Behind her blindfold, time ceased to pass in its customary manner. Five minutes of flogging lasted an hour. One night in his arms passed in minutes. An hour-long beating was something to be grateful for. The beating would seem to last forever. Even eternity in Hell was no Hell if he was there.
The flogging finally ceased. He pressed in close to her. She felt his strong, bare chest against her burning back. She breathed in and inhaled his scent. Even warm from exertion and arousal he still smelled like a deep winter night.
He placed his hands on her fluttering stomach and brought them slowly up to her breasts. A night with him always meant waning pleasure and waxing pain, waxing pleasure and waning pain. He brought her through the cycle over and over again. The pain brought her body to life. The pleasure was always most acute when it followed the pain.
Now it was pleasure alone she felt as he caressed her breasts and teased her nipples. His mouth found the spot between her shoulder blades that when touched sent a thrill straight into her stomach. One hand slid between her legs and touched her clitoris. With his finger and thumb he massaged it until she was so close to coming she felt the first muscle contraction.
He pulled away from her, leaving her panting and desperate for him. She prayed he’d let her down now, let her down and finally take her.
When she heard the whistling sound of something slicing through the air, she knew he wasn’t done hurting her yet.
After so many years together she’d learned how to prepare herself for a flogging, for the whip and the strap. She knew tricks, ways to breathe, ways to hold herself, to alleviate the pain even as she received it. But when it came to the cane, nothing helped. And when the first strike landed on her lower thighs, she could do nothing but cry out. The second came on the heels of the first, a little harder and one inch higher. On the fourth strike she screamed and felt the blindfold turn wet with tears. The fifth was lighter only because the sixth and final strike was always the worst. The sixth landed in a diagonal across all five previous welts. She sagged in her bonds and cried. He didn’t always beat her until she cried. She learned to love and fear those nights he did. He saved up her pain, counted it like currency and the more pain she endured, the more pleasure she could buy with it.
When he untied her from the bedpost, her arms fell like dead weight to her sides and her knees buckled. He caught her before she collapsed and laid her tenderly on the center of the bed.
His mouth was at her ear now. With words intimate and secret he whispered his love for her, his pride that she was his property, his possession, his heart. She was always his, would forever be his. New tears flowed now but they were ones wrenched from her by love and not torture. This was her favorite pain.
He kissed her now on the mouth for the first time. He kissed her like he owned her, as he owned her. He kissed her like her mouth was his mouth, her lips were his lips, her tongue was his tongue. They were one flesh. They needed no wedding ring, no ceremony to know that was true. She had the collar around her neck. She did not envy married women what they had. She would take his collar over a blood diamond and a cheap gold band any day and for all time.
He moved away from her again. She waited on her aching back and relished the absence of pain. When he returned to her he pulled the coverlet down underneath her so she lay on the sheets. He took her by the knees and wrapped a soft cotton rope around them. She relaxed and let him tie her to the bed. Her knees were up and pulled wide. She lay completely open now. No matter how hard she could try to close her legs, she couldn’t. She never tried.
The bed shifted. She knew he knelt between her wide-open thighs. She inhaled sharply when she felt his fingers slowly enter her. He opened his fingers to widen her, to prepare her for his penetration. He pushed into the back wall of her vagina and pressed down until she flinched hard around his hand. Her passage was slick and wet for him. But he was large enough that he could tear her or bruise her if he didn’t ready her for him first. There were times he took her so roughly she bled. Those were the nights he was lost to himself, lost in the darkness that hid beneath the shadow of his heart. But tonight he wasn’t lost. He was with her.
She felt the wet tip of him poised at the entrance to her body. He pushed in slowly. She whimpered as she stretched and opened to take all of him. If she could have taken his whole being inside her she would. If she could disappear inside him and live in his skin she would.
He moved in her with long meticulous thrusts that filled and emptied her. His pace did not quicken. He gripped her wrists and pressed them into the bed. Many nights he would secure her wrists with rope, as well. But some nights he needed to hold her down with his own hands.
She lay beneath him and panted. Tied as she was she could do little more than take him. She wanted to beg but he hadn’t given her permission to speak. She tilted her hips up as much as she could to take even more of him in her. With one hand still on her wrists, his other hand reached between them and caressed her where their bodies joined. The pressure built in her hips. A knot tightened in her stomach and she felt an invisible rope pull her toward the ceiling. She came hard and spasmed around him. He didn’t stop.
The second climax came not long after the first one. He could manipulate her body as if he knew it better than his own. It terrified her at times how in control of himself he was even when inside her.
He thrust harder. He pushed in deeper, moved faster. She gasped as his grip on her wrists tightened to the point of pain. With one final push he poured into her. When he came at last it was in complete silence.
Still inside her he reached behind her head and untied the blindfold. She looked to the side and didn’t meet his eyes.
“Look at me,” he ordered and she did so gratefully. His steel-gray eyes glowed with his love for her.
“I love you, sir,” she whispered.
The slap came so sudden and fierce that her whole body shuddered in shock.
“Did I give you permission to speak?”
This time she didn’t answer. She shook her head. The movement dislodged a tear that had been lurking at the corner of her eye.
He smiled at her and dipped his lips to hers. He kissed her again and she relaxed into his mouth. His lips moved to her neck and up to her ear.
“I love you, too.”
Still buried deep inside her, he began to thrust into her once again. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back as he wrapped his hand around her neck. Her collar bit into her throat.
She swallowed hard against his hand and breathed and breathed.
He’d only just begun to hurt her tonight.
“Hey, Nor, I’m home. Want some dinner?”
Nora blinked and rubbed her eyes, which had gone dry from staring at her computer screen for so long.
Wesley stood just inside her office and at first she could barely focus on him. She saw him but saw through him and past him at the same time.
