Clearly we still needed some work on defining “necessary” and “kind.” But at least he had listened. And watched. And apparently had an epiphany, because when we went back to his place after the crowd had dispersed, he was practically cackling with glee.
“I got it. I get it now. I know what to do. This is awesome!” He swung me around his tiny living room before tugging me up the stairs after him.
“Are you going to tell me what this amazing insight was?”
“Maybe once you’re naked.”
He actually started telling me before I had shed the last of my clothes. “I decided to just focus on one person, and then I pretended I was at the club and she was a sub I was meeting for the first time. Trying to figure out what she was really interested in.”
“What?” That sounded like a tactic with potential for disaster, if ever I’d heard one.
“No, no, it’s because of what you said. About listening and understanding before I try to answer. At the club, I’m usually trying to figure out what the sub needs. Not so much from what they say, but from how they say it and their physical cues. We should shower and wash off this mosquito repellent.”
He had covered us both with bug spray before we walked out the door, citing statistics about the incidence of West Nile virus and various fun facts about encephalitis. Evidently, he was equally concerned about the potential neurological or other systemic effects of leaving toxins on the skin for too long. I had known this about him before, of course, but I had never participated in the washing-off portion of the obsession. He cleaned me off and was very thorough.
“The problem is, you kind of brought the mood down,” I pointed out, a little breathlessly, as he worked on me with a soapy washcloth. “She wanted to talk about her trip, and you made her talk about how she didn’t like it.”
“She wanted to talk about that,” Ivan insisted. “You could tell from her word choices and the way her mouth moved when she spoke that she hadn’t enjoyed the trip, despite what she was saying. Yet she raised the topic, so obviously she wanted to talk about it.”
It was difficult to explain the concept of a party pooper to somebody who didn’t really get the concept of a party. “We all recognized that, but it brings everybody down. Even if you sense that she wanted to vent or something, you don’t do it when you’re the center of attention at a small gathering. Not if it’s negative like that.”
“Fine. Obviously I will never get this. Spread your legs for me, Camilla.”
Oh. He had used that voice, the one that somehow seemed to be plugged directly into my libido. In one sentence, the frisky playfulness of the shower turned into something full of dark promise.
He was still being thorough. Very, very thorough. I leaned into the shower wall in front of me for support, gasping as Ivan’s fingers slipped through each fold. And then a sharper gasp as he plucked a single hair.
“Ow,” I complained, but he was already soothing the sting with gentle pressure.
“I want to shave all this off. I want to see all of you. And it will make you even more sensitive.”
Could I stand to be any more sensitive down there? I really wasn’t sure.
“Can we take a rain check on that? I’m not too sure about—”
“No. I want to do it now.” He sounded calm but decided. As if we were talking about something mundane, like paying a bill or scheduling a dentist appointment.
“What if I said no?”
“Hmm. Well, that depends. Are you saying this is a hard limit? Is it no, never, under any circumstances?”
It was getting hard to think with his fingers stealing back and forth along my slit, taking little detours to toy with the hair in question. “No. Not a hard limit.”
“In that case, saying no would mean that I restrained you, shaved your pussy while you were tied up, and then punished you for refusing in the first place.” He reached around me to turn the water off, and had handed me a towel by the time I finally responded without looking back at him.
“And if I say yes?”
He snickered into my neck before nipping there delicately. “I’ll shave your pussy first, then restrain you and punish you for arguing with me.”
As I dried off I pondered those two options, and the curious mindset that made both seem highly attractive. I wondered what struggling might accomplish, and thought of that delicious horror-movie fear. Neither of us had a rape fantasy, perhaps. But at the same time I felt an urge to press the limits. To see how far he really would go. Or maybe to see how far I would go.
“The safeword’s still red, right?” I whispered, hoping not to break the tension building between us.
“Yes, Camilla, the safeword is red until you change it,” Ivan confirmed, sliding his arms around me from behind and pressing a kiss to the top of my head. “That’s the other side of the trust thing, remember?”
“What do you mean?”
“I trust you to be honest about your limits. Not to let me push you somewhere you don’t want to go, then resent me for it afterward. I need that, because I don’t really…I don’t always understand…”
I didn’t want that. Didn’t want his insecurity triggered now, here, popping the bubble of idyllic sex euphoria we’d created over the past twenty-four hours. Squeezing his arms, I wrapped him around me a little more tightly. “I know. But you get this part, right? And I’ll tell you if it’s too much. You can trust me.”
Ivan rested his chin on my head, reminding me how much taller he was. After a moment or two of silence, he seemed to pull his mindset back to where it had been. “Professor,” he murmured.
“Professor,” I acknowledged, with a quiver of anticipation. “Please don’t do it, Professor. I don’t want to be shaved down there, I’d be so embarrassed for you to see me like that.” This was true, actually, but not normally something I would have admitted. Not that any of this was normal anymore. I was heading in an entirely new direction, and God help me if Ivan didn’t take over the lead again soon because my nerve wouldn’t last for much longer.
But I had no cause to worry any longer. He was there instantly. “I want to see you, Camilla. Every bit of you. See you and taste you with nothing in the way. No hiding anything from me. Your embarrassment makes your gift of submission more meaningful.”
