Mabel Shot Part 5

"Macro, I can’t get addicted to a feeling my body has already experienced." I slowly exhale through my nostrils and lower my fingers. "Mr. Gregovivk won’t be able to hurt me like that."
"For God's sake, you can’t be so naive to think you can walk into a cell to play with a tiger and think you’ll come out unscathed!" He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. "Nate was just a sick bastard who wanted to cause pain to a woman, without the slightest notion of what that would entail for her life. But Gregovivk? He’s sadistic by nature, Mabel. From what I understand, no one becomes a counselor unless they’re wickedly good at what they do." He waves his hands in the air in a distressed manner. "That girl, the one who agreed to play with him, she disappeared all of a sudden."
"What do you mean, disappeared?" I fall silent, paying attention to this story and feeling nervous again about everything Macro is telling me.
"No one has seen her for a long time." He lowers his hands and stares at me.
"She just vanished?" I lean forward. "She died?"
"No, not like that; it's all very confusing about this story. A girl, a submissive, at the last meeting I attended, said that this girl who played with Czar moved to Australia; it seems she got involved with a master there."
"See, it’s just gossip from the ladies at tea time." I let out a long breath, feeling relieved. "For a moment, I thought you were going to tell me he hid the girl's head in the fridge, by the way you got all withdrawn when talking about him." I smile and pick up my cup, finishing the rest of my coffee. "The truth is, to participate in this world, it seems everyone has to have a screw loose. Look at us here as living proof of that..."
"Christ, this habit of treating everything as a joke sometimes makes me want to punch you!" Macro doesn’t laugh at my joke; he just scolds me, sounding like a lioness roaring in my ears. "Pay attention, that man fucked that woman so hard that he left her unconscious. Do you have any idea what that is?! And it's because of what happened with that girl that he doesn’t keep the same submissive more than once."
Mr. Gregovivk told me it would just be the two of us, that during the game he wouldn’t touch other women. Did he lie to me? Will he keep the other submissives close to him while playing with me, or will it really just be the two of us? I fall silent, not sharing our agreement with Macro to avoid him worrying more about this girl’s story.
"This must just be stories, Macro," I say more to myself than to him, wishing not to believe everything I'm hearing.
"It’s not; all the girls who went through him spent days unable to lie down with other men, due to the amount of erotic pain their bodies received." Macro continues speaking, making me even more anxious and confused about the decision I’ve made. "And the scariest part is that they say he shows no reaction at all; they say he’s completely cold, like a glacial ice wall."
"Mr. Gregovivk didn’t seem like that to me last night..."
I lower my cup, looking at it empty. "He was different."
I stop talking and lower my eyes to my wrist, remembering his hands touching me yesterday, slowly, lifting me in his arms after he carefully took the cuffs off my wrists. Silent, yes, but not indifferent.
Macro looks at me, lost, and blinks repeatedly, raising his hands and resting his elbows on the table, leaving his chin on his hand. "In what sense?"
"I don’t know, I..." I suck on the corner of my lip, recalling how those brown eyes silenced all my demons. "After everything that happened, he took care of me."
"Took care of you?" Macro asks, astonished. "What really happened last night, Bel?" Macro asks softly, looking at me curiously.
"A lot of things," I whisper to him, running my fingers slowly over the bump, as if I could feel the large hand wrapping around my wrist.
"You both played for real?" I lift my face to him, who notices my confusion, not understanding his question. "I mean, did he fuck you, like really fuck you, like a sadistic master?"
Yes, he had fucked me; he had touched me and made my mind shut off, but I can’t say if it was in a way a sadomasochistic master would fuck someone. But after that, he didn’t touch me again. Well, he did touch me; his hand passed over my body several times while giving me a bath or when he dried me afterward. But none of those touches that followed, after he got me out of that erotic dungeon, as I had nicknamed it, were sexual in connotation, perhaps paternal. I was confused about this man.
"Well, he did some things with me, but that was before he fucked me," I reply to Macro, rubbing my wrists. "And afterward, he took care of me..."
"Christ, now I don’t understand anything!" Macro leans back in his chair, letting his arms fall at his sides, looking out the window and becoming thoughtful. "Is he playing with you as a sadistic master or as a dominator?"
"I don’t know; I think both. I don’t really understand the difference between the two." I take my bag off the chair, pulling my phone out and checking the time. "I have to go now; I need to get back to the gallery early. Boris wants me to go with him to assess the canvases of a new painter. He wanted me to go yesterday, but I managed to escape that..."
"Mabel..." I raise my eyes to Macro, who looks serious now, his forehead furrowed as he stares at me.
"What is it?" I look at him, holding my phone and my bag.
"Be careful; I'm lost now with this information." Macro stretches his hand across the table, reaching out to me. I raise my hand and touch his, watching him turn my wrist slowly. "If you’re right in saying he’s playing both sides of the coin, you need to worry. Not just about the sadistic side, but especially about the dominator. The very name already indicates the difference between the two. A dominator doesn’t care for what he doesn’t take as his own."
I remember Czar’s words, the way his face expressed pride when he looked at my marked throat. The silence that followed inside the bathroom after I asked him the question, his concentration in drying me inch by inch, the same concentration he had in dressing me. I took his silence as a yes; once the game ended, my agreement with him would also come to an end.