Sweet Agony (10 page)

And I say with the most relish I can muster:

‘Would you like me to leave my dress down, or do you prefer a bare work surface?’

Followed by the longest silence the world has ever known. It goes on and on and on, and the longer it does, the worse it gets. If nothing happens in the next thirty seconds I am almost definitely going to die. I think I might just burst like a balloon with too much air crammed into it, yet still he says nothing. He does nothing. I’m starting to think it might be better to just turn around and sit down again.

But, by God, I’m glad I do nothing of the sort. 

If I had I would have missed him standing, so slowly and deliberately it makes me tingle from head to toe. My sex seems to clench around nothing and my nipples immediately go tight and stiff – and that’s before he speaks. Oh, God, when he speaks. He seems to wait for just the right moment – when I’m dying to turn and see his expression but not quite daring to do it – and then he just cuts through the air with that cool, low voice. ‘Lift your dress,’ he says.

Though that’s not the best part.

The best part is how calmly he goes about it. He could be talking about the best way to bake a pie, for all the passion he puts into it. Not a word wavers, not a breath is taken out of place. I almost ask him to say it again, just so I can be sure it was as filthy as I thought. It feels as though it couldn’t possibly be. I must be mistaken, I tell myself.

Until he insists.

‘I was not aware I had all day for you to obey a simple instruction,’ he says, and despite my best intentions I practically fall all over myself to do it. I snag my tights in my haste and somehow almost lose a shoe, shame heating my cheeks as I go. Now he’s going to see just how eager I am, I think, and I want to disappear through a door in the floor.

But I know why I don’t.

It feels too good to cut out on. Even the humiliation turns me inside out, as I am certain he well knows. He actually tuts at me, once the dress is around my hips, and tells me off for wearing tights. ‘Did I not provide you with stockings, Molly?’ he asks, while I squirm and writhe and wish I had figured out those fucking suspenders. I spent forty minutes with them clipped so wrongly it made me walk doubled over, and after that I refused to try again.

Though that seems a pity now, with him looking at my woolly things from Marks and Spencer’s. I was so proud of them too – bought with my first real and quite fabulous wages, courtesy of my current employer – but now I can never be. They probably look dreadful over my frankly enormous bottom. He might even decide to stop everything right here, in sheer horror at the thought of touching such a nightmarish mess. It’s no wonder I start to shove them down.

But when I do, they’re so clingy that something else comes off too.

I want to call it my underwear, but my brain is afraid to admit that. If my underwear came down too, that means he can now see my completely naked arse, and I’m nowhere near ready for that. I was only just getting used to the other stuff. My bare bottom is a step too far – not to mention how much it’s going to hurt me if he actually does this. I mean, before I had the protection of seven feet of woollen underthings. Now there’s nothing between me and his hand.

Oh, God, is he going to use his hand?

I don’t know. I don’t know. It seems not, considering how little he likes bodily contact. But who can say for sure, after the silence that follows my sudden strip? It goes on for so long that I glance over my shoulder to see what he’s doing, and all I see shows me how bad this is going to be. His face is a picture. A great and glorious picture of someone simultaneously shocked by a naked backside and so fascinated they do not look away.

For a moment I feel studied, in that intense way he usually employs for everything but me. His eyes almost ease over my skin, so far from any scornful judgement that I come close to saying thank you. I flush from head to toe, under the kind of scrutiny I cannot fail to understand. He likes what he’s seeing, I think. He likes the shock of it, the daring, and the shape. Oh, he definitely likes the shape.

I know that because he tells me. Cyrian Harcroft, sentient robot from our dystopian future, says one word that sets my soul on fire. ‘Glorious,’ he says, and I just sort of sag against the couch. It takes almost everything I have to haul myself back to something like a standing position, and even then I need his help. He has to tell me
no
in this delicious, almost outraged tone – and then I feel something across my belly.

