by Christa Wick
I nodded, remembering the look in his eyes that night. It was different than the look today, softer and contemplative then.
One arm at a time, I pulled the straps down then peeled the cups away, my palm and forearm shielding my nipples from his view. He drew further away, warning me to remain in place. Stopping at the flat, silk draped object in the center of the room, he pinched one edge of the black fabric and waited.
I had barely noticed the obstruction when I reached the door. It was at hip level and my attention had been focused on Dylan and the sensual images of me placed around the room. Now I studied its size, estimating it to be approximately as wide and long as a pool table.
Slowly, he pulled the silk drape away to reveal a padded, tufted, leather surface about four inches thick supported by a curving rosewood base a few inches less on each side in its dimensions than the top. Drawers on all sides teased me with their potential contents.
Tilting his chin upward, Dylan looked at the ceiling and I noticed something else I had completely overlooked -- some kind of suspension bar with leather cuffs at each end and an automatic pulley. I inhaled roughly, my muscles starting to burn with how every new revelation had me holding my breath in anticipation.
Wait...there were two bars...
My legs started shaking and I didn't know if I could remain standing, especially with the way his eyes glittered darkly at me.
"Come forward," he rasped. "Without lowering your arm."
Flesh quivering, I managed to move to within a foot of him without tripping or shuffling numbly.
When I reached Dylan, he ran his hands along the belt then the button panel of my dress pants. There were hooks and a hidden zipper beneath the diagonal slash of buttons. I loved the way the pants looked and supported me, but I would go hours with barely a sip of water when I wore them because they took at least five minutes to fasten and almost as long to unfasten.
"Intricate," he observed and then a steely grin slashed a line across his handsome features. "I think I'll cut them off."
My panties, already noticeably moist against my skin, experienced a fresh flood of arousal, my body jerking once at the though of what he was about to do.
Dylan tapped the padded surface of the table. "On your back."
The hip-level height was Dylan's hip, not mine, and I had to brace myself with my free hand and give a little backward hop. With my ass settled, he bent down and captured my ankles. Lifting them, he helped me slide to the middle of the table and then he reached under its lip, his forearm flexing as he manipulated some control I couldn't see.
I heard the well-oiled whisper of the bar above being automatically lowered. My heart beat a little faster and a hell of a lot harder inside my chest. The bar stopped and he secured both of my ankles.
And then he showed me another of the device's tricks -- a small button in the middle of the bar could be pushed down, allowing him to slide the ends of the bar, and my fastened ankles, further apart. He opened me wide, wider than he had ever spread me before, removed my sandals, and then he pushed another button beneath the table and my feet were suspended two feet off the surface.
Moving to the center side of my body, Dylan studied my face as he trailed one hand from my ankle to the top bend of my thigh and then halfway across so that he could palm my mound. He squeezed the flesh once, twice and then I whimpered on the third squeeze from the rough grip and the look in his eyes.
A good whimper, a "holy hotness, I want you to fuck me now" kind of whimper.
"Not yet, love," he said in that same, unfamiliar voice that made my pussy contort around itself and my clit jump.
Moving to the head of the table, he brought the second bar down. My fingers danced in anticipation of him uncovering my breast, but he wouldn't be rushed. Stopping the bar a foot above the surface, Dylan gestured first for the hand at my side and secured it. Then his fingers wrapped around my other wrist and I heard a tortured groan, one I knew well from that night in Geneva and several nights since.
As alien as parts of Dylan might seem to me in that room, it was still Dylan, the man who loved me, who had allowed me to deflect his attempts to formally propose at least half a dozen times but who had not retreated.
Crap, I was going to cry again!
His hand released my wrist then moved to thumb away my tears.
"I've been remiss," he said, the tenderness in his tone twisting like a knife through my chest. "I feared I would be, and I have. You know you can stop this at any time, yes?"
I scratched out a "yes" as I nodded.
"But only with a safe word. Have you thought of one?"
