Cards of Love

by Sierra Simone

  And now that my work is through? My path walked?

  “No limits, Nimue.”

  Her normally happy mouth folds into a pout of disapproval—which, unsurprisingly at this point, sends a fresh surge of blood to my cock. “This is not a game, Mr. Rhys, and the stakes are very real. Bluster and false courage are pointless.”

  I’m about to die, how much more real can the stakes be?

  She doesn’t know you’re going to die. She doesn’t remember.

  A gash of lonely anger opens up in my chest. Was it so much to ask fate that I could love someone who wouldn’t cause my death? Couldn’t I have had that one thing?

  “No limits,” I repeat firmly.

  Her little frown deepens, only serving to make her look sterner. More beautiful. “I hope you’ll use your safe word when you need it.”

  I already know I won’t, even as she clicks my cuffs onto a latching restraint on the far end of the bench with a final-sounding click. Even as she adds a cuff to my other ankle and secures both to the lower part of the bench. I’ve already decided to savor these last days of mine—I’m certainly not inclined to shorten them by surrendering earlier than absolutely necessary.

  Of course, that’s an easy thought to have before the first crack of the riding crop. It’s much harder to think about resistance and perseverance afterwards, as pain stripes along the muscles of my ass and thighs, as Nimue pauses to flick—gentler but still hard enough—the leather keeper of the crop against my most sensitive places.

  She’s possibly the merriest sadist ever to exist; she hums as she trades out the crop for a rattan cane and proceeds to give me a caning fiercer than any British school headmaster’s. And when she tells me that she’s going to make “the last set count”—and then proceeds to give me six strikes that would buckle my knees if I weren’t already kneeling and slumped over the bench—she sings.

  Sings.

  I don’t even know what she’s singing, what the words are or what the melody is, because I’m babbling and begging and near to screaming now. Tears are spilling from my eyes in a way wholly unfamiliar to me; my entire body feels like it’s made of pain. Hot, scorching pain, and the pain is around my ass and thighs, yes, but it’s everywhere else too. It’s turned my stomach inside out and shoved it up into my chest, it’s made the very air into scalding concrete and the clench of my hands into something like thumbscrews.

  Never have I ever been so much in my body, this form I normally disdain as a vehicle for the soul and the mind, but now the form has taken control of me. I am this writhing, keening body, I am this pain, I am the dusky, swollen erection that still leaks and flexes even as I’m crying. And what comes with the pain is a gift—a dizzy kind of euphoria that sends my sight reeling, bringing me back memories and visions and magic. My whole body is sparkling with it as Nimue puts the cane away and comes back to run an approving hand over my abused flesh.

  I look up and meet her stare, which is awed and possibly just as dazed as mine is. She’s breathing hard, her face flushed and her pupils blown so wide that her eyes have become pools of black with the barest rim of blue.

  “That was beautiful,” she whispers. “You’re beautiful.”

  I can’t answer. I can barely even hear. All I want is to stare at her for hours and days. All I want is to be transfixed by her perfection until I die, just as the legends about me have claimed.

  She unlocks my cuffs and makes me straighten up, pausing when I cry out to give me a soothing shh shh shh.

  The shh shh shh continues as she walks me to the lounge at the end of the room. It’s long enough for a man to lie flat on, although the pressure and the fabric on my welted skin make fresh tears well in my eyes.

  It’s strangely not humiliating to cry thusly in front of the only woman I’ve ever wanted to impress; or perhaps it is humiliating, but it’s also not bothersome. A welcome kind of humiliation, a kind of punishing vulnerability that feels better than anything else I’ve ever felt in my life. And it’s especially not bothersome because my tears make this beauty hum and sing again. They make her kiss them off my face and give me more lovely shushes and cooed reassurances and all kinds of praise and petting words that turn the incandescent pain into something cherished and golden.

