“They can watch,” I mumble. Something’s spilling in from the new wedge of cold air between me and Auden, something like exhaustion and weary, dreary grief, and I feel myself ghosting again, blurring at the edges. “I’m used to people watching.”
And I really am—back home in the university town of Lawrence where I worked, I was a bit of a kink-scene party girl. Clubs, munches, play parties, I loved it all. The more the merrier, and nothing got me hotter than hearing the moans and grunts and rustling clothes of people getting off while they watched me serve or suffer. But if I’m honest, having Delphine and Becket join us doesn’t even feel like those scenes full of strangers and scopophiliacs, it just feels right, like when all of us are together, some essential connection is made that can’t be made when we’re apart.
“Yes. I’d like them here,” I answer again, making sure Rebecca can hear the consent in my tone.
“Then I’ll let them know they’re welcome. We’ve never discussed your hard limits—or your preferred safeword. I’ll need those now.”
It’s so hard to think, so hard to remember how these things go when it feels like my only memory, the only memory I’ll ever have again, is of bones and mud.
“No edge play. No spit.” My safe word back home was Boolean Operator, but that’s not what comes out of my mouth next.
“My safe word is convivificat,” I tell them, and then sink to my knees to await their instructions.
Chapter 5
Proserpina
Present Day
* * *
Down here, the idea of kissing Auden’s feet transforms into a necessity. It’s the most natural thing to want, and by natural, I don’t mean easy or understandable—I mean natural in the most violently inevitable way possible. Lions eat gazelles, tornadoes rip into the prairie earth, death follows life—and Auden’s feet require kissing, because he is a king and a predator and above me in every way.
Not always, not outside this room, but here and now, I am his supplicant, I am the unworthy worm on the steps of his temple, and the dazzling, dizzy clarity of that intoxicates me. I can feel myself slipping deeper and deeper into the waters of worship, feel how the world muffles its noise and its needs until all that’s left is who I am and what I have to do. And all I have to do is obey.
“Auden, my bag is in the corner,” Rebecca says, dropping to crouch next to me. The Italian cotton of her garnet-colored jumpsuit pulls tight around her legs and her chest, emphasizing her long limbs and her slight curves. She too is above me, a queen, and so beautiful and sharp it hurts to look at her. “Will you bring me a length of rope and the three floggers inside?” she asks him, who answers in the affirmative.
Her apprentice thus dispatched—and me mournfully watching his perfect, kissable feet move away as he goes—Rebecca turns to look at me, catching my chin with her fingers so she can properly assess me. She must be satisfied with the haze of submission already glassing my eyes and flushing my cheeks, because she nods to herself and stands up.
“Undress, Proserpina. Then I’d like you back on your knees.”
I dressed quickly this morning when Saint called, and so I’m just in boyfriend jeans and a sweater with holes for my thumbs. Unlike my friends—with the eternal exception of Saint—I’m not dressed in clothes that cost more than my monthly grocery bill. But still I know what Rebecca expects of me. I undress without tease or delay, but I make sure to fold my clothes neatly in a small stack on the floor; no matter how cheap they are, I sense Rebecca would be displeased if I treated them—and by extension, her instructions—carelessly.
Auden turns around and comes back to us right as I finish, and I can hear the long breath he lets out at the sight of me naked and on my knees.
“She’s a sight, isn’t she?” Rebecca says.
“She is,” Auden says. His voice is hoarse.
“What would you like her to call you?” Rebecca asks. I watch as her ankle-booted feet cross over to his bare ones; lengths of rope and leather dangle into view as he passes them to her.
He doesn’t answer for a minute. “Auden is fine,” he says finally.
For some reason, Rebecca laughs, although without raising my eyes, I can’t see why. “Hmm,” she says. “I think you’re not telling her the truth right now.”
Another pause. An exhale with a shudder ruffling the edges. “Sir would work.”
“Now that isn’t so hard, is it, Sir? Never mind—I can see exactly how hard it is.”
“Quartey.”
