Rose stayed perfectly motionless until he was finished. A pulse fluttered down her body, from her neck to her feet, leaving every inch of her more alive, more . . . awake than she’d ever felt in reality. He leaned back, observed his work with a satisfied expression and then settled over her, his thighs bracketing her waist, his — oh god, she’d tried so hard not to look! — hovering over her belly.
It was standing up straight. Was it meant to do that?
Almost immediately, she began to doubt whether it had been a good thing that she’d allowed him to tie her up. A moment ago it had felt satisfying, relieving even, to have the fabric snake around her wrists as tangible-if-circumstantial evidence that she was blameless in what was about to happen. Now, as he came closer, as his shaft looked like it became longer and thicker the more it approached her face, she found that being unable to resist him was actually a frightful notion, and that she ought to have thought it through some more.
There was one last thing that Rose knew about, well, the whole sex business. She knew that at some point, the woman was supposed to put her mouth to the man’s groin and swallow what he had between his legs. She’d come by that bit through a playing card she had found on the street and picked up because it was shiny. Millie had taken one look at it and laughed herself silly for five minutes straight.
She fervently hoped that he wasn’t expecting her to swallow his, because she very much doubted she’d be able to. It hadn’t looked that big or that straight when she’d brushed her hand against it. Although then again, she hadn’t left it there long enough to get an accurate picture.
“It’s your turn to kiss me,” he whispered, effectively settling her doubts. He lifted himself up so that he was kneeling with a leg on either side of her instead of sitting. Rose stared down his length, her eyes wide. Being certain that she knew what he meant for her to do didn’t make doing it any easier, as she still felt dubious about all of it fitting. Worse yet, he appeared to expect her to take some sort of initiative in the matter.
Why couldn’t he just force her? It would be so much simpler. So much more bearable.
She closed her eyes and formed an O with her mouth, hoping he would do the rest, and mercifully, he did, cupping her face with one hand and leaving a thumb under her chin, while the other guided his member home. The head of his shaft broke past her lips, stretching them around it, and went ahead until it poked the back of her throat.
He pushed her downwards, into the pile of pillows that sustained her upper body, and sank after her. It took her no time at all to realize that her body would not be convinced to cooperate.
She couldn’t do it. Couldn’t. It had been insane to even think it was possible, he was barely in and already she was gagging, her throat closing up against the invading member and refusing it entry. She felt a line of drool run out the corner of her mouth, to her chin, onto his palm. Her jaw ached. Not in the warm, yearning way the rest of her body did, but with sudden, ripping pangs that felt like symptoms of breaking.
“Breathe.”
She would have retorted that she was doing her best to breathe already, that not having been told that she should wasn’t the issue, that air could only be fiction when her lungs weren’t screaming for it. But she couldn’t, because the actual problem, the very literally inescapable fact that her mouth was filled with his meat, meant that the only sounds she could make were grunts and hiccups that couldn’t be turned into speech.
She started to cry.
He pulled away, swearing loud enough to make her ears ring, although the inside of her head was ringing so much already that she didn’t think it made much of a difference. Rose towed herself up by her now hated bindings, red-faced and dry-heaving, and turned on her side. He got off her but didn’t leave the bed, preferring to linger behind her. She supposed that was as much space as she could ask to be given.
Sniffling, she wiped her eyes on the back of her hand. Her throat hurt less now that she had swallowed a few times, but her lips felt hot and swollen, and so tender she was afraid of running her fingers over them, least they chafe.
“I’d appreciate it,” she said, slow and polite, as soon as her breathing stopped being noisy enough to fill the room, “if you would be more careful about the things you put in my mouth.”
“Oh, surely it can’t have been as bad as that.”
Rose buried her face in a pillow, wishing a boot would drop on his head.
“It was painful!”
“Well. My apologies.”
Many, many boots. A hurricane of boots.
“I’d like you to untie me.” The bindings were instantly gone. It was that easy for him, then. She wondered why he’d gone to the trouble of tying her up with his own hands. Then she remembered he’d said he’d like to tie her up, not that he’d like to have her tied up. The distinction was a sound, if worrying, explanation. “And now I think you should leave. If you are quite done with me, that is.”
“I don’t believe I should. Not until you cease to be upset.” He petted her head and carded her hair with his fingers. She didn’t believe that his decision was motivated entirely by regret about hurting her, but nevertheless, Rose allowed him to shuffle closer and put his arms around her. His hands met over her chest, which she was sure couldn’t be coincidental, but he was at least decent enough to not squeeze anything.
“Did you mean any part of it?” she asked, after a while. Her voice came out unsteady — unsurprising, seeing as his shaft was pressing against her, still hard and wet with the result of his botched experiment — but she tried her best to minimize the waver. “From what you told me before, about loving me. About how you perhaps could.”
“No.”
“Oh.” She didn’t know why she felt disappointed. He wasn’t real, after all. Everything that came out of his mouth, she’d put there unconsciously. He could only echo her own expectations back to her. Which when she thought about it, meant his reply was that much more depressing.