“Sounds good.” She glanced at the words on her screen. “I’m starving.”
“Pasta?”
“Too many carbs.”
Wesley rolled his eyes. “Fine. Salad and fish?”
“Fish? But it’s not Friday.”
“You’re the Catholic. I’m Methodist. We eat fish whenever we want. Give me twenty minutes.”
Wesley left her alone again. She printed out the pages she’d been typing and read through them.
The phone rang at seven and the call itself consisted of only seven words…
She read to the end and pressed the pages, still warm from the printer, briefly to her chest. Reluctantly, she slid the pages under her desk and fed them one by one through the shredder. She highlighted the text on her computer screen and hit Delete, flinching as the text disappeared. She closed the document and let the words disappear into the ether. She hated to do it. But she knew The Rule. She obeyed the Ruler.
Nora stood up for the first time in an hour and left her office. When she saw Wesley standing at the kitchen counter she actually could see him now. He smiled at her. She smiled back.
“So what did you write today?” he asked as he expertly sliced through the skin of a ripe red tomato.
“A really hot sex scene with a lot of S&M between a girl and her true love,” she said and Wesley rolled his eyes at her, his usual response to her wickeder scenes. “But don’t worry, I deleted it.”
“How come?” he asked, popping a chunk of tomato into his mouth.
Nora leaned against Wesley, taking temporary comfort in his warm, strong chest. He wrapped his arm around her and rested his chin on top of her head.
“It wasn’t fiction.”
6
My Caroline,
I didn’t want to write this story any more than you want to read it. It’s us. Of course it’s us. A name changed here, a date changed there…but still us. You have always been my only muse. I cannot paint or sculpt. I have only my words to render your likeness. Sometimes I wish I were both God and Adam so I could tear out my rib and create you from my own flesh. I would say I’d create you from my heart, but I gave that to you when you left me. But that’s a cliché, isn’t it? Sadly, that’s all I have these days. The whole story is a cliché. I desired you. I ate of you. I lost you. That ancient story—older than the Garden, old as the Snake. I would have liked to call this story of ours
The Temptation
but the word
temptation,
once the province of pious theologians, has now been co-opted by every third second-rate romance novelist. And although I loved you, my beautiful girl, this is not a romance novel.
“L
ike it, Zach?”
Zach blinked at the interruption, lost as he was in Nora’s new words.
“It’s quite an improvement.”
“An improvement? Oh, I meant the cocoa.”
Zach sat in Nora’s bright kitchen, the winter sun turning everything white. Nora’s new draft of the first chapter sat in front of him and a cup of hot chocolate steamed at his elbow. He sipped the cocoa and felt like a lad again in his grandmother’s kitchen.
“Very good,” he said, inhaling the warm steam. “So is this.”
He tapped the pages in front of him. Nora had taken his advice and created a frame story for her book. It would be a letter her narrator, William, was writing to Caroline, the woman he loved and lost. It was working beautifully already—the book and the partnership with Nora. He’d rarely gone to his writers’ homes and certainly never sat with them at their kitchen table and drank cocoa. Nora was proving to be a different breed from any writer he’d ever before known.
“‘This is not a romance novel…’”
Zach read from her new first chapter. “Excellent line. Evocative and provocative. Ironic, as well.”
“Ironic?” Nora sipped at her own mug of hot cocoa. She sat across from him at the table and pulled one leg up to her chest. “It’s true. It isn’t a romance novel.”
“Not a traditional one, of course. Your protagonists don’t end up together, but it is a love story.”
“A love story is not the same as a romance novel. A romance novel is the story of two people falling in love against their will. This is a story of two people who leave each other against their will. It starts to end the minute they meet.”
“Why does it end? You seem like an optimist to me, but the end is heartrending. The last thing she wants to do is leave him, and yet in the end she goes.”
Nora left her chair and went to the kitchen cabinet by the refrigerator.
“I’m no optimist,” she said as she opened the cabinet door. “I’m just a realist who smiles too much. And the reason William and Caroline don’t stay together is that while he really is in the lifestyle, she’s not. She’s only in the relationship for him. It’s their sexuality that’s the problem, not the love. It’s like a gay man being married to a straight woman. No matter how much he loves her, it’s a sacrifice every moment they’re together. The sex is secondary to the sacrifice.”
“A very close second, I notice.”
Nora laughed. She closed the cabinet door and knelt on the floor. She opened the bottom door and gave a victorious laugh.
“Found them.” She pulled out a bag of marshmallows. “I have to hide the sugar from Wes.”
“Has a sweet tooth, does he?”
“He has type 1 diabetes. And a sweet tooth. Bad combination. He’s usually really good about what he eats, but I catch him staring pretty longingly when I have cocoa and marshmallows.”
Zach wondered if it was actually the sugar Wesley had been staring at and not Nora. He couldn’t take his own eyes off this woman. She’d been captivating in her signature red Monday night. And now in casual clothes she looked casually stunning. He watched her as she rolled back onto her toes and rose straight up off the floor with the well-trained grace of a geisha. He marveled at her offhand display of almost balletic agility while she leaned over the table and dropped a handful of marshmallows into his cocoa and hers.
“Zach, don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re even more ridiculously handsome when you look happy,” she said, dropping back into her chair and popping a marshmallow into her mouth. “You aren’t, by any chance, enjoying working with me? The London Fog isn’t lifting, is it?”
Zach took a sip of his cocoa to cover his embarrassment. He was used to women hitting on him but never before had any woman been so shamelessly forward with him.
“As this is the first time we’ve actually sat down and worked on your book together,” Zach said and coughed uncomfortably, “I think a verdict on my meteorological conditions would be premature.”
“What’s the verdict on the book then?”