by Cara McKenna
“May I say something?” she asked quietly, a minute or more later.
Dread curdling in his guts, Rob nodded. “Sure.”
She sat up and shuffled to him, sitting close enough for their knees to touch. Smooth fingers closed around his tender wrist. “I know what we just did makes you . . . shy. But I want you to know, that was the hottest thing anyone’s ever let me be a part of.”
He stared at the plaid wool of the blanket, blinking. It took a few breaths to make sense of her words. He met her eyes. “Was it?”
She nodded, her smile warm and kind.
“I hope you didn’t feel too . . . silly. Saying all those things.”
“Of course not. It was fun. It’s just acting.”
He forced a swallow and mustered the words he owed her in return. “That was . . . That was the most intense experience anyone’s ever given me.” He didn’t think he’d ever come that hard, though it seemed a crude compliment to offer with the insanity of lust now gone. And with that madness lifted, he realized something so obvious, it ushered in a fresh tide of shame.
“I should’ve, you know . . . gotten you off, as well.”
Her smile grew mischievous. “There’s still time. Sounds like the rain plans to keep us inside all day.”
Her invitation was a welcome escape from his anxiety.
He gathered the two ropes and closed them in their box on the floor. Joining her beneath the covers, he turned his full attention to Merry. She shed her shirt, kicked away her trousers under the blanket. She kept her bra on, as she had the previous night.
“What can I do for you?” He rubbed her side—so soft and smooth. He wanted to do so much more. He wanted to smother her face and neck in grateful, humble kisses, breathe the scent of her hair so deeply into his body it became a part of him.
“Hold your hand like this,” she whispered, cupping his palm between their navels and curling his fingers. He held the shape as she led his wrist downward. He registered the soft tickle of her pubic hair on his knuckles. Her panties had gone, along with her bottoms.
“This is kind of weird,” she said, “but just go with it.” She propped up one thigh and guided Rob’s hand to her folds, so his fingertips just barely penetrated, palm cupping her mound and glancing her clit. She’s so wet. From the things I told her.
“Just hold your hand like that. Right there.” And she began to move.
Rob watched with wonder as her eyes shut, features softening with obvious pleasure. She rolled her hips, stroking her sex against his hooked hand.
He smiled to himself. If this was kind of weird, then surely his fantasies were the stuff of a sideshow. Yet he found he no longer cared. All he wanted was to give her even a fraction of what she’d offered him. Make her buck and sigh and shudder as he had last night. Take her orders. Give her pleasure. Be her perfect servant.
He imagined her doing this with his cock—tying him down and ordering him to be still as she exploited him. Despite the body-quaking orgasm, he felt desire stir, that hot pressure low in his belly rousing, unfurling.
“Feels great,” she murmured.
“I want to make you feel amazing. Even a tenth as amazing as you made me feel.” Even that slim facsimile would surely rival heaven.
“You are. And I’m thinking about everything we just did.”
“Are you?”
She nodded, warming him with that mischievous smile. “I loved watching you lose control. And knowing I was giving you something no one else has.”
All at once, he felt something very queer indeed—a prickling behind his nose. Rob hadn’t cried in ages. He’d given it up, left it behind with the gin and society and his ruined marriage and his grief.
These simmering tears were different, though. No despair; only gratitude and relief. But he held them in all the same, wanting this time to be about Merry. Her sex was slippery and hot against his fingers, her clit stiff and swollen.
“You did give me that,” he finally said. “No one’s ever made me feel anything close to what you did.”
Her eyelids fluttered but didn’t open. “Did you ever ask for it?”
“Not like this.” He’d never known how. He’d trained himself since childhood to keep it a secret, to shunt it into some dark corner and only ever bare it to those strangers, online, back in his so-called civilized life. To indulge it, only to be doused with self-hatred the second he came, the blinding light of reality shining to reveal him as he truly was—a pathetic drunk, one hand bathed in come, wrapped around his limp, spent cock. The other still on his computer mouse, his screen awash with some incriminating image, suddenly devoid of its allure; strangers bound and gagged, video of a hog-tied man being fucked by another man, ridiculous words typed by some anonymous nobody. Yeah. That sounds hot. That makes me hard, the nobody might say. What else?
