I wish, so much, that we were a three again.
I nod my goodbye, and with heavy bootsteps and an even heavier heart, I take the box of money and go back home.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Rebecca
The trees are turning.
Outside the library windows, I can make out wet smears of gold and orange and red among the green. Alder like a blaze of sunshine, ash like dried blood. Yellow hornbeam and birch, deep orange beech, red rowan. And the yews with their scarlet berries and deathless needles and trunks like skinny fingers, knuckle bones and all.
If the last week of rain and fog hadn’t made it clear, autumn is here at Thornchapel. The land is bleeding with it. Burning with it.
I close my folio where I’ve been answering a few last minute emails before my car arrives to take me to London, and I stand and stretch. I rarely work in the library if Poe is working in there too—I prefer complete silence, and Poe is a symphony of sighs, tuts, and small talk—but today is a short day anyway since it’s a travel day, and I wanted to be near the fire while I worked. I’m glad I did—the rain pattering against the glass and the occasional snuffles from Sir James Frazer were a welcome infusion of Thornchapel before I head back to the city and the sterile offices of Quartey Workshop.
And anyway, Poe was a very pleasant work companion today, totally silent other than the soft thump of books on the table and the sporadic clack of keys as she took notes and entered in metadata.
I bend down to give the dog a final scratch behind the ears before I go to fetch Delphine—she’s riding with me back to London—and then I see Poe sitting on a table, her knee pulled up to her chest and her head resting on it. She’s in a short red dress with mustard yellow tights, and she’s all color and curves as she stares out into the rain-haunted forest just beyond the library’s windows. Books older than the country she’s from are piled all around her, and a forgotten notebook with a pencil sits on the keyboard of her laptop, the screen of which is dark. She’s been sitting like this for some time then.
“I’m about to go,” I say, coming toward her. She nods against her knee but doesn’t lift her head to look at me. “You all right, love?”
“I’m fine,” she murmurs.
I’m close enough now that I see what I didn’t notice this morning, when I was deep in my emails and she came shuffling in with coffee to start her day. There are bluish smudges under her eyes—which are glassy and unfocused—and there’s color high in her cheeks. She still doesn’t look at me, keeping her eyes on the trees outside as if they’re speaking to her in some tree language made only of fluttering leaves and swaying branches.
“You don’t look fine,” I say, which I know isn’t strictly polite, but all my mistress instincts are flaring, and I suspect a direct approach is best. “You look lost.”
“Lost,” she echoes. She lifts her head just enough to tuck dark hair behind her ear. “That’s the word.”
Her nails aren’t bitten; her lips are plump, rosy, and soft; her hair is clean and brushed; and she’s wearing an outfit with components—not just a dress but opaque tights and cute little Mary Janes and a coordinating bracelet on her wrist. There’s a crumb-dusted plate and a reusable water bottle nearby. I can see that she has made some headway on her work today, before succumbing to whatever reverie this is.
I relax a little after taking my inventory. She is lost, but the kind of lost that I can trust her to unlose herself in.
At least I hope so.
“You’re not sick, are you?” I ask, and she shakes her head.
“No. I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so?” I press my hand to her forehead. It feels a little warm to me, but that could be because the room is so cool.
“What were the symptoms again? Visions? Sleeping constantly?” She gives a wan smile. “That’s already the daily life of a narcoleptic, so perhaps I wouldn’t know if I was sick if it came down to it.”
“Don’t forget the smelling like roses.” I study the blue-dark skin under her eyes. “Has your sleep been restful?”
“No,” she says, the already-faint smile fading into nothing. “It hasn’t.”
“Dreams?”
“Scenes. Visions. Memories that aren’t mine.” She closes her eyes. “Every time I sleep, I see the chapel and the door. I see the roses. I see people dying. But it’s like”—she opens her eyes and makes a gesture like she’s using her hand as a knife to slice something apart—“slivers. Little cross-sections of memory, and then they’re gone, and there’s no context, there’s no way to glean anything from them, other than that people put on the torc and walked to the door. The Kernstows seemed less sad about it than everyone else, but I don’t know why that’s the case. I can never see more than a few moments at a time.”