“Don’t Quartey me. And your first lesson is this, so listen up, Sir Guest: your self-consciousness is inevitable and it’s also valuable. You wouldn’t be here if there wasn’t some part of you that was an arrogant arsehole, but arrogance and arseholery can only ever be the seasoning to your scenes. You’re here for Proserpina, you’re here to give her what she needs, and your self-consciousness means you’re aware of that. Embrace it even while you work to get past it.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“I actually prefer Mistress if we’re getting technical. Now then,” Rebecca comes closer, her boots thunking across the wood planks with a very Domme-like drama, “we’ve got our submissive undressed and ready. Next we’ll inspect her. It’s not something I do in every scene, with every person, because it’s undeniably sexual and very possessive and not every submissive wants that. Poe, have you ever been inspected before?”
Keeping my eyes down, I shake my head. I’ve done many naked scenes, and I have no doubt my exes enjoyed watching my body during them, but I’ve never done this. Whatever this is.
I want it, though, I want anything that pleases them and shames me. I want something new and thrilling to clamp me in its jaws and shake me until I’m so limp and spent that I can’t remember what happened today. That I can’t feel anything other than the grinding euphoria of endorphin-fueled release.
“Good,” Rebecca says, sounding pleased. “You and Auden will get to have this first together then. I want you to cross your arms behind your back and then spread your legs as far apart as they’ll go.”
I obey, and Auden’s ragged exhale matches my own as the undeniable lewdness of the posture unfolds. With my arms behind my back, my full breasts jut forward, and with my knees this far apart, my cunt is completely exposed to the cool air of the room. I can feel that I’ve already grown damp, can see the tightly bunched points of my nipples, and when Auden steps closer, his feet coming into my field of vision, I shudder with undiluted arousal to think of him seeing me this way. Like a sex puppet, a doll. A nothing-girl to ease his body and then forgotten.
I can barely breathe with the filthy, indecent excitement of it.
“Now,” Rebecca says softly, “we inspect.”
She gets down to one knee—Auden mirroring her—and then with no preamble or foreplay, she takes Auden’s hand and guides it straight to my waiting pussy.
I nearly feel, as well as hear, the noise in Auden’s chest as his fingers slide over my intimate flesh, and I think I’d give away every book I own—the memory of every book I’ve ever read—to see his face right now. To see if his eyes are more green or brown, to see if he’s fighting a frown or a smile, to see if he’s getting drunk off my humiliation the same way I’m getting drunk off his power. And even though he’s touched me before—several times last night—there’s something about this that feels new and incredible. Momentous.
He seems to feel this way too, because his hand moves to mold over my entire mound, cupping me and my heat like it belongs to him now.
God. It does. It does belong to him now. Not just in this room, but everywhere.
I belong to him.
And I have no idea what that means for Saint and me.
Rebecca’s voice comes low and husky. “See how her pussy is parted like this, with her legs so far apart? How you can stroke right inside?”
“Yes,” Auden whispers, his fingers mimicking her words and pressing inside me. I can’t help but wriggle against them, even though I’m sore
and still new to penetration, and my wriggling earns me a quick slap on the breast. I squeak and freeze in obedience, even though Auden’s thoughtful exploration of my hole is driving me crazy.
“She’s not allowed to get pleasure until we say so,” Rebecca tells Auden. “Even though we’re here for her, everything happens according to your will. Your pleasure.”
“Quite the paradox,” Auden murmurs, hooking his fingers forward and pressing against a place inside that makes me gasp.
“Indeed, Sir Guest.” She still says Sir Guest with a grin in her voice, like she’s teasing him, but it sounds so right, so inevitable—like I would always be inspected by a Sir and by Auden Guest—that it hardly feels mocking at all. It fits him too well. “Now you should inspect her breasts. Feel free to make her clean your fingers or if you’d like, you can wipe them on her skin.”
