Professed

by Nicola Rendell

  I brush my teeth, quietly as I can, and then I turn on the floor heater so everything is nice and warm when she comes into the bathroom. I also make sure I don’t leave a mess in the sink with my toothpaste. I want it all perfect, just perfect.

  The way she was tied down, the filthy things she said, I have this sudden urge to get the rope out again and wake her up ensnared. But letting that brain and body rest, that’s fuel for me too.

  I slip on my sweats and my sweater and make my way downstairs to the kitchen. It’s even colder down here, open and a little bit drafty. I turn the coffee on and put some water to boil on the stove. She likes tea. I don’t think she’s noticed me watching her so close at the dining hall. Black tea in the morning. Iced tea at lunch. Chamomile with dinner, with a little drizzle of honey.

  Rubbing my arms a little, I look around, and I think, Beck. It’s time you figured your shit out. Time you manned up.

  Time you built a fire.

  It can’t be that hard, I think, as I put on my boots and head outside to get some wood. I mean, people have been doing it forever, right? Right.

  I pick some good-sized logs and carry them in. I get down on my knees in front of the fire. Looks straightforward enough. Fireplace. Matches. Some kind of composite blocks or something, which I assume are fire starters. I make a sort of a pyramid out of the logs. Seems logical. Possibly.

  Once, in some movie, I saw someone twist some newspaper up into a kind of roll. So I do that, trying not to make too much racket. Then I put the match to the paper and put it on top of the logs.

  I light one of the fire starters and throw it underneath.

  There, I think, standing up. Not so hard at all. It starts crackling satisfyingly. I dust off my hands and head back to the kitchen. Well done, man. Well done.

  Back in the kitchen, I take out some of the fruit I bought for her and cut it up. Then I turn on the oven and open up my secret weapon: Pillsbury Cinnamon Rolls. The canister pops open with a doughy thump. I arrange them in a pan that I find in the cupboard and get to work on making her a tray for breakfast in bed.

  There’s a warm smoky smell in the air. I’d call it a burning smell, except of course it’s not. Just the fire, or possibly some kind of something in the oven itself.

  I tend to the coffee. That’s one thing I can do, at least, is make coffee. I bought some tea for her too. Never in my life have I spent so much on groceries. And I realize, standing there trying to figure out how to open the Twining’s English Breakfast box without tearing it in half, that I really love this feeling. Doing things for her, learning things for her, fussing over her.

  Still though, that damned burning smell. And a sort of haze in the air. I turn around.

  Thick, black smoke is pouring from the front of the fire. We’re not talking a small fire situation here. The thing is growing and licking the edges of the mantle already.

  And that’s when the fucking smoke detector goes off. Screeeeeeech above my head.

  For the love of all that is unsacred on earth, if the Mystic fire department comes, I’m going to die. What kind of man can’t light a fire? What kind of man lights a newspaper and sets the house on fire?

  I grab the near-boiling kettle of water from the stove and toss it on the smoke. This doesn’t help. It just makes it so much worse. Then I hear thumps upstairs, her footsteps. “What’s happening!” she yells.

  “We’re good! Go back to bed!”

  Actually, we are not good. Not good at all. I take one of the vases and pull the flowers out and pour it on the smoke. The flames lick up towards a commemorative ship in a bottle on the mantle.

  Her incredible, intoxicating laugh trails down the steps in front of her. Full speed, and naked, she dashes into the kitchen. “Just going to stand there, boy scout?”

  It’s like I’m paralyzed. All I can do is watch the mantle begin to smolder. I may or may not have my hands on my cheeks.

  She’s still giggling. She’s searching the kitchen, and now fire extinguisher in hand, and like an absolute Smokey the Bear protégée, she pulls the pin on the thing and moves me aside.

  “Open a door!” she tells me, heading into the smoke.

  I manage to shake myself out of my low-oxygen fog and open the windows and doors. She sprays the fireplace all over with the retardant foam, which looks oddly like whipped cream. The whole emergency becomes nothing but a black sizzling mess.

