“Oh God! Oh God!” she gasped. He said nothing, simply watching her with his keen eyes as her body trembled, her nipples stiff and erect upon her breasts.
At last, used to this first sensation, she slowly began to push herself further down. She was not able to take him in her completely—not even half of his shaft filled her now—but those few inches were bliss as she rose and fell oh so slowly. She was making strange, inarticulate noises, half whimpers, half groans, and he simply watched her. He was so hard, so stiff now, but he let her take control of him as she impaled herself on him, fucking herself to a trembling, churning orgasm.
After she had fallen forward upon him, her wet hair in his face, he held her tightly to his chest, still inside her. Then, kissing her, he gently rolled her sideways. She grimaced slightly as he came out of her, but she was still hungry for him despite the pain—indeed, because of it. Lying on her side, she gripped one of his hands tightly again as he used the other to guide himself to her anus once more.
She was breathing more frenetically now. “Oh God, oh God!” was all she could say at first, then: “Yes, do it! Do it! Fuck me. Please, Daniel. Fuck me!”
She was shaking again violently as he entered her, and she pulled down her free hand to stimulate her clitoris, rubbing all along her slit and sometimes slapping it as he very carefully penetrated her. His movements were slow and gentle, but the size of him stretching her with his thickness was almost too much. She shouted out, her eyes screwed tightly shut, but amidst all the pain came a trembling orgasm. When he, finally unable to hold on any longer, also came, ejaculating inside her, she thought that she would die there, the last sounds she heard her own cries and the water thundering beside them.
Chapter Twelve
Once more Kris’s dreams were filled with visions of the dark bird soaring overhead, a black smudge like charcoal against the deep blue of the heavens. She was lying on her back, naked, throughout her entire body a glorious, warm yearning in her muscles, her body used and completed.
Although in her art this creature was like Loplop, the bird superior, in her dreams it was simpler, a creature completely avian rather than half man, half animal. Whether it was an eagle, however, or a condor, or some other gigantic creature of prey she could not tell. All she could do was look up towards it, the grass and soil at her back, the great longing for it in her belly and loins.
Rolling over so that her face now lay down in the softness, she felt her dream arms searching out her sex, her breasts, her holes. Even in sleep she could not stop the lust that filled her, and she moaned softly as felt and squeezed and masturbated her body, the great bird flying above her, out of her reach.
When she woke, her hands were indeed exploring her naked form, her slender legs stretched out across the sheets that were rucked around her, her face half buried in the pillow. Her clitoris was sore beneath her fingers—she could not believe how it had been used the previous week, and she was sure that she would pay later for what must definitely be bruising inside her vagina. Added to which now her anus was also smarting.
God! How they had taken each other, again and again. Her free hand groped blindly across the bed, feeling for him, and she was sad when she realised that she was lying there alone. Yet that sadness was nothing compared to the realisation that yesterday had been the last day of her allocated freedom. It wasn’t fair!
Pushing herself up wearily and rolling over, her breasts hanging forward slightly as she rested her head on one raised knee, her pussy still somewhat moist despite all its irritation from having been battered so much, she looked around her at the bare, Spartan room. When first she had entered Comrie, she had been disappointed by its emptiness, but now she realised that she cared very little for what possessions she had accrued during her short lifetime.
It was funny, even though she had insisted that Daniel return her phone to her, she no longer particularly desired it. Without anywhere to recharge, and with no signal worth speaking of, what she previously considered her lifeline to friends, social media and all the ceaseless chattering of the world was revealed as little more than an empty vessel.
But perhaps the strangest thing was the realisation that, for more than a week now, she had not drunk at all. Kris was hardly a great fan of alcohol, especially considering what it had done to her father. And yet, more than she cared to admit, it was frequently a crutch throughout her daily life. Daniel’s frugal existence at Comrie, however, meant that she had to do without this and plenty of other daily supports and what previously she had considered necessary pleasures. He had, indeed, told her once that people frequently misunderstood true epicurean hedonism, being not a love of luxury but the fulfilment of pleasure in the simplest things.
And, indeed, with the one pleasure that she found with Daniel, for a crazy time Kris did even wonder whether she needed anything else in life. How quickly, she thought, she could retreat to the state of a noble savage if she was fulfilled so deeply, so often, by this strange man and his large, magnificent body. Simply thinking of how he had taken her again the previous night, becoming more and more dominant once she had finally submitted all parts of her to him, made her shudder and become wetter.
That was it! She settled on a plan. At the very least, she would return to Dalrigh, tell them that she had been overcome with illness, buy herself some more time. Perhaps, if she was lucky, she would find a way to be able never to return. Sod real life. She wanted desire for a change, not necessity.
She was, however, frowning now, wondering where Daniel had got to. Listening carefully, she thought she heard the sound of water splashing in the bathroom and, extending one bare foot onto the bare, wooden floorboards of the room (it had occurred to her that Comrie could be less than idyllic in the depths of midwinter), she carefully pushed her aching body up, bending slightly from the pleasantly excruciating discomfort in her midriff that came from having been so well and truly fucked.
