“Mara also lives in your complex.” Amie reached out and traced a fingertip along one line of the rope harness. “Although it doesn’t seem to be keeping me from Mystery Dinners.”
The gentle pressure of that one finger was enough to jolt Dru’s attention back to what they were there for. “Or any number of stupid cat videos.”
Amie hooked the finger around the lowest loop of rope and pulled Dru closer, until they were face-to-face. “Your place has much better internet.”
“So, better for streaming porn, then?” Dru half whispered against Amie’s chin. They were both barefoot, and without the competing heels, she was about two inches shorter than Amie. She had to look up a tiny bit—the perfect amount—to meet Amie’s gaze.
“So much better.”
Dru couldn’t help herself. “For sex . . . things?”
“Oh God, shut up.” With a final yank, Amie closed the gap and kissed her.
Finally.
It wasn’t a challenge, a lipstick-destroying reminder of power exchanges past. It wasn’t one of the perfunctory smacks or shy brushes Amie had given her during their scene a few weeks before. It was deep and long, and tasted like relief, like water on a parched throat.
More than taking or giving pain, more than restraint, more even than laughing at the same places in the same stupid videos, this was what Dru missed. Lips on hers, an arm wrapped comfortably around her waist, one hand moving to the small of her back, another to the base of her neck. Being wrapped up in another person so completely that her senses grew saturated with them. With Amie’s familiar taste and the same honeysuckle shampoo and scent she’d been using forever. With the just-right pressure of her hands and lips. And yes, the nip of pain when kissing inevitably turned to biting. This time Dru gave that back, bearing down on Amie’s lower lip until Amie squealed and stomped her foot. Her body shook with silent laughter, though, and she worked her hand up into Dru’s ponytail and yanked it firmly. Dru let up, licking the wounded spot, regretting nothing.
“I don’t think anybody’s ever bitten me before.” Amie moved her lips to the safer zone of Dru’s neck, nuzzling until she found a good spot there to sink her teeth into.
A very good spot, one Dru felt all the way down to her toes, then right back up to her pussy. She clutched at Amie’s shoulders as she gasped, “Pretty sure that’s a line from a cheesy vampire movie.”
Amie didn’t answer. She was too busy suckling at the bite mark, gnawing, tugging, probably creating the mother of all hickeys. Dru didn’t care. She owned turtlenecks. Or, fuck it. She owned a kink club. She could wear her Dom’s marks out for anyone to see if she felt like . . .
Back off. Slow your roll, missy.
Turtleneck. Right. Friends. Friends with ropes and kissing. And whips. And probably finger-banging. Which were all fantastic benefits. Of friendship.
She gave up trying to play a passive role and snuck her hands down, then under the hem of Amie’s shirt. It took some doing. Today’s look was a long, loose yoga top, so Dru had to pull it up several inches to reach the bottom of it. But at last she met success, and her hands found a clear band of smooth skin over firm muscles. Amie moved her attention to Dru’s breasts, creating some space between them, and Dru took advantage of the opportunity to pull the shirt up. Barely pausing, Amie grabbed it and whipped it off, then continued the line of delicate kisses all around the perimeter created by the ropes. So soft, so distracting, Dru was lulled into a false sense of security and didn’t even notice Amie’s hands until they made a sneak attack on her already-hard nipples.
The first pinch made her squeak; the second made her sigh as the pain seeped into her soul, sharp and sweet. “More.”
“Topping from the bottom again.” But Amie took a nipple between her teeth and bit right to the edge of safety.
“Yesssss . . .”
Her brain was shifting gears, moving into subspace, hastened along by the ropes and the anticipation. But she had work to do first. Amie’s sports bra fastened in the back, four big utilitarian hooks—and it was perfectly fitted, too, none of that cheap box-store crap. No bouncing boobs allowed. So Dru freed them, chuckling through a hiss of pain as Amie shook the straps off and the movement jostled her teeth. Amie let go but only to suck the nipple into her mouth, hard enough to sting even if she hadn’t bitten the crap out of it. It was too much for a second, and Dru automatically tried to push against Amie’s shoulder. Amie grabbed the rope harness for leverage, using her hands to twist the slack out of it, tightening it painfully against Dru’s skin, then letting go only to twist it somewhere else.
