Camp
Despite the discouraging confrontation at Sawyer Mill, Denise McDonough wasn’t finished trying to reestablish ties with her daughter. She’d try to flag Kat down at school when picking up the boys or stand in her way on the sidewalk. But her daughter would ignore her, walk around, or reverse direction.
One afternoon, their paths crossed at the mall. Kat was alone, so Denise hoped they could speak freely. Kat wouldn’t look her mother in the eye and brushed Denise off, saying something about needing to be by the phone in case Seth called.
Denise would go to Target with the hope of catching Kat at work. When she did find her daughter, she noted a marked change in her personality. When Denise would talk to her, Kat would appear preoccupied, looking furtively around the store. She told Denise it wouldn’t be good if Seth saw them talking. Denise inferred this meant Kat’s boyfriend would yell at her mother for interfering with her daughter’s relationship. It didn’t occur to her that it could be bad for Kat.
On Portsmouth High School’s graduation day, Seth was scheduled to work and told Kat he couldn’t get out of his shift. He knew Kat’s parents would be there, and he didn’t want them trying to take her away from him, so he asked Roberta Gerkin if she would accompany Kat to and from graduation. Kat wasn’t entirely comfortable with this arrangement. She still wasn’t convinced that the psychic wasn’t a threat.
Denise and Peter McDonough were able to get two tickets to the graduation ceremony through their sons. After the diplomas were passed out and families began to gather for photos, Denise and Peter tried to maneuver their way through the crowd. They saw Kat, still in her gown, being pulled away by Roberta.
Soon after, Denise’s friend who lived at Sawyer Mill asked Denise if she could babysit for a couple of hours. Denise resisted the temptation to stop by Seth’s apartment and went directly to her friend’s place, but when she spotted Kat hauling a bag of trash to the Dumpster outside the building, Denise opened the window and yelled out a friendly hello. Kat froze and refused to come any closer.
“Why won’t you come over here and just talk to me?” Denise asked.
“Because if I saw you, I’d have to lie to him,” Kat said. “And I don’t want to lie to him.”
—
Kat got a new laptop to replace the one she’d used at her parents’ house, but she was somewhat limited in her online activities. There was no Wi-Fi in the apartment, so she had to tether the portable computer to the Internet through a gray Ethernet cable. It stretched only as far as the futon, so she kept the computer on the floor next to where the couple slept.
While there was no need to continue her midnight chats with Seth, Kat still liked to communicate with her friends via Facebook. Seth, however, did not approve of these chats. He said that any time spent IMing with other people was time spent away from him—even if the two of them were in the same room.
The new computer was state of the art. Instead of a login password, it had a biometric security feature, a fingerprint reader that allowed Kat to simply swipe her finger across a tiny scanner in order to boot up the machine.
Seth didn’t like the feature because it meant he couldn’t use Kat’s computer at will. He made Kat give him the backup password so he could also log on. When he used the laptop, he would usually sign in under Kat’s profile, despite her having set one up for his use. This gave him access to all of Kat’s e-mails, chat logs, and social media accounts and allowed him to post content and interact with other users as if he were Kat. Seth had a similar rule for Kat’s cellphone. He made her share her four-digit PIN number to unlock the phone and would regularly read her call log and text messages.
Seth didn’t reciprocate with his own passwords, so Kat had no access to his computer or cell phone or any of his online accounts.
—
Seth didn’t respond well to the news that Kat would be leaving in late August for Camp CenterStage. Her being gone for two weeks was unacceptable, he told her, completely unacceptable.
Kat argued back, telling Seth the camp job wasn’t a surprise. He’d known since he met her that she’d finished her training the previous summer in order to return as a camp counselor. Seth grumbled and pouted petulantly. The following day, he told Kat he’d laid down tarot cards in order to consider the option of her going to camp. He told Kat he’d make her a deal, one he expressed in a way that sounded less like a compromise and more like a mandate. Kat could go to camp for two weeks, he said, but only if she found a sexual surrogate to serve him in her place.
Kat immediately offered to skip camp instead, but now Seth was insistent. She could go, he told her, but she had to find a minion for him to play with. It was the only way to keep the Darkness in check.
