by Cox, Chloe
“Quicker,” he said, his voice thick.
She shed her blouse, unzipped her skirt. Soon, her clothing lay in an inert pile at her feet, and she felt the calm start to come over her, the stress and anguish of knowing she’d failed Jake—again—fading into the background.
She started to move towards the couch, but he stopped her.
“Wait,” he said. “Spread your legs.”
Catie obeyed automatically. It wasn’t until she felt his hand push between her legs that she remembered: today was Friday.
She had screwed up.
Before she could speak, his fingers spread her lips and probed her flesh. Jake frowned.
“Today is Friday,” he said. “Something is missing.”
Catie felt the heat spread through her body and rise to the surface of her skin, where it burned. She was both genuinely ashamed and, somehow, thrilled.
“I forgot, sir.”
His finger swirled carelessly, and Catie’s eyelids fluttered. He shook his head in slight disappointment. “Beneath the couch there is a box. Retrieve it.”
Catie padded across the floor, grateful for the no doubt priceless rugs. She had once felt awkward about being naked, in a strange way, but Jake had since given her a different sense of her own body. Every movement was part of their game, every gesture charged with desire, with the potential for pleasure. She could feel his eyes on her every step of the way.
“Open it.”
She did. It held what she expected: various toys, accoutrements, and equipment. She no longer wasted time thinking about what other women might have seen similar things in Jake’s presence. For right now, this moment, she knew she was all he thought about.
“This has earned you…more,” he said.
She bent her head, and tried not to smile. “Yes, sir.”
“Bend over, hands on the couch, as you were before.”
She shuddered. Every movement seemed to occur in slow motion. She bent slowly at the waist, keeping her back rigid and slightly arched, feeling the pull on her hamstrings. She placed first one palm and then the other flat on the rich red leather. And then, with her head down, she thrust her bottom ever so slightly towards him. An offering.
He said nothing. She heard him rustle through the box, heard him take out several items. He must know what the anticipation did to her.
Finally, she felt it. First a swab of lube, his fingers rough and unyielding. Then the cold, round metal of the ben-wa balls.
“This time, you will take it with these inside,” he said, removing the metal and pushing one, two fingers inside her, moving them about. “And you will not come. Do you understand?”
Catie bit her lip. She already felt dangerously aroused, dangerously alive. The forlorn despair of moments ago was long forgotten. Now an orgasm seemed to lurk just over the horizon.
But she would try.
“Yes, sir,” she said.
He didn’t hesitate, but pushed the first ball into her quickly, making her eyes pop open and a small sound escape her lips. She felt his hand on her buttocks, gripping the flesh and pulling it wide, and then the second ball pushing in after the first, feeling impossibly large and impossibly wide, simply too much volume to take—until she did.
“Oh God,” she heard herself murmur. These were bigger. She felt full, forced to squeeze down to keep them in. Her arms started to shake.
Jake stroked her, up and down, up and down, seemingly just to torment her. “Remember,” he said, and she thought she detected a hint of a smile, “you are not to come.”
“Yes…sir,” she said.
He was gone for a just a moment, and then she felt the first blow. The pain was only slight, quickly blooming into pleasure, and her body lurched forward. The ben-wa balls shook inside her, vibrating rapidly, and her muscles started to contract despite herself.
“Count the strokes,” he said.
She shook her head, trying to clear her mind.
“I said, count them.”
“One,” she gasped.
Just as she’d managed to quell the contractions, he struck her again. She couldn’t tell what he was using—a riding crop? It didn’t matter. She hung her head, quivering.
“Two,” she said softly.
He struck her again, a long, broad stroke across her most sensitive flesh. She cried out as the spring in the balls rattled, vibrating inside her.
“Do not come,” he repeated.
She breathed in, out. Her whole body wanted to contract in one, giant orgasm. That he forbade it brought it that much closer to fruition. She gritted her teeth.
