69

by Alison Tyler

  Your fingers dragged over the ends of stone pews, some pitted from proximity to the open elements, those close to the front still holding their quiet majesty. Stones, fitted with careful craftsmanship, worn by centuries of feet, led you between them. Stepping deeper into the space, power rolled over me. This time I didn’t flinch.

  My vision shimmered and the original incarnation of this building overlaid the ruins. Columns held the vaulting ceiling aloft. Torches fluttered, casting shadows that danced. Ahead waited an altar.

  I knew if I looked down I’d see dark red flowing robes of the sheerest fabric. I’d dreamed this over and over since my first visit; I was priestess in this temple where mysteries were protected, shared only with the initiated. Where women came to offer themselves in exchange for the protection of their warriors. I knew what was supposed to come next, too, if I had the nerve.

  I closed the distance between us as you paused, the shadow of a cross still visible despite the crumbling plaster. “This place…” You stopped, as unable as I to find the words to explain it. I slid my arm around your waist and you leaned back into my warmth, shivering slightly. My doubled vision let me guide us forward, ancient memories leading my footsteps.

  You twisted in my arms when we reached the two steps leading up to the sanctuary. The echo of the past showed your face overlaid with one younger, an expression of expectation and desperate hope over a wry grin. I don’t think you realized my hand twined in hair much longer than your short carefree locks when I pulled your mouth to mine. We kissed, slow and languorous, and my fingers slid your buttons free. My mind split between the realities, feeling the hesitation of my sacrificial lamb twine with the confidence of our embrace. The willing, eager offering was always a better one for the lusty gods I served.

  I backed you up the first step, urged you up the second. You laughed. Your hands slid beneath my garb, cool fingers finding my skin flushed with arousal. Pushing your shirt from your shoulders, I pulled from our kiss, a purr rumbling in my throat at the sight. Your nipples stood proud, begging for attention, free of the restriction of a bra. I licked my lips and guided you back two more steps. Your breath caught when the altar stopped your movement. I bent you back. A feral hunger flooded through me and I cupped your breast, filling my palm before taking the taut nub in my mouth and lashing at it with my tongue. Your whimper sent a ripple of dark need coiling into my cunt.

  With a whisper of sound I shoved your khakis down and pinned you against the altar, tracing the line of your elegant neck with sharp bites. I wondered if you noticed the stone radiating warmth into your back. Tipping you, I laid you out, hovering over you as my hands and mouth roamed over your skin. A dark chuckle bubbled up as both visions showed lithe bodies arching eagerly for me, one deliciously rounder than the other, thighs parting as my hand glided closer and closer to the source of the essence I would accept as your offering. The memory of the place swept us both closer and closer to its need, current time holding less sway here in this ancient place, where god and goddess drew their strength. I untied my robes and pulled the black cording free.

  Stretching over you I pulled your arms up and kissed you, tasting your mouth, teasing your lips with my tongue. You moaned when you felt the cord twine around your wrists, once, twice, three times, tied fast. Your eyes followed me, the arch of your neck lifting your breasts as you followed me to the head of the altar. I fastened the cord to the ring still sunk into the stone. Despite the heat glowing into you from the slab, your flesh goose pimpled as I drew my hands down your arms. You lurched when my fingers dipped into the sensitive hollows under your arms, gasping, a giggle threatening, then moaning as I traced my fingers over the little bumps circling your hardened nipples. Confusion warred with the eroticism of the moment and I bent over to nip at the bumps of your ribcage, distracting you.

  I could feel the pressure building, and the desperation. It has been so long since an offering has been made and they’ve grown so weak. I slid down your body, nuzzling my face into the crease of your hip, lifting your ass and pulling you down, the drag of your shoulders over the stone making you hiss. I pressed soft kisses across your belly in apology and heard the first whispered “Oh!” trickle from your lips. With your ass positioned over the depression in the slab meant to capture libations, I kissed and nibbled my way down your leg, fastening it to the slab with the leather strap hanging ready. The ancient time was coming through even stronger. I glanced up as I restrained your free ankle and felt my breath leave me in a gasp.

