by Sharon Page
What else am I going to do? Swim home? But I’m stubborn. “I can’t. It’s not fair to you.”
“I want to spend winter break with you. That’s the most important thing to me.”
I don’t understand that. He couldn’t compromise when he was dating Lara. Why would he be willing to do it for me? That makes no sense.
The truth is I don’t want to go home. I know I shouldn’t stay, but I really don’t want to leave.
“Okay,” I breathe.
Chapter Seven
The next day, Jonathon and I take a boat in to the main island to watch a cricket match, shop, and have dinner. Cricket is fascinating, I don’t understand all the rules about batting and runs and overs, but it’s tremendously fun to sip tea and eat scones while watching.
We stop for some of the famous Christmas treats, including slices of Black Cake, a fruit cake where the fruit is soaked in rum for weeks. Some people soak their fruit for a year. Rum is also drizzled on the cake, with more rum added to the remaining pieces after slices are served.
After my second slice, I am buzzed. We drink a rum drink that has cream and crushed ice, and is topped with nutmeg—kind of an island eggnog.
The brilliant sunshine makes it seem surreal to have Christmas coming. It helps take away the homesickness of not having Christmas Day with my mom. This was the first year Dad wanted to have me visit for the holiday—but of course, now I won’t be there.
Shopping on the main island makes me nervous. I have the exact opposite problem of what I had with Ryan. Ryan was hurt because he felt I’d assumed he couldn’t afford a gift. I guess I did think that, and I didn’t want him to spend money he would need for school.
Jonathon can have anything he wants and his own personal fortune continues to grow. What can I get him for Christmas? I have no money and can’t even dream of buying him something expensive that will dazzle him.
I’d love to get something meaningful, but would that be too much too soon? If there was a sex shop, I could get him a new spanking paddle or a set of handcuffs, but since getting spanked proved to be an emotional roller coaster, it might not be a good idea.
We split up for an hour since he says he has something to buy on his own. I chew my thumbnail. Is this where he buys my gift? Wearing a large hat, jean shorts and a tanktop, I stroll one of the main shopping streets. Beautiful, inviting stores lure me to stop and look in the windows.
There are gorgeous clothes. Sparkling jewels. Delectable edible treats. I see the price tag dangling from one jewel-encrusted clutch bag, which is in a locked four-tier glass case in the window. I swallow hard. It costs more than my entire first year at Yardley.
As I watch, a pretty saleswoman with a dark brown complexion and long braids highlighted with strands of pink unlocks the case and takes out the clutch. I watch it sail away. But really, what would I have done with something like that? Lock it away out of fear of losing it.
“See something you like?” Jonathon’s deep voice washes over me.
I turn to meet his sexy smile, and my heart stutters.
“There are some beautiful things. It’s fun to just look,” I say brightly. I feel out of place. My mom stayed with my stepfather for years because she didn’t think she could support both of us alone. That was after she knew the truth. She asked me if it was okay with me if we stayed, as long as the abuse stopped.
What could I say? That I feel creepy, wrong, sad, weird? I didn’t want to force her into poverty.
Dad left anyway, for another woman, a couple of years after we’d made that bargain. And I got used to not having things. It became a matter of pride for me. I only wanted what I could buy myself. I wanted to be in charge of my own life, independent.
“What’s wrong?” Jonathon asks.
“Nothing.” I shake my head. “Just Christmas memories.” Then I smile. “Is there anything you like? Christmas is coming in just two more sleeps.”
“Or a dozen more fucks,” he teases.
“Is that all? I plan to fit in more than that. So what would you like for Christmas?”
“Nothing, Mia.”
“You must want something.”
“I don’t do Christmas,” he says. “Even before my mother died, my parents were never around for it. We had it with nannies.”
“That’s terrible. I love Christmas.” I did, even without money for gifts. My mom and I would buy stuff from Walmart—pens, cheap nail polish, discounted books, even stuff we needed like tape and dishwashing liquid—and wrap it up. I decorated my gifts for her to look as precious as Faberge eggs. We did it by saving paper and keeping bows and ribbons.
