by Kerri Sharpe
He gives her back his tongue, twirling it around her clit until she screams so loudly that he swears he hears one of the cleaners knock over their bucket upstairs.
Before Laura has recovered, Miles has sorted and stowed all his rope and equipment back in his bag. Along with a couple of Motif’s badly stored personnel files.
Later, very late at night, waiting for her to call, Miles flicks open Gabriel Blaine’s file. The picture of him on the very first page had already told Miles all he needed to know when he looked at it in the basement. Dark hair, dark smile. This is the guy Laura is thinking of cheating on me with? Miles knows she has been thinking about it for at least a month.
Did you really think I wouldn’t notice? Did she really think that, when she had had that expensive haircut, changed her make-up and started dropping a rather distinctive-sounding name into conversation just a little bit too often, a man like Miles wouldn’t notice?
As he reads through Gabriel’s file again, checks the dates, Miles notes that Gabriel started as account manager at Motif just over a month ago. How very unsurprising.
In some ways Miles thinks it’s kind of sad. Sad that a sparklingly intelligent woman like Laura could have her head turned by a walking, talking piece of beefcake like Gabriel Blaine, without really knowing if he could meet her very precise sexual needs.
Miles thinks about her then, semi-suspended from the ceiling in Motif’s basement, twisting and making muffled noises into the pretty pink gag. Thinks about how wet she was when he fucked her, and how much wetter she was later when he pressed his mouth to her cunt. Wet and angry; always her way. Precise needs, indeed.
But the thing about needs like Laura’s – or, indeed, needs like Miles’s – is that they couldn’t be met by just anyone. Laura needs to understand that. Finding someone who has it in them, who can climb and soar the way she needs them to, isn’t something that she can tell by looking.
What people show in public, the way they present themselves to the world, often gives away nothing at all about what they want in bed. In fact, more often than not it’s just the opposite. The powerful politician who wants to be tied up and whipped might be a cliché. But it’s a cliché Miles has seen walking, talking and moaning with pleasure more times than he can count during his voyages through the sexual underworld.
Just a glance at Gabriel’s photograph is enough for Miles to know that is how Laura sees him, though. All that packed muscle and that dark brooding brow.
Miles knows that, when Laura looks at Gabriel, she imagines him slamming her up against the wall, kicking her legs apart, taking her hard, being the brutal beast he looks like. She sees a man who is all built – practically made of coiled power – and thinks that power just can’t wait to be unleashed. It doesn’t occur to her that it would be far more fitting to see all that urgent muscle bound and contained.
Because Miles knows what makes Gabriel tick. Not from looking at his public corporate face. Miles knows because Miles has met Gabriel before.
It was at a party. Some night after a club at some anonymous suburban house. Miles was there with a pretty girl on a dog leash whose name and face are now buried by their many successors. Thinking about it now, Miles finds that a bit shameful, but, in some ways, maybe that’s what happens when you find the one – all the others are eclipsed by the blinding light, drowned out by the choirs of angels. Not that he thinks of Laura like that. Not really.
But, the party. Gabriel. He remembers Gabriel. Too pretty to go unnoticed. That great hulk was kneeling, handcuffed, kissing the boots of his mistress – or at least his mistress for the night.
Lots of people looked at Gabriel at that party. Even in a room full of tousled blondes badly packed into PVC, Gabriel, with his luminescent dark skin and his big bright eyes, drew the gazes like nothing else in the room. There is something about a big alpha-looking man on his knees that appeals to almost anyone. Miles watched Gabriel for a long time at that party, with the kind of detached fascination he had perfected for events like these. He watched for far longer than he should have done to be fair to his own pretty thing.
He was watching when the seated mistress had lifted her foot from the floor, so Gabriel could bend right down and suck on her stiletto heel like it was a slender cock. And he watched Gabriel’s own cock – heavy, hard and barely contained by the white jock he was wearing – twitch and throb as she forced the shaft in and out of his lips.
