I tossed Ivan a towel and he dried off quickly while I tried to look elsewhere. “I probably have some sweats or something that’ll fit you.” When I started to leave the closet, however, he grabbed my arm to stop me.
“Camilla, please tell me what I’ve done. You know I’ll never figure it out on my own.”
That was certainly true.
I turned slowly, letting Ivan close the door behind me. He seemed to relax, at least fractionally, once it was closed. At least it was a big walk-in, easily six feet by ten. We’d have plenty of room to wait for the zombies.
“You didn’t do anything wrong, honey. I did. Could you put a towel on, or something, at least? It’s a little hard to have a conversation with you when you’re naked.”
He shrugged and took one of the dry towels I was still holding, wrapping it around his hips. He opened the closet door only long enough to toss the wet towel out—I noted that his sodden backpack, clothes and shoes were already out there—before closing it again and turning to face me. Even in the towel, he still looked pretty damn good.
“What could you have done wrong?”
Sighing, I tried to figure out how to say it without embarrassing myself completely. There wasn’t a way, though. I supposed with Ivan it didn’t really matter anyway. He wouldn’t understand what was embarrassing about admitting such a thing.
“I let myself forget that this was just a science experiment to you, even though you were absolutely clear on that right from the start. I started expecting something long-term, and last night when I realized you didn’t feel the same way, I was disappointed. For future reference, though, when you’re sleeping with somebody, it’s kind of bad form to be blunt like that and say ‘You’re not my girlfriend.’ Maybe learn to sugarcoat it a little, like say you’re not interested in a commitment, or…”
He had opened and closed his mouth several times while I spoke, as though he was struggling not to interrupt. Once I stopped, though, he bit his lip and waited.
“I’m done talking,” I finally prompted him.
“I know. I’m trying to figure out what to say.” He pursed his lips and stared at the far wall for a bit, then nodded. “Okay. I did say that the sex was like a science experiment. I never said it was just a science experiment.”
“Let’s not argue about—”
“Don’t interrupt, Camilla,” he reprimanded gently. The dark burr in his voice sent a shiver down my spine. “It never occurred to me to introduce you as my girlfriend because I don’t consider you my girlfriend. You’re my friend. You’re also my submissive.”
“I get that. You said that already. And the BDSM stuff isn’t real life.” My voice was cracking. Fuck. I was trapped in this stupid fucking closet with Ivan now, about to start crying again, and I wanted to punch him right in the solar plexus for being himself. “You’ve been as clear as it’s possible to be, and I should have known better than to let myself get…get all…dammit!”
I turned my back to him, pressing my hands over my eyes and trying to breathe slowly through my nose to stop the tears. When I felt his hands on my shoulders I flinched, but he held on tighter and turned me back around. He offered me a travel pack of tissue, which I guess he’d had in his magic emergency backpack.
“I’m doing something wrong,” he said as I snuffled into a tissue. “You shouldn’t be crying. Do you…? I don’t understand. Do you want to stop being my submissive?”
Oh, for the love of—
“I’m going back to the dining room.”
“No!” he insisted. “It isn’t safe down there. And we can figure this out, Cami. We can do this.”
“Do what, Ivan? Be friends with kinky benefits? Fuck-buddies? I thought we had more than that, I thought…oh, hell, I obviously wasn’t thinking at all. Okay, I know you don’t get this stuff. But I thought I was your girlfriend, and I was happy about that because I really like you. I thought you felt the same way, although it’s hard to tell with you. You seemed so interested. I wanted there to be more, and I guess I just imagined more, and that was dumb of me. But no, I don’t want to be your submissive anymore. And now I really, really wish we could get out of this fucking closet.”
“It’s a windowless room on an interior wall,” he reminded me, almost gently. “Camilla, I think I’ve figured it out. The problem, I mean.”
“You’re going to go back to your dining room? Or hey, maybe I could fit in my pantry.”