I tried a little tug, as though I might walk myself forward out of his embrace. His arms were firm as steel, and didn’t budge. “Let me go!”
“No, Camilla.” He slid his arms more firmly around me, and then scooped me up as though I weighed nothing, which was at the very least quite flattering. He carried me into the bedroom and plunked me on the bed. Before I could even rebound, he had cuffs strapped around my wrists and was securing them to the headboard. I struggled to twist my hands around, to pull myself free, but before I could manage that, he had pinned one of my legs by straddling it while he strapped the other ankle and thigh with more cuffs. Cleverly designed little fuckers, too. They clipped together, hobbling me on that side. I lost my leverage, and could only kick ineffectually as he secured the other leg.
And then I couldn’t kick at all. I brought my knees together and he chuckled. “Enjoy that range of motion while you can.”
He shifted my hands one at a time, clipping those cuffs to my thighs as well. Finally he secured tethers from the clustered cuffs down the sides of the bed to attachment points I couldn’t see. He tightened them to open me up again, preventing me from pulling my arms and legs any closer together. Then he stood back and surveyed the handiwork his superior strength and my admittedly halfhearted struggling had wrought. I was well and truly immobilized, splayed on my back with bent knees like a frog in a biology lab. When I tried a little harder to free myself and realized I truly couldn’t, my heart started to thump double-time.
“Shh. Easy. I’ll be right back.” Ivan went back to the bathroom, and as I watched him go, I realized he’d pulled his shorts back on. After a few seconds he returned bearing some small scissors, an electric shaver and a to
wel.
“This won’t be a very close shave, but there’s less chance of injury this way since you’re being uncooperative,” he explained as he folded the towel in half and slid it under my hips. “Later, when you’ve learned to be a good girl and be still while I shave you, I can use a real razor and get much closer. Or you can have it waxed. Up to you, as long as that pussy is kept bare for me.”
Pinned open as I was, I wouldn’t have thought I could feel any more naked. But by the time Ivan had finished clipping and then buzzing the hair away—doing a fair amount of teasing in the process with the smooth, flat, vibrating back of the electric shaver—I felt exposed in a whole new way. Possibly because the newly revealed skin was so sensitive and still cool after the sudden loss of its insulation. I wanted to feel it for myself, but Ivan left me in the restraints while he put away the shaving gear.
When he returned, he had a dollop of some clear gel on his fingers, and he proceeded to smooth the cold stuff into the shaved skin. Clearly this was not meant solely as skin care, though he assured me it was just aloe.
“Mostly I know it’ll soothe the burn but still not taste too bad.”
“Am I going to be tasting—ooh.”
His tongue was scorching hot, licking a sizzling path from my perineum up to my already tingling clit. With nothing in the way, I could feel every subtle touch, every press and flex and flick, and each nibble of his lips. And with no way to move, either to pull away or to get closer, I was utterly at his mercy. And he knew it.
“This time,” he said between licks, in a tone of casual cruelty, “I’m going to try something new. For your punishment, I mean.”
“Oh.” It was about all I could muster. My brain was already soaring, my body burning with the need for more. Coherence had failed me during the shaving.
“Yes, Professor,” he reminded, and nipped sharply on one of my outer labia, making me yelp.
“Yes, Professor!”
“It’s not all about whips and paddles and cuffs, you know.”
“Whips and paddles and cuffs, oh my!” I couldn’t help but answer, and then giggled like an idiot. “Professor.”
He looked puzzled for a second, then his handsome face broke out in a grin that would have shamed a movie star. “Cute. You’re very cute. Don’t go anywhere.”
And then he was back in his closet, rummaging around. I wiggled my hands and feet, surprised at how comfortable the position was. Once past the initial chagrin of forced exposure, at least.
Some day I would have to explore Ivan’s closet. I wasn’t sure where he hid it all, but he seemed to have a broad inventory of kinky goods stored on those tidy shelves. This time he came forth with a back massager, one of the big industrial-strength corded kind with a blunt, rounded head. I tried not to look too puzzled when he pulled a condom over it. Was a back massage part of the punishment? My shoulders had been a little tense lately…
Consider it a mark of my sheltered life that it honestly did not occur to me, until immediately before he did it, what Ivan planned to do with the massager. Up ’til then, the only vibrator I’d ever seen had been pink with sparkles and looked like a deformed bunny rabbit.
After plugging the machine into the wall, he flipped it on and smiled a deeply wicked smile as he looked from it to me. “You don’t look worried enough, Camilla. I suspect this will be quite a learning experience for you.”
He turned the massager off, tossed it casually to one side on the bed and teased me with his fingers at first. He slid one long digit inside me, then two, twisting to press at the most sensitive spots he could find. He bent down every so often to lick or suck at my clit for a few seconds at a time, always leaving me wanting. Within a few minutes I was hanging on a knife edge, so close to coming he could have pushed me over with five seconds of effort.
“Please, Professor,” I begged without thinking. “Want to come, please?” Within the constraints of the cuffs and lines, I was wriggling with needy impatience.