I couldn't imagine using a safe word, of cutting off this part of him, of admitting he was more than I could endure.
He continued stroking my cheek, the earlier, inflexible gloss gone from his eyes. "I can't give you one, you won't remember."
Sapphire came to mind, but I knew that was absolutely the wrong word to use. I would be throwing his past lovers in his face and resurrecting all my insecurities. I wouldn't use Gladiolus either because that was part of our past and this room was our future.
"Take your time," he said patiently. "It has to be something you'll remember, which usually requires it to be meaningful."
"Yes," I agreed. What did it predict for our relationship that the only meaningful words I could conjure were wrapped in pain? I blinked and started another damn flood down my cheeks. I loved him. I wanted to be with him. I wanted to experience this part of his life, so why couldn't I come up with a memorable, relevant safe word so we could proceed?
"Magpie," I murmured then repeated more forcefully. "Yes, magpie."
His gaze went soft, then the tip of his tongue rolled briefly against his bottom lip as his nostrils flared. My chest tightened at the subtle, but powerful play of emotion across his face. We both had childhood memories of the bird. Mine were good, his were more than mixed, some of them heartbreaking.
My first meeting with Dylan, that long ago interview that seemed like a lifetime had passed since, I had noticed the small figurines and imagery around his office. Most people wouldn't have noticed them at all -- some because they were trying to power stare a concession out of the CEO, others because they didn't want to seem flighty by looking around. They were in the Big Boss's office, after all, a momentous occasion for anyone outside the inner circle of privilege.
Those who did look around might have noticed a lot of birds in one form or another -- some black and white; some black and white and blue; some red and blue; a crested one with pale green and red and gray wearing a black eye mask that ran on each side from the back of its head to the dark orange of its beak. But only a handful would have realized they were all from one subgroup of the crow family.
You sure like magpies...Why?
I hadn't even possessed the maturity to blush when I interrupted whatever question Dylan had been asking at that moment. His answer had intrigued me.
Having a lot of them and liking them don't have to be inclusive, Miss Dekker.
I had laughed, my blush finally forming as I nodded and babbled on.
Don't trust your secrets to magpies -- is that what you mean?
I explained that was what my grandfather had always said to me right before giving my nose an affectionate tweak when I talked too much as a child. We spent the rest of the interview discussing the bird and all its variations. Any expert on how to successfully interview for a job would have given me an F minus, minus, but I had left the room floating on air, tightly clutching that first small kernel of a crush to my chest.
It was shortly before my second Christmas in the executive suite when I truly started to understand Dylan's relationship with the bird after a conversation I had with Riona over what Dylan might like as a gift. His father, she told me, hadn't offered affectionate nose tweaks. And it wasn't just talking that would earn the "magpie" insult. Gestures, expressions -- they were all means of communicating and the old man expected his children to keep their opinions
and feelings inside them. Most of all, he expected Dylan, the crown prince of the Kehoe Dynasty, to be inscrutable.
"I'm sorry," I whispered. "Was that the wrong word to chose?"
He shook his head, the gray irises turning watery. He bent down, his lips hovering over mine.
"It's perfect," he answered. "You're perfect, love."
Oh, god, was this supposed to be so emotional? It hadn't looked that way in the pictures or the small glimpses I had caught on screen of Jake and Alexa's club scene in Miami. Sensual, hot as fuck, yes and double yes. But this felt like I was watching a damn tragedy unfold.
"So perfect I don't need to test you, mold you, analyze you," he said, revealing yet another voice I had never heard as he eased the hand and forearm I had kept pressed against my breast over to the last cuff on the bar. "I get to experience you, soak you in...I've never had that."
Worship? Reverence? Was that the emotion his voice carried?
