Reversal

by Cara McKenna

  “Lie down.”

  I do as ordered, head on the pillows and arms draped behind in a gesture of obedience. She nudges my legs apart and kneels between them, gaze roaming my body like a landscape.

  “You’re so handsome.” Her throat tenses as she swallows. The heat in her eyes is nothing new, yet it seems that way. So often her lust is framed in awe, but tonight there’s something predatory about her. It quickens my pulse.

  Smooth palms stroke my shins, my thighs, skirting my cock to slide up my abdomen and chest, then down my ribs. My breath grows short. My fingers curl, arms tense from wanting to move, to touch her in return.

  Her attention is at my hips, thumbs following the contours of the muscles there. She slips her fingers under the band of my shorts and draws them back and forth, back and forth along my belly. She does the same to the hems at my thigh, a thrilling tease against the sensitive skin.

  Take them off, I want to say. Take them away and touch me. Suck me. Make me so hard it hurts. Take my cock inside you and use me until the ache is so sharp I’m begging, and say my name when you come.

  But I don’t get to make demands.

  Instead I let my breathing grow shallow and loud, let her hear what so few do outside those frenetic final moments of sex—my helplessness. My need. I groan softly, the sound saying, Touch me. Please.

  Her taunting hands edge closer, closer to the ridge of my erection, close enough that I can feel the pull of the silk against my pulsing skin, and that alone is enough to make me moan. My hands twitch and rise, ready for more. Ready to push my waistband down and do what she won’t, stroke my flesh and end this torture. But I stop. I lay my palms flat to my stomach, willing them to behave.

  Oh she’s mean. She toys with the fabric, drawing it taut—to outline my shape or purely to torment me, I don’t know. I shift my hips, intensifying the sensation.

  “You want more,” she murmurs.

  “Yes.”

  Her thumbs trace me, their nails drawing fiery-hot stripes down the sides of my erection.

  “Please.” I shut my eyes and my hands curl into fists atop my middle.

  She touches me—a soft sweep of her knuckles or fingertips over my balls then another, lower. There’s tenderness as she cups and fondles but I want more. More intensity, more of everything. The silk binds my cock, maddening. Everything I’ve trained myself to suppress in aid of spoiling my lovers gnaws at me, greedy and impatient. I want callous, tactless male things. To expose myself to her like an animal in heat, ease the skin down until I’m completely bared. I want her eyes on my hard flesh. I want her hands, her mouth, her cunt. Want her on her hands and knees. I want to punish her for teasing me this way, remind her which of us does the fucking, which takes what they’re given.

  But all that aggression dissolves the second she touches my cock. I tremble as the pads of her fingers run up along my ridge, gasp as they brush my head. Cool air caresses my fevered skin and she’s inching the band down. I open my eyes, draw my knees in so she can strip my shorts completely. Suddenly I have what I wanted so violently moments ago, to be exposed to her. But on my back I feel a shiver of vulnerability. Not an unpleasant sensation, I admit. Being at her mercy is taboo—an enjoyable twinge, unlike the paralysis of being at the mercy of my own compulsions and fears.

  She draws her palm along the sensitive underside of my cock. “Better?”

  “Yes.”

  I watch her hand and the sight draws my desire into a fist, hot and tight in my lower belly. Her touch grows steadily gruffer, until I’m stiff as stone in her hand, until my skin and her palm grow damp, the strokes dragging with exquisite friction. My back arches, hips seeking more. She pushes me flat with her free hand.

  “Just enjoy.” Just suffer, her tone tells me, a happy hint of cruelty glimmering.

  I obey. I watch her extraordinary face, lips parted with mischief or lust, and it’s laughable that I ever worried I wouldn’t rouse for her—with just us, just Didier and Caroly. I doubt I’ve ever felt so deeply, utterly naked. Stripped of clothes and control and the safety of roles.

  She moves to my side, propping herself on her hip and one hand, the other free to explore my body. The position presses her breasts together, the softest, palest flesh I’ve ever known, clad in lustrous satin. I reach for her, wanting to feel the weight of her, the warmth.

  She makes an admonishing noise and plucks my hand away. “You’re not allowed to do a thing.”

