She looked into his eyes and saw heat. And urgency. She saw red for power and passion, but she didn’t see anything bad. She swallowed and said, “I choose you, then. And if I change my mind, I’ll say. Thought you were in a hurry.”
She saw his smile, starting slow and then growing, heard a faint ripping sound, and then he’d set the roll down and was holding a strip of black. He came down over her, and she was glad for his heat.
She thought he was going to kiss her. Instead, he laid that black strip over her eyes, and the world went dark.
No stars now. No moon. She said, “Marko,” but he was shoving her knees up to her chest and saying, “Keep them there,” in a voice from which all the silkiness had vanished. After that, he took her hands, put them on either side of her calves, and she was already whimpering.
She felt the tape wrapping around her wrists, her calves, fastening them together, and then she felt it going around her again. He said, “If you tug, it’ll loosen. If you tell me to let you go, I’ll stop and do it.” She heard a rustle, and knew his jeans were coming off. She wanted to see him, and she didn’t. She was halfway there already, and he hadn’t touched her yet.
And then he did. The heat of his big body coming down over hers, holding himself up somehow, probably on his palm, and then the soft sleeping bag falling over them both, all the way to her neck. His hand shoving her hips over so he could get on top of her, and then the brush of his lips on hers. She was opening her mouth, needing him deeper, but not able to pull him in. It was frustrating, and it was so exciting.
She didn’t need to pull him in. He was already doing it. His tongue in her mouth, his hand in her hair. He whispered in her ear, “I’m going to fuck you so good tonight. So hard, and so deep. You’re going to be so tight for me. That OK with you?” and she couldn’t even answer, only moan. She felt his smile against her neck, and he said, “I’ll take that as a yes.”
He bit her neck, and then he did it again, and she was shaking. His hand was stroking down her bound arm and up it again, and his mouth was moving down her body. At her breast, settling in there. Moving her body upright again so the other hand could play with her other breast, pinching gently, then not so gently, until she was pulling at the tape, her wrists tugging against her calves, and crying out.
And when his palms were on the backs of her thighs, and his mouth was on her? She’d already started to rock. As good as it had felt before when he’d held her wrists, when he’d spread her thighs with his hands? This was so much more. This was… helpless.
No modesty. No power to move away. She couldn’t even see what he was doing, or what he was planning to do next. When he put a finger inside her, she gave a pained cry, and when he added another one, she tried to move, and couldn’t. His hand. His mouth. Harder and softer, teasing nibbles and mind-blowing suction. When he took his fingers out of her, she missed them, but she didn’t complain until she lost his mouth.
“No,” she moaned. “Don’t stop.”
“I’m not going to stop,” he said. “No worries. Just going to add a little extra.”
“I don’t think I can take extra. Just keep doing it.” She couldn’t see. She couldn’t move. It was maddening. It was turning her liquid.
The buzz, first, and then the touch. Vibrating. Circling. Closer and closer.
He’d never done that before. For that matter, nobody had. She’d never been a multiple-orifice kind of girl. But that circling… it felt good. “You can say no.” His voice dark, rough as sandpaper. “Or you can say yes.”
“Uh…” She tried to shift, and he circled even closer, then retreated, all the way up to her tailbone, because her lower back was off the ground. “Yes,” she gasped. “Yes. But be… uh…”
“Careful,” he said. He had a hand over her now, was rubbing her in the way that felt best. Not hard, and not aiming straight for that magic button, but just below it, so the vibrations went everywhere. And he was slipping that little bullet vibrator closer… closer… teasing at the entrance, and then, when she was gasping, slipping it inside.
She tensed, called out, and said, “Now. Now. Please. Oh.” And he kept that bullet going, set his mouth to her, and she pulled at the tape, wailed out the pleasure, and came like a freight train. Head banging, body shuddering and spasming, all the way gone.
It took every bit of self-control he had not to do something he shouldn’t. He’d kept to his timeline and his plan all the way until he’d shoved that vibrator up her sweet little arse and she’d started to come. Seeing her trussed up, blindfolded, open and helpless… he wasn’t going to be able to last.
