Erotic Teasers

by Rachel Kramer Bussel

  “There are other options,” Roland said.

  She looked at him across the table. “Yeah. And it’s even more of a guessing game how people will react if you bring that up.”

  “Well.” He tipped his glass toward her. “My boyfriend, my girlfriend, and I all fall on the continuum.” Her eyes widened. Then her mouth did, showing teeth in a grin. “You have both?”

  “They have me.” Maybe it was the beer, maybe it was the brightness of her smile and what it did to his heart jumping in his chest, but Roland decided to go all in. He pushed back his shirtsleeves and raised his wrists to show her. “These were both made by Amy, but this one she gave me”—a chain of silver links, fine but not delicate, beautiful yet a bit brutal—“and this one she gave our boyfriend, Michael, to give me.” Mike’s was a curved metal cuff, clean and straightforward, but more elegant the more you looked at it.

  Marisol leaned forward to look at both of them. She was silent for so long that Roland’s mouth became dry, uncertain what she would say when the time came. At last, she breathed out a sigh. “That’s really romantic.”

  “Thank you.” He turned his arm to meet her fingers, letting her stroke Michael’s cuff, then Amy’s links.

  “Just a shame,” she murmured. “You’re taken twice over.”

  “Not necessarily. If you’d…” He had to swallow, because his mouth was still dry, and his heart was a drum line overtaking any melody.

  She sat back, tracing designs in spilled foam. “Would you be okay with going slow?”

  “Of course. It’s great just to know someone else who’s not—” He nodded toward the windows facing the street with the sign-holders and made a face.

  “Well, I’m definitely not like that. Even if I am straight. Which I may be.” She made her own face, more thoughtful. “Probably not. If there’s…an inverse of bisexual, where you like everyone, but aren’t sure you like-like them—asexual, I guess.”

  “Sure. Or demisexual, when you sometimes grow to like-like them.”

  Nodding, she said slowly, “Maybe that’s me.”

  Roland shrugged, spreading his arms a little as he did so that his bracelets gleamed in the low lights. “Human sexuality is limitlessly…”

  “Weird?” Eyes on the bracelets, Marisol didn’t ask judgmentally.

  “And wonderful.”

  She met his glass with her bottle, the chime of the toast ringing out. “Here’s to that. I just don’t want you to think I’m . . . a tease.”

  “I can introduce you to Amy and Mike. If you want.” Even as he said it he realized this wasn’t exactly the definition of going slow, but Marisol’s face lit up again, after the way her smile had faded with her last word. And Roland couldn’t hold back a grin as he said, “They know a thing or two about being a tease.”

  Something cool and slick wraps around his cock. It almost seems wet, too liquid to also feel so tight, unbearably good. His mind, eventually, returns to him as another coil rolls against his skin and he recognizes the sensation of dozens of small round glass beads.

  “Are you going to use those in something?” he asks.

  “A personal project,” Amy answers in a dry tone, but over Roland’s head Marisol snickers. As she turns, probably to get something from the bedside table, the brush of her bare calves against his shoulders and arms startles him. She’d sat there unmoving for so long that their skin had seemed to merge, its own kind of intimacy. And he realizes—it feels like the bottom of him has dropped out—that all along the toys they’ve used to play with him have passed through her hands.

  Whatever she gives Mike now is silent—he assumes it’s to Mike, assumes they’re taking turns. And because of that, he finds it easier to guess the object that dimples his skin, a stiff, cool point. But, transfixed on that point, he doesn’t speak right away. He feels the other end of it—stamping its mark in his skin, so firmly he can visualize it: a pale ring with a cross-shaped, reddened dimple at the center.

  And then the shaft rolls over him in coiled stripes. “A screw,” he says.

  Close to his ear, Mike murmurs, “You guessing, asking, or offering?”

  Roland moans as much as laughs.

  As his mouth is open, one of his three teases slips something into it. A mint, the flavor startling and bright. The flavor’s so strong it makes his tongue feel cold.