When her legs had stopped trembling and she was able to walk, she slowly made her way to the bathroom. Daniel was standing there, naked and glorious as always, the subtle lines of his torso flexing a little as he moved one hand back and forth, his pre-tumescent cock hanging like a thick tube from his front, the sight of it and his tight buttocks having an effect on her like a salivating Pavlov dog. However, when she saw what he was doing she experienced a genuine shock.
With a bowl of cold water before him, Daniel was staring into a small, round mirror, and drawing a cut-throat razor across his chin and neck. From time to time he dipped one of his perfectly formed arms down to the bowl, shaking the razor free of suds in the water on which, Kris could see, a scum of froth and black hair was beginning to form.
The first time she had met him, she had disliked his beard. It was some mark of backwardness, a sign of his uncouthness. She had partly grown to like it merely because it was a part of him, and any imperfection—rather like the scars on his face—made him more admirable to her because it was a mark not of uncouthness, but of him and his nature.
More than this, however, she realised that such a change, something that in other circumstances would be of negligible significance, now indicated that a radical disturbance lay ahead of her. She felt a dreadful sickness in her abdomen as she watched him shaving, his chin and cheeks becoming smoother with each stroke. Something in the fool’s paradise she was beginning to create for herself was about to be transformed. Things were falling apart so that the centre would no longer hold.
“W-what are you doing?” she asked at last.
He half turned, his shoulders and back shifting in a delicious chiaroscuro in the morning light, and smiled at her, but said nothing, returning instead to his task of shaving.
“Why are you shaving?” Perhaps he had decided to ignore the idiocy of her question—after all, it was quite clear what he was doing, at least physically, even if the motives of his actions remained thoroughly obscure.
Still he did not answer, but concentrated on removing the last traces of his beard. Some of the curls o
f his hair were wet, plastered to his neck. As he picked up a towel and dried his face, Kris wanted to run across and grab hold of the bowel of water, to begin reapplying his bristles with her own fingers, to push them back into place, all the time telling him to stop.
When he turned to her fully, his chest broad, his abdomen still as rippling as it had been before, his legs solid and his cock dangling down to mid-thigh, all the same as before, yet he was a stranger to her. His mouth, certainly, was more handsome in an abstract way—the curve of his lips, their dark red slightly more pronounced—while the strong lines of his jaw were clearly revealed to him for the first time. Yet he was a stranger again. The scars had not shifted, and she had grown so used to them by now that she did not notice them—certainly with no repellence, occasionally drawing a finger across them softly. Why had merely shaving off his beard made such a difference?
Then she realised, the beard was just a sign. The real change was in his eyes.
Again, on one level these were the same, odd, hazel eyes, one pupil larger than the other, that had always been there—but they had never looked at her as they did now. Sometimes there had been hostility towards her, but from the first moment that Daniel Logan had seen her there had always been a flickering of desire, desire that so often since had blossomed as flourishing lust.
They were necessarily cold or contemptuous now, but they were closed to her.
“What do you think?” he asked, rubbing his chin with his fingers.
It was her turn not to reply. She wanted to shout out: I don’t like it. Grow it back! But she couldn’t speak. Her throat was tight, constricted as she watched him.
With a shrug, he walked past her out of the bathroom. She followed him, and saw him walk towards the wardrobe. For a second, he pulled an almost comical look of concentration as he fished behind the large, wooden structure, then she saw him pull out a key. When he opened the door, she was now not entirely surprised to see that the wardrobe was filled with suits and much more urbane clothes than those he had worn during the previous week.
He smiled at her—but the smile was guarded, cautious.
“It was fun while it lasted, don’t you think?” he said, reaching into the wardrobe for a white shirt which he began to pull across his shoulders.
What have I done wrong? Kris cried silently inside herself. Should I have resisted you more? Not given you what you wanted? Would that have made you need me more?
“I... I don’t have to go,” she told him in a quiet voice. “I could go to Dalrigh, phone them at work, spend a little more time here...”
He shook his head. For a second she thought she saw sadness in his eyes, real regret. But then he closed down again.
“No, that won’t be possible,” he said, his tones clipped and even callous once more. “I’m afraid real life calls—for me if not for you.”
“I thought you said our desires were real.”
At least he had the decency to look embarrassed at that. “Well, necessity then.” He was pulling on dark trousers now, the fabric rich and much more expensive than anything she had seen him in before, followed by a jacket.
Standing before her, he appeared more or less the vision of the perfect model, the suit cut to his broad shoulders exquisitely, flared in a little to emphasise his trim waist and hips, his legs even longer in the dark material. And he looked utterly cold and unreal to her.
“I don’t... I don’t know what to say,” she started to speak, her mouth forming into a sobbing wreck.
He crossed to her quickly. His eyes were cold now, calculating. “Don’t make this harder than it has to be. You knew deep down this day had to come. Let’s get it over and done with now. Don’t make a scene. Please. For your own sake, not mine.”
He was now almost fully dressed, pausing only to take out a pair of brightly shining, black leather shoes. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he put them and socks on his feet. Kris, still naked, her body crumpling in on itself slightly, her shoulders stooped forward and one hand unconsciously half-covering her breasts, the other across her pubis, watched him miserably.