  “Well, good morning!” she says, turning around.

  There she is. Naked, holding a fire extinguisher and smiling at me.

  She smells like a cookout and looks like heaven. I don’t think I've ever been happier in my life.

  “I could get used to this,” she says, padding around the bathroom tiles. She is aligning her toes with the grout lines, and comes up on the balls of her feet every so often before luxuriously lowering herself down onto the heated floor. Meanwhile, I’ve got one hand in the shower testing the water, and the other wrapped around her. The shower itself is like a showroom display of seahorse tiles. So many fucking seahorses everywhere. On the upside, it’s enormous and it has a bench. On the downside, there is obviously something wrong with the water heater. Something very, very wrong.

  “When you review this place,” she says, “I really think you should suggest that they consider a nautical theme.” She’s examining a sand dollar on a display shelf. Utterly, profoundly deadpan. She turns to look at me in the mirror, which is made out of a fake life preserver, painted red and white.

  I nod. “I’ll mention it.” The water becomes roughly the temperature of lava on my hand.

  “Do you think they bought it all at once, like at some special Marshall’s, or is it a collection?”

  “Believe me, it’s a collection. I mean, did you see the mugs?” Now the shower goes back to ice water.

  “No…don’t tell me…clams?”

  “Whales, clams, flounders, some sort of regatta mug from 1997. It’s a long-term effort.”

  Then she bursts into that mischievous smile. “How’s it going there, Tiger?” She rubs her bare arms with her hands.

  “Variable,” I say. That’s not the word. Insane is the word. I can’t even really feel my hand anymore. Is it hot, is it cold? Are we going to have to go to Urgent Care for third-degree burns? Are we going to freeze to death?

  She slips in alongside my chest and puts her hand next to mine under the water. “Oh my God,” she says as it immediately starts steaming and then drops to something near sub-zero.

  She toggles the knob herself. It’s shaped like an octopus. Of course it is.

  The temperature goes back to boiling oil. “Holy shit,” she says, starting to laugh.

  Back to ice.

  And what ensues is possible the most delightful, contagious fit of laughter I’ve ever seen in my life. As it gets cold she starts giggling, as it gets hot, she pulls her hand away and cackles. “Maybe we should just use the beach shower outside. Or the garden hose.” Now I try toggling the octopus a little harder. It’s wonky and loose on the bolt.

  “There’s a YMCA in Stonington,” I say, peering up at the showerhead like that could be the culprit.

  “Screw it,” she says, and yanks me under the water.

  She leans her head back into the now-icy rain shower, her shoulders lifted up towards her ears and hissing in the cold. She begins shivering, and I grip her hard. I’m shivering too. “Live together, die alone,” I chatter into her freezing hair. Briefly, it gets hot, and we have to both step back. Holding hands. Then, miraculously, things do reach an equilibrium. Like us being under the water balanced everything out.

  We are hesitant. I’m waiting to get scalded and snatch her away. It seems fine for now. I think.

  “Every time I look at you I think of new things I want to put on you.” With my finger I write new words all over her in the water. Want. Goddess. Minx. Beautiful.

  She turns and takes me by the shoulders. “My turn.”

  With her first finger, she starts high on my ch
est, working down. I. LOVE. YOU. When she finishes, she looks proud of herself and smiles up at me, blinking away the water from her eyes.

  I pull her close. “Really. I never knew what it was.”

  “I’ll bet you didn’t think it existed. Nihilist.”

  “True, actually. I thought it was…”

  “A construct?”

  I dig my fingers into her ribs. She tries to fight me off, but only a little.

  “But it’s not, is it?” she says, looking up at me. “It’s real.”

  “God, is it ever real. So real I can feel it, taste it,” I say. “So real, it’s changed the very way I think.”

  I watch her press her lips to my chest and push some of her wet curls away from her shoulders.

  She lowers herself down to her knees in front of me, that perfect flesh of her body touching the tile floor. She curls her feet under her body, one foot over the other, toes slightly bent.

