She stared at the violin case like I was holding out a tarantula.
“It’s assembled and stringed,” I said. “I’d like you to play it so I can see if any adjustments need to be made.”
She cast an annoyed look around the corridor, then led me into one of the soundproof warmup rooms behind the stage. The room wasn’t that big, so we were suddenly alone, and close.
“I told you, you didn’t have to do this.” She took the case, but didn’t open it.
“I did have to do it. By the way, the instrument you’re playing now is a piece of shit. You didn’t buy that, did you?”
“I’m borrowing it,” she said through tight lips.
“Good. Give it back. I’ll have the Pressenda delivered to your apartment tomorrow.”
“Stop.” Her voice was sharp, even if she looked at the floor instead of me. “Stop trying to shove your kindness shit in my face.”
“This isn’t ‘kindness shit,’” I said, my own temper sparking. “This is a nice fucking violin that I spent many hours making for you, because you deserve to have the best fucking violin in the world. Now I need you to play it for me, so I can finish the goddamned thing.”
Her stubborn features crumpled, and she burst into tears, hugging the case against her chest. “I miss you,” she said.
“I miss you too. Come here.”
I took her in my arms, the violin case wedged between us.
“I don’t mean to be a bitch,” she murmured against my shoulder. “I don’t know why I’m angry with you. I mean, I know why, but I still love you. I can’t believe you still made me a violin.”
“I told you I would.”
She drew away from me. I held the case while she wiped at tears, then she sat in one of the two chairs in the small room. I sat in the other and took out the instrument I’d built for her.
“It’s only partially glued, so it’s delicate,” I said, handing it to her. “You don’t need to play that much. Just enough for me to see the way…” The way to finish it. Were we finished, Lala Nyquist and I? There was a new and uneasy tension between us. It would probably always be there, because I hadn’t had the strength to keep my dick in my pants.
“This is so pretty, Milo.” She ran a finger along the edge of the fingerboard, and around the curve of the lower bout. “It’s so beautiful.” She gazed at the trim I’d placed along the center of the scroll and plucked one of the strings. I could see her tumbling into love with it, and it made everything that came before this moment worthwhile.
“I used those strings you like,” I said. “The heavy-gauge gut. They’ll take a while to stretch, but they’ll suit this instrument’s tone.”
“You thought of everything.”
She was still gazing at it, like a mother at her newborn child. I nudged her knee with mine. “Play it, Alice. Let’s hear how it sounds.”
She looked teary again, but she collected herself and lifted the violin to her shoulder, positioning it beneath her chin. I watched to be sure it fit comfortably, that my measurements had been accurate. She settled right into it. “Nice,” she said. “Hand me my bow?”
I gave her the bow she’d used for tonight’s performance. I imagined she had bought that, because it suited her tone and playing style far better than the violin she’d borrowed. She closed her eyes before she drew it across the strings in an open A.
“It might need a little tuning,” I said.
“It’s fine.”
She played a few more notes, gently turning the pegs and using the tuners to get the tone she wanted. I watched her expression as she played a short violin piece by her favorite composer, Vivaldi. The fit was true, and the sound she produced lifted the hair on my arms. It was that amazing. This new instrument was as good as the Grapeleaf, or better, and it wasn’t even finished yet.
“Oh, Milo,” she said when she lifted the bow.
She was in love with the violin. I couldn’t give her everything she wanted from me, but I could give her this. She touched my hand, like words were beyond her. “How did you do this?” she finally asked. “It’s perfect.”
“Because I know you. I know what you need.”
I meant the words in reference to the instrument, but in the small room, with the emotions flowing, they sounded dangerously sexual. She turned the instrument over in her lap, trying to hide the blush that her Nordic skin always gave away. Then her eyes widened.
“Oh, wow.”
“What?”
She touched the back, traced her fingers over the small heart I thought I’d hidden so well in the maple and varnish. “There was a heart shape like this in the grain of my old violin. That’s kind of amazing, to have it happen twice.” She looked up at me then. My face must have given me away. “You did this? You made the heart?”
