The Surrender Gate: A Desire Exchange Novel
Page 16
If they’re watching her now, it’s through night-vision goggles. She spins toward the plate glass windows. The power’s gone out at the neighboring houses as well; like the dunes, they’ve been reduced to slight tonal shifts in a sea of dark.
A candle flickers to life in the center of the room. Several feet away, just on the other side of the glass coffee table, a shadow brings a gloved finger to his lips in the small flame’s strengthening glow. All she can see of the man are his generous lips and strong jaw. His eyes are hidden behind some sort of mask and a hooded, tailored robe conceals the rest of his imposing figure. The mask’s eyeholes are filled with some kind of reflective black glass.
Ryan? She almost says his name aloud. But her heart is racing and the breath that reaches her lungs feels both electrified and stale. But after a second or two of peering at him through the dark, she’s sure the man is not Ryan. This man has an olive complexion, an angular face, and no real resemblance to any of Ryan’s age progression photographs.
He points down at the coffee, where he’s placed a message for her right inside the candle’s halo. The paper is some kind of expensive cardstock. Its edges are frayed and the words engraved on it are lined with some type of reflective ink that catches the flame’s steady flicker.
GOOD EVENING, LILY. PLEASE FOLLOW THE FLAMES
Flames. Plural.
Another candle flickers to life several feet behind her visitor. Its glow reveals another robed, masked figure and the figure’s prim little cupid’s bow of a mouth. Emily assumes this ghostly visitor must be a woman. The process repeats itself halfway up the stairs: another candle, another eye mask, another tense, set mouth, and then, at the top of the stairs, yet another. Then, in what appears to be a well-rehearsed sequence, all four figures turn their backs to her and begin a silent procession up the carpeted stairs.
There’s a slight burst of static in her ear. Suddenly, Marcus is back. “—your hand through your hair if you can hear me. Dammit! Emily, if you can hear me—”
She runs one hand through her hair.
“Okay, good,” he whispers. “We’re back. We’re back in business.” But he doesn’t sound confident or calm.
Fresh shadows divide the living room. The lights over the beach walkway have come back on, and a glance over her shoulder confirms they’re back on at the neighboring houses too. The minor electrical disturbance that heralded the arrival of these silent, robed visitors has passed. But inside Lily Conran’s beach house, there is only candlelight to guide them.
Candles that came to life by themselves, without the scratch of a match or the telltale click of a lighter. What kind of magic trick is that?
When she reaches the door to the master suite, she discovers all four figures have gathered inside of the bathroom. Standing rigid as monks, they’ve formed an inverted V in front of the glass-walled shower that sits in the center of a tiled bathroom half the size of her apartment. There’s something inside the shower, but she can’t quite make it out in the darkness. It looks like some sort of cube they’ve somehow hung six feet off the shower floor.
“I’m here, Emily,” Marcus says quietly. But he sounds distracted, as if he’s working as hard as she is to try to interpret the scene before her. “I’m here, babe,” he whispers.
As soon as she starts to search for Ryan’s features among her four visitors, her silent messenger steps forward. The candle he holds in his left hand is fat, purple, and balanced impossibly, it seems, in his open palm. In his right hand he lifts another sheet of paper on which is printed a new direction in the same elegant script as the previous one.
PLEASE DISROBE
“I’m here, Emily. You’re safe…”
Can he read the message too? Is he giving her permission to keep going?
Even as she debates this question, her hands fumble with her belt buckle. She tugs her blouse from her chinos. Her fingers are shaking and slick with sweat, her breaths so short she’s afraid she’s wheezing. For the first time, she can see they’re all holding their candles in exactly the same way, balanced in their open palms. Are they illusionists? Circus performers?
We’re sorry to tell you, Arthur, but in your case, it looks like your son actually did run off and join the circus!
She expects some sort of reaction from the figures before her when she unhooks her bra, but their robes don’t even rustle; she might as well be undressing in front of statues. The half-light helps her feel less vulnerable and afraid, but she has a sense that vulnerable and afraid are exactly how they’d like her to feel. Because this is a test, she reminds herself. A test of what exactly she’s not quite sure, but she figures they’re not just here to determine how quickly and easily she can get naked in front of strangers.
Once she’s completely nude, her clothes piled neatly on the counter next to her, the three figures behind her silent messenger all take several precise steps to the left, clearing an even broader path between her and the shower and its strange new addition.
Her messenger lifts a finger on his right hand. One request slides away, the paper scraping lightly across the tiles before it comes to rest at her feet. This simple gesture has revealed another request.
STEP INTO THE SHOWER
Every step she takes toward the shower seems to drive the breath from her lungs. She isn’t sure if she’s really cold or if fear has set her bones to trembling. As soon as she’s inside the shower’s four glass walls, something grazes her shoulder. She cries out and jumps to the side before she sees a pull-chain swinging in the air next to her head. Even more frightening than the chain’s sudden touch is the realization that she’s turned her back on her visitors.