Kat knew this was a tall order. It had been hard enough to get anyone to agree to watch her and Seth have sex, much less participate even in a limited way. Now Seth was demanding that someone be her sexual replacement for a full two weeks. She knew she couldn’t ask any of her friends, and he didn’t have any other women to call upon. The only chance Kat had to hold up her end of the bargain was to find someone online. Agreeing to try, she joined Seth in starting the search on BDSM websites.
Together, Seth and Kat scrolled through the dozens—hundreds—of profiles of people on the Seacoast who claimed to enjoy an alternative lifestyle. Their focus was on finding a woman that fit Seth’s preferred type—young, slender, and blond. If she were a lesbian or bisexual, that was considered a plus.
He wanted someone he could be a Dom with, someone who would then either be a Dom or a Sub to Kat when she returned from camp. Seth selected a few of his favorites from the profiles as if ordering off a wine list. He said it was better for Kat to make first contact with them, that it would be less intimidating if the invitation came from his willing girlfriend and not from him. They composed the message together.
Writing as “Skar,” she told the woman about her upcoming two-week absence. “We just want someone to keep him company, and for some sexual activities.”
They got no responses from any of the women they messaged. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. What Seth and Kat were looking for was “a unicorn”—something known in alternative sex circles as a beautiful, sexy, unattached woman willing to join a couple in bed, attend to their individual pleasures, without any strings or drama. The name, of course, refers to a creature that doesn’t exist.
The impossible quest didn’t stop them from trying obsessively, however. Even during sex with Kat, Seth would set up the laptop so he could simultaneously scroll through digital profiles, as if shopping for his surrogate Slave. As the camp date approached, more and more posts attributed to Kat popped up on the websites, each sounding slightly more desperate than the last. Kat knew that going to camp depended on this.
Right before she was to leave, Kat told Seth she’d found someone. A blonde in her thirties, someone who agreed to be a sexual surrogate and do some light housework. Kat had arranged all the details. The woman was going to meet him at the apartment the night after she left.
The Master was thrilled with his Slave. That night, Seth let Kat get on top of him during sex, her reward for a job well done.
—
Seth got up early and made Kat breakfast in bed. Her suitcase was packed for camp, and he was going to drive her to the drop-off point. They’d had sex the previous night, and it had been uncharacteristically tender. Seth was being clingy. He was already missing her.
“You are my Skarlet.”
“And you are my Darkheart.”
Kat explained there was a no-phone policy in place at the camp, even for the counselors. Seth instructed her to disregard the policy, and to call him every night after lights-out. Kat said she would try to call and possibly text, but it wouldn’t be easy. She didn’t even know if she could get a signal there.
Seth ignored her and repeated that Kat needed to call every night.
In the parking lot at the drop-off, he grabbed his girlfriend one last time. “Until the tides bring you back to me.”
Kat got on the bus with the rest of the theater brats and waved good-bye through the window.
When they finally arrived in Maine, Kat fell back into a familiar and comforting rhythm. Old friends. Ice breakers. Cabin assignments. Songs at dinnertime, the meal served family style. All the campers finally settled into their cabins and slid into sleeping bags with hardly any complaints of homesickness.
A safe amount of time after lights out, Kat snuck into an empty counselors’ lounge and powered up her cell phone. When the device finally connected to a remote network, a series of text messages sent earlier in the day began to fill the inbox. The phone buzzed again and again. There were also many notices of missed calls, Kat saw. They were all from “Darkheart.”
Seth texted that the surrogate had bailed on him. She hadn’t shown up. He wanted to know if there was some mistake about the day? Were they supposed to meet somewhere other than the Lair? Was she able to get her contact information for this mystery woman? Did she even exist?
When they first dated, Kat lied to her parents over and over to get out of the house, making up parties and work obligations and play practices for cover. She lied so she could do the thing she really wanted—to go to Seth’s. Was it such a stretch to think Kat would have done the same thing to get what she really wanted now—to go to camp? Seth was never able to track down his promised surrogate, but Kat later said under oath the woman and the arrangement were real.
