“I’m right here.” He felt foolish saying that, knowing that she was looking right at him and knew exactly where he was. He needed to reassure her, though. She looked so fragile and dazed.
“That hurt.”
His throat tightened. “It hurt me when you decided my explanation for being away wasn’t good enough, and broke your word to stop hiding from me.”
She flinched and dropped her gaze. He steeled himself against the instinct-voice screaming at him to hug her close and whisper apologies, and instead took her shoulders and turned her to face away from him. “Go sit in the corner until I call you.”
Amy hesitated. He gently pushed her toward the east corner of the room. “Nose to the wall,” he added. She sniffed and wiped at her cheeks as she moved to do as he’d instructed. His shoulders slumped, the muscles releasing physical tension he hadn’t been aware of until that moment. While Amy cooled her heels and her reddened behind in the corner, he went to splash cold water on his face. Her arousal perfumed his fingers. He didn’t wash it away.
Mac braced himself with both hands on the bathroom counter and stared at his reflection in the mirror. He didn’t see a monster. That was his normal every day face looking back at him, minus the lines of a sleepless night. He rinsed away the beads of nervous sweat on his forehead. Before he went any further with Amy, he needed to do some research. He couldn’t fumble blindly forever and do the job right.
He carried Amy’s laptop to the living room and set it up on the coffee table where he could keep an eye on her. She knelt stiffly, her hands on her thighs and her nose in the corner as he’d instructed. Her buttocks and upper thighs were still a bright, angry red. His erection, gone soft upon discovering her tears, roused itself and pressed eagerly against his fly. Just the sight of her skin, hot from his hands, infused him with a surge of power that he’d never known before.
He cleared his throat. “Are you thirsty?”
She nodded. He retrieved a bottle of water for each of them, careful not to touch her when he placed her water on the floor beside her. He moved the tissue box over so she could reach that, too, and settled in to boot up the computer. He’d never typed “BDSM” into a search engine before, and didn’t know what to expect.
A Rose of Any Color: MaleDom: A BDSM Anthology
Chapter Eleven
A ringing telephone startled him from his immersion in open letters to new dominants, essays on “what it means,” and Web sites offering advice on purchasing more kinky toys than he could count, let alone read in one setting. His gaze immediately went to Amy in the corner. She flinched as a second ring pealed through the apartment.
“I’ll take care of it.” He rose to disable the ringer on the living room phone. He did the same for the kitchen and bedroom, and on impulse disconnected the bedroom phone altogether. Whether they were sleeping or otherwise engaged, bedroom interruptions would henceforth be unwelcome.
Amy shifted her weight as he returned to her. Her toes curled, and she inched her feet closer together. His stomach rumbled, and he checked his watch. She’d been kneeling in the corner for only half an hour. It had seemed more like hours. He crouched beside her and stroked the back of her head, permitting himself a slight smile for the way her short curls wound around his fingers.
“You’ve been here long enough. Come talk with me.” He pressed one of his t-shirts into her hand.
Amy straightened away from the wall. A quiet sigh slipped past her lips. She glanced at the folded square of black cotton, but didn’t put it on. “I’m not comfortable doing everything naked,” she said.
“I know. You’re not comfortable doing everything clothed, either. Your physical nudity is a symbol of being emotionally naked. Emotionally open.”
“Being naked for you in any way is hard. There’s nothing to hide imperfections.”
He frowned. “I never wanted a perfect woman. I wanted you.”
“I wanted you to have a perfect woman.” She braced her hand against the wall for support and unfolded her legs. “My feet are asleep.”
“I’ll rub the needles away.” Mac rose and held her elbow as she hobbled over to the sofa. She swung her feet up onto his lap without a second prompting. Red nail polish caught the light and made her small feet seem delicate.
He studied her toes while he talked. Working the soles of her feet with his thumbs provided a meditative peace he hadn’t expected to find in an action so simple. “I realize in retrospect that I set a rule without giving you an opportunity to negotiate the terms. I didn’t really explain the purpose, either.
