by D. L. King
“Put away the kit, please.”
“Yes, Ma’am.” I gathered the stylus and returned it to the box. After making sure the inkwell was properly stoppered, I closed the lid and thumbed the latch back in place. While I was putting it away, Lina repositioned her head on the pillows and smoothed out the blanket and sheet. I crawled in next to her and placed my head on her chest.
“Pleasant dreams, Lina,” I whispered.
She brushed a strand of hair away from my face. “Good night, Sydney.”
I sighed blissfully, contented, and let the sound of her breathing serenade me to sleep.
I woke at 5:13. It was free time, so I slipped from our bed and walked on the balls of my feet to the bathroom down the hall. I did my business, then went through my exercises. When I was finished, I took a shower. Afterward I wrapped a towel around my waist and went to the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. I twisted so I could examine my Lady’s work. The newest ink was a bit faded; perhaps I shouldn’t have showered so soon after getting it done. She would be annoyed and I would likely face punishment. I felt a thrill at the possibility, but I pushed it out of my mind to finish getting ready.
The few friends and acquaintances who knew details of our relationship found it unusual, to be kind. A few assumed that she hit me or that our physical relationship consisted solely of her whipping or spanking me. Without getting into details, I assured them that they had no reason to be concerned. Yes, she had spanked me. She’d choked me, tied me up, punished me for being naughty or breaking the rules. But it wasn’t about violence or inflicting pain. I couldn’t explain it to them without getting into details far too intimate to share with friends, but I did my best to ease their worries.
I knelt in front of the dresser and opened the bottom drawer, where all of my clothes were neatly folded. My Lady’s outfits took up the majority of the closet space. Today’s outfit was on top, blouse and skirt folded with the underwear and stockings inside. I dressed myself quickly, covering with silk the words my Lady had added to her lexicon the night before. I could almost feel the material brushing over the ink like a kiss.
Once dressed, I went back to the bed and crouched beside my Lady. She was sleeping peacefully, lips slightly parted and her hair hanging loose across her face. I brushed the strands back, ran the tip of my middle finger over her cheek and admired her for a long, quiet moment. Her fingers were curled beside the pillow, and I could see a smudge of ink on the inside of one finger. I wet the pad of my thumb and wiped it away. I woke Lina in the process and she gazed at me sleepily until I noticed.
“Good morning, my Lady,” I whispered. “Did you sleep well?”
“As always. Yourself?”
“Splendidly.” I smoothed her hair so she would look slightly more presentable when she faced herself in the mirror. “I have to go. Is there anything you need before I leave?”
Lina shook her head and kissed my hand. “Have a good day.”
“Is that an order, my Lady?”
She grinned and lifted her head to kiss me properly. “Yes. I shall be very angry if you do not abide.”
“Okay.” I squeezed her shoulder and pulled the blanket back up over her.
I biked to the office, started a pot of coffee and took my station in front of my boss’s office at three minutes to seven. I checked emails and messages, sorting them by priority and how I knew each one would be received. I was nearly finished when I heard the elevator ding. I transferred everything to my tablet and stood up with the computer held against my chest.
Lina came around the corner, attention focused on the phone in her hand. I smiled at the sight of her, all business and completely different from how I’d seen her just a few hours ago. She had been unguarded and vulnerable, a side she showed only to me. She glanced up at me as she passed my desk.
“Ms. West.” She continued into her office without breaking pace. I pursued.
“Good morning, Ms. Ryan,” I said. I placed the phone messages on her desk where she could sort them herself, then consulted the computer. “You have an eight-forty-five with Mr. Peabody, and lunch with Evelyn Jacobi from the Whitney. She emailed and said she would leave the restaurant up to you. I recommend Keens.”
Lina nodded. “Very good. Call and make a reservation.”
“Yes, Ma’am. Is there anything else you need?”
“Not at the moment.”
I nodded. “Then I’ll be at my desk.” I started from the room, but Lina said my name before I reached the door. “Yes, Ms. Ryan?”
