He could kill her, and it wouldn’t be real.
He could kiss her and make it feel like nothing she’d ever felt before, but it wouldn’t be real.
He could love her, with his dream-flesh or his dream-heart, and it wouldn’t be real.
But it would probably feel nice.
Suddenly Rose wasn’t as sure of things as she had been a moment ago.
“What are you afraid of?” He leaned forward and spoke softly in her ear, the proximity of his mouth threatening more kisses. She would have taken a step — or a hundred — back, but there was nowhere to go, only wall. “Still afraid that I will hurt you? Afraid I can teach you things about yourself that you would prefer to ignore?”
“You are not . . . allowed to touch me!” she managed to say. He wasn’t doing anything of the sort, even if his lips were coming too close for safety, but she felt like repeating it, if only to make a point.
“I’m not?” He lifted a hand to his heart, feigning surprise. “When did we agree on that?”
“Just now! It was in the terms! I told you that you—”
“Your words were, and I’ll quote, ‘You are not allowed to lay a hand on me'." He joined his hands behind his back and allowed his smile to grow into a smirk. Then, before she could get out a retort, he fell against her and kissed her again, not hungry this time, his lips seeking not to devour but to taste. Rose gasped into his mouth, startled by the unexpected gentleness. Unfortunately, he broke away before she could do much else, and then had the nerve of chuckling at her reaction. “I still haven’t laid a hand on you, my dear, and look at yourself. Could it be that I’ll win after all?”
“You, you rake!” Summoning some of her wavering dignity, Rose raised a hand and pointedly wiped her mouth. She dropped it again, lightning fast, when she saw him bring forward one of his own, and saw what it carried. The knife was sharp and scrupulously clean, although the absence of dried, crusted blood on the edge didn’t make it seem any less deadly. It reflected her eyes as he twirled it. Shaking her head in despair, she whispered: “You said . . .”
“I am not about to kill you,” he interrupted, sighing as if she had just made a deeply unfair assumption about his character, which she didn’t think she had. He pushed the knife at her, handle first, and waved it to catch her attention, which was unnecessary. “What is this?”
“A knife.”
“Very good. Could you repeat that, a little louder, perhaps?”
“It’s a knife!”
“Not hands, then?”
“N . . .” she looked away from the light that danced on the edge and back at him, paling. “No.”
“Very good,” he said again. His eyes glinted, or something glinted where his eyes should be. “Now, if you would do me the courtesy of staying still while I work . . .”
As he brought the knife closer to her throat, Rose thought to herself that she should be neither shocked nor disappointed by this development. He was a murderer who murdered people with knives. Being murdered with a knife by a murderer who murdered people with knives was the reasonable, sensible outcome. The fact that her mind expected that to happen and was making it happen only meant that she was less perverse than she would be otherwise.
The tip of the knife touched her chin, so lightly it almost wasn’t a feeling, only the threat of one. He passed it from there to her neck, tracing its curve without ever drawing a drop of blood. The anticipation of having it slashed was almost as bad as the act itself had been in all of her other nightmares. She was caught between wanting to shudder and tremble and scream, and the knowledge that staying as still as a statue was the only thing with a chance of benefiting her. It wasn’t the simplest of choices.
She did scream — a stifled, choked sound — when he made the first cut, but it was of surprise, not pain. The knife avoided her flesh, and sliced easily through the collar of her dress before continuing down with hardly more difficulty, slicing her bodice and the chemise underneath into ribbons. Once he reached her breasts he stopped and, with a pensive look, pressed the flat side of the knife in the valley between then. Rose made an outraged noise and, against her better judgment, tried to slap him. He caught her arm with his free hand before she touched him, and put it back at her side.
“If you mean for me to continue keeping my hands to myself, you’d do well to pay me the same courtesy.”
“I don’t think,” she said, between gritted teeth, “that you are being very courteous.”
“I am doing my best to obey your terms to the letter,” he pointed out. Rose was about to shriek at him that that could very well be, but he wasn’t doing anything much to obey the spirit of them. However, he picked that moment to put the knife right and drag it through the fabric that separated it from the skirt, so she just shrieked aimlessly instead. When he ignored her, she stood up on her tiptoes and did it again, in his face. He rolled his eyes. “Be quiet. Please.”
“I will not!” she told him, and shrieked once or twice more, just to get her point across.
He sighed and kneeled down, placing the knife on the ground next to him. She was initially confused, as he didn’t strike her as the type who would get on his knees only to beg for silence, but he soon made it clear what his true intentions were. The skirt was flimsy enough that all he had to do was grasp each side of the cut he’d already made — without, unfortunately, ever touching her — and pull them apart, creating a tear that further pulls stretched to the hem. He picked up the knife again and passed it through it in one swift motion.
Then he started doing the same thing to her drawers. Having decided that he was likely going to keep his word and not murder her, Rose harrumphed to get his attention.
His head shot up.
“Yes?”
“I am not feeling tempted yet. Or enjoying any of this, for that matter!”
