You Already Know

by Charlotte Stein

  And then he obeys, just like that. He kind of turns his head and won’t look at me, before bringing the paddle down so suddenly and so dexterously I almost miss it. Clearly, he’s done this a million times before. He doesn’t even let out a gasp this time, though I’m sure it must have hurt.

  Which just makes me wonder about all of those gasps I heard behind the bathroom door, and how quiet he was really trying to be. I mean, it’s not as though I went far. I only called at the shops and he should have known I’d be returning any second. But he let me hear him anyway, making sounds he clearly doesn’t when he thinks things are more private.

  ‘This is really shocking behaviour, Brad,’ I say, and am stunned by how stern my voice is. It’s so stern, in fact, that he babbles in response.

  ‘Oh, God, I’m sorry, I’m sorry – I don’t mean to do it but I just have to, I need it. Work is so stressful at the moment and –’

  ‘Don’t make excuses,’ I say, like a hand rapping on a door. And even more remarkably, he falls immediately silent. Eyes still trained on something other than me. That paddle gripped sweatily in one fist. ‘Just admit it – you’ve always done this, haven’t you? It has nothing to do with work.’

  I don’t know how I dare. I’ve certainly got no real idea if what I’m saying is true or not. And yet I want to, I want to, I need to say those words to him.

  ‘Yes,’ he replies – sullenly, I think.

  His dark hair has fallen into his eyes and his mouth looks soft and sulky, and, oh, God, I don’t think I can take much more of him. He smells like cinnamon and apples, and he’s all raw and obviously aroused and I’m talking like this, I’m talking and talking and I don’t know who I am anymore.

  ‘Bend over the sink, Brad,’ I say, and, oh, how he moans in response. He moans and squirms and it’s as though every one of those little reactions connect directly to my clit. Any second he’s going to say something whiny like please no, I don’t want to, and, oh, dear Lord, I’m going to love it.

  ‘Bend over, and give me the paddle,’ I tell him again, in a colder voice.

  And this time he obeys. He just hands it over to me, body violently trembling as he does so, those black-as-midnight eyes of his suddenly shut tight.

  ‘You’ve been bad,’ I tell him, which I’m sure is probably the hokiest thing a person can say in this situation. It’s a cliché right from the BDSM handbook, page one, paragraph one, line one.

  But then, that’s where I’m at. I’m on the Beginner’s Pamphlet, still waiting to find out if the rules suit me. Because there are rules, aren’t there? I mean, I’m not supposed to really hurt him. Or what if that’s not the rule at all – maybe I am supposed to really hurt him. Maybe he wants me to reduce him to a blubbering, twitching mess on the bathroom floor, unable to sit down the next day without a reminder of me burning up through his body.

  Is that the way it works?

  ‘Hold still, Brad,’ I say, and then I crack that thing down on him so hard.

  Or at least, I think I do it hard. It certainly seems as though I do when I feel it whooshing through the air, and then the heavy connection of it with his gorgeous flesh. That connection spreads from him and back into me, all the way up my arm and into some heretofore undiscovered centres of my brain, most of which sizzle and spark and say things to me like: Slip a hand into your panties. Just slip a hand in and stroke your clit, while you spank him.

  But I resist. I resist right up until the point where he says some sort of glorious, insane, magical word: ‘Harder.’

  God, I thought I did do it hard. I can already see the mark I’ve made, tugging the pink of his ass back to a glorious crimson. But apparently, in the world of Brad Henderson and his thirst for corporal punishment, I’m just a wussy.

  ‘Like this?’ I ask, and this time I bring it down heavily. Not like a spank. More like a thud, a heavy dull thud on his perfect ass – one that makes my shoulder ache and my body judder under its pressure, as though I’m hurting myself as much as I’m hurting him.

  I think I almost make the same sound he does, when it connects. A sob, thick and breathless but buried under the press of my lips.

  Of course, he doesn’t try to bury his. He lets it out, so loud it reverberates around the bathroom and all the way through me. It spurs me to test out this newfound power, slapping him hard and fast with just the very edge of it, then slow and softer and heavier.