“Your nudity is not only a symbol of your own openness, but a symbol of my attention. If your breasts sway when you bend over to pick something up, you’ll remember that I gave your body freedom to move. You’ll remember me. More important, you’ll remember that you’re mine, and you’ll remember that I have taken away all of your obligations to be perfect in any regard.”
“You don’t want an unequal marriage, though.” Her toes curled against his wrist. “I’m confused. I wanted you to want this, but I didn’t really expect that you’d change your mind. I shouldn’t have put you in that position,” Amy said. “I was trying to manipulate you. Not to make you jealous,” she clarified, “but to make you want me again. I’m sorry.”
He gently pinched her Achilles tendons and moved on to massage her ankles. His gaze strayed up the pale, shapely length of her legs. She held his t-shirt, still folded, over the apex of her thighs. Unsure what to make of her continued nudity, he refrained from comment on the shirt, and instead met her eyes. “I can’t remember a single day in the last twenty years that I haven’t wanted you.”
Her eyes widened. “But-”
“No buts, Amy.” He gave her a quick, sheepish grin. “You’ve been the object of every jerk-off fantasy since the day you picked up that Mets hat for me. Remember that?”
She flushed. “Mac, I was thirteen!”
“So? Not much younger than me. You expected a fifteen year old punk not to notice when a pretty blonde bent over and flashed her tits? You’re the one who wasn’t wearing a bra,” he pointed out.
Amy snorted and rolled her eyes. “I was practically flat ‘til I went to college. You were stroking it to a trick of the light.”
The crude phrase rolling off her lips nudged his now-aching dick into a third-wind hard on. It reminded him of serious business on the table. He shifted her feet off his thigh and onto the sofa. Best if he didn’t tempt his hands.
“I need to know exactly what you want from me,” he said. The smile that had been playing at the corners of her mouth vanished. “If it’s physical punishment, I can’t do it. What I did—I enjoyed it too much. I was too tempted to keep hitting you. I didn’t even know I’d pushed you to the point of tears until I decided enough was enough and saw your face.
“Spanking for play…that’s something else. I think I could do that if you wanted. But I can’t be a physical disciplinarian.”
She averted her eyes. Shades of pink spread over her cheeks, down her shoulders and across the tops of her breasts. He would’ve given anything to know what thoughts were running through her head and making her small nipples bead up into hard little buttons. He could order her to tell him, but he made himself give her time to share on her own.
“Can we have a cooling-off time?” she finally said.
The quiet query hit him like a punch in the gut. The last thing he wanted to do was give her leave to go off on her own, but he acknowledged the wisdom of time apart. They would both benefit from solitude in which to consider their new roles, and he could use the time to grow into their changing relationship. He put his own wants into the background and nodded his assent. “If you’d like.”
The moment he uttered the words, weight lifted from his shoulders and his head cleared of the arousal fog. Amy’s frown deepened, however.
She cleared her throat. “I have a fantasy,” she said, so low he wasn’t sure he heard her correctly.
She rocke
d up to her knees and cupped his erection. A current of shock-sensation charged into his balls. He caught her wrist and held her gaze. “Fantasies aren’t exactly conducive to cooling off.”
“This isn’t good for cooling off either. I want to relieve you.”
“Not until you set some boundaries. I refuse to hurt you out of ignorance.”
“You know what my limits are,” she said. “You know me.”
Mac inched away and stood, suddenly claustrophobic and nervous. “I don’t know this aspect of you.” He cringed at the edge in his words. Amy’s face fell. “I want to,” he clarified, “but I don’t yet, so you have to tell me.”
She settled back on her heels and tipped her head back, looking up at him. Her eyes, the anxious set of her mouth, pleaded with him. “I don’t want to be blindfolded.”
The dark frightened her. He knew that. He didn’t realize it extended itself to a controlled blindfold situation, though. “What else?”