“And I still have some time left to change that.” He reached out and tapped the hourglass — half-full on the bottom, half-empty on top — meaningfully, then pulled her tattered undergarments aside, exposing much more of her than she’d ever wished to have exposed. Rose automatically clutched the two halves of her bodice together, but as she reached down to do the same with her skirt, the knife was pointed at her hand. He smiled up at her. “Fair is fair, my dear.”
In Rose’s quite modest opinion, there was nothing resembling fair about the way he was carrying on, but she couldn’t think of any other way of getting him to stop. She gripped the fabric protecting her breasts and stomach even tighter, crossed her legs and cast her eyes towards the ceiling, in a ferocious attempt to deny what was happening. It seemed like for now, her best option was to endure whatever indecency he had prepared for her with as much self-possession as she could muster, win, and make him leave. However, being resigned to her fate didn’t mean that she saw what he was doing as any less wrong or baffling.
In fact, what was he even doing?
Rose liked to think that she wasn’t entirely naïve about that thing that most people referred to as the pleasures of the flesh, Millie referred to as good fun, and Mrs. Cross — when pressed— referred to as aberrant fornication. She knew that it should only be contemplated, let alone done, after marriage, otherwise you were a whore and headed straight to Hell. She knew that it was where babies came from, and that there were herbs that could help with that, although she was hazy on what exactly should be helped.
She also knew it was intended to be done with both parties not having any clothes on. Which meant that whatever he wanted to make happen, it had to be something else.
Perhaps she ought to ask.
“Sir,” she said, in a timid whisper, “what do you mean to do to me?”
“Why, to kiss you,” he replied, seeming amused by her question. “Is it not obvious?”
“But my mouth is up he—”
There was no point in finishing anymore, because he’d already started showing her what he meant by kissing. Showing her enough of it, at least, to made it clear that their definiti
ons thereof were miles apart. His tongue darted out and traced the triangle between her legs, leaving behind a warm trail that outlined the area of interest like a brand. Ignoring her squeaky, thunderstruck reaction, he lapped at her outer lips and blew against them.
Rose was . . . appalled wasn’t even the word for it anymore, and it frightened her that she couldn’t seem to find a new one that fit. His breath was too hot to be real. Too hot not to be. The heat didn’t stop when it hit her shivering, trembling skin, either. Instead it passed through it and spread inside her, setting every inch ablaze. She opened her mouth to speak, but as she did, he lifted up both his hands and waved them before putting them back down, reminding her that whatever objection she’d been about to voice aside, he was still keeping up his part of their bargain. In a sense, anyway.
Rose closed her mouth. Then she opened it again, letting out a breathy sigh.
He’d dipped his head against her center and traced another path with his tongue, from the top of her thighs to the start of her cleft. Now he focused on another task, that of peeling her folds apart touch after touch after lick. Once she was sufficiently spread, he leaned forward and pressed his lips against the small, sensitive nub he’d just uncovered, kissing it as thoroughly as he had kissed her mouth.
Rose gasped and slapped her hands flat against the wall, completely forgetting that she needed them to keep herself decent at least from the waist up. Whatever control she usually had about herself deserted her, so much so that she nearly failed at processing the fact that her legs were fumbling to uncross themselves, struggling to part for him.
The sound was muffled, but she was sure she heard a hint of a triumphant laugh.
He kept kissing around her opening, lazily, as if he had all the time in the world. The hourglass said otherwise, but Rose wasn’t sure anymore if she cared about what it said. She didn’t feel like herself. A tickling, tingling sensation overcame her, and something tightened in her stomach, while her nipples felt both oddly stiff and oddly tender. As for her heart . . . her heart drummed so fast and hard that it seemed like it was either being ripped apart or on the verge of exploding. Either, she felt, would be . . . good.
She was about to die. She was about to die, and it didn’t matter.
Then the tip of his tongue touched inside of her, sending miniature earthquakes up her spine, and it wasn’t just her stomach wound tight, it was everything. He swirled it around a few times, coating her walls with saliva with sweet but disturbing efficiency. What he was doing had an air of ritual about it, of preparation for something else, and that should have worried her, but Rose didn’t care because she was in heaven, or at the very least headed there and determined to sneak in. Time — past, present, future, whatever of it was left in the hourglass — didn’t matter. All that mattered was the throbbing in her core, the rhythmic thrusts of his tongue.
He delved deeper, deeper than she would have imagined a tongue could go, and she howled, her ability to reason shutting down as her body unwound all at once. Whatever thoughts were left inside her brain after that whooshed by so fast that it was like she were thinking of nothing.
For an instant — although it could have been an eternity, or two — she stopped being a person, or a girl called Rose, or someone with thoughts, or anything but nerve endings on fire.
It was bliss.
After, he kissed her one last time and removed his mouth. Rose would have sworn that he had an air of smugness about him as he wiped it and stood up, but she couldn’t summon the energy to say anything about it.
She slumped against the wall, exhausted and unable to sustain herself. Her legs felt both heavy and unreal. The space between them ached and wept with the effort of contracting around nothing. She brought them together to see if pressing them against each other would ease the raging need, but all she managed was to get them covered with the same sticky wetness that glazed her spread lips. She was dimly aware there was so much of it that it couldn’t all be his spit.
