed her away from me once and the scars from that incident still indent my skin. I won't risk it again. I come to this conclusion, after much tortured deliberation, on the first of the year… every year. This day is no different. And as she stirs beside me in her sleep, unconsciously snuggling close, the first smile of the year stretches across my face and my resolution is made that little bit easier.

I will never lose her by letting the darkness win.

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A/N: I've always wondered how Christian could just shut off his needs just like that so I wanted to do a little fic where he does struggle, but they're internalised so as not to hurt Ana. Anywhooo, just a random NYD drabble!

Inks xx

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