  Both seem to make him shudder, but the ones that connect more solidly provoke a slightly different reaction. A lower note to his gasps, a hint of words in among all of them. And when I lean in close I can almost hear what he’s trying to say – a little fluttering of pleases and yeses and mores.

  I think it’s the sound of those exhortations that finally pushes me to do something about the hot throb that’s taken over my body. Of course, I have to do it when he isn’t looking, but that’s not all that hard considering he hasn’t so much as glanced at me since all of this began.

  His shoulders are hunched and I can see that his hand has disappeared to some place in front of him, so it doesn’t seem like I’m doing the wrong thing by sliding my fingers under the waistband of my skirt. Even though it completely feels like the wrong thing once I’ve done it. It feels like the dirtiest thing in the world, and the pressure of the material against the back of my hand doesn’t make it any better.

  But it does make it hotter. I can hardly reach, and my other arm is aching from the swinging I can’t seem to stop, but the moment I get close …

  My body thrills before I’ve even found and rubbed over my clit. Just the feel of my soaked panties, and the swollen curve of my outer lips standing out so stark through the material … it’s enough to make me miss the next spank.

  I think I catch him on the backs of his thighs somewhere, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He’s groaning now, really groaning, and, beneath the steady, flat rhythm of the paddle hitting his flesh, I can make out another, slicker one.

  He’s jerking off, while I mark him and masturbate to the sound of his voice.

  ‘Oh, God, yeah, just like that,’ he tells me, and I don’t know what’s more blissful about it. That he’s so desperate when he blurts out the words, or that I now know I’m doing it exactly right. Somehow I’ve hit upon the perfect pace, the perfect ferocity, and after a second of striping him almost black and blue with my little paddle he lets out this glorious sound – all long and drawn out and so thick with lust.

  It’s like nothing I’ve ever heard before, and I don’t mind admitting that it sends a rush of pleasure down through my body. I’m still barely touching my clit, fingers rubbing in some fumbling way at the edges of my sex, but I think I’m going to climax anyway.

  I can smell the sharp tang of his come in the air, and when I let the paddle clatter out of my hand it’s all I can do not to grab him. There’s so much I want to feel and lick and touch – the streaks of perspiration on his back, where his shirt’s riled up. The mess he’s obviously made of himself, somewhere just out of reach.

  And most of all those marks, those searing red marks. I can almost feel the heat radiating off them the second I lean in, and, though I know I shouldn’t find it so, his wince when I press against him is exquisite.

  It makes me think of him clenching his teeth, tensing his fists, biting down hard. And all of these things push me until I’m suddenly beneath the wet material of my panties, stroking over everything that isn’t my clit.

  If I touch myself there, I know I’ll die. At the very least, I won’t ever be able to go back. Bad enough that I spanked my roommate until he came all over his fist. Masturbating with the thought of that bright, brilliant pain in my head is a step too far. Anyone would know it.

  But as usual, I don’t.

  ‘Go on,’ he says. ‘Come all over me. Get yourself off.’

  How strange that this is the first time I’ve ever heard him say something truly dirty. But, oh, how sweet it is, how like the same sort of permission I gave him only moments before. I
arch against him to hear it, just one finger stroking through my slick slit until I find that swollen little bead.

  And then I give in; I give in and rub over it with my face pressed to his still heaving back, that heat pouring through me and under me and over me. My orgasm is so fierce it feels like pain, like someone striking hard on my exposed flesh, and when I call something out it isn’t his name.

  ‘Thank you,’ I tell him instead, though I don’t know what I’m thanking him for. Didn’t I give him something, after all? Didn’t I hurt him in just the way he wanted, and needed, and so desperately longed for?

  I guess I did, and yet I’m the one sobbing into his back. My legs won’t hold me up, the pleasure won’t stop pulsing from that single point beneath my working finger, and it’s in this moment that I realise what he has given me.

  A new dress, I think. A new dress, made of silk. And, oh, it’s perfect.

