“Oh, yes. So hot, so very horny. She’s so ready for me. I’ll bet it wouldn’t take much to make her come. But does this little slut deserve an orgasm?”
She gazed around at the others. I dropped my head, not wanting to see the blatant lust in their eyes. Everyone was reveling in my humiliation. I had been stripped and bound for their pleasure, and now Teresa was about to decide whether I should be allowed to come or not. As her wicked fingertip circled my clit, I wanted to beg her not to tease me, to give me what I craved, but that wasn’t my decision. I was in her hands. She was the birthday girl. This was her moment.
“Mick, what do you say? Has she been good?”
I glanced over at him, mute appeal in my eyes. He, who knew my body better than anyone, had to be aware how much I needed this. He could deny me an orgasm if he chose—it wouldn’t be the first time we’d played that particular game—and I would have to respect his decision even as I screamed silently for release.
He nodded. “I want to see you make her come, Teresa.” His words were echoed with a murmur of agreement from Gavin and Kim. Even Brian, who must have been wishing he was the one on the end of Teresa’s deliciously cruel treatment, beamed in approval.
With that, Teresa shoved her whole hand deep into my underwear. She strummed my clit with her thumb while she pushed one, then two fingers in and out of my hole. I writhed in my seat, responding to the swift in-and-out movement. Pleasure eddied through me. I bit my lip, almost ashamed of how easily I reacted to her touch. When she added a third finger, stretching me, I cried out and tugged at the ropes binding me. Sweat prickled on my back and my toes curled.
“Shh, Rosie. It’s all right. You can take it . . .” As if to prove her words, she widened her fingers. It stung for a moment, then the discomfort passed, and she fucked me hard.
“Oh god,” someone groaned. Brian or Gavin, I couldn’t be sure. Whoever, they left me no doubt about the effect the scene was having on them. The tension in the room was so thick it seemed to envelop us all like fog, and only my orgasm would break it.
Teresa kept up the steady rhythm with her fingers, driving me on. I humped my bottom against the seat of the chair, encouraging her to go deeper, harder.
“Do you think she’s ready, Mick?” Teresa’s casual tone, as if I wasn’t even in the room, almost had me pleading for an answer.
For a moment, he didn’t say a word. Did he really need to consider his reply? My nerves were strung taut, desperate for release, and my breath hitched in my throat.
At last, with a chuckle, he said, “Oh, I think so. Do it for her.”
I was so close to my peak, it only took a few more thrusts before I was coming, calling her name, and sobbing as I went limp in my bonds.
Teresa kissed me on the lips, slipping the point of her tongue into my mouth as she eased her fingers out of me. Then she dropped a soft kiss on my forehead.
“Well done,” she murmured. “Now, let’s get you free.”
Even though it was a relief to be rid of the ropes, part of me still craved them tight against my skin. Teresa helped me to stand, and I clung to her for a moment. I had placed my trust in her, and she had given me an experience I would never forget. I figured she’d given Mick some things to think about, too, and I had a feeling the next time he bound me, he would incorporate some of Teresa’s techniques into our play.
For the moment, though, I just wanted to curl up in his arms and watch whatever happened next. If he wanted to slip his cock into me while I sat on his lap, that would be nice, too. But I liked Teresa’s philosophy. As she turned to Gavin and Kim and asked them to produce the items of bondage they’d brought with them, I decided I would leave everything in the hands of fortune.
CONTRARY
Kim Kuzuri
It’d been coming up on noon when he looped a scrap of ribbon around your wrist and left you tethered to his horse.
“Stay put,” he’d said, and your cheeks caught fire, but you’d done it, hadn’t you. You stayed without a bit of fuss.
