by Cecilia Tan
The bed shifted as he went away and it felt as if the darkness around my eyes was like a blanket, like a cocoon of calm. Like those moments when I had been a sex robot, between orders I could just be, just enjoy being Chino’s girl.
I heard the crinkle of the condom package. “Here’s a challenge for you, sweets.” I felt his hand on mine and then the condom being pressed against my palm. “You put it on me.”
He had already opened it. I felt it with my fingertips, figuring out which direction it rolled. I got my tongue good and spitty and loaded up the tip, then felt for his cock with my other hand. Fitting it on like a hat and then unrolling it took a few tries, but once I got it going down his shaft I heard him groan.
“Is that all right? Good enough?” I asked, wanting to make sure it would work.
“Perfect,” he said, though I felt him pull away and it sounded to me like he adjusted it somewhat. “Now, if you want it, come and get it.”
I reached out and to my dismay he wasn’t where he had been. “Where are you?”
“Over here,” he said, and I could hear he had backed a few feet away from the bed.
“Chino!”
“It’s right here, waiting for you.”
I moved to the edge of the bed, my feet on the floor, and stretched my arms toward him but I couldn’t reach him.
“Right here,” he said again, and I thought maybe he had backed up another step.
I stood slowly, taking a hesitant step toward him.
“You’re getting warmer,” he said, like it was a child’s game. “But if you wait, you’ll get colder and colder…”
He was on the move, backing away from me. With my arms out, hands seeking him, I took a few more steps, following the sound of his voice—“warmer, warmer,” as I closed the distance, “colder, colder,” if he pulled away.
I stayed focused on his voice, on my goal, on the throbbing emptiness between my legs and the heat of him I thought I could detect with the palms of my hands.
“Warmer, warmer…”
I could feel we’d moved into the main room, the air currents moving against my bare skin, my nipples perking up in the cooler temperature. “I thought we moved to the bedroom to save your knees,” I commented.
“My knees won’t be a problem, sweets.” I could hear he was close and then my palm suddenly met his chest and he pulled me down as he fell back into the armchair. Instinctively I straddled him, his cock slipping against my hole but not quite going in until I reached back to guide it.
There. In. He thrust upward into me and it was like my entire inside was being fucked, one huge cavern of pleasure all the way to the tips of my fingers and toes.
I know technically it was all sex but whether it was cultural programming or just the way my vagina was wired this felt the most like sex of anything we had done. There was sex, and then there was sex-sex.
“Do you want to come?”
“No,” I said.
“No? Really?” He sounded genuinely surprised.
“Really. I mean, later maybe. Right now I just want this. Just want you. Just wanna fuck.”
“We can do that, sweets.” He snaked an arm around my waist and thrust upward harder. “Hang on to me.”
I held on with arms and legs and the next thing I knew he had picked me up and was fucking me standing up. The breath was knocked out of me as we hit a wall but I didn’t care as long as his cock was coring me. I needed penetration more than air.
His voice, words between panting breaths: “This…isn’t…good…for…your…bandage.”
He disengaged as I slipped down the wall, my feet touching the floor. He held my hands and led me through the apartment again. “Onto the bed, on all fours,” he urged.
I felt the edge of the bed with my hand and crawled into position.
“Now back up onto my cock, sweets. You’re going to make me come this time.”
Just like that the challenge was set. He steadied himself with a hand so I could impale myself by feel, adjusting my knees so the height was right. “I’m holding the condom, don’t worry about that,” he said. “Now fuck me, sweets. Fuck me hard. Suck the come right out of me with your body.”
Chapter Fifteen
CHINO
Sometimes when you talk dirty, sometimes when you give your sub an order, you don’t necessarily expect it’s going to work. You go with the flow, figure out what’s working, what’s not, change the plan if necessary.
That wasn’t the case when Maddie made me come inside her. If I hadn’t had a hand holding the condom in place she would’ve suctioned it right off me, and as it was, even though I was holding it there I had to keep looking to make sure because that’s how amazing it felt.
I yelled long and loud when I started to come—her name, praise to the universe, obscenities—I don’t even know what else. Listening to myself wasn’t high on the list of sensory experiences right then, as my nerve endings and my heart were overloading. But sweet mother of mercy this was everything in life, everything.
Well, okay, it wasn’t music and it wasn’t food and it wasn’t air, which were three things I needed to live, but merging with Maddie—giving her everything I had and taking everything she was—was right up there with the other staple needs of life.
She collapsed under my weight as I made the last few thrusts I could before my cock softened, bliss ebbing gradually, and then I lay there atop her, feeling like I never wanted to move again. I wanted to just stay like that forever, glued to her by sweat and desire, skin to skin, perfect.
But after a few minutes of listening to her breathe, I felt the urge to look at her, to touch her with my hands, to listen to her voice again. I slipped to one side. “You ready to have your eyesight back again?”
“Yes, sir,” she said sweetly.
I tugged the blindfold gently upward until it came free. “That’s the first ‘sir’ I’ve heard since before the paddling.” I kissed her temple so she would know I wasn’t criticizing. “I thought maybe you’d save it only for when you were being punished.”