What else? There was nothing else, once Rob came. Shut the offending window, erase his Internet history, get back to the chore of drowning his self-loathing in a bottle of Booth’s.
Yet here he was, sober. And a real and beautiful woman was with him in his bed, taking pleasure at the memory of indulging his darkest desires.
“I want to make you come,” he whispered. To be more than a still, willing hand.
“Then keep talking,” she muttered through a smile, seeming to luxuriate in the strokes she gave herself.
“What about?”
“About the things you want done to you.”
He took a deep breath, and let his deepest secrets escape from between his lips. “Sometimes I imagine I’m tied down, and there’s . . . there are women, who want my come.”
“They’ve taken you hostage.”
“Yes. They’re different. Like another race of beings.” Rob’s face heated to hear these stupid words even leaving his lips. But fuck it. “Or maybe a cult. They want to . . . to keep me hard for as long as possible, so I’ll . . .”
“So you’ll come more?”
“Yeah.”
“Do they fuck you?” Merry asked, and Rob’s last scrap of misgiving burned away.
“Sometimes. Like they need me, to procreate. Or they take turns sucking me. They each get a minute, maybe, all of them hoping they’ll be the one to get to taste it. Like I’m a delicacy.”
Her smile turned sinister and she bit her lip.
“What?” he asked, scared she was suppressing laughter.
Her brown eyes opened. “You are fucking fascinating.”
His cheeks heated with embarrassment, flattery, pleasure. “Thank you.”
“What else?”
What else? Just as that anonymous chat room nobody might demand. Only this was so, so different.
She moved in tighter strokes—tighter and quicker.
“Sometimes I imagine I’ve been drugged. That I wake up in captivity. Just like you pretended for me.”
“And you’re tied up.”
“Yes. Almost always.”
“What else?” Her voice was breathy, eyes shut. But she was with him, unmistakably. Not the way Rob must’ve looked to lovers, every time he close his eyes and escaped into his fantasies when the time came for him to climax. Checked out. Somewhere else entirely. Until tonight, startling as that revelation was. A surge of excitement rose in him, making him bold.
“Lots of things. Humiliating things.”
“Being punished, you said. How?”
“Teased, sometimes. Touched everywhere except . . . you know. Or made to lose myself with my pants still on. Or while being forced to watch, in a mirror. Or . . . or spanked, sometimes.” That last one made him uncomfortable, tangled up in the same anxieties he felt about all the times he’d resorted to gay porn. An entire adolescence’s worth of fear, fostered up north where there was absolutely nothing worse you could be than queer. Except p
erhaps whatever Rob was, he’d imagined. Spanking. That was something done to girls, because men were the spankers. The punishers. So what did that make Rob? The question had dogged him for years.
“Have you done that?” Merry murmured. “Been spanked?”
“No.” He’d been far too terrified to ask for it.
“Me, neither. What do you want to get spanked for?”
“For . . . failing. For being worthless.” His throat tightened to say it, but the constriction eased quicker and quicker each time he shared new secrets with Merry. “For being a disappointment.”
Her smile was faint and mischievous. “If you were trying to excite yourself, during what we’re doing now,” she said. “What would you be imagining?”
He shut his eyes, wrapping his wrists in a phantom rope. “That I’m tied up. That you’ve captured me, and maybe you’re testing me. If I make you come, with my hands, then my cock might be worthy . . . to please you. Or to . . .”
“What?”
Christ. Even that simplest demand got him hard. “You want to come, then you’ll make me . . . make me use my mouth. Once you’re . . .” He could feel it against his curled fingers, all that slick, hot heat.
“Wet.”