“Nothing…dirty.” She squirmed. “No golden showers, or anything like that.”
“What about handcuffs?”
“I’d like those.”
“Anal sex?” He’d never penetrated her there, but asked for safety’s sake. Amy’s flush surprised him.
“Not yet,” she whispered. She lowered her eyes.
Mac raised his eyebrows at her response. He’d only asked for sake of thoroughness and hadn’t expected a midway response. It drove home how little he really knew his wife. Would he be taking advantage of her wishes if he used her submissive desires to quiz her about all the things he never knew, but wondered? The prospect of being let in on her fantasy made him eager as a kid. Every conversation with her could be like Christmas morning. A huge adventure in unwrapping Amy.
The thrill of a sneak peek prompted him to continue questioning. He racked his memory for situations he thought of as kinky and asked, “Do you want me to gag you?”
She hesitated. “What about a safe word?”
“You could have a safe object to use if you can’t talk. Something you hold onto and drop if you’re uncomfortable.” He’d come across that suggestion in one of the Internet articles he had skimmed while she knelt in the corner. It bolstered his courage to have a solution that he didn’t have to fumble to find.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Not yet. I need to be able to talk to you.”
Her words, small and vulnerable, hit him hard. Again. The phantom pain sobered him somewhat, gave him a line to climb up from the quicksand pit of want. “I want you to talk to me about everything in our lives. Right now, I need to know whether you really want time to slow down, think, and cool off, or whether you want something else. I don’t understand your signals.”
“I don’t want to be apart from you. I don’t want to cool down.”
“Why did you suggest it earlier?”
She shrugged. “It seemed like a responsible thing to suggest.”
“It was. It’s still a good idea. Do you feel at all unsafe?” he asked, watching for any truth that might hide behind her lips. She shook her head. He didn’t see any hesitation in her eyes.
“Do you?” she asked.
Did he?
Mac glanced away, disentangling himself from the power her face held over him. He rubbed his hand over his chest but couldn’t placate the anxious thud of his heart. Did he feel unsafe?
He’d asked the question with the intention of determining whether she felt threatened. It took on a different meaning redirected toward himself. Was he a threat? An unsafe, dangerous element in her life? The earlier thrill of spanking her was not a thrill he’d wanted to experience. He doubted his self-control. In that sense, yeah, he felt unsafe. He was the predator. She, with her fragile wrists and big unsuspecting eyes, would crumple beneath him if he attacked.
He had to touch her.
Careful to touch, not attack, he went to his knees on the floor and pulled her from the sofa. Taking her by the thighs, he guided her over to sit astride his lap. The position opened her up to him; the fragrance of her arousal was a drug. “Tell me your fantasy,” he commanded, shifting to brace the small of her back against the edge of the seat behind her.
She flushed and averted her eyes. She still held onto his shirt. He caught her hand and pulled the cotton from her grasp, discarding it on the floor.
“Look at me when I’m asking for your attention, Amy.” Her stomach flattened as she exhaled a long breath. Her eyelashes fluttered reluctantly, but eventually she met his eyes.
He kissed the corner of her mouth and murmured, “Good.”
“I don’t know how to start,” she whispered.
“Start with yesterday. I lost you somewhere in the studio. I want to know where you went.” He nosed behind her ear, seeking the fragrance of shampoo and skin and the heat of her pulse. Her hands moved restlessly against his chest and eventually found their way to his shoulders.
“Amy,” he persisted. She shifted her weight.
“I’m uncomfortable.”
“I know. It’ll get easier.” To ease the physical strain of her position, he cupped her hips and drew her higher onto his lap, giving her room to move her legs and brace her feet on the floor. She made use of the new arrangement by pressing up against his belt buckle. Mac smiled and kissed her ear. “Tell me.”
Amy buried her face against his chest. Hiding behind him, not from him. He slid his arms around her waist, squeezed her close, and kissed her shoulder.
She shivered and confessed, “When I was in the photo shoot, I pretended you were behind me with all those toys and that camera.”
