by CD Reiss
“She turned into aroused Monica.”
He shifted to my side and sat up. “Roll over then, aroused Monica.”
I rolled over onto my stomach, holding myself up on my elbows. He placed his palm on my back, dragging it down my shoulder blades and the curve of my spine, landing on my ass, which he squeezed before standing up behind me.
“Okay, I’m going to show you something.” He picked my ass up off the mattress. “Bend your knees under you.”
I did it. I had one side of my face against the down comforter, watching him as he touched me and shifted my body the way he thought necessary.
“Now, pick up your butt. All the way up.”
I did as I was told, straightening my knees to right angles.
“Higher.” He gave my ass a slap that made me groan, then drew his hand along my back again, as if feeling for the right curve, “Put your hands under you, between your knees.”
I wiggled to get them under me. “Touch your ankles.”
“Like this?”
“Exactly like that.”
He touched me all over, and I did feel like his work of art, his living opus with my ass in the air, so far up and bent out that my cunt must have been saluting the room.
“Physically,” he said, “are you comfortable?”
“No, not really.”
“And emotionally?”
“Not scared, but I feel exposed.”
He kissed my ass, using his tongue along my cheeks. My cunt twitched in anticipation. But he stood up. I heard fabric shifting behind me and his movements, but I didn’t look. When he came into my field of vision, he was wearing sweatpants.
“Stay there,” he said. “Don’t move.”
“Where are you going?”
“You don’t get to ask questions. You get to wait.”
And he left me there, butt up, bedroom door open behind me. I wasn’t scared, but I should have been. My ass tingled. Was he getting something to spank me with? Some rough tether? Cuffs? Hooks? Yes, I thought I should be terrified, but all I could think about was how much I wanted him to come back and fuck the living shit out of me.
I heard clicks and steps from downstairs, then nothing.
Your ass is out to a psychopath.
You don’t know that. He could have been in the institution for anything.
At sixteen? Drugs. Suicide. Depression.
Violence?
I heard him on the creaky wood stairs, then his feet padding down the hall, then I smelled his sawdust scent.
“Very good.” His voice was close behind me. “When I tell you to go upstairs and be ready, this is what I mean, okay?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How was it? Waiting?”
“Not my favorite. But also kind of good because I just stewed, wondering what you were going to do to me.”
He stroked my ass, letting his fingertips brush the crack, inside the cleft, touching where I was wettest. “It turns me on knowing you’re up here doing what I tell you.” He put both palms on my cheeks. I felt something in his right hand.
He put his mouth on me, and I groaned when he kissed between my legs. He flicked his tongue over my clit. I bucked a little. I knew I wasn’t close, but I felt as though I could come from a warm breeze.
He moved me onto my back. He had a length of brown leather twine in his right hand. It might have made a fringed bag or a shoelace, but long. He looked at me clinically again, as if I were a problem to solve, then he went back to my eyes. “You ready?”
“The anticipation is killing me.”
“Me too.” He took my left wrist and placed it against my left knee, then looped a length of leather around them, making a figure eight, binding them together. “Too tight?”
“No.”
He knotted it off, then picked up my back while he ran the rest of the spool under me. He pulled, playing with the length until my tied knee and wrist were splayed. “I want to say,” he said as he placed my right wrist and right knee together, “If you say stop, it’s good enough for me, but we might want to set a safeword.” He spread my legs to get the right length under my back and tied my right side together, letting the rest of the loop drop off the edge of the bed.
“Tangerine,” I said.
“Tangerine?”
“I doubt you can keep doing whatever it is you’re doing if I say tangerine.”
“Fine, wiseass.” He leaned over me and kissed my lips so sweetly I wanted to put my arms and legs around him, but I couldn’t.
He got off the bed and looked at me. I couldn’t close or lower my legs, nor could I move my arms. A trickle of wetness dripped down my crack, and the discomfort of it was exquisite. He bent over and kissed between my breasts, dragging his tongue across, to my nipple, sucking it gently. “I’m listening,” he whispered. “I’m listening to your breathing, your heartbeat. I’m listening to your skin on the sheets. If you need something, just say it. I’m all ears.”
