by Sionna Fox
“You’re so wet, little mouse.” He grunted as he pumped his fingers into me. “Do you like this?”
“Yes, sir,” I whimpered.
In a single, fluid motion he pulled his fingers free, positioned his cock, and sank fully into me. I let out a strangled cry at the force of his invasion as Matthew started to fuck me in earnest. He reared up over me, grabbed the line where it spread across my chest to pinch my nipples, and used it for leverage as he pistoned his cock in and out of my pussy.
The lines chafed over my shoulders and breasts, the added torment only serving to rush me toward the orgasm I’d been working on since the moment Matthew said the word “bound.” A litany of curses escaped my mouth as Matthew fucked me, ending with me begging to come. Only when the cursing and begging had melted to my endlessly repeating “please,” did Matthew slip his fingers to my clit.
“Come for me, little mouse.” A few firm, circular strokes were all it took. My whole body pitched and rolled, tensing and trembling as the orgasm ripped through me. I screamed, helpless to stop it, the force of it almost enough to knock the wind out of me.
The moment my scream died, Matthew pulled out of me, stripped off the condom, gripped his cock, and stroked himself until he erupted all over my tits with a groan. He rolled away from me, panting like he’d run a marathon.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have…without warning you,” he croaked between breaths. “You’re just…so fucking perfect.”
I carefully turned and shut him up as best I could with a kiss. “Don’t be sorry.” I grinned, still slightly dazed.
He grinned back and raised a dark eyebrow, still breathing hard. “Really? Your notes said you weren’t sure.”
“Really.” I ducked my head, shy at admitting I rather liked being marked by him.
He kissed my forehead. “Good to know, little mouse.” He took my face gently in his hands and forced me to meet his eyes. “Thank you.” He rolled over and pushed himself to his feet with a groan and held out a hand to help me up from where I was plastered to the mattress. “Come on, let’s get cleaned up.”
He led me into the bathroom and wiped me down with a damp washcloth before he untied me, then wiped me down again. It seemed faster coming off than it did going on, but my sense of time was woefully unreliable. He showed me how to coil the rope for storage, then he undid it, tied it in a different series of linked knots, and threw the whole thing in the laundry basket. I stared at it, heaped in with his T-shirts, underwear, and towels.
“What are you going to do with that?”
“Wash it.” He left off the “duh,” but it was strongly implied.
“But…” The image of Matthew cheerfully washing a bundle of semen-stained rope alongside his neighbors in a shared laundry room almost broke my brain.
While I gawped, he somehow managed to translate the mingled horror and amusement that was all over my face. “I have a washer and dryer, little mouse.”
“Oh. Oh, good.” Whether it was endorphins, orgasms, or the sheer ridiculousness of the situation, I lost it. I cackled hysterically as Matthew led me back to bed, looking thoroughly bemused.
He bundled me under the blankets, ignoring my fit until I settled. “Sorry. I got this mental picture of you separating laundry next to some little old lady neighbor. Like, ‘Oh, this? This is my rope that I tie up girls with before I fuck them and come on their tits.’” I snorted and hiccupped some more.
“You have quite an active imagination, little mouse. Has anyone ever told you that?”
“I used to get that all the time.” I smiled and let out a jaw-popping yawn.
Matthew turned out the light and snuggled me up close to him. “Go to sleep, little mouse.”
Chapter Eleven
We fell into a routine of spending Wednesday and Saturday nights together. Saturdays often bled into lazy Sundays, which turned into rushing back to my place Monday morning before work. We spent a lot of other nights together too, hibernating together as fall slipped toward winter.
We were safe in a bubble, the two of us, with no pressure from friends, families, or social obligations. I was even doing a pretty good job of keeping my anxiety from showing. The amount of sex we were having didn’t hurt. He made occasional noises about leaving the shelter of his apartment, but even going on a date seemed too likely to pop the shimmering globe of giddy, dirty sex and togetherness we were living in.
The Saturday before Thanksgiving, I was facedown across Matthew’s lap while he inspected the fresh marks he’d left on my ass with a riding crop, when he poked a hole in the bubble.
