by Iona Nixon
***
It's not a room. It's a suite. He greets me with the assured, self-satisfied smile I can't stop seeing in my dreams, and offers me a seat, a glass of wine-
"What have you done to me?" My voice is harsh with rage and need.
He looks exquisite. I can't believe I've never seen it before. His delicate face, the dark eyes, the black, silky hair against pale skin. The flat chest and slender, toned arms, his firm thighs and calves, his cock -
No. I am not thinking about another man's cock. I am not. It's not visible through his clothes, and I'm not going to imagine what it might look like, thick and erect, pale and smooth like the rest of him, veins -
"Not a social call, then?" His dry voice snaps me out of my helpless fantasies. He sits back in the low couch, glass of wine in one hand. "If I tell you what I've done, what will you give me in return?"
"I'm not playing these games with you!"
"Suit yourself." He shrugs and sips his wine.
I should walk away. I should. But there's no conviction behind the knowledge, no desire to do what I know I should. I take a helpless step forward.
"I -- Fine. What do you want?"
He looks me right in the eyes. "Strip."
I don't know why I'm stunned. I should have expected it. I did expect it. But there's something about the way he said it that makes me hesitate.
"Please." His tone is weary. "Do you really think you have something I haven't seen before?"
I swallow a sharp retort and do as I'm told. My cock is semi-erect by the time I'm naked, but I refuse to let him see that it shames me. I keep my hands relaxed and loose at my sides, bite my jaws together and lock my gaze somewhere above his head.
"Now what?" I growl.
He stands and walks over to me. "Not the prettiest I've ever been with." He runs his fingers up my arm, leaving goosebumps in their wake. "But I think you've got enough thorny pride to make it worth my while for hours."
Is that a compliment or an insult? The sick thing is, I suddenly find myself wanting to please him. It's the spell. Just magic. If I play along for now, he'll answer my questions, and I can break his hold on me, be myself again. That's why I'm here. That's the only reason I'm here. I grit my teeth and stare at the wall as he walks around me, trailing his nails lightly across my skin.
He stops behind me.
"This is the deal," he says, in my ear. "You do as you're told. I get to have my fun with you. Afterwards, I tell you how to break the spell and teach you how to make sure this will never happen to you again."
I close my eyes, even though it does nothing against the hungry anticipation his words bring me. "Why?"
"Every time you look at me you'll remember what we did, and it will shame you." He reaches down and cups my balls in his cold hand, and I drive my nails into my palms and strangle a desperate moan in my throat.
He laughs softly. I want to kill him. I want to fuck him. I want his hands off me and I urgently want him to keep touching me, to kiss me hard and milk my cock until I come.
He moves back. I hear a clink of metal, a touch of something cold. He pulls my arms back, and before I realize what's happening, there's the click of a lock and my wrists are cuffed together behind my back. I begin to turn, to protest, and he places a finger across my lips.
I don't understand why the simple gesture turns me on so much.
***
My cock is hard, aching, exposed to his fingers and the cool air of the room, and my balls feel stretched to the point of bursting. I'm down on my knees, again, struggling to hold perfectly still, to give him nothing beyond what he takes from me, but I can't hold back the grunts and the moans when he touches me, the gasps when he pulls the chain with weights hanging from my nipples, the half-strangled whimpers when his fingers dance along the insides of my thighs, stroke the length of my cock, cup my balls and he closes his hand around them just enough to remind me of the power he has over me.
He has fitted a metal ring around the base of my cock and balls, making them engorged with blood and sensitive in a way I've never experienced. There's a leash attached to the ring, and he tugs at it periodically, presumably for the pleasure of seeing me jump. I keep thinking of how I will use that leash to strangle him when this is over. He pulls at it to make me move, leading me around by my cock, a gesture loaded with symbolism as ridiculous as it is heady.
I wish he'd hurt me. It would be easier to bear. Instead he just keeps me here, tethered on the edge between pleasure and pain, and every time I think it can't possibly get worse, he finds a new way to turn my body against me.
