by Cecilia Tan
I was also delighted to find I could easily access some of the BBC shows I couldn’t get legally in the United States. One evening Mal came in and discovered me watching one of them. He swept the tablet up and moved it from the bed to the table, letting the show continue to play while he pointed to the bed. I lay down immediately and then he crawled over me, greeting me with a kiss and the words, “I told you before, the BBC is overrated.”
“It’s research,” I teased. “I’m, um, learning British accents.”
He laughed at that and then bit me on the neck, letting up only when the imprint of his teeth was deep enough to last for a day or two. The sensation was intense and made me giddy with desire. “It might be a useful asset for you in acting if you could speak convincingly British English. Shall I teach you?”
“Are you serious?”
“Quite. I shall have to get a cane, though. Grammar lessons are not authentically British without punishment for errors.” He nuzzled in my hair possessively.
“You’re kidding, right? I mean, I know you’re not kidding about getting a cane, but…” He had already bought a few toys from shops in the city. “They didn’t really cane you in school, did they?”
He lifted his head. “I assure you sadistic schoolteachers are not what made me kinky. In the primary school I attended they used a shoe to administer the punishment, but corporal punishment in the elite boarding schools was outlawed when I was still a child.” He tilted his head, giving me an odd look. “Did your father spank you when you were growing up?”
“No. Spanking was purely an adult recreation for him,” I said seriously. “What about you?”
“My father’s punishments were always centered on privilege or deprivation. Sent to bed without supper, for example. He was much more likely to torment me psychologically than physically.”
“I would like to think if I ever had kids I wouldn’t torment them at all,” I said.
“Likewise,” he answered, and then turned his attention to leaving a matching bite mark on the other side of my neck.
* * *
MAL
I was surprised to realize that knowing Gwen was waiting for me had a calming effect on my interactions with the band. It was not so much that I had “mellowed” as that I was less prone to extremes. It was as if she were emotional ballast, keeping my feelings from being rocked or tossed too violently by the weather.
That was not something I had experienced in any of my previous relationships. If anything, those experiences had the opposite effect, creating more potential for chaos and angst, even when they were going “well.” But Gwen seated herself deep in my soul and centered me.
I tried to tell myself to be cautious, but her presence was a balm. I warned myself that Layla had seemed like the cure for Risa, and Risa had seemed like the cure for Camilla, and that my delusions had only gotten worse with each successive relationship. However, I was unable to hold back with Gwen. I could speak my mind and be myself in complete comfort with her.
She did not “tame” me, though. No, I was just as demanding as before, sometimes cruel, because that was what bonded us most tightly, like two wires twisted together. I was always sadistic. Well, almost always.
* * *
GWEN
One night late in that first week—I was losing track—he stripped down and beckoned me into bed, no restraints, no toys in evidence. By then of course it had become abundantly clear that Mal didn’t need bondage to restrain me—one word or even a gesture was all it took to make me immobile—and he didn’t need toys or implements to inflict intense pain.
He began by kissing me on the lips, something he usually did only after other activities, to soothe me after pain or to lay claim to my surrender. This time, though, it was a foray into tenderness, a gentle sweetness parting my lips and sharing my breath.
His mouth traveled down my neck, and he murmured, “The bruises are fading.”
“Does that mean it’s time to create new ones?” I asked.
He kissed along the top of my shoulder. “Perhaps. If I wish.”
His hands massaged their way down my torso, firm and sensual, and before long he had encouraged me to lie back against the pillows while his tongue searched between my legs. Gentle swipes brought my clit out to play, and I thought for sure any moment he would clamp it between his teeth. But no, the only torment was in my own mind, wondering whether this tenderness was going to be enough for me. I almost never came from oral sex given by my old vanilla boyfriends. It had felt like nice foreplay but lacked the edge that I needed. Sometimes to come while they were doing it I had to pinch my own nipples and hope they didn’t notice.
My breath hitched as I feared I might disappoint Mal if he wanted me to come.
He gently slid a finger inside me, slowly penetrating and pulling free repeatedly while his tongue languidly played at my clit. Some women couldn’t come unless they were relaxed. I was the opposite. I needed to be wound up. I was like a match that needed a rough surface to spark against. This was…
Nice. I realized I didn’t have to try to come. He hadn’t said anything. All I was supposed to do was lie there and let him have his way. Besides, who said I was going to come, anyway? More than once he’d stimulated me to the edge of coming and then laughed and left for a recording session, leaving me absolutely itching with need until he returned. Maybe tonight would be like that.
I stopped worrying about how much time he was spending down there. He was in charge. If he wanted to stop, he would.
He didn’t stop until my entire pussy was completely sopping, utterly swollen, and I was far more aroused than I thought I could get from such gentle sensation.
He kissed me again, hips settling between my legs, his spine undulating so slowly it could barely be called a thrust as his cock moved. He seemed in no hurry to penetrate me, our bodies moving against each other, his tongue seeking the erogenous hot spots on my neck.
When at last we connected, his cock pushing through my swollen folds, I let out a low groan. He did not hurry, keeping to the slow pace as he worked his way inside. I lost myself in the sensual haze created by Mal’s rhythm, surrendering myself to his patient lust. The steady penetration was like a small boat rocking on waves, floating, riding the tide, drifting on pleasure.