“Are you going home for Thanksgiving?”
I didn’t want to talk about my family. I’d been avoiding even calling anyone in Vermont because I didn’t want to break the spell. I didn’t want to think about them. I definitely didn’t want to think about them while Matthew’s hands were all over my butt.
I raised my head from the cushion and looked back over my shoulder. “Yeah. Izzy’s coming home with me. Her parents are in Florida for the winter and she hates flying at holidays. Why?”
He nestled down next to me, wedged between my body and the back of the couch. He frowned. “So you’ll be gone all weekend?”
“We’re leaving the Tuesday before and coming back Sunday.”
I had asked for the days off from work back when I’d first started, when Matthew was just someone I’d made awkward small talk with in a bar. If I left on Tuesday and stayed the whole weekend, I’d have ten days without him. I was going to lose my mind. I needed the calm I found with him more than I wanted to consider.
“That’s this Tuesday, little mouse.”
“Shit, I lost track of the days. It’s this week?” He nodded. “Aren’t you going home?”
“No. I have a dinner invitation for Thursday and some work to catch up on.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know if he was sad to be missing the holiday or if he was indifferent or even relieved. Talking about family hadn’t been in the scope of our arrangement.
“It’s fine.” He stroked my cheek. “I haven’t gone home for Thanksgiving in years. Spending two days trapped on 95 to get there and back, just to listen to my father go on about how if I’m so good at data modeling, what am I doing in an academic lab getting paid relative peanuts, is not my idea of a good time. Trust me, I’m much better off here with friends.”
“What about Molly? Does she get stuck with them?” It hit me how much we’d been avoiding real life, how little I knew about him. I’d had no idea his parents somehow didn’t approve of their brilliant son’s career choices.
“Molly can handle herself, but she won’t fly at Thanksgiving either. It’s too much trouble when she’s going to be there in less than a month for Christmas.” He kissed my forehead. “I wish you were going to be here, though.”
I rubbed my nose into the hollow of his collarbone. “I know. I’ll miss y-this. I’ll miss this.” I flinched and bit the inside of my lip.
He squeezed me. “I’ll miss you too, little mouse.”
Three days later, I parked in my parents’ driveway. I inhaled one, two, three, four, five and exhaled one, two, three, four, five, not unlike the way Matthew had taught me to breathe through pain. Slightly calmer, I turned to Izzy in the passenger seat. “Ready?”
I loved my family—sort of, for the most part—but I had to brace myself for the sheer number of them and the amount of noise they created, all talking at once. My aunts’ cars were parked up and down the street. The better part of the clan would be in my mother’s kitchen, drinking cheap beer and arguing over whether or not to put cranberries in the stuffing for Thursday. They would eventually compromise by splitting it into two batches. Like they did every year.
If the aunts were there, my uncles would be in the partially finished basement watching TV. Some number of multi-generational cousins would be wandering back and forth between them all, filching snacks from the kitchen and fetching more beer from the garage for the uncles. Dread settl
ed in my stomach, and I had to forcibly remind myself that it was not acceptable for me to turn the car around and go straight back to Boston.
I’d cocooned since I left Vermont. I had traded my small town for the city, but I spent even less time with other people there than I had here. I hadn’t changed at all. I might have even gotten worse, spending all my time wrapped up in Matthew. The realization sat like a lead weight on my chest. For all the adventurous sex I’d had, I was failing at the thing I’d set out to do.
Izzy shook my shoulder. “Come on, Mouse. They’re not getting any less rowdy the longer we sit in the driveway.”
I inhaled, counted to five again, and exhaled slowly. “Do not, on pain of death or my never, ever making that lemon blueberry bread again, mention Matthew. To anyone.”
Izzy frowned. “What if it’s an accident? What if Nana Bates corners me?”
“No lemon loaf, Isolde. None. Never.” I did my best impression of Matthew’s most stern, obey or there will be consequences voice.
