by Cecilia Tan
“Too much?” he asked.
I shook my head, but my hand was shaking as I reached up to wipe the sudden tears that had sprung from my eyes. Whew. “Let’s just say that’s good incentive for me not to fail,” I said. I loved how I felt now, but the pain itself, well, it had hurt. Then again, I was surprised by how good I felt now. When Brad had been clumsy in bed and hurt me—like the time he thought it would be sexy to bite my neck like a vampire and had bit too hard—I felt shitty afterward. I suppose there were different kinds of pain. I took a deep breath. “What next?”
He drew a handkerchief from his breast pocket and dabbed his forehead. Nice to see I wasn’t the only one affected. When he had composed himself, he said, “Tell me what you have on under the skirt.”
My heart rate was already fast, but it sped up even more with excitement. “Well, you didn’t say to wear any panties. So…so I thought I shouldn’t.”
“Is it really that you’re such a good girl that you thought you shouldn’t?” He chuckled. “Or that you’re a dirty girl who hopes I’ll do wicked things to her?”
“Can’t I be both?”
His grin was one of delighted surprise and he put a warm hand on my shin. “Indeed, my sweet. Life’s full of people who want to split everything into either/or, when in reality so often and would serve them better. Perhaps that should be our motto. ‘Forget or—embrace and?’ I like both, so let’s have both.”
His hand smoothed up and down the stocking, a sensual touch that felt so different from a caress on bare skin. “You appear to have followed most of my instructions to the letter. Should you get a reward for that?”
“Shouldn’t I?”
“Except that you did wear a shirt, and I don’t recall telling you to do that.”
Damn. He had a point. “Well, I had to wear something or get arrested.”
“It’s legal for women, as well as men, to go topless in New York,” he said wryly.
“Oh. Really?” Who knew? “Did you actually want me to run half-naked to the car?”
His hand drifted up to my stockinged knee. “I want to see what you’re not wearing.”
I froze, not because I didn’t want to show him but because I didn’t know how to do it without looking like a dork.
“Put your feet in my lap,” he said helpfully.
I kicked off the pumps and settled my feet in his lap, my upper body leaning back against the car door. I could feel the seriousness of his erection through the soles of my feet.
“Now spread your knees.”
My cheeks went hot as I did it, and I had to look away. I hadn’t ever simply showed myself that way before. My wide-open crotch was staring him in the face.
“May I point out that you are dripping wet with desire?” he said.
“Thank you?” I blushed harder. “That was a compliment, right?”
“Yes, it was, my sweet.” He settled his warm palms against the insides of my knees. “It reassures me you like this game. As for whether I wanted you to run half-naked to the car, the sight would have pleased me, surely, but your choice to wear a shirt is more prudent and it gives us more options for where to go this evening. After all, restaurants may refuse service to those without shirts.
“This is part of the game. My requests won’t always be clear. You have the choice to ask for clarification or to interpret what I’ve said to the best of your abilities. Your interpretations are part of the pleasure. When you interpret things in a way that pleases me, you are rewarded. Choose a way that displeases me, and you’ll be punished, which I’ll enjoy in any case. Asking for clarification is not an admission of defeat, but be warned, even the clearest answer may be open to interpretation.”
“Okay.” Damn. “I mean, yes.” His thumb rubbed back and forth at the edge of my knee, and I shuddered as if he were rubbing something else.
“Do you want to close your legs?” he asked then. “Are you uncomfortable?”
“Yes, I’m uncomfortable, but that doesn’t mean I want you to stop.” I forced myself to look at his face.
He met my gaze, seemingly more interested in my expression than in my exposed private parts. “Tell me your fantasies.”
“Ha-ha, get my PhD, a fabulous job, and a penthouse apartment,” I joked.
“Are these merely fantasies,” he answered with a smile, “or are some attainable?”