  “Oh Merlin, look what hurting you did to me,” she murmurs, and she lifts up her dress to reveal her bare cunt to me. It’s swollen and slick, and the little bud of her stiff clitoris is peeping through her lips, insisting on being attended to. A wave of lust hits me so hard in the stomach I nearly curl in on myself.

  I’ll die if I don’t touch her silk, taste her heat, fuck her tightness. I’ll die, I just will.

  “Remember the first time we met?” she asks as she swings a long leg over the lounge. It’s narrow enough that she can straddle it standing with a wide enough stance, but there’s also enough room on either side of my hips for her to plant her knees, if she so wishes.

  God, if she so wishes. How is that tiny little phrase so hypnotic to me?

  I hope she so wishes. I pray she so wishes.

  “I remember,” I say.

  “Do you remember what I said?”

  The memory rises in me like a visceral thing, like a breath, like a sound. And I’m there. Then.

  There and then.

  I’d just been hired the year before to consult for the DNC by its de facto prince, Leo Galloway, and I was at Vivienne Moore’s expansive lake house working on strategy for her inaugural gubernatorial bid. We’d been leaning over her desk looking at demographics maps when a door somewhere in the house slammed and loud singing echoed off the walls. And then some irate shouting for Vivienne to come the fuck on, really???

  “My little sister,” Vivienne apologized. “My mother died a couple years ago, and I’ve been her guardian ever since. She actually turned eighteen last month, but she still has to finish out her senior year of high school. So naturally we’ve been butting heads a little, and I may have taken away the phone in her room while she was at school today.”

  Stomping footsteps came our way, and the office door was pushed open by a young woman who I’d never seen before.

  And yet.

  And yet I knew her immediately.

  Same oval face with ocean-blue eyes, same long dark lashes resting on high cheekbones. Same tall, lithe body with a fall of dark hair down to her waist. Same irrepressible smile—even though she was also currently furious.

  She opened her mouth, probably to lay into Vivienne about her phone, but then she saw me. The spots of color high in her cheeks got even redder, and she swallowed. “Enchanted to meet you, I’m sure.” She said it in the wavering, fake-confident voice of someone who’s used to being charismatic but had temporarily forgotten how.

  I nodded at her, my chest tight, my pulse racing. The last time I saw her face, I’d been in a rain-shrouded cave on Bardsey, counting down the minutes to my death. And now here she was in a plaid skirt that barely came to the middle of her long thighs and brightly painted fingernails and a million necklaces with crystals and crescent moons hanging from her neck. Without her, desire had been only an abstract concept, a weakness that I could exploit in other people, but the moment I saw her, smelled the faint scent of lavender on the air, twenty-seven years of absent need bloomed inside my body all at once, a dangerous bloom indeed.

  “Enchanted,” I said back, my hands shaking, and I was the only one who knew how apt that word really was.

  Over the next month, I saw Nimue more and more. I wish I could say that I avoided her—if not for the sake of propriety, then at least for the sake of my pride. But I could no more avoid her than I could avoid myself. I offered to help Vivienne more thoroughly, with longer hours, and when she invited me to family dinners and family boat trips, I never said no.

  And so it happened one late March evening that Vivienne had to leave to attend some sporting match of Embry’s. I was right behind her, gathering up my things in her office after she left, preparing to drive back to my hotel f
or another long night alone, when Nimue stepped through the office threshold and blocked my escape.

  “Leaving so soon?” she asked, bold as you please, as if I were the eighteen-year-old schoolgirl and she were the older man.

  She was still in her maddeningly short plaid skirt—did they not have any kind of discipline at all at this school of hers?—and far from being boxy or unfashionable, her uniform polo shirt only served to highlight her small upthrust tits and taut stomach. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and all I wanted to do was shove her up against the wall and bite her breasts through her shirt. I’d spent the last month imagining doing exactly that, held in throbbing thrall to this desire I had no experience hiding or controlling. At least twice a day—more at night—I found myself seeking the same desperate, furtive releases I’d always scorned. In my hotel bed, in my hotel shower, in my car pulled to the side of the road just out of view of the lake house. Rough, fast wanks that left me breathless and hot with shame.

