The Theory of Attraction (13 page)

“What do you mean?”

“I trust you to be honest about your limits. Not to let me push you somewhere you don’t want to go, then resent me for it afterward. I need that, because I don’t really…I don’t always understand…”

I didn’t want that. Didn’t want his insecurity triggered now, here, popping the bubble of idyllic sex euphoria we’d created over the past twenty-four hours. Squeezing his arms, I wrapped him around me a little more tightly. “I know. But you get this part, right? And I’ll tell you if it’s too much. You can trust me.”

Ivan rested his chin on my head, reminding me how much taller he was. After a moment or two of silence, he seemed to pull his mindset back to where it had been. “Professor,” he murmured.

“Professor,” I acknowledged, with a quiver of anticipation. “Please don’t do it, Professor. I don’t want to be shaved down there, I’d be so embarrassed for you to see me like that.” This was true, actually, but not normally something I would have admitted. Not that any of this was normal anymore. I was heading in an entirely new direction, and God help me if Ivan didn’t take over the lead again soon because my nerve wouldn’t last for much longer.

But I had no cause to worry any longer. He was there instantly. “I want to see you, Camilla. Every bit of you. See you and taste you with nothing in the way. No hiding anything from me. Your embarrassment makes your gift of submission more meaningful.”

I tried a little tug, as though I might walk myself forward out of his embrace. His arms were firm as steel, and didn’t budge. “Let me go!”

“No, Camilla.” He slid his arms more firmly around me, and then scooped me up as though I weighed nothing, which was at the very least quite flattering. He carried me into the bedroom and plunked me on the bed. Before I could even rebound, he had cuffs strapped around my wrists and was securing them to the headboard. I struggled to twist my hands around, to pull myself free, but before I could manage that, he had pinned one of my legs by straddling it while he strapped the other ankle and thigh with more cuffs. Cleverly designed little fuckers, too. They clipped together, hobbling me on that side. I lost my leverage, and could only kick ineffectually as he secured the other leg.

And then I couldn’t kick at all. I brought my knees together and he chuckled. “Enjoy that range of motion while you can.”

He shifted my hands one at a time, clipping those cuffs to my thighs as well. Finally he secured tethers from the clustered cuffs down the sides of the bed to attachment points I couldn’t see. He tightened them to open me up again, preventing me from pulling my arms and legs any closer together. Then he stood back and surveyed the handiwork his superior strength and my admittedly halfhearted struggling had wrought. I was well and truly immobilized, splayed on my back with bent knees like a frog in a biology lab. When I tried a little harder to free myself and realized I truly couldn’t, my heart started to thump double-time.

“Shh. Easy. I’ll be right back.” Ivan went back to the bathroom, and as I watched him go, I realized he’d pulled his shorts back on. After a few seconds he returned bearing some small scissors, an electric shaver and a towel.

“This won’t be a very close shave, but there’s less chance of injury this way since you’re being uncooperative,” he explained as he folded the towel in half and slid it under my hips. “Later, when you’ve learned to be a good girl and be still while I shave you, I can use a real razor and get much closer. Or you can have it waxed. Up to you, as long as that pussy is kept bare for me.”

Pinned open as I was, I wouldn’t have thought I could feel any more naked. But by the time Ivan had finished clipping and then buzzing the hair away—doing a fair amount of teasing in the process with the smooth, flat, vibrating back of the electric shaver—I felt exposed in a whole new way. Possibly because the newly revealed skin was so sensitive and still cool after the sudden loss of its insulation. I wanted to feel it for myself, but Ivan left me in the restraints while he put away the shaving gear.

When he returned, he had a dollop of some clear gel on his fingers, and he proceeded to smooth the cold stuff into the shaved skin. Clearly this was not meant solely as skin care, though he assured me it was just aloe.

“Mostly I know it’ll soothe the burn but still not taste too bad.”

“Am I going to be tasting—
ooh.
”

His tongue was scorching hot, licking a sizzling path from my perineum up to my already tingling clit. With nothing in the way, I could feel every subtle touch, every press and flex and flick, and each nibble of his lips. And with no way to move, either to pull away or to get closer, I was utterly at his mercy. And he knew it.