“Well, the PhD would be in art history, and I’m close to finished. Unfortunately, I don’t know too many art history types with penthouses. And, well, who even knows if I’ll be getting the degree now.” Just thinking about it was a downer. “Can we talk about that later?”
“Of course. Would you like to answer the original question more seriously?”
“Which question?”
“I would like you to tell me one of your fantasies. Sexual fantasies, if I need to be specific.” He switched to his other hand and kept caressing me. I wanted him to touch me somewhere more intimate than my knee. After the way he’d touched my breasts, I had a feeling he wouldn’t be too rough or too impatient.
“Oh jeez. I don’t know.” I racked my brain, trying to at least make something up that would be sexy and sound interesting. “I used to fantasize all the time when I was a teenager. I didn’t know anything about what sex would be like, so my fantasies were always vague. Then after I started having sex, I don’t know. There really isn’t much to tell.” I blushed. “I’ve fantasized more about you in the past three days than I have about anyone else in the past three years.”
There it was again: the “Oh, really?” eyebrow.
“Seriously. But I keep stopping myself.”
The eyebrow went higher. “Why?”
“Because I get the feeling the real thing is going to be better than any fantasy I could come up with.”
“Refreshing,” he said with a nod. “But the fantasy doesn’t have to be physical. I’ll let you close your legs when you tell me one fantasy of yours.”
I watched his gaze drift down my legs to my wide-open lips, and my clit throbbed as if his fingers were brushing it. Then he looked back at my face and I had to come up with something to say.
“I guess when I was a girl, I had romantic fantasies, at least, if not sexual ones.”
“Go on.”
“Although, who knows, maybe that’s the whole point of fairy tales. They’re actually about sex. We just don’t know that we’re hardwiring our little girls to mistrust older women and to crave getting pricked—”
“Karina, you may indulge in a feminist critique of your fantasy later. Tell the fantasy first.”
“Prince Charming,” I said, almost a whisper. “Cinderella, the night at the ball, him kissing her foot.”
“I don’t recall Prince Charming kissing Cinderella’s foot.”
“Er, well, maybe that was only in my fantasy version, then.”
He smiled. “Perfect. As you’re not sure whether closing your legs is a privilege or a punishment, I have one more request.”
“Yes?”
He opened a small compartment in the back of the front seat and pulled out an ornate box. He flipped open the lid, and I could see a pair of marbles, these larger than the previous one and with more swirls and colors inside them.
“Have you heard of Ben Wa balls?” he asked mildly, tilting the box at an angle so that the light glinted off the glass.
“I’ve heard of them, but I wasn’t sure they were a real thing.”
“Quite real. Supposedly brought to Europe from China in the sixteenth century. They can be made of solid jade or metal with chimes inside, or glass, like these.” He held the box toward me. “Traditionally they are for one thing.”
“Female stimulation?” I guessed.
“Insertion,” he said, his voice roughened by desire.
“Oh.” I swallowed. I took the box. “Is it one per…opening?”
“I wouldn’t recommend anal insertion right now,” he said, as if he were trying to sound quite reasonable. “You’re less l
ubricated there, and things can get lost that way.”
Oh. I hadn’t even thought of that. Really there was only one thought in my mind, anyway. I reached between my legs, not daring to hesitate, spreading my lips with one hand to keep them out of the way. The marble slid easily inside of me, much more easily than I’d imagined it would, given the size. It was extremely hard and smooth. My body seemed to suck it in deeper. After a moment, I no longer felt it, except when I slid a finger inside me and touched it with my fingertip. It seemed quite snug where it was, and I tightened my muscles around it. “Should I do them both?”
“I think one is plenty for a beginner,” he said. “You did very well.”
I beamed under his praise and wriggled a bit, then gasped as the movement of my body renewed the sensation of something inside me. Those sixteenth-century Chinese were onto something.
