Out of Control

by Roberts, Teresa Noelle

  This doesn’t feel like playing. This feels real. Like she left it on because wearing my mark seemed right.

  Of course, she might have forgotten she was wearing it. After all, she’d neglected to sleep and probably to eat, let alone call him, because she was so caught up in her work. Easy to lose track of a bit of rope.

  But he liked seeing it on her. Liked to imagine something more permanent in its place. It was way too soon to make any kind of long-term decision, but it wasn’t too soon to indulge in a daydream or six.

  “You need a tracking device, woman,” he said, distracting himself from his fantasy. He meant to sound mock-gruff, but as he spoke, he realized he felt it for real. “I was worried about you.”

  Jen crossed her hands in front of her breasts and glared at him. “You sound like my dad.”

  “Well, I don’t want that.” He patted his lap. “Get over here. Let me prove I’m not your dad.” She gaped more when he reached into the drawer of the bedside table and pulled out a leather tawse.

  She started at the small, forked slapper and didn’t move. “I didn’t do anything wrong. At least I didn’t mean to. You didn’t give me rules yet. It’s not fair to punish me.”

  He slapped the tawse on the bed. “One, this isn’t a punishment. You’ll know when you’re being punished, and it won’t be fun. Two, I still owe you fun consequences for being late to work the other night. Three—” He looked up at her and smiled as evilly as he could. “Whoever said I was fair?”

  It’s not fair, Jen mentally protested again. But at the same time, she remembered how Drake’s hand felt against her ass, how the pain transmuted to hot bliss. A flicker in her lower belly might have been fear or desire, was probably both.

  Drake seemed upset with her, and she really didn’t get it. She didn’t get it and she didn’t like it and she felt like she ought to argue or at least ask pointed questions.

  But the kisses in the kitchen felt like a reunion, as if they were longtime lovers who’d been apart for far longer than a day and a half. And damn, he looked good enough to eat: the gray eyes that studied her so intently, the broad shoulders, the corded muscles of his arms, the strong thighs bared by shorts. Good enough to eat. Certainly good enough to yield to.

  The black-and-blue leather paddle intimidated her. It would sting differently than his hand. More concentrated. Less intimate. Definitely different. The cool yet organic feel of leather against her skin was a sensation she’d rarely experienced, and never since her early experiments with her roommate. She’d even feel the symbolic black and blue, though that, she knew, was just her overly developed awareness of color.

  But at the same time, she wanted to experience it.

  Drake slapped the viper-tongued paddle onto the bed again, and the sound jolted through her. Curiosity and lust got the better of nerves and resentment. She took one step forward, then another, and all but bolted the last couple to the bed.

  She started to lie across his lap as he’d directed, but those muscular arms caught her, and he directed her to stand between his open legs. Drake pulled her into a deep kiss. His hands traveled down her back. She shivered at the trail they left behind on her naked skin, a trail no one could see that felt like sparkles in all the pinks and reds of Valentine hearts. He reached her buttocks, began to caress and knead.

  It was soothing and sensual at the same time, deliciously sexy and yet tender too. And speaking of tender, she’d been sitting on a hard stool in the studio without noticing her butt was sore, but Drake seemed to know every spot that first spanking had left extrasensitive. It was just enough to help her flash back to that spanking, layering memories with sensation, adding to her arousal. All the time, they kissed as if they’d been apart for years and had just found each other again, fierce and devouring and full of need. She fancied she sensed anger in the kiss, a bright, acid green note against the richness of the need and the lust, but it was a kind of anger that made the lust and need more powerful, and it faded quickly as they kissed and caressed.

  “Now lie down,” he whispered, guiding her down across his lap. His shorts had pushed up, baring more of his legs. His skin was hot, and she was acutely aware of its texture, of its sueded softness over his hard muscle, and of the hair on his thighs. “Cross your hands behind you.”

