Safe Word: An Erotic S/M Novel (8 page)

Not exactly high finance, guessing the currency he
wanted to be paid in. But always as mysterious as high finance,
discovering that what he wants is exactly what I want most in
the world to do. I let the feeling wash over me while he moved
his finger a little higher up me. And then I dragged my lips,
still achy from when he'd bitten them, down over his chest,
the fine black hair on his belly. Down to his cock.

Slowly, slowly, he's getting longer and harder every time
I move my mouth over him. Curving up toward the top of
my mouth. Stay up near the tip a few times. Treat myself.
Roll my tongue around it. But he's not going to wait ...he's
pushed deeper, over and past the roof of my mouth and back
to my throat. He wants me to go fast now, and now it's not
just mouth, or lips. It's like it's all of me, and the atmosphere
I'm breathing is entirely the smell of him. Hair brushing
against my lips. He's got my head in his hand, he wants to move it himself, and my mouth is soft, liquid, and I can feel,
I can hear, his little moans and trembles. He's dropped his
hand now, he's disappeared, I don't even know where he is
anymore, it's all his cock now, and my sucking, and swallowing, inhaling him, he shudders and cries out and comes and
comes and comes.

Ah yes, well. The end of a good day, I thought to myself.
She was here beside me, the storytelling had been fun-and
useful, it had gotten us talking, comfortable. Oh, and massively turned on, too, and very well taken care of, thank you.
I felt terrific, as if I could sleep forever. I hadn't been sleeping
well for the last few weeks.

I turned to her, wanting to gather her to me, before
I turned off the light. She was lying on her side, her head
propped on her elbow, eyes still bright and impatient.

"You're not tired?" I asked.

She shook her head. "Overtired. Wired. Like a kid OD'd
on sugar."

And she expected me to do something about that, I realized. Well, good thing I'll be disciplining her again soon, I
thought. And I thought of how much I'd enjoy it, knowing
what a greedy little self she'd be hiding behind the bowed
head, the body meekly offered for punishment.

I'll pay for this later, I thought. He's keeping accounts and
I am deeply in the red. He put a finger up my cunt, gently
touching my clit, lightly, lightly. Just letting it all build up
in me, all the tension and excitement, and when I started
coming, I could see his mouth curve, as he watched me
writhe at the end of his finger. And even after I finished
coming, and was ready to sleep, he kept his finger down
there. He moved it to the outside lips, caressing them softly
and sweetly and gently. He sat up next to me, looking down
at me, and I reached up and touched his mouth, a wide
tilde surrounded by little inverted commas. He sucked my
finger, bit it gently, while he moved his hand again, put his
finger in me again, and then another finger, and another. I
could feel the bones, the knuckles in his hand, as it became
a fist, and I could feel the movement of his arm, taking me
far away, beyond words and almost beyond consciousness.
Totally out of control, until finally I had to grab his arm and
beg him to stop, gasping and kissing him wherever I could
reach.

He turned off the light and curled up into himself, and I
put my arms around his back, my cheek against his shoulder
blade. Enough rough strife for one day, I thought, time to give
it a rest. Tomorrow, though... well, tomorrow, we'd see.

'he rain woke me up just before dawn. It was pounding
loudly on the tile roof, dripping down on our little balcony, outside our window, whose faded blue shutters were
still open. I remembered the women in the yard taking the
sheets off the line yesterday afternoon, and I felt absurdly
happy that they hadn't got their laundry wet. I put my arms
around her and rubbed my front against her back, my cock
against her ass, and fell back to sleep for maybe an hour.

And when next I woke up it was still raining, but the
room was filled with pearly gray light, and she was up, she'd
turned around and her face, her mouth, were against my chest,
her arms around my waist. I remembered how demanding
she'd been last night, and how exasperated I'd felt, but all that
seemed comic, cartoonish, in the pastel morning, the smell of
the rain dripping from the trees in the courtyard.

