by Cecilia Tan
“You can’t see it,” he said, “but your pussy lips are protruding now.”
“Oh fuck,” I said, knowing full well that meant that tender area would be his next target for the switch. I had kept up shaving between my legs while we’d been apart, so there was not even hair to protect from the evil implement.
He was merciless now, not pausing between stripes, laying it on five, six, seven, eight times until I was screaming, and then another and another until I lost my footing. I curled instinctively, pulling my feet up, and I swung, hanging from the bar, forward and then back again. He caught me with a hand on my rump before I could go too far, then fondled me, working two fingers inside my wet core.
His voice was warm and sweet in my ear. “You did very well.”
“Did I?” My legs trembled a little at the way his fingers were moving inside me.
“So far.” With that he gave my G-spot a sudden tweak and I gasped and spasmed…
And crushed the egg. The sound of the shell cracking and then the wet plop on the floor was unmistakable. “Oh fuck fuck fuck.”
“Tsk tsk tsk. We’re not to the fucking part yet,” he said with a gentle laugh. “I guess it’s clit-flogging time after all.”
He released me from the yoke and led me to one of the covered pieces of furniture, sliding the drape off to reveal a seductively curved… chair? Divan? Imagine if an incredibly high-end furniture maker had designed a luxury gynecologist’s table. He folded the sheet and placed it where I would be lying back, and then helped me up onto it. I was reminded of the bucket seat in his car, curved to my body. “Now. Hold your knees with your hands. Keep yourself spread for me.”
He leaned down to plant a tender kiss right on my clit, which throbbed wildly in response. I was so aroused.
I watched him saunter across the room to open a cabinet set in the wall. I couldn’t see what else was in it, but when he closed the door again I saw he had a flogger with many short tails, only six or seven inches long, in his hand. “I bought this for you, after seeing how you responded to one like it in London.”
He came and kissed me on the mouth first, another long melding of our lips and tongues until I was panting, and then he went to stand at my feet. He dragged the tails slowly upward, the friction across my clit making my legs shake.
“That aroused already? My, my, someone really does love challenges.”
“Someone really does love you,” I confessed.
“Say that again when you’re not high on endorphins.” He caressed the insides of my thighs with his fingertips.
“Maybe I’ll say it when I come.”
“Maybe you will.” With that he began to flog my thighs lightly, alternating from one to the other, gradually working his way toward the middle. When at last he reached my pussy with the whap-whap-whap of the tails, the blows were still teasingly light, and I gasped and rocked my hips with each blow. Then he returned to beating my thighs, this time with harder strokes, again working his way to the center, where each time the flogger landed on my clit I cried out.
But he could strike even more sharply than that, this time snapping the flogger like a towel, leaving a trail of stinging welts down my already red thighs, closer and closer to my clit. He slowed as he neared it, spending a long time working my swollen lips with blow after blow, with only a stray tail catching my clit from time to time. I began to cry out on every strike then, my pitch rising as I realized how close I was.
And then quite suddenly the flogger was landing right there, at the place where my pleasure centered, at the place where the electricity crackled. I didn’t even realize at first that he wasn’t hitting me hard there: he didn’t have to. I was coming from a butterfly-light stroke now, screaming in ecstasy.
I hadn’t quite finished, hadn’t quite ridden the orgasm all the way to the end when he was commanding me, “Off the table, bend over, hands on the edge, spread your legs.”
I hurried to get into position, and then he was filling me, that part of him I’d craved for so long, bare and perfect inside me. I clenched around him, still spasming from the first orgasm, when he began to flog me again, reaching around me with the whip to beat my clit hard now, fucking me at the same time. When I began to come again, he laid it on even harder and faster, and that only made the orgasm more intense, and my screams louder.
Then I heard the flogger hit the floor, and his hand cupped me from behind, massaging my clit through one more while he pushed himself into me with the speed and intention I recognized meant it was his turn to come.
He came with a bellow and kept going until his thrusts turned soft and slick. Then he pulled free and with the last of the stiffness he could maintain, rubbed it in the crack of my ass, teasing there until he went completely soft.
We sank down onto the wooden floor and he cradled me, leaning himself against the side of the exam table. “You beautiful, fantastic, incredible angel,” he said.
I didn’t think I could muster words that big yet. “You’re not so bad yourself, you know.”
That made him laugh and he planted kisses wherever he could reach, my hair, the side of my face, my ear. “And now the drawback of having such a big house. The bedroom is directly below us. Perhaps I should install a trapdoor that would drop us into the bed.”
“While you’re at it, how about a water slide that slides us into the shower?”
“Also an excellent idea. Unfortunately, right now, we’ll have to get up and walk. In a few minutes.”
“In a few minutes,” I agreed, utterly sated, and gleefully content.
We eventually did get up, of course, and saw two of the ten bathrooms, one that was attached to the studio, and then the one attached to the master bedroom, which reminded me of the bathroom in the Charing Cross Hotel, only ten times bigger. The shower could have easily held five people.
It was just the two of us, though.