I touch her shoulder. “Does Auden know?”
“About the dreams? Yes.”
That seems like an unnecessarily specific answer, but when I start to ask what he doesn’t know, my smartwatch chimes. My car is here, and I need to get Delphine and go. But my inner Domme recoils at the idea of leaving Poe uncared for.
“Come on, then,” I say, pulling her off the table. “You’re done for the day.”
“I am?”
“Yes.” I pull her to the sofa and urge her to lay down. Her skirt pulls up and exposes a pleasing bottom that I have fond memories of spanking, and I give it a quick squeeze before I pull a blanket over her. “You sleep. I’ll let Auden know to wake you for supper.”
“That’s a good idea,” she says tiredly, already closing her eyes. “You always have the best ideas.”
“Of course I do.”
Sir James, spotting an opportunity, comes and curls into a ball directly underneath where her hand dangles over the edge of the cushion, earning himself a few sleepy strokes. I kiss her cheek—soft and maybe a little warmer than it should be—and leave to go find Delphine.
“I love your office,” Delphine says later that night, wandering around the room and peering at site plans and elevations laid out across various surfaces. She has a photoshoot tomorrow morning in Shoreditch, so I should take her to her place, I should remind her that the hour is late and she’ll want some sleep.
But she doesn’t bring it up and I don’t mention it, and I know why I don’t. I want her to stay at my place tonight. I want to fuck her until this twisting, grasping need in me is sated for a few hours at least.
But if I say it aloud, then it’s real.
It’s not like Thornchapel, where things can happen in a forested cloister set apart from the real world. No, if we fuck here in London, if we accidentally-on-purpose fall asleep together while post-sex here in London . . .
Then I’ll have to face the truth. That I want her, that I want to forgive her, that I want every day to be filled with her, and that I want the filling to start now.
Delphine leans over another table to examine the infinity-th iteration of the Severn Riverfront project, and my mouth goes dry. She’s wearing these incredible pants—not quite leggings, no, they’re something more expensive and more horse-related than that—and knee-high boots with a tight shirt and a cropped moto jacket over it. She looks like she left on a purebred horse and came back on a deviant’s motorcycle, and when she bends over, there is nothing hiding the lush curves of her bottom, the bite-worthy temptation of it. I could go right over there and run my palms up the contours of her thighs up into the flare of her hips; I could stroke my fingertips over the rise of her cheeks just under the waistband of her pants. I could mold my hands to the luscious form of her backside and then rub my thumbs along the crease where her cheeks meet her thighs.
I could.
And so I do.
I come up behind her and fill my hands with her, leaning back so I can watch, so I can take in the sight of my fingertips pressing into her bottom, so I can see how her body moves as I squeeze and plump and play.
Ever an eager sub, Delphine allows me this with a contented sigh—ev
en arching her back so the parts of her I want are more accessible. Fuck, she’s perfect, so perfect—just firm enough to squeeze, just plush enough to sink my fingers and teeth into.
I hear people say sometimes, usually as some kind of euphemism, that fat bodies are generous. She has generous hips, generous curves, generous thighs—a way to say fat that feels safe, I suppose. But as a Domme, I’ve only ever seen the word generous as the literal truth of a fat partner, because this...this is a gift. A body reminding me that I can’t grope fast enough or grip hard enough to take in everything at once. It makes me so horny I could growl with it.
And suddenly, fondling and palming her is not enough. Pulling her tight to me and sliding my hands under her jacket is not enough; crushing her tits until she moans isn’t enough. None of it is enough, and none of it ever is, because the only thing that’s ever enough with her is uninterrupted days and days, and even when I had them, my imagination still never ran dry, plans for her pleasure and pain never stopped coming. I never stopped being hungry, hungry, hungry for this upper-class girl who needs it so very much, so very hard and so very often.
