by Cassia Leo
“Be honored that you got a second date,” she told him. “I don’t do those.”
“Why not?” he asked, still skimming her hips with his fingertips. His humid breath misted her shoulder.
“I just don’t. I can’t get involved with a guy, because: reasons. And a second date leads to a third, and then either you get your heart broken or else you die early.”
“Pardon me?” His hands slipped down her thighs, almost massaging. She had run ten miles that morning, and his fingers pressed the acidic soreness out of her legs, soothing her.
She leaned back against him. “After the third date, it’s a relationship, and you either get your heart broken or get engaged. After you’re engaged, you either call off the engagement and someone gets their heart broken or you get married. After you get married, you either break your heart with a divorce or else one of you dies. If the other person dies first, you’re old and alone. Therefore, after the second date, your best option is an early death.”
“That’s,” he paused like he was searching for the right word, “rigorously pragmatic.”
“You just told me that you can’t start a relationship, either. Surely you understand about not being able to fall in love right now.”
Behind her, his chest rose and his hands moved on her thighs as he shrugged. “I’ve been assured that my heart is as black as midnight. I don’t think I can fall in love. I don’t think that love even exists, in reality. It’s just a construct to explain why people fuck.” He stepped back and held out his hand. “Come on.”
Georgie turned, and as she had felt against her bare skin, he was still entirely dressed in his white tee, jeans, and boots. “Aren’t you going to blindfold me? I thought everyone used a blindfold.”
“Maybe another time.”
“Alex, that’s what I’m trying to say. This is wonderful, and I’m so glad you came, but there can’t be another time.”
He flicked his hand. “Whatever. But no blindfold.” He stepped toward her again, and his dark eyes gleamed with a predatory glow. “I want you to see what I’m going to do to you. I want you to understand it all.”
He kissed her again, his tongue swirling on hers and his big hands pressing her naked body to his clothes. “Now that we understand each other,” he bit her neck with a little more force, and her skin stung, “no more talking.”
“What?”
His sharp slap stung her bare ass. “Oh!”
Alex said, “Unless I give you permission, the only things you are allowed to say from now on are your safe words. Those can be used at any time, for any reason you deem necessary. Anything else will be punished. Do you understand?”
Her ass burned. Georgie nodded.
“Excellent,” he hissed near her ear. “Walk with me.” He glanced down at her feet and her black toe-squishers. “Leave those on.”
She took his outstretched hand, and he led her to the thing that looked like a twin bed with a thin mattress and an unusually sturdy canopy frame that rose perhaps ten feet into the air.
Georgie glanced up at him, unsure.
Alex chuckled, a throaty sound grating from his hoarse throat. “Sit down on the end.”
She stepped closer to the bed. Ropes coiled from the corners, lying in loops on the tufted leather pad.
Evidently, he was going to tie her down.
But the ropes ran through pulleys bolted to the bedposts, and some of the ends lying on the bed were capped with leather bindings. Other ropes lay across the center of the bed.
Excitement grew in her belly. She had had guys, quite a few guys, enough guys that they were starting to get boring. All of them kissed, sucked—a few tongued—and then they fucked. Some better than others, though proficiency was often associated with tonguing.
Whatever this was, it did not look boring.
Georgie scooted onto the end of the bed.
Alex said, “Farther. Sit in the center.”
She did. The smooth black leather of the tufted pad cooled her ass as she sat on it.
Alex crawled onto the end of the bed, stretching his neck to kiss her slowly, with restrained heat, his lips grasping at hers almost thoughtfully. Champagne scented his breath.
He eased away from her, and the flickering torch-like sconces on the walls reflected fire in his dark eyes. “Now lie back with your arms above your head.”
Georgie curled backward and stretched her arms up. Above her, the rectangle of the canopy frame was reinforced with black diagonal beams that formed an X through the center, stark against the white ceiling far above. From the center of the crossbeams, a silver hook swung silently in the air conditioning breeze.
Yeah, this might get weird.
Alex slid backward off the bed and walked around to the top. He leaned over, picked up her hand, and kissed her palm with his full lips. The warmth of it flowed down Georgie’s arm to her shoulder, and her heart quickened its tempo.
She bent her neck and looked up at Alex, who had picked up a leather cuff with an attached rope. He smiled at her, his long hair swaying around his face as he looked down at where she lay. He buckled the black leather cuff around her wrist, the pressure snug but not tight, and he smoothed her fingers around the rope above it.
He did the same to her other arm, kissing her palm, restraining her with the cuff, and wrapping her fingers around the rope.
Then he hooked up more straps running from the posts to ropes under her back, maybe to keep it from moving or bunching while someone was getting royally fucked on it.
Actually, he was a duke, not royalty, so she might get nobly fucked, or perhaps ducally fucked. Georgie stifled a giggle in her throat.
Alex leaned over the top of the mattress, grabbing his own hair behind his neck to hold it back, and kissed her from above, gently sucking on her lower lip and running the top of his tongue over the top of hers.
The warm rush of passion felt like her brain was melting.