  Dancing On The Edge

  Charlotte Stein

  He says it in the middle of talking about something mundane – like quotas or reports or that meeting we all had last Tuesday. We’re just sat here at the bar, and Johnson’s gone to the toilet, and in that tiny moment that we’re alone he puts his lips too close to my ear and murmurs the words: ‘If you come upstairs with me once we’re done here, I’ll lick your clit until you come all over my face.’

  They feel hot, up that close – and not just because of the content. I can feel his steamy breath, rubbing against the sensitive whorls of my ear. And I get a heated hint of his body, too, as he invades my space.

  I don’t know how to react. A second ago he was Michael Turner, rather quiet and sort of uninteresting colleague. Now he’s a guy who propositions girls by using a word I don’t think I’ve ever heard a man say before. Not even in bed. Not even when the guy in question is actually touching me there.

  Though, come to think of it, even that’s rare.

  But this is rarer. I feel like he’s already done the deed, before I’ve even taken him up on the offer. My clit is suddenly huge, immense. It’s eating the rest of my body in pulses and tremors, and all of them make me realise something startling.

  It doesn’t really take a lot to make me come. I could come like this, while staring straight forwards at my reflection in the mirror behind the bar. I can see him just to the left of me, toying with his glass of Scotch as though nothing was said – but then he glances up just a little and our eyes meet around bottles of absinthe and mint liquor, and I know.

  I know I could come if he just breathed on me wrong. I’m primed like an engine; he’s said the magic words and kickstarted a libido I didn’t previously have. Usually I’m bored, restless, I have to work for it, push for it. I’m always on the edge and never all the way over.

  But that’s not the case now. Why didn’t I notice those eyes of his, over morning coffee and dull chitchat? They’re like neon lights, lowering on the front of a predatory sort of car. Something slick and close to the ground, ready to run me down. And his mouth … oh, his mouth.

  It’s like someone pressed a blade to his face. They carved those cut-glass cheekbones, and then finished off with a slash just above his chin.

  Which is all just a way of saying that he’s stunningly attractive, though I’d never quite seen it before today. I guess I’d passed him by in the same manner I pass by most handsome men, sure and certain in their uninterest, only concerned with what they have to say. Maybe it’ll be something good, like today.

  Though usually I’m just hoping for anything at all. From anyone, ever. A word, a sign that I’m alive. A hand on my thigh as nonchalant as a back pat, just before he slides away.

  Of course, I know where he’s going. He’s headed to that mythical upstairs – the one I can’t help picturing as a bin for this bar. Beer crates on the stairs, boxes in the bare living room, naked bulbs dangling from the ceiling.

  But Johnson tells me otherwise. He asks me if Michael has called it a night, and then he points to the place I was offered. ‘Maybe we should head off too,’ he says, while I reframe the place above with this new information in mind.

  Now it’s not a fuck on the stairs, amidst the rubble. There’s no splinters digging into my ass, from stripped floorboards in an abandoned apartment. I think of how he seems, instead, and what the home of a man like him would be like – pristine, elegant, sharp. The way his suits are, the way his haircut is, the way he’d whispered those words in my ear.

  So slick, I think.

  I should be angry.

  Instead, I’m walking up the stairs.

  I wait until Johnson’s bid me adieu outside the bar, and go through the motions of leaving as he does so – putting my gloves on, bracing myself for the cold. And then once he’s gone I turn around and go back inside, to the red door he went through at the rear.

  No one tries to stop me. No one says anything to me at all, so maybe he does this all the time. Invites a girl through this red rabbit hole, to a flight of stairs that couldn’t be more different from the ones I’d imagined.

  Everything is white, bright white, and at the top there’s another door, left ajar.

  Beyond, his apartment is the same. Clinical, almost, as though to take back the invitation that was so easily extended. Now I’m supposed to feel like an intruder, in the land that clean built. I’m a filthy whore who’d like her pussy licked, invading his precious space.

  Though it’s not this thought that makes my face heat. It’s how he catches me when he emerges from some space-age kitchen. I’m in the process of fleeing, before any of this solidifies and turns into that thing I did one time.