Her eyes fluttered open. Full night had fallen and the candles gave dim light. “Do you want me to say it more often?”
“No, sweets. I just thought it was interesting.”
“I don’t want to wear out ‘Daddy,’ you know?” Her grin would’ve been utterly lascivious except for the coy way she bit her lip at the end.
“Oh, yes, sweets. I know.” I pressed a kiss to her hair. She smelled sweeter and more intoxicating than wine. And she was mine.
“Plus your name means the same thing, now,” she said, leaning her head on my shoulder. “I wasn’t expecting submission to feel this good.”
I was already feeling about as good as I thought I could imagine, but hearing her say that made me feel even better. “Good in what way?”
“Like everything is…a perfect circle. And like before that I didn’t even know it could be a circle. Everything was a square or a triangle, with sharp edges and unfilled corners. And now…everything fits.”
I kissed her cheeks, her eyelids, her mouth. “I feel like that, too.”
“I’d tried submitting to guys in the past, you know. And it never felt like this. I read about subs who were looking for this…this peace…this inner tranquility, and they wrote about finding it in submission. And I always thought I’m a bad sub or not a ‘real’ sub because I don’t feel that way. But it’s not submission I find it in,” she said. “It’s in how safe you make me feel, how loving you are even when you’re dominating me. You’re what fills the hole, Chino. That’s what makes it possible for me to be your girl.”
And that’s why this is going to work, I thought. “I’ve had girls crawl to me on their knees and pledge to be my slaves before,” I told her. Some just said it to turn me on while others had meant it sincerely, but none had made me want to pledge myself to them for more than an hour of role-play. “I never fell for one of them the way I fell for you, though, Maddie. It just never felt like this. I nev
er wanted to pour my whole heart and soul into dominating them the way I do with you.”
“Whole heart and soul,” she agreed with a nod. “It’s scary, isn’t it? I’ve never felt safe enough emotionally in a relationship to give my whole heart and soul before. Even with some really nice guys. Maybe because they just weren’t the right one.”
“Or maybe because they were too nice. That’s the thing, Maddie.” I kissed her again. “You won’t just hand over your heart. I had to dominate you for you to open up.”
“I guess that means I’m submissive after all.” She sounded smugly content when she said it.
“My kind of submissive,” I said, my hands searching her skin for the pure pleasure of touching her. My hand looked brown against her creamy white butt cheek. I squeezed. “Do you think we’re going too fast?”
“No,” she said. “I’m starting to see why all our friends couldn’t figure out why it took us six months to get together in the first place.”
“You rang my bell the first time I laid eyes on you,” I told her. “Six months of waiting to make a move.”
She laughed and it was one of the most beautiful sounds in the universe, like the perfect fill topped with a china crash, bright and piercing. “I think I was attracted to you, too, which was why I avoided you for so long. So, see? It’s not too fast at all.”
“When love happens you just have to go for it.”
“Yeah.”
Knowing we both felt that way was the best feeling in the world.
I had bacon in the freezer and eggs in the fridge so I made us breakfast for dinner. I was out of butter for the toast so I grilled the bread in the bacon fat instead and served it with the orange juice that had been sitting in the fridge. I’d bought it thinking it would be healthier than soda but I hadn’t opened the bottle yet. Sometimes things work out just right.
Madison decided to stay the night and we deferred discussing things like when we were moving in together until the morning. I tucked her into bed, poor exhausted girl, sore from being fucked and tattooed and emotionally drained from everything that day. She was asleep within minutes and then I went out to meet my father for a drink.
We ended up in a dive on the far side of downtown. He ordered two Michelob Lights at the bar without asking me what I wanted and then we went to a booth to sit.
“Let’s get one thing straight,” he said. “I won’t lend you money, I give shit advice, and it’s never going to work out between me and your mother so don’t even think it.”
“That’s three things,” I said, “and I don’t need your money or your advice.”
“Good. And one more thing: call me ‘Dad’ instead of Cisco and I’ll belt you. So long’s we understand each other.” He clinked his bottle against mine and then smiled. “What the fuck, though, you didn’t even know it was me and you went and got the Bondage Beauties?”
“I know, right?” I shook my head. “So tell me what happened with you and Mom. Back then. As a kid I thought…I don’t know what the fuck I thought. That you didn’t love us anymore or some shit.”
He looked pained, sucking on his beer for a few moments before he answered. “You sure do go for the jugular, don’t you? Not that I expected you wouldn’t. Your mother basically threatened to get me banned from seeing you if I didn’t leave on my own.”
“Banned? But you didn’t see us anyway. We thought you just up and left.”
“Which was what she wanted you to think. She had proof of my fetish art and she had proof that I’d beaten her. Consensually of course, but the courts don’t care about that. Last thing I needed was to be a registered sex offender. She wanted to purify your minds of filth.” He looked me up and down, like he could see what a kinkster I was. Given my tattoos, he could. “I see it didn’t work.”
“Not with me it didn’t,” I said. “But Flor and Vicente—Flora and Vincent, now—they grew up brainwashed.”
He shook his head. “That’s…” He couldn’t even finish whatever he was going to say about that.
