To the Edge

by Anna del Mar

“You bet it won’t,” Noah said. “The whole purpose of this drill is that you remember so you won’t forget.”

  Reprieve. The crop didn’t strike this time around. Noah moved away and rummaged through the drawers on the far wall. I used the break to catch my breath. I dropped my head between my arms and sucked in great quantities of air. My ass throbbed and my thighs tingled as if a colony of ants had taken residence between my legs. My nipples had grown numb a while back, but my clit pulsed as madly as my heart did.

  A gleam of sweat broke above my upper lip. I wasn’t in pain, but I was hot, hypersensitive and overwhelmed. My overstimulated nerves fired off all kinds of signals. My body jittered out of control. Only one remedy could cure my condition.

  “Noah?” I squeaked. “Please?”

  “Do you want me to fuck you?” he said from somewhere directly behind me.

  “Yes,” I rasped.

  “Yes, what?” he said.

  “Yes, please?”

  It was infuriating to have to beg like this. It was maddening to be powerless to do anything about the need tormenting me, especially when it would have been so easy for him to put an end to it with a simple glide of his cock. It was also incredibly exciting.

  Note to blog: denial intensifies want.

  “Sorry, princess.” Noah was so freaking hot in his Dom role. “It’s not always what you want, when you want it, and you haven’t earned a good fuck yet. You’re close, but no cigar.”

  I was about to launch a formal protest when a buzz echoed in the room. I lowered my head and looked between my legs to see the impressive vibrator responsible for the noise and, more specifically, the wide head that approached my sex, juddering like a portable quake.

  The vibration jolted me like an electrical shock. Had I not been secured to the bench, I would’ve leaped in the air. Holy crap. The wand buzzed against my clit with body-rattling intensity. I shut my eyes, gritted my teeth and tried to stand the onslaught. My body quivered as if it were an extension of the wand.

  “That’s it,” Noah said as he nestled the wand in my sex. “Scream if you need to, but don’t come. Show me what you’ve learned. Show me that you can be my obedient little slut.”

  I wrapped my fingers around the frame and held on for dear life. I wasn’t going to come. I had to show him. I had will, spirit and spunk. My jaw locked. My lips pressed together. The bells joined the buzz in a spastic jingle, but it was my voice echoing in the room, a hoarse, shuddering growl that matched the vibrator’s frequency.

  I don’t know how long Noah vibed me. Whether it was a minute or an hour, by the time he succumbed to my pleas every molecule in my body spun with atomic intensity. My eyesight blurred. My joints quivered. It was shameful, but my juices trickled down my thighs.

  When the vibrator finally cut out, I collapsed on my elbows, spent from the effort of holding back and panting like a greyhound after the race. I pressed my forehead to the bench, convinced that he was going to kill me from need way before he ever fucked me.

  “Why did you stop having orgasms?” Noah asked.

  “What?” I said, gasping.

  “Two years ago,” Noah said. “You said you stopped coming. I want to know why.”

  “Um...” What could I say to that? “I just...did.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I’m telling you the truth.”

  “No, you’re not,” he said, “but you will.”

  His fingers separated my labia. I was already steaming down there, but the heat skyrocketed when the tip of the crop rapped on my clit. Tap. I flinched. Tap, tap, tap. I yelped with each strike. It was like an insistent knock on the door, relentless and maddening.

  “When did it happened?” Noah said. “Two years ago?”

  “Yes,” I hissed.

  “Wasn’t that around the time you started to work for the Luz Foundation?”

  “Right.” My clit was swelling to new, enormous proportions.

  “Was the job hard?” he asked. “Was it too much pressure for you?”

  “No,” I rasped. “Maybe. I... I don’t know.”

  I could hear Noah’s voice but I couldn’t make out his words. My brain wasn’t working. My body had rallied around my deliciously tortured clit. The erect knot of flesh felt like the center of my world, and every time that Noah landed the crop on it, I feared my world would blow up.