“To your knees,” I say hoarsely, unzipping the trousers I’m wearing and shoving them past my hips. “Right now.”
Even though I’ve given her no other warning—even though when she kneels, she’s kneeling in front of the floor-to-ceiling window behind my desk, visible to anyone who happens to look up—she does it without hesitation, without even a blink. Like she’s been waiting for it since the moment we walked in here.
She drops gracefully, so gracefully, years of ballet and dressage coded in her every movement, and I wish I had time to savor this, I wish I had the patience to just sit and observe her following my orders.
I don’t even have the patience to undress her.
Instead, the moment her knees touch the floor, I’m stepping close, sliding one hand into her hair and bracing the other against the glass behind her. Without preamble, I pull her mouth to me, guiding her to kiss and nuzzle my cunt through the thin silk of my knickers.
Her mouth is soft and her breath is warm, and when I look down at where I hold her to me, I see delicate smears of lipstick all over the silk. I want to hiss in triumph, I want this to be my national flag, my coat of arms, the sigil of my house. Rich-girl lipstick all over my knickers, a painting in pink and ivory. A masterpiece.
But even this can’t scratch the itch, even this can’t blunt the desperation I have for more of her. I drop my hand from the window and draw my knickers to the side, exposing my nakedness to her mouth. She flicks a look up at me that is pure slutty, submissive gratitude, and I want to cry. I couldn’t have dreamed her up even if I tried, and now here she is, fitting every puzzle-piece tab and slot of me, and I don’t know if I can keep her. I don’t know if I can let her inside the tenderest, rawest parts of my heart ever again.
The first buss of her mouth over my cunt is heaven. The parting of her lips and the lingering trace of her tongue down to where my clitoris pushes itself between my lips is the hottest fires of hell. I press my hand back against the window because I don’t know if I can stand otherwise, I don’t know if I can keep myself upright. She uses the tip of her tongue to find my clit, and then she licks again with her tongue flat—pressure, then velvet, pressure, then velvet—and I shove her face harder to me.
“That’s it,” I tell her. “Just like that.”
She hums in response, and I pull her hair a little, wishing briefly that I were at home or at Justine’s, someplace where I could have her naked and clamped, or at the very least, someplace I could be stinging her heart-shaped bottom with a riding crop while I used her mouth. But the wish is gone nearly immediately, because I know I wouldn’t have the patience for it anyway. I used to love elaborate scenes—I used to thrive on the drama, the pacing, the props. I would spend hours tormenting subs with all sorts of choreography and gadgets, and it had become such an integral part of my identity as a Domme that I would never have thought I could be a mistress without it. Without a stage, without a script, without an entire room of implements.
I would never have thought I could be just as much of a Domme with only this—only my trousers around my thighs and my fist full of hair—and yet here I am, here we are. Here she is being used and loving it, on her knees where she so loves to be.
“Suck,” I tell her, and she does, sealing her lips around my bud and drawing it against her tongue. “Good girl. Very good girl. Keep going.”
She makes a happy noise against me, like she wished on her birthday candles to be granted permission to do exactly this, and there’s another flare of heat behind my eyelids. Why does she have to be so otherwise perfect for me? Why does she have to fit me so well when she’s the same one who cut me apart with a careless ten minutes and a kiss?
But she sucks on me again, nursing on me until I can barely breathe, and soon the only feeling thrumming through me is jagged, unfiltered lust. I angle my hips so that she can push her tongue into me. With my trousers around my thighs, there’s only so much she can do, but she tries valiantly, stroking my seam with her tongue and searching out my hole, letting me ride her mouth until her kiss is so wet and slippery that her lips slide against me. Only then do I haul her mouth back up to my clit to finish what she started, widening my legs as much as I can, leaning on the hand against the glass and fucking her mouth with selfish thrusts.
Though the hour is late enough there’s no foot traffic at all, I imagine what we look like from the street were someone to look up and see us in the window. Delphine, like a slutty secretary on her knees, and me with my pants down past my hips, fucking her mouth with crude abandon.
