by Lilia Moon
Eli
Fuck, I almost pushed her too far and I don’t even have her all the way tied up yet.
I want to wipe the sweat off my forehead, but that would involve taking my hands off the woman who has just utterly melted under my touch, and there’s no way I’m letting go of what she just gave me. Spanking her ass was pure instinct, and for the rest of my natural Dom life, I will revisit the horror of the ten seconds afterward.
The ones where I thought I’d totally blown it—and where she decided to turn it into a gift instead.
I’m beginning to realize just how high this woman’s expectations of her Dom are going to be. I reach for the wide straps I’ve rolled under the chaise lounge. I need to get us to the part where we’re seeking her pleasure and not just her capitulation. A more experienced sub would know they’re both coming, but if I get nothing else right today, I can’t let myself forget how new she is.
Three knots, three bands. One around her hips, one around her ribs, one over her shoulders with her hands tucked inside for good measure. I won’t add the last one that would normally be there. I saw her cast a careful, intrigued look at the wide band Tim used to restrain Mira’s head during their wax play, but there are limits that even an idiot Dom shouldn’t cross with a beginner, and that’s one of them.
I am going to give her as much of a taste as I can. I collect up her hair, making sure it’s clear of the leather straps, and form it in a loose knot on the back of her head. A quick twist into a hair tie and I’ve taken care of basic safety—and made sure I have a really clear view of her face. She might imagine I’ll be watching elsewhere, and every so often I will, but this scene will live or die on what happens above Chloe’s neck.
Another quick twist with a second hair tie and a repurposed nipple clamp and I have her head hooked in to the leather wrapping her arm. It won’t hold her if she pulls very hard, but it will keep her head motion restricted unless she really needs to get it free.
The kind of restraint that only works if a sub wants it to work.
She makes an odd, gurgling sound in her throat as she tests to see what I’ve done, but I don’t miss the bemused smile that comes after.
I lean down, running my hands over the leather bands. A cage, built to set her free. “Still comfortable?”
There’s no fight this time. Just quiet acquiescence. “Yes.”
There’s no way that’s the end of her fight, but I stroke her neck, her back. Taking a moment to soothe, to let her feel held by my leather, because soon my hands need to go elsewhere for a while. She hums, a low sound of pleasure that has some of the early notes of arousal I’ve been waiting for.
I grin and stand up. Time for my big gamble of the day, one sixteen-year-old Eli wouldn’t have been wise enough to make. It’s time to take her to her cliff, and I’m not going to do it with my hands or with any of the kinky skills I’ve learned in the last twenty years. Because Quint was right—she doesn’t trust those. Not yet.
I am, in the purest way I know, going to ask her to trust me.
Chapter Forty-Six
Chloe
I hear him clanking around, making the kinds of noises a man or a small child makes when they’re trying to be quiet. I let the amusement bubble in my belly a little.
The sounds quiet, and then his hand is on my back again, working its way up into my hair. I know I should be furious he tied my head still, but I feel like a newborn baby. Held. Freed from all responsibility. Getting me ready for the real work of today that will happen on the inside.
Because I don’t think for a minute that the hard part of this is over.
Something slides behind my head, and then there’s cool fabric resting on my forehead. “This is a blindfold, Chloe. You have your safewords.”
I don’t need a safeword for a little piece of cloth. Or so I think until it slides over my eyes and shuts off the world. I hear my breathing, harsh in my ears—and nothing else. I can’t see, I can’t move, I can’t touch, and that little piece of cloth just put the camel’s back under an avalanche of straw.
Eli’s hand strokes my neck, my fingers, the line of my spine. Soft, trailing touches that aren’t trying to arouse, aren’t trying to soothe—they’re just there. A compass point in a dark, scary world.
He’s there. He’s got me.
And he’s put me in this place of topsy-turvy blackness entirely on purpose.
I grit my teeth. I will get even. I asked him to push, not to smash me with a hammer.
I hear a chuckle, low and amused and moving away. He’s not touching me anymore—and he clearly heard my threat as loudly as if I’d spoken it. Which is also new. Eli was always sensitive, but he used to wait until he had permission to eavesdrop on my soul.
My heartbeat pulses in my fingers, and I realize both my hands are fists. Which is a waste of energy, because even if he put his nose right up against my knuckles, I can’t move enough to do any damage. I breathe, sending peace to my hands, and a promise that they will have their day. More breaths and my shoulders drop away from my ears, leaving quivering muscles in their wake.
I remember the woman on the table, under the wax. The way she tensed when her Dom tried to take her over the edge. And wonder if I’ve hit mine this soon.
More air in and out, trying to do what has never worked very well on a yoga mat, but I don’t have a lot of other options. I’m a creature of sound and movement, and while I could probably deafen his neighbors from here, without being able to move that’s just going to make me feel like a prisoner. A helpless one.
I feel my breathing start to shake. This is headed so very deep inside me and we’ve barely begun. Somehow, it’s that embarrassment, that shame over my own weakness, that’s driving me closest to breaking. I’m a woman who knows who she is and what she wants and what she can take, and this moment is challenging all three.
