Everything Integrated: Cover Reveal, Blurb, & Chapter 1!

Mistress & Master of Restraint, #11, Integrated: Ezra Holden Zeitler’s story.

I embark on a journey of self-realization, redemption, and forgiving oneself…

I’ve struggled since I was thirteen years old to keep myself even. I lost my innocence when I fractured. The childlike part of me was tainted while the dominant part of me overpowered my mind. I’ve lived in a constant state of tug-of-war.

Some call me Master Ez, Dr. Lunatic, Son, Elder Holden, Dad, or husband. Until I integrated I couldn’t simply be called Ezra.

Everyone struggles throughout life. I would know since I counsel a large majority. Imagine a life filled with financial, familial, and romantic problems, but compound that by fighting one’s own mind. Imagine having two halves dueling for control of your mind as you try to merge them into one, to give yourself peace. Mental illness makes the mundane seem trivial, doesn’t it?

With great wealth comes an ease of freedom of choice but an even larger responsibility. I am responsible for all those around me: their happiness, their safety… their torment and punishment and ruination.

Integrated, I finally recognize all the evil deeds I’ve committed in the name of my alters. I must come to terms with my actions, and for the first time ever, I need to accept the responsibility and the consequences.

I’ve set my path of redemption. I’ve asked for forgiveness, and I cannot demand that my victims pardon me. Out of my control, their thoughts on my character are their own… now, a much more difficult task lies ahead… forgiving oneself.

As if a newborn, raw and exposed, wounded and fragile, I must learn who this integrated person is that I don’t truly recognize. The last time I was whole was twenty years ago. I was a child, and now I am a man.

You must learn to walk before you run… I must ask for forgiveness before I can forgive myself… and hopefully, I can learn who I was meant to be along the way. 

Integrated
–Chapter One–

Fog, wavering in a fog of self-creation. My mind’s way of protecting oneself from the guilt and shame. I know I’ve done something I will regret this evening as surely as I know I breathe. My body is sexually sated while my mind screams in torment. I realize both halves of the whole betrayed me on a primal level.

Both wanted what I had never planned to give… and the guilt is suffocating. It is a rape, a rape of oneself. When one half, or both halves, take dominion over your body to do as they will, it is the highest violation.

Already sensing something major was happening within my personal life, my mind fractured. One half took care of me while the other half laid in wait. Working in conjunction, they betrayed me- I betrayed myself.

I never planned on going through with my scheme with Daniel and Dalton. It was always a means to an end- an end where the boys lived a happily ever after, far removed from the fear, guilt, shame, and remorse over their sexuality. I simply wanted them to know they were better than they were behaving- to know they were worth more than waffling in self-doubt.

I never planned on being with them- fucking them- being fucked by them.

With a desperation borderlining on madness, I hunger with a desire so fierce that I’m on the edge of starvation- I must see Cortez. I must get to the meeting. No doubt he knows of my nightly activities, and no doubt he will surely leave me now.

While I’m always on the edge of madness, Cortez is always on the edge of flight. More so now than ever. I can feel it roiling in my blood, Cort’s behavior is not his norm- something is driving him away. He freely gives me unlimited access to his body but his emotions are closed off. It has always been the other way around.

I never feared losing Cortez, even when he denied me his body. His emotions were always an open book. Even when screaming I hate you, Cortez’s face was filled with love. Even when professing love, Cortez’s face was filled with hurt. One constant- the love was ever present.

Lately, Cortez has been suppressing the love while reveling in the lust. Fear has me forcing my companions to hurry, unsure what Master Ez said or did that put the tortured expression on Daniel’s handsome face.

This is what I hate. I hate that I have to ask myself what I did as if having a conversation about a separate entity. But it is ME who had upset Daniel. The discombobulating sensation is more than I can bare. If I didn’t have people counting on me, I’d have ended my confused existence by now.

My skin flushes pink, a mix of lust and embarrassment as I enter Misery Castle’s opulence. As if waiting for the perfect opportunity to ruin me, my halves waited until I arrived to the Christmas meeting to show me the hedonism I’d engaged in this evening with Daniel and Dalton. Ezra gleefully flashes sights, sounds, tastes, and scents into my mind. A kaleidoscope of lust-filled passions. This is how it’s always been. Ezra is gloating, bloated, fat and sated over this evening’s events. Ezra loves to be naughty and never tells me what I did until well after Cortez has received the punishment. In this instance, the punishment and the crime fall upon myself, so he, me, shows me what I’ve done.

Rosy pink flesh, striated with lean muscles, glistens with sweat. Pale, translucent skin filled with good health thrusts deep within me. A fingertip trails down a tattoo, its owner proudly professing that one of the Kings decorating the decedent landscape of his side represents me. Green eyes, blue eyes, green eyes, blue eyes flick like images being shot with the rapid flash of a camera shutter- an unearthly color and a color so deep that every sea envies the shade.

