Just like that, without artifice or evasion. There isn’t so much as a hint of sarcasm, and certainly no sudden rush to correct himself. No changing of that word ‘wish’. It stands as it is, completely astonishing just because it’s so singular. He never expresses wishes to me. I wasn’t even sure if he had them, and certainly I had no idea he had them more than I could possibly imagine.
That sounds like hyperbole to me, and Cyrian despises it. He told me so only last Wednesday, when I said Brussels sprouts were worse than biting into something Satan pooped out. ‘If Satan took a shit in your mouth, Molly, you would probably dissolve from the inside out. Honestly, you exaggerate with such flagrant disregard for sense, you make me discuss a made-up religious icon simply to set you straight.’
And yet here we are, in the aftermath of him doing the same. He is even less likely than Satan to admit a feeling, a longing, a regret, but he still did it. And about something so ridiculous, too – does he really think he was the one who went too far? He has to know he never could. I have to tell him he never could, so that he doesn’t think so for a second longer.
But he gets there first.
‘I also realise that I have neglected to do what I ought to have in these circumstances, for which I can only ask your forgiveness. I was ashamed and therefore convinced myself it was not a concern. But it is and it must be, or else the whole business is barely worth a thing.’
I’m stunned, and spend far too long trying to make sense of it. By the time he asks the next question I’m so lost in the fact that he apologised that I fail to see what he’s suggesting – or even what he apologised for. I just nod when he asks if he may rectify it, then let him lead me to a room I’ve never been in.
Once we are there, though, it starts to sink in.
I see a bed with a great brass frame and covers folded so neatly they could have been done by a machine, and my stomach decides to drop right out of my body. It can’t take any more revelations. It hears my mind whisper the words ‘his bedroom’ and just has to go.
And I don’t blame it. I feverishly review all the things he just said, trying in vain to work out what he intended. He told me he has responsibilities, but I am almost scared to imagine what they might be. All I know is that he wants to rectify something in this spare little room like something from a monastery, and despite my best efforts that makes me shake. Not out of fear, I think.
But out of some new thing that has no name.
Some emotion too intense to speak of, three parts anticipation and seven excitement. Add a little uncertainty and there it is – the thing I am feeling when he asks me to turn around. By the time he gets close enough to touch, my body is shuddering with it. And then he does touch, and I think it’s possible that I may just die. I certainly stop being able to breathe.
I know, because he comments on it.
‘If it is of any comfort to you, I have no intention of doing what I did before. You can be at ease, Molly, I promise you,’ he says, but only because he is an idiot. He has to be. If he was really as smart as he mostly seems, he would see this for what it is: he touched me somewhere on my back, and my body went absolutely to pieces. Seriously, I’m never going to be able to get it back the way it was.
He touched me.
With his fingers.
And granted, he only did it where the buttons are. But the fact that he makes no real contact with my skin nor puts any pressure on my flesh doesn’t matter in the least to me. How could it, when he’s touching the buttons to undo them? He undoes the buttons. He undoes them. He doesn’t reorder them until they’re the right way. He gets all the way to the waist and then he keeps going, until my dress parts like wings to reveal everything underneath.
My bare back, the silky underwear he bought for me, the stockings he asked for and that I wanted to give him, all so suddenly exposed I should feel self-conscious. I know why I don’t, though. I should ask him to stop – but I know why I don’t do that too.
It’s because I would do anything to see what happens next. This is uncharted territory; this is the surface of some distant planet. Everything that happens from here on in is completely alien, and not just to me. To him. He has never done anything like this with anyone else, I can tell. I would know it even if he’d never breathed a word about it, because when he turns me to slide the sleeves down my arms I see his expression. I see colour in those cold eyes and tension in his jaw.
And when his fingers accidentally glance against my bare skin, he makes a fist. As though nothing, nothing in the world could be more unbearable to him than this. He has to force himself to get this close to another person, so much so that I want to tell him he doesn’t have to. Whatever this is, I can do without it. I don’t want him to suffer for me, and yet when I tell him he says:
‘Perhaps, then, if you would be so kind as to do the rest.’
I mean, what am I meant to do with that? I think it might be the most oddly arousing thing anyone has ever said to me. There’s something about the relief in his voice, and the halting way he asks. The politeness of it. He expects me to carry on undressing, I realise, but I can’t do it. My hands are shaking too much. My mind is on some sex-based auto-pilot. All I can think is he’s going to fuck me, even though I know that can’t be true.
And I’m right.
I just don’t realise that being right is not going to be any better for my already overcharged body. If anything, his intentions are about a million times worse. They involve me awkwardly trying to get the rest of my clothes off, while he watches with eyes that seem to get heavier and heavier. By the time I’m naked before him the lids are so low I can barely see the blue beneath. He looks at me the way other people run their hands all over their skin – in the way he wants to but never can.
But that’s not the most intense thing about this.
That comes when he tells me to lie on the bed. ‘Face down,’ he says, then seems to hesitate before adding something more. Something he needs to do, I think, but barely wants to admit. ‘And please refrain from looking,’ he says, as though this whole thing is going to be so embarrassing he would rather I didn’t see him do it. He wants to hide it from me, which makes me wonder even harder what he might have in mind. By the time I’m lying there with my face pressed into the pillow – the one that smells like him, oh, God, it smells like him – I’m just about beside myself.