  So does the tongue that licks along his cock. He’s sure this is Mike but can’t feel his close-shaved beard— hands are holding his thighs, spreading them wide, and he’s sure from the way the nails dig in that they’re Amy’s. The mouth tormenting him draws back for just a breath. It runs across his skin. Then the soft slickness of moistened lips and cool tongue again, and the hard mint itself sliding against his shaft. Roland gasps, startled and overwhelmed, and as the tongue tip pries against his slit he winds up swallowing his own mint.

  Amy kisses him anyway.

  When she and Mike pull back, Roland is only aware of dizzy, desperate loss. So he misses most of the murmured conversation over his head. Amy sums it up with, “One more change of rules. Now, you get to guess where we’re going to touch you.”

  That’s unfair, blatantly unfair. It’s unfair in a way Amy usually isn’t—however she tortures Roland, she prefers to give him his wounds to the front. She follows rules and doesn’t ask the impossible.

  His heartbeat kicks up a notch. Some of it is nervousness, but it’s also anticipation and thrill, and some of the thrill is for her sake. For her to be so straightforwardly unreasonable is a good sign. It shows how she’s grown in confidence and self-esteem as much as selfishness. She had been shaken after losing Patrick—the loss that had unraveled, for a time, the family she and Mike built together. Roland hadn’t met them until two years after the car accident, and still she blamed herself for the death of their lover, for being behind the wheel. Only slowly has she been able to forgive herself, and from there allow herself pleasure again. Just now, to remember that she can give pleasure even in her very unfairness, selfishness, and cruelty.

  It’s thanks to Mike, often tender and gentle but enjoying a rigged game as much as any of them, and to Marisol, the appreciative audience encouraging her to show off.

  Roland doesn’t want to take too much credit, but maybe it’s thanks to him, too.

  “Belly button,” he says now, smiling to hear her laugh at the silly suggestion. Maybe she’ll even take it.

  She doesn’t. Fingernails spiral over his calves, tracing down to the ankle. His toes curl. He’s not as ticklish on the soles of his feet as Mike—a discovery made during one of their less relaxing massage sessions—but he’s not exactly looking forward to this.

  Then Amy’s hand lifts. Mike’s (he thinks) runs along Roland’s shoulder. Another fingertip traces his nipple, then meets a thumb to pinch it. He cries out in surprise.

  They stop touching him, but Roland can only pant, beyond articulating any further guesses.

  After a moment, Mike tells him, “Marisol’s pointing.”

  Oh no.

  “Good idea,” Amy tells her.

  Oh yes.

  A stroke up and down his cock—gliding, the touch smooth and cool against his arousal, lubricated. With a thoughtful hum from Mike and approving sigh from Amy, Roland’s thighs are pushed apart. The slick fingers move farther between them.

  “There,” Marisol says. Her voice is warm with pride like Amy’s earlier, at the almost innocent pleasure of issuing arbitrary commands she knows will be fulfilled without question.

  She’s still discovering her role, feeling it out along with everything else. She seems to enjoy this exploration most of all, without any pressure, knowing there’s no wrong place to land. “I know I’m not vanilla,” she’d said after the first time they played together. “Not anymore, at least.” Whether watching, handing over toys, or giving instructions—in turns voyeur, submissive, and sadist—she syncs with them whatever she chooses to be. There’s room for each.

  Their roles go beyond submissive or do
minant. Michael and Amy, they rebuild and repair. With needles and levels, blueprints and beads, pliers and hammers and, yes, screws. They construct things, too, beautiful new things that had never been there before. Roland’s also a creator, but of more immaterial pieces. A song, the memory of a night, a relationship, a household in the house that Mike rebuilt—each time with the instrument of his own body. Breathless now, shivering under unpredictable and multiplying touches, he’s awestruck to find himself at the center, to know that this is happening to him and because of him.

  Marisol is an investigator and experimenter. Curious, courageous, with contagious delight when something goes well, yet an ability to set boundaries and call something off if it doesn’t. It’s good to have her keeping watch. To have her watch. His new and favorite audience.

  “Where?” she murmurs, tantalizing now. “Guess where.”

  Roland’s beyond guessing. He can only feel—his chest, hips, and shoulders stroked by one hand, then two, then four. Then, startlingly, five. Or else he’s just lost count. Someone carefully smooths fingertips over the arc of his throat, a gentleness in the touch that approaches reverence. Another plays with his hair where it falls over the blindfold. Then hands tweak his nipples, fondle his ass. He can’t predict where or how or by whom.