Wow. Only minutes into foreplay, and they were already into entirely new experiences for Georgie. If she were a gambling woman, she would have lost a lot of money right about now because she had thought that she had tried just about everything. Even his tongue sliding on hers from above had been heart-poundingly new.
Alex walked around the bed, his motorcycle boots tapping on the tile. He watched her eyes the whole way, their eye contact breaking only when he walked behind the black bedposts.
He lifted her foot and massaged her ankle, holding her black pump in his big palms. His strong fingers released the last bit of soreness from her run that morning, and he fit the restraint over her foot. A stirrup fit in the arch between the toebox of her shoe and the high heel. He cinched a leather cuff around her ankle and buckled the stirrup to fit close around her foot.
Georgie wouldn’t have to worry about kicking her pumps off during this. That thing was tied on tightly.
Alex did the same to her other leg, massaging her before he buckled the leather cuff around her ankle and tied her foot.
With a few flicks of his hands, the ropes criss-crossed her body and trussed her up, running under her back and down her legs and tying around her.
Yeah, this was going to get weird, and Alex was very adept at it.
He stripped off his tee shirt—an event that Georgie had been waiting for with bated breath—and crawled on top of her, his rippled abdominals stretching and bunching with each languorous move of his arms and legs. Muscle wound around his broad shoulders and heavy arms, but he still looked lean and supple, more like a ripped dancer than a bulky bodybuilder. The blue and green tattoos on his back, like ripples of dancing water, trickled over his shoulders, down the backs of his arms, and around his tight waist.
Georgie could just stare all day at the way his biceps and deltoids moved, but he was halfway up her and dropped his mouth to her stomach, breathing on her belly and sucking gently on her navel with a kiss.
“You’re doing so well, Georgie,” he said, murmuring into her stomach.
She nodded rather than speak, because that was part of the game.
All this BDSM stuff was just games. Social games, sure. Dominance and submission games allow women to experience sexuality, even taboo sexuality, which subverts the spirit of the repression while maintaining the veneer of adherence to social norms.
Good girls don’t, but if a good girl is tied up, then she can.
Georgie didn’t feel the need to be tied up to experience her sexuality. She was already the worst kind of girl, but sex didn’t play into that. She was pretending to be a good girl who needed to be tied up to get fucked good and hard.
Alex ran his hands down her legs, bending her knees and lifting her legs. He hooked straps from her ankle cuffs to the ropes binding around her back and under her ass.
He kissed her stomach one more time, the ends of his long hair trailing across her ribs, and backed off the bed. “Ready?”
She nodded, because sure, why not? Fuck it all.
Alex reached down to the base of the bed, flipped out a handle, and cranked it.
The ropes around her arms and legs tightened and then pulled her up. The ropes underneath her became a hammock that her ass and back rested on. Her arms slapped together and stretched over her head.
Her breath caught in her chest. She panted, trying to get enough air.
The apparatus hoisted Georgie into the air.
Most of her weight rested on the ropes under her butt, but she grabbed the ropes above her head. She twisted her neck, looking down at the platform falling away from her.
Panic seized her heart and lungs because she was going to fall and be broken or be torn limb from limb by this insane torture device. “I quit!”
Alex dropped to one knee and yanked a lever, and she dropped in a controlled fall, lowering her until her butt rested on the leather mattress. The ropes slackened, and she curled up and wrapped her arms around her legs. “What the hell was that?”
He climbed on the bed behind her and wrapped her whole body in his strong arms, cradling her against his bare chest, skin-to-skin. The down of his chest hair was soft against her cheek, and that clean, green grass scent of his cologne on his neck smelled like a wildflower field in the summer.
“It’s all right,” he whispered to her. “You weren’t hurt. It didn’t hurt you. Do you want these off?”
He touched the cuffs over her wrists and the stirrups tied to her feet.
Georgie clutched his neck and stammered, “I couldn’t move. I couldn’t catch myself. I was going to fall.”
He stroked her hair away from her face. “You won’t fall. I’m very good at setting up an apparatus like this. I could have done it with just rope and knots, but I thought the cuffs might reassure you, your first time. You have to trust me. You just saw that you can trust me. When you said your safe word, I released you immediately.”
This was not fun and fucking games. “What were you going to do when I was all tied up?”
His deep voice rumbled beside her cheek. “I won’t force you to do something you don’t want to. I will let you have what you want most, what you crave, but you dare not admit, even to yourself.”
“That’s fucking insane,” Georgie whispered. The black leather binding her feet looked cruel.
“Most people are frightened in the beginning,” Alex said.
“I’m not scared.”
He stroked her cheek and looked deep into her eyes. “You trusted me to help you perform on the piano.”
She nodded.
“Compared to performing, this is easy. This is just us, alone, exploring what you really want. No one will see. No one will ever know except us.”
When she had brought him in here, she had fully intended to be the Dominant one. She had planned to tie him up and tickle him, maybe get him going until he turned a little blue, then ride him until he shouted when he came.
But this! This dependency, this lack of control, this vulnerability! She couldn’t take it. Her hands and legs quivered.