  She guessed at the rope before she felt it binding her, wrist to opposite elbow. It was an oddly comforting position, if not precisely a comfortable one, as if she cradled herself. The rope was soft, thicker than what was around her ankle but thinner than what he’d used the other day. “There you go,” he said, “all secure,” and his voice was somehow both full of erotic menace and soothing.

  Grounded by the rope and by the contact with Drake, Jen felt safe to drift in a silky scarlet haze. When Drake began to spank her, she didn’t even jump or yelp, just gave herself over to the new sensation, a sharp yellow counterpoint to the red, jarring, yet beautiful as an Ithaca autumn. She moved up and down with the blows, flinching away out of instinct, then pushing back for more. She was needy, dripping, yet too caught up in the moment to crave fucking, which she’d normally want when she was this aroused.

  She wanted to experience this, dammit. Experience whatever it was Drake wanted to give her.

  Even if it included anger, though she’d have to remember to ask him when they were calm again why he was annoyed in the first place.

  If they were ever calm. Calm didn’t seem to happen when she and Drake were together, even though everything about the colors in Drake’s house, everything about the way he conducted his life, suggested he liked to surround himself with serenity to the point of austerity.

  But he was anything but austere within his almost monastic bedroom. Here, he was fierce.

  He brought his hand down against her ass again and again until her head swam with pain and pleasure, until everything was crimson and nothing—not her work, not Drake’s odd behavior, not the bills she should be juggling now that she’d gotten her paycheck from the bakery—mattered except the moment. Jen yelped and jumped and mewled with each blow, then begged for more. Her ass was burning, as was her pussy. Her nipples were hard and aching where they rubbed against the sheets. She smelled the dark muskiness of her desire rising in the warm room, balanced by the rich cinnamon-brown spice of Drake’s need and the hot sharpness of sweat, both his and hers.

  Jen was quivering, on the edge of an orgasm or maybe taking off to another dimension, when Drake stopped spanking her, instead reaching between her open legs to tease her drenched cunt. The touch jolted through her like electricity, pushing her already incredible arousal one notch higher, but not pushing her over the edge. The slightest pressure on her clit would be enough to bring her off, but Drake seemed to be touching everywhere but her clit. “Please,” she begged. “I’m so close. Please.” He chuckled softly and kept up the teasing, taunting touch. “I need… Please let me come.” She tried to squirm so her clit and his exploring fingers would meet, but instead of obliging, Drake withdrew his fingers.

  “Not until I’m ready—and I’m not ready.” His voice was blue-black, starless night. “My decision, Jen. And I’m inclined to make you wait, just like I was waiting for you to get home or at least hear from you.”

  A flash of that acid green again, not anger exactly, but irritation, tempered with a warmer hint, maybe concern. His attitude reminded Jen a bit of her father when she straggled in late as a teenager, and it should have been annoying, but those colors were just flashes against the sexy darkness of his voice, against its whisky intonations, against the way his hard, muscled arms held her while he scolded, not like she was a prisoner, but like she was something fragile and precious that he was afraid to lose.

  She shivered from the sheer intensity of his voice, of his touch. It made her ache to come even more than she had before, but in some way she couldn’t start to explain, it also eased the jagged edges of her need, made it endurable. “Yes,” she whispered. “Yes.” She was affirming what he’d said about not com
ing, but as she spoke, she realized she was affirming something bigger, something so new and fragile it could only be acknowledged during the rawness of a moment like this. If she was thinking clearly, she’d rationalize it away.

  “Yes,” he replied, and she swore he not only understood all she’d packed into that word, all the tentative and terrifying notions and emotions behind it, but he was echoing them. “Yes indeed.”

  Then he picked up the little leather paddle. “This is a tawse,” he said in a voice that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in a classroom, explaining some new concept to a bunch of freshmen. He showed her the instrument, turning it over and around as he spoke. “It has two slappers and a light but stiff core. This style is sometimes called a viper because of the V-shaped slappers. It stings in a different way than a flat cut.”

  “Worse?” She swallowed nervously.