  Flat against the line of his cock, pushing it against his belly—the sole of someone’s foot. Amy, he knows: he can picture her standing, probably braced by Mike. She rubs against him, lets her toes flex. She puts a little more of her weight down, and he whimpers as her footprint stamps his flesh, not crushing but as if she intends to leave a mark.

  “How is that?” Marisol’s voice, and maybe her fingertips dancing along his shoulders, pressing away tension.

  “Easy now,” Mike murmurs, shifting at the end of the bed.

  “I’m okay,” Roland says, knowing too that nothing they put him through is going to be easy. Every inch of him has come alive, waiting to be touched or bursting at their touch.

  The foot lifts. Silky panties settle on his thigh, warm with a touch of slickness seeping through them. He feels more of it as Amy rocks. The hand pinching his nipple on the other side of his body, that might be hers or Mike’s or Marisol’s. He hears the shuffle of Amy pulling her blouse over her head, and Marisol’s breath goes short. He tries to remember if Amy had looked like she’d been wearing a bra.

  She isn’t now. He feels her breasts, soft with diamond tips, trailing across his chest.

  Fingers made frictionless with more lube ease inside him, start to stretch. Roland relaxes into it until they seek out and find his prostate, and with just a few strokes he becomes desperate again.

  Amy laughs, riding him as he writhes. She’s straddling his left leg, but Roland spreads his right out of the way, hiking his hips to meet that hand. “Please. Please.”

  Finally, Mike slides home. Roland presses his right calf to his back, urging him on, wrapping around him as much as possible as Mike delivers the gentle, steady thrusts he needs. While Roland meets them, trying almost despite himself to pick up the pace, Amy crawls forward, freeing his thighs and settling on his chest.

  Then Marisol is moving, climbing over his head. She knocks the blindfold askew as she does, so he catches a glimpse of her kissing Amy. Without breaking the kiss, Amy turns, sandwiching Marisol between herself and Mike. Marisol’s head falls back, tipping to let Mike brush his lips over her shoulder while Amy’s mouth moves to the low top of her cami.

  Roland makes a meaningless sound, or one too full of meaning—surprised and glad and curious.

  Amy glances over her shoulder and meets his eyes. With a smile, she moves her hips back and brings her groin down on his mouth, blocking out his sight again. He sighs and licks the wet silk of her panties, fabric sweetened by her juices. She wiggles until the tip of his tongue can feel the hard tip of her clit through the thin barrier.

  He can hear the slick, shuffling sounds of kissing, caressing, fingering, and fucking. Where Mike doesn’t reach, Amy’s warmth spreads through him. And Marisol, he feels her legs tighten around his chest as the others do something. She gasps, then laughs, not in humor but delight. Her hand falls to Roland’s side, seeming to brace herself against some incredible sensation. For the first time he wishes his arms weren’t tied; he’d like to touch her in return.

  Mike begins stroking his cock as his thrusts turn harder— close to coming, he wants Roland to join him. Always a romantic that way, Roland thinks with the giddiness these last overwhelming moments fill him with. He flicks his tongue across Amy’s cunt and feels her familiar trembling, but then she shudders and cries out, a flood of sweetness baptizing his worshipful lips, and he’s awestruck but he’s not responsible for that. Something Marisol’s doing. If only he could see. Next time he’s going to beg to see. They might even let him.

  With that thought, he spills over Mike’s fist.

  Amy grinds down, making him breathless, then lifts up as she comes. She moves off his mouth to curl beside him, balanced on the edge of the bed. Smiling down at Roland, she pets his hair, pulling the blindfold free.

  Marisol kisses her, then bends and kisses Roland. It’s hard and sloppy—half, he thinks, to get the taste of Amy from him, but then her tongue is tracing his lips with shy tenderness, and he realizes this is for his sake, too. He returns it as Amy’s fingertips rub his scalp. It doesn’t last long, but next Marisol turns to Mike, a kiss noisy with audible joy. His arm wraps around her waist, and Amy strokes her shoulders. Roland can only watch them.