They’ve fanned out now, facing her, but also blocking the only exits. The silent messenger is still in pole position, his companions now behind him. The candlelight dances in the strange black glass that fills the eyeholes of their masks. The eyeholes, she can now see, are generous and tapered like a cat’s, and the bridges over the noses are encrusted with strips of tiny, clustered jewels.
Once again, her silent messenger lifts a single finger on his right hand. Once again, a new request is revealed.
PLEASE GRIP THE HANDLES. DO NOT RELEASE THEM UNTIL GRANTED PERMISSION
Handles?
For the first time, she looks directly overhead. The cube is transparent, probably Lucite, and full of some kind of swirling, amber liquid. A single steel bar runs through the top, its ends secured to opposite walls with suction cups. Attached to the underside of the cube is what looks like two bicycle handlebars swaddled in black velvet.
Even though it makes her feel more exposed than being naked does, she lifts her hands into the air above her head until her fingers find their grip on each handle. The cool air teases her armpits, causing a sensation somewhere between being tickled and caressed. The instruction, the demand that she not release the handles until they say so, suggests that they’re not going to tie her up, and this slows her heartbeat some. Once she’s secure in her two-handed grip, each figure turns and places their candle on the nearest available surface. Now the bathroom flickers with diffuse candlelight that makes it seem as if it’s been staged for a surprise romantic evening by one lover for another.
When her silent messenger takes a long step forward, his three companions each drop to one knee behind him. Their heads are bowed like Olympic runners getting on their marks, but the pose turns their robes into draping shrouds, their presence suddenly more spectral, impossible, magical.
“I’m here, Emily,” Marcus whispers. “I’m here. You’re safe.”
Her silent messenger dips a hand into the folds of his robe. She can’t make out what he’s holding in it until his gripping fingers are inches from her mouth.
A peach.
He lifts a finger on his right hand, revealing a new request.
TAKE THE OFFERING IN YOUR MOUTH. DO NOT CONSUME IT. DO NOT RELEASE IT UNTIL GIVEN PERMISSION.
Don’t let go of the handles. Don’t bite through the peach. Simple enough.
Another lift of his finger and a new message appears.
ARE YOU READY TO SURRENDER, LILY?
Her mind fills with every dark possibility roiling beneath the surface of the scene before her. The hooded figures are poised for some terrible act of violence, she’s sure. The amber fluid swirling through the chamber overhead is some horrible poison, or worse, gasoline. She has been raised to think this way. Not just by her father, but by the world itself. Raised to believe this kind of vulnerability will cost you your life, especially if you’re a woman. All things being equal, the darkest possibility was always the most probable. But it’s not always true. And she prays it won’t be true now.
“Emily…”
Yes, Marcus. I’m here. Even though I can’t speak to you, I’m here and if you said the word, if you told me to stop, I would. For you, I would. For the promise of the two of us becoming that little painting someday, I would stop this right now. But I’m here because you told me not to bail. Even though I would have bailed for you, you big beautiful bastard.
The question hovers several feet from her face, as insistent as a demand barked in anger.
“You’re safe,” Marcus whispers.
She tries to find the man’s eyes through the darkness, finds instead that strange, impenetrable glass flickering with the reflection of her face bathed in candlelight.
Gently, so as not to jostle the peach from her mouth, she nods.
The silent messenger closes one gloved hand around the pull-chain. He gives it a single, determined yank, and everything that follows seems to happen in one dizzying, impossible instant.
Two threads of amber-colored fluid pour down onto her chest from the Lucite cube overhead, painting her breasts with something sticky and thick.
The three figures crouched on the floor spring to life, lunging across the floor like jungle cats, their robes falling away behind them, revealing flashes of muscle and shiny leather outfits that only cover their genitals, and in the case of the two women, their breasts.
Her silent messenger drops his robe, revealing plates of olive-skinned muscle. All four mouths take to her body at once, and only as they suck it from her nipples and lick it from the undersides of her breasts and trace its wet, oozing path down her thighs with flickering tongues, does Emily realize what it is that’s pouring down on her from the cube overhead—honey.
Grip. Don’t bite. Grip. Don’t bite.
Her hand aches from the exertion of holding fast to the handlebars, and at first the assault of pleasure overwhelms her senses, and in the resulting shock, she has no trouble holding the peach in her yawning mouth. But then two sets of lips begin to suck threads of honey from her pussy, while another mouth sucks at her right breast with the desperation of someone satisfying a long buried craving. And suddenly it feels as if a second skeleton has been electrified beneath her flesh, a skeleton composed entirely of raw, humming nerves that when fully stimulated, as they are now, become solid, scorching, radiant bones unto themselves.
After several minutes of being devoured, it starts to feel as if she’s floating up off the floor. But maybe that’s because one of the women working her over has lifted Emily’s right leg and draped it over her shoulder so she can run her tongue along the sole of Emily’s foot before sucking honey from her toes. Meanwhile, her male partner licks up the inside of Emily’s opposite thigh, then cups her mound in both gloved hands, kneading its outer walls, studying the pressure against her folds with a cocked head, his lips parted with evident hunger. And then there’s her silent messenger and the other woman, who are catching every fresh current of honey sliding across the top of her breasts just as it reaches her nipples.