  She felt him shrug, though she couldn’t see it in her current position. “Just different. Sharper than a flat slapper, with sting as well as thud. Some people love it. Others hate it.” Sprawled across Drake’s lap, she couldn’t see his face, but she bet he smiled, slow and sexy, when he added, “So we’ll have to experiment with both sometime. Compare and contrast.” As he talked, he’d been stroking her sensitized ass with his free hand. On compare and contrast, he dug his strong fingers into the tender flesh, making her first wince and then sigh as discomfort transmuted to desire.

  Then he smacked her ass with the tawse.

  The blow was only lightly painful, a mix of sting and thud that felt delicious on her already sensitive flesh, but the loud popping sound made her jump. She giggled as she did, knowing the reaction was all out of proportion to the level of sensation.

  “Funny, is it? It’s not supposed to be funny.” He struck again, harder this time.

  It still sounded startlingly loud, and she still jumped, even though she knew to expect it, knew the explosion was one leather strip popping against the other and had little to do with how it felt. This definitely hurt more than the first strike. It stung. It seared.

  And it faded immediately to a wonderful throb that echoed in her clit. She sighed and wriggled her butt. Her tongue didn’t seem up to forming words, but her actions seemed to get the point across: she wanted more of the tawse.

  And he gave it to her. Gave it to her until she wasn’t sure whether she should laugh or cry, or maybe both. The black-and-blue leather striking again and again on her ass and the tender flesh of her upper thighs hurt. She might end up with bruises. But at the same time, she felt wonderful. Floaty. Hot and moist, a swirling combination of crimson and azure. On the edge of danger, because, after all, she was being beaten by someone she scarcely knew, but at the same time, as safe as she’d ever felt in her life. Strong and fragile and brightly colored as one of her own glass sculptures.

  The orgasm hit as a surprise. Not a tidal wave. You could see those coming if you were paying attention. More like an earthquake, rumbling up from somewhere deep inside her, somewhere dark yet vivid, leaving her shaken at the most fundamental level. She cried out something as the waves broke inside her, and she dimly realized it was Drake’s name.

  Drake’s hand locked in her hair, drawing her head up sharply. “Thought I told you not to come,” he snarled, “before I permitted you to do so.”

  Ironically, she clenched, almost pushed over the edge again by the fierceness in his voice.

  “Good thing I enjoyed watching you. Don’t let it happen again, though, or I’m walking away for a while and leaving your hands tied behind your back.” One hand was still tangled in her hair, but he used the other to guide her half upright. Then he fell back onto the bed, taking her with him, drawing her into a deep kiss. She arched against him, suddenly desperate for the erection that tented his shorts. If her hands had been free, she’d have undressed him, but as it was, all she could do was move against him and surrender to the power of the kiss.

  Drake worked his way down her body, suckling first one nipple, then the other, pushing her toward the brink again. She tried to review the minerals she’d need to color the glass for her next round of projects, tried to distract herself from the sweet pull and tug of Drake’s mouth and the nip of his teeth on her breast, the strength of his fingers as they rolled the other nipple, the sensation building between her legs, from the swirling colors behind her eyes.

  She succeeded then, but when he shifted his attention to her clit and slipped two fingers into her pussy, she knew it was hopeless. And he would stop, she knew it, would walk away if she came without permission.

  So she did something she thought she’d never do. She begged, “Please, may I come? Please let me come…” The embarrassment of asking made her even hotter, or maybe it was the delight of knowing she was doing what he wanted.

  “Promise you’ll call me if you’re not coming home.” His fingers continued to pump as he talked.

  She nodded frantically. She’d have promised far more outrageous things to get his permission to come.

  “This is a rule, Jen. Call if you’re not coming home. Obey it.”

  Maybe it was being this close to orgasm that made it not seem weird—it was weird, right? But she gasped out, “Yes. I’ll obey,” and meant it with every cell of her overwrought body.

  “Then come, Jen. Come for me.” He licked at her clit, and she burst into brightly colored shards.