“You wanted me to pose and photograph you?”
“Yes. No.” Her breath caught and turned the words choppy.
“Then what?”
“I wanted you to expose me,” she whispered.
The admission drew him up, startling in its similarity to his own desire to get past her mask. Amy had given him her heart and body, but never such free, uninhibited access to her body. He’d never experienced this rush of complete, unlimited license to explore and provoke reaction from her.
“Can I touch you?” she asked, interrupting his awe.
Mac groaned and pushed her fingers against his fly. “Unzip me.”
Amy complied without a moment’s hesitation. She lowered his zipper and laid the folds of denim aside and stopped. The slick, swollen head of his cock poked through his underwear and nuzzled her wrist. He groaned.
“Mac?”
That brought his gaze back to hers. Wide, dark eyes welcomed him. The welcome was so tangible it robbed him of coherent thought for a moment and delayed his response. Eventually, he asked, “Yes?”
“I’m having trouble breathing.”
How had he missed the shortness of her breath? The rapid rise and fall of her chest tightened his throat. “I’ll get your inhaler,” he said, alarmed, and moved to shift her off his lap.
She forestalled him. “It’s not that. It’s—I’ve never been this hot before.”
He smiled and kissed her right breast, but struggled to his feet nevertheless. Amy squeaked breathlessly as he swung her up into his arms and carried her across the room. “Point me to the camera,” he whispered against her ear.
A Rose of Any Color: MaleDom: A BDSM Anthology
Chapter Twelve
Later, Amy sprawled exhausted in their bed. Mac had covered her with sheets, but her skin was too sensitive for any covering and she’d kicked them off. He sat beside her, his erection still spearing the air, and trailed his fingers up and down her back.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” he said.
“Not thinking anything,” she lied.
“Nothing at all?”
She smiled and rubbed her cheek against his thigh. “My brain is mush.”
He chuckled. “All the more reason you should tell me now what you’re thinking. You’re not clever enough to disguise anything with double-edged words.”
“I don’t use double-edged words,”
she said, peeping up at him. “They’re just carefully chosen.”
“I’ll have to work on making you talk without screening yourself.”
“Some men would give anything if their women would think before they spoke.”
“I’m not some men.” He finger-combed the hair away from her forehead. “And I want you to talk to me about what you feel before you have a chance to overanalyze and second guess it. So tell me what you’re thinking.”
She hid her face in the pillow. Mac pulled her hair gently, dragging her head up and forcing her to turn her cheek into the pillow instead. “Don’t hide from me,” he reminded.
“I’m afraid.”
“Of me?”
“Of saying the wrong thing. Sounding too grateful or something. Like a kinky girl-toy who was only out to get spanked so she could get off on dirty sex.”
Mac cocked a thick eyebrow. “I’m starting to rethink my stance on kinky girl-toys,” he teased. “Tell me, though—is this really about sex?”
She shook her head and lowered her lashes. “No. I’m just not sure how to articulate how I feel.”
“Why not just say it?”
“Because you might think it’s stupid.”
“Amy, I’ve known you forever. I’ve witnessed every dumb thing you’ve ever done and I still love you. I’m still here with you. You’re still the most precious gift I’ve ever been given. Tell me.”
She curled her fingers around his, clinging to the rough calluses that marked his hands and holding onto the security they provided. “I was thinking that I’m really selfish, making you take on this role. Wondering whether I should apologize.”
“You are selfish, but it doesn’t change the fact that I love you. I want to give you everything. I always have. If I can give you some kind of freedom this way, I will do my very best to give it completely.”
“Why?”
“Because your happiness is mine.”
She rolled toward him and propped herself against his thigh so she could kiss his stomach and nuzzle the dark hair that furred his abdomen. He smelled faintly of her body, but not enough. “Make love to me?” she asked shyly, rubbing her cheek against his hardness and flicking the tip of her tongue into his navel. He shuddered, and she hid her smile against his stomach.
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