“Yes, sir. I’ll do my best, sir.”
There was a pause. Then he struck her again, lightly, and again, harder, and then again, leaving no room to breathe, no time to collect herself, no opportunity for recovery.
She almost made it.
She came, the orgasm tearing out of her throat in a long cry. He held her hips as she did so, held her up while her head sank to the red leather below. He must have known what he was doing to her, must have known what would happen. The backs of her thighs still stung in a delicious way and her legs still quivered, and every contraction brought forth more vibration from the ben-wa balls.
“Jake,” she wailed into the couch. His hand smoothed over her buttock in response.
He waited. She didn’t know how long, but it was just as she came to, held up pathetically by his hands, her bottom still in the air.
“I told you not to come,” he said.
“You knew I would,” she panted.
She thought she heard him chuckle.
“But not enough,” he said. She turned her head as she felt him pull, again, on the string connecting the ben-wa balls. As it had been at the bar, the tugs against her flesh from the inside sent shivering shocks through her body and her knees buckled. He pulled them out, first one, then the other, and each one leveled her.
Jake ran his hand from her buttock to her hip and up the side of her body, taking his time and giving her some opportunity to recover so that she was fully aware when he cupped her left breast in his large hand. He squeezed, kneading the nipple, and spread her with his other hand.
“You come with me inside you,” he said, and plunged into her.
Catie arched her back and her hips followed their natural movement, trying to take as much of him as she could. His thrusts were rapid, and she came again almost instantly, too fast, short, fast little contractions that still left her unsatisfied. Jake slapped her on the side of her ass, telling her, “Not yet.”
When he pulled out, she groaned. Her body felt a wreck; she needed completion. He hauled her up, her body not quite boneless, not quite strong, and spun her around. Before she knew what was happening, his hands were back down on her butt, lifting her up, her legs wrapping around him. He supported her completely, and she collapsed around his neck. Slowly he lowered her down, spearing her onto his still erect cock. She moaned as the length of it slid into her. He still held her up by his hands, her full weight pressing into his fingers, his fingers digging deep into the soft flesh. He lifted her slightly, bent his knees, and thrust upwards, hard.
She screamed into his neck and bit down.
She felt his whole body tense, and he thrust into her again, harder, longer. As quickly as he could, he walked out of the library, still inside her, down the hall, until she heard him open a door.
Catie looked up. His bedroom.
His bed.
He fucked her upright all the way to his bed, not at all bothered by her weight, by the strain, by the sheer athletic demand. She was helpless in his arms as he drove into her, again and again, and as they fell down on the bed, all she wanted, strangely, was to drown in him, to be completely full of him until she had no room for the other things that crowded her troubled mind.
He obliged.
chapter 27
They slept together, if you could call it sleeping. Jake woke her twice to make love, once with the brittle winter light streaming
through the windows, hitting his face as it had the night before as he slung her leg over his shoulder and gently rocked her to another orgasm. She should have slept like a rock after all that, but the time between, with his naked limbs wrapped behind her, was anything but restful; the contact between them was like a constant buzz, an incessant droning that built and built until it would wake one of them and they’d need each other again.
Catie eventually slept, she supposed, when Jake left. When she woke, the room was dark; he’d drawn the drapes against the light for her. It took her a moment to get her bearings.
She forgot to feel guilty for one or two blissful minutes. And then it all came back.
Catie shot out of bed. She had to find Jake.
She had to fix this.
Catie ran to get something to wear, wrapped in nothing but a sheet, and stole a glance at clock. She stopped, stared at it. Holy shit, it’s four o’clock in the afternoon. She’d slept all damn day. The auction—the auction—was at eight.
And where the hell was Jake?
