Chapter 1

I slammed her head down on the formica-topped bar that separated her little kitchen from the rest of the apartment – not so hard as to break anything, but more than hard enough to let her know that my tolerance for any shit from her was negligible.

My ex-daughter-in-law tried her damnedest to fall to the floor, but the grip I had on her hair kept her upright – with the added plus that I could feel strands of it ripping out of her scalp.

"You can't-"

That was as far as the skank got before I stuck a hypo in her neck with more than enough ketamine in it to keep her nice and quiet for several hours.

Let me start this from a little earlier in the story, just so we're all on the same page.

You see, my son came home for Christmas.

Doesn't sound too unusual, does it?

But as far as my son was concerned, coming to me for anything, even acknowledging I exist at all is like the Jews erecting a statue to Hitler in the middle of Jerusalem with a plaque reading "Really Not Such A Bad Guy".

Okay, maybe not quite that severe, but although I'd never stopped loving Johnny, and I had no problem understanding why he felt about me the way he did, I was anathema to him – a symbol of cruelty and persecution that he wanted nothing to do with.

So when I saw him on my front door step, I was more than a little confused. I'd always figured if the world was ending and he didn't have anything better to do, he might, might mind you, show up at my door to spit in my face.

Seems like I'm going to have to go back even further – that's okay, I can do that.

There's a point, early in a boy's life, where the universe revolves around his mother. She is the perfect goddess, source of all that's good and true. It's the beginning of that jealous rivalry boys have with their fathers, up until the time when they come to realize that their mothers are as human as anyone else, and things ease between son and father.

But when that time arrived in Johnny's life – well, he thought his mother should be put on a pedestal and I thought she should be a footstool and she thought I had a pretty damn fine idea about that whole footstool thing.

Betty and I tried to keep it in the bedroom, or for playtimes with friends, but even twenty-some-odd years later I've never met a more pliable, submissive little slut than her.

So, as you might guess, Johnny didn't care for the way I treated his mother. Even as I showed her every courtesy and kindness in public, and in front of him, that adoring little radar in his head picked up something between her and me, something he didn't like at all. Maybe we weren't clever enough with our little codes and such, maybe he just sensed the dynamics of our relationship, but he and I were on the outs from then on, and he never cared much for hiding his dislike of me.

I demanded polite and respectful behavior from him, and got it through judicious applications of groundings and spankings and the removal of privileges, but it was obvious to Betty and I that he didn't like me much.

His sister – well, she's a whole different story, in so many ways, as well as a story for another time. But until she was old enough to reach that 'daddy-on-a-pedestal' phase, I sometimes felt terribly lonely. There was Betty, but she neither wanted to be my equal nor was capable of it. I had friends in the scene, other Doms and Dommes, but I saw them once or twice a month at best, the rest of the time there was me, and my happy little slut, and my son who hated me.

Anyway, to skip ahead a few years, when Johnny was fifteen, he walked into our bedroom at just the wrong moment. I think he planned it that way, I think he wanted to catch us, to see what I was doing to her, and he's neither confirmed nor denied that in the years since.

What he saw would probably have scarred any child, no matter what their previous relationship with their parents, and given how he felt about me, that was the end. No real need to go into details, I'll save those for more recent situations.

But before I could untie his mother, or wipe the little flecks of shit off my dick, he was on the phone to Betty's parents, and the next day he was on a bus to go live with them. I hadn't seen him since that day, and he never told them anything about what he'd seen or suspected – I think he was too afraid of what they'd think of his mother, their daughter.

I got regular reports on what was going on in his life from his mother, I kept money going to Betty's parents to make sure they had no problem supporting him, and I worried about him like any father would.

I heard about his marriage to a woman he'd met when he was fresh out of veterinarian's school and just starting as an assistant vet at in a little town outside Chicago, where his grandparents lived. I wish I could claim that some psychic flash had alerted me that he was headed for trouble, but really, all the anxiety I felt was what any parent would feel when their child gets married.

Then there was the night when Betty lost control of the car on a rain-slick road and there was the funeral he refused to attend as I'd be there, and the conversations with Carl and Susan, Betty's parents, got shorter and more rare – we'd never been all that close, more as a consequence of distance than desire.

I always figured they'd let me know if anything really important happened.

I didn't know they'd passed away until my daughter told me on one of her visits home from school.

And I thought then that my son was completely lost to me – and I mourned that loss just as I'd mourned the loss of his mother.

In the interim, his sister Meredith and I grew closer, but she had her life to lead and while her tastes ran very much in the same vein as mine, sharing our interests in that way was a line we never crossed, although we talked about it from time to time when it was late and we'd had a few too many drinks.

I'd found another helpless woman, Christie, who appreciated a firm hand and everything that comes along with that and while she couldn't replace Betty, she could succeed her. She's fifteen years my junior, and very enthusiastic, and we'd found happiness with each other.

