Once Upon a Dream

by Sierra Simone

  “It can’t be me. I won’t be the woman who says she kneels for no one, and then abruptly decides to because the right man came along. And even if I could, that’s not how submission works. I can’t be submissive for just one person, that’s nonsense, that’s wishful thinking, that’s—”

  Lorne yanks me into him, his mouth hovering a mere inch above mine. “You’re right,” he breathes. “You’re not submissive. You’re fucking stubborn.”

  And then his mouth crashes down on mine.

  3

  His kiss is exactly how I remember, and at the same time, it’s so much more.

  It’s more potent, more possessive, rougher and silkier all at once. His lips over mine are firm, warm, and the first flick of his tongue against my mouth is not a request. I part for him, and then I’m rewarded with plunder. Hot strokes that give no quarter, urgent kisses that have me sinking back into his arms—and his embrace brings renewed pain sizzling up my skin. His stubble hurts a little too—it’s just enough to scrape, just enough to scratch—as he moves his kisses to my neck and then ducks his head to nip at the exposed inner curves of my breasts.

  I can’t think straight, I’m not Lorne-sober, I’m flushed and flying under his drugging kisses and his demanding mouth. All my carefully constructed defenses, all the reasons why I shouldn’t, why I left him—they’re so flimsy in the face of this.

  In the face of him.

  Somehow, we’ve moved back, back against the ballroom wall, and his hand is cupping my nape while the wall presses fire against my bottom and my wings flatten behind me. His erection is pressing hot and thick against my stomach, and my heart is crashing against my ribs, and I can barely drag in enough air, and I think if I could do this for the rest of my life, I’d be happy. This dance of pain, this symphony of hungry but deliberate force.

  It’s why I had to leave.

  Because with him, I can let go of all the things that have kept me safe and strong, and what happens if I let them go? Who would I even be then? How can anyone live with their mind, their heart, their everything just out there, in the open? Defenseless?

  Beating raw and bloody in the open air?

  Fear climbs up my throat, and I break away from the kiss. “Lorne, I can’t.”

  He doesn’t chase my mouth, he doesn’t press any harder against me. But I still feel caught like a fly in a web—the hot need between my legs and the heat on my backside. The wall at my back and his beautiful eyes in front of me.

  As always with him, I’m caught between what I want and what I should want. And it’s just as miserable now as it was years ago.

  “Tell me why you can’t,” he says.

  He’s not angry—no good Dom would be, and he’s one of the best—but he is infuriatingly patient, which is almost worse.

  My jaw tightens. “Because I’m waiting for a date,” I half-lie.

  “Ah yes, this mysterious date of yours. When will they be here? Where are they while I kiss you? Where are they while I touch your pussy, while I check to see if it needs more from me?”

  “You’re not—”

  His hand echoes his words then, coming between my legs and finding me wetter than ever. I don’t even know what I feel right now. Indignation, arousal, shame.

  Vulnerability.

  Why does the vulnerability feel so good? Why has it always felt so good with him?

  “They should be here soon,” I answer with as much defiance as I can muster.

  His fingers search me, search out the lies. “Then you still have time, Morgan. You know how good I can make you feel.”

  “But there’s a price, isn’t there? There’s always a price with you.”

  He ducks his head to meet my gaze then, his eyes burning behind his mask. “Yes,” he says. “But like I tried to tell you four years ago, the price has never been what you thought it was.”

  It’s so hard to think with his mouth so close to mine. With his fingers so expertly filthy between my legs. How long has it been since I came with a partner? A year? Two? And how long since I let a partner pin me by the neck and wring orgasms from me like it was their job?

  Well, I know the answer to that. It was the night before I filed for divorce.

  “What is the price, Lorne?” I manage to ask, as if I’m not already writhing against his touch, as if my nipples aren’t already threatening to punch holes through my bodice.

  Lorne’s hand slides free from my hair, and he touches a finger to the corner of my mouth. “The price is that you forgive yourself for wanting what you want. That you let go of your fear.”