And then we got into bed, but only to cuddle, not to spend the night. It wasn’t even nine o’clock yet. I was amazed. I was certain he had been flogging and torturing me all night long.
The bed was huge and I couldn’t even guess what sheets that soft were made of. Silk? Baby chinchilla down? “All right,” I said. “Your turn. What secret will you tell me tonight?”
Ten
Thinking It Must Be Love
What do you want to know?” James had slipped on midnight blue satin pajamas and I nestled in the crook of his arm, both of us looking up at the mural painted on the ceiling. Soft music played in the background from speakers I could not see. Cellos.
“Lucinda. Tell me about her.” I draped my arm across his chest. “Stefan seems to think she was no good for you. Chandra, too.”
“When did you talk to Chandra about Lucinda?” He sounded curious but not upset.
“I didn’t. You talked to her where I could overhear.”
“Did I? I must have been careless.”
“It was at the doctor’s office that time. We did have a… sort of intense time. Maybe that made you less cautious than usual.”
“So we did. And it’s you, Karina, that makes me want to throw caution to the wind.”
“Me? What is it about me?”
“I told you that you’re special.” He kissed my temple. “Now about Lucinda. I suppose she should have been a cautionary tale, too. We met at a fetish night.”
“Fetish night?”
“At a nightclub. A night where everyone wears their leather and rubber and the kinky people can meet one another.”
“What were you doing at a place like that?”
“Slumming, of course.” He chuckled self-deprecatingly. “By far the best thing about no one knowing what Lord Lightning looks like is that I can move freely in a place like that. Not to mention the grocery store—”
“I can’t picture you in the grocery store. You don’t buy your own groceries.”
“I don’t employ a chef except for special occasions. I don’t have a butler or a live-in maid. Stefan lives in the so
-called ‘maid’s room’ downstairs. I do not send Stefan to the grocery store.”
“I still can’t picture you shopping for produce.”
“I like the farmer’s market when it’s the season, actually. But are my domestic habits what you want to know about?”
“No! Well, yes, but you were telling me about Lucinda.”
“She walked into this place looking like a Swedish supermodel, and set every man drooling. I watched man after man strike out. I bided my time, waiting for her to come to me. She eventually did.”
“How did you know she would come to you?”
“I didn’t. But I knew if I was going to have any chance at all, she would have to come to me and not the other way around. There were only three things that could have kept us from getting together.” He held up his hand, counting off on his fingers. “One, she was a lesbian. Two, she met someone before me who interested her more than me. Three, I met someone before her who interested me more than her. Well, no one there interested me more than her, and she wasn’t a lesbian. So it was mostly a matter of hoping someone else didn’t rival me for her attention.”
“And no one did?”
He chuckled. “No.”
“Oh, come on. There could have been another man as charismatic and handsome as an internationally known rock star there.”
“But there wasn’t. She finally approached me to ask what I was drinking. I told her and said if she wanted the honor of getting me a drink, she would have to do it on her knees. She knee-walked to the bar and back.”
“Knee-walked?”
“There’s a way to do it without looking ridiculous. It’s a martial arts technique, from kendo. That got my attention of course. She stayed on her knees at my feet while I sipped the drink she had brought. Then I said I had one simple test that any play partner of mine had to pass. She had to answer one question.”
“What was the question?”
“I leaned down and whispered it to her. ‘What do you want?’ And she leaned upward to speak the answer in my ear. ‘To be tested. Just like you’re testing me now.’ Bam. We stuck together like two magnets from that moment forward.”
“I can imagine. So what went wrong?”
“Many things. For one, she had a deep-seated need to be the ‘weird’ one in the relationship.”
“What did she mean by that?”
“She thought I was nothing more than a boring, rich businessman at first. Meanwhile she was the artistic, daring, part-time fashion model who had achieved a modicum of fame, and therefore I was supposed to fawn over her. I did fawn over her, but not because of that. Eventually I revealed who I was, and at first she was delighted. We were very much alike and we made a kind of matched set, tall and aristocratic and kinky. But the secrecy began to chafe her, and although I did much to help her career, I wouldn’t do the one thing that she wanted me to, which was to come out publicly at her side. She wanted to star in my videos. She wanted to be in all the tabloids photographed with me. It was very difficult to get her to understand that being in the tabloids would be my idea of hell.”
“Wow.”
“She accused me of holding her back. Of not understanding what it was like to still be struggling to reach a certain level of fame. Of being jealous of her and sabotaging her success to keep her from eclipsing me.” He shook his head. “Nothing could be further from the truth. It was those discussions about fame and celebrity that started me thinking I had to get out of the business. At first my thought was to step out of the spotlight and let her eclipse me. But a person paranoid and neurotic enough to believe that I was sabotaging her was not someone I could get along with in the long term. Our worst fight—the last fight—came when we were arguing almost constantly… except when we were having sex. We were still having fantastic makeup sex, which allowed me to think that deep down we were okay; we just had to work on the relationship a little harder. I truly believed that I couldn’t have such fantastic sex with someone I couldn’t love.”