  “Show me what you like,” she says, sliding her hands up my ass and looking up at me with the most devious innocence that ever was.

  She just traces the tip of my cock with her tongue. I can feel my blood throbbing through my erection, and I take myself in my fist, keeping my left hand on her shoulder, my right hand on my dick. I begin working my length for her. She’s watching so closely, studying everything.

  “You look at me just like that in class,” I tell her.

  “This is what I’m thinking about in class.”

  She cups my balls in her hands, just sliding one finger along my perineum. I have to brace myself against the shower when she does. Her eyebrows rise like she had no idea that was going to happen.

  “You know what you do to me. You fucking know,” I say.

  “Maybe,” she says, and leans down, licking my balls.

  Gripping myself hard, I move up and down, from head to balls, pulling the skin up and back again.

  “You’re ruthless,” she says. “I could never be that rough with you.”

  “This is how I fuck you,” I say, stroking faster and more urgently. I let go of her hair and lean my hand on the shower wall.

  A small, sexy, “Jesus,” slips from her lips as I stroke base to tip.

  It gets me so high, watching her like this, watching her watch me. It feels so fucking good, I know I’m close. That worshiping position she’s in, it’s killing me. She’s got my balls in her hands, and she positions herself right at the end of my length, but she doesn’t take me in her mouth. Instead, she opens her mouth and stays right in front of me, with her tongue on my frenulum. Waiting for my cum.

  There are few things that make a man come harder than an open mouth, begging for his cock.

  37

  As I towel off my hair, I admire the way his waist narrows, and that six-pack besides. Eight-pack. Is that a thing? I trail my fingers up his arm. “Who are you? Where did you come from?”

  He smiles down at me, his strong hand on my back, “My question exactly.”

  From the counter, he hands me my lotion. “Lemon sugar.” He shakes his head.

  “What?” I ask.

  “First time I met you, I couldn’t stop thinking about the way you smelled. Like lemonade.” With one hand he moves my hair away from my back and turns me around so I’m facing the mirror. He fills his hand with lotion and begins massaging it into my skin. My eyes close instantly, and I brace myself on the sink. My sort of helpless “yes please” moans fill the bathroom.

  He gets seriously to work on my body, staring with my shoulders. And this isn’t some amateur shoulder rub. This is serious. This is amazing.

  “You’re tight up here,” he says.

  I mutter a “lots…of…. papers” in between the rubs. He moves down, on to my scarred side.

  It’s not that it hurts, but I’m sensitive that it’s there. I’d damn near forgotten it, except now in the slowly un-fogging mirror, it’s impossible to ignore. I forget how ugly it is because I so seldom look at it myself. Gently, he puts lotion on that side. “When did that happen?”

  This isn’t really a story I want to tell. But it’s one of those things I want him to know. One of those horrible things that someone who loves you should know. The things that shape us are sometimes hard to say. “Thanksgiving Day, five years ago. I was on the boat with my dad.”

  He moves away from the scar, rubbing lotion now into my hip. “You fell in.”

  “I was knocked overboard by a wave.” Even just saying it, I can feel the fear come back up into me. My boots filling with water, my body getting heavy, feeling the foam and gasping for air. “The propeller was going full-bore.”

  His hand doesn’t move further, frozen on my hip but gripping me a little tighter. “Jesus.”

  I glance at him. I feel the cold run through me even though everything is warm right now. I feel the water going up my nose. I place my hand on the scar, on the three big diagonal cuts. “When it happened, when I was in the hospital, I remember them saying they’d never seen anything like it. That they couldn’t believe I was alive. They didn’t realize I could hear them.”

  He presses his fingers to his nose. His eyes are worried and focused right on me. “You’re so lucky.”

  “Three pints of blood lucky,” I say, nodding.

  He begins massaging me gently on the shoulders again, as if he’s tongue-tied maybe, because what’s a person supposed to say when they learn about a near-death story? That’s why I never talk about it, partly. His hands travel down my back, and the heel of his palm stops on my ass. He begins pressing into my left cheek nice and hard, placing his knee between my leg and his other palm on my chest for leverage. It’s almost not sexual—I mean, it is, he’s massaging my ass with his huge hands and I’m outrageously turned on—but it also just feels amazing. “You’re…” I stutter. It feels so damn good. “…Really amazing at this. You could moonlight…as…a masseur.”

