by Kalena Lyons
“Yes, all of them,” Jack replied assuredly.
She unfastened her bra slowly with her back towards Jack, but he soon swiveled her around to face him. She lingered over the simple black panties but realized if she had gone this far, she may as well remove everything for him.
Jack looked approvingly at every inch of her body -the supple hips; the small, firm breasts; her soft belly revealing a soft mole that seemed to dazzle in Jack’s eyes like a diamond; the gorgeous, if sleepy, face; the wide, quivering lips; even the heavy, half shut eyelids. He bade her to turn around, not lifting a finger upon her. She did so slowly, and when she turned around to face him, she saw a warm and loving smile plastered over his face. She smiled in return.
“Now, why did you do that so willingly?” Jack questioned her. She shrugged her shoulders. “At no point, did I force you to. At no point did I threaten you. At no point, was I going to lay a finger on you. Now there must be something that possessed you to do so of your own free will, wasn’t there?”
She could feel Jack’s question piercing her. Every illusion she had of free will seemed to crumble. Who was she? What were the choices she made in her life? Were they hers, or were they done solely to please outside interests? Did her choices define her? If not, what did?
Still, there was no denying it. She stripped for Jack solely because he had asked her to. She had never experienced a man being so direct with her before in her life. Every one of her relationships had involved a senseless rigmarole, an increasingly transparent game that she was tired of being an active participant in. But in Jack’s game?
She felt passive. As if she were the board, and not the pieces. And the more passive she felt, the more excited she became with the novelty of it all. And the more excited she became, the more secure she felt.
“I’ll ask again… What possessed you to strip for me of your own free will?”
“I… because… I,” Laura hesitated to try to put into words what was going through her brain. Finally, she had no choice but to admit it. She felt it last night, when Jack was acting the perfect gentleman while she was drunk out of her gourd. She felt it as soon as she even laid eyes on Jack for the very first time. And she felt it now, naked in this man’s penthouse suite. “It’s… Because I wanted to!” she yelled, with a force that surprised even her.
For the first time in her life, Laura Kimball felt entirely in control of herself - in control of her life, in control of her body. Seized as she was in Jack’s snare, she knew she had made a conscious choice in her life. She knew that submitting to him wasn’t duty, or an act of loneliness. She knew that submitting to him wasn’t a question of how much she was willing to give, but how much she was willing to let go.
Jack bade her to sit down in front of him. She felt confused at first until he sternly made her kneel in front of him, while he firmly bunched a fistful of her hair in his hands. Clammy, hung-over and red-eyed, she was still the most beautiful woman he had seen in several years. As he tugged gently on her hair, the shock made her wince until he touched the dimples of her cheek with his finger.
“Laura, I need you to understand something. You are not what you think you are. You are not your self-doubt or your self-pity. You are not some office drone. You are neither weak nor are you a coward. But you are mine. Do you understand?”
Laura nodded.
“Are you mine of your own free will?”
Laura paused before eventually stammering, “I… I guess… so.”
“Do you even have a will?”
Laura paused, uncertain what Jack meant. He saw the consternation in her face, and seized her by the hair roughly. “Do… You… Even… Have… a will?” He emphasized each syllable sternly until she had no choice but to answer.
“Yes.”
“What is your will?”
“My will is to serve you.” She was surprised at how rapidly and assuredly the words slipped out of her mouth.
He smiled as he stroked the curve of her upper lip, before leading her on to her feet. “Lay down on the bed,” he said very matter of factly.
She did so, and wondered if all the elaborate rigmarole she had heard about in D & S was simply an elaborate psychological game leading up to what would have been a fairly standard lay. As it turned out, it wasn’t.
He retrieved his iPhone from the bureau and turned it on her. “Now tell me… about the very first time… you ever had a thought about another man.”
She was bewildered. She knew that she had given her word to Jack, but had no idea he was going to record her. She didn’t know if she should tell him the truth or make up a lie. She was in no mood to exaggerate, and given that Jack could have very likely could have seen through her lie, she opted for the former.
“I guess… I guess…”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“I guess all girls,” Laura continued very frankly, suddenly growing unusually comfortable with the green light of Jack’s phone recording her. “When they start to hit puberty… sort of carry over their old childhood fantasies about Prince Charming or what have you. But that never really appealed to me; I saw it as being sort of old fashioned, I guess you could say. I always… this is going to sound crazy, but I always identified more with the villains.”
“Were you an underdog, Laura?”
“In a lot of ways. I was an only child, and I had a pretty active imagination. I developed early, and wasn’t comfortable with all the leers, so I decided to take up running to see if I could tone my body down a little.
“Anyways,” she continued. “There was this one boy when I was in high school named Mark. I didn’t know much about him, but he always had this sinister sort of leer about him. He was a loner too, and I kind of used to worship him from afar. He always seemed so aloof but… very handsome in a dark way. Like an attractive serial killer,” she chuckled. “So he was… sort of the first boy I ever… masturbated to. And I was raised Catholic, so that whole guilt thing… it’s a big deal.”
“What went through your head when you masturbated?”