By the time Amie released the tortured nipple, Dru’s toes were curled and her stomach tensed in protest against the pain. Bliss and shock raced side by side through her veins, and she clutched Amie as much for balance as for connection.
“More,” she insisted, choking out the word. “God, and take your pants off.”
“What the actual fuck?” Amie wriggled out of her capri-length yoga pants, taking her thong along for the ride, but then captured Dru’s wrists and held her hands away, using her greater strength and size to keep Dru from closing the gap between them again. “Who’s running this show?”
“The monkeys? Wait, no, that’s the circus.” Dru fought in vain to pull free of Amie’s iron grasp. She needed this, and she needed them not to keep stopping. Needed the flow so she could lose herself in it. She wasn’t sure why her toppy side kept popping up, but she was far enough along not to want to pause and analyze it. “Can we keep going and talk about it later?”
“Ugh, fine, but you really do need to get back into practice. And you can’t tell anybody about this or my rep will be shot.”
As soon as Amie released her, Dru grabbed a handful of Amie’s ass and squeezed hard, relishing the look and sound of startled pain. It hit then that Amie had correctly identified the problem, although she was probably only echoing Dru’s excuse from last time. Dru really was out of practice. She’d been mostly topping for the past six years—well, except for the past year and a half or so, when she hadn’t done much of anything kinky—and this was her habit now. Even if it hadn’t been her primary mode before, it had grown stronger through use. Like a muscle. And her subby side had atrophied, so it would need time and work to rehabilitate.
If this became a thing between them, she’d think about that work. But right now . . . less thinking, more of whatever they could do to each other.
Amie used the rope harness as a handle again, starting to wrestle Dru to the ground, then held up a hand. “Wait. Club floor. Gross.” She dashed—boobs bouncing oh so merrily—to her bag and pulled out the fluffy throw, spreading it out, then snapping her fingers imperiously. “Get those buns over here, Stasevich. Now.”
Dru weighed her options. She could rush in . . . but there was a very real chance Amie would flip or flatten her with some sort of krav maga or capoeira superhero move. Instead she went for a slow, arrogant saunter, and a last-minute tickle offensive.
Which failed epically.
“Oh, you are so going to regret that,” Amie said, sounding happier than she had all night, as she snagged the rope harness and spun Dru in a heady three-quarter turn. Then she did a tricky move with her foot, and sort of dipped Dru, and somehow they ended up on the ground with Amie sitting and Dru facedown over her lap. The first spanks landed literally before Dru had figured out which way was up. The first of many. Hard ones too, right from the start. “Not big on the role-play, babycakes, but I definitely know when somebody’s being a bad, bad girl.”
That called for a snappy comeback, but “Owwwww!” was all that came out on Dru’s first effort. She kicked her feet a few times, then tried again. “You win this time, Templeton, but I’ll be back!” She raised a completely nonthreatening fist, shaking it maybe a foot from the floor.
When Amie burst out laughing, Dru took advantage of the break in spanking to slither backward and sink her teeth into the meatiest part of Amie’s inner thigh. So much firmer than she wa
s used to. She dialed it back, not wanting to break the skin by accident, but Amie was still howling in protest. “Motherfucker. Stop that! That isn’t how this goes. When did I say you could do that?” She leaned over and landed another series of blows to Dru’s ass, switching from cheek to cheek.
“When we were negotiating,” Dru mumbled around a mouthful of delectable Pilates-toned thigh. “You said everything we’d talked about could be reciprocal. I thought you were cool with it.”
“I meant the sex stuff! Jeez.”
Dru pulled away, leaving a kiss before abandoning the spot entirely. “Do I have to stop? Because this is really doing it for me right now.”
Amie sighed dramatically, rolling her eyes. “I didn’t say you had to stop. I know what the safeword is, Dru. You were the one who wanted to keep going.” She made a “move it along” motion with her hand.
Huh. “Okay. Thank you. Carry on.”