Folk going past surely wonder why you’re out here, huddling in the needle-slim bit of shade cast by the little piebald mare. She’s not too keen on being left waiting either. Her restless hooves stir up the dust lying thick in the street with no rain to wash it clear. You never can seem to escape the dust these days; it coats you right now from the tips of your boots to the buckle of your belt. Even that scrap of ribbon around your wrist is more brown than blue. It’s better than mud sucking at your boots, you suppose, and squint up at the thin wisps of clouds streaking across the heavens.
A bit of a breeze rolls around, giving a playful tug to the frayed end of the ribbon. The flutter against your skin is light as the skip of a pebble on a pond, yet that doll’s scrap of robin’s-egg blue might as well be iron for how well it holds you. It ain’t some kind of witchery; you’re free to leave anytime you please. You’d slipped your tether and run that one time, a hundred miles or so east, when some shooting started up over a fool’s argument in the general store.
You hadn’t liked it though. You were glad not to catch a bullet, of course, but running off took the fun out of all that waiting and turned it into a chore. He’d held you tighter that night, which you did like, and whispered kind things into your hair until you forgot how annoyed you’d been. He slid his warm, wide hands along your sides and you felt every little bit of roughness on his palms as he pressed you down into the dirt and trussed you up with rawhide around your ankles and his belt around your wrists. Oh, how you’d kicked and struggled and wished for his knots to not be quite so efficient so you could slip free and stroke him—or yourself—as you damn well pleased.
You wore marks on your skin for days after that, the pleasant sort of hurt.
The sun inches across the sky. The little piebald mare flicks flies away with her tail. Across town the train comes in and for a short time there are more folk going by than you’ve seen in weeks. Some curious heads turn your way, but a town like this sees enough strangers passing through that you only warrant a second glance because you’re baking in the sun when the shade’s a few feet away. A naughty sizzle briefly seizes you low in the belly only to fade like smoke and leave you restless again.
“Stay put.”
You hear his voice in your head, level in tone, whisper-like. A necessary reminder, because your mind tends to wander at the best of times. You’re sweaty and tired and the grassy stink of horseshit is going to cling to you until the next time he sees fit to pay for a bed and a bath instead of searching for a soft bit of sand and a creek to wash up in. None of the discomfort and woolgathering truly distracts you from the promise around your wrist. You don’t daydream about that maybe-future bath; you’re as fidgety as the piebald mare, shifting from one foot to the other as a slow build of heat flickers in you. Some days your lustfulness is tamped down, others it’s an ember just begging for a bit of breath to emerge. But you never cool to ashes. Not really. Your mama’d always said you had a devil living inside you.
When the sun hits an angle, you know the lawman’s taking his sweet time just to rile you. You tilt your hat and ignore the trickle of sweat down the low of your back for the more important and insistent wetness gathering in your trousers.
You’ve got blood rising to thicken your veins. Your hands, they tremble with wanting. You’re stiff and ready for a touch down there, primed to burst like a plum at the height of summer. As the slickness between your thighs soaks into your unmentionables, you draw the ribbon at your wrist tight enough to raise ripples in the sun-browned skin of your arm.
That devil that’s brought you trouble near half your life can only be tamed to a point. You’ve got a dead-eye stare on the saloon door you’re so heated up. Your desire is red-hot, a brand raised to make its mark, the very air around you quivering.
You might look it, but you’re no feeble thing. You’re a wildfire waiting to happen, and dust be damned, you’d have that lawman right here in the street if you could.
The
saloon doors don’t so much as shiver, but you’re already anticipating the force he’ll use to push his way out and the sound of his boots on the wood, a steady ker-thunk ker-thunk. He’s got a steadiness to everything he does: whether he’s soothing the little piebald mare before the heavens crack open and pour down rain, threading the eye of a needle to do a bit of mending, or feeding bullets into the chambers of his revolver.
He was steady too, the time you saw him kill a man. For you.
But now’s no time for a memory like that. You’re not the bloodthirsty type, even if the bastard had deserved it.