I detached her arms, and I got up on my knees and
crawled down to the bottom of the bed, and "Ummmmmmm,"
she sighed as I put my head between her legs. It's different,
early morning sex. It's something your body does before your
mind's quite itself, all the little complexities and annoyances
still sweetly blurred. It's kinder. She opened her legs wide
and bent her knees, and I-right then what I was feeling was
that I wanted to spoil her so terribly that she'd never, never
go away. It meant making my mouth, my tongue, move so
slowly and so gently. Being so steady and building so gradually. I didn't want her to move away from me, I wanted her
to move toward my tongue, my breath, to dissolve under my
mouth, her cunt and then all of her, helpless with pleasure,
melting beneath me.

Tell her now, I thought. She'll agree to anything.

The thought surprised me. That hadn't been why I'd
eaten her. I'd truly wanted to make her feel that good. To
render her, well-helpless with pleasure was the word I think
you used, wasn't it, Jonathan? Shit, it was too early in the
morning for that sort of conundrum.

No, I wouldn't tell her now. Wouldn't even think about
it for a while. I was tired of strategizing, I thought. Maybe I
needed a vacation too.

"Let's have breakfast up here," I said. "I'll lick off the
croissant crumbs you'll drop all over your tits."

She laughed. "I'm surprised you want to be in the same
room with these sheets. They're pretty rank."

"I can handle it," I promised her. "And anyhow, I kind
of like the idea of being isolated from the world. Well, at least
until the rain lets up a little."

I did like the isolation, the subtle, underwater lightand how easy it would be to grab her right after breakfast for
a quick fuck. Except, as it turned out, I didn't have to grab
her at all. I did lick some crumbs off her, and she grabbed
me, hard, greedily. She pulled me to her, and I pulled her
to her feet, and we fucked standing up by the table, leaning
against the wall-a happy, noisy, silly-looking fuck where I
kept slamming her hips against the wall, and she had a leg
oddly propped against the perpendicular wall to keep her
balance, and we hoped the people in the rooms upstairs and
downstairs and next door were doing the reasonable thing
and having their coffee and croissants in the restaurant
downstairs.

"Come on back to that smelly bed," I said, "and tell me
what happened next.

"Sort of like we were stranded by fire or flood or something, you know, in some old monastery," I continued,
straightening the covers a little, "and had to entertain ourselves by telling each other dirty stories."

"Well, if you really want to..." she said. "I mean, it's
just your basic, redundant, S/M tropes, in which your eternally
clueless innocent gets shown-yet again-which end is up.
Which seems to be more or less how it actually happens to me."

I took her hand. Basic, redundant tropes sounded fine to
me. "Come on," I said. "You were in bed, and Constant had
just fallen asleep...."

I woke up slowly the next morning, alone in bed. I was a
little sad, but not surprised. Next time I saw him, it would be
completely different. Maybe I'd be harnessed to a pony cart,
I thought, stretching a little. And then I jumped, as the door
banged open and Stefan marched in. He stood over the bed,
looking at me for a moment, both of us simultaneously recognizing that I hadn't slept on the pallet. It seemed to make
him terribly angry. And then he pulled the covers off me.

"Waiting for breakfast in bed?"

I didn't know what the right thing to do was, so I scrambled off the bed to kneel at his feet. He sat on the bed and jerked
my head up, looping his fingers through the ring in my collar.

"Uh, no, Stefan," I said, as meekly as I could. "I'm sorry,
Stefan." But of course I wasn't sorry, because I figured that if
Mr. Constant had wanted me to sleep on the pallet, he would
have told me to, and I didn't see what business it was of a
mere secretary to get so exercised about it. Even if he was a
bright boy.

Bright enough to know that I wasn't sorry.

"Yeah, right," he muttered.

And then he just looked at me, in a sneaky, calculating,
hostile sort of way.