And the man who put me here has left me all alone.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Eli
I wait, bow poised over strings, cursing the well-developed Dom intuition that’s keeping my hands still. Chloe is falling, and she’s falling hard, but she’s not quite there yet. She’s still trying to fix this with anger, with comfort, with breaths that keep catching on the jagged edges of what she’s grappling with.
We both had too many moments of helplessness in our childhoods, those awful voids as we got ripped away from roots and friends and home by the whims of the army and parents who tried to convince us it was all one big adventure. Chloe learned to adapt, to roll, to ride the wave.
Today I’m asking her to dive beneath it. To surrender. To let it hurt and to let it break her apart and to let me catch her out the other side.
But I saw her on that swing in Sam and Leo’s back yard. I know her. If I offer solace too soon, she won’t go under. I watch her face, listening to the sounds as her own breathing slowly tears her asunder. It’s pure, unholy arrogance to think I can walk her through this, but I know I can. Not because of who I am. Two decades of kinky training is dandelion fluff in this moment.
This will work because of who she is—because of who she’s always been. And because, somehow, the wonder of who she is has always been willing to let me step in close and be all of who I am.
I can hear the thickness in her inhales and exhales now, the incoming tears. The hard-ass in my head who has been shackling my hands finally lets them loose and I set bow to strings, giving the tears inside her sound and freedom and fury. It wasn’t what I intended to play, but that doesn’t matter.
My cello has just become Chloe’s voice.
She freezes at the first note, a woman finally remembering she isn’t alone in the dark. And then she breathes out, an audible letting go that is the first exhale of her body instead of her brain. My fingers trill a few bird notes, laughing along with her. Spilling out my relief.
She squirms like I’ve tickled her ribs.
I let the notes come as they will, veering from laughter to tears. Naming this as a p
lace where both are sacred. Both are needed.
I watch, grateful and awed and honored, as she slowly relaxes. Her shoulders, her fists, her thighs, letting go of warrior readiness, of the need to protect and defend and hold intact. She lets the music of my hands tug on her, stretch her out into taffy, a shape that still holds together but is readying for something else.
Something that begins to taste of pleasure.
I grin, a potent mix of sixteen-year-old boy and pleased Dom and relieved man with a cello, as her pussy shows the first signs of getting hot and bothered, a wet sheen that teases my nose even though there’s no way I can smell her arousal from this far away. I put my appreciation into my hands, letting her hear what my eyes see, what that does to my own glow of pleasure and the much more primal flow of blood to my cock.
Because now we can begin to walk together.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chloe
Music isn’t supposed to be sexy.
I have no idea why that’s the place my brain has decided to take its last stand, and it isn’t one that makes sense, because even as a teenager, Eli knew how to put passion into his music. But this is something else. Something fierce and swelling that somehow still feels like it’s laughing at itself, and wrapping that boldness and laughter around me like the very softest of silks.
More bands to hold me.
I don’t bother testing the trusses again. I’m tied up until Eli decides I’m not, and every time I think of that it makes me mad and it makes me hot. Which the sexy music isn’t helping, and I’m pretty sure Eli has lined himself up to have a really good view.
I groan quietly into my fist. I would have let him watch, but the fact that he hasn’t asked, that he’s simply taking, and that he set me up for this from the very first strap he wrapped around my wrist, has anger and fire and heat fusing together in my belly. It’s so very clear that he has a plan and I’m just a reacting, lurching mess.
Nothing about that should be sexy, but it is.
The heat between my legs pulses in time with his bow, quick notes and long, slick ones. I am becoming his instrument. Instrument and audience both, and all I’m supposed to do is lie here and let it happen. I blink, or something deep inside me does, anyhow, bringing up vivid memories of sprawling on Eli’s bunk bed as he played in the corner. I used to do that for hours, willing ears for everything from scales to original pieces he wrote in the deep dark of night and never played for anyone but me.
My mind melts.
This is just the grown-up version of Eli’s bunk. I never resisted that—giving myself over to his music was easy, something I sought out on purpose because there was a place in the flow of sound where everything else stopped and I could just be.
I smile into the dark. He’s reminding me that I already know how to do this. That the only things I really need to fight are my own expectations. The ones where I’m an equal, participating sexual partner, not one tied down to a chaise with her arousal on display and the rest of her very literally in the dark.
I hear my giggle, loud and bouncy in my head and twanging into his music with all the grace of a drunken elephant. And then I hear his reply. Amused notes that bounce right back at me and pretend that elephants are exactly what I’m supposed to be.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Eli
I could do this forever. Sit here and play and make music with the sounds of the woman who is slowly finding all the absurd edges of this theater that is my life and opening herself to why they exist.
But that kind of generosity deserves rewards I can’t pull off with my hands on bow and strings, and I’m pretty sure there are a few other things I could do for the rest of forever too. I lean over to my phone, scroll down until I find what I need, and send a message to the speakers in the room. The contents of my new album, taking over for fingers that have somewhere else they need to be.
I see her jolt, taking in the change. Realizing it means she can no longer rest comfortable in knowing where I am.