  He squirts more cold lotion on me. “Actually, I’ll have you know, that’s how I put myself through grad school.”

  I open my eyes and look at him in the mirror. “Seriously?”

  He’s smiling while he’s working on my neck a bit. I feel it in the soles of my feet and all through my skull, somehow. “Nobody knows that. They wouldn’t hire me as TA, so,” he kneads into my back with his thumbs, “I did this instead.”

  But then he stops.

  My pathetic, spoiled groan surprises even me. “Noooo. Please, no, don’t stop.”

  Lowering his head to kiss my shoulder, he smiles into my skin. “I’m not going to stop. I’m going to do it right.”

  And so upstairs, on our messy unmade bed, he lays me out flat. He produces a bottle of actual massage oil and proceeds to give me an absolutely, astoundingly, mind-bendingly good massage. I’m fairly sure I’m drooling into the pillows, and I don’t even care. He pinches my skin a little, up and down my spine, he does that thing with the sides of his hands, making little hatchet moves back and forth. He tells me to breathe through knots. It’s absolute unmitigated heaven. This man, who I adore, working out every last knot in my body. With every touch, I feel myself getting more and more turned on, and yet I’m helpless to do anything about it. I feel myself getting wetter and more relaxed, more pliable and softer with every slip of his fingers.

  He’s straddling me, and I can feel him growing harder and harder against my ass. “I feel you,” I tell him, muffled by the pillow.

  “75% of massages end in sex, you know,” he says, laughing a little.

  Into the pillows, I say, “Really?”

  “I made that up,” he says, and then flips me over. I’m expecting things to get instantly steamy. But they don’t. He’s rock hard, and I can see that. I can feel it on my flesh, but he massages the rest of my body with that same tender, incredibly strong and authoritative touch. He touches my breasts, and they perk up for him instantly, but then he begins massaging the muscles beneath. “Holy shit,” I say. I can feel that one in my ass, amazing. Everything is a web.

  “I need t
o do this for you more often.”

  “Like, every day,” I say at the ceiling. He does a gentle pattering down my stomach. He works my thighs, even delicately massaging my face. His thumbs run softly over my cheeks, pressing down with just the right weight. Then to my temples. Then to my ears. I am utterly, powerfully, painfully turned on by this point. “I need you. Inside me. Please.”

  “What, is this torture?” Of the positively worst kind. “Please, please. Ben. Please.”

  He’s right over me. I’m near paralyzed with pleasure as he presses into me. He leans over to the bedside table and takes out a thick zip tie. In one hand he pins my wrists together and then zips the tie closed, making sure he doesn’t pinch my wrist bones.

  And then I hear a buzzing. “I want to make you come hard,” he says. “On me. Just like this.”

  I press my nails into my palms and feel a rush of extra-thick wetness. That’s a Hitachi. A magic wand.

  “Do you have one of these?” he says.

  “Nun-huh,” I tell him. I’ve seen themwho hasn’t?but I’ve never had the money to buy one. “Never.” “No vibrator ever?” he asks.

  By way of answer, I slip my fingers down towards my clit. “These have always served me really well.”

  His dimple appears. “I think you may be in for a treat. I bought this for you. Yesterday. When I got the blindfold.”

  Honestly, the buzzing is almost scary. I have no idea what to expect. He presses it to my thigh to let me feel it. It’s almost warm, deliciously warm and soothing. The head bends back just right. “Just for me,” I say.

  “Oh yeah. All for you.”

  He gives me a few good thrusts, and I squeeze him tight. “Damn it, Naomi. Why? You and your fucking Kegels.”

  I laugh at the ceiling and give him another good squeeze.

  “It’s not gonna work this time,” he says, shaking his head in a no-you-don’t way. “You wore me out in the shower.”