Done tightening the leather strap around my wrist and extending the bar, Dylan stared at my face as he worked the controls that lifted my hands as high above me as they would go without injuring the joints. He moved to a side drawer, the whisper of wood on wood the only indication that he had pulled it open. The meticulous order of his desk's interior and surface in Chicago flashed through my mind. Whatever the drawer below me held, I knew each item would be separated by a space the width of his thick thumb. There would be only one row per drawer, maybe even only one item per drawer.
Consistent, precise, often glacial in his pace and demeanor -- his little blond-haired magpie must have felt like chaos to him that first meeting. Maybe even there in the house he had purchased for us, every other room empty, he still saw me that way.
In silence, he moved to my left foot. I saw the silver flash of small scissors and then he began cutting along the side seam of my dress pants. The closer he got to the top of my thigh, the more tense I became. The scissors were sharp, with tips almost as narrow as a needle.
But I trusted him and so I forced myself to relax.
Circling to the other side of the table, he started on the right outer seam. The steel didn't touch my skin, neither did his flesh, not even the barest brush of a knuckle. He pulled the ruined pants from my body then tossed them over his shoulder like he was discarding a piece of notepaper from one of his ledgers.
Slowly, he exhaled, his attention on the silk panties, the eggshell-colored fabric darker between my legs where the juice of my arousal had soaked through. As careful as any surgeon, he brought the scissors to the bottom panel that covered my labia. He cut through the fabric with small, precise snips that had me trembling.
Dylan placed the scissors on the table. I felt the edge of a handle, the metal warmed by his touch. Folding the forward segment of the panel up, he stared at my flexing pussy and thighs. My skin was saturated, a condition he accented when he pressed three fingers against the seam of my lower lips and rubbed the cream around -- between the thick, pouting labia, the bend of my thighs, down my perineum...
With a sharp cry, I lifted my ass off the table. I had been heart sick no more than five minutes before and he already had me levitating from the threat of my first climax.
"Down, love," he said, his palm cupping my mound and exerting pressure.
I couldn't have held the position no matter what my desire. I collapsed onto the padded leather surface and blew out a strained breath. Smiling benevolently, Dylan took up the scissors once more.
This last cutting of fabric, the one that halved the front panel of the underwear, I felt the progress of the scissors -- because he wanted me to. Never the blade, just the curve of the handle and the flat of his fingernail. Up the line of my cunt, the metal a hard tongue caressing my clit, then the last of the distance to the top band of elastic as the heel of his hand wedged firmly between my lower lips.
I cried out again, the last thin strand of my sanity keeping me from thrusting upward as the scissors made their final snip.
Leaving the cut fabric in place, Dylan returned the scissors to their drawer. He came back to my right side and unfolded the irreparably damaged panties like he was unwrapping a Christmas present. Gently, he tugged the material away, the remnants falling forgotten onto the floor.
"I had planned on using a flogger." With my feet still held wide and high, he drew a sensual line from one side of my bottom to the other.
My flesh pulled tight down there, squeezing from an achy need his words and touch had produced.
"But the hand is so much more intimate."
Eyes shut, I nodded. My whole body was alive at that moment and it seemed like I could feel all of it at once. My nipples were sharp tipped and swollen, my labia pinched shut as my cunt sucked inward. My head felt light, like it was attached to a helium-filled balloon and not my body.
"Dylan..." I pleaded.
"In due time, love," he answered softly. "First these sweet cherries."
His hand drifted up to attend to one nipple. With increasing pressure, he held it trapped between his index finger and the pad of his thumb. He stroked from base to tip, the pressure increasing with each swipe.
"So exquisitely sensitive, infused with blood, their pale coloring darkened with lust."
Even his words were a caress that touched me everywhere at once.
His free hand opened another drawer and he drew out two -- no three -- clear cylinders that seemed to have plungers at their top.
"Suckers, love." His lips slid side to side just like when he worked his spreadsheets and decided a change in the formula was required. Taking just one of the cylinders, Dylan trailed it down my stomach to my mound. Centering it above my clit, he twisted the top handle twice.