So Miles knows that when Gabriel looks at Laura he doesn’t see what she hopes he sees. He doesn’t think about what a delicious sight she’ll be, brought down a peg or two, with all the puff taken out of her billowing sails. Oh no. He doesn’t see Laura the way Miles sees her. Miles knows that when Gabriel looks at Laura his cock gets hard imagining how that strict, sharp-tongued bitch she presents in the boardroom at Motif would translate her nasty act to his bedroom. And to him, helpless and tormented beneath her sharp heels.
Those higher-than-high heels – the conundrum they embody. Miles knows that Gabriel must think of them as signals of Laura’s taste for cruel dominance – pedestals – but he knows that they are really a part of her twisted masochism.
So there’s poor Gabriel; like Laura just too young and pretty to realise that a woman who struts like a dominatrix in public might be something rather different between the rubber sheets.
It’s while Miles is thinking about this that he notices that Laura still hasn’t called. He torments himself by thinking that she’s at home, fantasising about Gabriel.
He looks over at Laura’s file – he’d taken that from Motif’s basement too. He notices her date of birth and he gets an idea. Wouldn’t Gabriel Blaine be a perfect way to give Laura exactly what she wanted in exactly the way she didn’t want it?
The next morning, Miles calls Gabriel at Motif. He pretends to be talking business for a while, saying he has a new company and needs a public-relations firm. Then he says, ‘Your name is familiar, though, Gabriel Blaine?’
Gabriel laughs. A deep boom of a laugh. Miles imagines Laura, sitting only feet away, squeezing her thighs together at that dark sound, casting it as potentially a laugh of sadistic glee. ‘It’s a name people tend to remember,’ Gabriel says.
‘Oh, I know,’ says Miles. ‘But where do I know you from? Hang on . . . Are you a friend of Sabrina?’
‘Sabrina?’ Gabriel says, the tiniest hitch in his voice.
‘Mmm, you know who I mean, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
Sabrina is the name of the dominatrix Miles saw Gabriel with at that party. He isn’t really up on that kind of thing, but he called around. Finally found someone who remembered that party better than he did. Remembered Gabriel. Remembered who he was with.
It isn’t about blackmail with Miles, it’s about persuasion. Miles likes being persuasive. Actually revels in it. And Gabriel turns out to be the kind of man who is easily persuaded by the right kind of invitation.
Laura calls Miles in the end. She always does. She let it go a week this time, which was almost her record, but then, one hot night . . .
‘Hey, Miles. It’s Laura.’
‘Laura . . .? I don’t . . .?’
‘Oh fuck off, Miles, don’t give me that fake Laura-who crap. I want to meet up.’
‘Oh. That Laura.’
‘Listen, I was thinking, it’s my birthday next week. How about we do something special? I was thinking something long term. Over the whole weekend. A captivity scene. We’d need equipment, but I can go online. Get some new stuff. Maybe metal.’
‘Metal, that’s new for you. I thought you were all about rope?’
‘I can change my mind, can’t I?’
‘Yeah, OK,’ Miles says, trying not to chuckle because, really, this is just too perfect.
‘Great!’ Laura sounds almost surprised that he agrees to what she wants so easily. But she doesn’t sound wary. Even now, Laura still doesn’t seem to check for a catch. ‘Shall I go online, order some stuff?’
‘No,
baby, leave it to me.’
Miles knows that Laura is being impulsive again. Asking for the moon. He knows that the kind of custom-made hardcore metal restraints she’s thinking of are crazy expensive and would take months to be delivered if ordered online. But Miles knows about the Mole’s House.
Tinkle-tinkle.
‘Ah, hello, sir. No lady friend?’ The Mole is brisk and small with dark tight eyes like bugle beads. He sits behind the counter working on a wide strip of black leather with a knife easily the length of his own forearm.
‘No. Not today.’ Miles wonders which lady he’s referring to. When had he last been here? Like most of his people he bought so many toys online these days.
‘Ah, that’s quite the shame, sir.’ The Mole glances down, gouges heavily with his knife twice, and then continues, ‘So are you still interested in the percussion section?’ He gestures towards a wall hung with canes, whips, paddles and crops, and one long bullwhip snaking across the top.
