I speak slowly, feigning calm. “I could wallow in how anxious I feel for hours but it won’t fix me either.”
“It will. Over time.”
“Letting the pain become familiar won’t lessen it. It’ll only numb me. Why not numb myself with pleasure instead?” I reach for her, but she moves farther down the bed, stretching her legs to build a moat between us.
“I don’t want to be treated like an alcoholic’s drink,” she tells me.
“That’s not fair—”
“And the pain
will
lessen, if you make yourself feel it. It’s like…it’s like a storm. It can’t rain forever. You have to ride it out.”
I crawl to her, uninterested in being swayed by any logic outside the carnal. “It can rain all it likes, but I don’t see why I should stand outside and be miserable. Not when I can be warm and safe. Inside.” I nudge her knees apart with my own, but she braces her palms against my shoulders.
“Fine. Not a storm then. But it’s homework. It has to be done if you’re ever going to graduate to what’s next. And ignoring it won’t make the pile any smaller. Don’t give it the power to make you hide.”
I sit back on my heels and sigh, relenting.
“I won’t pretend we’re the same,” she says, “but you know how I used to be. So anxious about being with men I nearly turned thirty still a virgin.”
“Not such a terrible crime.”
“Maybe not, but pretty cowardly. It wasn’t easy coming here, to be with you. I stood on your doorstep for ages, too nervous to ring your bell. But I did, and I did the work, and the reward’s been worth it. So worth it,” she says again, and rubs my thighs in gentle concession. “I know it’s not the same. But find a reward. Something to make the work bearable. A place you want to visit. A friend or a relative you’ve had to shut out of your life, who you could see again.”
A woman whose respect I want so desperately to earn.
Whose body should stay here, wrapped in mine each night, under these covers. But the pain hurts so badly and there’s no guarantee she’d want the same, even if I could become functional again.
I let a long breath rattle from my throat then meet her gaze. “Do you not want me tonight?”
“No, of course I do.” In a near-mumble she adds, “I always want you.”
Relief loosens my back.
“I just don’t want you to medicate with me.”
“That’s never my aim.”
“I’m sure it’s not. But I don’t want you all…”
Weak? Pathetic? Exactly as I am?
“I don’t want you all worshipful.”
“Oh.”
“Not when I know it’s to help you get out of your head.” She looks thoughtful a moment, staring past my face toward the window. Slowly, a smile curls her lips and she meets my eyes.
“Yes?”
“Why don’t you let me seduce
you
for a change?”
My brows rise. This is unlike Caroly indeed. If sex is a Sunday drive to her, she’s perfectly happy to come along and see the sights—but she’s never once asked to steer. And I don’t know how I’d feel, not having my hands wrapped firmly around the wheel. Even with clients who wish me to be passive, I always feel in charge of the experience. The performance.
She’s not after a performance, though. Already my mind is racing. It feels as though I’ve drunk several espressos, anxiety buzzing at the edges of my head, drying my mouth. Tonight of all nights, I want to fall back on what makes me feel competent, in control. Tonight of all nights, I want to be the one
doing
.
“I don’t know.” I stroke her calves. “I like to please you. It would make me feel better to be that way. To feel…capable.” It’s hard to say these things. It’s been my job for so long to give women no reason to doubt my manhood, my skills, my command and reverence for their sexual experiences, inside my home. It occurs to me that the woman here with me now knows me better than anyone has in ages. She knows the veneer and the mess it hides. I suppose she must like the mess, but it scares me—being known.
“I know you’re capable. You don’t need to prove it to me.”
“I want to
feel
it.”
She sighs, seeming resigned for just a moment, before a fresh wave of determination straightens her spine and she sits up. “Let it be my turn to feel capable. In bed.”
I hold her stare, waiting for more.
“If the past few months have been my exposure therapy, with sex and men and all that, let’s test me then. Let’s see if you’ve trained me well enough to seduce a hot-blooded Frenchman.” She grins. If the idea intimidates her, she hides it well.
I hide something well, too—a heated, painful pang in my gut to imagine her going to bed with another man, eager to share with him the sexuality I’ve helped to foster.
You have her now, but you won’t keep her, not if you don’t get better.