“I do love your eyes.” He tipped her chin so that she was facing him and kissed her once on each eyelid, as if to prove it. There were so many layers to the statement that she didn’t attempt to dissect them all. She just prayed that he didn’t mean he loved them as food. “And I stand by my words on the subject of pleasure. Because this that we’ve done so far, my dear, is nothing.”
It hadn’t felt like nothing, Rose thought, unless he had a mighty strange concept of nothing. They were laying nude and face to face on a bed so soft it was sinful, and they’d had their mouths on parts of each other that she felt hard-pressed to believe mouths were meant to go on, and her body was a turmoil of shame and unresolved lust and sizzling need.
“What else is there?” she dared ask, keeping her tone as noncommittal as possible. “That is pleasant, I mean. Not like . . . whatever it was that you attempted just now.”
“Ah,” he said. His smile was back on. Was that good? She couldn’t tell. However, she was letting her body gravitate to him like a sunflower caught in the pull of the sun, so a part of her must like that he was smiling. Even if it was a dangerous smile. “I can think of a thing or two.”
It was amazing, yet faintly shocking, how fast he was able to go from nothing to frenzied action. No sooner were the words out, and he was toppling her over and maneuvering himself on top of her. She pursed her lips meaningfully, to show that she hadn’t changed her mind about anything going past them, but soon realized she had things far more important to concern herself with.
He slid a hand between her legs, running it up from her knees to her thighs. She shivered and clamped them together, trapping him there. When he looked up, his face scrunched up and questioning, she allowed him to see that she was petrified, absolutely petrified by what was happening. That he could expect no cooperation, because a part of her was still compelling her to resist in order to escape with her soul untarnished. That she wouldn’t part her legs for him unless and until he made her lose her mind in such a way that she would have no alternati
ve.
The killer smiled like Rose would expect a wolf to smile, all teeth and edges and menace, and she felt untold relief at his understanding. She’d dreaded that he’d take her manifestation of fear as a request to stop. She was at the point where she didn’t know what she’d do if he stopped.
“Do you know what I am about to do?”
Rose made a minimal assenting gesture with her head.
“Are you afraid?”
She repeated the gesture, more vigorously this time.
“Good.”
Spikes of terror raced up her spine. He snuck a hand under her backside and lifted her up to meet his shaft; the full-body version of the restraining move he’d resorted to when he’d kissed her the first time. Rose squirmed, both to get away and in order to excite him further. Her body didn’t seem capable of noticing the contradiction.
He started gently enough, at least as far as she was capable of judging such things, first freeing his other hand from between her thighs, then using it to spread her folds and smooth them down. Once he was done freeing the path, he collected some of her moistness on his thumb and showed it to her. Rose had no idea what he intended until he pressed the finger inside her mouth. She sucked in a breath and wondered how it was that her face wasn’t burned to ash yet.
Laughing, he twisted the finger around, over her mouth, teeth and inside of her cheeks. Rose found the whole experience incredibly unsettling, but admitted to herself that there was no doubt he was honoring her request to be careful at least when it came to her mouth.
Or so she thought, until he spoke again, nearer to her ear.
“After we are finished, I will give you a taste of your own blood.”
Rose made a muffled sound around his finger, not doubting for an instant that he meant it. The killer smiled beatifically and returned his attentions downward. His fingers lingered around her opening, reminding her eerily of the times in past nightmares when he’d done just that, but with a knife, before the blade plunged down and went through her. She found it darkly funny that both situations were made more of similarities than of contrasts.
Each fluttering touch was a tease, a promise, and each went deeper in. She whined a little at the strangeness of the sensation when the first finger entered her, but that whine was immediately followed by a gasp, as he coiled the digit and used it to massage some secret spot inside of her that Rose had never been aware existed. Its existence was, however, in the process of becoming a fact not only unquestionable, but incredible.
He added another finger, twisting it the same way, and she broke.
“Aaahhhnn . . .”
“Quiet,” he told her. It was likely the cruelest thing he’d said to her all night. She could no more be quiet than she could make herself deaf or blind. Whatever magic he was operating on her with his fingers was urging her body to react in every way it knew to. They were worse than his tongue. They could go deeper, move more freely, reach places where she’d never thought she could be touched. Imposing silence on herself only made her lose her grip all the faster.
Her upper thighs quivered against his hand. Rose threw her head back, thinking about nothing, doing nothing, feeling nothing but the flow of her blood rushing down her through some primal, instinctive pathway. His attention was fully on the flesh under his palm. His face was a study in rapture. He might not love her, but she was beginning to suspect that his desire was a force just as powerful.
When she started pressing herself against his fingers without any further coaching, he groaned, satisfied, and removed them. She didn’t have the opportunity to resent him for it, as it took him just another second to align the stiff pole between his legs with her entrance.
Rose looked down, then back up again. It occurred to her, at what could only be the worst possible moment, that he’d been convinced he could fit himself inside her mouth, and been unreservedly wrong on that account. Who was to say that the same wouldn’t hold true for the hole he was attempting to enter now? She’d never put much stock in Mrs. Cross’ cautionary tales about agony and rivers of blood flooding entire rooms, as she assumed that most women wouldn’t still be alive after years of marriage if that were the truth. However, if the man was too large and the girl too tight, and he attempted to put it in anyway . . .