“You’re mean.” She stuck out her bottom lip. “Mean. And don’t think I don’t know where you got that voice, you pervert.” She wagged a finger at me. “Now, come on. Before they come out here to make sure we’re leaving room for Jesus, Mary, and the Holy Ghost.” She opened the door and hefted her duffel bag out of the back seat.
I took one last breath and did the same. “Don’t call me a pervert within five hundred yards of town,” I muttered under my breath and elbowed her in the ribs as we walked up to the porch.
We didn’t make it up the steps before the aunts threw open the door and pulled us into a many-limbed hug, passing us through the living room into the kitchen. My mom hovered over the stove stirring onions, celery, and an unholy amount of butter together in a giant stock pot for the stuffing. It smelled like heaven.
I put an arm around her shoulder and squeezed. “Hi, Mom.”
She set down the wooden spoon and hugged me. “Hi, Jo.” She dropped me and embraced Izzy. “You girls have a good drive?”
“Fine,” we chirped in unison.
“Your dad’s downstairs.” She turned her attention back to the stove. “Go say hello, then you can get settled in your room. There’s food on the table, help yourselves.”
Dismissed, we trooped down to the basement into man land, where my dad and the uncles were gathered on folding chairs around a couple of beat-up card tables, drinking and talking shit about the high school football team. Izzy lagged slightly behind me. She would never admit it, but she’d never quite gotten over the time we walked into the basement to find them cleaning an out-of-season deer my uncle Pete “found.”
Uncle Pete cheered when we hit the bottom of the steps, waving what was likely not his first beer in his fist. “Hey, it’s the Little Professor back from the big city!”
I cringed at the childhood nickname and tried to slink by without engaging him. Izzy, god love her, blocked my uncle for me while I waded through a series of one-armed hugs and quiet “Hey, Jo, how you doing” greetings while Izzy verbally sparred with Pete. I made it to my dad, who folded me into a bear hug.
“Hey, kiddo.”
“Hey, Daddy.” My voice was muffled by his thick, flannel shirt.
“How was the drive?” He let me go and fished in the cooler at his feet, passed me a beer, and handed one to Izzy with a squeeze around her shoulders. “Hey, Izzy-girl.”
She cracked the can and grinned. “Hey, Tim.”
We pulled up chairs and hung out with my dad for a while. We never talked about it, but I suspected it was mostly from him that I’d inherited my discomfort with crowds and dislike of forced socializing. He spent family gatherings nursing a beer and saying as little as possible. My mother was happy to be in the center of the maelstrom, but my dad and I preferred our card table in the corner.
He asked Izzy about school and me about work, laughed at her jokes, told us about things at the college. “Same old, same old. Clogged toilets, lost keys, and blown fuses.” When he’d expended his cache of words and our rumbling stomachs got the better of us, we said goodnight and ventured upstairs to run the gauntlet of aunties that stood between us and food.
“We could sneak out and go to the Box?”
“You know it only gets worse the longer you avoid it. ‘Do you have a boyfriend? What are you doing in Boston? When are you going to come to your senses, come home, marry that nice boy Will and have babies like a good girl?’ You don’t want to give the hive any more time to work out how to get you to crack.”
I shuddered. Being tired of those questions was a huge part of why I had jumped at the chance to leave. Every year I had stayed, not married to my childhood best friend and having his children while we waited for his parents to retire and hand us the keys to the bar, was a year the questions got louder, more pointed. Did I think I was better than them? Too good for a husband and family? All that school and my feminist nonsense wasn’t doing me any good now, was it?
Izzy grabbed me. “Deep breath, square those shoulders. They’re a bunch of old biddies who don’t understand you, but that’s not your fault. Right?”
We hovered at the top of the steps to the basement. I put my hand on the knob. “Okay. Deep breaths. They mean well. Sort of. Let’s go.”
“Well, well, well, city girl. How’s Boston treating you?”
It was the fourth time one of the aunts had opened with the exact same line. Were they testing me to see if my story would change if they just kept asking? “Fine, Auntie Marie.” My teeth might not survive the weekend with how hard my jaw was clenched.
“Hm. Did you hear Tina’s having a baby?” No, Marie. I hadn’t heard for the twelfth time that my cousin is pregnant.