Catie forced herself to slow down and think. She walked back to Jake’s bed and sat, rewrapping the sheet around her for her comfort. She hadn’t had the courage to tell him the truth last night, not when looking him right in the eye, knowing she’d actually see him lose faith in her. But that gnawing worry that ate away at her—that was the realization that she couldn’t bring herself to stand up at the auction and let Jake bid on her, either. Maybe it was silly to think that that, of all things, was going too far, but Catie had gotten accustomed to thinking of herself as a liar, and Jake as the man she lied to. She hadn’t accepted the idea that she’d make a fool of him, too.
And where was he, anyway? The auction was in four hours, and Catie had assumed he would take her. Yet she’d avoided talking about it, she realized, in the same way she’d avoided talking about other things that reminded her of her guilt. Still, it wasn’t like Jake to just leave her with no explanation.
Catie walked back to the library to retrieve her phone. It was there, battery dying. No messages. She was about to call Jake when she realized what wasn’t there: the book he’d left her. Crossing the Rubicon.
She found it next to the bed. Jake’s bed. With a note stuck between the pages, hanging out at a jaunty angle. He’d left it there for her all along.
I had obligations at the charity, and thought you could use the sleep. I’ve promised dinner with Eileen Corrigan, but will meet you at the auction.
And then, a telltale hesitation mark, just before he signed—
Love, J.
It had taken a lot for him to write that word, “love.” But he’d done it.
Catie told herself that she would not cry. She was no longer going to just feel terrible about doing terrible things; Jake deserved better than that. She had to do something, she just didn’t know what. The book itself felt heavy in her hands, and she found herself wondering about what he’d told her: that she pushed people away by crossing boundaries. She knew it was true. In fact she knew, holding that book, thinking about her life and all the people in it, that it went deeper than that. She was so convinced she’d never be able to rely on anyone, so sure that faith would always be betrayed, that she had to make it come true before anyone had a chance to hurt her. So she just crisscrossed various Rubicons, burning the bridges behind her, left and right. And if she failed to fix this thing with Brazzer, that would be a Rubicon, all right. And if she were being honest, she knew she had already crossed one with Jake. She loved him, beyond all repair. There was no going back.
She read the note again. He was going to dinner with Eileen? Eileen, who’d written him that horrible letter, who’d blamed him for her son’s suicide? Catie thought back; the letters had been dated around this time of the year. Just a few days after Valentine’s Day, actually.
Oh God. Was this the anniversary?
He was going to dinner with Eileen Corrigan on the anniversary of Stephan’s suicide.
Catie had spent her life convinced that people were faithless and not to be relied upon, and yet, here was Jake, making sure he was there for Eileen Corrigan, no matter how much pain they’d brought each other in the past. On a day Catie was sure he would have preferred to be holed up somewhere, keeping his grief to himself, Jake was instead making sure that he was there for everyone else: Eileen, Volare, Catie.
If Jake could be faithful, so could Catie. She could be worthy of…well, no, she couldn’t. She’d already screwed up too badly. She had already chickened out the previous night, and the thought of it filled her with bitter shame. What could she do, but confess and alert them to the impending story, to Brazzer’s other source? She so wanted to be able to tell them she’d fixed it, that she’d found the source, before she had to reveal what she herself had done—or almost done. But she couldn’t even get to Jake before the auction.
“What the hell am I going to do?” she said, quietly, in a very empty room.
Her phone answered her. It buzzed an alert: one new message.
Last chance. Going to press with what we got. - Brazzer
She had run out of time.
chapter 28
Jake smiled encouragingly across the table at Eileen. He would have guessed he’d see Manhattan besieged by swarms of flying pigs, fighting it out in doomed air battles with the pigeons, before he’d see Eileen Corrigan nervous.
Eileen took another sip of her wine and managed a fleeting smile back.