For a second, I swear to God, I think it’s his hands. I come very close to screaming or sobbing or at least being stunned, until I realise what he actually did – which in a way is worse. If he was going to punish me, then hands would be the obvious choice. But a cane…oh, God, a cane…yeah, I think that is definitely a cane. The thin one, I believe, from the stand by the door. The one that barely seems like it would hold a person up, because it bends when you lean on it.

I think I see now why it does.

I mean, it might be terrible as a walking aid. But as something that presses into my stomach until I stand up properly? Then it’s pretty great. It doesn’t press too hard, it doesn’t seem like a big deal, and, even better, when he takes it away it swishes through the air. He has a swishy thing, like in my daydreams of dastardly headmasters, and now he’s going to use it.
Lord
, I can hardly wait for him to use it. The only thing that stops my right leg jiggling with impatience is the idea of how it would look.

Like something that doesn’t fit in this scene, I think. This incredibly sexy and intense scene, of the sort I never thought I’d be a part of. There is the crushed red velvet of a fancy couch under my clenching fingers, and I have heels on my neatly held apart feet. Somewhere in the distance a clock slowly chimes the hour and if I strain I can hear my own breathing.

It is
sublime
.

And then he strikes me, and I lose my mind.

It’s nothing like what I expected. Some part of me thought it would just be painful, and that people were lying when they talked about how exciting it is. But I see now that I am an idiot. The cane paints a searing stripe across my flesh, and when it does I try to climb up the nearest wall. The breath I was about to take sticks in my throat. Everything stops.

Swiftly followed by a sensation so intense I can hardly stand it. It seems to flood my body, filling me to the brim. I feel incapable of containing it, and even when I manage to cram it in there is more, hot on its heels. He doesn’t wait for me to take it in. He just does it again, this time so sharply it brings tears to my eyes. I come very close to sobbing, but, good God, I know why I hold it in.

If I let it out he may stop.

In fact, I know he will. He hesitates when I let out a harsh breath, and again when my knees buckle. Anything more and he’ll pull back, and I cannot have that. Just a little more, and I think I could actually come. The sore throb of each stroke is starting to filter through my body to some very pleasant places. It has my clit in its grip, and my nipples feel so stiff they’re painful. Every time my body jolts under the pressure they rub too much against the inside of my dress.

And oh, God, I am so wet. It’s as if there’s a river bursting its banks between my legs. I’ve never experienced so much slickness there – it seems to announce itself whenever I move. Something slippery slides against another slippery thing and suddenly everything is even more arousing than before. Hot, thick pulses roll outwards from my swollen centre, and then he does it again and I don’t know what to do. I have to jam my hand over my mouth.

But even that doesn’t stop the sensation that follows. It doesn’t stop me creaming myself like an adolescent boy, barely able to stand another touch in case it pulls my trigger. I’m going to go off, I think. I’m going to do it in one big gush. Who could blame me? This whole thing has been building up too long. I suppressed too much and failed to diddle myself when I needed to do it, and now I’m in real trouble.

Another second, I think.

One more stroke, I think. I’m so close to the brink I can almost taste it.

And then, of course, he steps back. Of course he does. He times it so perfectly I could have set my watch by it. I should have known it was coming, and yet somehow I didn’t. If I had, I probably would have fought harder for my orgasm. Given in faster, let it flow over me without a second thought. Now I have to wait – or, even worse, perhaps he won’t continue now. He seems to quite like teasing me into a tangle. Maybe he’ll do so again.

But what happens is even more monstrous. He takes his sweet time doing God only knows what, eyes no doubt all over my striped backside. Then, just when I think I might have to beg for the slightest thing, he does something so awful I can scarcely comprehend it. I expect him to make me make do with nothing, and instead I get the slow, inexorable slide of that cane.

I get it
right between my legs
.

Not over my new red lines or even the backs of my thighs. Between, he does it between, he just eases through my sex like a thin, tormenting finger. And when I say through, I
mean
through. I mean it spreads my swollen lips and strokes through all the sticky folds, triggering a million sensations. My clit can barely take him spanking me. Feeling the instrument of my torture slide over that stiff little bud is something I can’t deal with at all.

