by Cerys du Lys
A fist in her hair, he pulled her head back. His other arm curled around her, the hand cupping a breast, finding the nipple and squeezing hard.
She cried out again, and now he thrust hard and held himself there. There was a pulsing deep inside her and then an explosion of wet heat, a sensation of being filled all over again. Another brief flutter of tightening took her as he started to soften, a faint echo of that first orgasm, and then he pulled clear and she slumped to her knees, spent.
§
He took her head in his hands, an almost tender gesture, his touch suddenly light.
When he turned her head, she realized he was positioning her, positioning himself.
The head of his dick brushed against her lips. Wet. Still semi-hard.
He pushed against her, and when she opened her mouth he slid inside.
She swallowed him deep, taking his softening dick completely into her mouth, tasting herself on him – he was so wet with her juices!
When she sucked, a final pulse of semen came out and she swallowed.
She pulled on him with her mouth and he continued to soften, until finally his shaft was limp in her mouth.
He pulled away, then.
She sensed him stepping back, then heard the rustle of clothing.
Moments later he was gone.
§
It wasn’t him.
It couldn’t be.
She had misinterpreted, misheard, misremembered.
He’d only said a single word in her presence. No. Not enough for her to be sure. Just enough for her to grasp at something tenuous and impossible.
Jeremy was not such a sexual animal. He was not one to take control, to demand, to force.
He had always been gentle and restrained. Too restrained.
Where Jeremy had always made love to her, this man – the man – had fucked her. He had possessed her. She had never felt so totally had.
§
The other guy came to her a short time later, and she was still on her knees, shell-shocked by what had just happened.
She didn’t even notice him until he was standing there, looking down at her. For a moment she thought that it had been him, that they had just been playing games with her and this man who Danny had bossed around had come and had her.
But no, he was too tall. The geometries were all wrong. And his dark stubble was too coarse: not that velvet smoothness she had felt. He hadn’t had her, she knew that.
Then she wondered if that was what he’d come for now, if he was about to reach for his belt.
He stooped, took hold of her wrist and tugged her to her feet, then nodded to the stairs. Could he not speak?
She walked across the room, and up the stairs.
Outside, the evening sun must be low, because now it lit the inside of the villa in its golden, setting light.
Upstairs, the man locked her into her room, but this time the chain and cuffs were gone and she was free to move around.
She went to the bathroom, turned the shower on and stepped under its cool jets.
She pressed herself against the tiled wall, squashing her breasts against that hard surface, pressing her cheek against it.
She remembered the sensation of being lifted to her toes by that cupping hand, the growing tightness in her belly.
She reached down and cupped herself, pulling hard upwards as if she could somehow replicate that sensation. She started to roll her hand from side to side, working her clit beneath its protective fleshy hood. She let the tip of her middle finger slide inside, then pushed it up to the second knuckle, still rolling her hand against herself.
Soon her breathing was fast, her heart racing and then she felt that butterfly flutter of tightening muscles around her finger, a rapid pulsing as orgasm took her once again.
It couldn’t be him.
It just so damned well couldn’t.
6
It was him.
He left her all night, her mind racing from one impossibility to another. She lay there, unable to sleep even though she was on a proper bed for the first time in... how long? And all night, she kept returning to one question.
If it was Jeremy, then why did he not just say so? Why had he kept her blindfolded and then sent her away again? Why the mind-games?
§
She’d never really known him. Not the true him.
She’d never known a Jeremy capable of such manipulation. A Jeremy so dark and thoroughly chilling.
She’d always believed him.
She’d believed the smooth and conservative Jeremy she had married.
Then, when things had gone wrong for him, she’d believed the man who told her to trust him, that everything would work out.
She’d believed he was dead.
All of them: fictions. Masks. Smoke and mirrors.
He sent Keira for her in the morning. She was in her boy’s slutty fantasy outfit again: the fishnets and heels, the basque, the tiny thong. Perhaps the strangest thing was that El took the young woman’s mutilated features for granted now: it was just Keira.
El pulled on the shorts and t-shirt Keira had brought for her, and followed her out of the bedroom.
She could easily have overpowered the poor woman, but somehow that made the fact of her imprisonment even more disturbing. Were they that confident that either she wouldn’t try to escape, or that she couldn’t?
She followed Keira down to the ground floor and then out to a wide, tiled terrace. Off to one side there was a figure of eight swimming pool, but El’s eyes were drawn to a recliner, positioned with its raised back to her so that its occupant could look out over the lush gardens towards the Mediterranean. To one side, a tall parasol cast the terrace’s only shade over the recliner. There was someone there, she was sure, but it was hard to be sure because of the angle.
Even this was posed for impact, she understood. More mind-games. More delay.
Keira had remained in the doorway, so now El was on her own as she walked towards that recliner, and then skirted around it until she could confirm that it was occupied.
