Uncaring, unable to be even slightly human at this point, Kyah's limp body fell face forward onto his chest, held back by her bound arms.
As much as Riker would have liked to bask in the afterglow, he knew his first responsibility was to her, and she didn't look any too comfortable. With great tenderness, he extracted her arms from the sleeves of her pajamas, then moved her from the tattered remains of the rest of them, torn beyond all repair.
Gathering her, naked, to him, he rose with her in his arms, tucking the both of them into her bed. When she silently – clumsily, still largely unable to coordinate the movements of her liquid limbs – made as if to move to her own side of the bed, away from him, he gently but inexorably drew her back into his arms, cocooning himself around her.
After a few long moments, Riker said, "I'll get you another pair of pjs."
"You don't need to," she answered, quietly, which was unnatural for her.
His hands holding her arms over her chest, his fingers circling her wrists as if manacling them there, he chuckled. "Oh, but I like them, although there should be a double zipper with a pull at the top and one at the bottom, and the drop seat should drop quite a bit further, to my tastes, but they look very cute on you. They're kind of little girlish, and I've always thought of you – in some ways – as my little girl, to watch over and cherish and pleasure and discipline, when necessary."
They lay together silently for a moment. Ky sighed at her own prurient reaction to his words, even now, when she could still barely think, her body responded to him.
And then he couldn't stop himself from asking, "Okay?" as he always did.
"Yes."
Her clipped answer was nowhere near enough for him. "Do you wish you'd used your safe word?"
Why that question made her gasp, he didn't know, but, apparently, it was a more potent concept to her than to him. "I-I don't think I can use a safe word with you, unless I'm, you know, dying or something. It's like I trust you too much or something, something stupid like that." She wished he hadn't begun questioning her, because she was in entirely too suggestible a state. She was apt to tell him anything, and she'd already said much more than she wanted to. "I want you to do whatever you want to do to me. I want to submit to you, even if I struggle against it, and I probably always will."
She'd managed to knock the breath out of him with her words more surely than any man had, in a physical fight, in his entire life.
His heart caught in his throat, all he could do was just hold her tightly for a long moment.
And then he asked the question that was on his mind. The big one that he wasn't sure he wanted to know the answer to.
"Do you still want us to go back to the way it was?" he whispered, holding his breath.
There was a horrible pause, and then her small voice, saying, "No. I don't think we can, anyway. Not after – not after all this."
Barely able to contain himself, Riker managed to say, "I love you, Kyah. I know you don't feel the same way about me yet –"
She interrupted him. "But that's where you're wrong."
Her words were so soft that he almost missed them. "Say what, now?"
"I've always loved you – in this way, in a boy-girl, who are not siblings, way. I just…"
He felt a tear hit his forearm and realized she was crying, and he hadn't noticed. Feeling as if he'd failed her in some small way, and deeply concerned about how and what she was thinking about them and where they should go from here, he hauled her even more tightly into his arms. "Baby girl, what is it? Tell me and, whatever it is, I'll make it right."
That got a hollow chuckle out of her. "You can't, because it's me. I'm the one that needs to be fixed. Hell, no. That's not right. What I need is to be someone else entirely, in order to be right for you, which is why I've always played the sibling card with you."
Riker was confused. "Someone else entirely? For me?" It was an incomprehensible idea to him.
Ky sighed. "Yeah. Someone gorgeous, tall, and willowy, who'll look great on your arm. A size four or under, who's a mover and a shaker like you – someone who's rich, like you, and owns and runs a yoga studio, discovered a cure for a rare disease, and finds homes for rescue dogs in her spare time, while she bakes homemade bread to donate to a soup kitchen for the homeless."
This was the first he was ever hearing of this. He knew she was self-conscious about her weight, but he had no idea just how insecure she was. She'd never shown that side of herself to him, or if she had, he hadn't picked up on it.
"You…you think you're not good enough for me." He said it aloud, hoping she would contradict him.
But she didn't. Instead, she was nodding her head emphatically, which caused several more fat teardrops to land on his arms.
He wasn't usually at a loss with her, but this had come at him out of left field. He didn't have an immediate response to her concerns, and that left her sobbing quietly in his arms, and eventually, at his continued silence from behind her, she began to try to free herself from his embrace.
But he wouldn't – couldn't – have that.
"Oh no, little miss. You're not going to drop a bomb like that on me and expect to get away, seconds later, when I haven't had a chance to formulate a rebuttal."
But Kyah was beside herself. He still wasn't saying anything about what she'd said. Riker never shut up, but now he was silent as a tomb – because she was right, and he was too polite to say it to her, she was quite sure.
She was sure enough that she said as much to him as she continued to fight against his hold.
And that was when she felt the true extent of his strength as he lifted her off the bed, turned her mid-air – all while she was fighting against him the entire time – then he lay her, with all deliberation, over his hastily created lap as he leaned back against the headboard. Within seconds, she found herself lying over his lap, wrists caught behind her back, bottom rapidly and thoroughly roasted, no matter how she tried to twist and turn away from those vicious swats.