  “I’m not afraid,” I say.

  I’m so afraid.

  He gives me a look like he knows I’m lying. “If a sub came to you, and told you they felt ashamed of what they want, that they felt like they were letting all women globally and historically down by what got them off behind closed doors—”

  “You’re being deliberately reductive,” I protest. “I’m hardly just any woman, Lorne, and anyway, the fact that I’m a woman and you’re a man automatically reinforces norms that I refuse to reinforce.”

  “Not if we choose it,” he says. “Choice is different than what you’re talking about, and choice is what we have. We don’t have to inherit any part of those norms we don’t want, Morgan. I swear it.”

  I pause.

  It’s a good answer.

  And it may even be the right one.

  “But is that enough?” I ask, still feeling the warmth of his finger against my mouth. A single fingertip on my lip, and it feels like the reassuring weight of gravity, like the idea of love itself in one small touch.

  “Are you asking me if it’s enough for all women everywhere or just you?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. Because I believe him when he says he would never ask anything to change. I would still be Morgan Leffey, Vice President, I would still be the same person in public I’ve always been.

  “Let me show you it will be enough,” he whispers, his finger sanding lightly over the curve of my lower lip. “Let me show you one more time.”

  I look past his shoulder to the party beyond our veiled alcove. No one notices us, and no one would be able to truly decipher what we were doing without stopping and staring. And somewhere out there my Secret Service detail is patrolling the perimeter and keeping any would-be documentarians at bay. The detail knows where I’m at, just as surely as they know what I’m doing, but after a few years of them escorting me to Lyonesse, I’m no longer shy about where I get my kicks.

  I’m feeling shyer about admitting what I’m about to admit. “I want you to show me,” I confess. And then I confess something even worse: “I’ve missed it, Lorne. So fucking much.”

  “I know,” he murmurs, and then he replaces his finger with his mouth and kisses me again. Long...slow kisses while his hand moves from my sex to the opening of his tuxedo pants.

  I feel the moment he frees himself, I feel the idle stroke he gives it before he reaches into his jacket pocket and withdraws a small foil packet. He sheathes himself with a practiced hand, and I break off our kiss so I can watch. There’s just something about someone rolling a condom over their cock. I can’t explain it. The experience it belies, maybe? Or maybe it’s utilitarianism of it, this stark, practical confirmation that penetration is imminent? Or maybe it’s just the sight itself: an already delicious cock shining with clear latex, its shaft now a slick topography of veins and flares, rigidity and give.

  Finished, Lorne lifts my thigh to his hip, and pushes the front of my dress up to my waist. The silk underthings are tugged to the side, and then he’s pressing against me, all thickness and heat against my opening. But he doesn’t push inside, not yet.

  Instead, he threads his fingers through my hair and pulls—gently enough that it doesn’t hurt, but hard enough that I have to look where he’s making me look. Down to where we’re about to be joined, framed by tulle and tuxedo, lit by sparkling lights and by the glow of the chandeliers outside our alcove. There’
s no mistaking what’s about to happen, there’s no mistaking what’s coming next, and that’s the point.

  “A choice, Morgan,” he repeats softly. “Your choice.”

  I don’t have any answers…but maybe I finally have different questions. And that’s a start, if nothing else.

  “My choice,” I tell him. “Yes.”

  Lorne says nothing, but I feel his satisfaction with my answer like a living thing, pulsing in the air around us.

  And then he pierces my body with his own.

  He spreads me—stretches me—an upward stroke that steals my breath and then a slow withdrawal that steals it once more. He keeps a hand in my hair and another under my thigh, his jaw going tight as he spears me again. Fully this time, burying himself in my belly like it’s been his all along. Like he’s claiming what he’s owed—four years apart be damned, divorce be damned, my stubborn refusal to submit be damned.

  “God, you feel—” His eyes flutter shut for the briefest of seconds, long, sooty eyelashes resting against the edge of his mask.