A man, in a short-sleeved white shirt and knee-length pale gray shorts. Neat dark hair, cropped short. Small oval shades that sat close over his eyes, so that depending on the angle you could almost make eye contact, but then with a slight tilt of the head it was snatched away.
“Eleanor,” he said, a smile playing on his mouth. “Why don’t you take a seat?” He indicated a stiff-backed wooden chair that had been placed facing him.
Jeremy.
She’d known it was going to be him. She just hadn’t trusted her senses, trusted all the signs and clues.
§
She wanted to go to him, to fall into his arms. She wanted him to tell her the nightmare was finally over and that everything would be okay. He’d miraculously recovered from the accident and it had taken him all this time to track her down.
She stood there, looking down at him.
“You bastard,” she said, her voice low.
He didn’t respond, that smile fixed on his face.
“You left me to rot in jail,” she said. “Do you know the things they did to me in that place? You let me believe you were dead, Jeremy. How could you do that?”
“Sit,” he said. There was a tone in his voice she’d never known from him before.
She sat, without even thinking about what she was doing, or why.
“What happened, Jeremy?”
He reached across to a low table at his side, picked up a long glass of something sparkling and clear, and took a leisurely sip.
“I had to leave,” he said. “You were aware of that. If I’d gone to trial they’d have locked me away for life.”
She stared at him. It seemed surreal, hearing these words from Jeremy. They’d have locked me away for life... Such a chilling revelation, and yet he mentioned it as if he was talking only about the weather.
“You didn’t say anything to me. Or rather, what you did say was all lies. You set me up, Jeremy.
You set me up and left me to suffer. What was it? Did you have someone else killed and pay off a coroner to identify the corpse as you? And all that talk of a plot to kill you, someone who wanted you dead so you couldn’t talk... Was that all just for my benefit, so I’d tell the police and it would sound credible? Was that why you let me believe you were dead? Real grief is so much more convincing than pretend.”
“Cut the melodrama and you’re not far off,” he said. “If it helps, I was advised on good authority that you would present a sympathetic profile. I didn’t expect them to make an example of you and lock you away.”
So calm and logical. Had he really made those calculations, judging that it was preferable to risk her in order to protect himself?
Then he went on: “You’re angry, Eleanor. I don’t like angry. I like obedient.”
She swallowed. That tone of voice again, the command thing. How had she never heard that from him before?
He raised a hand and snapped his fingers. Immediately, Keira emerged from the house and approached across the terrace. She looked even more incongruous now, dressed in exotic lingerie out here in full sunlight, that perpetually surprised ‘O’ carved into her face.
At a gesture, she dropped to her knees beside Jeremy’s recliner. He reached out a hand and started to stroke her black hair.
“Obedience,” he said, and she rested her head in his lap, her cheek against the bulge at his crotch, her mouth permanently ready.
For a moment El thought he was going to make her watch Keira sucking him, but he seemed content to have her resting her head there while he stroked her hair.
He studied El, clearly amused.
“You’ve met my little toy, haven’t you?” he said.
Keira: his toy.
“When I heard Rob had found a new waitress to replace her at La Taberna I wanted to go and see. Rob always has good taste in waitresses. Oh, except that other one... Lucy? Is that her name? Far too Eastern European for my tastes.” He shook his head.”I was called away,” he went on.
El remembered that night when Rob had said the bar’s owner was going to visit, but then never showed up.
“He’d described you to me,” he said. “It sounded so like you, and yet... so unlike you to be out here like that. I thought prison would make you hide, Eleanor. I never thought... well, I heard what you did to poor Danny. You’ve changed, Eleanor. You’ve changed and I think I like it.”
§
How had she forgotten that magnetism?
Jeremy had always been a man who at first appeared unassuming, but then you would realize that he was the one in control. He was a man you would do anything for.
Now, she hung on his every word. She sat when he told her to, without questioning. She felt a thrill when he fed her positives.
I think I like it.
She’d always been willing to do anything for him.
She’d shaped her life around him.
Maybe that was why she’d been prepared to mutilate Danny, why she’d been prepared to kill. Even with Jeremy dead – as she had believed – she had been prepared to do anything for him.
Anything.
§
She sat there, while Jeremy fell silent for a time, still idly stroking Keira’s head in his lap.
“You present me with a dilemma,” he said, eventually. “You see, you were always part of a life that never really was, and now, all of a sudden, you have become part of a life that so very much is. Do you see my problem?”
She didn’t.
She was his wife. Was he telling her she was no longer needed? That she really had been just one long-forgotten element in his respectable cover story?
Their old life... Had none of that mattered to him?
“Things are going to have to change,” he said, and she hated herself just then: hated herself for the sudden surge of hope his words inspired in her. He wasn’t dismissing her. He wasn’t saying she had no place in his life.
“‘Change’?” she said.
He nodded.
Then, so casually, he closed his fingers in Keira’s hair and twisted her head so that she was facing El. Her eyes were wide and watering – how tight was his grip in her hair? – and that gruesome mouth gaped.