She held up a ballpoint pen. “This pen is out of ink.”
“Oh, no.” I walked back to the desk and took it from her. I flattened my palm and scribbled on the meaty part below my thumb. It left a thick black mark. “It seems to be working fine, Ma’am.”
“Does it? My mistake.”
Our fingers brushed when I handed the pen back to her. I knew exactly what I had done by purposefully marking myself. When we got home, I would be punished. My Lady smiled, and I had to fight the urge to smile back at her. I felt a tingle low in my gut as I envisioned what form my penalty would take. I didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to begin the day with an itch I couldn’t scratch, but her smile did things to me I couldn’t control.
“Will there be anything else, Ma’am?” “Not at the moment, Ms. West.”
I nodded and turned on my heel, walking away from her. I ran my fingertips over the illicit ink on my palm, not daring to wash it off until I’d paid for the indiscretion. Lina would put me over her knee, or she would write horrible words on my arms and legs to make me pay for what I’d done. She would make me crawl. She might even make me sleep in the spare bedroom. I hoped it wouldn’t be that one, but whatever punishment my Lady decided upon, I would accept it with grace and humility.
I could hardly wait to see what she would come up with.
COVERT AFFAIRS
V. Florian
The first time we meet, she pistol-whips me across the back of my head, bursting out of a dark corner of a safe house I thought was empty.
I’m angry when I come to again: she has me zip-tied to a chair, the back of my head hurts like fuck and it’s been seven hours and four time zones since my last cup of coffee.
We’re in Paris, or at least a suburb of Paris. I stare at her in the stark light of the bulb above our heads, the night just as stark black outside, but she’s not looking at me. She is carefully cleaning a gun. We are in a dingy kitchen, strewn with dirty dishes from meals stuffed down by god only knows how many covert operatives who have made this their refuge for a few, uneasy hours. I’m not sure she knows I’m awake until she says: “I’ve another one in my lap, so don’t try anything.” Her accent is English. The rich kind, all sharp consonants and nasal vowels. I don’t answer, and she looks up at me. She’s blonde with sharp features, thinner than covert operatives usually are, pale to the point of being anemic. “I’m sorry. Do you speak English?”
“Why don’t you get me the fuck out of this chair, and I’ll tell you what languages I speak,” I spit at her.
“You’re CIA?”
“I could be with Santa Claus for all you should care, this ain’t your safe house,” I say. It’s hard to tell when she’s sitting down, but she looks a few inches taller than me. She is at least ten years older than me, though, and I have fifteen pounds of muscle on her. I could take her. “Who told you about this place?” I ask, as if we were making conversation. Behind my back, I’m carefully finding weak spots in my constraints.
“Someone owed me,” she says, and starts putting her gun back together. “Someone didn’t say you’d stop by though.”
I could stay and make conversation, but I think better of it. While she’s looking down at her work I make a break for it, overturning my chair and the table with it, splintering the back of that fragile old wooden chair and hightailing out of there. She takes a shot at me, but it’s halfhearted, whistling through the air a fair few feet above my head.
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I cut my zip-ties on a piece of broken rebar on an abandoned lot and spend the night rattling back and forth in the artificial light of the metro.
The second time we meet, she’s all dressed up. I’m posing as a security officer at the American embassy in Ljubljana, and she makes me the second she gets in line for the metal detector. I ask her to get out of the line for additional questioning and sure, I’m being a bit rougher than strictly necessary when I pull her into the adjacent room. My head hurt for weeks after our first get-together. The sharp light and bare white walls in here make a stark contrast to the lush, luxurious rooms outside.
“What are you doing here?” I ask her. She doesn’t answer. I have her pushed against a table, my gun between her ribs. “I’m going to pat you down and you’re not going to move a single fucking muscle.”