“This time,” he said between licks, in a tone of casual cruelty, “I’m going to try something new. For your punishment, I mean.”

“Oh.” It was about all I could muster. My brain was already soaring, my body burning with the need for more. Coherence had failed me during the shaving.

“Yes, Professor,” he reminded, and nipped sharply on one of my outer labia, making me yelp.

“Yes, Professor!”

“It’s not all about whips and paddles and cuffs, you know.”

“Whips and paddles and cuffs, oh my!” I couldn’t help but answer, and then giggled like an idiot. “Professor.”

He looked puzzled for a second, then his handsome face broke out in a grin that would have shamed a movie star. “Cute. You’re very cute. Don’t go anywhere.”

And then he was back in his closet, rummaging around. I wiggled my hands and feet, surprised at how comfortable the position was. Once past the initial chagrin of forced exposure, at least.

Some day I would have to explore Ivan’s closet. I wasn’t sure where he hid it all, but he seemed to have a broad inventory of kinky goods stored on those tidy shelves. This time he came forth with a back massager, one of the big industrial-strength corded kind with a blunt, rounded head. I tried not to look too puzzled when he pulled a condom over it. Was a back massage part of the punishment? My shoulders
had
been a little tense lately…

Consider it a mark of my sheltered life that it honestly did not occur to me, until immediately before he did it, what Ivan planned to do with the massager. Up ’til then, the only vibrator I’d ever seen had been pink with sparkles and looked like a deformed bunny rabbit.

After plugging the machine into the wall, he flipped it on and smiled a deeply wicked smile as he looked from it to me. “You don’t look worried enough, Camilla. I suspect this will be quite a learning experience for you.”

He turned the massager off, tossed it casually to one side on the bed and teased me with his fingers at first. He slid one long digit inside me, then two, twisting to press at the most sensitive spots he could find. He bent down every so often to lick or suck at my clit for a few seconds at a time, always leaving me wanting. Within a few minutes I was hanging on a knife edge, so close to coming he could have pushed me over with five seconds of effort.

“Please, Professor,” I begged without thinking. “Want to come, please?” Within the constraints of the cuffs and lines, I was wriggling with needy impatience.

“Oh, you’ll get to come. Right now, actually.”

He turned the Vibrator of Doom back on and pressed it straight to my clit.

For a few seconds it was just too much, buzzing over too large an area for me to even process. Then it started, deep and hard, a climax that grew and grew until I was desperate for it to peak, one that felt like dying when it finally burst into full bloom. It consumed me, stealing my breath and racing through my veins like smokeless fire, and as it ebbed I could hear Ivan’s chuckle over the buzzing vibrator and my own harsh panting.

And then…he
kept
it there. Despite my begging, my frantic attempts to get away, the eventual tears, he kept the vibrator in place, only adjusting the speed down and lessening the pressure for a few seconds of almost-relief as the first orgasm abated. Then he cranked it right back up again, slipping his fingers roughly inside me to pump in a steady, brutal beat, ignoring my pained insistence that I couldn’t come again. I did just that within a few seconds. Even higher and sharper than the first time, reaching a point where I saw stars, where my thighs jerked in violent spasms as the pleasure shrieked through me. And that state went on and on, never lessening and never quite going over the top to get to the other side, an endless paroxysm of ecstasy that I could neither escape nor deny.

Ivan seemed to know what I would need, that after he finally relented and took the vibrator away what I would crave was to be filled and held. I heard myself whimpering and begging and scarcely recognized the sound of my own voice, except to note I knew how that girl felt because she was pleading to be fucked, and it seemed I would expire on the spot if I wasn’t fucked within the next five seconds.

He got there in the nick of time, sliding smoothly into me and pressing his hands to my face as I screamed my relief. “Shh. It’s all over now. I’ve got you.”

When he kissed me, it was the sweetest thing I’d ever known. Me, cuffed in an obscene display and tied down to the bed, still shaking through the end of a climax I didn’t even know how to categorize, and Ivan, the author of my current condition. But with his mouth pressed gently over mine, his tongue slipping in to flirt with mine, I felt not only desired but appreciated. Cared for. Needed, even, because I had no doubt Ivan needed all this as badly as I seemed to, if not more. That kiss was a rare moment of perfect understanding.