  ‘Leaving so early?’ he says, and my cheeks nearly flame. I’ve been caught with my hand in the cookie jar, then compounded my error by vacating the scene of the crime. Now I have to be punished, I suspect, though his and my ideas of punishment differ greatly, it seems.

  I think of spankings, or maybe a brutal fuck bent over his couch. He thinks of the promise he made me, and kneels down to shove my dress up over my hips. No talking. No asking. I’ve never been so bare before any kind of discussion has taken place.

  And it gets worse. He looks up at me with this shark’s grin on his gorgeous face when he sees my panties: plain cotton, humiliatingly girlish. And once he’s judged them suitable, he hooks two come-hither fingers into the elastic.

  Then drags them down. Slowly, slowly, as though my shivering shame and uncertainty are worth savouring. And I can tell he is savouring it, too, because he doesn’t look at my newly exposed pussy, sparsely furred and already gleaming with the evidence of my arousal. He looks at my face as he inches them down, then once they’re on the floor he lifts my feet to free them.

  Which has the bonus of spreading my legs. Once my feet are back on the ground, they’re noticeably further apart than they were before – and he’s still staring, too. He holds my gaze long after he’s leaned in to plant an open-mouthed kiss on my split sex, all wet and warm and too much, too much.

  I don’t know what to do with it. I can’t watch someone watching me, as he slides his tongue between my swollen lips and licks whatever he finds there. I just can’t. He isn’t even tender about it, holding back until I can take it, delicately forging forward when I urge him on. He grasps great handfuls of my ass and holds me there. He mashes his face right into my spread slit, and once he’s as deep as he can go he licks over my slippery hole like he’s searching for a way in.

  Which he finds, easily. Of course he does. He’s so greedy I’m surprised he hasn’t lost his way down there, so eager for more that he’s forgotten the breadcrumbs to get back. It’s like he’s drowning inside me, and when I make a startled sound he only forces himself deeper down.

  He finds my clit and really rubs it, in a way I didn’t think was possible with that particular appendage. I thought it had to be a thumb, for it to feel like that – or maybe some sort of toy of the kind he most likely has. He’s that kind now, I see.

  He’s the kind who forces me to stand still w
hile he works his tongue back and forth over my clit, until I’m moaning. I actually moan, even though we don’t really know each other and haven’t properly spoken before now.

  Our first real words to each other are cries of stunned pleasure and feral grunts of satisfaction – the former from me, the latter from him. Of course the latter’s from him. I can practically see the triumph in his gleaming eyes, as though this is all some strange sex-based revenge for wrongs I didn’t know I’d done to him.

  He’s going to give me orgasms until I’m sorry for dressing him down in that meeting one time – even though I never actually have. We acknowledged each other at the photocopier, once. We saw each other in the bar downstairs, and conspired in the awkward camaraderie of colleagues who don’t really know each other.

  And it all somehow led to this.

  ‘Oh, God, I’m coming,’ I say, because I have to. It’s so shocking that voicing it is a requirement, not an option. My legs are trembling, trembling, trembling and it’s kind of like he’s twisting something, lowdown in my gut. And then he takes my so-swollen clit between his teeth and that’s it.

  I make a noise like an animal dying. I grunt the way he did, five seconds ago – guttural and unfettered, full of a kind of satisfaction I’ve never felt before. This is what going over the edge easily feels like. This is what pleasure is.

  Something that makes you sob, even though you don’t want to.

  Though it seems that he isn’t satisfied with this. I’ve not given enough. I’m not the kind of mess he was hoping for. He wants to reduce me to rubble, I realise – which of course only gives credibility to that whole revenge-based idea.

  But the thing is … it doesn’t feel like revenge, when he carries on making these wet, nearly unbearable circles around my clit. It feels like he’s simultaneously bringing me down from the most gut-punching orgasm of my life and winding me back up into another.

  It’s almost good. It’s almost not. It’s just right on that glancing edge, perfect and blissful and nearly too much.