Ivan smiled. “You’d be well-provisioned but far less comfortable. I meant our communication problem. Girlfriend doesn’t seem like the right word for what you mean to me. Probably that’s what I should be calling you to other people, since I can’t introduce you at parties as my submissive. But to me, saying you’re just my girlfriend would be…it would feel like I was saying I wasn’t pleased with you, or proud of you. And I am. I’ve never had a submissive of my own before, because I’ve never met anybody I felt a connection with until now. On the other hand, I’ve also never had a girlfriend, so I don’t have a basis for comparison.”
“Oh,” I whispered. I hadn’t planned to whisper, that was just what came out.
We were standing closer together now, and I wasn’t quite sure how that had happened. I could smell Ivan, the damp and sweat layered over soap and deodorant, with a lingering whiff of barbecue smoke. If I leaned forward a few inches I could reach out my tongue and taste the salt of his skin.
“The thing is,” Ivan went on, his voice soft and soothing over the counterpoint of the howling wind outside, the insistent thrumming of the rain on the rooftop, “I think this is love. But I’ve never been in love before, either, so I don’t know.”
“No basis for comparison,” I concurred.
He nodded solemnly. “Nevertheless, it’s my working hypothesis.”
“You can never prove a hypothesis, though.”
“True,” Ivan agreed. The towel slipped off his hips, but he ignored it. “As long as it’s not proven false, though, we’re in good shape.”
His fingers slid through the hair behind my ears, shaping themselves to my skull.
“I hypothesize I love you too.”
Ivan smiled. The uplighting from the flashlight gave his face a sinister cast as he leaned over me, making him look for all the world like a sexy old-school vampire as he murmured, “Professor.”
“Professor,” I amended dutifully.
“This is all out of order, Camilla,” Ivan pointed out. “We’re in your room instead of mine, I’m naked and you’re dressed. We need to straighten things out, I think. Correct some imbalances.”
“That sounds like it could take some time, Professor.”
“Then we’d better get started.”
It had felt stifling, just a few minutes ago. Now it felt cozy, almost romantic, stuck in the closet with the storm howling with eerie insistence outside. Ivan undressed me slowly, teasing as he went, and by the time I was naked we were both starting to breathe more heavily.
The emergency backpack contained an emergency box of condoms, which Ivan said he always packed just in case. I found that a little too convenient, until he showed me the laminated checklist he used for packing and I saw that it did, indeed, include condoms. I guess it never hurts to plan ahead for safe sex, even in the face of hurricanes or raging hordes of the re-animated undead. Go figure.
What we didn’t have was props. No cuffs or ropes, whips or paddles or anything else. Just Ivan, who kissed me sweetly like the best prom date ever until I melted into a puddle of limp willingness at his feet.
Instead of orders, he gave me himself, kneeling down to face me and kissing me again as we tumbled to the floor together. The rushing scream of the wind outside almost masked our sighs, but not the groan he made when he rolled me underneath him and pressed my hands to the carpet over my shoulders. I could feel his sheathed cock, hard and hot between my thighs, and I rubbed against it instinctively, half expecting him to tell me to stop. He didn’t, though. I worked myself into a sweat under him, until
I was slick and swollen and so ready I was almost crying again, before he finally made a move.
Ivan skimmed his lips over mine and angled his hips, pushing inside me slowly until he was as deep as he could go and then stopping there. I arched up into him, wanting to get even closer, feeling as though I could never be close enough. He let one of my hands go so he could work his fingers under me, gripping my ass to pull himself into me with more force until we were both writhing and crying out at the blissful pressure.
His face was beautiful in the dim light, sheened with sweat and stern with intensity. Ivan looked down at me and pulled out almost all the way, then slid back into me one slow inch at a time, watching my face as avidly as I watched his. Out and in, over and over. It was an agony of delight. I came before I was quite ready for it, gasping in surprise and bucking my hips up. He never changed his tempo, even as I quaked and begged.