I keep my head high. I cling to my hate. I clench my jaws so hard that my teeth will be ground to dust by morning if we keep up at this rate. He just smiles and does something to my balls that sends a new wave of pleasure down my thighs and up my spine, making me jerk and choke back a scream.
"This isn't so bad," he says quietly. "Is it?"
I'm supposed to answer him. It's not the kind of game where you get the rules spelled out beforehand, but I know by now that a refusal to answer gets me pain and a nastier question in a vicious downward spiral that will leave me wishing I'd told him what he wanted to hear in the first place.
"No," I growl through my teeth, praying that the small, prompt concession will be enough to satisfy him.
It's not.
"In fact, you rather like this."
It's not a question, but I know that he wants me to respond nonetheless. I close my eyes and nod once, sharply.
"Tell me what you like about it."
Panic floods me. I don't know what he wants to hear and I can't even think of a plausible lie. In a desperate attempt to win some time I open my mouth, then close it again, unable to make myself speak.
He grabs my balls and twists.
The pain is almost enough to make me throw up. A scream is ripped from my throat, and for a moment I can't see, can't think, it's all blazing white pain, and then I'm lying doubled over, sobbing and sucking in air in deep gulps.
His hand is tangled in my hair. He pulls my head up.
"Well?" he asks me, kindly.
For a panicked moment I can't remember what the question was. He raises his eyebrow and reaches for my balls again.
"You," I blurt out, desperate, unthinking. "You. Please. I like. You touching. I. I've never, please, I don't, you, your hands, the way you, please-"
"Fair enough."
He's still fully dressed, calm, composed, not a hair out of place. The only concession to our activities is his sleeves, rolled back. I'm naked, trembling, bruised, soaked in sweat, cock hard and throbbing, cuffed, kneeling, and completely fucking incoherent in the face of his calm command of himself and his language.
I'll kill him. I will. I will make him beg for it before he dies.
***
I thought it would be a relief to get off my knees. But I'm on my back on black silk sheets, wrists cuffed to the bedposts, legs spread, making me feel like a damsel in distress from the cover of one of the lurid, cheap little booklets they sell down at the market. At least when I was kneeling he had to crouch down to get to me. Now he's standing above me, and the fear coils in my belly, serpentine and useless. I look up at him, every bit the proverbial lamb laid out for slaughter.
"This isn't actually about you." He lights candle after candle, until the warm glow fills the room together with the scent of melting wax. "If that makes you feel any better. You're just the means to an end."
"What end?"
I judge, by his conversational tone, that it's safe to talk again, at least for the time being. He likes the sound of his own voice and he likes for me to cooperate, to read his moods and adjust accordingly. I tell myself it's not about pleasing him. Any information I get out of him is good, for me, for us, even if it's just information he's decided to give me anyway. And every second I keep him talking is one second he's not using to make me scream.
"You know I can't tell you that."
There's an assortment
of tools and toys laid out on the bedside table. I don't know what all of them are for, but there are several that make me hope I'm not going to have to find out. The most worrying is a double-edged knife with a thin blade.
He sees me looking.
"Oh, this?" He picks up the knife and turns it over in his hands. "Looks unremarkable. It's very sharp, though. You could cut yourself and never even notice." He runs the blade across the back of his hand, then shows me the thin white streak slowly turning red as blood seeps to the cut. I feel the cold tendrils of terror creeping along my spine. My gut clenches as he smiles as sharp as the blade and licks the blood from his hand without breaking eye-contact.
"Want to give it a try?"
"No." I fight to hold my voice steady. "Thank you."
He laughs and puts down the knife, and some of the tension drain out of me. "Here's what's going to happen. First, I'm going to hurt you some more. Then, I'm going to fuck you. Then, I'm going to remove this cock ring and make you come. Questions?"
I shake my head.
"Excellent." He picks up one of the candles. "I know you like to play with fire. This will be right up your alley."
