Best Bondage Erotica 2012 (21 page)

That was where Jackson worked; where he sold other people's beachscape paintings to summer tenants and hosted wine tastings
and subtly promoted his own superior art. He didn't make a whole lot of money, but Jackson didn't need money, he needed only his ramshackle cottage and the leisure time to paint. Such asceticism was part of his appeal for me, when I was eighteen and he was twenty-nine. Like a lot of middle-class girls who grew up in affluent suburbs, I was fascinated by Jackson's bohemian freedom. It helped that he looked the part: barefoot, tanned and bearded with wavy surfer-Jesus hair.

I suppose you never forget the first man who ties you up. What's less commonly known is how you can never forget the man who won't come for you. Jackson tied me to a chair and fucked me with my legs forced open, he bound my breasts until they were more sensitive than my clit, but he never had an orgasm in front of me. He was always naked, because he even painted naked, and he was always hard. But he never lost control once during sex, and even on those rare occasions when I got his cock in my mouth, he would only let me suck him for two or three moments before pulling away.

When I caught him with another girl that summer, I screamed about his withheld orgasms in my shameless meltdown. A look of recognition crossed the girl's face and I realized it was probably his status quo—he just didn't come in front of any of the girls he dominated, tied up and fucked. At the time it didn't seem sad or guarded, just selfish. His orgasm was the ultimate trophy, my one opportunity to see the master exposed.

I thought about all this now as I paused in front of his dark gallery. The street was quiet and empty, though it was only just past eleven: the town went to bed early. Jackson would be home right now, painting and listening to talk radio, or with his newest conquest. I knew he had to still be here in this little town, selling other people's art and seducing girls and not women. He was immutable, like stone. A memory of his smell—ocean mixed
with hot skin mixed with turpentine—flashed though me and I gripped the steering wheel. My stomach was jumping around like a live wire. I knew then why I had come back to the Cape this summer.

 

My parents' rental cottage, with its moisture-warped floors and clothesline full of drying beach towels, was the same. That first night when I went to bed, I didn't let myself look at the window I used to sneak out of. I didn't let myself think about the moon shining over the beach, and all the ghosts holding each other in the empty dunes. Instead I slid my hand in my underwear and mentally replayed a threesome I'd had last winter with the guys in the apartment below mine.

But just before my orgasm broke inside me, my traitor mind switched to a different memory: an evening nine years ago, my hands tied to a pine tree while Jackson took off my bikini top. We had gone for a walk down the beach, then into the trees by the jetty. My whole body was quivering because I knew we were going to kiss, possibly fuck, and my green bikini felt too skimpy. Without asking, without negotiating or discussing safewords, Jackson took rope out of his pocket and tied my wrists over my head to a branch. I could barely breathe. Neither of us spoke as he took off my top and looked over my tits as if considering produce he might buy.
Touch me
, I was screaming in my head,
suck my nipples, finger me, do something
, but he didn't. Instead he slid my bikini bottoms halfway down my thighs. I spread my legs without him telling me to, which was perhaps why he smirked. I'd never been tied up before, never been possessed before with real mastery. I waited breathlessly for it then. Instead he walked around me, studying my body. Then he pulled up my bottoms, untied my wrists and tossed my bikini top at me, walking away before I'd even put it on. I showed up
at his cottage that night and begged him to fuck me. Begged for real for the very first time, shameless, desperate and horny.

He'd just shrugged and smiled like sure, he'd do me a favor, and tied my hands behind my back. Then he pushed me face-first into his sofa, lifted up my miniskirt, and fucked me from behind while I bucked and screamed with the hardest orgasm of my life.

“Here's the thing, Noelle,” he said, when he moved on five weeks later to the college student daughter of some newly arrived August tenants. “You might hate me now, but I emancipated you. I taught you who you are. And you'll realize later what a gift I really gave you.”