Auden takes her last suggestion, wiping his fingers on my thigh like I’m nothing more than a well-educated handkerchief, and the act is so demeaning and so erotic that I have to keep myself from wriggling again. Especially after he takes the weight of my breasts in his palms and squeezes hard enough to send tendrils of pain blooming up and down my body. He traces the curves with a studied slowness, as if he’s seeing them with an architect’s eye, and then he plucks and rolls my nipples until they’re rose-dark and aching and my cunt is hot and swollen enough to hurt.
“What do you think, Guest?” Rebecca asks. “Are they to your liking? Her cunt too?”
“Yes,” Auden says. There’s still some huskiness burning at the edges, but his voice sounds stronger now. Surer. As if the same spell that drags me into the clear, sweet waters of submission drags him somewhere else, somewhere equally potent and necessary.
“Is there anything else you’d like to see?”
“Yes,” he says, giving a breast one last squeeze. “Her bottom, if I may.”
“I do believe you were forbidden from using that may word,” Rebecca says, amused. “Nothing is denied us here. Poe, I want you to touch your forehead to the floor—keeping your arms behind your back and keeping your legs spread as far as you can. Your Sir would like to see your arsehole, and so would I.”
Shame, hot and prickling, needles everywhere at my face and chest and belly as I begin to bend down to the floor. The cool air that caresses my pussy is now everywhere as the position begins to expose my most secret flesh, and there’s no pretending away the reality of what I’m doing. I’m doing something I’ve never done before, I’m offering up the filthiest part of me for inspection, and despite everything the three of us have shared in the past twenty-four hours, I’m flooded with shame. It’s real shame now, not play-shame, and my safe word floats to the top of my mind, a buoy in the clear waters.
Convivificat.
I don’t want to safe out right now, I’m nowhere near the edge, but it’s nice to have it there all the same. Reassuring. There’s nothing they can do that I can’t stop.
And anyway, this is who I am—who I’ve been growing into ever since I found the words to define it. I am the girl who kneels at night. I am the bride by thorns.
With a deep breath, I press my forehead all the way to the floor, closing my eyes and inhaling the smell of leather and new wood. I hear my masters moving behind me, I hear Rebecca murmur something to Auden, and then there’s his touch again—firm and blunt and more confident than ever. I fight to keep myself still as he rasps a warm palm over my hip and the swell of my ass, and I barely fight off a yip when he gives me a sharp, quick swat on the cheek. But I can’t help the goosebumps that pebble across my skin, I can’t help the flood of heat in my belly.
“Don’t be quiet on my account, sweet bride,” he whispers. “I like to hear you.”
I recognize permission when I hear it, and so when he runs a fingertip over my hot, pleated button, I moan, both in surprise and embarrassment. The surprise is because it feels good—so good—this slow, light touch. It sends shivery sparks everywhere through me, pleasant and long-burning, and then when he presses against the opening, those sparks catch fire and I gasp. It’s uncomfortable and raw and I’m not sure what to make of the feeling. I’m not sure if I like it, having his finger pressing there, I’m not sure I like the urgent, animal way it makes me feel—although when he pulls back, I feel strangely bereft.
“Use her cunt to make your fingers wet,” I hear Rebecca instruct.
Auden does as she says, and once again, his fingers push inside me. I’m sore enough from last night that the intrusion makes my toes curl with pleasure, the hot ache of memory mingling with the tantalizing present, and Auden seems to enjoy my reaction quite a bit, if the rhythm of his breathing is any indication. I hear his clothes rustle, and then I feel the warm puff of his exhales on my skin, and that’s how I know he’s bending down to watch. Watch his hand moving against me and inside me, watch the spread of my tender flesh against his invasion.
He’s watching himself take ownership of me. Stroke by stroke, crook by crook, twist by slippery grinding twist.
I whimper helplessly into the floor, tension pulling tight in my stomach while my mind clears and then fills, clears and fills, like clouds chasing across the sky. For long seconds, there’s nothing but the satiating fill of his fingers, and then the thoughts will come—mostly thoughts like Auden Guest is fingering you; the pouty, rich boy you’re in love with is marking your cunt with his touch—and then he’ll spiral his hand this way or that way, or add another finger, or pull back to tease at my swollen clit, and the thoughts will disappear again. There’s only him and me and the authoritative tap of Rebecca’s toe on the floor as she watches her apprentice at work.