“Don’t fucking tell me what to do!” And Amie resumed the spanking, and Dru picked a new spot to bite. Eventually Amie wrestled free and rolled Dru under her, attacking her with kisses and the same tickling Dru had attempted earlier. Dru regained the upper hand when she managed to flip them to the side and wriggle low enough to nip Amie’s breast—not nearly as hard as Amie had nipped hers, but hard enough that Amie started flicking Dru’s cheek and pulling individual hairs tighter into Dru’s ponytail until she finally capitulated. She let Amie roll her over again, and accepted the smug grin of victory, along with the slow slide of Amie’s hand between their bodies.
Amie paused with her fingers an inch or so from Dru’s clit. “Hold that thought, don’t move.”
Dru whispered, “Don’t fucking tell me what to do,” but she held perfectly still as Amie retrieved a pair of black polypropylene gloves from the bag she must have gotten out along with the blanket, and smoothed them onto her hands. “Sexy.”
“Isn’t it?” Amie crawled back on top of her, finding her place. “You can’t snap them like the latex ones, but you can feel more through them and they don’t have that smell.” She used one leg to spread Dru’s and propped herself up a few inches, dragging her fingertips in a lazy arc through the hair directly above Dru’s slit.
It was an agony of not-quite-enough, and Dru never wanted it to end. She reached for Amie, pulled her down for a kiss, then moaned into her mouth as Amie worked her hand lower and pressed against Dru’s clit.
It could never be that simple, not for either of them. The moment of pleasure was followed by a sharp sting—Amie yanking hard on a pubic hair. Then another slow circle around the clit. Then another yank. And back and forth, until Dru’s whole world was narrowed down to the few square inches of her body that Amie had turned into a battleground in the war between pleasure and pain.
Pleasure won. It always did in the end. Amie slipped two fingers inside Dru—she forgot the lube, but she didn’t need any by then—rocked her palm against Dru’s clit, and Dru came hard and long to the grinding tempo Amie set for her.
By the time Dru caught her breath enough to start returning the favor, she realized Amie was nearly there without her, kneeling over Dru’s leg with two or three gloved fingers working her pussy while she rubbed tiny, frantic whirls around her clit. Dru pushed herself up to a sitting position as Amie came with a soft cry. She ran her fingers down Amie’s arms, watching her finish.
Amie looked up, apparently startled by the touch. And not in a great way. She shuddered through the rest of her orgasm, then sat back on her heels, panting, bracing her hands behind her. “Wow.”
“Same. I would have been happy to do that for you.” Dru nodded downward, eyeing Amie’s still-flushed folds. Waxed, which was new since college.
“Oh, I know.” Amie blew out a noisy breath through pursed lips—an old habit from the days when she’d worn her hair in layers and it tended to get in her eyes. “But I was ready to go right then, so. I went for it.” When she stopped talking, her jaw tightened. It was the end-of-discussion face.
Some instinct kept Dru from reaching out and stroking Amie’s pussy, or offering another round. Or even going in for a cuddle, which she could have used right then. But not the kind she feared she’d get from Amie if Amie wasn’t into it—the quick, slightly-too-hard squeeze, the brisk rub up and down the back, then the sense that Amie was trying to figure out how long she needed to keep it up. “If I tell you something, will you tell me something?”
Amie sighed and stretched, shifting her legs around to crisscross them. “Sure, I guess.”
It would be hard, Dru knew, but it wasn’t going to get any easier. “Okay. So the reason, I think, that I’m out of practice and reverted to topping was . . . I was in a relationship in Seattle. For, uh . . . like, five years. And for a while at the beginning, maybe a year, we had a third and he was the alpha top. But then it was just the two of us, and I was the top, which was a better dynamic for us. And we’d fallen in love by that point. So after another year we, you know . . . got married. Because it was legal in Washington state by then.”
“You were married?”
Dru understood the surprise, but she couldn’t stop to address it until she’d finished. “So Padma—my wife—was an accountant, but she also owned a club, which was actually where we’d met. I’d started managing it. She and Trip—the guy, the other top—owned it together. So anyway, that was . . . a really great few years. And then, about two and a half years ago, she . . . um. Okay, have you seen that movie Beaches?”