"Stop! No!" she shrieked. "I can't help it if I'm telling the truth!"
He never bothered to answer her, but simply continued to spank, even working his way down the backs of her thighs while her protestations yielded – if not her will – to the need to give voice to the discomfort he was creating in her backside.
Still, he didn't stop, not until she was lank and limp, no longer able to struggle or protest, and her rear, from the crest of each hillock to just above the backs of her knees, was an alarming shade of cardinal red, hot, tight and pulsating painfully.
Finally, Riker spoke.
"I have never heard such rubbish in all my life, and I will not hear it now, either."
Through her tears and despair, Ky recognized that she had never heard him quite this angry before.
And, as he spoke, he continued to spank her, every smack landing very deliberately, between key words. "I love and adore you. I don't pick and choose what aspects of you I love – I love all of you. If I wanted someone rail thin I could – all ego aside – probably have her, just on the basis of my bank balance. But you knew me before I became successful. You ground me. You've never let me, once, get away with being full of myself, and that's one of the biggest things I love about you. You're outspoken and independent – to a fault, since you've never let me do anything to help you, except occasionally using me as donkey labor when you move – and smart and bratty, and every time you step into a room that I'm in, my heart stops for a second. Every time you smile at me, it does the same. If you laugh at a joke I've made, or agree to go out to dinner with me or decide to sit next to me at a party…"
Just as suddenly as she found herself over his lap, she ended up beneath him on the bed, her backside stinging against the sheets. She could feel the very masculine power and strength of him, of his love and desire for her. Pushing its way insistently into her, until she found herself completely full of him, pinned down by his weight and his size and the breadth and length of him inside her, as he c
aught her hands above her head in one of his, leaning down to kiss her more gently than she expected him to.
As he began to move within her, he vowed firmly, "There never has been and there never will be anyone else for me but you, Kyah. I don't want anyone else. I won't have anyone else. Only you."
Riker gathered her spread legs over his arms, planting his hands far up her body, holding her wide open for his possession. As he pumped himself into her with massively powerful thrusts, he caught her eye and held it, through sheer force of will. "I won't spend our lives together trying to prove to you what you should already know, and I don't ever want to hear you – or hear of you – saying things like that about yourself again, or I will make you one very sorry little girl."
He finished his possession of her then, one of the few times she'd experienced with him when he made absolutely no effort to please her, but rather took her for himself alone.
He wondered, when he had her back in his arms, with Ky not having said a word since her tearful confession, if that might have been a mistake. He didn't usually second-guess himself, but he was in uncharted waters here with her. Usually, he relied on his instincts – in business and with her, he guessed, although he had never really thought of it that way, but he wasn't as sure as he usually was about how he should handle her. She wasn't crying any longer. She wasn't trying to get away from him – not that he would let her, anyway.
But he had to admit that he found her continued silence somewhat disturbing.
He was on his back with her clamped to his side, and just when he had made up his mind to say something to her, she moved up him a bit, so that her mouth was at his ear, to whisper tentatively, "I love you, too, Riker."
It was all he could do not to stand up and dance on the bed in wild abandon, but he managed not to, somehow.
Instead, he kissed the top of her head where she'd tucked it under his chin, grumbling, "It's about damned time." For which she smacked him sharply on the shoulder.
Their intimate, romantic, "I love you," having been exchanged at long last, Ri wanted her to move in with him immediately, but she severely resisted that idea, for no good reason, as far as he was concerned, and he couldn't quite bring himself to mandate it.
Yet.
***
"Why in the hell you're still living in that cracker box of a home, I'll never know," Mina Bates pronounced to no one in particular when they had all gotten together one night at – ironically, The Cracker Box. It was a bar to which a lot of the teachers retired at least once a week – her little group of friends could usually be found there on Fridays, but some, she knew, were there a lot more.
Teaching could definitely drive you to that. If it wasn't the students, then it was the parents. Or the restrictive budget. Or the administration. Or standardized testing. Or. Or. Or.
Take your pick of the aggravation du jour.
The topic for this evening – besides Mina's despair of Ky's housing situation – was the rumor that one, or likely more, teachers were going to be fired – riffed – so that the district could save on their salaries. Money was tight everywhere, but in education, it was so tight as to be non-existent.
And everyone at the table knew the rule of thumb that applied in this situation: last hired, first fired.
That person, unfortunately, was Ky. She'd gotten her job when the fourth grade class was big enough to split into two, but it really no longer was. And she was, at eight years, two shy of tenure.
And not likely to make it, at this rate, which was why she'd indulged quite a bit more than she usually did. She texted Riker to come pick her up from where he was working late, just around the corner, when everyone decided to head home, but really he was just futzing around, wasting time until he got her summons, which came none too soon for him.