He left the vibrator where it was, because that was feeling good, and he wanted to see her mouth stay open. He wanted to hear her scream again. And when he shoved her legs to one side and pushed himself slowly inside her? She was so tight, tied that way, that he groaned, swore, and held himself still. She was still convulsing around him, and that was almost too much right there.
“Marko,” she said. “Marko.”
“Yeh,” he managed to grit out between his teeth. “I’m here.” Like he could be anywhere else. “Tell me.”
She was going to tell him to cut the tape, to take out the vibrator. He was going to have to do it.
That was when he felt the ground start to vibrate.
“Fuck me,” she said. “Please. Marko. Fuck me hard.”
Oh, bloody hell. The vibration was growing, too deep for hearing, but there. And he was plunging deep, she was coming again, or still, and he was swearing, every filthy thing he could think of. In Basque. In English. He was telling her everything he’d ever wanted to do to her, everything he was doing to her now, unable to help himself, and she was keening. Beneath them, the ground was shaking, and around them, the noise was growing. Thundering.
A herd of elephants. A stampede, almost on them now. The whistle piercing the night. And the hurricane was here. The rumble. The shake. The roar. The engine sweeping past, then the long line of boxcars and tank cars and refrigerator cars. Shaking the ground, and them, to the bone.
Noise. Vibration. Nyree calling out, “OhGodOhGodOhGodOhGod,” her body pulling the orgasm out of him, and he was shouting. He was shaking. He was losing his mind.
She was wrecked. Boneless. Somehow, she realized vaguely, Marko had got all the tape off her, and it hadn’t stuck at all. Must be special. The stars wheeled overhead, and the vibration was dying out under them, around them, the hum from the rails fading away. And Marko was lying over her, propped on his elbows, rubbing her wrists, kissing her mouth.
“Uh…” she said. “The beach was never… like that.”
He laughed softly against her mouth and kissed her again. “I haven’t done that in a long time. It’s never felt as good as that.”
“Haven’t done what? Boy, this isn’t comparison time.”
Another laugh. “Nah. The train, that’s all. Call it a full-body experience.”
“And you weren’t even the one taped up.”
He stroked the hair away from her temple, then brushed a kiss over first one closed eyelid, then the other, before he settled over her mouth again and kissed her with so much sweetness, her heart swelled. Without deciding to, she was wrapping her arms around his bare back, stroking her hands over the muscle there, trying to pull him closer, like she hadn’t had enough already. Like she needed him to stay on her, and in her, forever. “I’ve never done anything like that before,” she confessed. “Nothing close. I wasn’t sure. The only reason I could do it was… I knew you’d stop.”
“Mm.” He rolled to his side, but kept his arm across her body, and his own body was so warm, she had to snuggle in. “Always. No trust without promises kept, eh. That’s why I keep my promises.”
She moved so her head was on his chest, and he stroked his hand over her hair, pulled the sleeping bag more thoroughly over her, and tucked her in tight under his arm. “I’d say,” she said, “that any night when you get blindfolded, get done that hard, feel a freight train,
and see stars—that’s a good night.” She sighed. “That’s… paintworthy.”
On a breezy May midday nearly three weeks after what Marko had taken to calling her “train ride,” Nyree was hitting the button to lock the Escape, reminding herself to take the keys, trying to keep her heart under control, and hustling across the Auckland Airport carpark with Ella to meet Marko.
The problem was, it had been much too long since those stolen five days after they’d come back from Tekapo, when Ella had stayed on with Caro after all, saying, ‘Too boring to be in Auckland the whole time, since I don’t have friends and all.’
Five days during which Nyree had gone to work with absolute reluctance and raced home afterwards. That night, too, when Marko had come in to eat at Bevvy, and how it had looked to see him walking through the door, taking up too much space. Hearing the buzz beginning around him, and knowing he was there for her. Getting the chance to flirt with him even as she knew people were watching, the chance to tease in a way she’d never done in her life, absolutely safe and out on the edge at the same time.