“Yes.”
“To make it look like my old one?”
I laughed, a rueful, self-conscious sound. “I had a small hand in making your Grapeleaf, Alice. When I was alone in the studio with it, applying varnish, I hid a heart on it too. My father never knew.” I paused, thinking of the many times he and my mother had pushed me toward Alice. “Or maybe he did. Anyway, it shouldn’t affect the tone.”
She blinked down at the heart. “Why didn’t you tell me you put a heart on the Grapeleaf? Why didn’t you show me? It would have made it more special to me.”
I laughed again. “You were in love with some other boy then, some adolescent Swedish beefcake. I couldn’t compete.” I’d been skinny and pimply well into my twenties, and always so dark against her joy and lightness. Her perfection.
She shook her head. “I wasn’t in love with that guy. Puppy love, maybe, but only because you were out of reach.” She traced the back of the violin, noting all the care I’d taken to create smooth, solid resonance in the fluid lines. “Thank you for this. For everything.”
“I hope it brings you a lot of money when you sell it. I’ll have it done in a couple weeks, if you want to line up some buyers.”
She gave a half-tearful laugh. “You know I’m not selling it. I’m going to have to find an apartment with a fire and explosion proof chamber built in, because if I ever lost this thing, it would kill me.”
She handed back the violin, and I put it in the case I’d also fashioned especially for her, or, at least, her instrument. She put away her bow and we stood to move toward the door, but we bumped into each other in the cramped space. I reached to steady her, smiling. She gazed back at me, not quite smiling.
I wasn’t sure what happened then. A spark, a need, a re-ignition of the pull we couldn’t shake. I cupped her face between my hands, pressing my fingertips to the lattice of her braids as our lips connected. Be gentle. Show her you’re not the monster she’s heard about. But I was that monster, and she shredded my control.
She whimpered at my violent kiss, and gave it back in kind. I was still holding the violin, she was still clutching her bow. The shit violin she’d played earlier was somewhere at our feet, so I couldn’t shove her to the ground and rip off her clothes even if I wanted to. We were in a soundproof room, and I wanted to make her scream, but this wasn’t the time or place.
“We need to talk,” I said, nudging her away.
“No. Talking won’t change anything.” She pulled me close again, staring in my eyes. “We need to take the leap and be done with it. Enough is enough.”
Chapter Fourteen: Alice
Blue yipped with pleasure when Milo escorted me into his living room, but neither of us stopped to pet him. We stashed the instruments on the kitchen counter, out of the reach of a certain dog’s curious, wet nose.
“Bedroom or dungeon?” Milo asked.
That was a stupid question. The dungeon was the place he could be himself, and the place our sparks really flew. “Take me to your dungeon, and show me more things,” I told him.
He hustled me down the hall. “Do you remember the safe word?”
“I’ve been dreaming about it,” I said, which was the truth
We went inside and he flicked on the lights, more than he’d put on the first time. We undressed, shedding our clothes, eager to get naked together. I’d wanted to see him again for so long, unable to get the image of his nude glory out of my mind. The olive-toned muscles. The broad shoulders. The already-hard cock. It was then, as I stared at his huge, hard shaft, that I remembered there would be pain to pay to get what I wanted.
I looked around the dungeon, seeing it with new eyes. I thought he’d played hard with me before, but it had been, apparently, just a taste of what he was into. Would I survive this next encounter? I hoped so, because I wanted more. More of him, more of his urges, more of his hot, wicked perversions.
“Milo,” I said, holding out a hand when he tried to kiss me again. “I want you to know that I—I want to try—I want to try what you like, but I’m not only doing it for you. I’ve fantasized about the things we’ve done together. I’ve masturbated to the memories so many times.”
He gazed at me. “You have?”
“Yes, so please, don’t worry that you have to hold back. I have the safe word if I need it, and I trust you.”
“It’s not that easy, to just trust me.” He fisted his cock. “What if you hate something I do to you? What if it makes you hate me?”