My eyes closed at some point, and when I opened them again Ivan was smiling down at me, looking amused and a tiny bit smug. Then a shiver passed through him and his face tightened. His hips snapped against mine sharply the next time he thrust inside. I didn’t know if it was cause or effect, but his pace changed then, and he drove into me with increasing urgency until his cries and taut muscles in his face and shoulders signaled he was close.
Raising my free hand to his face, I stroked his cheek before letting my fingers curl around the back of his neck, pulling him down for another kiss. He plundered my mouth until he came with a shuddering cry.
The storm was still blowing when we started to notice our surroundings again. The closet, large though it might be, was still growing stuffy and slightly dank as the lack of air conditioning started to sink in. The wind’s screaming tapered off to an even more ominous silence, as the eye of the hurricane passed.
I pulled my sleeping bag down from a shelf and spread it out for us to sleep on. We covered up with the remaining dry towels and were asleep well before the wind started picking up again.
* * *
Seventy-six degrees. It was almost chilly that morning, even though the power was still out so the air conditioning hadn’t been running all night. The storm had cooled things down, a small recompense for the destruction it had wrought.
I looked out the bedroom window and saw Ivan down on the patio, wearing his running clothes with—alas—a T-shirt. They were the clothes he’d had on last night, and he’d thrown them on this morning not minding the damp. When he looked up at the window and waved at me, I realized I was breaking his routine—he didn’t usually see me there on Saturdays or Sundays.
It was already after seven o’clock. Ivan was starting his day off-schedule, anyway. To my pleasant surprise, he hadn’t seemed too perturbed by that. Nor had he displayed any signs of panic from sleeping in my closet all night. When I pointed this out, he’d just grinned and kissed the tip of my nose. He still insisted on going for the run, though.
It wasn’t my usual time to be up on a weekend, but I was curious to see the damage, so I pulled on some clothes and ventured outside. Everything looked fine in the backyard, aside from the debris everywhere. Little twigs and a liberal amount of shredded leaves coated the surfaces like bizarre confetti, plastered to the walls of the houses and the cars by the sheer force of the wind. According to the radio, the storm hadn’t even hit the city full on, and I could only imagine what the area in its direct path must look like.
I wandered down the row and around the side of the building, only to stop in horror at the sight of the utility pole leaning from the fence line straight into Ivan’s front bedroom window. The wires hadn’t snapped, and I was fairly certain it was a telephone pole rather than electric, but I still got a little lightheaded thinking of it. Ivan could have been in that room. We could have been in there together.
Things happened for a reason. I grinned like an idiot, thinking about the improbable things that had happened in my closet last night as the storm raged outside. Hot, sweaty, decidedly naughty things, even more creative than usual because we were stuck in there for hours with nothing else to do. Strangely, I woke up more than ready to do further naughty, sweaty things. Preferably in a bed, however.
In half an hour or so, Ivan would be back from his run, and if the water was back on—it had gone out at some point in the wee hours of the morning—he would take a shower. I planned to wreak further havoc with his schedule by joining him. Then breakfast, then checking email if we could get an internet connection. And later—far later than the usual time of 9:00 a.m., I suspected—we would most likely do some gardening. Today that would probably consist of picking up storm leavings from all over the yard.
After that, barring any other errands, we might well do something spontaneous and deliciously deviant. Or we might sit around watching movies, or helping with more communal barbecue if the power stayed out. Whatever came next, I was cool with it. And somehow I knew Ivan would be cool with it, too.
* * * * *
About the Author
After earning two graduate degrees, practicing law awhile, then working for the public school system for more than ten years, Delphine finally got a clue. She tossed all that aside and started doing what she should have been doing all along—writing steamy novels!
When not writing or doing “mommy stuff,” Del reads voraciously, noodles around with designing websites, and plays computer games with her darling (and very romantic) husband. She is fortunate enough to have two absurdly precocious children and two delightful mutts. Del and her family are all Texas natives, and reside near Houston in unapologetic suburban bliss.
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ISBN: 978-14268-9404-6
Copyright © 2012 by Delphine Dryden
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