“It was twenty years ago. What’s… important about this is that I remember maybe a couple years after I graduated and was in college. We were at this party, and I saw him there. I had a few beers and we were talking… and he asked me to go for a walk down by this park. So I did, and he was still very, very good looking.”
“Were you a virgin?”
“At this point… no. But I was still inexperienced. So we started fooling around…” Suddenly, the thought began lighting up her body. She began to feel beads of sweat and burgeoning warmth between her legs. She was looking straight up at Jack, who was recording her the whole time, an utterly impassive look on his face. She remembered Dan had once propositioned recording their sex lives and the thought had utterly repelled her. But here she was, naked in front of an absolute stranger taping her, writhing at the very thought of some boy she hadn’t seen in almost fifteen years. She was not only comfortable but she was irremediably turned on. She decided to come right out and ask Jack.
“Look,” she said with a slight fluster. “Would you mind if I… touch myself?”
“Would that make you more comfortable?”
She nodded, and Jack did so in return. She continued as she began stroking the folds of her sex, already glistening and damp from the strangeness of the morning. “We were fooling around and… I wanted to seem a little worldlier. So I asked him if I could take him in my mouth. I’m not… I’m not usually that forward, but I guess I still had a crush on him. Even though it was night, we had to sort of hide near this covering. There were always joggers around. Anyways, I started sucking him off and… I had never done that before. I didn’t really know what I was doing, and he was really… kind of rough with me. He was calling me all sorts of names, and I began to feel embarrassed. But, I was also really turned on. So as he was… basically using my mouth, all of a sudden we saw this jogger. Maybe twenty feet away, watching us,” she explained between gasps. The thought of Jack recording
this for posterity was getting to be too much. She pinched her nipples for him, smiling as she closed her eyes and continued recounting the story.
“Anyways, he got scared… his dad was a cop… and he zipped up his pants and ran in the opposite direction. He just left me there, drunk and helpless while this jogger just looked at me with the most disgusted look on his face. I was so humiliated,” she paused, gasps pouring out of her as she felt the dampness in her being brought out to the forefront. Her eyes were closed as Jack pressed the pause button on his phone.
“You forgot the worst part of it,” he said nonchalantly as he leaned over her, rolling her onto her stomach. “The worst part is that you loved every second of it.”
The words reached right into her. This was the first time she had ever even told this story, and this stranger had gazed right into the depths of her soul. She was left stunned and with at a loss for words. It had taken her a minute to regain her composure; but by that time it was too late.
The open palm of Jack’s hand stung her ass cheeks with a resounding slap, as he tugged on her matted hair. She could feel tears welling up in her eyes, but they were less of pain than of gratitude. He spanked her soundly a second time, and then a third, seizing her by the shoulders and forcing her onto her knees on the bed in front of him. She bit her lip as he spanked her a fourth time, using the other hand to softly massage her shoulders. This was the first time she had let a man get away with handling her so roughly, and she felt quivering in his stern hands. She cooed softly as he spanked her, feeling herself grow numb until there was no choice but to submit to him as he pried her legs apart.
She felt him enter her swiftly, piercing her folds. With each successive thrust, Jack grabbed onto more of her hair, using the strawberry blonde tresses as leverage as he took her from behind. The curve of his prick jutted upwards inside of her, humming with some dim and seemingly hostile energy that was resolved to break down every last one of her barriers. Every trace of her frail ego seemed to melt with the friction… both her vanity and her self-doubt, discarded like so much old confetti, All her fears, all her pettiness, her jealousy, her envy… all dissolved in the heat of his buckling rhythms, now furious inside her in an ancient rhythm, a cipher whose meaning he alone held the key to. His fingers explored the contours of her mouth, keeping her from screaming out in either savagery or ecstasy. He seized her shoulders as he forced himself into the very depths of her, drawing out the hissing moan which seemed to spring from the base of her spine and electrified every pore, every nerve until it culminated in a scream that began at the top of her skull before emerging from her frazzled mouth.
Jack pulled out of her, and let her collapse face down on the bed, panting and moaning. Though he was slightly dazed himself by Laura’s reaction, he knew that one of them had to maintain some semblance of restraint. He knew the virtue of patience. Soon, Laura would as well.
CHAPTER NINE
Laura awoke almost two hours later. She found the still open bottle of mineral water and took a quick swig. She looked around her and saw that Jack had left her alone. She desperately craved a cigarette; and, as if by magic, spied an ashtray near the open patio. She threw on Jack’s t-shirt and pajamas, which had been discarded earlier. They hung loosely on her, as she shuffled out on to the patio. She savored the sun beaming down on her, looking over the bustling and tightly knit Providence skyline. When she was finished, she returned to spy Jack just coming back from his run, his highly terse brow glistening with sweat.
She gave a coy smile, “You must think I’m sort of selfish child, to abuse my body while you try to take care of yours,” she laughed.
“Not at all…” he gasped. “It’s like an old friend to me sometimes. But you ought to think about freshening up.” He sat down on his bed and began removing his running shorts and soaked shirt. “We’ve got to get a move on if we’re going to be there on time.”
“Oh? And where are we going?”
“Well, I don’t want to ruin the surprise.”
“This is the first time you told me of any surprise.”
