by Alexis Hall
Anyway, we had fun together. Fun that involved me crying and hurting and yelling. But I was crying and hurting and yelling on my own terms. And I always got to come after. Sometimes during. Often both. I never let her spank me, though. I didn’t realise it was going to be a problem until the first time her palm landed crisply on what I’d assumed were my eager upraised buttocks. Turned out, they weren’t eager at all, and I’d safe-worded at light speed. Had to sit in a corner in a blanket for a bit. Crops, cats, single tails, floggers—even the cane which was right on the edge of too much ouch for me to take—all fine. But the intimacy of hand to skin, I wasn’t ready for. It felt like it belonged to Caspian, and Caspian alone.
“Well, poppet,” she said to me one weekend, having got off my face and dragged her dick out of my wet, gasping mouth, “would you like to see some photos?”
I peered up at her through a haze of happy sex tears. “You’ll probably have to untie me first.”
“Shame.” She unleashed a melodramatic sigh. “You look delicious all spread-eagled and helpless and covered in come.”
“The truly tragic thing here,” I pointed out, my throat hoarse from its recent abuse, “is that none of it’s my come.”
“Tragic for you, maybe. I’m having a wonderful time.” She tugged on the cascade of stars falling from the barbell through my right nipple.
I whined and wriggled—not that it did much good, considering she had me spread like a Boxing Day buffet. “You’re torturing meeee.”
“Oh no, poppet.” Reaching behind her, she caught up the remote for the vibrating plug she’d tucked into me earlier. “This is torturing you.”
She clicked. I howled. And my poor cock juddered like it was trying to achieve actual liftoff from the rest of my body.
“I…I need to come,” I gasped out, rattling the cuffs that held my wrists and ankles.
George regarded me curiously. “Now why do you think that is?”
It probably had something to do with the fact she’d kept me in a state of agonised arousal for what felt like hours. But I wasn’t in any mood to sass her. “Be-because I need to?”
“Yes, you’ve made that very clear. But”—she put a hand thoughtfully to her chin—“why do you need to? Do you think it might be because you’re a voracious little slut?”
My face flamed with shame as sweet and neon-bright as American candy. “Maybe.”
“Maybe?” she repeated. And leaned over me to lick up the precome that was dribbling like candlewax down the sides of my cock.
“Oh God. Okay. Yes. Yes. I’m a slut. Please…I can’t…I need…”
Lifting her head, she tsked. “Do try to pay attention. I didn’t say you were a slut. Anybody can be a slut. You, poppet, are a very special kind of slut.”
I quivered, my toes curling helplessly, and my fingers clawing at nothing. At this rate, she’d talk me over the edge, though, frankly, I was damn near desperate enough to take it. Sometimes it embarrassed me that she could do this to me—that she knew me well enough for words to be as potent as whips or chains—but mostly it was good embarrassment, making me feel seen and cared for and slightly toyed with.
“I’m waiting” she purred. “Tell me what kind of slut you are.”
Tossing my head against the pillow, I put up a faint show of resistance. Of course, I wasn’t actually resisting. I just occasionally liked to be a little broken.
“Tell me”—her fingers dipped between my pulled-wide legs and nudged the base of the plug—“and I’ll reward you.”
The thing is, I also knew George. Sexually speaking at least. And part of me recognised that I should absolutely clarify the nature of this reward. Unfortunately, most of me was a roiling mass of exposed nerves and thwarted desire, frantic to get off.
“I’m a…a…voracious slut,” I said. Okay, that’s a lie. I yelled that shit out like I wanted to make sure everyone in Swale got the message. “And I need to come. Please.”
“You are, poppet. You are. Look at you, wriggling and humping the air. Such a gluttonous young fuckpuppy. You’d do just about anything for pleasure, wouldn’t you?”
In my present condition? “Yes. Yes. What about my reward?”
“You shall have it, of course.” She smiled down at me. Red lips, white teeth. Princess and monster. “Your reward is to see some very lovely photographs.”
I nearly goddamn cried. “What? No…I mean…yes…just. Now?”
