But—
I don’t know. I don’t like how this is making me feel. This is worse than being naked somehow, this is having a lover say, here, dress up in this slutty thing I found, and having to show one’s lover that one can’t, that one only looks good in slutty clothes with planning and good angles and maybe a couple passes through Adobe Lightroom.
This is having to explain to a lover that one’s body won’t look as good as the lover imagines it will, and that feels an awful lot like saying, my body doesn’t look good at all. I know that’s not true—at least I think? I think I know that? But it feels true.
It feels brutally and humiliatingly true.
When I look up at the concierge, he says—in an offhanded sort of way, like of course it’s not meant to soothe me, it’s just an observation—“A mistress would be very pleased to see her pet wearing the things she chooses.”
I swallow, looking back at it. It’s like a snake on the bed. I’d been smiling earlier, and now I can’t remember what a smile feels like on my lips. “I don’t know if it will fit.”
“Why don’t we see?”
“I—” The idea of trying it on and then knowing for sure that it’s as bad as I’m imagining . . . it’s unbearable.
But before I can say no, before I can run back down the hall and take the lift to freedom, the concierge comes up to me and gently unhooks my bag from my shoulder.
“I’ll assist,” he says, and then he’s helping me out of my jacket with quiet grace.
“I don’t know . . .”
My bag and jacket are stowed in a discreet cupboard among the bookshelves, and then he’s kneeling at my feet, unbuckling my heels with a surprising deftness. Or maybe not so surprising, given that it’s a kink club. Rebecca told me last time that the employees here sometimes work as submissives or Doms, depending on the demand. Perhaps he’s been trained to do this very thing. Perhaps he would do it for fun even if he wasn’t paid.
My shoes deposited in the same cupboard, he then moves to help me with my clothes. “This outfit came from a very well-known atelier,” he informs me, again in that casual kind of voice, “and the atelier only takes custom orders. This means your mistress ordered this specifically for you. She would have given the atelier your measurements in order to do so.”
I chew on my lip as he unzips my dress. “You think so?”
The dress is tugged off, and then he steps back so I can remove my own knickers and bra. I’m not shy—photoshoots cure one of that quite quickly—but I still hesitate.
“I hate this,” I say. “I hate this right now.”
“My Dom sometimes makes me wear a corset,” the concierge says with a rueful smile. “I hated it at first—my belly hangs below the bottom and my back spills over the top, and I just kept thinking, ‘Does he want me to be thinner? Is that what this is? Or does he just want me to be embarrassed and miserable?’”
I run a fingertip along the leather. It’s supple, almost like satin to the touch. “And? Did you tell him you couldn’t wear it anymore?”
The concierge picks up the top part of the lingerie. “No. But I asked him what he wanted with me in a corset, and do you know what he said?”
I shake my head.
“He said he wanted to fuck me in it,” the concierge says with a laugh. “It was hot to him. I was hot to him. That simple.”
That simple.
I close my eyes. I should be over this. Why am I not over this?
“Let’s just try it on,” he says calmly. “If it doesn’t fit, then we will explain everything to your mistress.”
“What if it fits, but I still don’t like it?” I whisper.
He gives me a sympathetic look. “If you were going to push yourself to become braver—if you were going to perform exposure therapy on yourself so that you could wear whatever the hell you wanted—why wouldn’t you do it with someone who’ll reward you with orgasms?”
“I do like orgasms.”
“Of course you do,” he says. “Now lift your arms. There you go. Oh, your hair too, I don’t want it to get caught.”
Together he and I get the top on. The straps crisscross up to my tits, making leather cups that can be unlaced down the middle to expose my nipples, and the straps stretch up from those cups to create a halter, which effectively collars my neck.
The concierge cinches me up from the back, and then we turn to look at the mirror. I catch my breath.
Shockingly…it fits. And it fits well. I don’t know when Rebecca managed to find my measurements, or how, but somehow all the straps and laces work together to cup my tits enticingly, and with plenty of support.