It wasn’t just Kat’s past behaviors on display. Seth was in full-on temper mode. His behavior mimicked how he’d reacted at Christmas, the unbearable thought of not having his woman behind closed doors for uninterrupted hours. His inability to confront Kat about the situation only made it worse.
Kat didn’t check her phone again until two nights later. Hiding in the counselors’ lounge, the cell came to life with another flurry of unanswered phone calls and text messages. The surrogate was a no-show for the third straight night, Seth wrote. Darkheart was demanding Kat respond. Why had she not replied to his text messages the night before?
Kat wrote back that there was a lot going on at night and it wasn’t a good time to slink away. Darkheart didn’t want to hear how she had been socializing with friends when she was supposed to be calling at the appointed time, Seth wrote. Kat said it was much too quiet at camp for her to make a phone call, but that she’d try to text.
Darkheart then said that Kat had been a bad Slave to her Master. He said she would pay when she got home.
—
Back in Dover, Seth was crawling up the walls. He’d been so looking forward to having a new plaything—and now he had nothing. As the two weeks wore on, his mood continued to blacken.
He went to see Roberta Gerkin and asked for a tarot reading. He said the situation with Kat had made the Darkness more intense, more difficult to control. Seth said he felt like Doomsday was coming and that he couldn’t control him. He told Roberta that if Kat didn’t start checking in with him at the appointed time, someone “would be dead.”
—
On August 25, toward the end of the second week, Seth composed an epic text message, detailing the elaborate, humiliating punishments he had planned for her failure in securing a sexual replacement for him while she was at camp.
When Kat read what Seth wrote, she was appalled. She had never seen anything like this from him before. Even when doing it as “the Nameless One” or “the Hollow One,” the roughest of the sex personas, he had never threatened his Slave with such violence. It horrified her. Just as he had disproportionately demanded four nights of dates because he lost one night to Mother Dragon, his response to her not obtaining a temporary sex Slave was also disproportionate. It was disturbing and extreme.
Kat deleted all of the other text messages from her phone, but couldn’t bring herself to get rid of this one.
Like a hideous screenplay, Seth even dictated the dialogue for them both. “‘You’ve been a naughty slut.’ ‘Yes, sire. I’m sorry,’ you will reply,” he wrote. “I stop halfway and listen to your whimpers and yelp. ‘Beg for the rest of it,’ I say.”
He told her she was then supposed to ask him to do more. The text went on and on, with Seth gleefully describing how he would continue to strike her all over her body. She was to constantly say, “Thank you,” to apologize for leaving him alone, and to submit to a laundry list of sex acts that would denigrate her body.
“I will twist, slap, whip with a chain, pull hair, and punish you as you ride me.”
Seth even threatened to do something he had never done in bed with Kat, the one thing that truly terrified her. He was going to sodomize her.
And yet, the long list of what he had just described would only be Kat’s first punishment. The text continued.
“The second price of this—you choose a friend,” he wrote. “I may do *anything* I wish with her while you watch and assist.”
The text message ended on a sinister note.
“I think it would be fitting if the first thing you saw me do when you got back is pleasure one of your friends until they died of orgasms. And only then turn my brutal attention back to you.”
—
Months later, while on the witness stand, Kat said a friend dropped her off at the apartment when the bus returned from Maine. When she opened the door, she found Seth waiting in the Lair with all of the contents of their special box laid out on the bed. She rolled her suitcase into the cluttered apartment and left it by the closet.
Darkheart ordered Kat to take off her clothes. She began to beg Seth not to sodomize to her. She begged as hard as she could. It wasn’t the kind of play begging that Subs did for their Doms, where they pretend not to want the thing they know comes next. It wasn’t even the kind of begging Seth had made her do as his Slave. Seth ignored the pleas, seemingly determined to hurt her.
Tears were rolling down Kat’s cheeks. She offered to do anything else Seth wanted, any kind of impact play he could dream of. She said she would be his Slave for however long he wanted. She appealed and sobbed and bargained and pleaded.
Darkheart’s will was strong, Seth reminded her as he unbuckled his belt. He’d told her there would be two punishments and this was just the first.
He pulled Kat over to the futon and made good on his promise.