  Too often, they happened inside the lake house itself.

  Earlier that day, after Nimue had stormed into the house in her usual tornado of singing, shouting, and laughter, it had only taken one glimpse of those long thighs to send me over the edge. I’d quickly excused myself from the group of strategists and aides in the office and found an empty bathroom. I’d barely gotten the door closed before I had my back against it and my hand in my pants. It took too long, too goddamn long, to fumble my erection free, and I groaned when I did. It was always this way—always this frantic, madcap sin against civilized behavior, always so powerful that by the time I got myself alone, I no longer cared who could hear or see me. Who would know.

  God help Nimue if I ever got her alone.

  As usual, it only took a minute or two, barely long enough for me to pull out my handkerchief to finish inside of, and it was over. Pulsing, shameful relief.

  But that messy culmination seemed forever ago now, with Nimue in all her lissome glory in front of me.

  Looking at me, really looking at me, with unabashed appreciation.

  This was not good. It didn’t matter that she was eighteen, that she was literally my soul mate—both my career and my morality dictated that I leave her alone. I needed to leave her alone; in every sense of the phrase, my life depended on it. But it was so hard to remember why with her right here. With that lavender scent tempting me closer and closer…

  “Your sister left,” I said, trying to rally and leave. “If you’re looking for her.”

  Nimue put a warm hand on my chest. “I’m not,” she said. “Looking for her.”

  I tried to take a breath. I tried to say something, I tried to move. I tried, I did, I swear.

  When her lips met mine, she tasted of the flavored lip balm schoolgirls wear, a taste I was surprised to recognize from my last two years Stateside.

  “Dr. Pepper,” she laughed against my lips and pushed me backwards. “It’s Dr. Pepper flavored.”

  Somehow I found myself sitting on the low sofa with her straddling my hips, and even with her doodled-on sneakers digging into my thighs and her lips tasting of soda-flavored lip balm, I was the one without any experience. I was the one getting my first kiss. And the gentle brush of her lips on mine was exactly as I remembered from before—hesitant at first, then growing warm and sure as we went.

  She moved my hands to her hips, to her waist, and finally up to her braless breasts with their thick nipples poking my palms even through her shirt, and all the while she rocked her firm, hot cunt over my hips, managing to line up her seam with my erection just so, and I would have come right there and then if she hadn’t stopped.

  But she did stop.

  “Do you have a condom?” she asked breathlessly. “I’m on the Pill, but you know.”

  Did I?

  Know?

  “I don’t have any,” I told her honestly. I’d never even bought any; I never needed to. My desire began and ended with Nimue, and even after I’d found her, I’d tried to stay away.

  I wish I could say that the pause for a condom stopped the twenty-seven-year-old man from fucking the girl in the Catholic school uniform, but it didn’t happen that way. A condom was found in her room, and on her messy bed, she took my virginity. She pushed me back and eased herself onto my thick, latex-covered shaft.

  I came immediately. She just laughed. “I thought older men were supposed to have stamina.”

  I debated about how much to tell her, and settled for the truth. “I’ve never had sex before.”

  Her eyes grew round. “Like…never?”

  “I’ve never wanted to,” I told her honestly. “Not until you.”

  And that was the moment it all changed, really. The moment it went from being about her fucking the sexy, older Brit and falling for the man himself. I fell too, and of course, it was a mistake.

  The creativity of people who want to fuck but who should not be fucking is limitless.

  She came to my hotel room, I snuck into her bedroom. We stole away at Vivienne’s lavish parties. I embraced the awful skeeviness of our ages and picked her up from school, and then we’d fuck in my car, my suit pants tugged around my hips and her plaid skirt up around her waist.