I’m shaking not with that new emotion but with the million guesses that are currently fluttering through my head. He must mean fucking, I feel sure, but that sounds way too straightforward. So maybe it’s something perverted, something he put together out of necessity, something born of his bizarrely narrow needs and his many boundaries. He has to put on a mask and then do you with his right foot, my mind tries to tell me, but I should have understood really.
I don’t even know why it shocks me. He pretty much told me what he wanted to do, and I just didn’t listen. But, Lord in heaven, I’m listening now. The very second I feel something as fine and soft as silk on my bare backside, all my senses sit up and pay close attention. They can hardly do anything else. The sensation is too exquisite, the reason for it too achingly clear. He doesn’t want to do a perverted sex thing.
He wants to do something that is weird only to him.
He wants to care for me.
And, good God, the way he goes about it. I can almost understand why he doesn’t want me to look, because in some ways this is much more intimate and intense than anything more overt. He does it so slowly, so deliberately, everything so soft and gentle that something definitely slips out of the corner of my eye. I try to keep it in, but how can I? He is soothing the red marks he made, as sweetly as anyone could. I think he may even be using some cool lotion, applied with what I feel sure must be his fingers.
Though I’m not disappointed when I realise otherwise. I should be, considering how much it would mean to have him really caress my bare skin. But I find it hard to be, when I think of the lengths he’s gone to in order to get th
is right. To circumvent his own issues and give me what I need. He thought about it so carefully, I know, because the only thing more arousing than his hand is the thing he uses.
A paintbrush, he’s using a paintbrush. And when he eases it around I can tell: he’s writing letters on my skin. That was an S, and there is an O. Then after that I don’t need to discern the rest, because I already know. He just spelled out ‘sorry’, as though he ever needs to be after this. My face is wet before he’s finished. Every nerve ending in my body is singing, and not just for obvious reasons like this feels fucking amazing.
For smaller ones, like the way the charged air stirs against my skin. He keeps shifting, and I’m so hyper-aware of it every time he does. I can’t see his thigh but I know it’s close to mine, and when he turns a little to better coat the stripe just below my back, I almost make out something more. The cuff of his shirt, the slide of the unnecessary belt, all of it so tantalising I come close to turning a dozen times. I just want to see for sure how near he is. I want to know if that was really his cuff.
Or was it something else?
I don’t know, and I swear that not knowing is starting to make my skin fizz. I think my teeth may be trying to chatter, even though I have my jaw clamped so tight shut you couldn’t get so much as a pin into my mouth. It has to be, because if I let my lips flap around I know some really weird sounds will come out. I can already feel them burning the back of my throat, and that’s before he starts making these ever-decreasing circles with that slippery, silky brush. Pretty soon he’s going to be easing it into the seam between, and it seems clear that doing so has nothing to do with healing me.
But I pretend otherwise for a little longer. I let myself be lulled by the slow, easy sensuousness of someone painting on my skin, without thinking for a second about what this might mean. It’s just like getting a massage from a professional, I tell myself, only minus the music and the furniture from Ikea and the undercurrent of practical professionalism.
Because no matter what I do, I can’t persuade myself that the latter is there. He is not professional about this in the slightest, and getting less and less so by the second. Almost as though he is on an icy hill somewhere, and once he stands at the top he inevitably finds himself sliding down. One foot in the wrong place and it’s curtains, yet still he keeps going. Sometimes I think he doesn’t even know he’s falling.
His hand skirts a little to the left, and suddenly there it is:
Me, trying not to scream into the pillow.
Stop, I want to say, stop, but what if he has no idea he’s started? I might have a weal right over the outer edges of my sex, even though he was never as cruel as that. He knows he wasn’t. He has every idea, and yet he still does it. And he still tells me to turn over, despite how little sense that makes.
There is definitely nothing there for him to deal with. Nothing but my aching, trembling body, and its most sensitive bits. Nothing but all the stuff he looks at like a ravenous dog who’s trying to pretend he doesn’t really want to eat your dinner. No, no, you go on. I just want to sit here staring at you for no reason. I have no other intentions, beyond being your helpful companion.
Christ, what if he wants to be more than my helpful companion?
Though even the ‘helpful companion’ part sounds brilliant. It gets me sexy punishments and fierce conversations, followed by this delicious nightmare – because it is delicious, and it is a nightmare. By the time I do turn I’m almost losing it. Seventeen warring emotions are competing for the Hunger Games title in my head, from that searing self-consciousness again, all the way through to plain old fuck-hungry lust. And when they get together, it does some really odd things to me. I squirm in a way I never have before, half like a whore wanting nothing more than for him to see my plump, perky tits, and half like I could run and hide.
I arch my back so he can really see, my stiff nipples sticking up in a deliriously rude fashion. And then I curl inwards, in an attempt to hide my broad hips, my soft belly – all those things that say how weak I am and how imperfect. I am not glacial, the way he is. Not firm and honed to a fine edge by years of abstinence. I’ve been forged in something far less fine; I’m messy and sloppy and overrunning my own boundaries. I have to tangle and twine my fingers around the brass headboard to stop myself grabbing.