  But I violate this rule without thinking, not even a minute later. She catches my fingers as they brush her skin. “The maestro’s very bad at sitting back while someone else conducts.”

  “My hands won’t listen to me. Or to your rules. Tie them down if you don’t wish them to wander.” I say it with a smile, body flushing at the notion. Perhaps I’m not so terrible at passivity as I’d imagined.

  Caroly calls my bluff. She leaves me to go to the chest at the foot of the bed. I admire the curve of her hip outlined gold in the candlelight, the trail of her spine, all the shadows of her. She straightens with silk scarves in her hands.

  “Those will never hold me,” I say, a touch cocky. “Keep digging.”

  With a curious look she turns back to the chest to rummage, eventually finding what I hinted at. Two thick, tan leather cuffs connected by a foot-long strap. The buckles jingle as she holds them up. “These?”

  “Yes. Those may stand a chance at keeping my hands out of trouble.”

  She returns to bed, scanning for something she might secure me to. The posts rooted in the headboard are too high, and too awkward, being at the corners of the mattress. She doesn’t know all the secrets of this room yet, I think, smiling at the notion.

  “There’s a spot at the foot of the bed,” I tell her. A decorative scalloped cutout in the footboard big enough to slip a fist through, which I fitted with a metal post for just these wicked purposes. Caroly finds it and, since she’s driving tonight, I let her fumble with the logistics and discover the best way to squeeze one cuff through the gap, around the post and back. If she’s nervous, it doesn’t show on her face when she turns to me. I think back to the woman I first welcomed into this flat a few short months ago. A startling transformation indeed.

  “Come here,” she tells me.

  I lie as she directs and rest my wrists above my head. The leather feels stiff and smooth, buckles cold, the bed foreign with me lying backward and without a pillow.

  “Tighter,” I say as she threads the first cuff. “One more notch.” If I’m to feel helpless, we’ll do it properly. No chance I can slip free. This may be just the sort of therapy I can get behind.

  When the task is done, she smiles and tells me, “That’s the last order you get to issue tonight.”

  “This is less a seduction than a hostage taking.”

  “This is whatever I feel like,” she says, smug and playful.

  I tug at my restraints. In an emergency my hands could unbuckle one another, though it would take some effort.

  Caroly leaves me for the chest again. What else does she want, I wonder?

  It all feels very…different. I’ve had the odd client ask to tie me down, but none I’ve let do it quite so snugly. And those few times I knew if I was to fight or tremble or beg. I knew what I was expected to be. But I know Caroly wants only me, and unadulterated Didier hasn’t ever been restrained quite this way.

  Without a part to play, my hands are antsy as ever.

  They want a job. They need a watch to fix, a lock to pick, a meal to prepare, a woman to excite. They’ve always been that way. As a child I was a nail biter and a skin picker, whapped soundly by my mother whenever caught. Like me, her beauty had been her currency and she proclaimed my anxious habits tantamount to self-mutilation. Desperate, she had my grandmother teach me how to knit. I took to it so obsessively it’s a wonder I didn’t develop arthritis at age eight. I made great long useless rectangles, only to unravel them when I ran out of yarn and start again. My mother said she always knew where
I was in our flat from “that incessant clicking”. But I never again bit my nails or savaged my skin.

  I moved on to tinkering by adolescence, turning an unsightly compulsion into a rather useful hobby. I sometimes wonder if I could have been a musician, had my fingers found keys or strings instead of a tool set. But I will settle for being a master of the female body. No instrument feels so good in the hands or makes so fine a sound.

  But now my restless fingers have only leather and air to occupy them. I grasp the strap that links my wrists, rubbing its worn edge with my thumbs and letting the texture distract me.

  After a minute’s perusal, Caroly says, “Shut your eyes.”

  I hear and feel as things are set at the foot of the bed, near my elbow. I try to guess from the sounds what she has in store for me. Was that the clink of glass or metal? But the smoothness that touches me a moment later is merely her fingertips. Her weight joins the bed and she strokes my chest, throat, arms.

  “You can open your eyes.”

  I do. I swallow.

