The Dom Project (8 page)

So over the coming month, I’ll be writing here about each of our planned thrice weekly sessions, basically laying it all out for your enjoyment and hopefully my illumination.

We’re both concerned about privacy, but you already know I’m also a show-off. So you might see a photo accompanying my reports—cropped discreetly, of course. In the meantime, here’s an instructional video on how to spit-shine leather boots. I’ll be studying it carefully as part of my upcoming duties. Service!

Love,

The Picky Submissive

Chapter Five

“Hi,” John said as he opened the door for her. He looked the same as always. His voice wasn’t particularly growly. When she stepped into his apartment, it seemed familiar, even smelled familiar—citrusy wood cleaner and the faintly oily smell of John’s cooking.

Her skin felt warm and flushed. She resisted the impulse to dart to the bathroom and check her reflection. But no, she was perfect. Exactly as requested in a neat pencil skirt and smooth silk blouse opened down to her lacy new bustier.

“Don’t take off your shoes.”

She’d had one finger halfway worked into her heel strap, because that was always what she did when she walked into someone’s place.

She froze.

He’d said it so casually. It didn’t matter. Everything changed. And when she looked in his eyes, he knew it. The satisfaction showed on every line of his face, especially the cruel, sensuous curve of his lips. She stood straight and shifted her weight to rebalance, suddenly dizzy. It wasn’t a good feeling, not at all.

“This is a little tricky,” he said, “the in-between time. Tricky for anyone, but especially us, considering. I think it’s going to be important to have clear lines between this and the rest of our lives together, so I’ve got something for you. To help.” He held out a bracelet—no, it was a very small necklace, a pearl choker. Not the expensive kind, but the design was elegant, and the iridescence of the dark gray pearls appealed to her. “This is a marker. You’re going to turn around, and raise your hair up. When I put this on you, that means you need to leave certain things behind. Let them go. I’m here to make that happen for you. And when we’re done, and you take it off...” The way he trailed off seemed purposeful; he was waiting for her to finish the sentence, to speak for the first time.

She took a deep, relieved breath. “We go back.”

He grinned. More satisfaction, and some hunger too. A strange balancing act, as if he were standing on the border of his ordinary slacker self and the dominant man she’d glimpsed at Miss Kitty’s. “Exactly.”

She turned, presenting her back to him, and raised her hair from the back of her neck. The dizzying sense of wrongness only increased, because her pose felt bizarrely out of context—
oh
,
would you get my necklace for me?
Something a married couple would do on their anniversary dinner and wow, when she thought about it,
John bought me jewelry
. It was too much all at once, and the terror of that rose up in her until it took all her willpower not to run right back out the door again.

But then John was at her back—not pressed against her, though she could feel his heat—and his arms reached over her shoulders, the cool pearls draping down onto her collarbone and then rising again like a sigh as he pulled the choker taut around her throat. The fear didn’t stop, but it went from a pounding to a fluttering inside of her. She didn’t move.

In fact, she’d gone perfectly still, like a mannequin, too frozen to do anything or make any choice at all.

John’s hands wrapped gently around her wrists, guiding her arms back down to her sides and letting her hair fall. “Turn around for me,” he said in a voice barely above a whisper, but it wasn’t a question, and it wasn’t even a request. It was an instruction—no, a command.

She turned.

John smiled as he ran his fingertips along the string of pearls, so lightly, and she shivered as if he were touching her skin. But of course, he wasn’t. No touching skin to skin, unless it was to position her. No caresses. No kisses. No openhanded slaps. No fingertips digging into her hips as he pounded into her from behind—

She forced herself to look him in the eye, and let the steady concentration of his gaze ground her again.

John’s hand fell into the dip of her waist and rested there, the heat and weight of his palm searing her through the sweet slip of her silk blouse. “Tell me your safe word,” he said.

They’d already discussed and chosen it, when they were writing their contract. At first she’d thought it was silly and kind of overcautious to be asking it now, but when the word didn’t immediately come to mind, she saw the wisdom in John’s decision.

It came to her. “Mareau,” she said, the word as rich in her mouth as butterscotch candy.

He nodded. “Take off your blouse.”

She tried to think of the task as just that—a task, a goal, no other meaning. Simple. The buttons passed easily through the silk slits, one after one. She didn’t fumble.

The hard part was when she took her shirt off. The strapless bustier had looked gorgeous in the fitting room, and stayed tight around her waist, but couldn’t cling to what wasn’t really there in the bust department. The rolling motion of her shoulders lifted her right out of it. So much for a sophisticated look.

The cool weight of the pearls reminded her to stop judging and measuring.
I’m here to please
...
someone else.
That’s what matters.

She folded the shirt into a neat square and waited.

A completely different man spoke to her with John’s voice, so close she felt his breath against her ear. “You want to be
useful
, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she murmured.

He tapped her heel with the toe of his boot. Enough to shift her minutely, not quite enough to make her stagger. The shock was profound. Every muscle in her thighs tensed.
Stop it.
Stop it.
She wasn’t sure whether she wanted to tell him that, or herself.

“You forgot something,” he said.

“Oh. Sir. Yes. Sir.” God, this was crazy. Saying that word stirred her on a visceral level, as if an invisible hand had reached inside her chest to subtly rearrange her body. She shivered in one breath, felt comfortably warm in the next.

“That’s right.” The floorboards creaked as he stepped back and forth behind her. Examining her. She arched her back a degree more, and a spike of desire hit between her legs—violent and unexpected—knowing that she’d just
presented
herself and was overcome with the shamelessness of that, no matter how subtle. “The right word, the right pose—you’re very dedicated.” There was no teasing in his voice, not anymore. “I have some work for you, Robin. A way to be useful.”

