He set up a blank word-processor page for me, then opened one of his drawers and rummaged inside. I heard a clinking sound and looked up at him in consternation.
‘You’ve heard the expression “chained to the desk”, I suppose?’ he said, drawing out a length of slim silver chain.
‘Jasper!’
‘I just need to make sure your focus is … optimised,’ he said, wrapping the chain around one of my wrists, then the other, before securing its end in an eyebolt inside the bottom drawer and padlocking it. Once the drawer was shut and locked, I had no way of stepping more than a few inches away from the desk. My hands were free to type but they could do very little else.
‘What if I need the loo? Or some other emergency?’
‘You’ve got your phone, haven’t you? Call me. Besides, I’ll be coming in every half-hour to check on you. I expect at least four hundred words per half-hour.’
‘What if I can’t do that?’ I wailed, knowing my propensity to stare out of the window for one hour and then put on a tremendous burst of last-minute speed.
‘You can,’ he said firmly, and with that he left.
I tugged at the chain, enjoying the way it dug slightly into my wrist. I tried to unloop it from my other wrist but I nearly broke my fingernails in the attempt. The drawer, when I rattled it, was well and truly locked. I could stand up, I could take half a step back, an even smaller step to either side. I was locked into position.
This, coupled with the promise of a real talk with Jasper later, worked better than any amount of stimulants to kick-start my writing. It seemed I’d been wasting my time with caffeine and omega oils. What I needed was bondage and mild optimism.
Half an hour flew by and I was surprised to hear the door click and Jasper enter the room. I did a double-take when he did – he had changed out of his rumpled lounge wear and now wore a rather sharp suit with very shiny shoes.
‘You’ve got changed,’ I blurted.
He ignored my outburst and bent over my shoulder, peering at my document, before taking the mouse from me and clicking on the word count tool.
‘Well done,’ he said. ‘A little reward for you.’ He kissed and nipped at my neck, long and luxuriously, breaking off now and then to breathe into my ear. His hands cupped my breasts and massaged them so that the lace of my bra chafed at my nipples. Just at the point where I had to catch my breath and try not to beg for a kiss, he drew back.
‘Carry on then,’ he said.
It took me five minutes to get back into gear and stop my nipples throbbing, so I was a little worried, on his next visit, that I might not have hit my target. I’d scraped through, though, and he rewarded me this time by making me stand up so he could take off my jeans and kiss and caress my bottom. It was still a mite sore from the caning, so this turned me on in a nanosecond, lighting me up like a Roman candle, so that I had to support myself on the desktop and moan.
He kissed and stroked me into a state of quivering helplessness. I couldn’t go back to writing about the antiques marts of the south coast after this … there was only one place I could go and that was the destination marked ‘orgasm’.
But he took away his tongue and his lips and gave my bereft bottom a hearty smack before growling at me to get back to work.
He took my jeans with him.
I collapsed hard on the chair, forgetting that this was an unwise move until the cane welts reminded me. I was soaking wet. If I looked down between my thighs, I could see a kind of mist on the racing-green buttoned leather.
It was crazy. Earlier on that morning, I’d been ready to hand in my temporary resignation from the world of sex. Jasper had incapacitated me with the intensity and extremity of his demands upon my body. Yet here I was, gagging for more. He was a witch. Or should that be a warlock? A wizard?
My brain was as tired as my body.
I stared at my article, which was almost half-done, and wondered what language it was written in. All I could think of was sex, sex, sex.
If only my hands were free, I could …
I tried to wrench them downwards but they could go no further than the edge of the desk. Jasper had seen to that.
Was there no other way? I tried to grind myself against the leather. It hurt my sore bottom, but I didn’t care. My knickers tightened and bunched up a bit between my pussy lips, which seemed to help matters at first, but it soon became clear that the best I was going to manage was a slow, frustrating journey to the lower slopes of pleasure. It would wreck my already over-strained thigh muscles too.