Oh, shit, I thought. He's going to fuck me-he's been
given permission, as a reward for all the little chores he's
been doing. Only he wants to fuck me where Mr. Constant
fucked me-shit, Carrie, he worships the guy, how slow can
you be, figuring that one out? He worships the guy, he'd give
anything to be in my place, and he hates my guts, especially
because I've been taking him for granted, as a functionary. Oh, and if he can't be in my place, at least he wants to be in
the place where his boss's cock was.

And I heard myself say, very softly, almost meditatively,
"Well, he did come in my mouth, but that was before dinner,
before I ate the oysters, and some sorbet to clear the palate,
you know. And after dinner he fucked me a lot up the ass,
but he didn't come, I think he was feeling kind of affectionate
to me, so he decided to come in my cunt...." Just trying to
be helpful. I figured he wasn't allowed to beat me without
specific permission, and I didn't think he'd want to tell Mr.
Constant about this little conversation. Of course, I thought
belatedly, it's not as if he's going to forget this conversation
the next time he does get permission to punish me.

But for right now, I'd won-well, the battle, if not the
war. Well, maybe a small battle, anyway. Because even if
he was going to fuck me, at least he wasn't interested in
discussing it any further.

"Shut up," he said, "and turn around. Head on the
floor."

This probably had always been Plan A, anyway. Well,
it was what would hurt me the most, and after all, he'd so
neatly marked the spot for himself yesterday, with his X. And
I won one more tiny battle that morning. I didn't cry, though
he hurt me a lot and I certainly wanted to.

"Take a shower," he said afterward, standing up and zipping his fly. "There'll be some clothes on the floor for you
when you get out, next to your food and water. And hurry
up. Our plane leaves in two hours."

The clothes I found on the floor, next to the cut-up banana
and rice gruel, were smaller-sized versions of Stefan's: black jeans, black collarless dress shirt, black leather jacket. He'd
probably had to buy them for me, and he wanted to make
it clear that he hadn't spent any more time than necessary
picking them out. They fit, I guess you could say, in an
approximate way. Probably Mr. Constant wouldn't be on the
flight, and so it wouldn't much matter what I was wearing.

The plane trip was uneventful. I was right about Mr.
Constant's not being there just me and Stefan, looking like
your basic bratty rich leather kids in first class. When we got
to the security gate, he silently and matter-of-factly took my
collar and cuffs off, and sent them through on the conveyor
belt, and just as silently and matter-of-factly put them back
on me after we'd gone through the metal detectors. Some
people stared, but I wasn't bothered by it as much as I would
have thought.

He said almost nothing to me the whole way, except to
tell me I couldn't have coffee or alcohol. He did hand me my
glasses and the book I'd been reading before the auction, and
then he buried himself in some terrifyingly abstruse-looking
journal, its subject matter seeming to be balanced on the cusp
of mathematics and economics. At least that was what I could
tell from my occasional peeks at it. As for the runic-looking
notes he furiously scribbled on green index cards, they might
have been physics or Gaelic or-for that matter-Greek. I was
surprised that he let me peek at all, but his concentration was
so fierce that he didn't seem to notice. Or maybe he refused
to let on that he was noticing. Well, it must be a perpetual
humiliation for him to have to shepherd me around like this.

Maybe, I thought, he'd kind of fade from view when we
got to the island. But I doubted it. I imagined him lurking in
corridors, like one of those infinitely resentful Shakespearean villains in their black velvet doublets-Edmund, lago,
Richard III. He even somewhat looked the part-though
more your handsome bastard Edmund than your crippled
Richard-tall, with his pointy cowboy boots, hair in a severe
little ponytail, and cold, pale blue eyes. Oh, and a surprisingly small, pretty, sensual mouth.

But I was probably pushing my luck, checking him out as
openly as I suspected I was. He was starting to look annoyed,
so I read a story or two in the book. And then I was dazzled
by the bright beautiful sunlight as the plane swung out over
the Mediterranean. I pressed my nose against the window. I'd
never been to Greece. I knew this wasn't a sightseeing trip,
but I was still getting excited.