“You, Eleanor. You will have to change. Are you prepared to remold yourself? Are you prepared to be, truly, mine?”
She met his look.
She’d changed before. She was unrecognizable from the woman she’d been two years ago. For a moment she found this dizzying. Was that old Eleanor the real her, or had this been a process of discovering who she really was? A process of peeling back the civilized layers... When you looked at it like that, there was no escaping the conclusion that she was still on that journey, still working to reveal the person she really was.
“What do you want of me?” she asked him. “What do I have to do?”
She saw it in his face. At that moment he owned her, and he knew it.
7
Danny Taylor.
That’s what Jeremy wanted of her.
Was he seeing how far he could push her? How much would she be willing to take, just because he told her she must?
Or was he trying to break her, as he had broken Keira and how many other women before her?
§
“I think you kind of owe Danny, don’t you? After what you did to him...”
She stared at Jeremy.
He’d let Keira rest her head in his lap again now, and had resumed stroking her hair.
“Danny...”
“Sounds like the two of you got quite intimate, from what Danny tells me. Oh, don’t look alarmed, please! We’re above all that. I’m a generous man. I like to share.” He laughed. “I really don’t mind that you’ve been with other men, Eleanor.” His hand ran down Keira’s back then. “But Danny... You owe Danny big time, don’t you, my love? Shame you broke him so well.” He laughed again.
“There are others, of course,” he went on. “You’ve met Bruno, haven’t you?”
He must mean the man who had been with Danny the previous evening.
“As I say, I do like to share. We have plenty of visitors here. Maybe Danny would like that, too? Maybe he would like to watch? I’ll have to discuss the matter with him. I do know one thing, though, Eleanor: Danny would really like to humiliate and hurt you. When a man hates so strongly, it really is very easy to read on him...”
§
He came for her that night, revenge and hatred in his blue and green eyes.
Back in her room, the evening air was muggy and hot, heavy with a storm that had not yet broken. Even naked there was no respite. She ate a little paella, and drank from a bottle of chilled water, not caring if they were drugging her again.
It was so hard to care about anything in this heat. So hard to even think. And a small part of her brain was rational enough to understand that maybe this was a sign that it was not the heat at all: her head was messed up – so much to take in! – and maybe they’d been drugging her all along. Even that day, out on the terrace... it was all a blur. Images running together, fragments of conversation all disjointed, no sense to it.
Now, she had to really concentrate even to remember Jeremy’s features, and every time her concentration wavered it was Keira she saw, peering up at her from Jeremy’s lap, eyes and mouth wide.
The glass balcony doors were wide open, and she went out, hoping for at least some breeze, but the air was motionless. She went to lean on the railing, and looked out across the garden. Now that she had her bearings a bit more, she could see that the tiled area off to the left was one end of the terrace where she had seen Jeremy earlier that day.
Falling away into the distance, she could see the lights of the town, and somewhere down there would be La Taberna. She wondered if Rob was there. Would he have replaced her already? He had such good taste in waitresses, after all, Jeremy had told her.
Even that... even La Taberna seemed another life altogether.
Another her.
She looked down. She was on the third floor and the drop was sheer.
She’d fought with Rob here. She’d come so close to toppling him over the railing!
She heard someone enter the bedroom, the door shutting with a soft thud.
When she turned, for some reason she expected to see Rob. He was in her mind, just then, remembering the bar and the fight. Why was her mind drifting like this? Why was it so hard to... to just focus?
Danny came to stand in the balcony doorway.
“Hey, Danny,” she said. Then: “Hey, Danny. Why are you looking so angry?”
He punched her – his fist against her jaw felt as if she had been hit with a brick, and then it felt of nothing at all.
§
She came to, lying on a hard surface.
Wood, she thought – not cold like metal or stone. A wooden floor?
There was something around her wrists... cuffs of some sort. Hard and cold.
She turned her head and felt a stab of pain through her jaw.
He’d hit her. The bastard had punched her!
The room was dimly lit by a few spotlights around the walls, and there was a raised bench in the middle of the room like an operating table. There were metal loops set into the walls, and the cuffs on her wrists were attached to one of these by a slender metal chain.
She remembered the basement. She’d been here before. Brought here by Danny and the other guy – Bruno? Was that his name?
Danny...
He’d hit her.
So hard to focus.
She made herself sit, her back against the wall.
She waited. She just had to get through.
§
He came to her. Down those stairs, and then pausing at the bottom to look across the room at her.
The hatred in those eyes!
Danny... You owe Danny big time. Who had said that?
§
He squatted before her, an evil grin on his face.
“You think you matter to him?” he said. “You think you ever did?” He spat, off to one side. “You don’t mean shit to him. Don’t you get that yet? You don’t mean shit.”
She turned away from his look and his hand darted out, caught her jaw in a tight grip and turned her so she had to look at him.