She was standing outside the bar by herself, which he didn't like at all. He double-parked his car and got out to collect her, asking in a tone that definitely cast aspersions on her friends' characters, even though he knew every one of them, "They left you alone?"
Ky hung herself all over him, and he knew she was soused. "They knew you were coming," she said, then snorted loudly at her unintended double entendre.
Before she managed to throw herself at him and miss, he preempted her and swung her into his arms to carry her to his car, spending the ride to her place – where he had essentially moved, under protest – sternly fighting her off. It was only the threat of him pulling the car over into a busy mall parking lot to give her what would essentially be a public spanking that got her to behave.
He reversed the process in getting her into the house, not stopping in the living room but carrying her directly to bed. "Do not pass go, do not collect etc, etc, etc," he said to no one in particular.
Ky stood where he had put her, near the bed so that he could get her a nightie. "You know what, Riker? Know what?" she asked loudly.
"What, angel?" he asked, leaning her against him a bit to get the pretty, enticingly short cotton gown over her head.
"I'm going to be unemployed!" she bawled.
Sometimes, she could hold her liquor better than he could. Sometimes, like now, she couldn't hold it at all, and she went from a slaphappy drunk to damned near suicidal in the blink of an eye.
"Why would you lose your job, Ky?" She might be drunk, but this sounded serious.
"Because of budget cuts, that's why. Because of the war in 'raq. Because of George Bushes!"
He had to smile – she could be so cute when she was plastered. "Bush. George Bush," he corrected. He could see that he wasn't going to get much help from her on the subject, but he'd do some poking around, tomorrow, just to see if she really had anything to worry about.
She stared up at him, bleary eyed. "No, Bushes. There were two of the big bastards," she informed him seriously, holding up three fingers.
Ri sat her down on the bed, saying quietly but firmly, "You stay right there. I'll only be a minute, but I don't want you to move." She was looking very sleepy, but he wanted her to stay awake at least until he got back, so he held her chin in his fingers and forced her to look up at him. "Tell me what will happen if you don't obey me, little girl."
Her usual physical protestations of him imposing his will on her – the squirming and wiggling against it – became even more exaggerated when she was drunk, but he was resolute, issuing a sharp, "Kyah!" with the hopes that it would snap her back to reality a bit, anyway.
"Oh, all right," she frowned comically. "If I don' obey you, I get spanked."
Barely able to suppress his grin, Riker agreed, "That's right."
"Can I tell you a secret?" she stage-whispered at him before he could turn to go get the supplies he needed, leaning so far towards him that she almost fell off the bed.
"Of course, you can. I want to know all your secrets, baby."
"I like it when you spank me!" she confessed breathily.
He put his hands on his hips, grinning down at her, knowing that if she remembered this conversation when she was sober, she was going to truly regret it. He should get her drunk more often…"Oh, you do, do you? Even though it hurts?"
She nodded her head so dramatically up and down that she got dizzy and, again, nearly fell off the bed.
Ri rethought his plan and lifted her off the bed in one arm and carried her into the bathroom, where he had intended to go without her to get the things he needed her to have before he let her go to sleep.
"Do you need to tinkle?" he asked impulsively, watching her turn several shades of red.
"Ri-KERRRR!" she made his name into a vehement protest. "You can' ast me that!"
His brow went up, wondering if he'd hit on something here. "I most certainly can. And I am. And I expect a truthful answer from you, too."
She gave him his answer non-verbally, by crossing her legs like a little girl who needed to go would, but he expected her to reply to his question, regardless, and she knew that.
"Yes," she whispered in obvious embarrassment
, her eyes nervously avoiding his, as if she knew what he had in mind for her.
He put his hand out to her as if he was leading her into a ballroom instead of to the potty, escorting her there and, before she had a chance to protest or do it for herself, he bent down and whisked her panties down to her ankles. "Sit down, honey. You need to go."
She obeyed, but once she was enthroned, she tried to shoo him out.
He played dumb, not intending to go anywhere. "What do you want, missy?"
"Ri! I want you to go!" she complained, as if she knew she shouldn't have to explain such a thing to him.
But he loved embarrassing her like this. "Me? I don't have to go, you do. Now let's get it done so that I can get you into bed. It's way past your bedtime."
"It's a weeken', so I don't gotta bedtime," she said, more bravely bratty than she would have been sober.
That was one rule that she remembered she hated, even through the alcoholic haze. She got up so early, and as they began pretty much living together, he realized that she also stayed up way late. She was lucky if she got four or five hours of sleep a night. And it wasn't because she was working, correcting papers or writing lesson plans, but rather she was playing online games with her friends, or binging on Netflix, or even just reading.
He had put a stop to that within the first few work nights they'd spent together, instituting a ten o'clock bedtime, with lights out at eleven.
And she had spent the next week and a half or so getting nightly spankings for ignoring – or, as he defined it, defying – that rule.
But he had – eventually – agreed that, on weekends, or nights before days she had off, she could stay up as long as she wanted to.
Only You Page 7