I don’t even care if he hears me.

I let out a guttural groan of absolute bliss – one that gets louder when I realise exactly why he rubs me between my legs like that. He can deny it all he wants, but I know it. I feel it deep in my bones, along with the almost constant roll of intense arousal. He wants to look, I think. He wants to see for sure just how wet I am. And when he finally speaks, I find I am right.

Because he asks me for more.

‘If you stand with your legs a little further apart it will be easier to take,’ he says, so crafty I feel like giving him a round of applause. I probably would, if I were not so desperate. I almost get tangled in my own tights in my eagerness, rubbing them down with my shins until I can do exactly what he wants. I don’t even think about what he will see once it’s done.

And when it is, another glut of pleasure pushes through me. My clit seems to swell and jump, and my already flushed cheeks flush harder. I bet I’m glistening, I think. I bet my pussy looks like that description in the book. Like a ripe, wet peach, freshly split. All my folds so pink and plump, and coated in slickness from my greedy little cunt all the way to the tightly closed hole between my spread arse cheeks.

He could probably push in there with no difficulty, I think.

But I don’t expect him to do it. It seems far too sexual for someone like him. He is still intent on pretending this is an ordinary punishment. If he did something like
that
he couldn’t go on claiming he has no interest in sex, because penetrating me is about the sexiest sex thing someone can do. There’s no room for misinterpreting it, no matter how hard I try. I do my best to think,
Oh he must have slipped
, as that strip of slender wood ever so slightly eases in.

And then I let myself see it for what it is, and lose any restraint I had left. The words ‘He’s fucking my arse with the thing he just spanked me with’ flash up behind my eyes. They practically have a parade, or at least that’s how it feels to my body. Everything seems to burst, and when it does I do not hold back. I think I put a hole in his couch. I say things I never want to say to someone like him: ‘ohhhhh yeah oh my God I’m coming you’re making me come oh fuck fuck fuck.’

But best of all, I don’t regret it. If anything, the sound of me blurting out such filthy things – so full of abandonment and burning lust – makes me go harder. I imagine his startled face, as all sense of propriety flies out of the fucking window. Or maybe his disapproval, oh, yes, God, yes, his disapproval makes me come so good. I all but feel it in my teeth. My cunt clenches hard around nothing, as if jealous of the thing that’s fucking my arse.

And my clit, oh, the shivering, stuffed-full sensation that blooms from my clit. It seems to strain against my skin. I feel as though I can’t quite contain it, and although I do, everything is over-taxed. My heartbeat is a raging, brain-squeezing thunder. For a second I can’t breathe, and when I finally do I have to gasp it all in. I have to pant and shake and sag against the couch, face suddenly wet with tears I don’t remember shedding. I don’t mind, though. Even if he sneers at me for doing it and says something cutting, I can take it. It would be a small price to pay for whatever
that
just was. My primary feeling is relief, rather than any silly shame. Relief that I finally got some respite from the arousal that’s been torturing me for days, weeks – months, if I’m being honest.

I’ve wanted him to take me apart from day one, I know.

He was made for this thing. He could have done it in his sleep, if he was not so unsure of his feelings about sex. If he had given in sooner and just gone for it, forgot all his reservations and left his hang-ups behind. All he had to do was give me one look and we could have been doing this all along. But I don’t regret the wasted time. It was all foreplay for this, and now that it’s here we can have so much fun. There is so much I want to do and say and explore, now that he is at last eager to try.

But I am glad I keep all of it inside.

It would have been mortifying to have said ‘Thank you,’ I think.

Only to turn and find him reading his paper as if nothing had happened.

Chapter Eight

I consider broaching the topic with him. Maybe slipping some references to sado-masochism into everyday conversation, instead of simply agreeing that Thomas Hardy was an insufferable bore of the highest order. Or I could ask him what he thinks of Anaïs Nin, and see how far things go. If I get lucky he might read a little to me – though that is kind of the problem. I have to be lucky. I still need to approach with caution and move stealthily, as if one wrong step will dislodge everything.