I wanted to sob with need, but it was clear that there was nothing for it but to try and dismiss my arousal and get on with my article.
I’d wasted time, though, and when Jasper came back in, I was under my target.
‘Oh, dear,’ he said. ‘You’ve been frittering your time away. What have you been doing? Daydreaming?’
‘If you didn’t keep coming in and –’
‘Oh, so it’s my fault, is it?’
‘Yes.’
‘I see. No more rewards, then. Up on your feet.’
I was rather dreading what might follow. Another spanking on top of what I’d already had from him might just kill me.
But nothing happened – no smart and salutary smack on the backside was forthcoming.
‘You can sit down when you’re at fifteen hundred words,’ he said, and then he left.
Typing standing up is no joke, something I’d never realised before. It was hard on the legs and thighs and tough on the spine too. I dashed off the next five hundred words as if I was being chased by a legion of editors with spears and arrows.
They were probably rubbish, of course, but at this rate I’d have a bit of time left over at the end to improve the sense.
Jasper let me sit down again but there was no reward for my productivity – rather the opposite. He lifted my top up over my breasts, pulled down my bra cups, then fixed a pair of nipple clamps to my poor sensitive nubs. Not the worst kind – the pressure was gentle at first – but it was made clear that they would not be removed until the article was two thousand words long.
I had never typed an article so quickly in my life. The clamps weren’t terribly painful but the tightening was inescapable and my nipples throbbed, then numbed. When you added the itch between my thighs and the way my bottom stuck to the chair, I was a hot-faced mess and I knew it.
Jasper’s final visit was a triumphant one.
‘Twenty minutes to spare,’ he said, impressed, removing the clamps. My nipples flooded with sensation and I gasped.
‘I’m not sure it’s my finest work,’ I panted.
He massaged my shoulders, reading the words on the screen.
‘Looks all right to me,’ he said.
His hands crept down to my breasts, setting my senses alight.
‘Can’t see any spelling mistakes.’
‘No, I mean, it’s a garbled disaster,’ I said.
‘You can look it over tonight. Change it if you need to.’
He was growing a bit of a beard and the bristles prickled at the soft skin of my neck. I loved it. There were better uses for his razor strop than sharpening a razor anyway.
‘You aren’t going to make me do it now then?’ I whispered.
‘That’d mean taking my hands off you,’ he whispered back. ‘Which is not on the cards.’
He caught my mouth in a long luscious kiss. One of his hands slid down over the bump of my stomach and into my knicker elastic.
I moaned and arched, lifting my pussy lips to meet his fingertips.
‘Soaking wet,’ he said into my ear, rubbing in lazy circles. ‘Those antique shops must really turn you on.’
‘Mmm, they do,’ I agreed, not really knowing what I was saying. I just wanted more, harder, faster. My clit was sore from all the attention it had had the night before but I just didn’t care. I gave it up to him, I made it his, whenever he wanted to use it.
‘Are you going to be a good girl?’ he murmured,
working away at me.
‘Mmm, yes,’ I whimpered. I’d do anything, there was nothing I wouldn’t do.
‘Are you going to tell me who you belong to?’
‘You, to you, God, yes.’
‘I want to make you come, and when you do, I want you to say that you’re mine.’
‘I’m yours, I’m yours.’
I wasn’t even coming yet. Call it a rehearsal.
It wasn’t long, though, before I began to push myself on his fingers, my thighs shaking while he wrenched my orgasm from me. He held me by my shoulder and made me keep still, made me feel every second to its fullest extent.
‘Yoooours,’ I said, and he laughed and kissed me.
‘The more you deny it, the truer it is,’ he said. ‘What do you say?’
‘Thank you, sir,’ I complied meekly.
‘Good girl,’ he said, removing his fingers from me and putting them to my lips for me to lick clean. ‘Best girl.’
I laid my head against his chest for a moment, coming to, then I looked up at him.
‘I’m still chained to this desk,’ I mentioned. ‘Is that … OK?’