“No time like the present.”
“But”—I’m not even going to try and describe how pathetic I sounded—“I don’t like denial.”
She covered me with her body, which led to some very undignified bucking and squirming on my part, and kissed me deep, and rough, and nasty. “I would never deny you, poppet. I’m delaying you.”
“I don’t like delay either.” I kicked in my bonds—the world’s most abortive tantrum.
“You love control, though. And”—her mouth grew gentle against mine—“you always know what you can do.”
I did. But this was not even remotely approaching a safe word situation. I uttered what I hoped was a heartbreaking whimper. Even if, thinking about it, trying to make a sadist feel bad about the sadism they were inflicting on you with your full consent was probably a lost cause from the outset. “Fine. Let’s go see some photos.”
She let me go and helped me up, but then drew my hands behind my back and recuffed them.
I gave her my biggest eyes. “Seriously?”
“What’s the matter?” Picking up her paisley silk dressing gown from where she’d thrown it earlier, she draped it over her shoulders. “You don’t need your hands to look, do you?”
She had a point. A mean point.
“Don’t pout, poppet. Come along.” Her hand encircled my cock and gave the poor, suffering thing a little tug.
Probably I should have resisted this indignity, but my hips had other ideas, and also, the friction was just too good. It took us a while to reach the studio because I kept pausing to moan, and George kept pausing to make me moan. But once we arrived, I saw the table, where I’d had many kinky adventures, was spread with pictures.
George settled into a chair and pulled me into her lap. I went submissively enough because, frankly, my brain was needy mush. Let her ease my knees apart, exposing me in all my urgent horniness to the drift of air and her tormenting touches.
“These are some of my favourites.” I think she was talking about the images but her hands were gliding up and down my inner thighs. “What do you think?”
I said glerble. Or thereabouts.
A sharp slap to that vulnerable and sensitive flesh managed to reach me through the lust haze. “I can’t believe you’re trying to sex me over photos of me.”
“Photos I took of you.” She laughed against my neck, deep and rich with joy. “I did warn you, Arden, the first time we met. I like sex and I like art, and right now, you’re both.”
I rocked against her knee, shamelessly taking whatever stimulation I could get, the plug shifting inside me—little shocks of sensation that were as tormenting as they were satisfying. “I can live with that.”
“Good. Now let’s see how pretty you are.”
Pushing my heavy eyelids up, I focused on the images. Gasped. I hadn’t wanted my wang, or too much of my bum, in the public domain, so the shots were suggestive rather than explicit—lots of coy angles and strategically placed shadows—but there was also no getting away from it: These were some sexy pictures.
Sexy, kinky pictures.
Sexy, kinky pictures of me.
Kneeling, crawling, lying in a fucked-out heap, tied up, tied down, leashed, collared, marked, suspended from the ceiling, rolling around on rumpled sheets…Probably I should have been embarrassed to have such intimate moments framed, preserved, potentially reproduced, but the more I stared at the photos, the more I realised I loved them.
I just looked so fucking happy. And it was…nice—weirdly nice, but nice—to see that side of myself. I m
ean, I was no model but George had found ways to flatter me: the places I was sleek and the places I was soft, the silly freckles across my nose, the glint of my nipple jewellery, the dimples at the top of my arse that were probably some of my favourite bits of me, the way my mouth in pleasure made shapes like laughing. Basically, I came across like a normal boy having a whale of a time.
There were some other pictures too—one taken the night of Ellery’s birthday, another at George’s window—but these had a grainer quality, the colours less vivid. I seemed…distant in them, restless, my gaze slipping past the camera, like I was Penelope in search of a horizon.
“Well?” asked George.
“They’re…amazing.” I let out a shuddery breath. “I honestly can’t quite believe they’re me.”
“Which do you like best?”
“All of them.”
She gave one of my nipples a tweak sharp enough to make me yelp. “No cheating.”
“Haven’t I already blown you today?”
“Yes.” Her touch became a caress. “And now it’s time to suck my other cock.”