***
It's a new game to me, but I learn quickly. The higher he holds the candle, the less the wax burns when it drips on my body. The closer the candle, the greater the pain. Some body parts are more sensitive than others. When he feels kind, he gives me time to adjust to the pain, to accept it, and to turn it into pleasure. When he's cruel, the drops fall so fast that it's less dripping and more pouring, the hot wax coating my skin, making me sweat and twist and scream. Or he makes me wait for it, for seconds or minutes, until the anticipation makes me crack and I find myself begging him for it, because it gets so that the fear of the pain is worse than the pain itself.
There is more cruelty than kindness in him. The room is full of candles, and he is in no hurry to get done.
At long last, he finishes. By then, I'm trembling with exhaustion, every nerve end tingling. I slump back, closing my eyes, but jolt back up when I feel something hot and wet engulf my cock. He's sucking me off, fondling my balls with his hands, squeezing them together and letting go as his tongue traces the underside of my cock, making it twitch and jump. I clutch at the headboard, feeling my eyes roll back in my head as he does things to my cock with his tongue that I never even imagined possible. The pain is washed away under this rapid, unrelenting onslaught of pleasure, his tongue, his fingertips, his mouth, lips, teeth, fuck, teeth, and I'd jump out of my skin if I could, but then it's good again, so damn good, and I can feel the orgasm building, and it hurts, it hurts so much, my balls are bursting, my cock straining against the metal ring, and I hear myself sobbing, begging.
His fingers find my asshole and it's like having a bucket of icy water dumped over me. I freeze, arousal killed dead in its track.
"No," I hear myself say in a small, strangled voice I don't recognize. "Please don't. Please." I try to get away, but I'm chained to the damned bed, spreadeagled and helpless, and I can't even close my legs and deny him access.
"Well," he says, and for one who's just come up for breath after giving head he sounds infuriatingly calm, "isn't that an interesting reaction?"
"I can't," I whisper, eyes closed, clutching the chains that cuff me to the bed as if they offered salvation. "Anything. Please."
"Tempting, but no." I feel his weight leave the bed, and open my eyes to see him grab a jar from the bedside table. "Listen," he says. "Everything else I've done to you has hurt. This won't. Trust me."
The fucked up thing is, I do. I think he'd lie to me about a lot of things, but there's no reason for him to lie about this. I can't stop him. I can't refuse him. Looking at him now, pulling his tunic over his head, revealing his smooth silky skin for the first time, kicking off his boots, easing his trousers and briefs down over his hips, I can't even want to refuse him. I'm terrified in ways I can't begin to sort through, but spell or no spell, I want him.
He touches my cock and I feel it rising under his hand, feel my desire begin to mount again. It's humiliating how easy I am, but I still whimper when he touches me in all the right ways, as skilled as he is impersonal.
"Lie still now." He releases my arms, then my legs, and I resist the urge the rub the skin of my wrists as I wait for his next order. He takes the jar and places it by my hip, then grabs my legs and pushes them up, towards my chest.
"Hold your legs for me."
The now cool wax on my chest and stomach cracks and splinter when I move. If I had thought myself beyond humiliation, this new, horrific position shows me how wrong I was. I feel lewd and obscene, on my back, legs pulled up, offering my ass to him, suddenly less a passive victim and more a willing culprit in my own degradation. And still I obey, the shame making my cock harder.
He kneels between my legs, stroking his semi-erect cock, coaxing it to swell, to rise. I watch, transfixed, torn between fear and desire. With one hand he opens the jar, and slathers something cool and wet over the crack of my ass and my asshole. He pushes one finger inside, and I instinctively clench up against the intrusion.
"Close your eyes," he says. "You'll want to relax. Get used to it. Remember to breathe."