“Then I’ll safe word my way out of things. But I really think I’ll enjoy whatever you do.” I wanted to pinch my own nipples, hurt my own breasts, out of anticipation. I wanted to squeeze my own pussy, which was already dripping wet, just from the intent look on his face. “Please, Milo. Let’s try.”
He came at me so fast, I didn’t have time to step back before he took my face between his hands. “I love you so much, Alice. What is it about you? Why are my feelings for you so strong, so fucking voracious that I hate myself?”
“Don’t hate yourself.” I gazed at him in entreaty. “Tie me up. Hurt me.”
He made a feral-sounding growl in his throat and led me to the X-shaped St. Andrew’s Cross. He put my back against the slightly angled structure, and I stared at him as he bound my arms above my head, one wrist to each crosspiece, and then bound my elbows as well. The position forced my breasts out, bringing a delicious feeling of vulnerability. My legs were bound next, first at the ankle and then just above my knees.
I could wiggle—a little—but I couldn’t escape, no matter how I moved my hands or danced on my toes. Milo watched me, a glint of satisfaction in his gaze. He loves when you struggle, I thought. He loves that you can’t get away.
“How does that feel?” he asked.
“Wonderful. And scary.”
He lifted one of his dark brows. “Good. Now, less wonderful, and more scary.” His eyes were dark too, on fire. “Since you’re willing, we’re going to try some new, interesting things. A few more painful things.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“We’ll see if you like them. Well, if you can take them without safe wording.”
My voice quavered. “O-okay.”
He went to his row of storage cabinets, opened a long drawer, and took out a clear Lucite rod. It was thin, even bendy. Almost pretty. He returned to the front of me and tapped it against one of my nipples.
I yelped. God, it stung. He tapped the other and I started flailing around. “Too much?” he asked.
It kind of was, but I shook my head because I wanted to challenge myself. I wanted to get to the magical place where the pain started to feel good. He laughed and put down the Lucite tool, and went for a small, braided leather whip. It didn’t look any friendlier, and when he flicked it against my stomach, I let out another cry of alarm at the hot pain. “How does that feel?” he asked.
“It…it stings, Sir.”
“Stand still for it,” he said, but I couldn’t. I danced on my toes, twisting my torso as far as I could while he flicked each of my breasts.
“You’re not being very still.” He was enjoying this, lecturing me, frightening me. I wondered what else was in those drawers. “I think I have a solution for your problem.”
He crossed in my line of sight to another cabinet of scariness. When he opened the door, I got an eyeful of metal dildos and anal plugs in graduating sizes. At first, I thought he intended to plug me, but he brought a dildo instead, thick and hard, about eight inches long, wider at the bottom and tapering toward the top. Not quite as big as his cock, but almost.
“What is that for?”
“Hush.”
He was rubbing it with lubricant, and I saw that the base had a small, flat flange. “Hips forward,” he said, making me arch them away from the cross as much as my bonds would let me. As soon as I did so, he attached the dildo to the cross with a metallic click.
I knew by now what was happening, how he intended to stop me from squirming around. “I’ll try harder to be still, Sir,” I began, as he nudged my hips back. My asshole stretched around the solid metal tip.
“You know what to do,” he said, ignoring my words. “Sink back on it. It’s well lubricated.”
“I can be still on my own. I promise I’ll be more still from now on.”
“Yes, you will, with this in your ass.”
Oww… My legs tensed as I eased back onto the dildo. It wasn’t unbearable pain, but it was uncomfortable and humiliating. He lifted my chin, forcing me to look in his dark brown eyes as I bit my lip and whimpered. How stern he could look, and how sexy it made him. It made the pain a tiny bit easier to bear.
“Good enough,” he said. “That’ll keep you where you’re supposed to be.”
Between the shaft in my ass and the bonds around my arms and legs, I felt dangerously controlled—and aroused. I’d been able to move a little before; now any movement made the shaft slide in my asshole, creating a clit-aching feeling of sexual slavery. Oh God, I wanted sex. I wanted to be fucked, and not just by a metal dildo. I stared at his hard, bobbing cock, wondering how long he’d make me wait.
