by Cecilia Tan
“Karina,” he said darkly, “if you have a problem with me demanding your body—”
“No! I don’t have a problem with it! Listen to what I’m saying. I’m saying.” I sat up and bunched the duvet in my fists. “Just because I’m the submissive in the relationship, I don’t want to be taken for granted.”
He moved slowly, sitting up beside me and unclenching one of my hands enough to take it into his. “Listen to me. Karina, if I wanted someone who was merely ‘wet pussy on demand’ I could have Juney—or a million other women, for that matter. The reason I want you, the reason I want to claim you again and again, is because I need your heart and soul, too. I’m incomplete, otherwise.” He kissed the back of my hand and I felt a thrill whip through my core like a gust of fresh air. His voice was quiet, but his words pinned me. “If I decide I’m going to fuck you on the foyer floor every time you walk into the house, it’s not because you’re a slut who does what I say. It’s because I need, beyond all reason, to have you. And I need, that badly, to know you need me, too. I need you beyond all reason, because I love you. Love is the only possible reason for me to be this out of my mind.”
I kissed him then, and found myself pressed back into the bed by his body, the thin layer of satin between us. When his lips moved from claiming my mouth to my neck, I said, “Love is the only possible reason why I never resist you. Why I never get enough of you. Even if I’m mad at you. No matter what you want to do, I leap in and try it.”
He held himself above me and looked into my eyes. I could feel his cock hardening against my leg. “The day will come when you’ll refuse me. But as long as you aren’t refusing me because you’ve ceased to love me, we’ll survive.”
“Today is definitely not that day,” I whispered, rocking my hips against him. I sucked in a breath and trembled a little as he slipped his pajama pants down and slid the searing hotness of his cock along my thigh.
“Are you sure?” he whispered back.
“I’m just… sore.”
“I’ll be gentle.”
Those were the last words we spoke for a while, as he pressed against me slowly until he was between my legs. The slippery head of his cock nudged between my lips and he moved his hips in a small circle, not teasing so much as doing exactly what he promised. Soon the first inch of him was in me, pumping back and forth, and then another inch, and another, each time penetrating slowly before he resumed the undulation of his hips.
I don’t think sex had ever felt so good, not even with James previously. Where our bodies met was a fusion of liquid pleasure, nerve ending against nerve ending feeling nothing but a frictionless glide. The sensation of penetration had always sent sparks through me, but this was like the sparks had turned to a white-hot glow, edgeless and growing the longer it went on.
We didn’t kiss. He didn’t play with my breasts or change my position or anything, nothing to distract me from the pure pleasure of his penetration.
I began to quiver once he had worked himself all the way in. It was as if the ceaseless, gentle rubbing had erased the soreness of earlier, had taken away the stinging marks of the whip and the places where I was abraded and bruised from being fucked so hard. And on and on and on it went, too, until I realized I was having an orgasm that had blossomed so gradually I hadn’t felt the usual blast of fireworks at the beginning of it. Instead it was like the middle of one, stretching on and on. I let out a long “aaaaahhhh” as the pool of pleasure spread from my center all the way to my fingers and toes.
I opened my eyes as it ended, as the pleasure of him moving inside me had not lessened but my peak had passed. He kissed me then, and pulled free, and finished himself with a few very quick tugs, spattering hot droplets on my stomach. He kissed his way down my breastbone, then a few extra-gentle licks to my clit.
Our next kiss was salty with my sweat. “I love you,” I said.
“I love you back,” he answered, his forehead pressed to mine. He held my gaze for another long moment.
And then a gentle chime sounded from nearby.
“You had best get back to Becky,” he said. “You’re going to work with Sabine six days a week now, remember.”
“I remember. Wait. Are you not going to be there?”
He shook his head. “You proved today you fit in just fine with the others.”
“Does that mean no audition?”
“We’ll still have an audition, to pick who the principal dancer will be from among the women in the troupe.”
“I still don’t think I’m that good…”
“Which is why we planned an audition in the first place, right? It’ll still fulfill that purpose. You’ll see how you measure up. But there’s more. I need your help to keep her in check, Karina. I need you to do this.”
I gritted my teeth. “And I do love a challenge.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Okay. But what’s this about you won’t be coming to practice at Sabine’s anymore?”
He looked down into my eyes as if he were reluctant to move or to let me go. “I have to leave in the morning for London.”
“Already? I thought you weren’t going until next week.”
“So did I. Right before you arrived, I discovered I can’t wait. We need to grab the studio time now.”
“How long will you be gone?”
“At least a week, maybe two.”
“Well, it’s going to take me a week to recover from tonight anyway,” I teased.
“I am going to be desperate to have you by the time I get back.”
“Maybe it’ll have to be one of those fuck first, talk later kind of greetings, then,” I said in as sultry a voice as I could muster.
He growled and rocked his hips against me. “You’re lucky I’m completely spent, or I’d take you again right now for inflaming me with talk like that…!” An evil glint came into his eye. “Leave the case here.”
“The case? Oh.” Of the glass toys.
