Day 4: Part 2

A New Method

Jasper led me to the playroom without a single additional utterance of preamble. I had frozen for a moment once he opened the door, a palpable mixture of dread and longing, two discernibly opposite forces turned physical on my body. I had raised a foot with the intention on stepping forward, but instead found it on the ground behind me. In the same instance, I had reached forward to match my stride's length with my opposite hand. It stayed forward. This moment, half entering his home and half backing towards my car, felt intimate in its depravity.

"Please, Bella," Jasper had said, stepping back from the threshold. "Come in."

I had obeyed and was now standing in his playroom. The playroom looked the same, but also inherently different. As though its original intention had been disfigured and rearranged to fit my presence. Nothing had actually changed about the room; it still had the endlessly high ceiling and dark wood paneling, but still it was altered in some intangible way.

"Please, sit," Jasper said, gesturing to one of the chairs aside the door. I did and he pulled the ottoman from the opposite chair towards me before sitting on top of it. He was holding a legal pad in his hands, flipping idly through the pages

"Bella," he said. "For the purpose of helping you, I need you to listen to me. It is a priority without which I will be unable to do so. Do you understand?"

I nodded.

"Today, I am going to immerse you in the more disciplined aspects of my learned experiences. I am capable of helping you overcome your condition, as I trust you have already begun to realize."

I hesitated. Edward's pained expression as had I left him, standing outside his bedroom door, was so raw that the words of acquiescence I allowed Jasper felt like they were ripped, word by word, out of my throat. "I trust you."

Jasper smiled and motioned for me to stand. "There are many techniques involved in gaining control over your emotions," he said. "You have your own method. However, your method only prevents full escalation of symptoms. My purpose here is to maintain a constant level of control."

He was so beautiful. Standing erect, his hands out from his body, their fingers pressed together to create a delicate pyramid. His Dom bracelet was wrapped around his wrist, and the soft, pliable leather followed the contours of his arm, like they were as inherently a part of him as the surrounding flesh.

"Is that . . . possible?" I asked. "To never have one again? A panic attack?"

"There are many methods," Jasper said and I nodded at him. To my surprise he wasn't smiling, but an immense look of pure satisfaction threatened to turn his mouth into a smirk. "Counting works as a means to prevent further symptoms. Are you five feet and seven inches tall, Bella?"

I nodded.

"May I measure your legs?"

"Um, sure. I guess."

"Tanya, please measure Bella's legs from inner thigh to foot."

Suddenly, I realized what felt different about the room. It wasn't that it had changed itself, but simply morphed around me, bending to the shape of my body. I was now just as much a part of this room as any of the whips and canes in it. My throat tightened and I put my hands on my stomach.

"Count by twos to twenty, Bella."

I swallowed a mouthful of spit. "T-Two, four, six, eight." The nausea stopped almost immediately and I oriented myself back into the room. "Why does it work so quickly?"

"Where does your panic begin?" he asked.

"In my stomach."

He shook his head. "What part of your body recognizes panic first?"

"My brain, I guess."

"Correct." He put a finger to the side of his head. "And there begins the problem. I guarantee the last thing you want to do is to stay in your head, to remove yourself from your surroundings. When you do that, you begin to focus too much on where the panic originates. If you allow yourself to experience the outside world during an episode, you gain your bearings better. Otherwise, you're too task-oriented."

Tanya knelt down in front of me, holding a flexible measuring tape between her hands. One of her hands touched my upper thigh and I blushed at the contact.

"Tanya is doing her job," Jasper said.

Tanya pulled herself up from the floor and went to the legal pad, taking the pen clasped to its side and writing on it. She handed the pad to Jasper and he walked towards the bench, reading it.

"No, Jasper," I said, shaking my head. "No, I'm not going to do that."

"Trust, Bella," he said, bending down towards the knee rests. "And count."

I swallowed with some difficulty and tried to control my breathing as panic set in. "Two, four, six . . ." Even with the muted churning of my stomach, still I watched him as he reached behind the knee rest and loosened a screw. He raised the knee rest, looking silently at the legal pad, before clinking it into place a few inches higher than it had been.

". . . sixteen, eighteen, twenty." My throat tightened.

He turned to me, still squatting in front of the bench. "Press your hand to your chest."

I did, and he slowly counted, one digit by one digit, until the beat of my heart began to slow. I brought my hand back down to my side at 'ten' and he stopped counting. He stood up and turned to me.

"Bella, have you ever heard of systematic desensitization?" he asked. I stared at him for a moment, trying to decipher his expression. One of his eyebrows was raised expectantly, awaiting my answer. But his face still remained neutral; no acknowledgement that it was me, Bella, standing in front of him, opposed to any stranger that would happen to find us here.

I narrowed my eyes at him.

He raised his other eyebrow in an expression of surprise. I felt my lips twitch in a self-satisfied smile. But then both of his eyebrows came back down and a large smirk followed.