He is -- at a lack for a better word -- gentle. There is no force this time, no cruelty, no making me admit I enjoy it. He probes me carefully, fingers coated with lube, stretching me out, telling me to breathe, to relax, just like that, and I keep my eyes closed and try to follow his instructions. He slips in two fingers, then three, and little by little my wariness gives way to a cautious curiosity. It's strange. In a way, it's awful. But at the same time, it's really not that bad. Then his cock is rubbing against mine, and the fingers of his free hand stroke my balls, and his other fingers sinks even deeper into me, and it feels good, it feels great, I want this, for real.
"All right." He pulls out his fingers, and my asshole feels disturbingly empty, open and gaping for him, begging to be filled. It's a whole new sensation and I have no idea how to deal with it. "Now. Look me in the eyes when I fuck you."
He adds more lube, both to my asshole and his long, hard cock, and then he enters me in a slow, smooth stroke. I gasp, ready and at the same time wholly unprepared for it, and dig my nails deep into my thighs as he begins to fuck me, slow and measured, watching my face carefully. I feel naked, flayed underneath his gaze as his cock impales my body, again and again, sending waves of unexpected pleasure through me.
I have never seen anything as beautiful as him, right then, kneeling above me, all poise and toned muscle, his perfect face flushed with pleasure, his thick cock the center of my universe. I want him. I hate him. I love him desperately, and I would do anything I could, anything at all, to make him smile at me just once. He increases his pace, starts fucking me for real, hands on my hips, pounding against my ass, and all I can manage is a relentless begging, a hungry, helpless, mewling please that could mean anything.
I'm so close, so damn close. Then he comes, grunting, and I feel his load inside of me, like an explosion, feel it leaking and dripping down on the sheets as he pulls out. He brushes a strand of black hair from his face with the back of his wrist and grins at me. I can't meet his gaze. He gets off the bed and finds a handkerchief to wipe off his cock, and I take the opportunity to get in a more comfortable position, trying not to think about my throbbing cock and the way the clamps on my nipples are really starting to hurt.
"Would you like to come?" he asks, over his shoulder.
I nod, wordlessly.
"Down on the floor, on your hands and knees."
There is no strength left in me. I keep thinking that if I do this thing, this one last thing, it will be over. I could mouth off, but he'd punish me for it, and the damn spell makes disobedience harder than it should be. I want to be worth his while. So I get down on the floor, wishing I could curl up in a boneless heap, and position myself like he wants me.
He runs his fingers through my sweaty hair. "You've done well. Almost ther
e now."
And then he surprises me for real. He pulls my head up and gives me a soft, lingering kiss on the lips. No bite. Hardly even any tongue.
It leaves me blinking, confused by the sudden tenderness.
He touches my sore nipples. "I bet you're hurting by now. Let me take those off for you."
Without further warning, he pulls the clamps from my nipples. The pain when the blood comes rushing back is excruciating. I clench my jaws to keep from screaming.
He laughs softly.
"Spread your legs."
I'm too tired to understand what he's doing. When his fingers brushes against my cock I freeze up and whimper deep in my throat. He removes the ring and the leash, and after hours of toying with me, it's almost disappointing how fast I come once he lets me.
It should be over. But he's not done. While my head is still spinning, he grabs my neck and moves my face over the mess I've made on the floor. "Lick it up."
"No." I'm surprised at the strength in my voice, but proud of it, pleased to see that I still have some limits. This, I will not do. Even with the spell telling me that yes, yes, I really do want to, I can still summon a strong, unhesitating no to throw in his face.
I expect punishment, but when I glance up there is no anger, just a thoughful expression, as if he's still trying to figure out what makes me tick.
"You're a sorceror," he says. "Like me."
He seems to wait for an answer. Feeling like I'm about to walk into a trap, I give a cautious nod.
"Then you know that some spells require components. A physical link to the target. A lock of hair, a drop of blood. A beloved possession. An object of significant symbolic value."
He's lecturing now. I know all this, of course. My teachers have covered this, again and again. Be careful of who gets a hold of your blood, lest they-
Understanding dawns on me, sick and cold. It pleases him that I get it. He nods.