  While she was still fragmented and floating, Drake slipped away long enough to undress and find a condom. He rolled her onto her side, then entered her from behind. She’d barely noticed him undressing, distracted by the force of her orgasm. She was sorry she’d missed what must have been a good show, and sorrier that she couldn’t watch his muscles strain as he fucked her, observe the expressions of lust on his face, watch him struggle for control, see his storm-gray eyes soften as his own release took him. But the way he moved in her, it didn’t really matter that she couldn’t see. Helpless, her hands bound, she was at his mercy, moving as he moved her, wincing and then smiling every time his hips slammed into her tender ass. Aroused as she already was, it didn’t take long before she found herself on edge again.

  “I’m going to… I need to… Please….” She couldn’t complete a sentence, but Drake knew what she meant.

  “With me, Jen. Just a minute.” He thrust into her a few more times, almost brutally. “Come with me!”

  And she did.

  Drake slipped out of her. He untied her arms, brought them in front of her and retied them with her wrists crossed in front of her. The bonds were loose this time, but he extended a rope to one of the D-rings on the headboard, tethering her while allowing her to move around a bit. The rope’s sweet embrace and Drake’s focus kept Jen floating, her pussy still twitching with aftershock. Her brain slowed to the point her exhaustion could finally catch up with her.

  Slowed enough that Drake slipped out of the bed before she registered he was on the move. “Sleep,” Drake whispered, pulling the sheet over her. “I’ll be back.”

  “Where are you going?” she murmured, fighting the weariness, wishing she could pull him back down to the bed.

  “Downstairs to my study. It’s still early. I have things to do.”

  “So do I. At least more unpacking.” She struggled to sit up, which was hard between her bound arms, the lassitude brought on by good sex and utter exhaustion.

  Drake gently pressed her back down. “What could you possibly do now that you couldn’t do tomorrow, and do better since you’d be more awake?”

  Jen thought for a few bleary seconds and couldn’t answer the question. “Trick question,” she finally responded.

  “Yell if you need to pee. Otherwise, I’ll untie you when I come back. I’ll be nearby. Even you can’t do too much tied to the bed with your hands bound, other than sleep.”

  “And fuck. And get spanked.”

  He grinned suddenly, his severe face looking much younger. “Yes, all that too. But now it’s time to sleep. I’ll be back soon.” He kissed her foreh
ead, not giving her a chance to try to seduce him into staying, and turned out the light as he left the room.

  She listened to his footsteps on the stairs, but she was asleep before he reached the first floor.

  A short time later, she woke to find Drake, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts, standing over the bed. “Join me? Please?” she said, wishing she could pat the side of the bed, but at the same time, enjoying the immobility.

  “I brought you something.”

  “Oh, I bet you did.” She glanced in the general direction of the cock that bulged against the shabby khaki. He stepped away, smiling flirtatiously as he did. He unzipped, not slowly and teasingly, but as if the shorts confined him and he had to get them off before they burst away. He let them fall to the floor casually, without a bit of ceremony, and stepped out of them as if nothing much had happened.

  Then he paused and let Jen look her fill. She wouldn’t say he was posing, exactly, but when a man built like Drake got naked and invited you to take a good look, he didn’t need to strike some sexy-model pose. He was erotic art embodied, standing in front of her, painted by soft twilight through the window, just out of easy reach and in that strange moment, no more touchable than a statue in a museum. Looking was enough.

  The moment stretched sweetly. Jen sighed.

  As she did, her stomach growled, breaking the mood a bit. But only a bit because Drake said, “Now I’m going to do something I very rarely do.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Jen licked her lips in anticipation, trying to imagine what exotic, sensual delight Drake might be fetching from just outside the bedroom door, what a guy like him might “very rarely do” but want to do with her, now, while she was tied up.

  Then, with a dramatic flourish, he produced a pizza box from The Nines in Collegetown. He must have had it delivered while she napped. A rich fragrance redolent of tomato and basil, toasty cheese and fresh crust wafted over to her, and she realized she was starving.