Hard Rhythm

by Cecilia Tan

  “You’re a connoisseur,” I said as his mouth closed over my clit, his tongue making me tremble. “Oh. Oh! Oh!” His fingers slipped into me with the most delicious penetration and I bucked against them. “But you know, you’re making me crave your cock.”

  He lifted his head, his chin glistening with my juices. “I know. So now that we’ve gotten the ‘intercourse is a prize’ thing out of the way, now I’m just holding out to torture you.” He laughed wickedly. “And torturing you is definitely a win-win situation.”

  I groaned while his fingers continued to work inside me and his tongue tip teased me to the edge of orgasm.

  And then he pulled away, one hand massaging my thigh tantalizingly close to my pussy but no longer stimulating me directly. “So, ground rules for tonight. If you’re really craving cock, what if I let Lion or one of the other guys fuck you?”

  “No!” I said instantly. “I’m not actually interested in anyone touching me but you. I mean, if you would find it super-hot to have someone else play with me, we can negotiate that, but if you’re asking me my preference? No. You or nobody.”

  He gave a slow nod, like the answer was satisfying to hear. “Good. And very good for expressing your preferences clearly. I won’t have anyone else fuck you. I am going to torture you with not having my cock, but I thought you should know I’m not going to stick it in anyone else, either.” His hand drifted northward and a finger slipped gradually into my swollen pussy. “That goes for in general, by the way. Not just while we’re at this party.”

  I bit my lip as he slid a second finger in beside the first one. “I’m glad. Thank you.”

  “Thank you?”

  Hearing him ask made me wonder, too: Why had I said that? “Most guys won’t declare monogamy without being prompted.”

  “All relationships are a kind of bargain,” he said, his dark eyes deepening as the night sky darkened through the window. “But I’m not offering it to you as a bargaining chip. I’m interested in you, Madison. We’ve obviously got a thing going on here. Even if it’s just sex, just kink, I only want you. I’m going to be exclusive to you.”

  Hearing him say that made my heart jump and race. The cheaters and jerkwads in my past would never have dared to bring it up. I wasn’t even sure if it was more scary or exciting. “And…and do you want me to be exclusive to you?”

  There was that long slow nod again, but the words that came out of his mouth were, “There are a lot of things I want. But as I was saying after the thing with the blindfold, you shouldn’t always give me what I want just because you’re the sub.”

  “Do you think I should have a safeword?”

  He grinned. “Well, yes, but you should also point it out if I’m asking for too much, you know? Because I have this feeling I’m going to go further with you, Maddie, than I’ve ever gone before.”

  The racing of my heart intensified, and I could hear the blood pounding in my ears. “I have that feeling, too. That’s why I’m so nervous.”

  “Remember. I like you nervous,” he said. “That’ll be your signal to me that you’ve got a problem, all right? If we’re in public and you don’t want to say too much or you aren’t sure what’s bothering you, say ‘I’m nervous.’ That’ll cue me to dig deeper, all right?”

  “All right.” I had never used a safeword that way before. I decided that might be relevant for him to know. “For me a safeword has always meant ‘stop right now,’ like an escape hatch. Like for emergencies.”

  He patted my knee. “So would saying ‘stop right now, this is an emergency’ work in that case?”

  “Um, yeah, now that you mention it.”

  “Let’s keep that in mind,” he said with a grin. “Now, up you get, let’s go out and mingle with the others and watch some scenes. You’re going to be wearing nothing but the trickle of your desire. That means you better carry a towel with you to sit on or kneel on so you don’t end up leaving wet spots everywhere.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m going to put leather pants on. I’ll let you know when I want them to come off and if I want your help with that.”

  “Yes, sir.” I found myself grinning with happy anticipation, even though I had no idea what we were going to actually do later. Something fun, I was sure.