“I’ll let you know.”
“In words.” He sucked the other nipple, which was hard and tight. He pressed his lips around it and pulled.
“I’ll say, ‘Get the fuck off me and untie me, you animal,’ but not when you do that. That’s good.”
“And this?” He kissed down circling my diamond crusted navel and down to my left thigh. He ran his tongue over my pussy to the other thigh.
“That needs a safeword.”
He licked my clit with the pointy part of his tongue. “What should it be?” he asked before licking again, then giving it a light suck.
“Oh, God.”
“‘Oh, God’ it is.” He got on top of me, his dick just touching my exposed pussy.
He kissed me. I moved my hips against him, and he shifted away, keeping the head at the entrance to my vagina, waiting. He watched me gasp as he pushed a little. He must have felt the way I closed in around him, as if I’d suck him into me.
“Please,” I said. “Please fuck me. Sir, please.”
He slid his cock inside me so slowly it felt ten feet long. Inch by inch, skin to skin, soft against slick, until he hit the end, and he pressed against me, rocking while my clit exploded. Then he pulled out just as slowly, and the feeling was devastating sharp in the pleasure of its loss. The heightened torment continued as he slid in again, and I couldn’t grab him or move. All the other stuff was dress rehearsal for the control he took as he tortured me with the measured, unhurried thrusts and slow rocks of him against my clit.
“Jonathan, Jonathan, Jonathan....” I forgot to call him sir or anything else but his name.
He sped up, dropping onto me, a splayed thing, open, bound, servile, utterly compliant mass of nerve endings and clutching, wet flesh. His movements turned to pounding, slamming fucking that brought me close enough to cry out.
He slowed, straightening his arms above me and changing the rotation so I felt his cock, but not enough to stimulate me to orgasm.
“No,” I said in a voice so desperate I was shocked to hear it.
“Easy, Monica.”
“Jesus.”
“You’re mine. Your orgasms are mine. Your pleasure is mine to give.”
I wanted to rail at him. I wanted to demand it. But not only would that not get me what I wanted, it wasn’t how I wanted it to go down. I wanted to be fully compliant. “Yes, sir.” Saying it calmed me.
“Breathe slowly.”
I did as I was told.
He moved against me, gradually, as before. “Look at me.”
I did, seeing the sweat on his brow and the pleasure in his face. That pleasure brought me the greatest satisfaction. I had done that. I gave him what he was giving me.
As if sensing my thoughts, he leaned down and kissed me. “Will you come for me?” he asked, his voice low and growling.
“Yes, it’s yours.”
“Mine,” he whispered.
He fucked me in earnest, then. He fucked me like he meant it, roughly, hitting the right places as if it was what he did to get
himself off. My breasts bounced with the motion. My cunt was a pulsing strip of flesh under him, a swath of need. Then, like a rush from a firehose, I came, ass and pussy clenching over and over as I screamed and released it all. He kept going, hovering over me, thrusting, and the release continued to the point where pleasure met pain, and I came again, pushing my hips into him as he opened his mouth and grunted hard, then moaned. He slowed, rotating again, then dropped on me with a heaving chest and hot breaths on my neck.
He reached behind with his left hand and untied my right wrist and knee. They separated with a cramp. Sitting up, he untied the other side. I rubbed my wrists.
“So?” he asked.
“So, a needle pulling thread. You’ve ruined me.”
He brushed the hair off my face, and I did what I’d been wanting to do. I put my arms and legs around him.
twenty-five
I awoke slowly to a few sensations: the light of the sun cutting past my eyelids, my sore pussy, and Jonathan’s fingertips stroking my hand as it rested on his chest. When I opened my eyes, he was looking at me.
“Good morning.”
I grumbled and shifted closer to him.
“Are you working today?” he asked.