  “Did you hear what I said?” Noah’s voice startled me out of the frenzy. “I want you to think hard. Something happened around that time. I want to know what it was.”

  “Don’t ask.” I squirmed. “I don’t remember.”

  “Try harder.” He landed another rap.

  I groaned. “I don’t know.”

  Tap.

  “I can’t remember.”

  Tap, tap, tap.

  The word just busted out of my lips. “Yellow.”

  The crop stopped immediately.

  “Clara?” Noah’s voice came curt as I’d ever heard it. “You asked me to slow down. Do you mean red? Do you want me to stop?”

  “No, not red,” I muttered between my teeth, hearing the emotions in his voice, shock, alarm, disappointment and a whole lot of questions. “But I don’t want to talk about it, ever.”

  It. The word filled the silence in the attic like a scream. I closed my eyes and panted. I swear, the room was so quiet that I could hear my pores sweating, my sex dripping. I shook on the bench, from need, from shame, from denial. I’d admitted to it. Wasn’t that enough for one day?

  “That was very brave.”

  Noah’s voice eased the struggle in me. It felt like a refreshing balm. My ass burned, my clit throbbed, but the tension tightening my jaw relented. I panted on all fours, heaving as if ejecting bad memories from my soul. I felt fragile and exposed, easy to break, far from shatterproof.

  The noise of a cap unscrewing from a bottle rustled in the room. Noah came around and pressed a bottle against my lips. A spurt of cool, crisp water moistened my mouth and soothed my throat.

  “You’re going to feel so good when I’m done with you,” he murmured, caressing my face, smoothing the wet tendrils away from my face, planting a kiss on my lips. “You’re doing great, Clara.”

  If I was doing so great, why did I feel like a quivering pile of need?

  “You look amazing on the bench,” Noah said. “You ought to be proud. Take a look at what you’re doing to me.”

  He tilted my face to his groin and rubbed his crotch against my mouth. My lips traced the shape of a massive erection beneath his pants, leaving a pair of wet tracks over his jeans.

  “See?” he said. “You’re not the only one feeling the heat.”

  The idea that he was as aroused as I was heartened me. My mind coalesced around my craving for him. His cock felt enormous to my lips. I was not the only one suffering extreme need. I nuzzled against his groin and rubbed my face against his erection while he caressed my hair.

  “I want to fuck you so bad,” he said.

  “Then why don’t you?”

  “I want you to be ready.” He lowered himself and took a knee on the floor, so he could look directly into my eyes. “I need you to be ready.”

  I couldn’t be any readier than I was, slick, naturally lubed and eager. And yet by the expression on his face, I could tell he wasn’t convinced. He uncapped a tube from his hand and pressed it against my lips.

  “Protein gel.” He squirted it in my mouth. “It helped with missions. You need it for stamina and endurance.”

  I didn’t think I could endure another minute on the bench like this, but the translucent gel slid down my throat and, within moments, I felt its nourishing effects. When I was done, he buttered my lips with the rest of the gel.

  “I need the energy too,” he mumbled as he slurped
the gel from my lips, kicking off a messy kissing session that ended with his tongue exploring my mouth and his hand kneading my right breast and setting off the bell.

  “Whatever you did,” he murmured against my lips, “whatever is bothering you, you’re going to put it behind you. Do you know why that’s important?”

  I shook my head, gaze fastened on his.

  “So that you can go on,” he said. “So that you can be free.”

  Without warning he unclipped the clamp from my breast. The blood rushed to my nipple with a wallop. I opened my mouth in shock. A strangled sound squeaked out of my throat. In that instant, I relearned the meaning of extreme pleasure that flirted with pain and vice versa. Then Noah ducked under the bench and his mouth closed over my nipple.

  Relief. Thank heavens. Noah’s lips massaged away the sting. Within moments, I’d forgotten about the pain and my body centered exclusively around the pleasure of his mouth on my breast. He suckled me hard, drawing on my nipple like Romulus on the she-wolf’s teat.