Alex leaned back and rocked her as he held her in his arms. “We can stop now. If this frightens you too much, if it pushes a button for you, if you don’t want to explore this side of yourself, we can go back to my hotel or we can take you home. I thought you wanted this.”
Georgie pressed her hands on her thighs, trying to stop the shaking. “I thought I was going to be the Dominant.”
Her voice sounded stronger. Good.
He chuckled. “You’ll get to know me better tonight.”
“That was never going to happen, huh?”
“Just not my personality.”
“I don’t think this is mine, either.”
“I think it is.”
“We’ve known each other for a few days and boinked once. How would you know that?”
“The way you responded at the piano. You want to perform. You are drowning for lack of music in your life, but you couldn’t let yourself go until I, essentially, forced you to do what you so desperately wanted to. Performing is always an enormous risk. You couldn’t open yourself and allow yourself to be so vulnerable.”
“I can be—” She didn’t bother finishing the sentence.
Alex lifted her chin with just one of his long, callused fingers. He kissed her, his warm lips gentle on her mouth. “It can be terrifying to have an experience that you want so much, that is so intense, that you lose yourself. You have to trust me to take you through the place that terrifies you, to keep you safe, and to hold you until you emerge on the other side. If these few nights are all we have, let me have all of you for just this short time.”
Georgie had started trembling while he spoke, but it was just a few nights, her last nights in the Southwest before she ran. She wouldn’t ever see Alex again.
Maybe, just for tonight, just for a few hours, she could release her ironclad control of everything in her life. “Okay.”
“So we’ll start again,” Alex said. “Safe words are still ‘largo’ and ‘I quit.’ If you use your red word again, however, this might be too much for you, and we’ll stop entirely. Do you understand?”
She nodded.
He leaned down and kissed her again, an intimate, gentle kiss. He whispered, “Let me have you tonight.”
Georgie nodded again.
Alex untangled his long arms and legs from around her and slid off the side of the bed. Reaching onto the mattress, he arranged her arms—his strong hands gentle on her wrists and ankles, as he positioned her body as if Georgie were a doll.
Just give up your freakish control, she thought. Just for one night, Georgie didn’t have to be the Ice Princess. Alex would take care of her.
Something that had been clenched in her mind unfurled.
Georgie breathed.
Alex stroked her arms, relaxing them, lengthening them, and kissed her palms and the inside of her wrists. He curled her fingers around the ropes.
He ran his fingers down her legs, caressing her, and he straightened the ropes on the mattress.
The ropes, once snarled from her freak-out, were now coiled in the corners in the suspension frame, ready to be wound on the pulleys and tightened.
Alex crawled above her again, his body sliding between her spread thighs as he moved up her body to kiss her mouth again, slowly, with such control. “Are you ready?”
Metaphorically, Georgie opened her hands and let it all fall away. She nodded.
He said. “Talk to me. No silence, this time.”
Georgie whispered, “I’m ready, Alex.”
He closed his eyes when she said his name, and his long, exotic eyes creased at the corners. He tucked his chin toward his chest and swallowed.
When he opened his dark eyes, his long hair hanging around his face, swaying, he said, “Let’s begin.”
This time, Georgie didn’t brace herself.
She let go.
WHICH OF US IS ALEX?
Alexandre de Valentinois
Alex.
Georgie called him Alex and it rang through his h
ead, a clear, cold note like an aquamarine chill in the air on the top of an Alpine mountain.
Alexandre de Valentinois filled his head and body. His hand twitched, intending to reach for Georgie’s wrist and release her from this contraption, to lay her on the bed and hold her in his arms and with his body until they were both sated. This compulsion to orchestrate a performance felt alien, even though it shouldn’t have.
He had been sliding away, and he hadn’t even felt it until she called him back with his name.
The power of his name had called him back. The connotations swirled: the nine billion names of God; a deep and inscrutable, singular, jellicle name; the intimacy of being named, in the name of the Lord, and more.
Again, there was something in there, some art, something that sang to him in a deep red tone and a taste like a silver knife on the back of his tongue. It would need a strong bassline and blown-out drums during the processing. A melody line began to knit itself together in his head, a rise and fall like a plaintive wail, around the words, Call me by my name and— something.
The words weren’t quite forming, but it was close.
Alexandre lifted his head, focusing his eyes on her. “Let’s begin.”
WILLING SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF
Georgie
Georgie breathed, letting the air flow through her chest, just like all the panic attack therapists had taught her. The breathing exercises were working a lot better now than they ever had when all her high school friends had started hating her or when someone was watching to see if she made a mistake while playing the piano.
From the base of the bed, Alex steadied himself by holding onto one of the tall, iron posts and bent, cranking the ropes until they were snug but her shoulders and feet still rested firmly on the bed. With every dip, his biceps bulged, and his abdominals crunched and stretched.
Georgie’s mouth watered.
He crawled between her legs and lay on her, the hard seams of his jeans scraping her thighs and belly as he moved up to kiss her.
“You’re so beautiful,” he whispered against her mouth.