I think this woman loves me, but she’s not a saint. Her patience will wane sooner or later.
I mirror her wicked smile, faking the enthusiasm I wish I felt. “Is that what all this has been? Your training?”
“In a way.”
“And you’re ready to earn your certificate then?”
She smiles again, softer this time. “I’d like to find out.”
I nod, surrendering. And surely not for the last time tonight. “All right then. Let’s see how well I’ve taught you.”
Chapter Two
“Let’s stand,” Caroly says. “And start this properly.”
We do, and I shiver as she runs her hands and gaze up my belly and chest, over my shoulders, down my arms. I reach for her waist but she catches my wrists.
“You don’t get to do anything except be spoiled,” she informs me.
“Not even touch you? What a cruel deprivation.”
“Just let me be in charge.”
“Very well.” Worries nip at me. Will my cock respond, with all my precious control castrated? If it doesn’t, will I hurt her confidence as well as mine?
The questions drop to the back of my head as she strokes my sides, then my back, her small breasts under her soft cotton top glancing my chest.
Plenty of clients have requested this one-way breed of contact, women who crave a man’s body but fear his touch. It was different all those times. I simply embodied that role, became that obedient man for an hour or two. But Caroly wants
me,
just Didier, and I’m fidgety when asked to be still. If my hands aren’t kept busy, all their wasted energy goes directly to my hyperactive brain. I could take on a pleasing part, put on a show, make myself into the perfect submissive man…but then it wouldn’t be the two of us anymore. Not the way she wants. Not the way I want either, in all honesty.
“May I speak, or shall I be mute as well as limp?”
She smiles up at me. “You can speak all you like. Just don’t bother making any demands.”
She looks strange to me. New somehow. There’s a gleam in her eye, a wicked glint to match her smirk. She rises on her toes, holding my jaw as she kisses my mouth. It feels odd to accept a kiss, rather than give it. Like writing with my left hand.
Dropping back on her heels, she lets me go and nods to the bed. “Have a seat.”
I do. Caroly does what I might have next, moving the card table iced in half-melted pillar candles closer and lighting a dozen or more wicks. My fingers twitch, wanting to be the ones busy with the task.
She turns, still wearing that funny little grin. Still wearing everything but her shoes, but she remedies that, removing her jewelry, peeling her shirt up her long, long waist and over her head. Her pale skin is opal in the moonlight, cream in the cool dawn, golden now in the candles’ glow. Her brassiere is a shade darker, caramel satin edged in the same lace that minutes ago tickled my fingertips between her thighs. She’s full of interesting angles—the dip of her collarbone, the points of her elbows and the bones of her wrists, the strong lines of her jaw and cheeks. You might find this body on a runway, if never the cover of a men’s magazine. She’s a heron, at once graceful and awkward, long and rare and startling.
Her skirt drops in a whisper of silk. I’ve never watched her this way before. In fact I can’t recall a night when I wasn’t the one to undress her. My mouth waters. I’m a hungry man forced to watch a feast laid out, not yet allowed to taste. She steps out of the garment, standing between my knees at the edge of the bed. She strokes my hair with lazy distraction, traces the outline of my face. I stare up into her eyes, the angle reminding me of every succulent minute I’ve spent between her legs, kissing her sex. Her thumb follows the curve of my lips.
“Lie down.”
I do as ordered, head on the pillows and arms draped behind in a gesture of obedience. She nudges my legs apart and kneels between them, gaze roaming my body like a landscape.
“You’re so handsome.” Her throat tenses as she swallows. The heat in her eyes is nothing new, yet it seems that way. So often her lust is framed in awe, but tonight there’s something predatory about her. It quickens my pulse.
Smooth palms stroke my shins, my thighs, skirting my cock to slide up my abdomen and chest, then down my ribs. My breath grows short. My fingers curl, arms tense from wanting to move, to touch her in return.
Her attention is at my hips, thumbs following the contours of the muscles there. She slips her fingers under the band of my shorts and draws them back and forth, back and forth along my belly. She does the same to the hems at my thigh, a thrilling tease against the sensitive skin.
Take them off,
I want to say.