  You hair spread about your head and shoulders in a dark cowl. Your eyes pressed shut, lips parted, your chest rose and fell in shallow, rapid breaths. A flush darkened your alabaster skin, your dark nipples stood impossibly tight atop the mounds of your breasts. A line of red bites tracked my mouth’s progression from your neck to your pelvis. The absence of hair between your thighs revealed your arousal, the blood-filled flesh plump, glistening.

  My body shook. I needed you. They needed you.

  I shed my robes; they pooled like blood beside the altar. With a practiced twist I mounted you, holding myself above your body carefully. The brush of the inside of my thighs against your sides drew your gaze to mine. Their lust shone through your eyes and I shuddered with the restraint necessary to resist ravaging you.

  “Please,” you groaned, hips lifting in search of contact. I pulled my body out of reach and slid my fingers between my thighs, coating them with my own essence. A tremor raced down your body. “Oh God.” I leaned over you, balancing on knees and one hand. I pressed my slick fingers to your brow, then your throat, dipped my fingers again and touched them over your solar plexus. Over and over I marked you, down your body until I finally touched my fingers between your thighs.

  It was all I could do to maintain my composure when my fingers found you drenched. I groaned and slid my fingers between your lips, earning a keen of need as I brushed your clit. Your hips rose up and the muscles of your thighs and stomach jerked in sympathy. Your orgasm hovered over me, making my body tingle.

  Take her. Now.

  The words bloomed in my head, two voices speaking in perfect harmony, their tones ancient yet familiar and powerful. I nearly came. I lowered my body to yours, sought your lips, slid my fingers inside your hot, tight, tunnel. Somehow you spread even wider for me. I knelt between your thighs and fucked my fingers into you. You twisted in your bindings and I shoved you down, pinning your hips in place. Your muscles clenched and fluttered around my fingers and each thrust spilled liquid down your ass.

  I pinned my hand against you with my hips and started to grind my fingers into you. Your moans escalated and you punctuated them with “oh God!” “Please!” and “FUCK ME!” as well as my name. When I pressed my thumb to your clit you bucked and the crackling energy building around the altar condensed into a mantle over my skin and my cunt began to flutter.

  My lips pressed to yours. I devoured each moan and gasp I fucked from your mouth. Your muscles began to ripple around my fingers and I fucked harder, building both of us up. I could smell your essence and it was as if my goddess walked the mortal plane, the scent of nutmeg and cinnamon filling the air.

  Come for us. NOW! The command wasn’t just in my head that time.

  Your eyes flew open in surprise and I thrust as deep into you as I could, obeying the command. I curled my fingers and pinned them against your G-spot and held tight as your body lurched under me. Your scream lifted up into the rafters. You drenched my fingers in your essence and I came with a hoarse shout, thrusting myself between your thighs as I followed you over the peak. My body shook as if someone were urging my orgasm on, pulling it out. You fought at the cord wrapped around your wrists, moaning and writhing under me, forcing yourself against me with small jerks of your hips.

  I was dizzy when we both fell silent and still, my head on your belly, tiny tremors twitching the muscles under my cheek and around my fingers. I shivered,
sweat drying along my spine and you whimpered as the movement carried through my hand. I pressed tender kisses below your navel.

  “Sorry, darlin’.” My whisper sounded loud in the sanctuary and you draped your arms around my shoulders, fingers burying in my hair and tugging.

  “Come here.”

  I blinked, seeing only you, no remnants of my earlier vision. I crawled back up and rested my body carefully against yours. You shivered, and I realized the slab beneath my hand was cold. “Hold on, sweetheart.” Reluctantly I pulled my fingers free, starting at the distinct splash of your cum on the altar. Your teeth chattered and I hurried to retrieve our clothes, helping you into your blouse and shoving my legs into my jeans.

  Your legs shook when I helped you down from the slab. I lowered us to the floor and leaned back against the stone, curling you in my arms. Your mouth found mine and the room pulsed with energy around us.