  “Pain’s gone,” Noah murmured between kisses. “Guilt’s gone.”

  I recognized the ritual. Confession led to absolution.

  By then, my right nipple was mollified and he was out from under me, staring at me, studying my face. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Tell you what?” My body tensed, bracing for the next jolt of pleasure-pain.

  He kissed me. “Why didn’t you tell me that you were using the substantial advertising money you were making off your blog to support some of the foundation’s programs?”

  My eyes widened. My jaw dropped. Was he capable of decoding my brain? “How do you know that?”

  “You know how.” His mouth twitched with impatience. “You gave me your passwords and authority over your life when you signed on for this. You can’t blame me if I used my brain and my resources to find out what I need to know.”

  He knew, then. He knew how I used most of my salary from my foundation job and the chunk of change I made from the blog’s advertising revenues to pay for small, vital parts of the programs that got underfunded every year. In the big scheme of things, it wasn’t huge amounts of money, but it did wipe out my bank account on a regular basis, which was why I ended up depending on the family trust for my living expenses and looking like a spoiled brat to the casual observer perusing my bank accounts.

  I hated depending on the trust, but I hated to close down programs even more. I routed the money to the programs under a fake donor’s name and, since I had full access to the system, nobody else knew, not even my mother.

  But Noah had found out.

  “I was going to tell you...someday,” I mumbled, to make the statement true.

  “When?”

  “I thought maybe if we...you know.”

  His eyebrows rose on his forehead. “If we what?”

  My heart sank. “Forget I said anything.”

  “I don’t want to forget.” He tugged on the little bell dangling from my left nipple. “You were going to tell me all your secrets if we did what?”

  I took a deep breath. “If we made it through this. If we became friends again. If we found a way to be what we once were to each other.”

  His eyes went obsidian. “You want that?”

  “I thought that maybe...” Hard to tell a lie strapped to a spanking bench while he held a crop and my clamped nipple in his hands. “Yes.”

  His stare skewered me. “Is that why you sent me to that doctor friend of yours?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t think you’re sorry at all.” He kissed me, a harsh kiss that left my lips smarting and my mind reeling. “But I thank you all the same. I’ll always be your friend. Always.”

  “You promise?” I said, voice frail with fear. Had I said too much? Had I not said enough?

  “I swear,” Noah said.

  The clamp was suddenly gone. The pain jolted through me, sharp, intense and raw. I fought the shock, rattling in my bonds. Noah lowered his face to my nipple but paused for an instant to meet my eyes.

  “Clara?” he said before granting me both joy and relief. “So that we’re clear. I never stopped loving you.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Noah

  For a guy who liked to stick to a plan, my clumsy declaration of love sucked. For an operator who’d meticulously anticipated my steps, I’d gone off the grid ahead of schedule. Nothing like stepping out of the shadows to complicate a mission. But the SEAL in me was good with the adjustment. Adjusting was what we did to survive when everything went to hell. And everything had gone to hell in my head the moment I understood that Clara was willing to give me—us—a second chance.

  I stalked to the back of the sex bench and with a pull of the lever, tilted the bench so that her head went down and her ass came up.

  “Noah?”

  “Hang on, baby.”

  I went down on her pussy, licking and laving. No more waiting for Clara. She had earned her reward.

  Distracting her with my tongue, I reached forward and, squeezing my fingers together, released the clamp between her legs. She screamed even as my mouth landed on her clit, desperately trying to soothe the swollen little button. She was still in shock as I came to my feet, and hooking my arm over her waist, glided my fingers into her tight pussy.

  I felt the recoil of my penetration jolt through her body, felt her muscles strain as her body fought the straps and heard her desperate cries as I pumped my fingers.

  “Is it red, baby?” I winced as my cock tightened. “You want me to stop?”

  “Oh, God, please help me.” She let out a deep, guttural groan. “It’s green. It’s fucking green, Noah, please!”