“Yeah.” A head rush rocked him. “Like you’re feeding me or something. Some ritual that’ll make my . . . I don’t know.” I’m sorry. I’m so unbelievably fucked up. Yet so unbelievably turned on.
“Like it’ll . . .” She struggled for the words, too, but it looked as though arousal was clouding her mind, not hesitance.
Tell her what she’s asked to hear. Be obedient. That’s what you want, isn’t it?
“It’ll make my come . . . right, somehow. Worthy. Or powerful. I’m not sure.”
Her eyes opened, if only a fraction. “Do you ever resist in your fantasies? Like, fight back, or try to escape?”
“Not really. Resist, yes. Enough to be punished. I . . . I cower. Or plead. But I don’t run. I’m too weak. The woman is too powerful.” You. You’re too powerful. She had to be, the way she coaxed these scary thoughts from his lips with nothing more than patience and kindness. And the way her mock-cruelty had coaxed far dirtier results, not so long ago. He wished he were still wearing his soiled shorts.
“So after I come,” she said, hips lost to their luxurious motions, “what would I do to you then?”
“Tie me to the bed, maybe. Or just tie my hands behind me and make me lie on my back. And force me to taste you. Make you come again.” He could practically feel it now, bindings rasping his hands and the small of his back, chafing exacerbated by his sweat. Stinging.
“And then?”
“Then maybe . . . maybe you’d suck me off. Or unbind my hands and loop the rope around my neck, and make me fuck you.”
“Top or bottom?”
“Me on top.” He imagined it, the cruel tug and scratch at his throat, harnessing him like a bridle. Maybe looped between his teeth, as well. To be treated like a slave, or livestock. “I’d have to fuck you just as you commanded me to, or you’d get rough.”
“Good,” she murmured, hips rolling quicker, the hand on his arm squeezing, thumb rubbing in a thoughtless way. It thrilled him, the way she moved and how she took pleasure from him. Not just his hand, but his thoughts.
“H-how would you . . . make me fuck you?” he asked. As the question came out, he realized a new threshold had been crossed. He’d asked her to join him in this exploration, instead of merely telling her about the landscape. “Slow? Or fast?”
“Fast,” she said, and bit her lip.
He wanted those teeth digging into his skin, pain chased by more callous words. “Rough?”
“Fast and rough,” she agreed. “So fast and rough, you could never sustain it.”
“So I’d disappoint you?” His cock was throbbing, shrieking and angry, trapped by his clothes once more. He could come from this. From her voice, and this exchange. With his eyes open and no more friction that the wool blanket pressed against his arm.
“You’d disappoint me,” she agreed. “So I’d punish you.”
Fuck. The world reeled, Rob’s consciousness reduced to a boiling, chaotic pressure rising in his belly. “How?”
“I’d push you off me. I’d be angry. I’d make you wait on your hands and knees, and pull on the rope, like a choke chain.” She paused, seeming to have crossed her own line. “Not really. But we’d pretend it was tight.”
“Sure.” Keep going, keep going. He fidgeted, cock screaming, pleading.
“I’d hold you like that, and I’d spank you.”
“Oh.”
“I’d spank you until you promised to fuck me the way I tell you to.”
“Yes.”
“Now tell me the rest.” Her pretty face was strained, and the rhythm of her hips had grown frantic. She was close. The realization made Rob dizzy. She was close, and from thinking about the things that he liked. That was insane.
“I’d promise,” he told her. “And you’d let me try again. You want it so fast, and it’s so degrading . . . but I want it, too. And I’m scared I’ll come before you tell me to. Before I get you off.”
She was so close. He felt it in her fevered, slippery, swollen sex.
“I want to beg you please, let me stop, but I know I’ll only make everything worse.”
“Beg me anyway,” she whispered. She cupped his face and drew it close, urging his mouth just behind her ear. Her hair tickled his lips.