  The woman I love is above me, and not in any context I’ve ever experienced. Her face is half in shadow, curls lit by the flames behind her. The way she stares, she looks beautiful and dangerous, an angel gone rogue. An exciting stranger in familiar skin.

  Her fingers play along my side, drawing a line from my hip to my shoulder and back again. Her touch teases, but her gaze burns. Hot desire in those cool eyes, that huntress look she gives me so often, one that strokes my vanity and arousal equally. Finally the setting matches that stare. I’m no lesson tonight, no tour guide, not even a partner.

  I’m her plaything.

  “What will you do with me?” I ask.

  “Whatever I like.” She reclines again on her hip and elbow at my side. Her gaze and fingertips trail from my throat to my chest, my belly, down to my thigh and up again. And again. Just the lightest touch but fire rises in its wake. My cock envies the attention, stiffening, but she ignores it. It’s my mouth she wants next. She traces my lips with her thumb then slides it inside. I shut my eyes and close her in my heat, sucking. She draws her thumb away, replaces it with a finger, then two. I spoil them as if they were as sensitive as her clitoris, lavish them with my tongue, remind her what I can do.

  She takes her hand back and I open my eyes. Her hair brushes my cheek as she leans in, her warm breast settling against my chest. I’ve grown used to being the initiator of our kisses, and I have to ignore an urge to lead when her lips brush mine. She wastes no time in showing me she’s only too happy to steal the reins.

  Her kisses are exciting—deep and confident. How long has she known how to kiss this way? How long have I gone not realizing, always so busy dictating?

  The questions fade as her palm glides down my chest and belly to close over my cock, drawing a moan from my mouth into hers. She coaxes my thighs wider and I obey. Her touch roams, stroking, cupping, squeezing. My hips flex, wanting more. That firm hand pushes me flat to the mattress once more and I feel her smile through the kissing. A fond smile of amusement at my eagerness? Or the smirk of a woman keen to torture? Her hand closes around me and I lose the will to care.

  Her strokes are slow and decadent, long pulls from the root to just below the crown. I feel spoiled. And measured. Taunted. I feel hard and needy and helpless, powerless and virile at once. A predator, fettered and hungry. When my hips rise again she allows it. Faster, I tell her, thrusting into her fist, willing it to tighten. But she only indulges me for a dozen beats, then her hand is gone, my arousal left to throb in the cool air. I’m abandoned next by her mouth as she sits up. I watch her tongue trace her lower lip, imagining her servicing my cock. She kisses differently when she’s in charge. What other tricks might that mouth reveal, if allowed to keep surveying its territory?

  Alas, I’m not to find out. Not yet.

  “Turn over. On your hands and knees.”

  A shiver whisks through me. In part it’s the uncertainty, not knowing what she has planned. But more intimidating is that wide-open curtain, being made to look out across the rooftops and the glittering city.

  I do as I’m told, getting to my knees and palms. The strap of the cuffs twists, drawing my wrists a bit closer, a bit tighter. Now I see the items she’s chosen for tonight’s reversal—the smooth glass dildo and the smallest of my paddles. The last time we used either, my hands wielded them. I’m no stranger to being their target, but the idea tenses me more than it normally might. The city is watching tonight. No human gaze could chance upon me, not in this dim light and not so high above most of the neighboring windows. But Paris is watching. That great brick bully’s twinkling eyes are on me, witnesses to my powerlessness.

  My heart is a rock, my throat a length of cloth wrung dry and taut. A soft, slow hand strokes my back, and I sense Caroly reading my thoughts.

  “It’s a beautiful city.”

  “From afar, perhaps.”

  “It’s your home,” she tells me.

  No, I think. This building is my home. These walls are my entire world some days, the flat my island nation, its rooms familiar provinces, all of it suspended in a cold, chaotic sea—Paris. Paris, with no up or down or left or right, where I’ll be swept away and lost if not tethered, where I’ll drown. My lust withers to limp shame with those electric eyes blinking, staring. Mocking.

  That city is my jailer, but I love my cell so very much.