  I added another finger, so that my three middle fingers were now in her. Fuck. She felt so good, sleek, snug and tight. Her throat rumbled, a delicate protest, a delightful, delighted sound. I pressed down on the small of her back, so that she could feel me, really feel me, as I pushed her closer to the edge. She screamed. She begged. She cried. But I didn’t relent. I kept pleasuring her, splashing in her tight little cunt, until it squeezed over my fingers with an astounding grip as she squirted a burst of liquid pleasure, before her screams broke and her body went limp.

  I had her unstrapped and out of the bench in thirty seconds flat. I wrapped her in a blanket, sat in the big stuffed chair and cradled her in my arms.

  “Good?” I said, tidying her up with a couple of wet wipes.

  She never opened her eyes. “Good.” She murmured incoherently. “Amazing.”

  After she began to breathe right, I lifted her in my arms and carried her down the stairs to the basement, where I propped her up on her feet against the wall while I unlocked the door to the garage.

  She could barely stand, but she clung to the blanket, blue eyes sparkling with curiosity. “What are you doing?”

  “I need to show you something.”

  “In the garage,” she said. “Right now?”

  “Right now.” I opened the door and flipped on the lights.

  The light illuminated my extensive workbench, the tarp covering my motorcycle and the item that took most of the space in the huge garage, the wooden sailboat I was in the process of restoring.

  Clara’s mouth fell open. With hesitant steps, she approached the trailer where the boat sat. She was quite the sight, standing by the sailboat, as finely constructed as the classic beauty. Her hand reached up and caressed the name painted on the stern. “Is this our Seaductress?”

  I nodded. A surge of true hope washed over me. She remembered. She’d called the boat ours.

  “How did you get it?” She ogled the sailboat. “I thought it had been sold, years ago.”

  “She was sold,” I said. “I tracked her down to Newport, Rhode Island. I
had to wait years before the owner agreed to sell her to me. I got it a few months ago, had it sailed down and transported here. I’ve been slowly restoring her since.”

  She fixed her eyes on me. “Why?”

  “Why do you think?”

  Her throat rippled with a compulsive swallow.

  “Come with me.” I offered her my hand.

  I helped her climb the ladder onto the transom and over the gunwales. I led her beyond the wheel, through the cockpit and down the companionway. Her bare feet rustled on the newly restored teak deck. The scent of sanded wood lingered in the cabin, but the air smelled fresh and the wood gleamed with a new coat of varnish. The sitting area, the head and the kitchen were completely stripped but this week I’d managed to refurbish parts of the berth cabin.

  The v-berth cabin was a small triangular room, edged by two cushioned benches that came together at the bow. The benches formed a small platform in the forepeak. Clara halted at the threshold and took in the space.

  “You did this?” Her hand went to her throat. “For me?”

  It wasn’t much, really, and not nearly what I would’ve wanted, just some new cushions on the benches and a couple of comfortable pillows I’d had delivered from the mainland. To lend the berth some light, I’d hung a stream of white Christmas lights along the hull and on the ceiling and plugged them directly to the garage’s light switch.

  An orchid lay on the bench, a bright yellow wildcat, splashed with a medley of chocolate browns and deep reds. I’d managed to find a florist who delivered it to the ferry on Friday morning. My trouble had been worth the time, because Clara’s fingers wrapped along the long stem and wouldn’t let go.

  “You gave me one of these.” Tears bulged in her eyes. “You traveled to the mainland that summer to get an orchid suitable for a wildcat, you said.”

  I smiled at the memory. I’d been a young fool back then, thinking I could have someone as far out of my league as Clara Luz. I was still a goddamn fool, but for the first time in a while, I was a hopeful fool, willing to live by the minute and forget my condition, at least for a few hours at a time.

  “Thank you.” She wrapped her arms around me and gave me a hug that warmed me to my bone marrow. “It means a lot to me that you remembered.”