But none of that seems to matter in the slightest to him.
On the contrary – he takes in all those details with more avid interest than I thought he was capable of. In particular he seems to find my hands completely fascinating, like an alien attempting to understand what makes someone so greedy and short on resistance. Though somehow I suspect he’s about to get a crash course. Whatever restraint he had is starting to dissolve, I can tell. I can see it in his expression, so much softer and slacker than usual. I can hear it in his voice, when he tells me to be still for him. Hell, even the words themselves suggest as much.
For him, I think, as though he has needs that he wants fulfilled.
Be still, I think, as though any more movement will send him over the edge.
Then finally there are the things he chooses to do. Oh, the things, the lovely, lovely things. They all but sing in my blood. Each one is so carefully designed to make me worse that I can’t fail to see what he’s really doing. He’s crossing the line into something flagrantly sexual. He’s not pretending this is just practical or a punishment any more, and that just kills me. I can hardly watch the way he holds the brush, as he eases the point around my tight little nipple. Eyes so intent on my every move that I doubt my toes could twitch without him knowing it. Almost holding his breath as he does it, as though it takes every ounce of his focus and concentration. No prevarication in any of it, no bones about it.
He rubs me there, with the full intention of arousing me.
Even the way he leans over me is lewd – with most of his body, like he wants to loom, like he wants to smother me in his shadow and his scent. And he’s successful. I can hardly see or smell anything but him, it’s all too intense to stand but so much sweeter for it. I could sink into him up to my eyebrows as if he were some deadly sandpit, and still love every second of it. I could breathe him in until there was nothing else left in my body, and be just fine in my dying moments.
But when I see him bring the brush to his lips…
That’s when I lose most of my calm.
I just don’t expect it. I thought he would go back to the oil he has on the nightstand, to make the tip of the brush wet. But he doesn’t. He brings it up as though to kiss it, so casual about it I can hardly believe it. And then he licks it, and my disbelief doubles and triples and eighty millions. I see the tip of his tongue, and still struggle to accept what I’m seeing – partly because I thought his tongue was a myth designed to destroy womankind. But mostly because oh, God, oh, God, the way he goes about it.
Why did he have to go about it like that?
He practically tastes it. Everything about it is sinful, from the slow, slick draw of his tongue over the brush to what he does with it next. I wait with bated breath to feel the coolness I know is coming to my straining nipples, and instead he just ever so slowly lets it trail down, down, oh, way too far down. It gets to my belly button and my mind shouts: he’s not fucking stopping there abandon ship abandon ship.
And my mind is right. I should abandon ship, because he’s not stopping. He keeps right on going until he gets to the slight curve of my sex, lightly furred and tightly closed – though God knows why it is. As soon as the brush coils close to that place I want to fling my legs apart, but when I try to I suddenly get what the problem is.
The unbearable, blissful tension seems to have fused my thighs together. I try to budge them and nothing happens, though I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. When I go to breathe, all that comes out is a whine. Every time I try to keep still something jumps or jiggles or attempts to escape out of the window, as though disobedience is the only way to deal with this. My body has to divorce itself from my mind.
And especially after he just goes ahead and does it anyway. The point of the brush is so fine that all it takes is a deft hand and a little pressure, and somehow it slides right into that neat seam. I feel that cool smoothness skim my clit and ever so slightly part my swollen lips, then lose control of myself almost completely. My hips buck without my permission. My breathing comes quick and high and I can feel my fingers slipping off the brass.
And that’s before he returns the brush to his lips.
As though he’s going to lick the taste of me on it, I think, and I just about burst with pleasure when he does. My clit jerks and swells beneath the pressure of it. For a second I have to close my eyes – but only for a second because, by God, I want to see. It was bad enough when he was just licking and touching bits of me. But wanting to taste, wanting to have me in his mouth…I have to take every bit of it in. Every little detail, from the flicker of light in his eyes when he sees and feels just how slippery I am to the almost eager way he goes back for more. He pushes the brush as far down as he can get, and then when it’s nowhere near enough he just says. He tells me. ‘Spread your legs,’ he says, and after that I simply cannot help it.
I moan at the sound of those words. I mewl like some desperate, horny slut.
Most probably because that is what I am. I am a desperate and horny slut, who has to obey him immediately. Just the word ‘spread’ is enough to do it, so sinful in that smoky voice of his. It practically licks my clit, and in a much more intimate way than the brush. It makes that hot, wet ache intensify to the point where I don’t know what to do. I want to rock to alleviate it, but when I try it only gets worse. My head floods with thoughts of how I must look – like I’m fucking someone who isn’t there, like I’m so hot to trot I could hump the air – and when it occurs all of these thick, tingly waves flow through me.
Like I’m coming, I think.
But I know I’m not.
I know because when he starts to stand up, I do something unthinkable. I lose my mind in that brief, lust-addled moment, so greedy for an end to this torment that I just don’t process. I put out a hand, and I grab him.
Sweet Agony Page 10