  “Did that really happen?” you asked much later. We lay on the hillside below the church, watching the sunset paint the sky. It hadn’t taken long to decide to leave the small chapel after we realized the wall was no longer collapsed. More than that had changed, but as unnerved as you were I didn’t point out the absence of the cross’s shadow, freshly swept floors or the change in decor to something more…hedonistic. I also didn’t point out the pool of your come soaking steadily into the stone altar.

  I shrugged. “I’m not certain.” You looked up from your spot against my shoulder; I smiled. “I do know I fucked you for the first time and made you scream.” I lifted my fingers and inhaled deeply, my cunt fluttering, mouth watering in reaction.

  You gasped and your grip on my arm tightened.

  “Hotel?” You nodded and we scrambled to our feet, as eager to be someplace else as to be somewhere we could indulge our appetites. Our rental waited at the bottom of the hill. We hurried down the gravel path, refused to look over my shoulder. My back glowed with the pressure of their gaze and as we reached the gate a whisper slid through my mind and you paused to meet my eyes for a long moment.

  Thank you…both.

  Hers

  By Charlotte Stein

  When the belt snaps, I know exactly what to do. He tells me, he tells me—even though he thinks he doesn’t. He thinks I’m perfectly comfortable and in charge and that I know, but I kinda don’t.

  What he wants guides me, instead. He draws a little map with all of his jerks and pressed-back moans, and I follow it all the way to the dark center.

  Lord, how I love his dark center!

  I love everything about this, even if I sometimes act real bored and pretend I don’t. Though, really, that’s just part of the game, isn’t it? All the sighing and tutting and me acting like this is nothing more than a chore.

  When, in truth, I can’t get enough of seeing him do all of the little things he does to set the wheels in motion. The way he’ll become suddenly vague and fidgety, and then after a while maybe he’ll do something. Just a little something, like…forgetting to turn on the dishwasher or accidentally upending a drink or just something, something sloppy that’s nothing like the way he is usually.

  He’s usually neat and put together and completely in control of himself and his environment, every move he makes so deliberate and precise. So I know—I think I knew right from the start—that him knocking a drink over means as much as if he’d said to me: I want you to punish me, and punish me hard.

  I think he got the idea from that movie, you know. The one with James Spader? Only in that it’s the girl who gets the spanking—but Thomas never spanks me. No, no. Not ever. He’s tough at work and tough to people in general, and sometimes he can be a real asshole. But he can’t even pin my arms above my head, in bed.

  Not that I’d want him to. I’m too far into this, now, all tangled up in him and ready to make the belt snap—oh, how he loves that sound!—whenever he surreptitiously wants or needs it.

  And I give it, I give it.

  I get the belt all nice and loose in the middle—a nice slack circle that’s going to close us in, soon enough—while he assumes the position over our bench, and then thwack! I pull it taut. The loop closes as though the two sides of the belt were never meant to be apart, and I say the words that thrill through me every time: “Are you ready, Thomas?”

  Of course, it’s more for me than it is for him. I don’t think he really needs to brace himself, even though I’m the one doing the hitting. The whipping. The whatever-this-is.

  No—it’s me who needs to brace and be sure and get it just right. I don’t want to hit so hard that he won’t be able to sit at his desk tomorrow, but I don’t want to go so tame that he’ll derive no satisfaction from it.

  Or so tame that I’ll derive no satisfaction from it.

  Because I do. I don’t want to, sometimes, but I do anyway. I like the look of him spread out before me, skin all honey-golden from the expensive tanning sessions he likes. His ass so firm and good and smooth, just waiting for the crack of the belt.

  And the way he squirms, oh the way he squirms even if he doesn’t think he’s doing so. These minute tremors will go through him, and I can always see his fingers digging into the leather. Then maybe he’ll sigh when he hasn’t intended to, or moan even though he knows he’s not allowed, and yes, yes.

  I like that best of all. The moan that pushes out from between his sandwiched-together lips, after I’ve laid down the first stripe.

