“I know,” she says, “I know. Use your submissive.”
He uses his submissive. In an instant, I’m emptied of their touch and then hauled against Auden’s firm chest as he kneels in front of me. He crushes his mouth to mine, one strong arm banded across my back while his other hand drops to unfasten his trousers, and with an impatient yank, his cock is freed and then ground into my naked belly.
I’ve seen Dominants take their pleasure every way imaginable—handjobs, blowjobs, fucking, even masturbating over a sub’s striped and quivering body—but never have I seen a Dominant so undone, so desperate to come that grinding against a sub’s belly while devouring her mouth is the only cure for the madness.
Then again, I’ve never had a virgin Dom before, never had Auden Guest with his bitterly noble air and crooked smile . . . I’ve never been used and made to serve while my hand still ached from the thorns that had been used to bind me to the land the Guest family owns.
Auden’s kisses are hot, searching—as invasive and possessive as his fingers were—and he’s kissing me the way he kissed me last night by the fire as Delphine fucked me, like he wants to reach into my chest and cup my heart between his hands. Like he wants every single part of me to touch every single part of him, and that there’s no such thing as close enough. We’ll never get close enough until we’re crawling inside of each other, and even then there will be no squeeze too hard, no thrust too deep, no tears too scalding, because nothing will be enough until we’re twined tighter than the thorns around the chapel. So tight that God himself couldn’t pry us apart.
“Look up at me,” he whispers against my mouth. He bands one arm tight around my waist to keep me close. “I want to see those pretty eyes.”
I look up, mesmerized by the intensity I see in his gaze, the lust and the desperation and the vulnerability so raw that it’s almost like anger. His lips are parted, his cheeks flushed everywhere except around the small, barely-there scar under his eye. His hair has fallen over his forehead, messy and tousled, and every muscle in his jaw and neck and shoulders is tensed with something almost like pain.
His erection is scorching the skin of my belly, stiff and wet at the crown, and then he takes my chin in his hand, holding me just a breath away from his lips so that he can look at my face. With a shudder and quiet grunt, he spills against me, his organ giving hard, jerking throbs as it pulses his spend up to my ribs and against his thin shirt and into my navel and onto his opened trousers, making a mess of both of us.
We stay like this for a moment—his hand still cupping my jaw and his hazel eyes burning into mine—panting hard and both of us marked now with the hot proof of how much he needs this. I want to touch it—I want to touch him—because Auden’s come three times with me, and all three times he’s been clothed, it’s been separate from me. Kept from me, my dazed mind thinks. It belongs to me, and he’s kept it from me.
My sides heave with the effort it takes to stay still, to keep myself from mewling for his touch, for the orgasm I know I haven’t earned yet. But haven’t I pleased him? Haven’t I made him happy? Perhaps he won’t be so cruel as to deny me now—
But then he moves back and grates out, “Bex.”
While Auden was consuming me with kisses, she’s been peeling off her jumpsuit with her usual elegance, and now she’s only in her boots and panties, having gone braless under her jumpsuit. Her breasts, small and high, are tipped with dark nipples currently pulled tight against the cool air.
She steps into Auden’s place. “Stay,” she says to me simply. And so I stay.
Her fingers wind through my hair, and while she’s steadier and calmer than Auden, she’s still more worked up than I’ve ever seen her—save for last night by the fire. From my position on my knees, I can see the quick expansions of her chest and the quiver of her belly, I can discern a faint tremble when she pulls my hair tight enough to make me gasp.
She guides my head to the warm apex of her thighs—which is a contrast of textures, of silky skin and rough lace—and presses my mouth to where she wants it without bothering to hook her panties to the side. I part my lips and lick at the lace with my tongue, getting only the barest tastes of her between the whorls and paisleys of the delicate fabric. I know the minute I touch her clit, because she stiffens against me, her hand in my hair tight enough to make my eyes water, and so I redouble my efforts to please her, tracing the stiffened bud until I’ve mapped her fully and then sealing my lips around her to suck on it.