In spite of being sweaty and naked and wracked with denied…no, delayed…arousal, I giggled. “You’re completely shameless.”
“I try to be. Shame is the most self-destructive of vices.”
There was something in her voice, an unusual hint of fragility, that made me nuzzle at her clumsily with my chin. “I’m crazy about what you do—with me and with your camera. These are stunning. So much beyond anything I could have imagined I can’t quite wrap my head round it.”
“What did you imagine?”
“I honestly don’t know. I guess I thought you’d realise I wasn’t all that photogenic.”
“There’s no such thing as photogenic. Just people who are more comfortable having their photo taken.”
“I wouldn’t put myself in that category.”
She laughed and nipped at my ear. “Neither would I, poppet. Which is why I made sure you were sufficiently distracted that your comfort was neither here nor there.”
That made sense. I’d lost track of the camera so thoroughly that I couldn’t actually remember half these photos being taken. Since my hands were still out of action, I jerked my head towards one of the images. “That one…I like that one.”
For her own use, ever the efficient despoiler, George preferred cuffs. But that day she’d gone for rope—rope in every colour of the rainbow, wound around me as bright as birthday bunting. I was kneeling, legs bound and spread wide, my arms—also bound—braced in front of me so I wasn’t flaunting my wares to the world. Knots crisscrossed my torso, the ropes vanishing over my shoulders and into the shadows between my legs. It was one of the few times I was looking directly into the camera lens and I was grinning like I’d just spotted the loophole in a deal with the devil. Which could have been incongruous with my pose but, somehow, wasn’t—as if the two were not oppositional, but connected, my triumph and my submission.
“So do I.” George’s fingers closed around my cock and I sighed with what was at first pure relief—though no less intense for it.
“Oh God.” My hips arched involuntarily, legs falling open still further. “Don’t stop. Please don’t stop. Even if this is seriously fucking narcissistic.”
She gave an unabashedly filthy chuckle. “There, there, poppet. This is about my narcissism, not yours.”
I was rapidly losing my capacity to care what it was about. Nothing mattered except the long, smooth strokes of her hand and the giddy cockscrew of my pleasure. I’d long since lost track of the remote for the plug, but George hadn’t, and the sudden burst of stimulation against my inside happy place made not coming everywhere an outright impossibility. I’d got off while bound before but there was something about the position, and having my hands trapped behind me, that made my body feel like a gun someone else had fired. I came, thrashing and shuddering, in a wild jet that George made exactly zero attempt to control for me. My orgasm-wrecked brain helpfully slo-mo’ed the experience: an arc of my own semen pattering gently down on my celluloid self.
“For my private collection,” murmured George.
I collapsed against her, panting and satisfied. “You are a sick fuck.”
“I’ve never claimed otherwise.”
She put a hand under my chin, turned my face up to hers, and kissed me with a kind of lazy thoroughness—like she had no compunction in using me, but no desire to possess me. It brought me gently back to myself, to the safety of being held by someone I trusted, and the comfort of knowing everything I’d gone through had been mine to choose. George had a blanket ready and wrapped me up in it, but she left the cuffs on until I got restless. I’d found too much freedom all at once could sometimes freak me out.
I’d dozed off against her shoulder for a bit, but when I stirred again, I found her uncharacteristically serious.
“Now that you’re thinking clearly,” she said, “you should probably decide once and for all what you want me to do with these photos.”
“You…you don’t want to use them?”
That earned me a little shake. “Of course I do. But now you’ve seen them, I wanted to check you were still comfortable with them being public.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Because”—she sighed—“the world has changed since I first picked up a camera. Information is forever. You need to think that your enemies will see these, your family, every reporter who ever writes about you, every employer you ever work for.”
I sat up a little straighter. “They’re not porn. I’m not ashamed.”
“I’m not saying you should be. I’m saying not everyone will understand.” She pulled me back into her arms, breath warm against my neck. “Barthes said the photograph is always invisible. But the photographer is not. Nor the subject. You need to be certain this is something you wish to reveal about yourself.”