Grip. Don’t bite. Grip. Don’t bite…
Behind the peach, her groans are choked, agonized things that catch in her throat. To a blind bystander, they would sound like agony. But no one here is blind. Everyone here can see, and they can all see her. She is their sole focus. The sense of being the center of such raw, animalistic hunger sets off a delicious war within her body, a war between the parts of her struggling desperately to hold on to the handlebars overhead and keep the peach tugged snugly in her mouth, and those parts of her that have been rendered skinless by the feral ministrations of her slobbering, slurping visitors. The only aspect of this experience that lessens the raw physical pleasure of it are the flashes of their glassed-over, anonymous eyes visible through their masks. They leave her hungering for faces, not necessarily their faces. But real faces, not suggestions of them.
Marcus’s face…
If the peach weren’t in her mouth, she would mouth his name clearly and decisively, so there would be no missing it through the cameras. She would do something to alert him that even amidst this storm of unexpected, incapacitating pleasure, it is his face she sees, his mouth she wants suckling at her breasts, her thighs, her heaving, honey-slicked folds.
Marcus…
Her lips start to form his name. When the peach almost slips from her mouth, panic surges in her chest. She tightens her grip on the handlebars overhead, tilts her head back to maintain the peach’s precarious balance. Her silent messenger pulls himself from her breast; he runs his gloved hands up her body, driving small tides of honey ahead of his leather-sheathed fingers.
She’s close. She’s terribly, irreversibly close, and apparently this man can sense it. He’s running his hands over her racing heart, tracing the underside of her breasts, gently kneading her nipples in between thumb and forefinger. His slow, sensuous motions make for a delicious counterpoint to the frenzied mouths working on her down below.
“God, you’re beautiful….”
Where did this whisper in her ear come from? Did she imagine it? Did it come from the masked man tracing paths of pleasure across her skin with his gloved fingers?
When she realizes it was Marcus’s voice, that it was Marcus who just spoke them with a tone of hypnotized abandon divorced from jealousy and possessiveness, if only for a fleeting moment, then her orgasm rocks through her, and another war beneath her flesh begins, a desperate struggle to obey their only two instructions even as it feels like her body is flying apart beneath their fingers, lips, and tongues.
Maybe it’s cheating to throw her head back like this, or maybe it’s exactly what they expected, but it certainly keeps the peach lodged firmly in her mouth as the rest of her body bucks and writhes.
The fight also prolongs the orgasm, until she seems to have lost all sense of herself, and her entire being seems to have coalesced around the resonant memory of Marcus’s whispered words. Her silent messenger has cupped one arm under the small of her back. He’s staring down at her now, his only trace of an expression the proud, satisfied smile on his slick, glistening lips. He brings his mouth to hers and gently removes the peach with his teeth.
She sucks in a desperate, pained breath; feels both of her feet come to a firm rest on the icy floor. All four of them are standing before her. One after the other they bend forward and take a small bite from the peach their leader holds firmly in his mouth, until there’s only one small chunk left, and her messenger swallows it in one easy gulp. Once this ritual is complete, they turn to face her and then sink to all fours, as if she is a temple goddess and they have just completed paying tribute.
The black woman standing in the bathroom doorway is unmasked, and while her outfit covers most of her body, it’s the same style and material as those worn by the four prostrate pleasure-givers taking up the expanse of tile between them; a shiny leather that looks like it’s been poured onto her ample figure, a lustrous cape tailored snugly at the waist to give the bottom half the effect of being a long skirt. Her hair is a thick brown halo even in the flickering candle
light. Under her right arm, she carries a large leather-bound book.
“Congratulations, Miss Conran,” the woman says. “You’ve passed.”
17
“And if I hadn’t?” Emily asks in between gasps.
Despite being ravished, her naked body is still slathered with honey trails, and it will remain so until she can take to it with steaming hot water and a pile of loofahs.
“We would have offered you some additional exercises designed to unlock the combination of stamina and willingness essential to a rewarding visit to The Exchange. But in your case, they won’t be necessary. Stamina and willingness are two things you seem to possess in spades, Miss Conran. Congratulations. You’ll join us tomorrow night.”
“Where?”
“First, a bit of business to conclude,” the woman says, stepping forward into the candlelight bathroom with the crisp but casual air of a real estate agent presenting closing documents. On cue, Emily’s silent messenger rises onto all fours. The woman places the leather-bound notebook on the man’s bare, rock-hard back and opens the book to an empty page somewhere in the middle.
“What’s your name?” Emily asks.
“You will learn my name in The Exchange, along with many other things, mostly about yourself.” There’s a trace of impatience in the woman’s voice. There’s also a trace of a Southern accent that sounds as if it’s been worn away over the years by a kind of cultured timelessness that outside of these crazy circumstances would sound absurd.
“I don’t usually sign the guest book until I get to the party,” Emily says, trying for her best I’m too rich to be bossed around voice.
“This is far more than a guest book,” the woman responds. Then she removes a small hourglass from a leather satchel that’s been camouflaged against her robe.
“Once I set the timer, you will have ten minutes to provide us with your fantasy.”