Instead, you think of how the lawman’s got a stone the same color as your ribbon set in silver around his neck. You’ve never asked him what it means to him though surely it’s got some sort of meaning what with the way he carries it, precious in the ways he is with you in the gathering dawn. The smooth edges dig into your skin when he presses an ear to the valley between your shoulder blades to listen to the slowing of your heart and the gasps triggered by the slip of his fingers across the ache of your wrists lashed to your ankles.
Ker-thunk, ker-thunk.
You try your damnedest not to seem so eager at his return.
“We’re moving on,” he says. His shadow stretches all the way to where you stand like it’s straining to reach you. “There’s a rancher lives two days west-northwest that sounds like our man.”
“Is he the killing kind?”
“Can’t yet say.”
You’d wanted a bath and a bed that wasn’t the hard ground, but if the lawman’s determined to keep on the road, you’re not ready to part ways yet. Our man, he’d said, and you roll the phrase around in your head like a marble. What’s he grown to think of you and of your willingness to accompany him? You extend your hand, the ribbon-bound bones of your wrist a silent assent.
He boosts you up into the little piebald mare’s saddle and sets your hand on the pommel, winding the scrap of ribbon around it so you know you’re meant to stay put here, too, and let him do all the walking. He tugs on his gloves and gathers up the reins to lead you out of town. You stretch your neck out like a bird. What would it be like to wear a bridle and bit? Would you like being told where to go just as much as not being able to go anywhere at all? You ponder the notion and sit tall in the saddle, resisting the urge to let the slide of smooth leather between your thighs give you a bit of relief.
Miles of scrub pass by as the sun inches down the sky ahead of you, and when it’s slipped low behind jagged red-rock teeth, the promise of night’s cool fingers drifts across your skin. You’ve been promised a lot of things throughout the day.
Stopping, finally, you do the work you’ve decided is yours: taking care of the piebald mare. You find her some sweet bits of grass to nibble on through the night, and groom her with a gentle thoroughness. Your mama always liked brushing your hair—a hundred strokes at least—and you’d liked the feel of it too, so it stands to figure the mare might find the care just as pleasant. She’s only a horse, a part of you argues, but she’s more than that too. She follows the lawman just as willingly. You listen to the soft bellows of her lungs as you pass the brush along her sides and keep count.
The lawman’s hair doesn’t take easily to a brush, not like yours. His needs a comb to work through properly, and it’s always longer than it looks. When you’re tucked up beside him safe and warm, when he’s watching you with those dark, thoughtful eyes, you like giving a tug to the one little curl near his temple—the one that grows contrary to all the others. During the day, when the cloud of his hair is tucked away hidden by his hat, you sometimes think of that little curl and smile.
You’re smiling now, you find, and the moon is fat and round, bright as a paper lantern when you leave the mare tied to her picket line. The lawman’s made a fire and there’s something cooking in the pot. You haven’t eaten since before midday, but you’re hungrier more for what he can give you than you are for supper.
He made you wait so long. He’s making you wait right now. Once he’s rinsed the sweat and road from his neckerchief, the way he fingers it thoughtfully has you aching all over again. You take your turn to wash up as best you can with the bit of water he’s set aside for you, and you wonder if it’s worth the risk giving him what you’d found back in Pima County. You traded your mama’s carved hairpin for it, one of the last things of worth you could call your own.
But more and more you’ve come to think that the lawman’s worth is greater than material things.
“That box I picked up a ways back . . .” You’d started off bold as a songbird in the morning, but now can’t find your words fast enough. Your heart starts kicking in your chest, breaking up all the things you aim to say.
“I recall it.” He holds his hands out. “Yea big.”
“You open it?”
“Ain’t mine to open.”
You knew he wouldn’t have. It’s one of the reasons you stick with him. Never did meet a man so genuinely respectful of you or your things. When you’d come back to the hotel with the box all he’d asked at the time was if it was going to bring trouble calling. You hadn’t thought so at the time, and you hope your gut feeling holds true. The only trouble it’d rightly stir anyway is between him and you. He might—
He plain might not want this from you seeing as he didn’t want your fingers slid into him even though he’d been just as wet as you that first time.