‘I’ll let you go in a moment. First I want to show you what I’ve been doing while you’ve been slaving away.’
He took the mouse and clicked away until a web page came up that made me crinkle my nose.
‘Facebook? Really?’
‘I thought I should. I mean, all my films and their production companies have their own pages, but I’ve never taken the plunge personally. I’m going to keep it semi-private, though. Friends only. In fact, I’ve only invited one person so far.’
‘Is it me?’
He grinned and rubbed his nose against mine.
‘Clever girl. And look at this.’
He showed me his profile and made the cursor hover over ‘Relationship Status’.
‘In a relationship,’ I read. ‘Oh. Wow. That’s …’
‘A commitment?’ he said. ‘Yes. And I want a word with you, Missy.’
‘Do you?’ I said, my stomach lurching. I thought I knew what was coming.
‘Yes. What the fuck does “It’s complicated” mean? Hmm?’
‘I didn’t think you’d want my friends asking questions about us. If I put “in a relationship” they’d all be hassling me to know who it was with. I didn’t feel like opening that particular can of worms yet.’
‘You’re digging yourself in deeper by the second, my girl. Are you calling me a can of worms?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It just seemed a bit … presumptuous. That’s all. I mean, who knows what the future will bring?’
‘Nobody,’ said Jasper. ‘Not a soul on this earth. But you have to take a leap of faith sometimes, Sarah. If nobody did that, the species would die out.’
‘I know …’
‘What do you want for the future?’
‘I want to get these cuffs off.’
He sighed and took the key out of the desk.
‘Same question,’ he said, ‘but a little longer term. Tell me.’
‘I want this,’ I said. ‘You. What we have now. I want it to go on.’
‘Right, well, so do I.’
‘But our lives are so different, Jasper. We come from completely different places. I mean, all this …’ I gestured with a newly freed hand at the opulent surroundings. ‘And I’m just normal. You’ve seen my parents. Mr and Mrs Normal, from Normal Town, Normalshire.’
‘So we have to come from identical backgrounds for a relationship to work? Bollocks, love. Not buying it. Why are you trying to look for ways out of this?’
‘I’m not! I’m just scared I’ll get in too deep … oh, why am I kidding myself? I am in too deep. Way over my head. I’m ridiculously, stupidly, horribly in love with you and I don’t know what to do.’
Tears were in my eyes and I put my pins-and-needling hands up to them, crushing them back.
Jasper wrapped his arms around me from behind and squeezed me tight.
‘Oh, my silly, much too serious, over-thinking girl,’ he said. ‘Come on. Let’s have that talk you wanted.’
He led me to his cinema screening room and I wondered if he was going to put on more films of our kinky adventures, but no. Once he’d fixed us drinks and nibbles, he got his laptop out and began clicking away until the cinema screen synced with it.
‘What’s this?’ I asked, watching over his shoulder as a list of dates came up.
‘I had a lot of old films transferred on to my hard drive a while back,’ he said. ‘Really old films. Not directed by me – well, some of them were. Most of them … see for yourself.’
He clicked and a very faded beach background came into shot.
‘I’m afraid the quality’s not great,’ he said. ‘Video being what it was. I can get it cleaned up – I’m having it done now, actually. This is what I’ve got at the moment, though.’
On the beach, a boy was making sandcastles.
‘God, is that you?’
I giggled at his scrawny little chest and mop of hair.
‘Yep. Summer of ’82. I was nine years old.’
‘I wasn’t born.’
He sighed.
‘No.’
Another boy wandered into shot, waving a spade, and I leant forwards, gaping. It was another Jasper, for all the world. Jasper the first leaped up and the two began sparring with their buckets and spades.
‘There are two of you!’ I exclaimed.
‘There were two,’ he corrected flatly.
‘Oh! Isn’t he … I’m sorry.’
‘Joseph was my twin,’ he said. ‘When we were twelve, he got leukaemia. He lived another eighteen months.’