Jake had still had trepidations about this dinner—an entire meal predicated on sharing intimate moments of grief and mourning seemed like exactly the sort of thing he would fail miserably at—but he was finding that whatever new skills or sensitivities he’d developed because of Catie transferred at least moderately well to other situations. He didn’t want to get up and run, for example. He thought he was doing rather well. Eileen, on the other hand, normally the center of any room or conversation, seemed unable to speak. In the lulls, Jake inevitably thought back to Catie; he felt terrible about leaving her in the house after that night—and morning—but he couldn’t bring himself to wake her. He hadn’t much practice with that sort of thing. Then he’d realize he was thinking about Catie, naked, in his bed, while at what amounted to a memorial dinner, and he’d feel terrible all over again.
Conversation had stalled.
Jake decided to try the direct route. “Eileen, did you have something…in particular that you wanted to tell me?” he said gently. She’d said a lot over the years, in various ways. Whatever it was, Jake could take it. He steeled himself.
“Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I don’t know why this is so hard,” Eileen said, and grabbed her purse from the floor, where she’d insisted on keeping it. She opened it and started to root around. Jake guessed it was so she wouldn’t have to look at him. She went on, “You know what was easy? Yelling at you. Saying awful things to you, things I knew weren’t true even at the time. The worst things I could think of—that was easy. Saying something nice—that’s hard.”
Jake said, “What—?”
“Oh, shut up, Jake, let me get it out. I’m on a roll now, I might never do it otherwise.”
Eileen fetched a pile of papers from her bottomless beige bag and put them on the table between the bread rolls and the olive oil. It was a jumble—folded sheets of typed pages, longhand on fancy stationary, even scraps. Jake recognized the handwriting on a few visible pieces. Stephan.
It just sat there, sucking up all the sound in the room.
“What’s this?” he asked. He was unable to take his eyes off the papers. He noticed that she’d tied them together with butcher’s string.
“This is the stuff of his I found afterwards that I never told you about,” Eileen said. She took a deep breath. “Jake, you have to understand, I was so angry. So, so angry. I felt like I never even had a chance with him, he’d cut me out so early. But now, I don’t know…”
Eileen trailed off, and when Jake looked up she was wiping one eye delicately with her finger.
Her mascara hadn’t run.
“Well,” she said. “The upshot is that most of those things mention you. There’s a hodgepodge journal, some of his short stories, odds and ends. Poems and stuff. You know he wasn’t organized. But he loved you. He admired you in so many ways, and he wrote about the things you gave him, spending time with him, especially after Harry died.”
Jake and Stephan had felt like they only had each other after their dad died, leaving out Eileen in that self-centered way of adolescents. And then Jake hadn’t been there on that one particular night. Jake could feel the failure all over again, just as fresh as if it had been last week. Apparently now he wore his pain on his face, because Eileen reached across and grabbed his hand.
“Hey! Listen to me. I’m not saying that you screwed up; I’m saying you were a good thing in his life. I’m saying you made it better. I’m saying that what I wrote to you…I was wrong. Do you hear me? I was wrong.”
Jake finally looked her in the eye. She looked furious in an oddly motherly sort of way, her green eyes glaring at him with the same intensity he could remember when he and Stephan would get into trouble as kids.
“You listen to me, Jacob Jayson,” she said. “I was wrong. I was angry, and looking for someone to blame because I was sure that I…” She caught herself, shook her head slightly, and plowed ahead. “It was no one’s fault. Stephan was sick. We all did the best we could. I asked you here to tell you that and to give you these so you could see for yourself how you did good by him. Ok?”
Bewildered, Jake didn’t know what else to say. He said, “Ok.”
Eileen squeezed his hand. “Then what are you waiting for?” she said, looking at the pile of papers. “Take ‘em, they’re not going to burn you.”
Gingerly, Jake reached for them. She was right—they didn’t burn. He’d have all the time in the world to read them, though he wasn’t sure he wanted to. No, he did want to. He just…
“While I’m on the subject,” Eileen said, taking up her wine glass again and swirling it with a little too much deliberation, “I’m also sorry for giving you the cold shoulder when you were a boy. Harry might’ve had a wandering eye before we got married, but that was no reason to take it out on you.”