“Now the bottoms,” the concierge says, and these I need less help with, but he still laces up one side while I lace up the other. When the concierge buckles them to the top, I can feel where they crisscross my bottom and bite into my flesh. Not much—it’s too well fitted for that—but some, because it’s inevitable. “Look,” he says, turning me to the mirror. “Look at yourself.”
I look again, and blush. The bottoms are made to expose my sex, and so framed by all the precisely cut leather is a delta of gold curls, silky and trimmed enough to show the pink seam where I split open. My hair is an equally golden waterfall of sleek waves, sliding against itself as I move this way and that.
“You look like a Disney princess who was cursed into slutitude,” the concierge says fondly. “Your mistress will be very pleased.”
Will she? I turned in the mirror some more, wondering. There’s no hiding the convexities of me like this—but there’s also no hiding that I’ve listened to her, that I’ve done as she asks. Her will binds my body along with the leather; in fact, the leather is her will, the leather is Rebecca’s command, her hunger, her possession of me.
How can I hate it then?
I still feel uncertain as the concierge tidies up the bed and then leaves. I kneel by the desk, ducking my head so that I’m surrounded by a curtain of blond hair.
I stare down at my thighs, which are pale and dimpled and flecked with a handful of stray freckles, and I wait.
I don’t have to wait long.
After only a few minutes on the floor, the door opens and I hear Rebecca enter. Even if I wasn’t expecting her, I’d still know those footsteps. Deliberate, precise, and yet fluid for all that. Almost dancer-like, although Rebecca would never do anything so frivolous as dance. The only time I’d seen her do it was in the thorn chapel, her feet bare and her eyes sparkling with firelight and champagne.
Rebecca strides toward me, and I try to imagine what will happen next. She’ll say she’s pleased maybe, and I’ll get to feel that sweet warmth in my chest at making her happy. Or maybe she won’t say anything at all, but have me present my body for inspection, and I’ll know I’ve pleased her by the curl of her mouth or by the satisfied flick of her eyes.
I’m not ready for what actually happens.
Rebecca makes a punched, gasping noise like she’s about to fall from some great height, a noise that’s as needy as it is stunned, and I’m surprised into looking up at her.
We meet eyes across the room, and for a moment, we’re both still, her lips parted and her eyes glittering, and before I even know what’s happening, before I can prepare to be bossed around, made to crawl, paddled on the backside, whatever, she’s on me. She’s in front of me and she’s yanking me up by the leather straps of my bodice and then she’s devouring my mouth like a woman starved. She’s molding her lips to mine as her hands find my hair, my waist, my arse, and she’s seizing me to her like she’ll rip this city apart if she can’t use me right now. Like she’ll set the world on fire if I’m not hers.
The kiss is like no other kiss we’ve shared. There’s a feral life to it, a desolation, and when I open my lips to say something—I don’t even know what—she steals inside my mouth with her tongue, and all my words leave me anyway. She’s too hot, too soft and slick, and each stroke of her tongue against mine sends thrills chasing through me, skating do
wn my spine to the soles of my feet and skipping to the tips of my fingers. Breathing is an impossible thing, it’s all stolen wet gasps and shuddering exhales, and I’m dizzy, I’m so dizzy with it, but in the best possible way, like being on a sailboat that’s turning too fast, like dancing at a club so hard I can’t breathe, like watching thorns bite into my hand as they make me bleed.
Rebecca makes another one of those punched gasps, like the very existence of me is enough to bruise her, and then we’re moving, she’s pushing me as she kisses me, and I’m shoved against a bookshelf hard enough to make a book rock off the edge of the shelf and fall to the floor. We both ignore it, too lost in each other, too desperate for more. No single kiss is enough—so much so that the moment a kiss starts, we’re already chasing the next one, and the next, already grabbing, already seeking, tilting, taking.
I’m not supposed to grab. I’m not supposed to take. It’s not why I’ve been trussed up in leather and made to kneel. But every time I use my teeth, every time I squeeze a slender hip, cup a firm breast, I’m rewarded with growls and scratching embraces and eager presses of her pelvis against me, and so how can I stop? How can I stop when she’s like this—wild and insensate with wanting me?