“But you told me you had tons of sex with groupies.”
“Tons of sex. Not particularly fantastic sex.”
“Oh. I see.”
“So there it was. I was convinced because of how great we were in bed that our differences could be worked out. And there we were in a fight, an epic one, and I confessed that I didn’t want to fight, I didn’t want to have all this strife, and she burst into tears and told me it was all my fault for not being dominant enough.”
“Wait, you? Not dominant enough?”
“Yes. Because apparently what she wanted was for me to dictate every moment of her life. She felt if only I could control her enough, she wouldn’t even feel the urge to argue with me or fight! Therefore the fact that we were having a fight was clearly all my fault!”
“That’s… twisted.”
“I know. She really believed that if I were more dominant, she wouldn’t ever be unhappy, because I’d control her happiness like a faucet I could turn on and off. She confessed she was horribly disappointed by the fact that I didn’t require her to walk two paces behind me at all times, and that I didn’t spank her if she left the milk out instead of putting it back in the refrigerator.”
“Wow.”
“I told her that kind of twenty-four/seven role playing would be impossible to keep up.”
“Says the man who maintains a secret identity.”
“Yes. And you see why I am ready to leave it behind. She told me if I was a real dominant, I wouldn’t feel it was role playing. I’d ‘really’ be like that.”
“James, I’m pretty sure you are really like that.”
“I know. At any rate, we split up. By then I had already introduced her to the society, and of course she had a crowd of suitors filling her dance card. She ended up in a relationship with the society’s regional director and they do, as far as I know, maintain something like a twenty-four/seven relationship. Then again, I only see them at society functions, where of course they are in role. She seems happy. That’s what matters.”
We listened to the cellos playing for a few minutes while I digested that. “So you have women like Lucinda at one end, and you have women like Juney at the other end.”
“Juney? Oh, in London.”
“The one you dumped out of your lap.”
“Of course I did. Submissives, slaves, servants, whatever you want to call them, should have better manners than reaching into anyone’s trousers without permission.”
“What do you call them?”
“Lucinda considers herself the director’s property. I suppose that makes her a slave, being owned that way. Different people use the words for different things. These owner/owned relationships may have a more equal standing as partners, though, than some who consider themselves servants or service-oriented. In those the inequality of the relationship can be part of what works for them.”
“Hmm. So not all slaves are submissive or even servants; not all submissives are servants either.”
“And not all service is sexual. Though there’s always that undertone, I believe. Juney thinks she wants to be a sex slave, owned more like a pet than a person. And pampered like one, too. Hmm. And I don’t mean a pet like the people who play at being puppies or ponies. I mean it metaphorically. She wants her master to play with her and whap her with a rolled-up newspaper when she’s bad, but generally just enjoy her. A Persian cat has no duties other than to lie around looking beautiful and to be a source of affection and amusement for her owner. She’ll likely find someone whom that suits.”
He fell silent again and then I asked what I had been trying to think about for a while. “In other words, labels are complicated. But they have meaning. At least personal meaning.”
“Yes.”
“So what am I, then, James? I’m not like either of them.”
“No, you’re not. We don’t do what we do because we get off on the roles of master and slave, Karina. We do what we do because we get off on each other.”
“You
didn’t answer my question, though.”
“You’re mine,” he said simply. “You’re mine, and I am so lucky that the woman I love fits me like the key to a lock.”
I sucked in a breath. “You say that word so easily.”
“Which one? Love?”
“Yes.”
“You said it first,” he pointed out with a smile. He shifted onto his side so he could look at me. “You’ve worked hard to get me past my fears. You showed me I shouldn’t fear to speak the truth. Are you surprised I can say it so easily now?”
I kissed him. “No. Not when you explain it like that.”
“Tell me a secret, Karina. What are you afraid of? What do you fear?”
“It’s a silly fear.” I combed his hair back from his forehead with my fingers. “Because I feel confident it’s not true.”
“Fears don’t have to be rational. What is it?”
“I fear that I’m going to someday discover there’s one more layer of mask, one more layer of you, and when it’s peeled back I won’t like what’s underneath after all.”
He touched my chin softly, tracing the outline of my bottom lip. “That’s not silly in the slightest, given our history. But, Karina, you have gone all the way to the core.”
“I know. I told you I didn’t think it was likely.” I let out a long sigh. “I’ll tell you my worry, instead then, which is a little more rational. I think.” I hadn’t, until this moment, realized what my worry was. My heart began to beat a little harder.
“What’s that?”
“I worry I’m not really going to fit into your life.” I sucked in a breath, hoping he wouldn’t be hurt by what I was going to say, because my chest and throat suddenly ached as I began to say it. “I worry it’s not going to work between us if we don’t keep the distance, if we take it beyond you whisking me places in the back of your town car.”
He opened his mouth as if to protest, but I didn’t let him.
“I worry that no matter how much you love me, you’re going to decide you like me best as a plaything, that it worked better when you could simply text me an appointment and snap your fingers to have instant wet pussy on demand.”