“Yeah. She remarried a guy in a Christian community, one of these Bible-thumping throwback, no-TV, no-popular-music types.”
“Don’t knock the Bible,” Cisco warned.
“I’m not knocking the Bible. But they’re not even like a real church. It’s almost like a cult.”
He chuckled, his voice sarcastic. “Like we raised you to love church.”
My reply came out earnest. “I remember going to Christmas Mass when I was a kid. In Spanish. I remember the singing.” I found myself unable to take a sip of beer because of the tightness in my throat. “Somewhere here in LA.”
“Tch. You were like five. Probably the last time I set foot inside a church.”
“I was seven,” I said. “I remember because I’d had my first Communion and I felt like a grownup being able to go up and take Communion for Christmas.”
He pulled on his beer and regarded me warily. “Weird when you think about it, isn’t it? Here, it’s this guy’s birthday. To celebrate, his body’s the cake, his blood’s the wine.”
“Yeah,” I said. Was Catholicism any weirder than any other religion, though? I didn’t think so. “Was that the church where you and Mom got married?”
“Your mother and I were never married,” he said, eyes flat and expressionless as he took another swig of his beer. “So. Is she happy?”
“I don’t know. She mostly refuses to talk to me, her devil son.”
He gave a long whistle, the pitch dropping like hope sinking out of sight. “She can be cold-hearted, your mother.”
Here goes, I thought. I hadn’t known for sure if I was going to tell him what I knew, but I decided it was now or never. “Flora called recently, though, all freaked out. Told me he’s forbidden any of them to call me, Mom included.”
“But your sister called anyway?”
“She snuck away to warn me. To tell me she’s scared our stepdad’s turning violent.”
“Well, shit.” I could see his fist on the beer bottle, grinding it against the wooden table. “That’s no good. What are you doing about it?”
“Waiting. Trying to get through. Trying to convince her to come to LA and get away from him.”
Cisco let go of the bottle and pressed his palms against the bald patches on either side of his head. “Listen to me, Chino. You can’t always save people from themselves. You can’t save them from what they think they know is right. Lord knows I tried.”
“I just want to get her away from him.”
“Do you want it enough to clean up your act and pretend you’re reformed for her? That might be the only way.”
Pieces of the puzzle were falling into place. So many things I didn’t understand as a kid, or even know were there to be known. “You pretended to be reformed for her?”
“I did.” His face was pained, like something inside him was cramping up just remembering. “After you were born, I kept trying to go straight. You know how hard that was when we didn’t have food on the table but some editor would call up and want me to draw a Bondage Beauty for him? I couldn’t give it up. I would get up in the middle of the night and draw while she was asleep.” He sucked on his beer as if it might ease his pain, his eyes drifting toward the TV above the bar but not focusing on it. “And the truth is if you’re bent there’s no going straight. I tried to get her to see that.”
“You think?”
“I know it. People trying to repress what they need is what fucks them up and turns them into monsters.” He shook his head. “And what an irony, to end up with a wife-beater, when supposedly me spanking her was a sin? The only thing worse would be if he was one of those types who thinks the Bible gives a man the right to beat his wife.”
My blood ran cold. “He beat me a couple of times when I was smaller, telling me he was going to beat the devil right out of me.”
He chuckled. “Didn’t work, did it. Probably just made you more bent than before.”
“You paddled me once, too,” I sa
id, but not like an accusation, more like just a fact, a memory.
“You think that’s what made you kinky?”
“No. Nothing made me kinky.”
Cisco nodded and clinked his beer bottle against mine. “God makes us in his own image and he’s the most twisted fucker there is.”
I was still straining to understand. “You think that’s why Mom’s so into this guy? Because his kink’s religious?”
He shook his head. “Who the fuck knows. Listen. When I met your mother, she’d only been in the States a couple of months. She was thousands of miles from her family, didn’t know where to turn, and was trying to figure out all the shit in life that is hard no matter where you are, much less in a country where you don’t understand half of what’s going on. She was just a kid, really. By the time she figured out I was an unredeemable mistake, there were three of you. It took a lot of strength for her to leave me and do what she felt was right. I respect her for that. I still think she was wrong, but that doesn’t change my respect for your mother.”
He tipped back the beer and seemed disappointed that it was empty.
“Let’s hope I was the biggest mistake of her life and not this asshole. Ana takes a long time to make up her mind, but once she does, there’s no changing it.”
“What can I do to change her mind about him? Maybe she’s starting to see it.”
“Then maybe you have a chance. But…fuck. I told you I give shit advice.”
“What should I do?”
“Didn’t I just say I give shit advice? You really want to know what to do?”
“Yeah.”
“Come with me, then.” He stood up. “Finish your beer. Don’t waste it.”
I chugged the rest of the beer and we left the empties on the table, then got into his pickup truck. He drove me through the city to somewhere I hadn’t been before, or at least I didn’t remember it. We didn’t talk at all as he drove.
It was midnight and I wasn’t expecting him to take me to a church. To a locked garden where the wrought iron back gate could be vaulted easily enough. To a statue of the Virgin Mary. In the dark I could hear a fountain but couldn’t see it. There was a stone railing in front of the statue.