He pressed me back into the bed with a flurry of kisses across my neck and under my chin. “You can share my deprivation. Nothing into you until you have my cock again, hmm?”
“Evil! But fair. Am I allowed to come?”
“Yes. In fact, be sure to send me video of yourself masturbating. That is, unless you can catch me live.”
“And if I do catch you?”
“Then I’ll join you.”
It was nearly midnight when Stefan dropped me off, by which time I was starved again. Becky and I got our last Chinese takeout meal in the apartment. We prepacked a little but mostly we talked. She told me her parents had started pressuring her to get married, and that the only reason her mother didn’t go wholeheartedly into arranging a marriage for her was because she and Becky’s father (who had been an arranged match) were fighting a lot. Meanwhile, back in Ohio, my own mother was doing well. Tera convinced her to buy all new curtains and bed linens, she said, and there had been no sign of Phil.
The movers came the next day. Stefan himself met us at the gallery with the keys and supervised the men a little, but they were unfailingly efficient. It was going to take us ten times as long to unpack everything as it had for them to pack it up. They had even labeled all the boxes, and they piled the ones full of books by the floor-to-ceiling shelves that lined one side of the living room, put the ones from Becky’s bedroom into the room she picked, and the ones with my name on them into the front bedroom with the windows overlooking the street. They set my futon up as a bed instead of a couch, and the room had a somewhat worn-looking but huge antique dresser, so for the first time in years I had somewhere to put my clothes besides in shelves made of milk crates.
I quickly slipped into a routine of sleeping late, having a quick breakfast of a little granola and yogurt, and then taking the subway up to Sabine’s dance studio. By the end of the first week, the group had grown to eight or nine dancers. The first hour was almost always the same: warm-ups, isolation exercises, moves that built strength or flexibility or both. In the secon
d hour Sabine would change what we did, though, sometimes making us learn short routines, pushing us. One exercise we did every few days involved crossing the floor. She wouldn’t tell us what to do here: it was up to each dancer to improvise what moves to do as we crossed from one side of the empty floor to the other. Ballet-style jetés, spins, jazz sidesteps, you had to make it up as you went along. We usually went three or four at a time, one group, then the next, and then waiting on the other side until everyone had crossed and then going back. It was one way to build stamina and also keep your brain sharp, and it was a chance to be creative after a solid hour of doing nothing but following instructions and imitating moves.
One day she introduced a new twist, which was that we had to make the floor pass in pairs instead of solo. Sabine called that “pass de deux,” a bilingual pun. Sabine was from Martinique and could pun—and curse—in several languages. The goal was to make it look like we were coordinated with our partners, which was a fun challenge, even if we weren’t all that coordinated.
Ferrara came by about once a week to check on our progress. She didn’t appear to recognize me at all, which didn’t surprise me given that she’d seen me only once. That night she hadn’t given me a second glance after Vanette told her I was a society trainee, as if I weren’t even there. The dancers as a whole spent a fair amount of time hanging out together but Ferrara didn’t join us, which suited me fine.
The only complication of hanging around with the dancers was that—as Annika had told me—they were an incestuous bunch. Everyone had slept with someone there, and it seemed like the possibility of hooking up with one another was always alive. I brushed off a few advances and then stopped spending a lot of time with them beyond grabbing a bite to eat after Sabine would throw us out each day to make room for her students. Not that some of them weren’t nice—not to mention attractive—but I was very, very off the market, thanks to the one person I couldn’t tell them about.
James and I talked or texted every day. I gathered that things at the recording studio were going slowly, sometimes badly, but he did not want to talk about it. I imagined he was something of a perfectionist in the recording studio and I knew beyond any doubt he was a control freak. So it didn’t really surprise me that three weeks later they still weren’t done.
A little over a week before the audition for the role of principal, he told me that each dancer needed to prepare a solo dance of no longer than two minutes. He advised me to adapt what I had done at the ArtiWorks. “Adapt” was putting it mildly since everything about that performance had involved interacting with a massive installation of glass sculpture that would not be present in Vegas. But it did give me an idea, which was to build the dance around an absent partner. At first it didn’t go very well, but then I hit upon the idea to use an empty stool as a focus and that went much better. Fortunately, the living room was mostly empty in the new apartment and there was still the large space where a dining room table should go, so I had room to practice. The date of the trip grew nearer.
“You’ll have to fly to Las Vegas without me,” he told me a few days before we were set to leave, as I lay in bed under the windows. It was a voice-only call while he was taking a quick break from recording, and I had my earbuds in to hear him in stereo. “I’ll need to be here until the last possible moment and I’ll meet you there. I’m having you and Chandra and a few others take the same flight.”
“What about Stefan?”
“He’s here with me now.”
“Ah, of course.” I rolled over onto my stomach. “So I’ve been meaning to ask you something for Becky.”
“Ask away. Has she been liking the new apartment?”
“She loves it. It’s so much bigger than our old place. Plus the sink here isn’t cracked, and we don’t have to jiggle the toilet handle to get it to flush. Even her cat likes it better.” I looked at the blank wall across from my bed and wondered if I should get some art to hang there. “Anyway. She’s writing her thesis on representations of feminist utopias in your rock operas.”