  * * *

  CHINO

  When someone says “bungalow,” I imagine a shack in the jungle, or maybe on a beach somewhere, not a high-tech, luxuriously carpeted pop art house, but that’s what this one was. No wonder the rent was kind of high. The casitas were nice but the main house was nothing short of swank, and when you added in the bondage furniture that had been brought in for the weekend, it was a decadent paradise. A standing frame in front of the fireplace, a leather-padded spanking bench where a coffee table should’ve been, a sling in a cube of gleaming steel pipes looking part modern art, part torture device.

  A lot of couples—and triads and quads, let’s be real here—have a pattern of scene that’s pretty similar. The dom(s) puts the sub(s) into bondage, some kind of beating happens (sometimes an artistic flogging or a strict caning or a passionate spanking or a sadistic whipping), and then when the sub(s) are totally turned to jelly, the actual sex happens. There’s nothing wrong with that any more than it’s “wrong” for every restaurant to offer you appetizer, then main dish, then dessert. There are a million variations: all good. What kind of bondage? What kind of beating? What rules or twists do you put on it? And what kind(s) of sex?

  The thing I’ve noticed is that for most of the people I seem to know, the beating is the main dish and the sex is the dessert. Which is great if that makes them happy. In fact we know some people for whom the bondage itself seems to be the point. But with me, if sex isn’t the main dish, I don’t get it. I mean, why tie someone up if it isn’t so you can do wicked things to them? And no matter how much it floats my boat when I spank her or bite her or whatever, the beating and bondage only make sense to me as foreplay. I know not everyone’s like that and that’s cool, but for me, if there isn’t a fuckload of orgasm at the end, something went wrong.

  We sat on the sectional sofa, Maddie on her towel, watching a short woman with glasses flogging her man with great gusto.

  “Jeez Louise,” she said at one point, pausing to stretch her arm and shoulder. “Bry, I swear you’ve got Kevlar instead of skin.”

  He laughed.

  “I mean, lookit.” She gestured to his white ass cheeks and we spectators could see they were slightly pinked by her efforts but nothing more. “I’m switching to the paddle.”

  “Don’t you dare,” he said.

  “Nope nope nope, this flogger just isn’t doing it.” She laid it down and picked up a wooden paddle with holes drilled in it. “Here it comes, baby.”

  She swung it with both hands and it cracked mightily on his rump. He howled and thrashed in the sheepskin-lined cuffs and she laid the swats on heavy and fast. I felt Maddie tense next to me, maybe thinking about how hard she’d paddled me a week ago.

  When Jill paused to inspect her handiwork, she was disappointed. “Nothing. Barely a welt, Kevlar Butt. It’s so unfair. I sneeze and I get a bruise! I’m getting the Top Saver.”

  “Don’t you dare,” he said again. “I mean it this time, Jill.”

  Maddie and I exchanged looks. This couple clearly had negotiated a very different kind of scene—or had a very different definition of limits than we did.

  From their toy bag, Jill pulled out a small flail of some kind, with two thick leather tails hinged on a stiff handle about the length of her forearm. “Oh, come on, you’ll barely feel it.”

  She snapped it a few times against his skin and his howls turned quickly to curses and profanity and then, in a move I didn’t expect at all, he unclipped his wrist cuffs and grabbed her. “You minx! I warned you!”

  A great deal of laughing and shouting and wrestling ensued, and eventually she twisted free and fled toward the pool, giggling maniacally. He unclipped his ankles and ran after her.
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  “Well, that was different,” Maddie said, biting her lower lip to keep from laughing too hard.

  “Here they come back again.” I patted her knee and encouraged her to put her legs over mine. Watching Jill and Bry was stimulating to say the least, and I wanted some of Maddie’s weight against my rising boner.

  Bry carried Jill over his shoulder—her kicking and protesting the whole way but not enough to actually get free—and then laid her over the same bench where he’d been. He quickly had her tied to it and then picked up the paddle. “So,” he said, swaggering up to her, smacking the wood against his palm, “the paddle isn’t that bad, eh?”

  “Oh, no no no, please Bry, no, not that.”

  “It’s no more than you deserve, you wicked thing.”