My eyes flew open. Was it possible? “Mal?”
“Yes, lover,” he answered without lifting his head, his lips brushing the tender skin behind my ear.
“I think I’m going to—I mean, may I come if I can?”
“Yes, you may,” he said simply, and returned to his gentle fucking.
I hooked my feet behind his knees, tension in me rising, rising, rising, and then shuddered as the tension snapped and pleasure dappled all over my skin like a torrent of beads from a broken string.
He responded with an increased pace, the build of his own tension pulling me with him, and at last he began to exert some force in his penetration as he chased after his own release. I was coming again before I realized it, this time with a wordless moan of ecstasy that he answered with one of his own as he pumped hard, finishing and then milking the aftershocks until his cock went soft and slipped free.
I found myself clinging hard to him, the orgasm over, but my mind spinning, my heart pounding. What had just happened?
He kissed my cheek, my ear, my throat, then looked me in the eye. “Are you all right?”
I must have had a wild look in my eye. He brushed my bangs off my forehead and laid a tender kiss there. “Gwen?”
“I’m…I’m fine…” I blinked. Something had shifted. Something had changed.
Me, possibly.
We got cleaned up and then settled back in bed, as far from the wet spot as we could manage. Fortunately it was a large bed.
He massaged my hair as he cradled me close, but he didn’t demand to know my thoughts. Perhaps he sensed I was still trying to figure them out myself.
How did that work? How did he make me come from gentleness alone? That w
asn’t how I was wired. That had never worked before.
Did that mean I didn’t need kink after all? A flutter of panic went through me. After all the work I’d done to accept that I needed pain, that it was part of my sexuality and who I was, now I was finding out it wasn’t true…My thoughts were in a spiral of turmoil. If I didn’t need pain, did that mean I didn’t need Mal? No!
Then the thought rose from the murk like a clear, bright star. No. The key wasn’t the pain itself but the way the pain made me feel. Taken. Owned. His. That was the thing I needed, not a sensation but an emotion, not what happened to my skin but what was going on in my mind, my heart.
I burst into happy tears. That was the moment Mal began to worry. “Gwen? Oh, Gwen, what did I do?”
I hugged him around the neck. “It’s just that I’m so in love with you! I’m so in love that it hurts. In a good way. Oh, God, it’s like nothing else I’ve ever felt.”
I felt that momentary stab of panic that he was going to be one of those losers who flips out over the L-word. But no. He smiled. He hugged back as hard as I hugged him and he murmured soothing words like “My beautiful Gwen” into my hair.
Before I could begin to worry that this was the start of a new vanilla lovemaking phase of our relationship, he added, “Tomorrow we start training you to come from pain itself.”
A ghost orgasm rocketed through me at those words alone. “Yes, Mal! Ooooh, yes.” We had more than a week to go in Montreal and I wondered if we would succeed.
* * *
MAL
Of course the night that I wanted most to hurry back to Gwen would come on the recording day when we made the most breakthroughs. When everything is working musically, you feel like you can’t get enough of playing a song, like you want to play it over and over because it gets better every time. I dubbed two guitar solos for a song we were calling “Fire” and they were both so good we couldn’t decide between them. That was a good problem to have.
It was nearly two in the morning when I returned to the hotel, wondering if I would find Gwen asleep. I opened the door to see a gratifyingly arousing sight: She was asleep on a blanket curled on the floor near the door. She woke as I came into the room and rolled onto her back, pulling her knees apart with her hands.
“Don’t move,” I said, pulling my cock out and tugging it quickly to hardness. I dropped my trousers and knelt in front of her, spanking her pussy hard about a dozen times—that was all it took until I saw a trickle of her natural lubrication issue forth.
“That’s all the foreplay you’re getting,” I whispered, climbing over her and positioning myself. “Hold on to me if you need to.”
I thrust deep and she sucked a sharp breath through her teeth, no doubt trying to be polite to the other hotel guests by not screaming. She took my suggestion and clung to me, the cold still emanating from my leather overcoat, as I pulled almost all the way free and then thrust as brutally as I could again.
Through clenched teeth her words were still intelligible: “God, yes!”
“Does it hurt, my love?”
“You know it does.” She panted and moved against me, though, impaling herself, taking me even deeper. “But it doesn’t last.”
“Nor should it,” I said as I moved in time with her. “Your body craves me too much to resist for long. I could not resist taking you when I saw you awaiting me here.”
I did not let up fucking her until I had come, taking my full due of my willing captive. When I pulled free, I sat back to watch my seed ooze from her, the sight satisfying to some primal part of me I could not rationalize.
“Did you come?”
“No, Mal.”
“Good. Stand up.” She still had my come dribbling down her legs. I retrieved a cloth from the bathroom and wiped her down roughly, then shrugged the duster from my shoulders and put it around her. “We’re going out.”
“Out?” She buttoned it closed but I could still see her bare neck and the marks that marked her as mine.