A few years ago, her response to those words would have whiplashed her into self-loathing. She’d overcome that. Now it only felt a tiny bit wrong but mostly really, really hot and full of triumph that, yes, she could go there, so far down into the depths, and come back up again. For now, she’d be his servant, but when it was over, they’d be friends and equals again.

It’s working
.

“Yes, sir?” she said, putting a rising intonation in her voice, an expectant lilt.

“Put the shirt on the chair over there, and walk into the kitchen. There’s a set of antique sterling silver candlestick holders and everything you need to polish them.”

A menial, repetitive task that was mildly humiliating... and weirdly compelling? He knew her too well. The fine detail of beautiful objects was that rare place where her public and intimate life intersected. And that crossing was
electric
.

She leaned down, bending at the waist, and placed the shirt on the chair. She wanted to see his reaction very badly, but she didn’t turn. Luckily, she didn’t really need to: there was no mistaking his hissing intake of breath.

So his control of the situation wasn’t superhuman. A small, private smile curled across her lips before she forced it down again.

Only a few steps to the small corner kitchen. The candlesticks were neoclassical in design, relatively unornamented, with fluted columns that had collected a thin layer of dark, oxidized grime. The pattern of the luster beneath was complex, swirling, hypnotic. Her fingertips itched to trace those swirls, to transform them.

There was a container of silver polish by the sink. It was the traditional stuff: thick, dark pink cream, looking organic and glutinous. A pair of gloves rested next to the container, along with sponges and drying cloths.

The scene of a domestic ritual. Her role was clear. She assumed it by snapping on the gloves. She knew exactly what to do, her mind settling into a comfortably narrowed focus—

He
touched
her. When he’d placed the pearls around her neck, she’d known and seen what was coming, but this—she twisted and twitched, almost knocking over the jar of paste, a sense of anger and violation starting to rise.

No
. The touch was light. Not his hand. It was the tip of a cane tapping against her knee. She rested her gloved hands on the counter and took a deep, calming breath.

“All right?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Sir.”

“Go ahead and polish one of them. I’ll do that again when you start on the second holder. If you’re not sure, we’ll move on.”

Her chest had tightened and she didn’t trust herself to speak, so she nodded, then went to work again. The sense of wrongness faded away with every cleaning stroke. It was a good feeling that he was there watching her, that he was so attentive and responsive to her mysterious needs.

She ran warm water over the candleholder and watched the layer of now-grayish paste melt away. Underneath, the wet, mirror-bright surface reflected her own colors, softly gleaming like the neon city at twilight. She turned off the tap, dried and polished the candleholder to a sharper gleam—the sexual form of the motion wasn’t lost on her—and tried to focus on her task instead of waiting for John’s next move.

“Next time you do this,” he said, drawing the cane up the back of her thigh, “You should wear some thigh-high stockings for me. You know the ones. With the seam up the back.”

The thought of that gave her a weird flutter. She covered it up with a derisive snort. “Next time? You have other phallic objects lying around for me to rub?”

“Plenty,” he replied, not angry at all, and cracked the cane across the thickest part of her ass.

Just enough to sting. Just enough for heat to flare, so that everything below her waist felt too tight and restrictive. The pencil skirt might as well have been mummification gauze. God, she almost pressed against the counter for relief before she caught herself. When she rebalanced with a click of her heels, the heat between her legs was unmistakable. Suddenly the candlestick wrapped in both her hands felt absolutely deliciously
obscene
.

“Sorry,
sir
,” she said through clenched teeth.

“You thought that was a punishment?” He sounded amused. “Actually, I don’t mind a little back talk in the spirit of mutual respect. You don’t really strike me as a bratty sub, and since we just established you like it, you’re going to get a caning no matter how you act.” He stroked the inside of her knee with the tip of the cane.

Oh yes
,
please
. She shivered and bit her lip, hoping John didn’t catch the expression. She wasn’t quite ready, yet, to give him the extent of her plain-faced desire.

She picked up the sponge, dabbed it into the paste and went to work on the second candleholder. John controlled her position with light touches of the cane. The hardest was when he tapped against the inside of her heels to spread her legs farther apart, pulling the skirt tighter and making it even more unbearable. She wished she could take it off. But then...

“Sir, I’d like to take my skirt off.”

“What was that?”

Had she whispered it? “I’d like to take my skirt off, sir.”

This position was beginning to tug at the seams. The skirt’s seams.
Her
seams. That little slit up the back of it must be a full triangle by now.

“No,” he said cheerfully.

She was so torn between saying,
Fuck you
,
John
and
please
,
sir
that she couldn’t say anything at all. So she bit her lip—again, and it was beginning to hurt—and kept working. By the time the last candlestick was fully polished, she’d entered a heightened state of awareness where all the frustrations of her position didn’t matter as much. Oh, she still
felt
them—the fabric encasing her thighs, the evil lace biting into her labia, the ache in her calves, the anxious almost-pleasure of the random cane taps—but she accepted the sensations as part of the work. She didn’t fight them.

She took off the gloves and twisted to face John, about to say,
I’m done sir
, but the words kept slipping away because the way he looked at her was so alien. Not like John at all. He looked right through her as if all their history had fallen away and left them strangers. As if he were
measuring
her. He would have been completely terrifying, if not for the satisfaction she saw curling in his smile.

It thrilled her to the core that he loved this so much.

“You did an excellent job. I knew you would.” He tapped the cane into the palm of his left hand. The chrysanthemum tattoo quivered as his shoulder tensed. “Now pull your skirt up to your waist, and hold it there.”

She turned back to face the sink, but even without looking at him she couldn’t think straight, her mind racing in two entirely directions—
No.
Not for John.
Yes.
Anything for him.
Naked
,
on my knees
,
anything.
She remembered her safe word and let it float out of her mind again, because her body was already responding.