“Is that old Land Rover of yours part of the act as well?” she asked.
“Not an act,” he said casually. “It’s more convenient here. But I’ll drive it down to Oban, leave it there before I fly on to Glasgow.”
“And where then?” she asked. He did not reply.
She paused. “Alfama,” she said, her voice low but the word pronounced loudly enough for him to hear her. Lacing up the second shoe, he froze for a moment and, for a second—less than a second even—his eyes flickered up and she saw something other than coldness in them. But then he returned his attention to his elegantly clad foot.
“Why on earth do you want to say that?” he asked.
“I don’t like this game,” she told him. “I want you to stop it. I want things to go back to how they were before.”
For a moment she was sure that his face reddened, but then he struggled to control his emotion. “It’s not a game. In any case, if you remember our agreement, the second time you used that word, things were over in any case. That was the law, remember.”
Then he stood up and walked past her, out of the room.
She wanted to scream at him, to shout at him, call him every name under the sun. Why are you doing this, you bastard? she wanted to howl. Why are you abandoning me—and why now? She was starting to collapse in on herself.
“You can leave when you’re ready,” he heard her call up. “Don’t worry about locking up. I’ve never used a key for Comrie. Nothing worth stealing here, and the place is far too desolate to appeal to your modern squatter.”
“Don’t go, please don’t go,” Kris said quietly. Her pride now would not allow her to call out, nor would it allow her to cry. Her eyes were burning red, but she refused to let her tears fall, for all that they seared her skin. Yet those few words could not help escaping.
Yet one tear did fall across her cheek, jolted from her when the front door suddenly banged and she jumped up. Running downstairs, she rushed to the front door and, still utterly naked, opened it to see Daniel climbing into the Land Rover. She was utterly torn then, her pride nailing her to the spot, preventing her from fleeing outside without any clothes on, flinging herself before the vehicle, humiliating herself completely, abjectly. Instead, she stood there and watched him drive away.
When, at last, the vehicle had crossed over the ridge that blocked any sight of Comrie from the main road, she turned and, utterly desolate, returned into the croft. She was crying now—could not help it. It didn’t matter in any case. There was no one here now to witness her absolute misery. She hated him for this, hated him and failed to understand how on earth he could behave this way.
Stumbling into the living room, she saw her keys placed on her drawing pad.
Chapter Thirteen
For an hour she had sat at Comrie, utterly miserable. For a while, she had even been unable to wash or dress, only covering herself when it was quite clear that Daniel wasn’t going to return. The love bites and scratches on her body, the bruises between her thighs where they had thrown themselves at each other, each of these marks now were accusations that all their passion was unreal.
Her tears had been brief. Anger and disgust were her overriding emotions now as she picked up the clothes she had brought with her, finally stuffing the pad into her bag and picking up her keys to leave. She had considered leaving it behind, but the drawings of the birdman, the swan and Leda, her own Loplop would, she suspected, become more important to her than this selfish, stupid man who had crashed across her life and then left. She could feel the old armour prickling over her body again, her limbs encrusting with their subtle defences, but it was not the same: more than anything now, she felt defiant. She had created, that was what was most important, and she would create again.
The return to Dalrigh was bittersweet. She had come to this place expecting nothing, and though she was full of indignation at the moment she also
knew that she had received much more than she could fully realise now. It would take time and reflection to understand fully what had happened here.
She was grateful that the place was so sparsely populated. As she collected her things and packed up, she was sure that the few inhabitants around Dalrigh such as Mary would be full of gossip about the visitor from London and her disappearance, but then she never had to come here again. The only person who mattered had gone, and more than anything at the moment she hated him.
The journey to the ferry would, under different circumstances, have been a pleasant one. The day was bright, and even the one shower that burst over the boat as it crossed to Oban was fresh. Yet she was stiff and buttoned up inside herself now. Whenever she closed her eyes images of Daniel appeared before her, his muscular body, his hands grasping hold of her, taking her, penetrating her. Great, she thought to herself wryly. A new flashback to replace the one that had so fucked her up before. She understood entirely the meaning of this one, however: it would just be something that she had to deal with.
She did not rest on the way back to London, other than to grab cursory meals on the way. As such, the long, long drive was exhausting and she did not arrive back at her flat in north London until the early hours of the next day. She was strangely buoyant, however. This particular feat had pushed her harder and longer than she expected herself capable of, like so many things that had happened on the previous two weeks.
Not that she was particularly glad to be home. Her small apartment—with its solitary bedroom and poky living area and kitchen—was much smaller than Comrie, which itself was hardly palatial. Nonetheless, she smiled grimly to herself: because he was married, Mark had often insisted that they meet here (which fact did not prevent him making disparaging comments about her living arrangements). Before going to Scotland, she had mooned around the place, seeing him sitting in a chair or lying in the bed, waiting for her to bring him a meal. Whatever else the two weeks had done for her, they had revealed Mark Travis for precisely the little man that he was in every sense of the word.
Fractured Crystal: Sapphires and Submission Page 11