“Excellent!” He sounded giddy about it.
“Is it? Does that mean she’s right?”
He cleared his throat and tried to sound more serious, but I could still hear the glee. “Whether she’s right or not doesn’t matter. Being taken seriously as an artist is the rarest reward.”
I decided this wasn’t a good moment to remind him that Becky’s fan nickname was Baroness Babelicious. “Well, anyway, I said I’d ask if she could interview your choreographer.”
“She might be better off interviewing me, if she is trying to ferret out the source material. Though isn’t that cheating? Going to the source? I thought postmodern critique discounted the influence of the creator.”
“She’s not a postmodernist. She’s a feminist. I mean, she uses a feminist school of critique, which I think actually takes into account the intention of the artist more than most of the others.”
“Ah. Is she in the women’s studies department?”
“I don’t think we have ‘women’s studies.’ She’s in the department of cultural and social analysis, with a fellowship from the Institute for Gender Studies.”
“That’s quite a mouthful.”
“You should see it when guys try to hit on her. Their eyes glaze over before she can get halfway through an explanation of it. Half the time she just says ‘Culture Studies’ and changes the subject. Anyway, it’s her dissertation, and I promised I’d ask.”
“I’d be more than happy to speak with her and introduce her to whoever she wishes. Hang on.” I heard the phone rustle as he turned to speak to someone else in the background. “Sorry about that.”
“Do you have to go?”
“Soon. They’re still setting up a piece of equipment we need. Almost done. I’m yours until then.”
I teased him. “I thought you were mine forever.”
“That, too,” he said drily. “How has rehearsal been going?”
“Well, we’re not really rehearsing anything with Sabine, you know. It’s exercises and exercises and exercises, but it’s not like we’re learning any routines.”
“Of course. That’s what I meant. You won’t start learning the actual steps until the whole troupe is together.”
“How many dancers are you hiring?”
“The full troupe is twenty. Several of them are already in Vegas. A few got gigs there after the last production. Everyone else has been hired and vetted.”
I imagined the ability to keep a secret was what they were vetted for. “Some of them have been talking about trying out for the part of principal. I really do think some of them are better dancers than me.”
“Karina, please don’t worry about it. I know one of my goals is to make it harder for Ferrara to meddle in the production, but I didn’t hire you for nepotism and I’m not hiring you because of the hard-on I have for you, either. Speaking of which…”
The delay in his return meant I had masturbated every day, often with his supervision and input, but as planned, there had been no insertion. Not even my finger. “Don’t you have to go soon?”
His voice was low and silky. “I do, but touch yourself until I do. Describe to me what you’re doing.”
“I’m running my fingers along the edges of my lips where I’m shaved. Slowly. Lightly.” I pushed my panties down to my ankles. It was good to have the privacy of my own bedroom, again! “Now I’m letting my middle finger graze the tip of my clit where it sticks out. Ngh.”
“How long do you think it will take you to come? Can you do it in under two minutes?”
“I don’t know, James. It’s like you rewired me! I feel empty. It’s hard to come sometimes from my clit alone.”
“You don’t know how much I wish I was there to fill that emptiness.” He sucked in a breath and I wondered if he was rubbing his cock through his clothes or what. “I am somewhat tempted to bend the rule.”
“To let me slip a finger in?”
“You know, you c
an always use your ass.”
“It’s not the same!”
“Have you tried?”
“Well, not yet, but—”
“I suggest you try, if you’re having trouble coming. But no, I was thinking of something small that would make the long flight to Vegas more interesting for you…”
I rubbed myself harder and faster as he talked.
“Perhaps if you were flying alone,” he concluded. “No, you’ll just have to wait, and so will I. And now I must go, sweetness.” He made a kissing sound into the phone and hung up.
The flight to Vegas was uneventful. The most interesting part was getting to know Chandra a little while we were sitting around at the gate waiting to board. She was older than I realized. She looked to me like she was in her twenties, her dark brown skin flawlessly wrinkle free and her figure fashion-model tall and thin, but she had just turned forty. She had been a dancer and backing singer when she and James met, but she had a knack for organizing and that led to him hiring her as a personal assistant for a tour a few years back. She’d quickly moved from tour assistant to full-time assistant to full-time manager.
The hotel was quiet and luxurious, exclusive rather than touristy. Once we arrived, Chandra checked in for us as a group and provided our keys. As we rode the elevator upward, the others in our party got off on lower floors until it was just her and me.
I wasn’t surprised to see we went all the way up to the top floor, the “club” level. We came to my door first. “Your room has a connecting door to a suite,” she said. “I suggest keeping it closed for appearance’s sake.”
She didn’t have to tell me who would be staying in the suite.
“I’ll be directly across the hall,” she added. “And you have my cell phone number. The van to rehearsal leaves right from the driveway outside the lobby at ten-thirty a.m. Don’t be late.”
“I won’t.”
“Order room service if you want it.” She looked me up and down like she had something more to say, but she didn’t say anything other than, “See you in the morning.”