The sights put the pink high in my cheeks. But the melodious sounds- a composition of lust played by the greatest orchestras in the world fill my mind, causing my skin to tighten and burn with embarrassed arousal. The keen of two very satisfied young men in their early twenties without a lick of hair on them- boys that were almost untried- innocent- jaded by my knowledge. Ezra, I, had drank them deep, consumed them, and turned them into men.

My alters worked in communion with one another on the pair of young men: Ezra for the pleasure of flesh and Master Ez for the pleasure of the cerebral fuck.

I am not proud that I partook, but proud of the way Daniel and Dalton owned their true nature, reveled in the pleasure of being one’s true self. Never again will they deny their need for one another- they will never take the wrong path and fall off course.

The last thing I remember this evening- I, me, Ez, as I refuse to think of myself as Ezra or Master Ez. The last thing I remember as a whole being, not figments being flashed by a spiteful child or apologetic images being poured into my memories like glacial waters by an ethical tyrant.

The last thing I remember is Katya.

Our full-to-bursting household had just finished the Misery Castle Christmas dinner from Hell. All of us knowing, but not truly knowing what was to come upon midnight. We were antsy, predatory- anticipatory. A skittish Cortez wanted more time with the children, and the second he was out of earshot, Katya demanded my entire attention- and then it’s blank, save the flashes from my separate halves. 

I see Katya at Restraint through a blurry haze from Ezra’s memories. This is the perplexing facet of my being. I focus on what I fail to remember, the dark void of utter blankness, and one or the other always mentally answers my unasked question. They pour difficult truths within my fractured mind. But what they show is never truth- it is filtered by their intentions, their protections- their perceptions.

This is the mind of madness.

As I enter Whittenhower Estate’s Grand Ballroom, my eyes instantly seek and find Cortez. My gaze connecting with my twin gaze. I relax. I blush. I feel guilt. I feel love. I toss Cortez a wary smile and wink. My heart ceases to thud when Cortez blushes and smiles in return.

He’s not mad at me, and he most definitely knows what I’ve done against my will. Pupils dilated, eclipsing the storm raging within his eyes, Cortez heatedly looks at me. A look I welcome. A look that beads my body with sweat and causes my cock to pulse like nothing ever could. I know in an instant that Cortez is not fleeing me because he’s already imagining remarking his territory with his body, with his lust, with his love. And I gladly await the exquisite torture.

I hear commotions around me. Shouts that one of my alters most definitely perpetrated. I take ownership for my unknown actions, but I don’t give it a second thought. It’s not arrogance or lack of empathy that has me not caring that the youngest Daniel and his pregnant female’s lives just smoldered into ash. I feel for the young couple on the deepest of levels. My lack of attention is due to my utter shock.

I’m captured within in their tightly wound familial web. My son and daughter. Brother and sister, eyes nearly the same but not quite. The male version is steely, just as Cort’s and mine, as is my dead aunt’s and my bastardized father’s gaze. The feminine version is softer yet colder, bluer- as with my living aunt, mother, and female cousin. The son carries the tainted Hunter genes, while the daughter, no less or more tainted, carries the Holden genes. My children are like Ezra and Master Ez, halves of my whole. Side-by-side, my child half, the Holden, Ava, sits by my stronger half, the Hunter, Zane.

Zane and Ava, united for the very first time, heal me, change me, unite me.

Cortez pumps the very blood through my veins, for he is my beating heart. Cortez’s life sustains my own. For if he breathes, I refuse to die. But that has never been enough to keep me even, balanced- whole. My children, my halves, they integrate me.

Integrated.

I sit down, noticing nothing but my son and daughter and Cortez’s gaze holding mine. On my left, I reach a hand out until a small, fragile, delicate and pink hand fills mine. I simultaneously do the same on my right with a hand identical to my own, only younger.

I hold my children’s hands and my partner’s eyes, and I am whole.

Integrated.

Heart pumping wildly out of control, breath sawing between my parted lips, eyes bulging in wondrous fear, my world view tilts on its axis, returning me to the state of existence I haven’t experienced in almost twenty years- I am finally myself: Ezra Holden Zeitler.

A gasp rushes out of my filled lungs. A gasp pulled from the mental inundation I undergo- the transformation- the completion. Memories don’t frigidly pour into me. The images aren’t snide snippets of gloating. It’s a lifetime of memories without unwarranted protection, twisted intention, or altered perception.

I just know… everything… in an instant- from one heartbeat to the next, one breath to the next.

There is no Ezra and no Master Ez.

Ezra: the boy who refused to be a Hunter to the point that he broke. Master Ez: the man who held me back from ending that boy’s life- our life. They are no more, because they are more together than apart.

There is only me- a whole entity. Ezra Zeitler.

Integrated.

October 21, 2013 | Categories: Blurb, Chapter 1, Cover Reveal, Integrated, Mistress and Master of Restraint, Uncategorized | Tags: Erica Chilson, Integrated, Mistress & Master of Restraint series | Leave a comment