“Put on your boots.” I don’t think I would have dared this in an American city, but Montreal was French in its soul, and something struck me as so very French about taking a naked woman out for a stroll. I cleaned myself up a bit and then out we went.
The hotel lobby was deserted at that hour and so was the street outside. I held Gwen’s hand as we walked toward some bars and restaurants, most of them closed but I knew a few were open until four a.m., some all night.
We settled at a place that served smoked meats, sandwiches, and other fare. The food was good but I was distracted by the constant looks from the waiters. It was patently obvious that Gwen had nothing on under the leather coat far too large for her, and the gazes were by turns intrigued, jealous, and lustful. I felt quite decadent, even as their attentions set me on edge.
“I was surfing the Internet today,” Gwen said, drawing my attention back to her. “Do you remember the stable? It’s currently unused.”
I wasn’t paying enough attention to her flirtatious tone, I suppose, because I said, “Are you thinking of getting a horse?”
She laughed. “I was thinking of being your horse,” she said. “Er, pony, I guess is the term. Although you know, if you wanted to get an actual horse you could keep one in our stable.”
I found myself caught off guard more by her than by her mention of pony play. Going out into the real world like this was more discomfiting than I expected, and the talk of her home only exacerbated it. “Thank you, but…” I tried to steer the topic to sex and play and avoid thinking about what awaited us in the future. “Pony play, you say?”
Gwen described some of the human pony tack she had seen online and I let her go on about it for a bit before I stopped her with a single finger to my lips.
“I think I prefer the real Gwen to pony Gwen right now,” I said.
One of the waiters came and filled our water glasses, even though they did not really need refilling. I had a strong feeling he was trying to get a better look at Gwen, perhaps hoping she might flash a tit. I was certain if I took her into the men’s room he’d fuck her without hesitation while I watched. My cock hardened in my jeans as the fantasy progressed to me tearing him limb from limb for daring to touch what was mine.
When the waiter was gone, disappointed, Gwen kissed my finger and said, “Real Gwen wants you to know that when we get back to Los Angeles she still wants to be your captive.”
“Does she? Should I keep her in the stable?”
“You should keep her wherever you want.” Her smile started out innocent but somehow curled into wicked as she said, “I do still have that fantasy about being kept in a cage, you know.”
“Didn’t that cretin in Providence do that to you?”
“He never actually mail-ordered the cage, just showed me pictures of it on the Internet to get me hot.” She raised an eyebrow in delicate challenge. “I mean, I know you’ll be gone on tour again soon and all that, but when we’re both in town, on weekends, maybe…?”
Another waiter appeared to inquire if everything was all right. I might have answered with a glare and bared teeth. No, everything was not all right because the real world was intruding rudely on our delicate balance. I didn’t mean the waiters, either. I meant the looming challenge of how to maintain this when we had to live normal lives. The artificiality of it was thrown into sharp focus when contrasted with the real world.
I was not ready to face that. Not with another week of studio time to go, and not with Gwen right there within my reach. I caught the eye of the first waiter, furtively watching us, and imagined locking Gwen into that cage…
“Penny for your thoughts?” Gwen asked.
I gave a harsh bark of laughter, then took a calming sip from my water glass. Maybe it had been a mistake to try to leave the room and the safe, small circle of our own little world. It was the first hint of a dark mood I’d had since her arrival. “Just wondering what kind of fantasies the waiters are having about us.”
“There’s alw
ays a lot going on in your head, isn’t there.”
I nodded. “Most of it not pretty.” I reached for her, running my thumb, wet from the condensation on my glass, against her lower lip. “Only my fantasies of you are pretty. Would you do it if I told you to expose yourself to one of them?”
She swallowed, her eyes looking directly into mine. “If you told me to, I would.” She licked her lower lip, her voice low but clear. “I’ll suffer through anything you say, Mal.”
“Exhibitionism would be suffering?”
“Tolerating a stranger’s gaze? Only if it was what you wished.”
I leaned across the table and kissed the sweet taste of her words right from her lips. I left cash on the table and we swept out of the eatery, curious gazes following us as we went.
Back in the room, I lifted my leather coat from her shoulders as if it were a priceless fur, but it was what I uncovered that was truly priceless. I hung the coat in the closet and then took one hand in mine, my other at her hip, turning her in a circle as if we were beginning a ballroom dance.
I pressed my mouth into her hair. “Tonight we begin training you to come from pain.”
“Yes, Mal.”
“As mine, you’ve experienced many kinds of pain. Paddle, flogger, cane, belt, my hand, my teeth on your skin, your nipples, your ass, your genitalia.” I left out flames. I did not want to tempt myself, and this hotel room was not a suitable place for fire play. Too many sensors and alarms, too dangerous. “There are more to explore, of course, but of the ones you’ve felt so far, which would you say is your favorite?”
Her head rested on my shoulder and I rocked her gently to imagined music. “You know which pain is my favorite,” she said.
“Do I? Oh, yes, sudden penetration.” She had called it the best pain ever that day she’d arrived in Montreal. “Very well. And second favorite?”
She hesitated before saying, “Y-your belt.”
I tipped her face upward to look at me. Her cheeks were scarlet. “This admission embarrasses you?”