I gasped, my shoulders jerking and my hips pushing up. I could feel the flesh swelling from just those two twists and there seemed to be more twists available.
"For your nipples," he teased, taking one of the remaining cylinders, "I need to give you a few licks each to form the seal, but your pussy is sopping, baby."
Hell, yes, it was!
His tongue laved the far nipple, circling, dancing, his lips closing for a wet suck and then he put the device over it and twisted twice. He repeated the pattern with my right breast and then gave each of the handles a third twist.
A jolt of sensual delight shot through me each time or I wouldn't have been able to keep count.
"You're doing beautifully, baby," he said, rich with appreciation. "So open with your pleasure."
Stepping back from the table, he quickly stripped off his clothes. He had been big and rock hard every time he had taken me, but in that playroom, he was indescribably magnificent -- larger than large, more steely than steel.
But I would have to wait to have his cock in me.
"A flogger to your lush ass," he reminded me as he released the tension on the sucker attached above my clit. "That was the plan."
Roughly, he palmed my mound, squeezing and rubbing and pinching at the clit and labia. "But it's your pussy that's driving me crazy."
I twisted along the table, lifting, contorting, ass thrusting upward to grind my mound against his hand.
The first slap startled me even though I knew his intent.
"More," I screamed, my body as close to the edge as I had ever been without falling over.
Slap, slap, slap.
A guttural cry ripped from deep inside me, hooked the flesh of my throat to leave me sobbing in orgasm. I was still riding the wave of that release when he put the sucker back in place and gave three vicious twists on the handle. Tears leaked from the side of my eyes as my mind floated somewhere above my body.
Fingers invaded my cunt, not one exploratory digit to test my readiness or two companions but three, thick and hard driving, the rough pads scraping inside me at that spongy, responsive bulb nestled against the backside of my clit.
Fluid squirted into the cylinder as its tube jerked hard enough to point the knobby handle in the direction of my face. Another thick squirt and t
hen another. He released the tension on the sucker, removed it so that the juice dribbled in every direction, most of it reaching the surface of the table before his mouth sealed over my clit.
Suck, nip, slap, repeat.
Over and over, my body jerking, my lips moving, incoherent babbling, his blue-eyed magpie coming again and again.
Just before I was certain I would pass out, he dialed back. The slaps against my clit became a gentle massage as his other hand worked to release the suckers at my nipples. Repositioning the hand at my cunt, he continued to ease the swollen flesh between my legs as he gently pulled one nipple into his mouth and then the other.
I remained perched atop the crest of my release, the timing of each move he made expertly executed. I couldn't remember my name, my address, my age -- but I remembered my safe word, if only to make sure I didn't carelessly use it and dam the deluge of ecstasy.
"Shhh, baby," Dylan cooed, momentarily depriving me of his touch. Down came my legs, an efficient, short massage encouraging the blood to circulate more vigorously before he repeated the procedure with my arms.
"Don't get up," he warned. "You won't find your body very cooperative yet."
If I could have giggled, I would have. I couldn't remember how to move, had no intention of doing anything but lay there and pant softly.
He brought me a tumbler of water and helped me sit up a little, my back against his chest and stomach while I emptied the glass. Something poked at me between sips, something smooth and hard, hot and long.
I realized that the stop in action hadn't subdued his erection.
"Done," I said and handed the tumbler to him, my mind racing to how the rest of the evening might unfold.
"Play is over, love," he said, placing the glass on the side bar then taking a swig from the bottle. He studied my face, his gaze almost wary, and then he sucked a breath in.
Still, he was hard, unflagging. Play might be over, but we weren't.
He prowled the six steps from the sidebar back to the table. His arms flexed as he braced his palms against the surface, lifting his lower torso and legs like a gymnast or some parkour enthusiast so that he quickly covered me. He shifted a knee, wedging my legs open. His forearms flat against the table, closely framing my shoulders, he dipped his pelvis and filled me with the entire length of his cock in one swift thrust.