  Then he opens his eyes again and stares at me, all amber heat and dark lust. “You feel good, my little witch.” He drives in again—hard, hard—sending me to my toes. “Fuck. I’ve missed it. Missed this pretty cunt. Missed these green eyes flashing at me, like you can’t decide whether you want to hiss or purr. There’s nothing like fucking you,” he growls as he rams himself inside me once again. “Nothing.”

  Now that he’s fit himself to me, now that he’s mapped me anew, he starts going rough. Vicious. Not the rapid pounding of a youth chasing his own pleasure, but the hungry, brutal strokes of a Dominant partner too long denied.

  It takes me a minute to sort out the pain from the pleasure, the using from the choosing, and it’s a feeling I can’t describe, except to say that it’s every feeling all at once. It’s every feeling pouring out of my adrenal system and ovaries in a heady cocktail of chemicals, leaching right into my very blood. Soaking my heart.

  And then it’s there.

  The thing underneath it all, which is something like completion, except it’s not completion necessarily, and neither is it satiety, because I want more and more and more of it and the wanting is part of the feeling too.

  It’s more like...serenity. Or ecstasy. No matter how different those two things might seem on the surface, they are twins at the root. They are both a rightness of self, a rightness of the world.

  A rightness so deep that even my bones feel right. My cells, my mitochondria.

  Everything is curled up in bliss and singing with happiness to be fucked like this. To be Lorne’s again. However briefly.

  “You were going to give this to a stranger,” Lorne breathes, biting at my neck as he pumps into me. “You were going to go to a stranger when I was right here, when you have an ex-husband who could give you exactly what you needed.”

  The shock of each and every thrust makes it hard to speak. Everything below my navel is a single, searing ache, made hotter and achier by the near-angry way he stabs into me. Still, the truth tumbles out of my mouth. “I was going to pretend it was you,” I admit, my head dropping to his shoulder. “I wanted it to be you, but my pride...”

  “I know all about your pride, little witch,” he says, surging up into me and then giving my clit slow, hard grinds. I moan into his tuxedo. “But your pride is one of the things I treasure most about you. I’d never want you to give it up. Just let me inside it with you sometimes.”

  “Liar,” I mumble as the pressure behind my clit becomes unbearably wonderful. “I know Dominants. I know you. You want to play with my pride too, not just treasure it.”

  I feel him smile against my hair. His stubble scratches the shell of my ear as he agrees, “Yes, my witch. That too.”

  And then—incredibly—I’m smiling back. I forgot how good this feels, the smoldering wickedness of him, being drunk on him. How free and playful it was, how exhilarating, how alive it made me. I mean, I am always alive, of course, and dominating can be just as thrilling, just as sweet, but only with him have I also felt this. This...euphoria threaded through with a delicious kind of shame, a fun kind of fear.

  And before, when we were married, having both feelings inside me felt like a lie, like I was being disingenuous somehow. But maybe…

  I can have both. I can choose.

  “Then play with it,” I tell him, sinking my hands into his dark hair. “I want what I came for.”

  “And what did you come for, ex-wife?”

  I turn my head to study the strong-featured face I’ve missed so much. The blade-carved jaw, the proud nose. The bold eyebrows over his drink-me eyes.

  “To remember what it felt like to be yours.”

  He sounds more curious than upset when he asks, “Even if you had to use someone else to do it?”

  “Well. You can punish me for it, if you’d like,” I say, and then he laughs.

  “You’re smiling again, Morgan le Fay. Someone might think you’re happy, and then what will become of your fearsome reputation?”

  I move my fingers down to trace the line of his mask. “Maybe I’ll have to take fearsomeness lessons from you.”

  “In that case.”

  His hands find my ass, and suddenly I’m hauled up against him, my legs around his waist, and my core still impaled with his rigid length. His hands are over the fairy dress, which means whatever’s in the fabric that’s been irritating my skin is now back to tormenting me.