Take them away and touch me. Suck me. Make me so hard it hurts. Take my cock inside you and use me until the ache is so sharp I’m begging, and say my name when you come.
But I don’t get to make demands.
Instead I let my breathing grow shallow and loud, let her hear what so few do outside those frenetic final moments of sex—my helplessness. My need. I groan softly, the sound saying,
Touch me. Please.
Her taunting hands edge closer, closer to the ridge of my erection, close enough that I can feel the pull of the silk against my pulsing skin, and that alone is enough to make me moan. My hands twitch and rise, ready for more. Ready to push my waistband down and do what she won’t, stroke my flesh and end this torture. But I stop. I lay my palms flat to my stomach, willing them to behave.
Oh she’s mean. She toys with the fabric, drawing it taut—to outline my shape or purely to torment me, I don’t know. I shift my hips, intensifying the sensation.
“You want more,” she murmurs.
“Yes.”
Her thumbs trace me, their nails drawing fiery-hot stripes down the sides of my erection.
“Please.” I shut my eyes and my hands curl into fists atop my middle.
She touches me—a soft sweep of her knuckles or fingertips over my balls then another, lower. There’s tenderness as she cups and fondles but I want more. More intensity, more of everything. The silk binds my cock, maddening. Everything I’ve trained myself to suppress in aid of spoiling my lovers gnaws at me, greedy and impatient. I want callous, tactless male things. To expose myself to her like an animal in heat, ease the skin down until I’m completely bared. I want her eyes on my hard flesh. I want her hands, her mouth, her cunt. Want her on her hands and knees. I want to punish her for teasing me this way, remind her which of us does the fucking, which takes what they’re given.
But all that aggression dissolves the second she touches my cock. I tremble as the pads of her fingers run up along my ridge, gasp as they brush my head. Cool air caresses my fevered skin and she’s inching the band down. I open my eyes, draw my knees in so she can strip my shorts completely. Suddenly I have what I wanted so violently moments ago, to be exposed to her. But on my back I feel a shiver of vulnerability. Not an unpleasant sensation, I admit. Being at her mercy is taboo—an enjoyable twinge, unlike the paralysis of being at the mercy of my own compulsions and fears.
She draws her palm along the sensitive underside of my cock. “Better?”
“Yes.”
I watch her hand and the sight draws my desire into a fist, hot and tight in my lower belly. Her touch grows steadily gruffer, until I’m stiff as stone in her hand, until my skin and her palm grow damp, the strokes dragging with exquisite friction. My back arches, hips seeking more. She pushes me flat with her free hand.
“Just enjoy.”
Just suffer,
her tone tells me, a happy hint of cruelty glimmering.
I obey. I watch her extraordinary face, lips parted with mischief or lust, and it’s laughable that I ever worried I wouldn’t rouse for her—with just us, just Didier and Caroly. I doubt I’ve ever felt so deeply, utterly naked. Stripped of clothes and control and the safety of roles.
She moves to my side, propping herself on her hip and one hand, the other free to explore my body. The position presses her breasts together, the softest, palest flesh I’ve ever known, clad in lustrous satin. I reach for her, wanting to feel the weight of her, the warmth.
She makes an admonishing noise and plucks my hand away. “You’re not allowed to do a thing.”
But I violate this rule without thinking, not even a minute later. She catches my fingers as they brush her skin. “The maestro’s very bad at sitting back while someone else conducts.”
“My hands won’t listen to me. Or to your rules. Tie them down if you don’t wish them to wander.” I say it with a smile, body flushing at the notion. Perhaps I’m not so terrible at passivity as I’d imagined.
Caroly calls my bluff. She leaves me to go to the chest at the foot of the bed. I admire the curve of her hip outlined gold in the candlelight, the trail of her spine, all the shadows of her. She straightens with silk scarves in her hands.
“Those will never hold me,” I say, a touch cocky. “Keep digging.”
With a curious look she turns back to the chest to rummage, eventually finding what I hinted at. Two thick, tan leather cuffs connected by a foot-long strap. The buckles jingle as she holds them up. “These?”
“Yes. Those may stand a chance at keeping my hands out of trouble.”
She returns to bed, scanning for something she might secure me to. The posts rooted in the headboard are too high, and too awkward, being at the corners of the mattress.