The image is suddenly too much, the idea of it, that Delphine is my secretary who I can call into my office to use whenever I need—
Holding her face tight to me, her hair bunched in my fist, I come against her mouth in several hard, shuddering spasms, each one lasting longer and longer and longer until they eventually recede into a warmth settling in my stomach and my thighs. My breathing is harsh and ragged as I guide her mouth away from me, my clit giving one last kick as I see how her lipstick is smeared across her mouth, as I take in how it all looks with my trousers shoved down and her lips all swollen.
“My God, Delph,” I breathe. “My God.”
She smiles up at me, and I know I can’t be done for the night, there’s no way I’m done for the night. I haven’t even tasted her, I haven’t felt inside of her yet. I want to push her toy inside her cunt, and I want to tease her with it the entire trip back to my flat, and then I want to tie her to my bed and make her come while I flog her breasts into hues of pink and red.
I help her up, and then while she uses makeup wipes in her bag to fix her lipstick, I pull up my trousers and button them shut again. “Come back to my place,” I blurt. “I know we haven’t talked about it, but I want you there. Tonight.”
She drops the makeup wipe in the small bin by my desk and turns to look at me. There is something in her face . . . not hesitant, maybe, but wary.
“Just for tonight?” she asks. “Or until we go back to Thornchapel in three days?”
It’s a fair question, and the answer’s obvious:
Yes, of course.
Of course I want her there all week.
I want her to fuck and to play with and to leave beauty rubbish all over my bathroom counter; I want to wake up with her using me like a long teddy bear. But as soon as I part my lips to tell her yes, I want her to stay, panic chokes me like cold seawater. I nearly sputter around it, and suddenly breathing is hard and thinking is hard, and all I can feel is that awful feeling on that storm-tossed Lammas, when it felt like she’d plucked my heart right out of my chest, twisted it from my aorta like a grape from a stem.
All I can feel is what it felt like to love her and have her hurt me.
She sees. Of course she sees, and she ducks her head, so that I can’t see her in turn.
I’ve hurt her.
And de
spite what I said to her in the Long Gallery the day I found out about Emily, despite what I thought for weeks after, I don’t want to hurt her. I don’t want her to have to shield her heart from me.
It’s only that . . . well, I don’t want to have to shield my heart either, and yet here I am, here I’ll always be, because it’s the only thing that keeps me safe. She taught me that lesson more than any other person in my life, and maybe it’s only fair that she should know how it feels too.
“On second thought,” she says, and I can’t see her face, only the flutter of her eyelashes against the fading sex-flush on her cheeks, “I do have an early morning tomorrow. I should probably get a cab and go home for sleep.”
“Delph, I—” My hands drop to my sides. “I don’t want that. Come over tonight.”
When she looks up at me, her eyes are wet and her chin is dimpled and quivering. But her voice is strong. “I’ve changed my mind,” she says. “I really should get home.”
“I want you to come over,” I say, and it’s so stupid and hypocritical, but now I’m filled with panic that she doesn’t want to come over, that she doesn’t want to stay. “And yes, you should stay until we go back to Thornchapel. Because we should keep doing this, shouldn’t we? Logically, it makes sense: I need a sub and you need a Domme, and we both like sex, and this serves us both.” I know I’m saying the wrong things, I can hear the wrong things pouring out of my mouth like rainwater from a gutter spout, but I can’t stop myself because if I stop myself then I might say the right things, and if I say the right things, the honest things, the other panic will come back, and I’m not ready for that either. “This can be fun, you and me, it could be easy, Delph, so easy between us.”
The word easy makes her blink once, hard, as if I’ve just hit her. And then she swallows and says, “No, thank you.”
“No, thank you?”
“I mean, no thanks. I don’t think it’s a good idea for me. I did—I really did think I could do this, that if all I got from you was Mistress Rebecca, that would be enough. But I think I’m realizing it’s not enough now, and I’m sorry, but no, thank you.”
Door of Bruises (Thornchapel Book 4) Page 27