It’s messy—the lace keeps me from sucking properly—and as it gets wetter from my mouth and her arousal, it chafes against us both. But she must like it, because she keeps me held fast against her, and I like it so much that I’m mindlessly squeezing my thighs together to mimic the pleasure I’m giving her. I’d like it even more if I could properly see to her, if I could have her pussy bare and open to me, but also the barrier between my mouth and her flesh is maddeningly enticing, an inflaming reminder of what I want more than anything in this minute and can’t have.
I lick and suck until she’s rolling her hips against my face, until she’s murmuring, “Good, Poe, that’s very good, that’s a very good girl,” and then she finally gives us what we both want, and she pulls the lace to one side.
“Make me come now,” she tells me, twisting the hand in my hair so that my eyes meet hers. “Make me come.”
I nod eagerly, pressing my lips to her exposed mound now, to the clitoris so plump and full that it’s parted the lips it rests between. Her cunt is completely bare, and there’s nothing like the smoothness of it, nothing like the softness of her lower folds when I burrow in and kiss them. And then she parts her legs just that little bit more, just that extra so that I can tilt my face and tongue-stroke her where she’s the wettest and softest of all.
The moment I do, she moans, and I hear an answering noise from right behind me . . . and then I feel the warm press of Auden. He’s shirtless now, his trousers fastened once more, but a fresh erection still presses against my ass. He’s kneeling too, his knees on the outside of mine, his chest flush to my back, and his arms wrap around me as I continue to eat Rebecca.
His arms feel like possession and generosity all at once. Jealousy and encouragement. Like all he wants is to see me being shared, and also all he wants is to be the one who has the right to share me.
I’m too far gone to have any feeling about this other than: yes.
Everything is possible, right? That I might kneel for a selfish man.
That I might feel some measure of peace on the day I first saw the grass growing over my mother’s grave.
Rebecca likes it best when I suck on her clitoris, when I nurse on it, when I flicker my tongue across its needy tip, and I eat up her pleased noises as much as I eat up her physical pleasure. Auden plays with my breasts as I work; he slides a big hand down my panties and cups my pussy hard enough to send jolts of high-octane goodness searing up my spine. And my groan against Rebecca’s skin makes her groan, which makes me wetter and squirmier, which makes Auden groan, and then on and on and on, all of us feeding on each other, stirring each other harder, driving each other to the brink surrounded by the gray velvet of the rainy afternoon.
Rebecca comes with a surprised gasp, a small oh!, like someone has come up behind her and lifted a heavy bag off her shoulders, like she’s suddenly looked up and found the world easier and prettier than she ever remembered. Like she’s been given a gift with no strings at all attached, and that gift was just a moment for herself, a single moment of selfishness and sensation that she didn’t have to earn.
Auden’s middle finger pushes past my swollen folds as Rebecca grinds her orgasm against my face, wet and pulsing and sweet, and it’s so hot, it’s so fucking hot to be played with and used at the same time. I think again of kissing Auden’s feet, and my belly tightens enough that I think it’s going to happen, I know it’s going to happen—
“That was a very good girl,” Rebecca says, stepping back and arranging the lac
e panties so that they cover her again. “Wasn’t she such a good girl, Guest?”
“Very good,” he says.
“And that was only the beginning.” I can hear the wry smile in Rebecca’s voice even though I know better than to look up to see it. “Usually inspections are more, ah, perfunctory.”
I can feel his quiet laugh against my back, and I laugh a little too, and for a moment the only sounds are our laughter and the renewed patter of the rain against the glass, and despite the ache in my cunt and the three floggers waiting for me on the floor and despite the grief waiting for me later on tonight—I’m happy. I can’t explain it, because I shouldn’t be, not after learning that my mother is truly dead and not just missing, and not after being stripped and used as a plaything, but I am. I’m happy that I have Rebecca and Auden, I’m happy that I have friends who love me enough to help me forget and help me cry when forgetting isn’t an option.