  “I know, I know, I’m sorry!” Her eyes were wide and her voice squeaked as her pitch went up.

  “Ten smacks with the paddle. Count ’em.”

  She slumped in her bonds and counted out her punishment, sniffling and weeping a bit at the end. “I’m sorry! I won’t do it again!”

  “You bet you won’t. Now, what about this.” He picked up the Top Saver and twirled it.

  “No. No, no, no. I don’t even know why we have that thing. We should throw it out,” she said quickly.

  “I’m pretty sure it was you who bought it—”

  “No way, mister—”

  “And you who packed it—”

  “It was in the bottom of the bag! I thought you packed it, I swear—”

  “And however it got there, you got a good three or four licks in before I stopped you.”

  She was silent, then, looking very contrite, her lip trembling.

  “So I’m thinking four stripes,” he said, bending down to put his face near hers. “On your inner thighs. The bruises’ll be so dark they’ll look like burn marks.”

  “No, please,” she said, her eyes huge and round, her eyeliner running from the brimmed tears. “I’ll do anything you want if you spare me that.”

  “Anything?”

  “Anything.”

  “Four minutes of me fucking your face, then.”

  She blanched but said, “Okay. It’s a deal.”

  He untied her and turned her over so that she was on her back lengthwise on the bench, her head hanging off one end.

  It was one of the more impressive face-fuckings I’ve seen outside of professional porn. He wasn’t small, and I swear we could see the bulge in her throat when he went all the way in. I was very tempted to have Maddie put her mouth on me, but I didn’t want her to miss the show. I moved her hand to my bulge instead. A couple of times Bry held himself against Jill’s face, waiting for her to gag or struggle, and then when she would he’d thrust in and out hard. He slapped her cheeks sometimes if he felt her teeth, but how could he not?

  When the four minutes was up he hadn’t come and he went right around to the other side, put a condom on, and fucked her the traditional way—well, as traditional as you can get while tied to a custom-built bondage bench in the middle of a group of voyeuristic pervs like us. She came three times before he did and when he finally did it was with the exclamation, “What a freakin’ unbelievable wife Jill baby love you oh my freaking ngggghhhhhhh” which caused the rest of us watching to break into applause.

  They were giggly as fuck afterward. The two of them got wrapped in blankets and joined us on the couch and then dissected their scene. Jill whapped him on the shoulder. “I almost lost it when you were like ‘four, four licks, muahaha.’” She did her best impression of the Count from Sesame Street. “In my head I was thinking, Four? Four is nothing!”

  “I was just trying to make your capitulation make sense, you know?” he said, cuddling her close. “I guess I should’ve let you go on a little longer before I busted out but man, that thing freakin’ hurts.”

  “I know, dear. That’s the point.” She giggled and looked at Maddie. “Did you guys enjoy it? It’s always more fun with an audience.”

  “Loved it,” Maddie said. Her voice turned curious, which made me curious, too. “How long have you guys been together?”

  “Twelve years in August,” Jill said.

  “Thirteen,” Bry corrected. “But who’s counting.”

  Jill wound her hand in his and held up their forearms. “Check out our tattoos.”

  The two designs were supposed to merge together into a single image but I wasn’t at the right angle to really see it. Something circular like a geometric sunset or a flower, maybe?

  Suddenly an ear-piercing sound like an extremely rhythmic pig squeal cut through the room. On the other side of the dining room Sakura was doing something to Helene that made her come with one of the most distinctive orgasm noises I’ve ever heard. We had to wait until she was done before we could continue talking. Not that we minded.

  “Your tat is so cool,” Madison said to Jill. “Have you guys been going to parties like this for a long time?”

  “We met at one.” Jill grinned at him.

  Bry grinned back. “We flipped a coin to decide who got to top that time.”

  “You mean who got to bottom!” They both laughed.

  “You should’ve seen it out there,” Bry said, jerking his thumb toward the patio. “She almost slipped and fell in the pool. That would’ve been a very different scene.”