Amie looked at her like she’d gone nuts. “With Bette Midler? Yeah, I’ve seen it, but—”
“So sometimes when you get a virus or a bacterial thing like strep, even strep throat? It can cause that heart condition. Cardiomyopathy. And the thing is, it’s pretty rare. And Padma, she was . . . she used the word fat but I’ve never felt comfortable with that. But she wasn’t thin, anyway. So, if you aren’t thin and you go to the doctor because you’re suddenly short of breath and tired all the time, and your ankles are swelling, and you have this thing that feels kind of like heartburn or gas but worse . . . the first thing they do is not run a thorough diagnostic check on your heart function.”
Comprehension was dawning on Amie’s face. “They say to find somebody like me. Don’t they?”
Dru nodded. “All they see is fat. And they assume there’s overeating and a rotten diet involved, and a general lack of fitness. Because God forbid anybody should dare be a size fourteen when they’re five foot six, right? So they didn’t check her heart, past a quick listen with a stethoscope in the GP’s office. The GP told her the pain was indigestion, and the swollen ankles were from too much salt in her diet, and recommended a better diet and more exercise and basically said that if she dropped a bunch of weight that would fix her.”
“Oh my God.”
“Yeah. And it . . . didn’t.” She closed her mouth, tightening her upper lip as she breathed out slowly, willing the tears not to fall. She could do this now, get through this story calmly, but it had taken her a long time to get there. Through experience, she’d learned that if she started crying now, she’d lose it; the secret was not to start. Power through. “Another few months went by, she went back in, got the same story even though she actually had lost a bunch of weight since she was barely eating by then. Because, as we all learned after she wound up in the ER a few months after that, she had cardiomyopathy. It was pretty severe, and at the end she went downhill too quickly to get her on the transplant list and find a match. It was five months to the day after the diagnosis. But—” she slapped her hand against her thighs and exhaled more sharply “—she made me promise that I would follow through with our big plan. Which was to move back to the East Coast like we’d always talked about, and start a new club out here. And that after a year I would get back out there and start . . . playing, dating, whatever. Trying. So I’ve kept those promises. And that, all of that, is the reason I haven’t done much bottoming lately and am out of practice.”
In the silence that followed, Dru ran
her fingers through the fluffy nap of the blanket under her. Every part of her touching the blanket was warm; the rest of her was too cool again, as the sweat evaporated and the sex glow faded. Goose bumps on her boobs. Amie not saying a word. For one surreal moment, she had the sensation the scene hadn’t happened at all yet . . . they were right back where they’d started.
Amie’s face had gone cold about halfway through Dru’s explanation. She was aware of every muscle in her cheeks, around her mouth, as she tried to work out what kind of reaction was the right one to show—what could possibly be the right way to respond to news like that? There was nothing right about it. She had no idea how to feel except awful. So many kinds of awful it was impossible to sort it all out.
Widow.
Dru was a widow. Which was a word Amie had only ever had to apply to old ladies. The youngest widow she knew was fiftysomething, and even that case had seemed like a special tragedy. Her husband had died of a massive heart attack at fifty-two and everybody had said, “so young, too young.” That was what a young widow looked like.
Dru was . . . a queer Danielle Steel heroine.
And Amie was under no illusion that she was the lesbian equivalent of the nice dude who could romance a widow out of her grieving period through patience and kindness. Or whatever it was the heroes did in those books. She hadn’t read one in a long time. Or even an actual romance book where nobody died—not since Mara had introduced her to fan fiction. Which was free, and sometimes even had girl-on-girl action.
She knew she had to respond, so she finally went with honesty. “I have no idea what to say.”
“Heh.” Dru’s mouth curled philosophically. “That’s refreshing. There’s only so many ways people can say, ‘I am so sorry’ before it starts to feel like . . . Okay this is really, really terrible. But one of the last in-jokes Padma and I had together—and what’s terrible is that it came true—was how many times I was about to hear those words, and how people would try to mix it up. You know. I . . . am so sorry. I am . . . so sorry. I am so sorry. I am so sorry.”
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