  I give a low cry—muffled by his sudden kiss—as the pain on my bottom joins the carnal bliss currently knitting itself into a frantic orgasm. God, I forgot this too, the way pain and pleasure work a spell together, the way they hex each other into twisting, thorny rapture. It’s like being stabbed all over with paradise itself, like being tickled and caressed with agony. A contradiction I’ve only ever found with Lorne.

  As if he knows what his hands are doing to my poor, abused backside, he grips me even harder, he squeezes me, plumps me with his fingers, and I sink my teeth into his shoulder to keep quiet...which is nearly impossible with the rough, unforgiving way he’s riding me right now. He’s fucking me like he paid for me, and every second of it, every goddamn bit of it, is too good; it’s what I’ve needed, what I’ve craved. And it’s too much like falling back in love—

  With an abrupt shudder, I come apart—a mess of fairy wings and urgent, gasping squirms. I try to fuck myself against him, I pull his hair, I bite his shoulder again and again, but he is relentless, he is all fury and burn and the triumph of my orgasm has only stoked the burn higher.

  He fucks me through my climax, and then the minute I’ve collapsed shivering in his arms, he sets me down and spins me around.

  “Hands on the wall,” he grates, and I’m too Lorne-drunk to argue, too horny to care that this is definitely less ambiguous to anyone watching us through the gauzy fabric of the alcove.

  He pushes my dress up and over my ass and hisses in pleasure at what he sees.

  “Beautiful,” he says, fitting his cock to my opening once again. “Fucking beautiful.”

  And with a low grunt I feel everywhere in my body, he wedges himself back inside. One hand curls around my hip while the other reverently strokes my bottom. “My Morgan,” he sighs, fucking into me harder. “My witch.”

  It takes nothing for me to come again like this. My hands against the wall, the gentle sear of his fingers over the welts from my dress. His massive erection stroking me from the inside out.

  It doesn’t matter what this means, it doesn’t matter that I’m terrified to call myself a switch, it doesn’t matter that I’ve pushed this man away over and over again because he’s the only person since Maxen Colchester to make me vulnerable.

  All that matters is how it feels, and how it feels is fucking perfect.

  I climax again, barely able to stand, shuddering with pleasure as Lorne bands an arm around my waist to keep me upright. He keeps moving between my thighs, holding me up to fuck me, until—with an abrupt bre
ath torn from his throat—he rams into me a final time and I feel his erection swell.

  His warm lips find my nape, my neck, as he throbs in my cunt, and I know the minute he starts pumping the latex full of his release, because he sighs again—a sigh like a man dying. A sigh like a man coming home.

  For a long moment we stay like this, his lips against my neck, his cock finishing inside me. His arm stays around my waist and his heart is beating so hard I can feel it even through the thin wool of his tuxedo and the wire and netting of my wings.

  Happiness.

  That’s what this is.

  It’s the same happiness stolen night after night in our marriage, always followed by a crashing fear that I was somehow a coward or a liar for stealing it.

  Morgan Leffey, the Witch of the White House, becoming a kitten in the arms of a man.

  I don’t need to see Lorne’s face to know that when he pulls out, it’s with a deep reluctance, because I feel the same.

  If only the entire world could be this moment, this hot embrace against a ballroom wall while a party whirls and twirls behind us…

  I feel the cool, damp emptiness signaling his withdrawal and hear the slick noise of latex over skin and the rustle of fabric as he pulls off and wraps the condom in a handkerchief—an old trick of his from when he used to fuck me at fundraisers and charity galas.

  I feel his knuckles against my ass as he tucks his spent organ back into his tuxedo and fastens his trousers, and then I feel his fingers ghost appreciatively over my backside. He kneels behind me and kisses the welted skin there, his lips at once soft and searing over the abused skin.

  “Hold still,” he commands, and then I look behind me to see him pulling a small tube from his inner jacket pocket. Some kind of medicated ointment.

  He unscrews the cap and with the care of a surgeon, applies it onto the worst of my welts. Each and every one, he kisses before he rubs the soothing cream over it, like a priest kissing his stole, like a pious man kissing his holy book before setting it aside.