I thought about it. Not because I needed to, but because she wanted me to. “The thing is,” I said slowly, “what you saw in me when you took those photos, I’m proud to reveal.”
“Oh, poppet. With talk like that, you’ll turn a girl’s head.”
She sounded much as she always did—wryly amused at something only she understood—but then she kissed me again, and there was a sweetness in it that took me by surprise.
Afterwards, though, she just laughed. “How’s that hot young blood of yours? Think you can get it up again?”
“Probably”—I waggled my eyebrows like a cartoon lecher—“given enough encouragement.”
“Glad to hear it. I’ve a mind to break you like a wild stallion.”
Chapter 26
The Arden exhibition—and even thinking that made my head swim—was a single-night affair timed to fall playfully close to Valentine’s Day. When I’d heard about George’s shows, I’d hoped I might attend one someday. And here I was the actual motherfucking subject. Holy shitballs. I told my family, of course, and they were thrilled for me, but we all agreed it was probably for the best they didn’t come. It was one thing for them to be a hundred percent behind me doing exactly what I wanted to with my own body, up to and including having lots of kinky sex with it, but quite another to look at pictures of me, well, doing that. I did send a copy of the accompanying book to Nik, though. Partly because I was insanely proud. But also a little bit to mess with him.
And, of course, I wanted to tell Ellery, but she was still couch surfing her way round the band and I was still working up the courage to ask her to move back in. So I didn’t think I’d have much luck with, “Hey, come and look at some fairly naked pictures of me.” Before I’d kissed her, I’m sure she would have found it hilarious, but now I’d turned myself into a threat instead of her ally and I wasn’t sure seventy-eight photos of Broderick were enough to make her want me in her life again.
So I ended up going to the me exhibition by myself. Which was fine, and probably fitting, and I knew George would be there when I arrived. I decided to be fashionably la
te, since that way I’d be able to come and go unnoticed, though I got delayed making my hair cute and ended up unfashionably late. Albeit with excellent hair.
I’d heard of the Laine Matthäus Gallery but sort of in the same way I’d heard of Cirque le Soir or Annabel’s; that is, I was aware it was known to be cool, but hadn’t expected ever to have reason to go, or reason to believe they’d let me through the front door if I had turned up. But the gallery turned out to be surprisingly welcoming—not of me, in particular, but in general. It sat in the middle of a parade of shops near King’s Cross, sandwiched between a Super Laundry and a kebab emporium, still boasting the sooty tile façade it had possessed when it had been a bookie’s. The rest was window, allowing the light from within to glaze the dark pavement with a sheen of gold and the wibbly reflection of the sign which read Laine Matthäus Gallery in cursive red-pink neon.
Gosh, it looked busy in there. People were even hanging about outside, some of them eating kebabs. My insides did something weird, caught between anxious squeezing and excited fluttering, that ended up feeling like my heart had just sneezed. I mean, I was glad the place wasn’t empty—the last thing I wanted to be was the George Chase collection nobody cared about—but at the same time…this had all got very real, real fast, very suddenly.
But still, I had no regrets. A realisation that gave me the courage to head on in. As I got close to the door, my shoulder collided with someone coming the other way at a speed best described as antisocial.
“Ow, I’m sor—” The instinctive British apology, even though I wasn’t the one who’d caused the crash, died on my lips as I recognised Nathaniel.
His head came up. And for a split second he was staring at me with naked hatred. Then—and this was honestly kind of worse—his eyes filled up with tears.
“Are you—” I started.
But he just shoved me out of the way and kept walking. I watched him go, slightly worried and deeply confused. What was he even doing here?
I wasn’t going to find an answer in the street. But before I really had a chance to get my head sorted out, George had spotted me, swooped over, and was dragging me into the gallery. The next thing I knew, I had a drink in one hand, George had claimed the other, and I was at the epicentre of a conversational tsunami. Questions, compliments, and introductions were boomeranging round my head, which was initially flattering, then about equal parts flattering and overwhelming, and finally just overwhelming. So I committed to an evening of forgetting everyone’s name, answering what I could, smiling a lot, and trusting George to steer me right.