“Lunch shift.” I spread my hand out on his chest, pushing it forward, brushing the hairs between my fingers. “Then I have to go to Frontage and see if we can work something out. I don’t want to gig there without Gabby, but I don’t want to be stupid.”
He pulled me on top of him. “There’s nothing stupid about you.”
I kissed him, and that kiss got deeper and more urgent. My sore pussy twitched when I felt him harden. He ran his hands all over me, then over my arms which he guided to the headboard, until I was stretched over him.
“Oh, Jonathan. I’m so sore.”
“Is that a no?”
“Just be gentle.”
He guided himself into me, and it hurt, but with the most delicious pain. I used the headboard to leverage myself, and Jonathan guided my hips and then rotated his finger on my clit until I gave him a sweet orgasm that felt more like a long breeze than a tornado.
With his face beneath me, falling apart under his own pleasure, I knew something for sure, and I whispered it to myself as he came. I love you, I love you, I love you.
twenty-six
My clothes had been washed again and were waiting for me when I got out of the shower. Living on a hill in a crap neighborhood my whole life, I’d never had industrial-strength water pressure, and it seemed a good water heater was pretty important if you wanted a nice skin-scalding shower. I got into my clothes, and feeling so refreshed, I almost skipped down the stairs, where I saw Aling Mira sweeping the corners.
“Hi,” I said.
“Good morning.” Her English was accented, but didn’t seem too bad.
“Did you wash my clothes?”
“Mister Drazen left them for me. I get up early and do it.”
“Thank you. It’s very kind of you.”
“You’re welcome. I have tea for you in the sitting room.”
“The what?”
She leaned her broom against the wall and motioned for me to follow her. We went downstairs, into the living room and through an arch I hadn’t noticed before, past a short foyer, and into an enclosed porch on the side of the house overlooking a flower garden. A silver tea tray sat on the low table. I could hear Jonathan talking on the phone in another room I couldn’t identify. Aling Mira indicated the couch.
I sat down. “Thanks.” I picked up the teapot to let her know I’d do the pouring.
She nodded, smiled, and slipped out. I realized Jonathan’s voice was coming through the wood sliding doors on the side of the room. The sound of the morning birds was deafening, and though it was a lovely white noise to distract me from Jonathan’s phone call, his voice cut through. He did not seem happy. I tried to tell myself I wasn’t eavesdropping, but when I heard her name, I stopped pretending I wasn’t listening and made an effort to shut out the sound of the bird’s chirping.
“Jess,” he said, “this is you being afraid of being alone.” Pause. “No, you don’t. That’s right. I’m telling you how you feel.”
There was a longer pause, during which I sipped my tea and hoped the conversation ended soon, but Jonathan’s voice got stronger.
“Don’t you dare.” Pause. “Jessica, let me be clear. If you do anything like that, I will destroy you. I. Will. Destroy. You.”
That voice. It was the sawdust and leather voice, the voice that got me to unquestioningly spread my legs or bend at the waist. I’d never heard him use it outside of a sexual context. His voice got too low to hear after that, then the doors slid open.
He walked in looking as if a blanket of sadness had been thrown over him and tied at the neck. “You’re up,” he said.
“There’s tea left if you want some.”
He stepped forward until he was standing over me. “How much of that did you hear?”
“I know who it was but not what it was about.”
He paused, then kneeled in front of me between the couch and the table. I put my hand to his cheek and leaned forward. His eyes shone a troubled green, and his mouth set itself in a line.
“Jonathan, what’s wrong?”
“I won’t let anyone come between us. I want you to know that.”
“She won’t if you don’t let her.”
“If she says anything to you, you need to come to me with it right away. Do you understand?”
“What happened, Jonathan?”
“Just say you’ll call me.”
“I don’t understand.” I held his face in my hands, stroking his cheeks with my thumbs.
“Wherever I am in the world, before you think you know anything, you make sure you call me. Say you will.” He wasn’t using his domineering voice, but the voice of a man who needed, desperately to be soothed.