“You,” she breathes, tearing away from my mouth and ripping at my bodice with shaking fingers. She can’t even wait to get a cup all the way unlaced before she shoves her hand inside to feel me, and then she can’t even wait to properly feel me before she’s replacing her fingers with her mouth, seeking out my soft flesh amid the leather and then making a satisfied noise when she finds it. Growling with pleasure when she draws my nipple into her mouth and it’s already tight and hard for her.
“You,” she says again, a groan, a plea, her normally deft fingers frantic and desperate as they unlace my other cup, and then once both my tits are exposed, she can’t seem to pick where she wants to be. Sucking on my breasts or my neck, biting my jaw, licking into my mouth. Her hands everywhere, restless and greedy, squeezing at my hips and bottom and thighs and stomach and all the places I’ve let shame live for years and years, and I almost want to laugh, because so many tears and therapy sessions and Xanax pills and an entire influencer career has gone into my feelings about those parts of me, and still it’s never, ever occurred to me that those parts of me could make me happy. That they could make a lover happy. That someone could be so fucking wound up and horny over me that they go mad and slam me against a bookshelf so they can maul me properly.
“Mistress. Rebecca . . . ” They’re not even words, they’re breaths instead.
She’s replaced my oxygen with the sounds of her name.
And then her hands find my mound—they find where the leather opens to frame my cunt—and she shudders so hard that all the breath seems to leave her in one shredded exhale. Her fingers play over the unyielding leather, over my curls, tracing the slutty outlines of it. She finds where my clit has swollen past my lips, a pouty little bud, and she plays with it a moment. It’s a toy meant for her, not for me, and knowing that has me whimpering, mindless, begging for more with pawing hands and arching hips.
“So wet,” she murmurs. “So wet for me.”
Her hand comes up and she takes in a short, quivering breath as she presses her fingers to my lips. I lick them, tasting myself, at the same time she starts licking too. Our lips and tongues meet between her fingers, a tangle of slippery kisses that taste of me. And her. Of sex and faintly of mint.
I squirm as we kiss through her fingers, heat pooling so low and fiery in my belly that I can’t believe I haven’t gone up in flames. My cunt aches without her touch; I know it will ache more with her touch but that doesn’t stop me from chasing it, from rubbing against her, from making small keening noises in the back of my throat.
There’s this beautiful suffering right behind my clitoris, right in the heart of me, a twinging and yearning inside my body. It’s agony, but it’s the kind of agony that’s the opposite of hurt. It’s the kind of agony that makes me feel more alive than I’ve ever been, and it’s because of her. It’s because she’s raw and ravenous, powerful and demanding. Sovereign.
And it’s as I catch a glimpse of her eyes—dark and avid and exposed—it’s as I hear her breath hitching with my name—Delph, pet, pet, oh Delph—that I realize the Rebecca we always see, the Rebecca we take for granted as being calm and untouchable always, she’s not the real Rebecca, not really. The real Rebecca has messy joys and hungers, the real Rebecca is more like Thornchapel than the orderly corporate gardens she designs.
She is fierce and alive and unconfined, and I want her always like this, always this ruthless and ferocious with me.
I drink her in as she steals kisses, as she returns to suck viciously at my breasts while she palms my sex. I drink her in, and I pray that this is real, that this hungry woman won’t slip away from me and retreat back into her shell. Into the place where I cannot reach her, I cannot know her. Into the place where I can’t even tell her I love her without her dismissing me.
The next idea comes to me so clearly and urgently that I have no choice but to listen. My body will allow nothing less, and I think I’ve been wanting this for a long time but haven’t known how to ask for it.
I spread my legs more and reach for her hand, and I press her fingers all the way past my folds and into my opening. We freeze there a minute, both of us rocked by the feeling of her fingers only a knuckle deep.