Typical arrogance from a typical older man who liked wowing young girls. He was twenty-nine then, which made him thirty-eight now. I was curious how he'd aged. I wanted to think he was bloated and sad, the kind of ex-lover you look up on Facebook just to kill any lingering regrets and what-ifs, but I knew he wasn't. Call it instinct. Call it destiny.

The next evening my parents decided to cook at home, so I drove to a roadside market for corn on the cob. It was a hazy evening, the scarlet sunset flirting with mist, and I suspected it would rain the next day. As I paid for the sack of unhusked corn, I looked down the street to the Sandpiper Gallery. It was lit up and busy with parked cars. I walked over.

Jackson was holding court in the gallery, listening to a middle-aged woman describe her knee surgery. His back was to me but his sun-streaked hair and broad shoulders were the same. The woman nudged him and he turned around with an expectant face. Perhaps he was hoping for a customer, or this summer's latest beach nymph. Instead his hooded eyes went stunned and almost troubled as he saw me.

“Hi, Jackson,” I said like we'd broken up last week.

He looked exactly like the old Jackson plus nine years would. The beard was gone and the blond scruff on his jaw was laced with silver. His cheekbones were a little sharper, his mouth a little harder. His skin had settled in a chronic sun-baked brown so deep that his gray-green eyes swam in his face. He would pay for that tan in future years but right now he just looked roughly, dastardly handsome.

I stepped forward to hug him. His body felt unexpectedly hard and rangy in my arms, but then we'd never hugged before. “I'm visiting my parents and just wanted to stop in.”

“Well. That's great.” His voice was strained and I thought maybe he couldn't remember my name. “Noelle. Wow. How long has it been?”

So he did remember. “Nine years.” I did a perfunctory look around the room. “The gallery seems to be doing well. How's your work?”

“Great. I had a show in Boston last winter. There was an article in the
Phoenix
.” He looked wary, as if I wasn't adding up for him.

I began to back out. “Well, I just wanted to say hi.”

“Wait. Listen, you should come by. Catch up. You remember where I live?”

I tried not to be flattered by his urgency. “I think so…”

“Cool. Come by later tonight.”

Driving home, I was amused that he didn't have a date tonight. Maybe he was putting her on ice for me, or maybe it was a painting night. I hadn't followed his career online; it was a policy of mine not to Google, not to Facebook stalk, to leave the past in the past. But I wasn't surprised to hear he was doing well. Jackson wasn't emotional enough to implode in some kind of relationship disaster, or sink into an artist's self-destruction.

After my parents went to bed around ten, I left our cottage on
foot, traveling down dark, sandy roads carpeted by pine needles, past the television noise of neighboring cottages. I'd memorized the route back when I was seventeen, when Jackson was still the sexy older painter who was my fervent summer crush. Back then I actually thought he was unattainable, that he probably dated sophisticated women his age who knew exotic sex tricks. Only the following summer did I learn that he preferred girls who were young and inexperienced, with no skill other than squirming in bondage—girls like me.

I moved past the beachfront rental cottages and into the woods where he lived year-round in the cottage he'd inherited from his parents. He had the security lights on tonight, illuminating the redwood deck he'd built himself. I hesitated on the bottom step for just a moment. A strange and unexpected sense of myself as an intruder came over me.

I went up the deck steps and knocked on the sliding glass door.

He came out of the kitchen in just a pair of long, loose, paint-splattered shorts. Apparently he wasn't perpetually naked these days, or maybe the shorts were a nod to decorum. “Good to see you,” he said and hugged me. It was still a tough, detached hug but I appreciated the gesture. Jackson had never been warm.

His cottage smelled the same: a mix of beach, paint, weed and various chemical solvents. He'd put in a new hardwood floor and it wasn't gritty with sand like the old one. The leather sofas were new, too, as was a massive coffee table of glass and iron. I sat down and accepted a beer. My eyes followed him as he opened the refrigerator door, where there was a photo of a young girl lifting up her bra.

“So.” He smiled and sat down one cushion too close. “You look good.”