He turned away and went for something else to torment me with. I closed my eyes, afraid to look. When he pinched my nipples, my worst fears were realized. He held a pair of wicked looking black clamps.
“If you want to be with me, Alice, you have to get used to these.” He dangled them in front of my eyes. “I use them almost every time, because it’s a really fast way to make you hurt. These are going to hurt more than the last ones, okay?”
“Yes, Sir.”
His quiet warning did nothing to prepare me for the burst of torment when he applied the first clamp. They weren’t just strong, they were heavy. I gasped, struggling against the pain, getting fucked by the dildo in my ass because I couldn’t keep still. I tried to twist away from the other clamp, but of course, that was impossible. He gave me a sympathetic look that was nonetheless pleased. “I know, they’re awful,” he said. “They’re called clover clamps, and they come in bigger sizes, for the record. I won’t leave them on longer than ten minutes or so.”
Ten minutes? I needed them off now. I could have safe worded. It would have ended the pain of the nipple clamps, at least, but just as I thought of the word Lala, something kicked on in my brain, something that had me clenching my asshole and pussy, hovering on the edge of an orgasm. I exhaled in short, jerky bursts, caught between terror and a horrid kind of ecstasy.
Then the whip was back, flicking my upper thighs, my hips and stomach, my breasts, making any chance at an orgasm disappear. I cried out at each blow, then sobbed a plea as they grew progressively harder. He ignored me, because I wasn’t supposed to beg for mercy. His only reaction was a concentrated smile. I fucked myself on the dildo as a kind of soothing mechanism, because it hurt less than being whipped. The indignity of it made tears well in my eyes.
When he stopped, I sagged against the cross, as much as the dildo would let me. “I know,” he said, placing the whip beneath my chin to tilt my head up for another kiss. “It hurts, doesn’t it? But you’re feeling pleasure too.” As he said this, he slid his hand down and parted my pussy lips. I was so wet, so sopping drenched, that I felt humiliated anew. “Maybe this thing between us, Alice…” he said, his lips against my temple. “Maybe we have a chance.”
I nodded, because I couldn’t speak. Every time I moved, the clamps swung, making me tremble at the renewed pain. I felt stinging, hot lines all over my body from the whip. He hadn’t been as gentle as last time, I guess because I wasn’t a beginner anymore. I’d finally calmed myself down when he put down the whip and picked up the Lucite implement again.
“I won’t hurt you,” he said, tracing over some of the hot spots he’d already left. “Not that badly.”
He didn’t hit me with the Lucite rod at first. Instead, he slid it along my stomach and down between my pussy lips. It glazed over my clit, slick and hard, and I arched my hips, straining to feel it again, fighting against the shaft in my ass.
“Oh, you like that?” he murmured. “Feels good?”
I made a garbled noise of assent.
“You’re such a maso. But I should have known.”
He drew the rod back and smacked my clit with it, a sharp explosion of pain. “Oh God,” I whispered. “Oh God, Oh God.”
“God’s not listening right now. Only me.” He slid it along my clit again, and the feelings of pleasure warred with dread of the flick that would surely follow. Even so, I couldn’t help grinding against it. The clamps swung from my nipples, with biting, dull pain.
“What a good girl you’re being,” he said. “Let’s take a break for a minute. Let your hair down.”
His fingers ran along my scalp, separating my painstakingly neat braids into loose tendrils that tickled my temples and cheeks. It was a soft, gentle feeling, in contrast to the other pain he was visiting on me. Every few strands, he stopped and kissed me, sometimes softly, sometimes with violent passion or a frightening bite.
“Are you ready for more?” he asked, when all my braids were unraveled.
“My nipples hurt, Sir. They hurt a lot.”
“I know.” He brought the rod up with a crisp thwack between my pussy lips, then flicked the bare skin above my mons as I bobbed on my toes. “Ow, ow, ow.”
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