I’m happy that I’m here at Thornchapel, no matter what horrors had lain waiting for me in the ruins.
I’m happy that my sore hand and cunt remind me the ruins yield just as much magic as they do pain.
“On your feet, Poe,” Rebecca says. As Auden stands and helps me up and as she pulls her jumpsuit back on, she asks, “Am I correct in assuming you’ve been flogged before?”
“Yes, Mistress.”
“Do you like it?”
I’m too deep in the moment to do my usual cost-benefit analysis of telling a Dominant the truth. So I say, “I love it,” entirely honestly, knowing that she might deny it from me simply because I love it, or flog me within an inch of my life instead. Who knows with sadists?
But Rebecca steps forward and cups my cheek in her hand, raising my face to hers. “Good,” she says softly, and I’m happy again, because I can see so clearly, in a way I can’t always in a scene, how much she wants this for me. To help me. To give me some release from the pressure swelling and swelling inside my chest and threatening to rupture into something noxious and sticky, like a balloon filled with tar.
“Help me cry, Mistress,” I whisper. “Please.”
Her eyes are dark and gentle. “I will,” she promises, leaning in to kiss my temple. “Over to the middle of the room.”
Auden has redesigned the rooms in the south wing around the idea of leaving several of the original beams exposed, and this particular room has a pitched ceiling with a beam and its braces running across it in such a manner that you could toss rope over the beam and—for example—use it to tie up a librarian so that her wrists are stretched high above her head.
Which is what happens to me now.
Rebecca shows Auden how to wrap my wrists in rope and how to keep my bonds snug while still ensuring good circulation. In the dim light, he seems to have trouble making out the knots, and puts on his clear-framed glasses, which should make him look arty and pretentious, but only make him more beautiful.
And then he bends studiously over the rope, examining each wrap and each flex of my fingers as carefully as he would a building plan—as if seeing my body and his restraints in the clean, precise dimensions of diagrams and elevations.
And every time I flinch—which is often since the jute is rough as hell on the hand still healing from the thorns—he pauses to drop kisses against each and every cut, just like he did last night. His lips are so soft and so warm on the parts of me that hurt, and for every kiss he drops onto my hand, I want to drop fifty onto his feet in return.
Rebecca has him restrain me while I’m standing flat-footed, rather than up on the balls of my feet, which I appreciate, even while I suspect it’s so she can beat me for longer without my leg muscles tiring. And then she has Auden get her the first flogger.
I love a good clamping, I adore being spanked, I could be tied up every day for the rest of my life—but there’s something about flogging that scratches the deepest itches I have. It’s pain that dances, it’s pain with melody—it starts off waltzing between stinging and tingling, it spins and pirouettes between smarting and soothing; it stitches steps and leaps of ecstasy right beneath the surface of my skin until my entire body is taken over.
So I’m breathing hard in anticipation, my denied orgasm still aching in my groin, but nearly forgotten now that I’m awaiting one of my favorite treats, and when Rebecca throws the first strike, I don’t gasp or whimper. I sigh in relief.
Again and again she goes, warming up my back, talking quietly to Auden the whole time about where to aim, how to avoid wrapping the falls, how to gauge distance and force. I try to listen, to be present, but the more she hits me, and the more my skin heats and my flesh stings, the less I can absorb. Endorphins drug my blood, pleasure and pain fight with each other in my mind, and my cunt grows so heavy and wet between my legs that it feels obscene.
“This one was suede,” I hear her say, and then I hear her ask for the next flogger. She tells him that it’s made of pressed cowhide with the falls cut at an angle.
I take a deep breath.
Fire sears across my back, and then again right away. I dance up to the balls of my feet, letting out a low noise, but Rebecca moves with me, following my body with hers so that each flick of the flogger lands with the same agonizing heat. The tips of the falls—what feels like hundreds of them—move across my skin like knives dragging sparks across stone, hot and bright and dazzling—and soon my entire body is on fire, I’m a pillar of flame.