Jack looked at her and threw his arms up into a mock pantomime. “Sur-prise!” He laughed, and pecked her on the cheek. “Come on… I’ll let you grab your suitcases from your room. Meet me back here in half an hour.”
Laura paused. After last night, she couldn’t very well go back to the conference, she thought. At the same time, what was keeping her in her old life anyways? Habit? Comfort? Nearsightedness?
On the other hand, who was this man anyways? What was his game? Could she trust him? What did he have in mind with his ‘surprise?’
I don’t even know his goddamned name, she thought.
She looked back at him. He seemed so assured, his gaze so firmly affixed on her, that she couldn’t well refuse him. Be it for a night or for a week.
But what the hell is his name, anyways?
She walked towards the door, and looked behind her. “Let’s say I decide to take you up on whatever offer you have in mind. Could you at least give me the decency of telling me your name first?”
Jack chuckled, and threw her his key card. “For now, Laura? Just call me… ‘Mark.’”
TO BE CONTINUED…
SECRETS EXPOSED
Alpha Male Romance
CHAPTER ONE
Laura Kimball sat waiting patiently outside the Hotel Viking reclining on one of the benches as she leisurely smoked a cigarette. Her thin summer dress clung to her tightly, despite the swaying summer breeze. Normally, she’d be throwing on a baggy sweater to cover the flimsy cotton, self-conscious as she was. But it had been Jack’s insistence that she wear clothing a little too tight, a little too revealing for Laura’s modesty. Besides, thanks to the heavy wine she had consumed during the dinner, she was without a care in the world.
It had been five days since she had first met Jack, and she still had no idea what her “surprise” was. In fact, she didn’t even know his real name. It was his insistence that she only refer to him by the name of Mark. It was a role of virtual anonymity he maintained at all times; not only was she supposed to know nothing about Jack DiStefano’s personal life or his business associations, it was his persistent dismissal of all questions pertaining to any background whatsoever—including her own—that caught her off guard. It seemed to Laura at times that one of the roles she was to fulfill required a deliberate erasure of history altogether. Neither of them was to have a past, mutual or otherwise. And what was to be of the present? It was merely a question mark; a cipher that stood between themselves and the present - a present without cause. And as for effect? It might take her a lifetime to figure out.
Laura felt as if layers of skin were being shed from her revealing a supple, subtler personality. All questions of responsibility had been stripped from her over the past week. She knew she could never go back to work after her mysterious disappearance from the conference; a disappearance she only explained in a curt text to Gloria:
“Sorry to do this but I’m going to have to tender my resignation immediately. I no longer see any point in continuing my career with this company. I wish you the best in the future.”
That was it. No explanation, no requests for severance, not even a two-week notice. Even Gloria’s repeated and frantic texts went unanswered without any rationale whatsoever.
To celebrate, Laura decided to get a complete makeover while Jack was busy finalizing the particulars of his auction (the ostensible reason they had traveled down to Newport.) Jack had already begun to take the lead in her transformation. He insisted on a full wardrobe change, including clothing that just two weeks earlier Laura would have dismissed as unrealistic. Yet when she stood in front of the full length mirror, watching the plunging necklines and short cut hems of her dresses hug her body, revealing the full length of her languid curves and soft, ample skin, she felt alluring for the first time in years. It didn’t matter that she was a size 14, even on the self-assuredly aristocratic streets of Newport, where every woman w
as an elfin-shaped advertisement for collagen disasters; she didn’t care about their smirks or haughty glares, or the way their husbands would linger a little bit too closely on her backside as she walked arm in arm with Jack into a restaurant. She had them outclassed in every respect imaginable, and she knew it. It was evident in her slow, feline stride and the tilt of her neck straight ahead, her eyes envisioning a horizon far beyond the cloistered and sterile walls; a horizon perhaps even beyond the very edges of the Atlantic Ocean itself.
She had her hair cut in a chin-length, asymmetrical bob and had dyed it a dramatic hue of cherry red, to compliment the shade of lipstick Jack preferred. At first, she was a little put off by the cut. She thought it made her cheeks appear more round; and to make matters worse, the shade was practically porno red. But when she saw Jack’s mouth curl in a sneer of lusty approval as she stepped through their hotel door, she felt validated in her decision.
As she sucked in the summer breeze, she couldn’t help thinking of where she would have been just two weeks ago; eating ice cream straight from the carton, and debating about mustering the courage to go to a TGIFriday’s where—if she was lucky—she might kill time in a fruitless session of groping with some junior level wealth manager who had one too many Long Island iced teas. She didn’t want to dwell on the past; in fact, every time she thoughtlessly chose to bring up her former life, Jack admonished her—even if it was with nothing more than a stern glance. But as much as she couldn’t help luxuriating in her newly found freedom, she couldn’t help but compare it to her former life. Perhaps we can’t really see the truth about ourselves until we’re wrenched away from it, she thought. Perhaps only thing we can really rely on is change. Perhaps…
Just then, the headlights of Jack’s Acura cut an arc against the tiled wall. He stepped out in that methodical, assured gait of his, his voice echoing like drops of rain against the cobblestone walkway.