You retrieve the box from where you’ve kept it hidden wrapped in your nice dress, and set it atop the blanket laid out on the hard ground.
“It’s for you,” you tell him in a tone that carries more edges than you mean for it to, but he knows you’re not much on manners. You thrust a finger at the box now that it’s out of your care. “If it don’t interest you, you just toss it in the fire, never mind the cost.”
Statement made, you shut your trap and settle down on your knees, patient on the surface but roiling like an angry midsummer storm beneath.
His hands move over the box, curious and thorough. He notes the neatness of dovetailing at its corners, the thin line of abalone inlay that cuts across its middle. You know he’s wondering what’s hidden inside, light as it is. You clasp your hands behind your back, wishing he’d tied you down already so you’d have that to put your mind to.
When he’s loosened the catch and opened the lid, he looks stricken, gutshot.
It terrifies you, but you’re both fumbling your way through the dark here. Sure, you’d sussed him out in a matter of days, while the fools he’d been riding with accepted the lie and teased him about taking a bullet in the balls and needing to squat to piss. You’d had your hands bound then, too, when you’d come up on him in the grass. You can remember the feel of the metal cuffs and how you would hold the links with your fingers so they’d quit their awful clinking. You hadn’t meant to sneak up on him, hadn’t thought you could.
He’d stood up and cupped at his groin to hide what wasn’t there, and you’d said nothing even though you could tell from the way his jaw clamped tight that he knew you’d seen. Later, when you’d better judged his mettle, when it was just the two of you, when you offered to him what you hadn’t so much as thought of giving to his fellows you missed the feel of the metal twisted in your grip. You knelt before him, but not to sway his mind; if he was going to turn you in and collect his money, that was that. No, you’d done it for the look on his face when he tried to cover himself again and you gently uncurled two of his fingers so they stuck out proud and stiff as a cock. You sucked them in so deep his nails scraped the soft of your throat, and the sound he’d made watching you swallow him—oh, you were greedy for more of that raspy, shivery delight as your lips just barely brushed the secret he’d kept hidden for who knows how long.
The first few times, you thought he was like some of the women you’d lain with before, the sort who simply preferred to do all the touching. You figured it out, soon enough, that the lawman wasn’t just dressing the part.
“You ain’t lac
king a thing,” you tell him now, willing him to believe you. “But maybe it’ll feel right.”
“Must’ve cost you a fair amount,” he says in that scraping whisper of his. He holds the phallus laid across his palms like an offering. The black lacquer shine on the wood picks up the orange of the fire and the blue of the moon.
“Not enough that setting it to burn would be bothersome.”
After a long stretch of quiet, he hands it to you. You expect him to say something more, but he tends to supper instead, pulling the pot from the coals and leaving it at the edge of the pit to keep warm. Your heart twists into a jackrabbit again, desperate and fretting. More than once you find you’ve forgotten to breathe, the air growing stale in your lungs. Waiting in the dust at midday is one thing, this kind of waiting is damn awful.
“You’re a well of surprises,” he says finally.
He’s not steady now. His sweetly curled lashes are wet, and he wipes at his face and laughs and coughs and mutters something about being a fool.
Your palms find his face, hold him true. Ain’t nothing wrong about being born contrary to what the world expects of you. That’s a truth you faced well before you learned your letters.
“You let me put it on you—just this once, mind,” you say, tartly. He meets the bite of your warning with a crinkle-edged smile, knowing just as well as you that if he told you to firm enough, you’d do it.
There’s a cord in the box, and you lace it through the base of the phallus just like the ladies who’d sold it to you had shown you. Reverently, you unbutton his woolen trousers, skim them down his hips just far enough to wrap your arms around him and tie it in place.
Best Bondage Erotica of the Year Page 11