  I fidget, needing to feel the leather around my wrists. Captivity is as soothing as a blanket to a mind like mine. Paris has a willing prisoner in me. It’s Caroly who keeps digging tunnels, keeps sawing through my bars and inviting me to make my escape. Always her hand, reaching out.

  Everyone else is content simply to visit, to believe I’m happy as I am. To let me believe it. With their help I stayed locked inside for three years. With their help my tender feet grow blistered after two blocks’ journey, it’s been so long since I’ve laced them into shoes. Their love has turned me pale, left my eyes sensitive to the sunlight and made me forget what a garden smells like. They love my costume as much as I do. Only Caroly seems to prefer the naked actor trembling inside.

  She loves me best, I realize. And all at once, I sink with perfect surrender into my body.

  “Okay?” she asks.

  “Yes, I’m okay.” Take me out of my head, I want to beg. Let me suffer this vulnerability in my body, where everything is simpler, where misgivings morph to kinks.

  She shifts behind me, knees nudging my calves apart another inch or two. Her hands stroke my skin in perfect symmetry, seeming to memorize. The fins of my shoulder blades, the chute of my spine, muscles in my back that I can feel but never see. She kneads my hips, my thighs. The briefest, cruelest tease of a touch tells her my cock is still hard—some parts of me won’t be bullied by the disparaging nonsense that haunts my head, at least.

  Her hands round my hips to my ass, circling my flesh, tracing my cleft. I sigh when she grazes that most intimate spot. My arms shake and I drop to my elbows.

  “You like this, don’t you?” The cockiness has left her tone, and she wants reassurance she’s welcome to cross this line, and the next.

  “I do.” Her fingertips stroke up and down between my cheeks. I’ve done this any number of times over the years, with a generous handful of clients. But it’s different tonight. Caroly’s going somewhere I know she never expected she would, and it makes the act feel new to me as well. Everything feels new with her.

  “It’s intense,” I say, “but that’s good. It pulls me out of my head. Without numbing me, I mean.”

  She doesn’t reply, just keeps drawing her fingers up and down.

  Fuck me, I think. Dominate me. Push me so deep inside my own helplessness I find its pitch-black, frozen center; so deep it can’t hurt me anymore. “I’d love for you to do that to me,” I whisper.

  It’s the nudge she needed. She leaves me, shuffling to the other side of the bed, to the side table. I know that in a few breaths she’ll return with the minera
l oil. The lover I’ve coaxed and molded these past few months, the one always so eager for my guidance… A novice no more. The master tonight.

  Chapter Three

  As Caroly sets the oil on the floor beside the bed, I hear her mutter the faintest, “Okay,” to herself, a breath’s pep talk.

  A cool hand holds my hip then slippery fingertips glide between my cheeks. A shiver runs through me, chased by a fever.

  At once I wish my hands were free. I wish I could brace myself higher, against the footboard, turn my head to watch. Instead I drop my forehead between my fists and submit to the powerlessness.

  I moan each time she brushes my entrance, letting her know I want this. And that it’s okay if she wants it too, this act that used to furrow her brow with confusion…though she asked about it often, wanting to understand why other women would request it of me.

  She preps me well, with more oil and the slow, thrilling ventures of a single fingertip. Circling to start, then inside, just a millimeter. Deeper, deeper, by the tiniest measures. My entire body is on edge, that exotic mix of excitement and shame I know well, dark and rich as caviar. I ache to know what she feels—if she’s nervous or turned-on, scandalized or fascinated. All I get are her heavy breaths behind me.

  Then her finger is gone, and both hands. The dildo disappears from beside my elbow, and my arousal spikes in perfect counterbalance to my nerves.

  As the tip glances me, a desperate, helpless sound falls from my lips. Caroly draws it over my entrance in short sweeps and the pleasure sharpens. It’s by no means my first time in this position, not my first time with my hands bound, even. But it’s been a long while, six months or more since I had a client request this. It’s never a natural sensation, not for either sex, but that’s what makes it exciting. That and the sinfulness of the inversion, of a man letting a woman penetrate the most intimate depths of his body.

  The glass leaves me only to return in seconds, slippery with a fresh drizzle of oil. She doesn’t push yet, only strokes between my cheeks, the contact explicit and scary and forbidden.