“It will be very simple,” he said, like it was a secret joke just for the two of them. It worsened her nervousness instead of improving it, and what he said next sealed it for her on whether she should be terrified or not. “Frightening, perhaps, at first, but worth it in the end.”
Rose closed her eyes, almost wishing to wake. They flew open again, big and startled, after the flicker of a second it took for her to process that something had happened.
Her mouth opened too, in a small semicircle of dismay.
“W . . .” she started, because he was in, he’d entered her and sheathed himself fully with one single thrust, just like that. She felt no pain of any sort, just an overwhelming numbness that informed her that her body had yet to catch up with the development that something was in it. The shock had split her mind aside, leaving her one step ahead of her physical responses. A division which, unfortunately, didn’t last. She cringed away from him, wailing. “No, nonono . . .”
“Did I hurt you?”
A heavy black boot fell down from nowhere and landed on his head.
“Yes,” she managed to say, while he took the boot and examined it with a bemused expression. As a matter of fact, she was hurting still. Her response made him turn, and in a blink he went from bemused to looking like he’d looked at her when she’d declared that she did not want him. Like he’d been certain of a thing, certain enough to stake his life on it, and was having evidence of his wrongness pushed under his nose. “Is there nothing you can do with that, that thing of yours besides causing me harm?”
He caught her face, smushing her lips into a pout, and peered deep into her eyes in the same calculated, searching way he had in the alley, although now there was also a hint of preoccupation in the mix. The vertigo she’d experienced then returned.
His face disappeared, although her gaze remained locked with his . . . somewhere. Because all at once, it was as though she was dreaming an entirely different dream. One where she wasn’t an active player but an observer, floating, watching the events of this new realm as if through a fogged window.
Shapes became desert, sand blown asunder by unforgiving winds, and desert became the faraway walls of a city that was great and old and lost. The desert also became riders, armed with spears and long knives, carrying with them a weapon, a disease, a plague that unbeknownst to them would swallow them all. In the distance, there was a cry.
The riders became darkness.
Rose snapped back into her first dream, and being back inside a body was a shock, considering what was happening to the body in question. The fact that something was inside of it had become too raw, too blatant. She wasn’t bleeding a red river, or close, but her whole lower body felt like a bruise under pressure. She made a wheezing noise as her inner walls contracted around the invader. It was impossible to say if the reflexive action was an attempt to accommodate it or to expel it.
The killer was still looking at her, his face a blank, his mouth an inexpressive line. She thought about how unfair it was, that he was the one who was made up, yet also, between the two of them, the one who was going to a greater length to treat the other as something unreal.
“I see,” he said. There was a strange echo behind his words, but it faded as his face became more animated. “I owe you an apology. The first time I looked, I saw your unique tastes, but failed to notice that they are meant to be handled in a certain way. If you could allow me to—”
“Unique?” Rose interrupted, undecided on whether to feel flattered or insulted. There was much about the activities they were engaging in that was new, to her at least, but unique? “I don’t understand what you could find unique about not wanting pain.”
“That is it, exactly.�
�� He shifted his weight, triggering a current of spasms through her lower body, and briefly let his eyelids drop. “You do want pain. My mistake was in delivering it slowly.”
“I do not—”
He just nodded at her, with a peaceful sureness that scared her more than his insane declaration. What was he on about? No one wanted pain, and she wasn’t any different in that regard. The only pleasure to be had in it was in inflicting it, and to do that was both wrong and disturbed and mean. He couldn’t honestly believe . . . her mind couldn’t be warped to the point of making her a dream lover who was convinced that she wanted to be hurt. True, he had earlier read her mind with frightening accuracy, but he had to be wrong on this account. She needed him to be wrong.
He slid out of her an inch or two and thrust back in. The first time he’d done it she’d been too overcome to appreciate the subtle ripples the action produced, both in her body and his. This time she felt everything. Every shudder and tremor that spread through her belly as she went from full to hollow and back to full. Every millisecond of him stretching her past capacity.
And then he did it again, and again, and every conviction she had got turned upside down.
She cried out, heedless of his command to stay silent, as her flesh took advantage of her mind’s confusion and started humming and bucking in every direction except away from him. He made a low, unsatisfied noise and bit into her shoulder, hard, adding yet another sensation to the assemblage that was already wreaking havoc inside of her. She didn’t know if he’d gone deep enough to draw blood. Details like that seemed to have become irrelevant.
The bite turned into kisses and licks, and they came in tandem with his thrusts, which only muddled her thoughts further. Rose wasn’t even certain anymore if he’d been right or wrong in thinking she’d like pain. First, she would have to be able to tell the pain apart from everything else she was feeling, and she had no hope of that. Instinct was beginning to overrule her, leaving no space for worry or doubt or analysis.
It was a simple thing, to let go, to put her arms around his neck and pull him down to do whatever he wanted, whether it was bite or kiss. She didn’t have to fear losing herself anymore. He’d find her on the other side, even if he had to chase her to get to her.
The Darker Side of Love (A Dark Erotica Boxed Set) Page 44