  The first stripe is always the best one. Arousal-wise, I mean. There’s always this strange, sharp, tense feeling that happens because of it, like leftover knowledge of something you shouldn’t be doing, or some subconscious thing rising to the surface or I don’t know. Either way, it happens, and then my body buzzes and a rollercoaster dip of pleasure will flood my sex like nothing else.

  It always leaves me a little breathless, but that’s okay. He needs time to recover, too. The belt has made a lovely red welt all the way across his ass—it’s far sweeter and more frightening than the one the crop leaves, or the one my hands leave.

  But that’s okay, too, because I can hear how much he loves it. The sound he makes is stifled, but it’s audible to me. He could hide it behind a sound-proofed wall and ten tons of lead, and it’d be audible to me. I can hear it in my bones and in my sex, and the latter shivers and pulses like he’s just licked my clit.

  It’s kind of like he has, I have to say. My lower body turns to water, and I have to slap the belt down again, only this time when I do it I press my free hand over my pussy at the same time. I’m wearing a thick woolen skirt and shirt combo, but I managed to push against the place that needs it most, anyway, almost getting the contact I need but not quite.

  Which is frustrating. But made sweeter by the knowledge that I’m taunting him at the same time. I goad him, letting him know that he could touch himself if he liked, but knowing he’ll resist while I get to do whatever I like behind his back.

  It’s a greedy thing. Like something forbidden and naughty. Like something that mocks him while he’s suffering, only not quite as cruel as that. No. Not quite as cruel. After all, I’m giving him exactly what he wants. He wants to be taunted, and he wants to be belted, and if I rub the heel of my palm against my sex while I do both, what does it matter?

  I feel like it kind of matters. So much so that I stop when he stops. I hold off, because he’s holding off. He says no in answer to my question about touching himself, and then he says it more firmly and I want to kiss him for being so good.

  But I have to play the game. I have to laugh, instead. I can’t laugh and touch myself, after all, because that’s just one mean step too far.

  So instead I get a rein on myself the way I’ve got a rein on him, and tell him off for all the things I’m actually thinking about myself—about horniness and lack of control and how his employees would probably think I’m pathetic, if they could
see me now.

  Even if I don’t actually think he’s pathetic when I look on him, spread out before me. I look at the glorious red mark on his ass, and hear the panting breaths he’s been reduced to, and wetness floods my already soaked panties. My clit jumps and my nipples rub uncomfortably against the prison that is my bra, and the last word I think of is pathetic.

  Instead, I think of all the ways in which he’s wonderful and brave and strong. I think about how handsome he looks like this—abandoned to pleasure and pain, slick with perspiration and unable to control himself, because of me. He’s like this because of me and something we do together and all of this, all of this…oh.

  I can’t stop myself. I know I should, because he’ll probably be irritated later that I only belted him a few times before I fell to softness. But I can’t help it—a great wave of tenderness swells up inside me, for all the things he is, and everything he does. I want to touch him with my bare hand, and I give myself permission to, in the same way I always give him permission when we play these control games.

  Then I run my fingers over that bare red mark, light and soft. Not enough to hurt. Surely it’s not enough to hurt.

  Only he gasps like he’s been stung, and for one long, agonizing moment I’m caught in uncertainty, terrified. Have I gone too far? Hurt him too much? It seems as though I have, but then I know. I know the way I always know him, even though I don’t see him do it, exactly, and nothing about his demeanor really suggests he’s coming.

  Apart from maybe the moan. And the sense of him I have, inside myself. Sometimes I think I know him so well that even when I doubt this knowledge, it still guides me. It makes me put a soothing hand on his back, even when there’s still a chance that he might want more, fiercer, harder. He might want punishment for having come so easily, but I don’t think so and besides…I think he knows how much it excites me. I think about him spurting on the floor and the urge to touch myself goes through me again, hard and vicious—so much so that as I comfort him I press one naughty hand back to that place, just once, and feel my orgasm bloom in my sex like a sweet little gift.