  I may have been new to sex, but I was an eager student, and she barely needed to say anything aloud before I learned it. Where she liked to be licked and where she’d rather be sucked. When she wanted slow grinds and when she’d rather have fast, hammering thrusts. I held nothing back, left nothing trapped inside my imagination, and in the short time we had together, I visited every filthy, delirious act upon her body that we could dream of. I bit her, sucked her, spanked her, tongued her, fucked every place on her body that she wanted fucked—which was all of them. I couldn’t even care that I’d become the stereotype of the man chasing after teenage pussy—I knew the truth and had known it for fifteen hundred years.

  It was only ever her. It was only ever going to be her.

  The end happened all at once, or so it seemed at the time. Now, looking back, I can see it from almost the very beginning. The first time I met her at her school, she spilled out of the front doors next to a young man who was carrying her book bag and for whom the term strapping was invented.

  The knife in my guts was dull and cold.

  My visions hadn’t helped me here, hadn’t bothered to warn me or prepare me. Of course they didn’t last time either.

  “Who was that?” I asked casually as she finally slid into my car, humming to herself.

  I already knew the answer, but I didn’t know how frankly Nimue would look over at me and say, “My boyfriend. That okay?”

  No.

  No.

  It’s not okay and I’ve only just got you and you’re not even mine.

  “I surmise it will have to be okay in order for me to keep seeing you?” I asked as I started the car.

  Her teeth worried at her lower lip, and her frank expression was subsumed by something doubtful and dark.

  “I don’t know, Merlin,” she said after a minute. “I just…I don’t know.”

  For six weeks, I pretended not to care. I fucked the woman I’d loved across two lifetimes and tried not to care that during the day she was with a handsome quarterback; I folded her in my arms and pretended not to smell his youthful aftershave on the skin of her neck.

  “I hate this,” she told me the night before her graduation. She was in my hotel room, sprawled over my chest in a warm, sated tangle of limbs and hair. We’d fucked so many times that my cock ached, but I didn’t care. I’d fuck her as many times as she’d let me.

  “What do you hate, my little moon?”

  She often teased me about my pet name for her—it was unusual and old-fashioned, to be sure. She had no idea exactly how old-fashioned it was. But she didn’t even blink at it tonight.

  “I hate that I’m still with Jack when I only want to be with you. I hate how much I want you because it feels like I don’t even belong to myself anymore, not all the way. I hate that I feel like you’
re going to leave at any moment and then I’ll have nothing at all.”

  I thought about that. It had never occurred to me that Nimue might consider me the flight risk, me the cavalier unattached one. How could it have? When I had known from the moment I was born that she would always, always give her body to another and then leave me to die?

  It would be my life’s work to control information—to decide when and how to tell the truth, to choose which secrets would stay in the shadows and which would be brought into the light. But sadly, it was a gift that I couldn’t apply to myself. I was too close to it, maybe, still too bitter about what had happened between us before. Bitter that history was already repeating itself—goddamn Pelleas again—and bitter that I still loved this singing little sprite with her blue eyes and wide smile.

  I should have told her the truth then. Everything, I should have told her everything, and especially what I should have told her was this:

  I love you.

  I love you and I won’t leave.

  I’d rather die than leave you, and let me tell you about the time I did just that.

  But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Instead, I said, “I don’t belong to myself all the way either. Even if I left, you’d have the biggest piece of me to hold on to. For eternity, little moon.”

  And then we made love again, sore cock and all.

  It ended the next day. The next night, really, at the lavish graduation party Vivienne threw for her little sister and the rest of Nimue’s graduating class. I don’t even remember why I attended now, except that Nimue wanted me there, and my protests felt weak in the face of her sweet pleadings.

  I’ll just be the strange old man at the party full of young people.

  Don’t be ridiculous, all the parents will be there.

  That doesn’t make me feel better, you know.

  But when have I ever truly refused her?

  So I went to the party, knowing full well that we were still hiding from Vivienne, from everyone, and knowing that she’d be on her teenaged boyfriend’s arm. Knowing that I’d be consumed with jagged, helpless jealousy the entire night.