Note from Riottori: Enjoy (?)

The oysters are placed in front of me. They smell of deceit, fragrant steam rising in billowing fingers, toying with my senses, cloying to me. My stomach turns.

"Teddy phoned me today," Christian begins, normalcy returning. I don't want to talk about the children, I think. I don't want to be Mom. I watch him prepare an oyster, those long fingers playing with the core of it. He looks like he's cutting out a heart.

"Open your mouth," he commands, softly, quietly, as if we're alone and not surrounded by other diners. His eyes bore into me, penetrative as a drill.

I open my mouth and find my voice. "Stop it," I say, the sound a whisper, dead on my lip. "Just stop it." How can I play this game? How have we become these players? I don't know the rules that he has written.

"What?" he asks, surprise washing over his beautiful features. "Ana, what's wrong?" His hand still proffers the oyster, his wedding ring glints like a knife.

"What's wrong?" I ask, my voice escalating as I rise from my chair. "How could you Christian? How could you do this to me? After everything we've been through?" The cliches spill from my lips, but they're not enough. They sound too trite to convey how I really feel, to make the impact that needs to be made. They've been said a million times by others; they are borrowed; hand-me-downs. I need words that belong to just me, just us. They'll never exist.

"Ana?" His face is a grotesque carnival mask of realisation. He knows what I know, what I've seen. If anguish were a tangible, palpable thing, it would be the look on his face.

"I want you to remember this," I say, my voice echoing my words from earlier. "Remember this feeling, for the rest of your life. When you're at work, remember me, when you're at home, remember me. Remember us, what we were, what we had. What you ended. Good bye, Sir."

I tumble out of the restaurant on legs that don't feel like mine and pound down the street. I wend my way through the series of back-alleys I have planned out to reach my car, creating a labyrinth for him to get lost in, a game of my own.

Only when I reach the unassuming motel where he'll never think to look for me, check in under an assumed name and sink down onto the well-worn bed, do I exhale the breath I've been holding for days.

I wake, early. The sun peeks shyly through the slice of shutter, not wanting to disturb me from my restless slumber. The memory of the night before floods over me, has been threatening to crash over me like a wave all night. I don't want sun, I think. I want rain and sleet and nature at its worst. I roll over and remember.

"So, Ms Steele," my psychiatrist said. "Talk." Such a simple imperative, such a simple rule to follow. One even I wouldn't have difficulty obeying.

I had found my own Doctor Flynn and I didn't like her very much. She prodded and probed and was cold. She was just what I needed. No sugar-coating, no BS. Dr Flynn belonged to Christian and this Dr Black belonged to me. Even her name was cold – Black, the absence of light.

I had given her the bare bones to pick over in previous sessions, Christian and me in a nut-shell: my husband used to be a Dom though I was never his Sub, he had had a hideous childhood, had started to heal and loved me, very much. I was the reason for the healing of his scars – I knew that. We had two children, 12 and 10. Each fact was noted down on a jotter and marked by a sharp little nod. Our relationship fit onto a sheet of paper.

"Well, it's been...seven...no...wow...eight years since we've had anything other than vanilla," I began, looking anywhere but at Dr Black.

"And you miss the, let's call it, chocolate?" I winced. This was harder than I'd thought.

"Yes and no." She sat back, allowing me to elaborate. "Yes, because it was something we shared and something I..." I gulped, "I learnt to enjoy."

"Enjoyed or tolerated?" Dr Black asked.

I took a deep breath. "Enjoyed." Was she judging me? I wondered. Her face remained as impassive as the wall behind her. A small nod and I continued. "My husband wanted to both control and please me. It was only once about pain and that time nearly destroyed us. He never, ever, over-stepped the limit again." I involuntarily shuddered, remembering the pain that day almost 13 years ago in The Red Room. The internal and external pain. He had almost been lost to me, he'd almost made himself lost to me. We'd come a long way since then.

"And no," I said. "No, I don't miss it because of what it means. That my husband has finally healed, that he's cured. He no longer needs that control, sex in those terms." I was speaking the words of Dr Flynn now.

"You don't believe that." I looked up sharply at her. It was a statement, not a question.

"I don't know," I said

"Ms Steele, if you do believe that he is cured, you wouldn't be here, talking to me. I think you believe that he still needs the pleasure found in chocolate."

At that moment I hated her, irrationally and forcefully hated her. You didn't want BS, I reminded myself. Take the truth, baby.

"I'm going to deconstruct this for you. There are some people – men and women – who are thrill-seekers, adrenaline-junkies, call them what you will. They are always looking for the next high. You know, the ones who jump out of planes, bungee jump, put themselves in danger." I nodded, thinking I could name a few. "There are others who are always looking for the 'new', the unexplored, the – perhaps – unobtainable. They don't know if they can get what they want but they sure enjoy the process of trying to get it. You told me that you weren't your husband's Sub, although he had you ear-marked as one."

"Yes." The word escaped me, low and slow.

"You were a challenge. A challenge that 'paid off' in the sense that he married you and had your children." I allowed myself a small smile, thinking of myself as a 'pay-off'.

"I don't doubt that your husband loves you very much, Ms Steele. You helped him heal, helped him to love. He will always be indebted to you, I'm sure. But believing that he has given up his quest for the 'new' is like believing an adrenaline-junkie won't take up a new extreme sport."

I felt tears prick at my lids. The ghost of a voice I had been suppressing whirled in my head. But you'd already worked that out, it said. Out with the old and in with the new.

"But I was willing to experiment with him," I replied. "More than willing. It was he who didn't want to."

"Yes, but because he experimented with you, you weren't a challenge anymore. He conquered you. I don't mean to be blunt, Ms Steele," Dr Black. "I could glide over this subject, tell you that he has broken some mould, but in my experience, he will probably always crave the new. Now, whether he acts on it or not is another thing..."

She arched an eyebrow, the movement awakening my anger.

"You don't even know him," I shouted, knocking her neat little flower arrangement to the floor, as I turned the coffee-table over in my haste to get up and out. The vase shattered on the cold, stone floor.

"Calm down, Ms Steele."

"He would never... He loves me"

"Love and sex are two different things..."

"Not to me," I screamed, my voice-box inflamed and raw. "And not to him."

I slammed the door behind me, the bang final, like the sealing of our fate.