He was staring at her, waiting for her to react with something other than breathless panting. Rose didn’t know what to say to him. She wouldn’t have even if she could find her voice, which he apparently was able to take away in more than one way. Her eyes travelled past him, to the hourglass. The sand at the top was in danger of disappearing. Only one thin line remained.
She took one deliberate, shaky step away from the wall and swooped down, boneless.
He kneeled down again, over her, and traced her jawline with the knife. She didn’t mind. The coolness of the metal provided a pleasant contrast to her fevered skin. As for what he would do to her, with it . . . she was sure that she should be worried, that it should matter, but not right now. Right now, all she wanted was to drown in the remnants of her delight and never come back up.
In her mind’s eye, she pictured the last grain of sand falling away.
“I’ve won, then.”
Rose made an effort to respond, but what came out of her mouth was incoherent, so she just nodded. He put the knife away and sighed at her agreement. With relief, much to her surprise. Had he truly thought, at any point, that he might lose?
He picked her up, one arm freeing her from what was left of her clothing, the other cradling her against his chest. Rose didn’t protest. She’d given her tacit permission for anything he wished to do the instant she’d decided to leave the safety of the wall. Nodding again, as much to herself as to him, she rested her head over his heart. Hers kept contracting and expanding, singing a loud and disjointed song, and his was beating just as erratically. She didn’t know why she had conjured him with one.
He deposited her on the bed — which was indeed very comfy — and started undressing himself, removing his coat and shrugging off his shirt in a whirlwind of buttons before throwing them both away as if they offended him. There was no point in looking away, since what she would see had to have been in her head to begin with. More and more of his skin was revealed, all of it dark, almost all of it scarred. Now that she had the full view of it, Rose saw that the scars formed an image. Some sort of bird.
The lines that formed it were jagged, and split from each other at odd places, creating offshoots that had nothing to do with the drawing. Without knowing how, she knew that they were like that because he hadn’t stayed still to receive the markings. Because he’d tried to fight them, and failing that, forced the knife to slip to botch them up as much as he could.
She shook her head, wondering how the information had gotten in there. Then she remembered that it was likely she knew about it because she’d invented it herself, albeit unconsciously.
When she finally tore her gaze away from his chest, she realized he’d freed himself of whatever else he was wearing while she was distracted.
She looked away very, very quickly, but not quickly enough.
He climbed on the bed with her — she felt the mattress give under his added weight — and pulled her up, locking their lips in their longest kiss so far. She allowed herself to melt into the feeling, knowing that she was getting herself lost, lost, lost, and that she wasn’t sure if it was worth it to try to find the way back. None of it was real. Was there any harm in losing herself a little for just a while?
She guessed that at some point they’d have to part to do essential things like collect themselves and breathe, but he refused to break away. Her head, which hadn’t felt like it was screwed on properly ever since he’d kissed her the first time, began to cloud. Air was fiction, a thing she’d been lied to about needing, and her mouth hadn’t been made for anything but what she felt.
He drew a lean finger over the constellation of freckles on her thigh, causing her to shiver. Did he care that she’d never done anything like what they were doing? He did look pensive, even as he kept kissing her. Perhaps he was beginning to see that she was too young and inexperienced and too much of a frightened maiden to be worth bedding. Perhaps he was starting to ponder if it wouldn’t be better, more charitable and more chivalrous to spare her
innocence and leave.
She was just pondering the size of the piece of her mind she’d give him if he did that, when he unglued his lips from hers and spoke, hoarsely, breathlessly:
“I’d like to tie up your arms, if you don’t mind.”
She could tell by the way he said it that the ‘If you don’t mind’ had been added out of politeness and nothing else, as if it were impossible for him to conceive a world where she would mind. As if what he was requesting were entirely sensible and reasonable. In fact, it was so ludicrous it even made her think a bit straighter.
“Why?”
“It would please me.”
“Why?”
“Because you are beautiful.” He paused, while Rose preened. Compliments were compliments no matter who they came from, and she wasn’t often called beautiful. Most people just went with ‘pretty’. “And you’d look more beautiful still bound and at my mercy. Will you allow me or not?”
Rose thought about it.
On one hand, she didn’t want a murderer, even one she’d invented, tying her up.
On the other hand, he was about to defile her utterly, and she was about to let him, so he might as well do that too. He had already run a knife all over her, without her having a single cut to show for it. Besides, if leaving herself at his mercy meant he’d do more of what he’d just done . . .
Her head bobbed up and down, once.
He didn’t wait. As soon as he had her blessing, he brought up not a length of rope, but a dark sash made of smooth, silky material. He looped it around her wrist thrice, tied the ends together and brought her arm up towards the center of the headboard. Flowers and fruits and vines had been carved into the wood, and the space around the carvings had been hollowed out at places, to make them stand out. He passed one end of the sash through the center of a stylized apple, brought it back through the nearest opening, and tied it to the other end. An identical sash appeared in his other hand, and he repeated the process.
The Darker Side of Love (A Dark Erotica Boxed Set) Page 43