Five days when she’d eaten too much, laughed too hard, and possibly had too much sex in too many new positions, judging by the soreness of her muscles afterwards. Five days when she hadn’t painted nearly enough, a fact she’d pointed out to Marko when she’d left him at the airport two weeks earlier, en route to South Africa with the Blues.
He’d grinned at her, said, “So you’re waiting for me to set you free, eh. A bit like last night.” When he’d used that tape again, this time to fasten her wrists together over her head. Before he’d draped her legs over the back of his couch.
She might have shivered a tiny bit at that, because he’d smiled some more, leaned across the seat, kissed her much too deeply for public consumption, and said, “I’ll miss you too, baby. Two weeks is two weeks too long. Be good while I’m gone.”
“Telling that to the… wrong person,” she’d said. Not as firmly as she might have, because he’d been kissing her neck, absolutely heedless of anybody watching. “I’m not the one with, uh… access to temptation.”
“No? And yet you’re the one working at a restaurant, wearing those pretty clothes, sending that message you just can’t help, and meeting all those fellas who’ve had too much to drink. I can’t even scare the bastards away, because the clientele keeps changing. Bugger.”
“You may have to trust me. And I send a message? What message?” Her fingers had curled through his hair, she’d rubbed her cheek against his, and all she’d wanted was to keep him with her.
“Dunno about anybody else,” he’d said, “but that message says ‘life’ to me. Always has. Possibly ‘sex’ as well. And here’s a thought for you. You may have to do the same thing, trust-wise.” He’d kissed her mouth again, nothing but sweetly, run his hand over the side of her face, looked into her eyes, and said, “You can, you know.”
She’d felt that treacherous lurch of her heart. “So can you.”
After that? He’d opened the door and left her. She’d watched him head into the terminal and be stopped by two blondes before he could even get to the door. He’d posed for one selfie, then another, and she’d driven away thinking, You could have done something easier than this.
Except that she hadn’t had a choice.
Two weeks, then, of paying back those traded shifts at the restaurant. Two weeks of losing herself in her painting again, her bedroom studio filled with the smell of acrylics and the music of Spain, her head filled with the saturated blue of a mountain lake, the yellows and browns and sage greens of the subalpine heath, and the velvet black and blazing white night sky that a woman might have looked at, forty or fifty or an impossible sixty thousand years earlier, from a sleeping hollow dug out of the red Australian earth. Her heart filled with the memory of a freight train passing too close and the orgasm of her life shaking her body from outside and inside, and the man over her, inside her, piercing all the way to her soul. Feeling all that power tumbling her over, around, down and down, into the star-strewn blackness. Helpless.
Two weeks to let her imagination run free, to feel it all again, to take it further, and then to put it on canvas with all the genius and control she could possibly command, while the lack of sleep left her ever more giddy and reckless. Falling asleep with a brush in her hand, and waking up to paint again. Yanking herself out of the painting trance with an almost physical effort to do some lonesome-cat tending, to fix meals with Ella and hear about school, because people mattered, too, and Ella was right here. Of reading the card of the day and Marko’s sexy, sweet texts, and trying to let him know, in her answers, that she was thinking of him. Two weeks of too much to do, and not enough Marko.
And last night.
The first text had come a couple hours after the match, when Marko was probably at a bar surrounded by leggy South African blondes. He’d written, She could be a bit more subtle. But what am I saying. It’s my mum. Also, you’re going to think this is the only reason I can’t wait to see you. Have to admit it’s looming large, but it’s not the only reason.
It had been followed by the most phallic Tarot card Nyree had ever seen.
The Ace of Wands, his mum’s text had said. This one’s about giving all your energy, putting it out there. Since your match is over, that’s not it. It’s about following your impulses, wherever they lead. I know they won’t steer you wrong.