I gritted my teeth together.

"Bella, please let me repeat my question," he said. "Have you ever heard of systematic desensitization?

I frowned. "No."

"It's the process of placing yourself into a phobia-inducing scenario. The purpose is to desensitize you to the experience so you are eventually able to be in similar situations without an episode."

"So," I said slowly. "You're going to force me to panic?"

"Yes," he said. "Systematic desensitization seems counterintuitive, but it works."

Yeah," I said. "I think I heard about this in one of my psychology classes."

"You probably did. Though my method is not exactly how textbooks define it, the essential similarities are enough that I allow myself to use the term to fit my particular need."

He smiled widely, his mouth stretched. My legs jellied underneath me, and I spread my hands out in front of me to maintain my balance. He took a step towards me.

"Bella, I will be whipping you."

My arms felt suddenly heavy, as though blocks of stones were tied to my wrists, and they fell, fast and hard, smacking the sides of my thighs as they landed. "O-One, four, six," I started but shook my head. "T-Two, four six." I took a deep breath. "No, you won't. That's not why I'm here."

"Then why, pray tell, are you here?"

I wanted to laugh at him and call him an idiot and say "why the fuck do you think I'm here?" To help me overcome my panic; to assist me in taking control of my body; to fix me; to help me get me back.

But Edward had spoke truths: there was medication, behavior therapy. So the truth was that I didn't know what the fuck I was doing here.

And that was the most dangerous reason of all.

I blinked, slowly, and turned my head towards the door. "I have to leave," I said, so softly that I wasn't sure I had spoken until Jasper gave a quiet chuckle.

I was pulled back to when Jasper was leaning over Edward's bed with a self-satisfied smirk and his heady perfume of fruit and something sweeter, something more sinister. Something that made me both want to cave into his body and run, terrified, away from it.

"You were born a sub, Bella," Jasper said. "Without it, you cannot function."

I groaned.

"If there is something you'd like to say, Bella, please speak. You are not my sub and I am certainly not holding you hostage here. You are free to leave, whenever you would like. I will not keep you here if you do not wish to be here."

The terne handle, which was bolted into the door by small, almost indistinguishable screws, was peppered with four small, perfectly even fingerprints. By instinct, I supposed, or perhaps by sheer force of will, I knew them to be Tanya's fingerprints.

"Without trust, you will forever be dictated by your episodes. I will not remind you of this again. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Does the idea of whipping not appeal to you?"

"No, yes, I don't know," I said. I looked over at the bench. The cherry leather reminded me simultaneously of Rosalie's burlesque outfit, Jasper's dining chairs, and James's maniacal, open-mouthed laughter as he folded a whip in half and smacked the two ends together, creating a sharp cracking sound, similar to one a belt made in the same sort of gesture.

"Perhaps we will work up to the bench," Jasper said with no particular inflection to his voice. He went to the far end of the room and stopped in front of the paddles, running his fingers loosely over the edges of them. I followed his movements, lithe and quick, but with a sort of determined calm; a forced self-restraint.

The paddles were endless. They ranged in size from ones as big as my fucking head to smaller, miniature ones. They were wood, leather, metal, rubber, and cloth, some with holes and some without them. They stood upside down, hanging from individual pegs by circles of string. Jasper stopped in front of a collection of smaller, thinner paddles made out of a rubbery material. He ran his long fingers delicately over one of them before taking it from the peg and holding it in his hand.

He walked back towards me and I was just too fucking paralyzed to move. My chest felt tight and my lips felt dry and my stomach churned uncomfortably, but it was all muted, all drummed down until it was only an annoying ache in the back of my head, suppressed and reduced into a faint buzzing somewhere in my subconscious.

I licked my lips.

Jasper walked slowly towards me, one hand holding the handle of the paddle, the other end laying flat on his palm. He looked at me for a moment, narrowing his eyes.

"Tanya," he said.

"Yes, Master?"

"Please retrieve the video equipment."

"W-What?" I said, spit dribbling down my chin. "Jas – " I bent at the waist as a wave of nausea ripped through my stomach. "Jas – " I snapped my mouth shut, tasting the onset of bile on the back of my tongue. "No, no, no . . ."

I gagged and made a retching sound, feeling my stomach contract as it tried to force its contents upward.

And then I felt it.

I hadn't felt my shirt rise or his cold hand touch me, but I felt the loud snap of the paddle as it hit my lower back. I gasped and lost my balance, though the pain wasn't more than a brief, passing moment of discomfort. But still I fell forward and landed, hard, on both my knees and palms.

I choked out an angry sob. The muscles in my arms trembled violently and another roll of nausea forced bile into the back of my throat. But it was lesser. A smaller, less intense version of its previous torrent.

But still, it was there.

"Again," I whispered, spitting indelicately onto the polished wooden floor of Jasper's playroom. "Green."