She won’t have a gun on her. If she needs one she will have stashed it somewhere inside the embassy, or had someone stash it for her. But that’s not what I’m looking for when I upend her purse, rummaging among the lipstick and pressed powder and the thin wallet containing only bills and a good, but fake, Norwegian ID, when I kick her legs apart and drag my hands along the expert, expensive seams of her dress. It’s information. Something letting me know who she is and why she keeps turning up. I find nothing. I make her take off her shoes anyway—she’s still taller than me in her stockinged feet, even though I’m wearing boots— and I run my hands up her legs. Her stockings have seams in the back. They are perfectly aligned with her legs. My hands slip easily up the black material. She’s gripping the end of the table now, looking down at me. The look in her eyes does something to me, but I carefully push the feeling away.
“Maybe a little higher,” she breathes. I stand up and step back.
“You should know shit could go down here tonight,” I say. “So tell me.”
She folds her arms. “We could stand here all night and lie to each other. I won’t get in your way.”
She doesn’t. When we move in, she’s nowhere to be seen. Whatever she was doing there, she got out quickly.
The third time, I’m bleeding. Another safe house, in South London this time, and we have done something necessary but incredibly illegal. Our country would disavow us if we were caught, and the memory of what I’ve done is carefully tucked away in the place in my mind where I put these things.
I’ve been patched up in a different safe house, where they removed the bullet from my shoulder, and where I slept sedated for four hours. Then we had to leave, Derrick and I. We’re not even supposed to be in the UK. But here we are.
Another day, another shabby apartment with frayed wall paper and a kitchen from the 1970s, at best. Derrick dumps me there. He needs to get new papers to get us out of the country and I need to change the bandage on my shoulder. I get some help from a junior British agent—MI5 or MI6, I’m not sure. I’m not sure it matters these days. He has gentle hands. I’m careful not to get any blood on my black fatigues, because I only brought the one pair and I’m not sure when I’ll get a chance to change again.
Somewhere in the apartment a phone rings, and he disappears. When he comes back, he’s pale.
“Someone’s coming in,” he says. “I’m supposed to go. I’m sorry.”
I’m supposed to wait. I find instant coffee in the fridge and boil water in an electric kettle made of yellowing plastic, and then I sit there, listening to the water come to an excruciatingly slow boil, for several long minutes. A wall clock ticks. The burner phone that’s only been in my pocket for a couple of hours beeps with a message. It would be unreadable to anyone but Derrick and me, but the gist is: hang tight, the UK is arranging an airlift. That is unexpected, but then again I’ve learned that covert operations are never as covert as they are supposed to be.
Then she enters. She’s taller than I remember.
“Hello, Emilia,” she says. It’s her way of letting me know what she knows.
“Florence,” I say, showing part of my hand. Two can play that game. “Want some coffee?” She declines. I rummage through the cupboards for a cup and pick a cracked white one with the Royal Air Force logo on the side. I’m not sure Florence is her name—it’s the one name she uses the most, as far as I could find after our run-in in Slovenia.
“Well done today,” she says, leaning against the fridge. She’s cut her hair since then.
“Not sure what you’re talking about,” I say, stirring water into the instant coffee. The spoon clinks against the edge of the cup. This is why we’re lonely, we spooks. It’s layer upon layer of lies. I know people who have been married, briefly, pretending like they are traveling three hundred days a year on business. But it wears you down, lying to someone who trusts you with everything. It never lasts.
That is why we’re drawn to each other. It’s easier with someone who never asks, because they don’t want to tell.
I’ve looked her up by now, and apparently she’s looked me up. Her file is sparse, the kind of blankness that lets you know somebody is well above your pay grade. But I’ve managed to find out some things. She’s grown up rich, in one of those families that can trace its roots to before gunpowder reached Europe. I am none of those things, a child of immigrants who died too soon, grown up in rural Texas. She’s calm, icy cool. I’m rash and hot. But we have things in common too: she was an officer in the British army for years, reaching the rank of captain before turning covert. I was a Marine before disappearing into black ops. We both have notes from worried psychiatrists in our files. If either of us some day becomes less good at what we do, those notes will come into play. Right now, they need us too much to care.