She doesn’t know all the secrets of this room yet,
I think, smiling at the notion.
“There’s a spot at the foot of the bed,” I tell her. A decorative scalloped cutout in the footboard big enough to slip a fist through, which I fitted with a metal post for just these wicked purposes. Caroly finds it and, since she’s driving tonight, I let her fumble with the logistics and discover the best way to squeeze one cuff through the gap, around the post and back. If she’s nervous, it doesn’t show on her face when she turns to me. I think back to the woman I first welcomed into this flat a few short months ago. A startling transformation indeed.
“Come here,” she tells me.
I lie as she directs and rest my wrists above my head. The leather feels stiff and smooth, buckles cold, the bed foreign with me lying backward and without a pillow.
“Tighter,” I say as she threads the first cuff. “One more notch.” If I’m to feel helpless, we’ll do it properly. No chance I can slip free. This may be just the sort of therapy I can get behind.
When the task is done, she smiles and tells me, “That’s the last order you get to issue tonight.”
“This is less a seduction than a hostage taking.”
“This is whatever I feel like,” she says, smug and playful.
I tug at my restraints. In an emergency my hands could unbuckle one another, though it would take some effort.
Caroly leaves me for the chest again. What else does she want, I wonder?
It all feels very…different. I’ve had the odd client ask to tie me down, but none I’ve let do it quite so snugly. And those few times I knew if I was to fight or tremble or beg. I knew what I was expected to be. But I know Caroly wants only me, and unadulterated Didier hasn’t ever been restrained quite this way.
Without a part to play, my hands are antsy as ever.
They want a job. They need a watch to fix, a lock to pick, a meal to prepare, a woman to excite. They’ve always been that way. As a child I was a nail biter and a skin picker, whapped soundly by my mother whenever caught. Like me, her beauty had been her currency and she proclaimed my anxious habits tantamount to self-mutilation. Desperate, she had my grandmother teach me how to knit. I took to it so obsessively it’s a wonder I didn’t develop arthritis at age eight. I made great long useless rectangles, only to unravel them when I ran out of yarn and start again. My mother said she always knew where I was in our flat from “that incessant clicking”. But I never again bit my nails or savaged my skin.
I moved on to tinkering by adolescence, turning an unsightly compulsion into a rather useful hobby. I sometimes wonder if I could have been a musician, had my fingers found keys or strings instead of a tool set. But I will settle for being a master of the female body. No instrument feels so good in the hands or makes so fine a sound.
But now my restless fingers have only leather and air to occupy them. I grasp the strap that links my wrists, rubbing its worn edge with my thumbs and letting the texture distract me.
After a minute’s perusal, Caroly says, “Shut your eyes.”
I hear and feel as things are set at the foot of the bed, near my elbow. I try to guess from the sounds what she has in store for me. Was that the clink of glass or metal? But the smoothness that touches me a moment later is merely her fingertips. Her weight joins the bed and she strokes my chest, throat, arms.
“You can open your eyes.”
I do. I swallow.
The woman I love is above me, and not in any context I’ve ever experienced. Her face is half in shadow, curls lit by the flames behind her. The way she stares, she looks beautiful and dangerous, an angel gone rogue. An exciting stranger in familiar skin.
Her fingers play along my side, drawing a line from my hip to my shoulder and back again. Her touch teases, but her gaze burns. Hot desire in those cool eyes, that huntress look she gives me so often, one that strokes my vanity and arousal equally. Finally the setting matches that stare. I’m no lesson tonight, no tour guide, not even a partner.
I’m her plaything.
“What will you do with me?” I ask.
“Whatever I like.” She reclines again on her hip and elbow at my side. Her gaze and fingertips trail from my throat to my chest, my belly, down to my thigh and up again. And again. Just the lightest touch but fire rises in its wake. My cock envies the attention, stiffening, but she ignores it. It’s my mouth she wants next. She traces my lips with her thumb then slides it inside. I shut my eyes and close her in my heat, sucking. She draws her thumb away, replaces it with a finger, then two. I spoil them as if they were as sensitive as her clitoris, lavish them with my tongue, remind her what I can do.