There were no adequate words. All I could do was stare at him, horrified, and take his hand. Looking back at the laughing children, I teared up.
‘Oh, Jasper.’
‘’S all right,’ he said, with a little hand wave, but his lower lip jutted more than it usually did. ‘Long time ago.’ He pulled me closer, though, and I could feel his chest move up and down. He didn’t want me to see his face but I heard him swallow.
‘You’ve never mentioned it,’ I whispered.
‘No, well, not the most cheerful topic of conversation,’ he said.
‘I don’t care about that,’ I said, absolutely consumed with the need to hold him and make his world whole again. ‘I care about you.’
We held on to each other while the ghost boys flickered, splashing in the waves. The film went blank and all I could hear was the heaviness of Jasper’s breath as he fought to master it.
‘It must have changed you,’ I said, once he was able to loosen his grip on me and let me look at his face.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘God, I hated the world and everything in it. To have my life, as I knew it, taken right out of my hands like that … well … It wasn’t easy. Joe and I … our bond was special.’
‘Of course it was.’
‘I went looking for it, for versions of it, all the time. Ava Rose – I thought she … but no. And perhaps you can understand, a little, why I like control.’
‘Yes. It makes sense to me now.’
‘When I direct, the world is the way I make it. It’s the way I want it. If I don’t want the person to die, they don’t die. It’s therapy.’ He smiled crookedly.
I took his face in my hands and kissed his forehead, then his lips, where the smile still quivered.
‘Do you think you’ve let him go?’ I whispered.
‘It’s getting better,’ he said. ‘Growing up is tough at the best of times, and it wasn’t the best of times. I had kind of a wild youth. I was lost. Directing – when I got into it – really started to change that. I’m not the raging child I was any more.’
‘Are you still looking for Joseph?’
He shook his head, smiling through a glimmer of tears.
‘I stopped that after the Ava Rose thing … stopped having relationships. No more disappointment for me. It was fuckbuddies all the way. U
ntil you.’
‘Until me.’
I understood now what was at stake. If Jasper took a lover, he wanted them, body and soul. Nothing less was going to do.
‘Sarah,’ he said, ‘you say, “It’s complicated,” and I suppose a lot of people would agree with you, but is it? Really? I want to love you for who you are, and I want to be loved for who I am. Not because I’m famous, or I’m pretty bloody good at the Dom thing, or … do you know what I mean? All of me. Good and bad. I need somebody who accepts it all.’
‘Do I know the worst?’ I asked gently, hoping against hope that there weren’t any corpses in his closet.
‘Absolutely. I’m a controlling bastard, I admit it. I like everything just so. I have high standards and I get pissed off with people who don’t. I like whipping willing women. I’m ambitious and I’m driven, perhaps a bit too much sometimes. But if you’ll stay with me … if our life can be like that summer was … God, I’d change anything about myself for that.’
‘So would I. It was perfect. It was like a dream. But we have to live in the real world now.’
‘We can make our world.’
‘The way we want it?’
‘The way I want it.’ He flashed a rueful smile. ‘Sorry. Joke. Bit of a rubbish one. Yes, love. The way we want it.’
‘I’d do anything for you,’ I said, the words spilling out with yet more tears.
‘So would I,’ he said. He picked up the laptop again and started clicking. Within a few seconds my Facebook page was on the screen.
‘So …’ he said, handing the machine to me. ‘Why don’t you log yourself in and …’
I took it and typed in my password, then accepted his friend request.
‘And?’ he prompted.
I moved the cursor over ‘Relationship Status’ and clicked on the menu.
In A Relationship.
Yes, we were.
Chapter Eight
‘That guy, the film director?’
As Monday-morning ‘have a good weekend?’ greetings went, Rob’s opening gambit was unusual.
‘Sorry?’
I buttoned up my spencer and raised an eyebrow at him as he threw off his overcoat and rummaged in the costumes wardrobe.
By His Command Page 9