Jonathon slips his arm around my waist and leads me into one of the dress shops on the shopping strip.
I start to blush. A sales girl comes hurrying up. In a melodic accent, she says, “Can I help you?” She is far better dressed than me.
“I’m just looking,” I say awkwardly.
But Jonathon insists that I want to buy dresses and shoes. I panic as he describes what he wants in the dress I’m supposed to wear. As the salesgirl sashays off on her heels to do his bidding, I move close to him. “I can’t afford anything here.”
“I want to take you out tonight and I assume you didn’t pack a formal dress.”
I roll my eyes. “I don’t even own one, except for my prom dress.” And that was bought second-hand. “I wasn’t thinking beyond the beach and bed.” Even then, I blew my entire budget for January on bras and panties.
“Then let me buy you a gift.”
I shake my head fiercely. “That’s just…wrong. You’ve already brought me here, which I shouldn’t have let you do. I believe in paying my own way.”
“Stop being stubborn. Your pride is getting in the way. I want to do this for you.”
“It makes me feel owned.” But maybe that is the point? Is that part of a dominating personality? “All right, but I will pay you back.”
“No, you won’t.”
Now I understand how Ryan felt. My pride is provoked.
“I want to take you to the most exclusive place on the island for dinner,” Jonathon murmurs close to my ear, making me shiver. “There’s a waiting list of several months.”
“You booked months in advance?”
“I don’t need a reservation.”
“Why not?”
“I gave the chef the investment money to start his restaurant. I met him the second year I started spending Christmas here, when my father stopped coming to Azure.”
Once again, he surprises me. “You knew he would be successful.” Restaurants and bars are notoriously shaky investments and usually money pits. From what I’ve heard, Jonathon’s aren’t.
“I knew he deserved to be successful,” Jonathon says. “He proved me right. He works hard, his food is fantastic.”
Now I feel guilty if I don’t take the dress—I don’t want to show up Jonathon in front of the chef. That makes it about business. In a way, I’m letting him buy me a uniform. I’ll pay him back. Somehow.
Six dresses await me in the fitting room. Jonathon takes a seat to watch me when I parade out, and he’s given a flute of chilled champagne.
I pull on the first dress, which is black, satiny and slit up to the top of my thigh. Black shoes are provided—strappy, with five inch heels. I see the tag on the shoes and almost slither to the floor. $1500. The dress is $2000. Okay, I can’t pay this back.
Jonathon doesn’t like the dress when I come out and turn in front of the mirror.
We go through all six. Each one is a pure fantasy dress. I look like I should be on the Oscars’ red carpet. Six more are brought. In the end, Jonathon chooses a little black dress that costs the earth, yet transforms my body into a stacked arrangement worthy of a porn star. And somehow it’s classy at the same time. The second dress is a column of gold. Then he selects a third that is jade green, enhances my red-blonde hair, and even makes my freckles look cute. Matching shoes are selected, all the skyscraper heels.
&nb
sp; Back at the villa, I hang the dresses in my closet and arrange the shoes below them.
I love the dresses. Each one is beautiful. But Jonathon made the decision, not me. And that makes me feel wrong. Not like a whore, but like a gold digger—as if I’m willing to give up anything to be taken care of.
I want to be independent. Certainly, I never dreamed of marrying a rich guy and being given everything on a silver platter. Not when I’m an ordinary girl with a reasonable body, wild red hair, and freckles.
But mainly, I want to be independent because I have a brain and because I should aspire to be something.
“What’s wrong?”
I turn and face Jonathon. “I shouldn’t have taken these from you.”
“They are a gift.”
This is driving me crazy. Yes, I know they are a gift, but they still feel wrong. Every time I look at them. I think they should go back…but then what am I going to wear that won’t embarrass him?
That’s the problem, isn’t it? My poverty will embarrass him. He may want me, but I’m sure he doesn’t want the part of me that lives in a frosty, rented bungalow in Milltown.