Miles shakes his head. ‘No, not today.’ He remembers then, the last time. A thin blonde, crazy as a masochist; she was always dragging him here for new toys to hit her with.
But that isn’t the requirement today. Today Miles wants restraints. Just as Laura had outlined. Metal. Strong ones. Big ones. Not the cheap leather or tinny handcuffs he knows he would be offered in the normal sexual recreation shops in Soho. And not the single old set of metal handcuffs he has back at home.
Gabriel is a big man. Miles remembers that party again, how Gabriel’s thick wrists looked cartoonish in a pair of thin handcuffs. Miles wants the aesthetic to be right. And he wants stuff he can depend on. He needs the Mole’s House.
The Mole frowns when he explains what he needs.
‘These are very big measurements,’ he says in an accent Miles can’t place and isn’t even sure is real.
Miles nods. He sees the look in the Mole’s eyes and decides to let him wonder.
The Mole looks at Miles for a moment more, his little nose wrinkling and his whiskers – because at that moment he really did seem to have whiskers – shaking with a rhythm all of their own. And then he says, ‘I think you should step out back, sir.’
The Mole leads the way through a rattling beaded curtain and into a room that is even darker and more groaningly ominous than the shop proper. The room is full of furniture. ‘Alternative’ furniture.
The shuffling Mole walks over to a wall where a mass of chains, rings, hooks and manacles are tangled and draped together, swooping off ceiling hooks and dangling like forest branches. But as the Mole turns, weighing a great iron ring in his hands and grinning toothily, Miles sees the cage and his idea ratchets up a level.
On Friday evening, Miles picks Laura up. He notices that she is wearing a black dress, which he has often said that he liked, but when she gets into the car he doesn’t say anything. Not even ‘Happy birthday’.
Laura isn’t so quiet. She’s full of questions, curiosity, demands. ‘You got them, right? Metal restraints. I took Monday off work just in case. I mean, Gabriel can cope without me.’
‘I’m sure Gabriel can cope,’ Miles says, stressing almost every word in the sentence.
‘OK, so what’s the plan? You’re going to chain me up, what, standing?’
‘Why don’t you just wait and see?’
‘I hate “wait and see”. I want to know. Now. How do I know that it’s something I’ll like?’
‘Laura, baby. You’ll love it. I promise. It’s exactly what you want.’
‘Oh really? You know exactly what I want now, do you?’
‘Oh yeah.’ And I’m going to give it to you.
Laura bounces up the steps ahead of Miles – his flat is on the third floor. Her excitement is making him feel a little strange. Torn between a desire to turn this all around and give her what she wants and a deep pulse in his cock when he thinks about how twisted everything is going to become when he opens the door.
He arrives at the door to his flat with Laura waiting, hopping from foot to stilettoed foot. Eager. Buzzing. He puts his key in the lock and stands back to let her enter first.
She heads straight in the living room. Probably hoping that’s where her new toys will be. Hoping right. Over the clatter of his keys on the hall table he hears her say, ‘Oh, why have you got the curtains closed in here?’ And then, ‘What is this?’ And then, ‘God. What the . . . Oh my God! Gabriel?’
Miles moves to the living-room doorway so he can see her. See her face when she sees her gift – exactly what she wants and yet, not what she wants at all. Gabriel Blaine, her big hard-bodied fantasy dom, trussed in metal manacles and crouching in a cage Miles bought from the Mole’s House. The cage isn’t that small, but Gabriel is so big that his body inside the cage looks like an optical illusion. His muscles are burnished with sweat as he struggles and shifts position constantly in the small space. He’s crouched, his big haunches splayed by his curled chest. His head bowed by the top of the cage. His hands are chained behind his back. His ankles are cuffed together too – albeit rather needlessly. He’s naked, but a little scrap of metal glints at his crotch. An impulse buy.
Laura’s expression won’t stay still. She’s shocked, horrified, aroused, confused . . .
Aroused?
Miles never saw that coming.
‘Laura?’ he says.
Laura turns and pushes past him into the hallway. For a moment Miles thinks she’s leaving. Walking out. But she stops by the hall table and picks up Miles’s keys. A set of keys that contains a few extra ones tonight. The keys to Gabriel’s restraints.
