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Ever Unknown by Charlotte Stein
The email looked like nothing at all, really. No fancy fonts, no exclamation points—red or otherwise—nothing with any urgency in the subject line. Just the words, ‘for your attention,’ without a capital letter amongst them. Followed by a few abrupt sentences about nothing in particular. Molly Hunt had read a thousand like it before, and never batted an eye. But she batted an eye for this one. Oh, she batted an eye, all right. Mainly because of the last line, which at first glance, didn’t seem like anything at all. I would be deliciously pleased if you could rectify this issue.
Until she looked back, and found that, yes, this person really had, in fact, included the word “deliciously,” right in front of “pleased.” And whoever it was had used the word “pleased,” too, instead of something far more innocuous, like grateful. As though the email sender derived the greatest possible satisfaction from the idea of her filing her forms in the exact precise place.
Because that’s what the rest of the email had been about. Filing. This person had noticed that she’d filed something in the red box, instead of the green box, and he’d be deliciously pleased if she managed to rectify said filing mishap, as soon as possible.
Then he’d signed it not with a name she could search out, or a company ID she could unearth, but his initials…E.U. Like the conglomeration of European countries, only smaller, and hopefully a person. Even his email address looked to be an outside one, and said little more than those two letters—EverUnknown@hotmail.co.uk.
He could have been anybody—maybe it wasn’t even a he she was dealing with. Maybe it was Louisa in accounting who had a fetish for the word deliciously and hated bad filing. Maybe it was all just a mistake, some overzealous punching at the keyboard and somehow the word deliciously just fumbled its way in there, elbowing past more sane word choices to sit proudly amidst an otherwise normal email.
She’d had similar brain farts herself, though usually they involved typing the word butt when she’d meant but, as in that notorious email to the head of marketing. The one that had somehow ended up suggesting he use his ass instead of premium stock white card.
These things happened. So she wasn’t sure, exactly, why she was still thinking about it hours later. The word grew huge and curling behind her eyes, like something enchanted out of a genie’s bottle. It danced, and wriggled its hips, and said disturbing things like, if you reply, use a similarly incongruous word. Make it really out there like, “I’m so glad you caught my sexy error. I’d be only too happy to stroke it to correction.”
Fresh Start by Jane Davitt
The carpet against her knees had always felt soft when she was walking on it barefoot, but after forty minutes of kneeling, Helen was convinced that it was made of sandpaper, not wool. She shifted position, just a little, just an inch, and Connor’s hand moved.
God, that hurt.
How many times had he tugged sharply on the chain? She’d lost count. She’d tried to stay completely, perfectly still, but it wasn’t easy and the blindfold wasn’t helping. She wasn’t disorientated, just distracted. Connor was sitting at his desk, writing, and the scratch of his pen, and the rustle of paper, told her exactly where he was.
If he’d taken that sense away from her, too, plugging her ears, it wouldn’t have mattered. She could still smell him, each breath she took leaving her more helplessly aroused than before. It was a subtle seduction of crisp cotton and clean skin, and she wanted to find the places on his body where that scent became earthier, richer, and nuzzle into them.
She inhaled deeply and regretted it when the clamps pinching her nipples gave her away, the small bells hanging from them chiming, a cool sound, like water over rocks. The echoes were drowned in her moan when Connor sighed and pulled again at the slender chains linked to the clamps. The end of each chain was held in his hand, warmed by his palm as she’d discovered when he’d needed both hands to refill his pen. He’d coiled the chains and pushed them inside her mouth to hold, the irregular bumps pressing into her tongue and palate. The taste of the metal had lingered after he’d taken the chains out and she’d licked at her lips, trying to take the metallic tang away.
He wrote in navy ink, always, with a fountain pen worn shiny where his fingers gripped it. The sound of the nib travelling over the paper was like a language she didn’t speak but could guess at in places. It didn’t matter. She’d be given the pages to read and she’d see for herself where he’d changed his mind and scratched out a sentence with an impatient click of his tongue and be able to guess at why he’d done it.
Connor leant over, his leather chair creaking, and let go of the chains. Helen felt them strike her thighs softly, the chains swaying with her quick, caught breath. Small though it was, the additional weight increased the pain in her tender, tortured nipples. The clamps weren’t overly tight because Connor had known that she’d be wearing them for a while, but they’d been on for almost too long to bear.
Connor capped the pen and put it down, two distinctly different clicks. Helen hadn’t reached the state where she was floating, anchored by her awareness of Connor and a quiet exultation in the perfection of her submission. Not today. Not for a long time, really, though that was a passing thought, no more than that.
A Very Personal Trainer by Justine Elyot
My life back then was full of someones and somethings—non-specific people and objects who needed my attention in various ways. The trouble was that the someones and somethings appeared to outnumber the units of my attention by a factor of about ten to one. To be frank, things were getting out of hand.
I had let my gym membership slide, my wardrobe was like a rummage sale and any poor dogs needing bones would have been better off canvassing Old Mother Hubbard. My kitchen table was piled high with parking tickets, overdue bill reminders and dog-eared takeaway menus with the phone numbers circled in black marker.
Life was getting away from me, and I didn’t like it.
A typical dinner of the period—pasta à la microwave. In other words, some hardened curly things in a blisteringly hot, tasteless sauce. It hardly embodied temptation. Neither did the pile of unironed clothes, the half-finished tax return or the dishes in the kitchen sink. That bottle of Merlot and family-sized tub of Phish Food on the other hand…
No, Lara, no. I would sometimes catch myself off guard in the mirror—pale, pasty, carrying several more pounds than my clothes could handle. My skin was dull and my eyes looked tired. I needed a haircut, but the last time I’d managed to get one I liked was in 2005. The messages on my phone told me that I’d missed a dental check-up and my brother’s birthday. The shit was in close proximity to the fan. I was out of control. I had to do something about it. Quickly.
I opened my handbag and almost shut it again on being confronted with a hundred balled tissues, some capless lipsticks and three metric tonnes of loose change. But I had to brave the shoulder-borne rubbish dump if I was to make any progress, so I let my fingers pluck at the detritus until I unearthed the treasure I sought. The newspaper clipping Shona had given me when we’d met in Starbucks a few days earlier, still intact, not ripped or shredded yet. I’d been ten minutes late for our meeting and she’d been angry—actually really angry, not the kind of eye rolling ‘it wouldn’t be Lara if she wasn’t a bit late’ indulgent exasperation. I was hot at the memory of it, and so ashamed of myself.
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