A few minutes later, when he came to his own shuddering conclusion, the look on Ivan’s face made me cry all over again…even though I couldn’t yet put words to what I was starting to feel.

Chapter Eight

That Monday was like being thrown into ice-cold water after spending the entire weekend in a sauna. Not merely unpleasant, possibly aneurism-inducing.

I’d spent two days cocooning with Ivan, even literally sleeping with him after our exhaustion got the better of us Saturday night and he found he actually could sleep with somebody else in the bed. Even if the sex hadn’t been…different, it would have been hard to go back to the daily reality of tedious work, bad coffee and wearing clothes.

Monday brought me back into the real world on multiple fronts, none of them fun. First of all, the repaired air conditioning in my office was not really repaired. It operated at a noisy fifty percent efficiency or so, and only achieved enough cooling to make the office officially habitable. It was still miserable and sweaty hanging out there all day with the temperature in the low eighties and a funky smell oozing from the ducts. But it wasn’t quite hot enough to send us all home again.

My boss, usually a mild-mannered and levelheaded researcher, was in the final stages of freak-out that always occurred near the end of writing a grant. And since my work related directly to many of the statistics she was using in her proposal—my scripts found the patterns in the data her research generated—I was one of the first in the crosshairs. She would send me to compile one set of figures, and then by the time I brought her that report, she’d decide she wanted the numbers presented a slightly different way. And by the time I brought her
that,
she was on to wanting another set of numbers entirely. And so on.

That was on top of my usual day-to-day work, of course. And answering the phone if there was overflow. There was always overflow.

And worst of all, my mind was not on any of it. Mentally I was still back in Ivan’s apartment, in his bedroom, tied to his bed or kneeling on his floor or getting a paddling and liking it very, very much indeed. My bottom was still a little tender from the unaccustomed treatment, but it was the sweetest reminder of the weekend.

I wanted to email or message him, something subtle but sexy, breezy and cute. None of my thoughts were anywhere close to subtle or breezy. Borderline cute, maybe. It was pretty much all about the sexy, and the opposite of work-appropriate. So I really couldn’t figure out what to say, despite wanting the connection so badly. I was almost giddy with relief when I returned from an especially trying session with my boss, Agatha, to see that Ivan had emailed me first. No subject, no salutation. One paragraph.

It was more than enough.

Sense memories of you persist and do not seem to abate as the day progresses. It’s disconcerting, Camilla. I don’t like it when my mind plays tricks on me. I would much rather simply have you here in the flesh, to feel and taste and smell with my actual senses. Instead my mind keeps conjuring this false perception of your presence. I think it means I miss you.

I read it three times before closing it. Then I opened it up and read it once more for good measure. It was so purely Ivan. The most convoluted yet precise way possible to tell me he was thinking about me. For some reason I found it almost painfully beautiful, and actually started to choke up a little before I got myself under control and fired back a quick response. Quick, because I couldn’t say a fraction of what I wanted to say, not from work.

Professor,

Me too.

~C.

The rest would have to keep until that night. But somehow, though the end of the day couldn’t come soon enough, the wait now seemed a tiny bit more bearable.

I wish I could say we were discreet and tasteful about our reunion that evening. Sadly, as it happened, we were neither. Ivan greeted me on my back doorstep when I came home, and pinned me to the door in a liplock before I could even turn the key. We were still there, necking and panting and generally acting like teenagers in a hormone frenzy, when Ed, Ben and Ben’s girlfriend came strolling by on their way out somewhere.

The gasp and somebody’s cry of “Whoa!” broke us apart, and then there was much throat-clearing, waving awkwardly and avoiding eye contact among us. For four of us, that meant glancing to the side or up or down or anywhere that seemed safe. For Ivan, it meant a very obvious eyeroll followed by a grumpy glare that finally got the little group of friends moving along again. As soon as they were safely past, he spun around, turned the key in my lock and shuffled me through the door before closing it firmly behind us. Then we repeated the mutual attack from the other side of the door, with no onlookers and a lot more groping.