I keep my chuckle quiet. Doms aren’t supposed to be easily amused—it messes with the mystique. I turn up the volume of the music a little, masking my steps on the rug. I let her hear the creak of the footstool as I pull it closer and take a seat.
It doesn’t take any more than that for Chloe to go utterly still.
Smart sub. Amazing, responsive, gorgeous sub. I trail a finger down her spine. Slowly. Rebuilding the meditative space that will hold us for what comes next. Watching her skin tremble. Feeling her breathe into a touch no heavier than fairy dust.
I smile. I might have to get some candle lessons from Tim. In the meantime, I have a few things in my bag of tricks that should take us to more or less the same place. Ones that won’t do it gently—because I promised.
The music wrapping around us has a hot, almost Latin flavor, and I decide to go with it. I pull out a tube of my favorite body lube and let a little warm on my fingers. Then I reach for her earlobe.
She jumps, both at the touch and at the cool wet of the lube.
I grin. That will change soon enough. I rub, finding the sensitive places behind her ear, down the slope of her neck. Waiting for the special ingredients in the lube to do their magic.
Her breathing responds first, rapidly followed by a squawk of protest as the heat blows away any lingering remnants of her musically induced coma. One day I’ll let her stay in that space while I play with my bag of toys, but not this one. Today I’m not only trying to seduce her body—I’m also wooing her mind. I watch her carefully. For most people, this lube is all about heat and tingling. For some, it causes an unbearable itch, which is why my fingers are tracing her earlobe and the line of her neck instead of the slick wet of her pussy.
I’m close enough to smell her arousal now, and it’s hell to be depriving myself.
I decide the lube is torturing her in all the right ways and trail a finger down her arm, rubbing some into the inside of her elbow. Connecting the dots, one erogenous zone to the next. She hisses as I make my way to the peekaboo curve of her breast, and I don’t need to see her eyes to know what messages I would read there.
I follow her ribs to her spine and meander my way down. Mimicking Tim’s path with the wax as well as I can given that I’m dealing with the back of my sub instead of her front. I have my reasons for that and they’re mostly kindness, although Chloe might feel differently.
I dip my fingers into the enticing divot at the base of her spine. I know exactly the moment Chloe begins to suspect what comes next. Cymbals clash in her breath, and an erratic moan that tells me just how fraught this moment has become.
I keep my fingers where they are, not amping up the tension, but not backing off on it either. Letting her choose. And then I remember how new she is, and lean I forward to make that obvious. “You have your safewords, shorty.” I use the nickname very intentionally. I want her to know she can trust me, even if she can’t yet trust this.
Slowly, the cymbals ebb from her breath. She’s not relaxed, exactly, and she’s not at all certain she wants this trail of sensation going where I intend to take it, but she’s chosen not to fight.
Yet.
Chapter Fifty
Chloe
Someone once dared me to eat a whole bag of those little red cinnamon hearts—the really spicy ones. Right now my skin feels like Eli is using those to finger paint. Tingling that borders on fire. Heat that sneaks up and then makes very clear it’s not going away anytime soon.
Which makes the current location of his fingers wildly uncomfortable for more than one reason. I’m a grown woman and I’ve tried anal play, but I didn’t much like it. I don’t get off on trying the forbidden—I like my sex to feel good. I wiggle my ass the tiny amount the restraints will allow, trying to let Eli know I don’t want to go there.
He traces a light trail of heat into the top of the valley between my ass cheeks. All the wiggling does is make his line a little crooked.
I try to speak, but all that comes out is
a croak. I clear my throat and try again. “I don’t like this, Eli.”
His finger keeps tracing.
Dammit, he said he wanted to know how I was feeling. “I’ve tried it before and it’s not my thing.”
He leans closer. “I don’t care what you’ve tried before. I care about how you feel right now. You can stop this if you want, or you can wipe your slate clean and give this a chance. Up to you.”
I hear the words that say I have choices, but this feels like negotiating with a very large boulder. “If I give this a chance, my ass is going to tingle like fire for hours. That’s hard to undo.”
He chuckles. “Only about thirty minutes.” The fingers at the top of my ass crack are suddenly colder. Wetter. “Choose, Chloe. You stop this or you take it.”
The growl is out before I can stop it.
He doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t have to. The straps and the blindfold and the fingers ready to cinnamon heart some of my most sensitive skin are speaking for him.
I clear my throat, entirely ready to end this—and then I remember the woman on the table. The fight that hit her body when the first drops of wax splashed between her legs. And the look in her Dom’s eyes as he watched her struggle, as he met her defiance and her resistance and gave her what she needed anyhow.
The safeword that almost left my lips sinks back down into the ooze. I know why he’s doing this, and somehow, that’s worth suffering for—even cinnamon hearts in my ass crack. He seems to know this, because his fingers are moving before the ripples in the ooze clear, dragging cool slime down onto skin that’s trying really hard to run away and getting nowhere fast.
And then the heat hits. The burning tingle of instant sunburn, except this time it’s not itchy and sweaty and heading into annoying. It’s a hot, zippy jolt of pleasure funneling straight to my core. I hear the moan that leaves me, and I know he hears it, because his fingers move, circling down into the same tight cavern where the jolt has just gone.