I did look good. Whether I looked good to him was a different
story. I wasn't the tanned and lithe jailbait he'd known, my long hair tangled from salt water and my skin gleaming with suntan oil. These days the highlights in my hair came from a salon and any tan came from a Chanel bronzing compact. I was someone he might try to sell a painting to, rather than seduce. I'd become, I realized, the kind of woman my teenage self wrongly thought he would date.

“So,” he said with a dirty smile. “Where'd you tell your mother you were going?”

“To visit you. Why would I lie?”

“I remember how you used to fight with her constantly.”

“All teenage girls fight with their mothers. I'm twenty-seven now. We get along fine.”

“Almost thirty,” he taunted, as if he wasn't almost forty himself. “But you still look good.”

I knew then where this night was going, although of course something feral in me had planned it all along.

“I was just a kid back in the day,” I reminded him. I gave him a fond smile so he would know it was a good memory. “But you did teach me a lot.”

He laughed a self-satisfied laugh. “I always said, I taught you who you really were.”

“You did. I got deep into bondage once I got to college—spreader bars, arm binders, tape, handcuffs, chains…”

Surprise and distaste flickered through his eyes. Jackson never bothered with actual BDSM gear, hadn't gone through the kink training all responsible modern perverts undertake. Safewords and aftercare: those concepts went right over his head. He just copied whatever slave-girl fantasies he saw in magazines.

But he recovered with another leer. “So you still like being tied up, huh.”

“Or doing the binding.”

He paused, then smiled indulgently. “Really.”

“I'm not a big roper like you are, but I can still tie up a nice harness or dragonfly sleeve.”

He burst out laughing. “Somehow I can't see that.”

Our gazes locked. Then I looked around for the rope that had to be there. Different lengths of what looked like six-millimeter hemp were coiled under the coffee table.

I held one up. “Try me.”

He smirked and held out his wrists like a prisoner. “Okay, cowgirl.”

That was the wrong thing to say. I pushed him facedown on the sofa, bringing his arms behind his back. “You're not that fast,” he said, turning his face to the side so he could talk. Jackson always talked during sex, could never stop lecturing and pontificating and educating. “I could still get away at this point.”

“I'll keep that in mind for my next abduction.” I skipped all the fancy knot work and went straight for incapacitation. I toyed briefly with the idea of hog-tying him, but decided it would limit his uses too much.

He jerked experimentally against the rope. “Not bad.”

Neither of us said anything, and he forced a laugh. “You going to leave me like this, compadre?”

“You sound nervous.” I ran a fingernail down his long brown back. “Afraid I'm going to violate your maidenhood right here on the sofa?”

“Impossible. I'm inviolable.”

“I remember.” I slid my hands up inside his loose shorts, all the way to his crotch, where his cock was already stiff. I played with his balls instead.

“Noelle, come on…”

“Now, now. You don't want to be one of those little bitches who can't take her own medicine.”

I undid his shorts and pulled them off. Jackson was naked and bound now, at my disposal in a way I'd never had him before. An excited little frisson went through me, like a kid unwrapping her favorite Christmas present. His untanned haunches looked oddly vulnerable. Sometimes I liked fucking men half-undressed, their wrists cuffed and their jeans pulled down around their knees to bind them further. But Jackson naked was too glorious to stage differently. I rolled him over and pushed him upright on the couch.

His cock slapped his stomach, long and flushed scarlet. Despite his former pride in always going naked, he looked at the floor, as if embarrassed.

A sadistic appetite surged up in me. “Close your eyes.”

His eyelids were hot to the touch under my fingertips, his eyelashes bleached almost white by the sun. The physicality of him was overwhelming, how
possess-able
he was now. I could experience the ridge of his ears, his hard flexed thigh muscles, his armpits: so many elements withheld from me previously. He never liked me touching him much before, but now he couldn't hide anything from me. I scratched my nails down his torso, hard enough to leave lines in his tanned hide. His nipples were pale brown and hard and I pinched them. He shifted with pain or arousal.

Every cell in me was screaming with the urge to dive down on his cock and suck him off like a greedy succubus. But we weren't there yet.