She stands there, arms folded across her chest, watching me sip my coffee.
“You want something from me,” I say. It’s not a question.
“What I’m supposed to do here is make sure you leave the country safely. Nobody really wants a loose cannon on the streets right now,” she says in that crisp accent that manages to annoy me and turn me on at the same time. I let my gaze glide down her clothes, far less revealing this time: a gray blouse of some soft material, black pants, black shoes. They fit her like they should—draped so that you can just see a hint of round breast, a hint of round hip. She falters for a moment, noticing me looking, but continues: “Your colleague is already en route to a suitable airfield. We figured it was safer to transport you separately. A jet will be ready for you in two hours. We need to leave in a little over one.”
That’s not really what I meant, and I won’t let her get away that easily. “You couldn’t task that to the errand boy who was here before?”
“I know what you can do, Emilia. Paris, Ljubljana, Dresden and Beirut last year, Saint Petersburg the year before. Those were all you and your crew, right? I’m not going to leave you with someone green.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. So you’re the muscle?” I shrug. “Fine by me. What did you want to do for an hour?”
“Let me look at your shoulder.” She comes closer. I hold my cup like a shield between us.
“It’s okay. I just changed the dressing.”
She’s close enough that I could grab her and pull her against me. I put my cup down.
“Well, then I just don’t know what we should do,” she smirks.
I grab her.
The door to the bedroom creaks dangerously when we crash into it. Her fingers dig into my neck and her teeth are sunk into my bottom lip. The taste of her kisses is suddenly tinged with iron.
Florence pushes me down on the bed, trying to pull my tank top off, but gives up when faced with the bandage. She pushes it up instead, along with my bra, cool air manifesting as goose bumps on my skin.
She is curiously gentle when touching the shoulder where I’ve been shot. I want to ask her to prod it, push it, push me—I want pain to rush to my head again, make me dizzy. But then she makes me dizzy, her teeth leaving a trail of smarting skin from the side of my cheek down my chest. She lingers at my breasts, blowing cool
air at my nipples, twisting them, biting them. I arch my back, pressing against her, tearing at her clothes.
When she looks up at me, her eyes are dark with need.
I take that moment to relish the reality of this situation. I’ve dreamed of this ever since I had her pushed against the table in that little room in Ljubljana. Maybe since Paris. She’s been on my mind during late nights in cold beds where I’ve tried and failed to sleep.
I was never a good sleeper.
She tugs at my belt and I reach down to pull her up again. I want to feel her, but she won’t let me. “Please,” I breathe, and she shakes her head.
“Soon,” she says, and the promise makes me tremble.
I never fucking tremble.
But when she has peeled off my pants, she comes up for a kiss. She pushes my good arm above my head, holding it there with more force than is strictly necessary. It’s going to leave a bruise, and I’m already looking forward to prodding the sore skin on my transatlantic flight.
“Are you going to be good for me and not move when I let you go?” she asks.
“No,” I say. She digs her free hand into my ribs and I yelp at the sudden pressure. “Fine. Maybe.”
And then her mouth is gone again.
My body protests, but when I feel her teeth on the inside of my thighs, her nails scratching my hips, it settles.
Her mouth is soft and wet and harsh at the same time, her tongue painting sweet circles around my clit, the reverberations of every move ripping through me like thunder. I want to touch her, but I promised to behave.
My black bush obscures most of her face. Florence moans and her lips vibrate against me while her tongue grows more insistent in smaller, tighter circles and she has me where she wants me, has me bucking against her, has me surrendering, has me coming in her mouth while she licks up every drop of it.
I want a cigarette after, even though it’s been years since I stopped. I started because it felt suitable for someone like me. I stopped because I decided I could. The craving is a cliché, like the room around us: impersonal enough to be revealing. But Florence is no cliché, resting her head against my thigh, wiping wetness off her chin.