“Can you feel her tightening up?” she asks him. “Do you see how she’s quivering and starting to buck back against your hand—you can smack her for that, by the way—and do you see how deeply her cunt is flushing right now? She’s close to coming. Don’t let her.”
Let me, let me, let me, I silently beg, but I’m not so far gone as to make a rookie move like that. I keep my pleas in my throat where they belong—for now—and somehow manage not to burst into tears when Auden slides his fingers free right as I begin to crest up toward my climax. And then, without Rebecca saying anything, he touches a cunt-wet finger to my entrance and works his way inside.
A groan tears out of me, the feeling of his finger there, going deep, so deep, like nothing I’ve ever felt. I’m ashamed and scared and also helplessly aroused by the idea of being examined like this. Inspected for his use.
A cool hand sweeps over my ass, and then I hear Rebecca kneel down next to me. “Turn your head,” she says softly, and I do. I’m rewarded with a fond caress over my lower lip before she pushes into my mouth. “Suck,” she orders.
Once I’ve sucked her finger to her satisfaction, she moves behind me, and I only realize what she’s going to do as she’s doing it, as she’s pressing her finger inside me next to Auden’s.
I cry out, rolling my head against the floor, my hands dropping from behind my back to scrabble at the wood—which earns me a spank from Rebecca, who doesn’t miss a beat with her other hand as she works her finger inside me.
And then I have two fingers in my ass, deep and almost tickling, if elemental shocks to the nervous system can be called tickling.
“Feel how tight she is here?” Rebecca croons. I feel a brush of fingers, and I think she’s taken Auden’s other hand and is guiding it around my body again. “This ring, so snug, like it doesn’t want to let you go? Think of how it would feel cinching up and down your cock, Guest. Think of how hot and soft it is here—” she wiggles the tip of her finger deep, deep in my ass, moving it enough that I feel every single twitch “—that would be around your head, like the plushest, silkiest prison. Just squeezing all slick and smooth and small around you until you can’t take it anymore, until you’re certain you’ll die with how good it feels, until you realize there’s no way you can survive unless you get to fuck this at least once a day.”
Auden makes a n
oise—a ragged, agonized noise. “Yes,” he whispers after a minute. After a long minute of them sharing my body, because in this moment, it’s theirs to share. “Yes, I feel it. Christ. Fucking Christ.”
“Shit,” Rebecca whispers back, sounding haunted by her own spell, sounding suddenly as taken by desire as the rest of us are, and then she murmurs, “Guest,” at the same moment Auden says, “Quartey” in that melodic husk of his, and then they kiss.
They kiss as they’re still owning my body with their touch, as I’m still bent over and exposed for their gratification. They kiss and I can feel the sturdy wool of Auden’s trousers and the soft cotton of Rebecca’s jumpsuit brush and press against the back of my thighs, and I don’t have to see them right now to know that they’re pressing their bodies together, that they’re seeking friction, seeking relief, and I can tell by the grunts and pants spilling out from between their kisses that they’re finding it.
Have they done this before?
Have they kissed before this moment?
Maybe in a fit of teenage experimentation, as best friends sometimes do, curious and then awkward? Or maybe late at night, some weekend in college, overworked and raw from the intellectual grind of being the best, the smartest, the most creative, did they look up from their books and see mouths shaped like respite? Hands shaped like comfort?
It should make me jealous, this. Jealous that they’re kissing now, jealous that they may have kissed before. And I am jealous, I think, but I’m also so turned on by their frank display of lust, so turned on by the knowledge that it was me, my body, my submission, that reduced both of them to this, that my jealousy is only part of what I feel. And most of what I feel can be summed up with one word.
Yearning.
“Fuck, Bex,” Auden mutters, using his more familiar name for her. “I’m going to—I need to—”
Feast of Sparks Page 3