  “I know, right?” Jill sighed happily and snuggled down close. “Maybe next time.”

  A tall black man in leather pants and a leather vest approached. “You guys done with this?”

  “Oh, yes, David. Let me clean it up,” Jill said.

  “No, no, you guys do your aftercare. I got this.” He whistled and another man, this one in a leather hood shaped like a dog’s head and leather short-shorts came hurrying over on all fours. Following behind him was Faisal, the guy who had been grilling the burgers earlier. David clipped the puppy’s collar to an eyebolt on the bench and Faisal began wiping the bench down with the cleaning supplies on hand for that purpose. The puppy wagged his butt.

  When the cleaning was done, Faisal stood aside with his hands clasped behind his back.

  “Thank you, boy,” David said. “You’re released to go have some fun, at least until I’m done here.” He gave the other man a quick kiss and then turned his attention to the pup, who was rubbing against his leg.

  It truly takes all kinds. I enjoyed watching the other people playing, but the whole time I was wondering what Madison was thinking and feeling. She watched very quietly, very still, as if she wasn’t going to let what she was seeing affect her.

  “Come all the way into my lap,” I said, and shifted her so she was leaning back against my chest. I wrapped my hands around her to fondle her breasts, my thumbs paying particular attention to her nipples until they stood out pebble-like. “You like watching guys with guys?”

  “Yes,” she said, her chest swelling as she sucked in a breath. “If you like cock, two is better than one, after all.”

  “So logical. Enjoy the show while I enjoy you.” I let my fingers do the walking, so to speak, exploring her inner thighs, the soft curve of her belly, the sweet dampness under the curve of her breasts as what she watched heated her up and made her sweat, and the even sweeter dampness between her legs.

  When I brought my sopping wet fingers up she licked them clean without even a single moment of hesitation. “I guess I don’t necessarily have to beat you into submission,” I murmured to her.

  “No, sir,” she whispered, and I felt a thrill go all the way to the tip of my toes, and the tip of my stiff cock. I’d thought I might have to work as hard as I had that night at the Governor’s Club to turn her into putty in my hands in front of other people, but here she was as soft and pliant as I could imagine.

  “Can I put you on display for these nice people?” I asked her.

  “Aren’t I on display already, sir?” Her legs were splayed wide, her folds wide open, her breasts free and loose—she had a point.

  “Yes, but I was thinking som
ething to show you off a bit more.” In particular I wanted to explore what felt like a deepening D/s bond between us. How did it work? What made the engine run? Madison had played with lots of doms but had never actually felt deeply submissive to any of them. I was in a similar boat. I’d enjoyed playing the dom role for lots of women because it turned me on, but I’d never found one I wanted to keep. Lusting after each other was only the start. If there was something more to us, I wanted to find out what the limits were, how the inner workings functioned, what made us tick. That meant taking her apart and putting her back together: exactly what a scene is for.

  Chapter Ten

  MADISON

  Chino brought me out by the pool where the night air was cooling off but the sky was beautifully clear and full of stars, something we didn’t see often from the city. “Jill and Bry seem like they have a lot of fun, don’t they?”

  “Seriously,” I said. “I wonder if they plan in advance when they’re going to switch or is it totally freeform? I almost got a little worried a couple of times when they were saying ‘no, I mean it’ but they obviously know each other well enough to tell when the protest is serious and when it’s part of the fun.”

  “Think we’ll ever know each other that well?” Chino asked, looking up at the stars.

  I looked at my own hands. “I suppose if we did as many scenes as those guys, we’d learn a lot.”

  He took my hands in his and turned me toward him. “Is that what scares you about BDSM? You’re not afraid of pain, or of being sexual, like most people. Are you afraid I’ll figure you out?”

  His voice was gentle, making it a good-humored joke so that if I wanted to I could laugh it off, or I could answer seriously.

  I wanted to laugh it off—or run away—but that wouldn’t have been the mature thing to do. “Isn’t that what everyone’s afraid of?”