“Oh, you’ll get to come. Right now, actually.”
He turned the Vibrator of Doom back on and pressed it straight to my clit.
For a few seconds it was just too much, buzzing over too large an area for me to even process. Then it started, deep and hard, a climax that grew and grew until I was desperate for it to peak, one that felt like dying when it finally burst into full bloom. It consumed me, stealing my breath and racing through my veins like smokeless fire, and as it ebbed I could hear Ivan’s chuckle over the buzzing vibrator and my own harsh panting.
And then…he kept it there. Despite my begging, my frantic attempts to get away, the eventual tears, he kept the vibrator in place, only adjusting the speed down and lessening the pressure for a few seconds of almost-relief as the first orgasm abated. Then he cranked it right back up again, slipping his fingers roughly inside me to pump in a steady, brutal beat, ignoring my pained insistence that I couldn’t come again. I did just that within a few seconds. Even higher and sharper than the first time, reaching a point where I saw stars, where my thighs jerked in violent spasms as the pleasure shrieked through me. And that state went on and on, never lessening and never quite going over the top to get to the other side, an endless paroxysm of ecstasy that I could neither escape nor deny.
Ivan seemed to know what I would need, that after he finally relented and took the vibrator away what I would crave was to be filled and held. I heard myself whimpering and begging and scarcely recognized the sound of my own voice, except to note I knew how that girl felt because she was pleading to be fucked, and it seemed I would expire on the spot if I wasn’t fucked within the next five seconds.
He got there in the nick of time, sliding smoothly into me and pressing his hands to my face as I screamed my relief. “Shh. It’s all over now. I’ve got you.”
When he kissed me, it was the sweetest thing I’d ever known. Me, cuffed in an obscene display and tied down to the bed, still shaking through the end of a climax I didn’t even know how to categorize, and Ivan, the author of my current condition. But with his mouth pressed gently over mine, his tongue slipping in to flirt with mine, I felt not only desired but appreciated. Cared for. Needed, even, because I had no doubt Ivan needed all this as badly as I seemed to, if not more. That kiss was a rare moment of perfect understanding.
A few minutes later, when he came to his own shuddering conclusion, the look on Ivan’s face made me cry all over again…even though I couldn’t yet put words to what I was starting to feel.
Chapter Eight
That Monday was like being thrown into ice-cold water after spending the entire weekend in a sauna. Not merely unpleasant, possibly aneurism-inducing.
I’d spent two days cocooning with Ivan, even literally sleeping with him after our exhaustion got the better of us Saturday night and he found he actually could sleep with somebody else in the bed. Even if the sex hadn’t been…different, it would have been hard to go back to the daily reality of tedious work, bad coffee and wearing clothes.
Monday brought me back into the real world on multiple fronts, none of them fun. First of all, the repaired air conditioning in my office was not really repaired. It operated at a noisy fifty percent efficiency or so, and only achieved enough cooling to make the office officially habitable. It was still miserable and sweaty hanging out there all day with the temperature in the low eighties and a funky smell oozing from the ducts. But it wasn’t quite hot enough to send us all home again.
My boss, usually a mild-mannered and levelheaded researcher, was in the final stages of freak-out that always occurred near the end of writing a grant. And since my work related directly to many of the statistics she was using in her proposal—my scripts found the patterns in the data her research generated—I was one of the first in the crosshairs. She would send me to compile one set of figures, and then by the time I brought her that report, she’d decide she wanted the numbers presented a slightly different way. And by the time I brought her that, she was on to wanting another set of number
s entirely. And so on.
That was on top of my usual day-to-day work, of course. And answering the phone if there was overflow. There was always overflow.
And worst of all, my mind was not on any of it. Mentally I was still back in Ivan’s apartment, in his bedroom, tied to his bed or kneeling on his floor or getting a paddling and liking it very, very much indeed. My bottom was still a little tender from the unaccustomed treatment, but it was the sweetest reminder of the weekend.
I wanted to email or message him, something subtle but sexy, breezy and cute. None of my thoughts were anywhere close to subtle or breezy. Borderline cute, maybe. It was pretty much all about the sexy, and the opposite of work-appropriate. So I really couldn’t figure out what to say, despite wanting the connection so badly. I was almost giddy with relief when I returned from an especially trying session with my boss, Agatha, to see that Ivan had emailed me first. No subject, no salutation. One paragraph.
It was more than enough.
Sense memories of you persist and do not seem to abate as the day progresses. It’s disconcerting, Camilla. I don’t like it when my mind plays tricks on me. I would much rather simply have you here in the flesh, to feel and taste and smell with my actual senses. Instead my mind keeps conjuring this false perception of your presence. I think it means I miss you.
I read it three times before closing it. Then I opened it up and read it once more for good measure. It was so purely Ivan. The most convoluted yet precise way possible to tell me he was thinking about me. For some reason I found it almost painfully beautiful, and actually started to choke up a little before I got myself under control and fired back a quick response. Quick, because I couldn’t say a fraction of what I wanted to say, not from work.
Professor,
Me too.
~C.
The Theory of Attraction Page 10