She pockets them and heads back into the living room, pausing only to close the door softly in Miles’s face.
Miles is sitting out in the hall, listening to the sounds coming from behind the closed door – familiar sounds of two people making each other very, very happy. He thinks how funny it is that just as what a person shows you in public can hide what they are really like in private, what they show you in private can sometimes be just another mask. Like peeling an onion. Who’d have thought that Laura would pull a switch on him like that?
Just goes to show, you never can tell.
Mathilde Madden is the author of the Black Lace novels Mad About the Boy, Peep Show and Equal Opportunities.
Pickup Girl
A. D. R. Forte
IT’S THAT TRUCK he has. That big, shiny metal and chrome monstrosity that purrs in diesel double-bass. It’s a country-boy cowboy truck: dooley, offroad tyres, toolbox, even hunting lights. I’ve seen plenty like it around here and I know the type that drives them. Only thing is, he ain’t a cowboy; not in the least, most generous stretch of the imagination. And maybe that’s why.
Why I want him to drive me out into the warm wistful night of a Texan summer. Speed down an empty country road and turn off into a deserted field where only the stars watch. And there under the starlight, surrounded by nothing but night and open space, fuck me good and hard in the bed of that truck in true cowboy style.
Problem is, he wouldn’t dare.
I know few people who make such a point of playing by the rules as Nathaniel David Marble. He’s always on time. He always knows what to say. And his khakis never have a wrinkle. Sometimes I think his pants must be bewitched, goodness knows I find myself staring at them often enough, wishing they would just disappear.
I know it probably doesn’t improve his opinion of me when I give in to sudden random fits of laughter, but it would probably be much worse if he knew I was picturing a band of twinkling, enchanted stars encircling his abruptly bare hard-on. Before I got down on my knees and started sucking him off with no regard to time or place or decent behaviour. I think the knowledge of that little fantasy would be more than he could handle.
Or maybe not. After all, he bought that damned truck. Tony, my stylist and self-proclaimed expert on men of any orientation, would say he’s compensating. But I venture to disagree. A man who’s compensating doesn’t have quiet confidence. He doesn’t move thro
ugh life with the air that he owns the world and never feels compelled to prove it. A man who doesn’t have self-esteem doesn’t have near-inhuman self-control.
Sure, he doesn’t fuck casual acquaintances. Flirting isn’t in his vocabulary. Yet, even so, I’ve caught a stray glance or a treacherous smile from time to time. And, even fewer and further between, I’ve brushed up against a temper simmering beneath that cool façade. I’ve faced Nate Marble down before and I’ve liked it. I’d like it even more if I had him twisting and arching under me, begging me to ride him harder. If only. But maybe . . . maybe he just needs direction.
I park my truck next to his. He knows it’s mine and he’ll know the black sandals and the suede bag on the passenger seat are mine. An edge of navy lace and silk peeks out of the open flap of the bag, part of some unknown garment. The sandals are black patent leather, four-inch heels.
Let his imagination come up with the reason for why they’re tossed so carelessly when he knows I’m fanatically neat, neater than he is. Let his fantasy conjure up the picture of me wearing them and that lacy, silky something. I wonder what he’ll think of, wonder what effect it’ll have. There’s a lot I would give to know. I’m grinning as I lock the door and leave the parking garage.
The next day I catch him looking at me despite his best pretence to be absorbed in the contents of the folder in his hand. So of course I walk right up to him.
‘Hey, Nate.’
‘Hi,’ he replies, looking straight up and making eye contact. Sassy bastard.
‘I didn’t know you’d got a new truck.’
He starts to explain, to say something about when or where that I don’t care about.
‘I really like it.’
That cuts him off and the faintest trace of pink crosses his cheeks.
Embarrassment or pleasure?
‘Thanks.’
He flips the folder closed and smiles. Not his polite smile – this smile reaches all the way to his clever, dark eyes, that are the colour of polished oak. Those eyes that have passed me over with cool indifference and blazed at me with impatience before. Today he cannot or will not look away, and the spark in his gaze is neither disgust nor anger.