Nyree had answered, typing as fast as her thumbs would move, not waiting to think better of it, Could be I want your energy, and your impulses, too. Miss you so much.
He’d replied,
Got this one as well. More high-minded than the place I went, maybe.
Another card, then. Another message.
The Star. This is Nyree’s. Tell her—dreams really do come true. It’s all right to believe. And remember, baby—you aren’t the only one with that energy, or with those dreams.
Now, she crossed the street to the terminal at the zebra stripes, and Ella said, “You’re acting nervous. I’m the one who should be nervous.”
Nyree hesitated where she was, then finished crossing before turning to Ella.
It’s not enough to look, she reminded herself. You have to see.
Ella tucked a lock of hair behind her ear, trying for casual. But when her hand fell, her thumb was running over her fingertips, just like that first day in the furniture shop. Nyree said, “Nobody’s going to miss that you’re pregnant, but Tom already knows, remember? So does most of the team, probably, since that school visit, but that’s all good, too. Like you said—you’re not wearing any scarlet letter. You’re doing a beautiful thing. And you are beautiful.”
Ella snorted. “Yeh, right.”
“Yeh,” Nyree said firmly. “Right.” Ella was wearing a crossover yellow-gold top that lit up her skin, as well as a stretchy brown skirt that would’ve nearly reached the knee on Nyree, but didn’t come anywhere close on Ella’s long legs. Nyree had heard tallboy drawers opening and closing that morning, then heard them some more, and had known it was Ella changing clothes too many times. When the girl had finally come downstairs, Nyree had seen the tears and the fear just under the surface. But at this moment, all she looked was gloriously young and perfectly ripe, like the goddess of fertility. “You wait,” Nyree promised her. “You’ll see.”
She told herself, too. Dreams really do come true. And not just dreams about sex.
They were almost late, which wasn’t just due to fear on Ella’s part. It had been Nyree’s doing, too. Now, though, they were here, through the doors and into the echoing hall, just having approached the knot of women and kids when the first group of big, tired bodies headed out of International Arrivals and into the terminal.
A group of middle-aged men, that is. The coaching staff, which was another reminder Nyree didn’t need. Next Saturday, the Blues would be playing the Highlanders at Eden Park, here in Auckland, and on Friday, her mum was coming up. Nyree had asked Kane not to mention her new living arrangements to her mu
m or his dad, and he hadn’t. How did she know? Because she hadn’t felt the Disapproval Waves washing over her all the way from Dunedin, that was how. Marko didn’t need those, and neither did she.
She stopped thinking about coaches, then, because a familiar, tiny figure with a mop of black curls was shrieking and charging under the barrier, arms waving.
“Daddddeeee!” The word reverberated even above the hubbub, and there was that famous grin and full-arm Maori tattoo as Koti James, first out of the doors, grabbed his daughter in mid-charge, swung her high overhead, and cuddled her close while she put her little hands on his cheeks and laughed into his face. Nothing but loved, and nothing but secure.
“Aww,” Ella said as Koti reached Kate, who was holding the baby. He put a gentle arm around her, gave her a lingering kiss, and said something to her. Something sweet again, Nyree assumed, but then she stopped watching them, and Jocelyn Pae Ata, too, who was getting her own absolutely enthusiastic kiss from Hugh Latimer, the captain looking as big and tough as ever.
But not brutal. That was somebody else.
Marko came through the doors with his duffel over his shoulder. In the midst of a group of players, most of them searching the crowd for that special somebody. His dark eyes met hers, the fierce expression changed to something else, and she thought, Breathe, and then forgot to think it and just stood there, rooted to the floor.
He was in front of her, but he still wasn’t smiling.
He just frowns at them so they move off, Ella had said.
It was like she was holding one of those flat plastic disks with the silver balls inside. That moment when you tipped it just right and the three little balls finished the maze and settled into place, like that was how it was meant to be.
He frowned when he felt too much. He was a whale, that strongest of Maori totems, most of him under the surface. Protective. Unmovable.
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