More, my greedy sex demands. More and more and more.
Rebecca meets my eyes. The afternoon sunlight slants in gray and cloudy, and it adds a silvery shine to her high cheekbones, her small, queenly nose. I can see the pulse banging at the side of her throat, and I can see as she swallows once, as if for control.
“You’re sure, pet?” she says hoarsely.
“Yes—” That’s all the negotiation we have. I haven’t even finished saying the word, and she’s over my mouth again with a searing kiss. As I open my lips to let her tongue slip inside, she slides her fingers deeper. Another inch, slippery but still hard-won.
I can’t concentrate on kissing now. Pleasure roils from my center, pleasure mixed with a trace of pain.
I worried—I still worry. What if the pain makes me feel like I did in Audra Bishop’s garden? What if my body doesn’t know the difference between what happened to me then and what’s happening now? My therapist warned me, my support group warned me, and now all these warnings froth up like soap bubbles in my mind—
Only to pop one by one as Rebecca fucks me with filthy, expert intensity. The trace of pain only grows as she finally fits her fingers in to the bottom knuckles, stretching me in places I’ve ignored for years, and stokes the slow, unbearable ache in my core. But the pain feels good too—it’s wanted, it feels just as wonderful as being spanked or flogged or bound. It weights down the pleasure so it’s not so oppressively delicious.
Like salt on caramel, like chili powder or cinnamon in hot chocolate.
And I should have known. I should have trusted.
Nothing from Rebecca could ever feel bad.
Rebecca buries her head in my neck and feasts on my jaw, my throat, the skin between my neck and my shoulder, fucking me between the legs all the while, her clever fingers changing to slow, grinding strokes with twisting and a pressure against my front wall that has my eyelids fluttering. The heel of her palm grazes and grinds against my bundle of nerves as she goes, and she only stops kissing me in order to look down every few moments. Her expression is one of base, biological greed as she watches her hand moving in and out of me, as she plays with her submissive’s cunt like I know she’s been wanting to for weeks.
The orgasm, when it comes, kicks me in the chest and buckles my knees. The pleasure twists and twines around her fingers until it’s no longer pleasure at all, but something even better. Something necessary and perfect and human and also divine—something I feel in my soul as much as I feel in my sex—something that cuts through me like floss, cuts me right in two.
H
ard, hot contractions grab at my womb; curling waves of sweet sensation spiral out from my clit and cover me everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. I feel this climax in my thighs and belly and chest, I feel it in my tingling lips and in my seizing lungs and near-sightless eyes. I’m overpowered by it, consumed, and I don’t even realize I’ve crumpled to the floor until I hear the thud of Rebecca’s shoes being toed off, until I hear the impatient zipper of her cigarette pants, and she’s crawling over me, straddling me and finding my hand so she can use it how she wants. She’s so wet, so fucking wet—wet enough that I think she must have been thinking of this all day, for hours and hours. And it’s so unlike her to be like she is right now—no formality, no plan, no toys or ties. No, it’s only us, struggling for kisses as she rides my fingers, struggling for that indefinable more—more friction, more teeth, more taste, more of each other. Nothing is enough, not a kiss, not a buck of her hips, not a rub of my thumb over her clit, none of it is enough until we’ve tasted each other’s hearts.
That’s what’s different today, I think dizzily.
Rebecca’s heart is here. It’s beating outside her chest.
It’s seeking mine.
She comes like a woman being unwound from the outside in, she comes like someone on a clattering, rocketing roller coaster—laughing, gasping, terrified but alive. She comes like it’s the only thing she’s ever wanted in this life, and she milks each and every jolt, riding my hand until it cramps a little, until her body is finished and until her slick channel is completely and utterly still.
Until my hand is soaked and she can finally take a long, deep, very relaxed breath.
She slides off of me and tumbles to my side, looking more mussed and well-fucked than I’ve ever seen her. Her eyes slide closed and her long lashes rest on her cheeks like a doll’s. A smile plays at her mouth.
Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel Book 3) Page 17