I don’t even know what’s going to happen sexually between us tonight. He said no whippings, no spankings. He’s lived up to it so far.
I take a deep breath. “I don’t know if I can change, Jonathon. You don’t want to push me or rush me, but I don’t think I can ever change. I can’t do pain. That’s not who I am.”
But I’m not being honest. Something snapped in me when he started spanking me. I wanted it to hurt. I wanted him to hurt me.
And that terrifies me.
He was right. The spanking that was supposed to be playful was a trigger—a trigger for the most destructive emotional reaction I’ve ever had.
I don’t want to frighten him away with my fears and my issues. But I know that’s inevitable.
“I would have said I can’t do vanilla,” he says. “It’s not who I was.”
“Then we have an impasse, Jonathon. I can enjoy being tied up. Maybe I can get into a light spanking. But no further.” I sigh. I know it’s over. We’re going to spend five more days here just burying a relationship that can’t exist.
Then I think more about what he said. As if it was in the past tense.
Jonathon cups my cheek, then brushes it with his knuckles. Tenderly. “Mia, I would have said that before I met you. With you, I’m willing to give you all the vanilla you want.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know. I’ve always had my sex with bondage,” he muses. “Before this week, I’ve never done straight vanilla.”
That isn’t what I mean. I meant: why is he willing to change for me? But what he revealed stuns me. “How is that possible?” Jonathon strikes me as a man who lost his virginity young. There are traits in him that I recognize from the boys I knew who were sexually active at fourteen or thirteen.
“I was introduced to sex through bondage.”
I guess I can understand that. Though it makes me heart lurch. Consensually or not? I know if he wanted to tell me, he would, and his eyes look cool and shuttered. A question won’t get an answer, I can tell. But I’m too curious not to probe a little. “What about in high school? You really tied up girls in high school?”
He shrugs. “Girls went along with what I wanted of them. Several of them discovered they enjoyed the lifestyle and have stayed in it.”
“And you are really willing to try…normal sex for me?” I don’t know if normal is the right word, but he seems to get what I mean.
“I have already done it with you. It was…good.” He leans against the doorframe. Strokes his chin. Black stubble shades his strong, tanned jaw. He looks as if he is thinking intently. “We have time before dinner. How vanilla do you want to be?”
“Very.” I guess for Jonathon, ordinary sex is more unusual than BDSM and group sex is to most people.
Stripping naked, I draw back the satiny quilt and the silk sheets. I slide into the bed.
“I suppose you want me to be on top,” he says.
“Ooh yes,” I say playfully, since missionary with me on the bottom would be the most ordinary and vanilla sex possible.
His biceps flex as he pulls his t-shirt over his head. I love watching his broad, bare back. I’m also jealous—in just days, he’s tanned to a deep bronze. I have to use sunscreen or I burn.
Jonathon strips off his shorts. They’re swim style, and he’s naked underneath. Grinning, he goes to the door and clicks off the light.
I giggle. He curses as he fumbles toward the bed. “I did this to tease you, but the joke’s on me, damn it.” He bangs into the bedside table.
The bed creaks and moves as he jumps on it, landing beside me.
He gets on top of me, braced on his arms.
My eyes get used to the moonlight. Silver-blue light touches Jonathon’s sculpted cheekbones and his full lips, making his eyes glitter. I hear the soft tear of a condom packet.
Vanilla is amazing. The bed is soft beneath me, the sheets wonderfully smooth and cool. I love being able to slide my arms around his broad back. Hook my leg around his hips.
Beneath my fingers, his skin is warm and silk-smooth. Hairs dust his legs. His back muscles ripple beneath my hands.
I arch up and kiss his neck, tasting the light saltiness of his sweat and seawater. He smells of the island—of the water, the flowers, even a bit of chlorine from the pool. He pushes his cock down, presses it against my clit, slides its girth between my pussy lips. I’m wet so he sinks right in me. I gasp at being filled so quickly. He’s in me to the hilt, his groin pressing against mine.