“Your scent intoxicates me,” he whispered. He took me gently by the wrist and pressed my still-slick fingertips to his nose. He took a deep breath, then rubbed them on his upper lip, back and forth a few times before sucking them into his mouth. His tongue cleaned each fingertip and made my clit throb harder.
Then he let me go and indicated I should sit up and arrange myself and my clothes. “We’re nearly there.”
“Nearly where?”
“Somewhere to eat.” He inhaled through his nose and licked his lips. “But no matter what I’m eating, I’ll be tasting you instead.”
Five: Valentine Evenings
The car came to a stop. The driver got out and a few moments later opened the door on my side. He didn’t hold out a hand to help me up but instead bowed with a flourish. I emerged from the car to find us at the valet parking stand of a high-rise building. Several white-jacketed valets flanked the glass door, and one of them opened it for me.
None of the men seemed at all dismayed that I was dressed like an extra in a music video or that I wobbled slightly on my unfamiliar shoes and shaking legs. The Ben Wa ball shifted inside me as I walked, while the sensation of it sinking in, pushing apart my walls as it penetrated, was fresh in my mind.
He caught up to me with a loose arm behind my back, steering me not to the elevator but to the host stand outside the entrance to the restaurant, off to one side of the large, marble vestibule.
Once there, I could see the restaurant was built into an atrium, with a high glass ceiling and a water feature that turned one wall into a giant Zen fountain. We were quickly ushered to a table tucked away in a nook from which we could see the other diners, but most of the patrons could not see us.
Which was just as well. He was dressed in a stylish suit, even more posh than the one he’d worn last time, the hint of a gold watch peeking from under one sleeve. I felt like something the cat had dragged in.
He ordered drinks for us both and some kind of multicourse meal, and the server was gone almost before I got a good look at her. He pushed the candle to one side, leaving the center of the table clear.
“Would you like to learn to read minds?” he asked.
“What?” I shook my head slightly, thinking I’d misunderstood him.
“It’s clear you’re wondering what everyone here thinks of you. Of us,” he said.
“It is?”
“Yes. You should see your face.”
“So, you’re actually reading my face, not my mind.”
“Correct.” He grinned. “But reading faces is a large part of it. Call it ‘reading people’ if you want, but it’s what’s going on inside them that you’re reading. Now, lean forward a little and look to your right and tell me what the couple sitting over there thinks of us.”
I leaned forward a little and could see who he meant, around the corner of the nook. They were young-looking, probably around my age, checking their phones obsessively and leaning together and whispering from time to time. “They’re acting kind of suspicious, but they seem happy, too.”
“Indeed. I would say they have decided only someone ridiculously famous would dare walk in here dressed like you. They are no doubt trying to figure out who you are so they can tell their friends they ate in the same restaurant as you.”
“I once ate in the same restaurant as Sarah Jessica Parker.”
“Did you try to snap a cell phone picture of her and text it to all your friends?” he asked.
“No. I thought that would be rude. I told my mother about it, though, and she refused to believe it and was mad at me that I didn’t.”
“You are a good girl,” he said with an approving nod. “Now, how about the older couple off to my left?”
I had a good view of them. The woman took her cell phone out and began to make a call. A server swooped down and ushered her out of the dining room. A few minutes later, the woman came back and handed the phone to the man, who got up and took the call, then returned. A short argument ensued, but the woman looked happy and almost smug.
“Tourists, I think. Beyond that, I got nothing.” I broke off as tiny plates of salmon mousse were put down in front of us. The server explained it was just an “amuse,” which I took to mean the appetizer for the appetizer.
It was a single bite of creamy, salty, fatty goodness. For a moment I was lost in the flavor.
When my attention returned, he gave his theory about the couple. “I believe they think you’re my daughter. I must be some rich fellow who can bring his bratty teenager to restaurants if I like. They’ve barely given me a glance, so they haven’t noticed I’m not old enough to have a teenager. Or perhaps they think I’ve had excellent plastic surgery.”