“Please,” he murmured. In his fantasy, his entire body would be shaking from the strain, so he made his voice reflect that, his muscles too, clenching them tight. “I’m too close.”
She held his head, fisting his hair. “Not until I tell you to.”
“Please.”
She was pleading as well, with her motions. Rob cheated, moving his hand for her, meeting each stroke of her sex, deepening the contact, rubbing the pad of his palm along her clit. He let his fingers dip inside, to help her imagine the penetration. She groaned, an angry, desperate sound, brows pinched together.
Fuck, yes. She was coming. She was thinking about the things that excited him, and she was coming.
“Please,” he whispered. “Please, Merry.”
“Oh God.”
His hand turned greedy and frantic, until he was leading the caresses, her body merely riding his bucking fingers and palm.
“Please. Please.”
And she seized. Pressed hard into him, driving his hand back against his own throbbing arousal. He could feel so much—her fluttering muscles, squeezing, twitching. He wished it were his cock, and this an order. Feed me, her body was saying, and he’d obey, spilling inside her. Giving this cruel and benevolent goddess exactly what she demanded.
“Oh, Rob.” She went still, pressing her forehead to his neck and releasing his hair.
He swallowed, willing the mania to ebb. The most wondrous thing had just happened. He had to drive the madness from his body and wallow in this. It might never—
She pushed him. Not hard, but enough to surprise him, and he turned onto his back. She was between his legs, plucking at the bow of his drawstring. She tugged his bottoms down. Fisted his pounding cock.
She offered no demands, and Rob was beyond the role-playing. Her warm mouth enveloped his crown and he thrashed, elbows digging into the covers, hard and rough enough to burn.
“Oh.”
He kept his eyes open, and for once, he needed no scenario. Only this woman, making him feel this. Wanting it from him, after everything he’d told her. This greedy mouth didn’t belong to some alien being, or hostage-taker, or sadistic mistress. Only Merry—beautiful, startling Merry—and he’d obey her.
He held her head gently, following the motions, feeling the pressure and suction, the hunger of her.
Her hair against his fingers was silken, cool, and smooth. When he came, it was no act of obedience. It wasn’t a wailing, shrieking release, but a sweet, deep ache, feeling ages long and made of pure surrender.
As the pleasure finally let him go, he drew his hands away. Her hair whispered between his fingers as she drew back, swallowing. Smiling, a touch embarrassed, he thought. Or perhaps even smug. But not regretful. Not ashamed or disgusted or condemning. Rob sat up, leaning against the headboard, and hoisted his bottoms to his hips.
She must have read the request in his eyes. Come here. She did, sitting beside him on his small bed, twining their arms and fingers. Her weight felt so perfect, the way she leaned into him. She drew her long hair over her far shoulder and sighed.
“I ought to say something,” Rob mumbled, feeling drunk. No—feeling so much better than drunk. So sensate and alive and awake, yet addled. “But nothing I can think of will be right. Be enough, I mean.”
“Just tell me it felt good.”
He laughed. Just as he’d suspected, words were inadequate to describe this moment. “It was amazing. It was more than I’ve ever felt.” He blinked. “That doesn’t even make sense. But that’s what it was. It was more than I’ve ever felt.” Every emotion, good and bad, wrung from him in so short a time. Fear and shame and guilt, mingled with pleasure and lust, power and helplessness. Everything, just everything. “Thank you.”
She squeezed his hand. “Thank you. For sharing yourself.”
“You’re welcome.” He mouthed the words more than he spoke them, so humbled his throat seized up.
“I wanted you,” she said quietly, turning to look at his chin or mouth. “Almost the minute I met you. From the minute I met you, except I wrote it off, since I was delirious and all.”
He had to smile at that. “Really?”
“Really.”
“I was such a cranky, rubbish host.”
“But you were always in there.” She stroked his palm with her thumb. “I could see someone in those eyes. Plus you’re very sexy.”
He laughed. “Definitely your head injury talking there.”