I grunt, I arch, I crumple, and still the fire comes, like a relentless destiny. Like a blessing.
Rebecca moves to my ass, careful of my kidneys and tailbone, and to my thighs, as cruel there as she was everywhere else. I can feel welts and even the hot/cold pinpricks where the skin is broken through, and there’s a low sound welling up from my chest, wordless and elemental, like a keening, wailing prayer.
I don’t know how long I’ve been making it, because I don’t know how long she’s been flogging me, but it feels like forever, like I’m as old as the thorn chapel itself, like I’ve been here in this room dancing between pain and delight long enough for thorns to grow around my feet and roses to bloom in my hair. I’m sweaty and on the edge of—something—not orgasm but something like that, like release maybe, or reprieve. Tears are close and the air feels thick around my body, like Thornchapel itself is caressing me and tormenting me, just like Auden and Rebecca are.
“One more flogger, Proserpina,” Rebecca says. She sounds slightly winded, which makes sense because flogging is toil for everyone involved, not just for the person being flogged. “And I don’t think it will take long.”
“Long until what?” I hear Auden ask quietly.
“You’ll see.”
I hear Rebecca set down the cowhide and hear her pick up the last flogger, and I know, I just know that this last one is going to break me. It’s going to crack me open and everything will spill out and I’ll be empty.
I want to be empty. I want to be no one and nothing.
“You should stand in front of her,” Rebecca tells Auden. “Support her if she needs it.”
Auden comes into view, his trousers hugging his trim hips and those bare feet still driving me to distraction. I can see the lean muscles of his abdomen and chest tensing and releasing as he breathes, the faint sheen of sweat on his chest and shoulders even though he’s only been watching.
“Look at me, Proserpina,” he says for the second time tonight, and I look up at him. Hazel eyes burning behind his glasses, his mouth still slightly swollen from kissing. His jaw is tight with anguish, and I’m not sure why until he steps forward and presses his lips to mine. “You’re so beautiful,” he says against my mouth. “You’re so beautiful, and I haven’t earned you yet.”
I want to tell him I don’t care anymore, that he can consider me earned because nothing matters—but before I can, Rebecca rains a blow across my back that buckles my knees.
I scream.
Auden catches me, tender even as his hands on my back send waves of pain where they touch my welts, and then
once I’m on my feet again, he steps back so Rebecca can strike.
And she does. Over and over and over again.
Across my back, across my ass. Thick cords of pain across each thigh—four times. She hits hard and fast and precise, moving from the side to behind me so she can use the full range of the flogger, both the meat of the falls and the nasty, wicked tips that feel like scars being made when they dig into my skin. On my sensitized, inflamed skin, each blow is agony, and each strike digs deep into my sore muscles, knocking the air right out of me.
When I can breathe, I scream again and again until I can’t scream anymore. Until my voice is hoarse and my breathing is wild and I’m so sweaty and weak that even standing feels like the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
It should sound terrible, this flogging.
But it’s wonderful.
Sometimes pain drives me in, in, in, sending me into a place inside myself that’s still and quiet and calm, a place much like the feeling of being inside under a blanket when the wind howls outside and the sky hurls rain and thunder against the windows.
But this—this is making me fly apart, not watery-quiet, but airy and fiery and loud. This is a combustion sending me outwards, this is me trembling and shaking until I break. Every brittle and strong part of me, every blighted happiness and every hope that hasn’t yet been poisoned, every moment I ever spent with my mother and all the moments I’ll never get to have—
All I’ve been given and all I’ve been robbed of—
The girl who came to Thornchapel thinking everything is possible and the girl who saw her mother buried behind the altar—
All of it. All of me. I crack into spiderwebbing fissures of pain, and then I splinter, and then I shatter into a million pieces. A trillion. I’m nothing anymore, I’m not Proserpina, I’m not a librarian, I’m not a girl who loves summer and the smell of books, I’m not falling in love with two men, I’m not a bride or a saint or a goddess. I’m not a daughter.
Feast of Sparks Page 4