“Yeah, that’s exciting.” Wait for it. One, two, three...
“When are you going to settle down, Jolene? You’re not getting any younger, you know.” Marie frowned at me like at any moment I would morph into a crone at the ripe old age of twenty-eight.
“I don’t know, Auntie Marie.”
She patted my shoulder sympathetically. “You don’t want to wait too long, sweetie. I’m sure you could find a nice boy here at home if you would give anyone a chance.”
If I didn’t leave, I was going to punch her. I gave her a tight smile. “Good to see you, Auntie Marie,” I bit out and whirled off in Izzy’s direction. I excused us both from my aunt Kathy and pulled Izzy toward the door. “If I stay any longer, I’m going to strangle one of them. And by one of them, I mean Marie. We’re going to the Box.”
Izzy dug out our coats from the stack piled at the door while I ran down the steps to the car. As soon as Izzy slid into the passenger seat, I was on the road.
The Penalty Box was quiet. The next night it would be packed to the rafters when everyone who returned for the holiday remembered spending four days with their families was a prospect too daunting to face sober. We plopped onto the stools I still thought of as ours. Will came around the bar and picked me up in a rib-cracking hug.
“Jesus Christ, Jo, I was about to send out a search party. Where the hell have you been?”
I grimaced. I’d been a bad friend. I’d been so wrapped up in Matthew, I’d sort of forgotten about the guy who’d been my best friend since first grade. “Shit. I’m sorry, Will.”
He wrapped an arm around Izzy and fake-whispered, “She’s finally getting laid again, isn’t she?”
Izzy burst out laughing, which was all the confirmation he needed. I punched his beefy arm and made him promise he wouldn’t tell his mom, my mom, or any of the aunts in between. “I had to threaten to cut off Izzy from baked goods. I don’t have that kind of leverage over you anymore.”
Will drew an X over his heart. “I promise, your secret is safe with me. It would only make it worse, anyway. It’s bad enough getting a pat on the arm and a ‘Don’t worry, she’ll come to her senses and come home’ every time I go to the grocery store.”
I hung my head in my hands. “I’m not going to last until Sunday, am I? Izzy,
I am so sorry, but you’re probably going to have to bail me out of jail before the weekend is over.”
“Pfft. I’ll be holding Marie’s arms so you can get a better crack at her.” We both turned to Will. Izzy batted her eyelashes. “You’d bail us out, right?”
Will shook his head at both of us and went to pour our drinks. He set a bourbon in front of me and raised a red eyebrow at one of the taps before Izzy nodded. As if Will Bennett, from a long, illustrious line of small-town bartenders, would have forgotten what kind of beer Izzy drank. He tossed her a coaster and set down the pint before resting two meaty forearms on the bar in front of us.
I sipped slowly. It had been months since I’d had more than a single glass of wine, and I had to drive us home. “How are Mom and Dad?” I didn’t hear or see them, so I assumed Will’s parents were taking a well-deserved night off.
Maggie was probably in the midst of preparing ahead as much as possible for feeding her own army on Thursday. Archie, unlike the men in my family, was most likely also in the kitchen, acting as self-appointed taste-tester and generally being a lovable nuisance. I’d always wished I could spend my holidays with the Bennetts without having to marry one of their sons.
“They’re fine; you know them. They’ll be sorry they missed you.”
“I’m sure we’ll see them tomorrow. God knows we’ll be here, hiding from our family like everyone else.”
The three of us spent a pleasant couple of hours talking, with occasional interruptions from other customers. By the time we decided to pack it in, I was feeling better about the odds of my finally losing it and telling some member of my family exactly where they could shove their fake concern for my happiness.
My dad was watching the news when we got back to the house. We caught the tail end of the weather and for once, the forecast for a snowstorm headed our way at the weekend cheered me enormously. If snow was coming, I’d have a perfect excuse to leave early. The idea of spending the weekend with Matthew had nothing to do with the way I practically skipped down the hall to my childhood bedroom with my phone in my hand. Nope.