Yes, this is so amazing.
He thrusts in me; deep, long thrusts. I wrap both my legs around him, hooking my ankles together at his low back. My arms lock around his neck. I find his rhythm, lifting to him.
With my legs wrapped around his waist and my ass high, he goes incredibly deep. So deep, my head lolls back and I moan fiercely. My fingers curl around his shoulders.
It’s good. I feel so close. Each plunge of his cock thrills me, delights my pussy, and strokes my clit. I’m going to come. I’m sure of it. I just have to work for it—
I feel it slipping away. I kiss his neck passionately, play with his chest, pinch his nipples, grab his ass, but I can’t get off.
I want to find his rhythm, and use it to take me there. For a long time, I’d never had an orgasm with a guy. I could only have one when I masturbated. But I came with Ryan (though I did stroke myself to do it), and I think I could because I loved him and trusted him.
Jonathon is the only guy who’s ever given me an orgasm.
It’s going to happen again. I’m sure it is.
Jonathon pumps harder. He’s fucking me so hard the bed jiggles and shakes. He’s lifting me off the bed. I run my nails down his back, suck his neck.
But I feel like I’m hovering over the bed, looking down at both of us. I can’t connect anymore. It’s just not going to happen.
Jonathon’s close. I can feel it in the speed and force of his thrusts and I feel it in the tension of his neck muscles under my fingers. He’s going to wait for me.
I arch beneath him, giving the performance of my life. I’m so convincing, my act almost makes me come, but I get to the peak and drop back before it happens. Still, I thrash and scream. Meg Ryan’s orgasmic performance is nothing on mine.
“Oh yes! Yes! It’s so good. You go so deep!” I babble all kinds of compliments.
Jonathon grunts. He freezes in mid-thrust. I’m sure I feel his cock swell, and I feel him get hotter. He’s coming, even though he barely shows it on the outside.
Then he reaches down, holds his condom in place, and withdraws.
Gently, he kisses the swell of my breasts. I’m damp with sweat. “Time for a shower, then we’ll get dinner.”
I have to know. “Do you like vanilla sex?”
“Yes, Mia.” He grins. “Due to you, I’m not a vanilla virgin anymore. Losing your
virginity is always a special thing.”
There’s a wry tone in his voice. I sit up, but he has gone into my attached bathroom, turning on the light. I hear the water run.
I wish he hadn’t said that. My loss of innocence wasn’t special. And I hate that it’s supposed to be such an important thing. I didn’t get to choose it.
He comes back out. “Want to join me in the shower?”
Since he wanted to shower alone before, this must mean something. I slip out of the bed. “Sure.”
***
Shower sex. I’ve fantasized about it, but never done it.
Jonathon is under the water in my shower, which is the smallest one of the villa. That’s because my bathroom has a sunken tub that’s large enough to swim laps in. The shower curtain is white, patterned with silver shells in an art deco design. I draw it back.
And put my hand to my heart.
I’ve seen Jonathon wet before, but to see water pounding his chest, running down his back, his ass, his long cock…
Wow.
He turns to face me, brushing his wet black hair back. It’s plastered down sleekly, and I have to giggle at the mini-waterfall running off his prick. Which starts to rise as I step under the warm blast of the water. He moves, holding my hand so I don’t lose my balance, and he positions me so I’m thoroughly massaged by the showerhead.
Then he bends and sucks my wet nipple. His fingers play with my pussy, which is wet and slick from the shower, and soaked from making love. Even though I didn’t come, I was really wet.
I reach down and wrap my hand around his cock. My palm glides along his thick shaft, lubed by the water.
“I’d love to kiss.” I say it because it’s part of my fantasy—hot French-kissing under the water. “I know you don’t do that, though.”
But suddenly he pulls me up against him and slants his mouth over mine. Searing, masterful, everything I dreamed. That’s Jonathon’s kiss. I swear his kiss could make me lose consciousness. I want to float forever in this amazing fantasy.