  Marisol reaches behind herself, out of their triple embrace, to find his bound hand and squeeze it. Simple as the gesture is, something about it overpowers him even more than everything that’s gone before. Wordless, unthinking—but not for an instant having to guess what it means—he squeezes back.

  FIX ME!

  Josie Jordan

  The doorbell rang. I scooped baby Abigail into my arms and went to answer it.

  “Hello,” said the man on my doorstep. “I’m Reece from Immaculate Kitchens.”

  I gulped. He was tall and well built with a shock of dark hair. And so damn gorgeous I could hardly bring myself to look at him. “I’m Chloe,” I said. “Um… Come on in.”

  He heaved an enormous toolbox inside. “Mike’s just coming,” he said.

  Around the corner came the older guy who’d done the quotation, with an equally enormous toolbox.

  “I’ve cleared the cupboards,” I told them. “Let me know if you need anything.”

  Mike opened his toolbox. “I sure will.”

  My husband, Brett, and I had found mold in our kitchen cabinets last month. With a new baby around, we didn’t want to take chances. The whole kitchen would have to be ripped out and a new one put in. Fortunately our insurance covered it, but I was dreading being without a kitchen all week.

  I felt Reece’s eyes on me. “Want a coffee?” I asked.

  “I’d love one,” he said. “Black, two sugars.”

  “Same here,” Mike said.

  I’d set the kettle up in the laundry. My daughter fussed and grizzled in my arms as I waited for the water to boil.

  Reece glanced over. “What’s her name?”

  “Abigail,” I said.

  “She’s beautiful. How old is she?”

  “Nearly one.” Still clutching Abigail, I tried to open the coffee jar one-handed.

  “Want a hand?” Reece asked.

  “Thanks,” I said, expecting him to reach for the jar. Instead he wiped his hands on his jeans and took Abigail. I waited for her little face to crumple, but she beamed.

  Reece smiled back at her. His eyes were the same shade as the coffee in the jar. “She’s a cutie,” he said. “My sister has a baby girl, eighteen months old now.”

  When I handed him his coffee, his warm hand met mine and I nearly dropped the mug. His fingers were broad and tanned; tattoos of dragons curled around his strong biceps.

  “Right,” he said eventually. “Better do some work.”

&
nbsp; He handed Abigail back and picked up a crowbar. The muscles in his arms rippled as he pried out a cabinet. With all the noise, there was no point trying to settle Abigail. Reece bent over, revealing an inch of smooth, tanned ass. I might once have sat back and enjoyed the view, but the sight of him only reminded me how damaged I was.

  When I’d fallen pregnant, my sex drive went through the roof. I used to greet Brett at the front door and we mostly didn’t even make it as far as the bed, ending up on the hall carpet instead with our legs in a tangle. When my baby bump grew bigger, I used to lie facedown on the mattress with my pillow under my breasts and have him take me from behind. My orgasms were so powerful they almost hurt.

  But the trauma of the birth changed everything. We hadn’t had sex since. That part of me had simply shut down and died. And each time Brett tried and failed to start something, I think another part of him died as well.

  “I’m going back to the factory for the rest of the cabinets,” Mike said just then, and off he went.

  I saw Reece looking my way. “Want another coffee?” I asked.

  “I’d love one,” he said. “Want me to hold Abigail again?”

  “Okay.” I passed her to him.

  Abigail gazed up at him. He tickled her toes and she chortled.

  “You’re great with her,” I said.

  “I babysit for my sister sometimes. She’s a single mum.”

  Reece must have been in his early twenties—ten years younger than me—yet he seemed older and more serious than other guys his age. I felt his dark eyes on me as he sipped his coffee, and it wasn’t unpleasant. Did my husband even look at me like that anymore? I didn’t know, because I didn’t look at him. I was too scared of starting something I couldn’t finish.

  I thought back to the last time Brett tried to initiate something. It must have been three or four months ago. I’d shrunk away from him. “Sorry,” I’d said.

  He held me in his arms and I wept, because I loved him, I really did, but I was in a deep, dark place where he couldn’t reach me.