“I don’t look sixteen.”
“I beg to differ,” he said. “You’re far more fresh-faced than many women in their twenties. You haven’t caked on the makeup or mascara.”
“True. And a lot of older people think everyone who looks the slightest bit young is a teenager. I’m twenty-six, but on campus older people often mistake me for a freshman or sophomore.”
“The phone call, that was the woman calling their daughter back home and then having to let Papa talk to her as well.” He took a sip of his cocktail, which I hadn’t even noticed had come. I’d been so distracted by the salmon mousse and the conversation. By my side was a tumbler of pricey sparkling water, with the bottle set to chill in a container of ice. “The fact that I am drinking alcohol and you aren’t reinforces that image in their minds, too.”
“Amazing,” I said. “You figured all that out by looking at them?”
“I connect the dots. It takes just two points to make a line, so I only need to know two things to get a direction. Three makes a picture. Some of the dots they reveal and some of them I provide, like what we’re wearing or drinking.”
He gave half a shrug. “I make educated guesses. The thing is, they are so busy making their assumptions that none of them will guess the truth.”
“The truth?”
“That I am, as we speak, already fucking you right in front of them.”
He meant the Ben Wa ball. My breath caught and I felt warmth rush through me at the thought of it and from his words. I couldn’t feel the glass globe now that I wasn’t moving, but I knew it was there.
“There is a man against the wall, by himself. He thinks we might be having a date. But even he doesn’t dare to imagine that we’re having sex at the moment, through words and shared knowledge, even though I’m not touching you.”
I had to stifle a moan.
“Squeeze your muscles down below,” he murmured quietly. “Do you feel it?”
I nodded, trying not to look like I wanted to collapse onto the banquette and have him ravish me that second.
As it was, he ravished me with his words. “No food they serve me tonight can compare to the lusciousness that you hide under your skirt. Have you had a man suck on your clitoris before?”
“What? No. Lick, yes, suck, no. They tend to suck higher up.” I adjusted my breasts, which weren’t even held in by a bra.
“Tell me about them.” He didn’t take his eyes off me
as the old plates were replaced with new ones and new silverware set down.
“My old boyfriends?”
“Yes.”
“If you want to have a sexy conversation, they’re not good topics,” I said.
“Truly?”
“Truly. They tended to suck. By which I mean they were sucky, not that they were into oral. Maybe if they had been, they would’ve been better lovers. And there haven’t been that many of them. Every time a guy turned out to be horrible in bed, it discouraged me from bothering to meet another one.”
“That seems a terrible waste,” he said.
“I guess. Maybe I just wasn’t what they were looking for.”
“And what do you guess that would’ve been?”
“I don’t know. Someone blonder? Someone with bigger boobs? Maybe that would have inspired them.”
“Well.” He paused again while more new plates were delivered, this time with a ginger-and-lime-flavored broth poured over a hunk of white fish.
We ate for a few moments in silence.
“Any man who needs blond hair or a bigger chest to be ‘inspired’ enough to perform well isn’t a man worth going to bed with,” he said suddenly.
I stopped eating in surprise.
“Every part of your body,” he said, holding one tender flake of fish on his fork, “is a gateway.” He seemed to consider his words. “I am trying not to sound overly mystical about it. But any part of you could be the key that unlocks the floodgate of pleasure bottled inside. There are the obvious parts, and there are the not so obvious.”
He set down his fork and put his hand palm up on the tablecloth, a clear invitation to put my hand in his. I placed it on top of his without further prompting. His middle finger drew a slow circle on my palm. Then he slid his hand back a little, interlacing our fingers. Two of them spread mine ever so slightly while his middle finger probed the soft flesh where my finger and palm met. It felt like he had spread my legs and was teasing my crotch, with his nose, with his tongue, with his cock? It could have been all of the above.
I had a feeling I was going to leave a wet spot on the seat. I pressed my legs together and licked my lips.