The little company I'd started had grown and when a major competitor, with more money than I could dream of raising, basically told me I could sell out to them for a generous amount or they'd crush my company and leave me with nothing, I wasn't too proud to take the money and run. I'd sold our old house in town and moved out to the lake house, where we had plenty of acreage and Christie could spend her days walking around naked save for her collar and not worry about anyone seeing her.

We were looking forward to going in to town for a nasty little Christmas playdate with another couple when my son showed up on my front door.

He looked like forty miles of bad road squeezed into a hundred yard stretch. I had Christie call and cancel our plans immediately.

Over four double bourbons he laid out the whole pathetic story – his ex-wife Natalie was a pathological liar, unable to keep her word in any respect, suffered from Munchausen's Syndrome – constantly developing medical symptoms that required massive outpourings of sympathy and attention, compulsively unfaithful, she'd left him saddled with over a hundred thousand dollars of debt, some of it to some very unforgiving individuals and when in desperation he'd taken drugs from the vet's office where he worked to barter down his indebtedness to those unpleasant types, he'd been caught and fired, although his former employers were kind enough not to press charges.

As I listened to the seemingly endless litany of betrayal and malevolence, I found myself rethinking some very long-held beliefs.

I'd run my sexual life on a simple set of principles – 'no meant no'; 'love is the primary aspect of any successful D/s relationship', and most importantly, 'it is all about giving people what they need'. But when I thought of Natalie, his ex-wife, those principles were called into question.

When he finally wound down, he apologized, but the divorce had become final a few days before and with creditors, and loan sharks, howling at the door, he'd realized he had nowhere to turn – it was either come to me or kill himself.

As the emotional flood dried to a relative trickle, it looked as though he was beginning to doubt the wisdom of the choice he'd made.

"Johnny, you're welcome to stay here as long as you like," I told him, "but you're once again under my roof, and I run my house the way I see fit. I'm not going to lay any heavy rules or anything on you, but I will not change the way I live just to make you comfortable.

"Tomorrow you'll give me the names of the men you owe money to, and I'll take care of it. I don't expect you to stay here long – I love you but I don't see you and I sharing a house as a stable, happy relationship. We'll get this shit pile Natalie left you in straightened out and then you can rebuild your life – I'd like it to be somewhere close – I've missed you, whether you believe me or not – but I'm not going to put any restrictions or conditions on my helping you. You're my son, you always will be, and I'll always be here for you."

He looked almost pathetically grateful, as if he believed his opinion of me had shaped mine of him over the years – as if he expected me to hate him in return for his hatred of me.

"I'm glad you've come home to me when you needed someone, son. Now, Christie is going to show you to the guest room, bring you a glass of juice and some aspirin. You need sleep, and a lot of it. Tomorrow morning, everything will look better, I promise."

When Christie came out from showing him to his room, I told her, "Quarter hit of Ecstasy in the juice, I want you to fuck his brains out so completely he'll be having trouble remembering to breathe. If you fail in this, I will scar the backs of your thighs – scar them permanently. Do you understand?"

"Yes sir."

"Good ... now I'm going to call Randy and have him come over tonight."

I'd never seen any reason to limit my enjoyment of sex to either gender, although I generally found more satisfaction with a woman than a man, but Randy was a special case in many ways.

For a time, he'd been put in training under me, as a favor to a friend in the scene, and there was something about him, something indefinable, but something that had clicked with me on a deeply emotional level. After I'd finished training him, we'd seen each other again – as equals. Part of the problem with his training had been his status as a 'switch', able to be top or bottom, and when I needed an equal, a partner ... when I needed to discuss things with another man, it was Randy I turned to, rather than any other Dom in my circle of friends.

He walked into my front door a submissive, but by the time we reached the bedroom, he was a friend and lover – no one Dominant, no one submissive.

We undressed each other, not slowly, not sensually, but like two people who wanted to skip the touchy-feely introductory encounters and just get to the shower so they could fall into bed together. While we enjoyed our time in the shower together, there was a minimum of foreplay there as well – the bed was calling us and would not be denied.

He could read my mood, and was giving enough as a partner to suck me off first, mouthing my cock in that way only someone who owned the equipment himself could do. As his warm wet mouth engulfed my penis, I slid my finger in and put a half hit of Ecstasy on the tip of my dick, and had him feed me the other half on his finger. While he massaged my cock with his mouth, I sucked his finger like it was his dick, wishing it was, but knowing our rhythms and that it was wiser if I waited until he was finished with me.

We'd both always believed that while a '69' was occasionally fun, good oral sex required complete and total attention on both parties parts – both receiving and giving. As the Exstasy began to work its magic on us, the touchy-feely came back to the forefront, and I lay back, feeling Randy caress my legs as he swirled his tongue around my cock. I soaked in the sensations, felt the peace and love between us swell to fill the room – when I closed my eyes, I would have sworn the walls glowed with it.