“I will.”
He rubbed his palms along the tops of my thighs and up around my waist. He laid his head on my lap and said nothing as I stroked his hair and hummed a melody that reminded me of the cadences of his voice.
We sat like that, me on the couch, humming, and him on his knees before me, long after my tea became cold and the morning birds silenced themselves for the day.
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This ends Sequence One.
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jessica.
(This begins after the Eclipse show, when Jonathan drives away from Monica’s house)
***
I watched Monica close the door behind her and felt the car dive off that cliff of a hill. Her house would be a deathtrap in an earthquake, and the hill was probably already falling into the backyard. I considered rectifying it. She was no good to me under forty tons of clay and detritus. She was only any good writhing under my hips like a pinned kitten. God, she was one big nerve ending, that girl, and those big brown eyes got just a little wider when she was close. And those bruises. And how she begged for them.
I knew she was special the night I met her, I just didn’t know how special.
I’d gone up to K with Eddie and two other guys from Penn. I was meeting Wendy afterward in one of the hotel rooms. I had one foot in LA from a disaster of a trip to New York, and the other in Seoul for a trip that could not, under any circumstances be anything but a roaring success, or I was going to have to answer questions. I hated answering questions.
So I’d just done the easy thing and took them to K. There had been plenty of nonsense before the tall girl with big, black eyes and long brown hair twisted into braids brought our drinks. The guys were bullshitting about ball and women, when we all stopped to watch waitress come toward us. The night was over. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Everything was in the right place, naturally. My staff has to look as stunning as the guests. But this girl wasn’t just beautiful, because they all are, she was something else entirely. I was trying to figure out what it was, and she just looked right back a
t me, as if daring me to make an even bigger ass of myself.
Then she spilled gin on me, and Freddie fired her. The guys tried to reason with Freddie, but the waitress was gone and I had to let him do his job however he saw fit. I was an hour to Wendy with her legs up in the air and I suddenly found the idea depressing. She was gorgeous and shrill and shallow. She blew too much coke and giggled at all the wrong times. She exhausted me. The thought of another night in one of my hotel rooms drained the life out of my limbs.
Freddie told me the waitress’s name, and that she was a sexual harassment case waiting to happen. But I couldn’t let the ebony-eyed girl walk away. I had to look at her again. Five minutes. I’d give her a severance. Whatever.
I heard her outside my office and I seized up a little. I wanted to look at her, but had to be discreet. She slipped in, and I wanted to fuck her immediately. She was so long, so curved, so smooth. Her skirt cupped her ass, and her heels brought her to a couple of inches shorter than me. As my eyes dragged over her breasts, and over the length of her neck, I realized she’d seen me looking again. She put her hands on her hips. Definitely a harassment case waiting to happen, especially considering she was telling me about Freddie’s fucking stupidity. I looked into her eyes. Fire, and pride. Not an ounce of fear. What was going on with that gaze was ten times more interesting than the curves of her body.
“I was going to offer you severance,” I’d said.
“I don’t want your money,” she’d shot back.
“Let me finish.”
She obeyed not just with her mouth, but her heart. Her face got red and she cast her eyes down. Her fingers twitched, but didn’t move otherwise. Holy fuck. I almost lost my breath. This gorgeous, proud creature was submissive.
I couldn’t let her walk into Los Angeles and disappear.
And it had only gotten worse since. Of course, I couldn’t fall in love with her, even if I tried, but I could pass a lot of time with her. A lot.
I wanted to know every twitch, every growl, every moment of desperate need, and eat her alive. If she needed me to be exclusive, I could do it. I’d just put Sharon on ice and stop looking around. How long could Monica last? A month? Two? How long could she make me laugh before she started asking for more? How many things could leave her lips that would make me want to put my face on hers? She couldn’t stay so attractive for long. She’d burn herself out soon enough, but for the time being, I could not have created a more flawless woman.
