Chapter 26
Twenty-Six
Tristan
The only illumination in the room comes from the club itself, glowing and flashing through the interior window, and then from a tall lamp in the corner, its light subtle and golden. I approach the chair, reminded strangely of the thrones on Samhain, and stop just in front of it.
I want to commit this to memory, this very sight: Mark’s wide shoulders and bare feet, Isolde’s large eyes and tousled hair as she’s curled up in Mark’s lap.
She’s a whorl of platinum hair and fuzzy blanket, but anything adorable or domestic about the scene is belied by the presence of a single exposed ankle, rope-kissed and delicate.
And perhaps the thin, scarlet line on Mark’s throat. The closest Mark might ever come to wearing a collar.
“I asked Dinah to smuggle me up here,” I say.
My heart hurts, being alone with them, and it already ached watching Isolde tremble and suffer onstage.
It throbbed as Mark fucked her brutally and wonderfully, and I coveted everything about it.
The tears soaking her blindfold, the ropes biting into her skin, the hard, slapping claiming after.
I wanted to be her and to be him and just be with them , and there is nothing worse than loving a married couple, nothing more pathetic, because it’s a love destined for the edges, for stolen moments and snatched time.
It’s a forever voyeurism that only gets sung about when it’s time to sing something sad.
But if this is a pathetic life, then I’ll live pathetically, and if this is love on the edges, I don’t know that I can endure love in its glowing, fulsome center.
I’m named for sadness after all, and maybe I could never have loved happily, never been inside one of those fairy tales where the ending is as simple as a kiss.
If I ever thought I could rescue the damsel, I know much better now.
Of the three of us, I am the damsel. And if I could, I’d lock myself into the tower of my two villains and throw away the key.
Mark’s fingers are tangling gently in Isolde’s hair, sifting and playing. “You sure you weren’t seen?” he asks. “Being backstage is one thing, but coming alone to a playroom is much harder to explain away.”
“I’m sure.” I can’t stop watching his fingers in her hair. It’s mesmerizing. Erotic beyond belief. “Dinah brought me up through the staff hallways. And I won’t be missed. Hugo gave me the night off, and I told everyone I was going to bed early.”
“That means we have you all night?” asks Mark silkily.
“Do you want me all night, sir?” I sink to my knees, already knocked sideways with prostrating desire. I’m between his planted feet, bracketed by his knees. Isolde is close enough that I could rest my forehead on her thigh. “You can have it. You can have anything you want.”
His chest lifts once sharply, and his eyes glitter from above Isolde’s head. “You think I don’t want you for as long as I can have you? Tristan.”
“I won’t pretend that I’ve earned your forgiveness. That you don’t still hate me for…everything.”
“Isolde and I have decided to set ideas of forgiveness aside for now,” he says. “It seemed easier.”
“How long is for now? ”
“Am I being interrogated?” asks Mark, amused. “If so, we need to work on your technique.”
“What would you work on?”
“Firstly”—a professorial eyebrow—“you shouldn’t pose your questions so broadly.
Stay specific. Ask ‘Does for now last until morning?’ Or ‘Will for now last until I go back to Montreal?’ Don’t give me room to wander too far away from your question, and don’t give me room to build a little palace of hedges and half-truths, because I will if given the chance. ”
“Is there a secondly ?”
The lights from the hall flash on white teeth. He’s smiling.
“Secondly, don’t ask questions with such a tragic pout. It lets your interrogee know what answers you’re afraid of.”
“And I suppose you know then?” It might have come out grouchily, but before I can finish speaking, he’s reached out to run a light finger along the bow of my lower lip. He could have his hand down my pants right now for how lewd that feels.
“ Puppy ,” he says, half scolding. Behind my zipper, my erection surges.
“Don’t pretend that you didn’t come in here with all sorts of thorny hopes clutched in a bleeding fist. Don’t pretend you weren’t watching from the wings tonight and having to strain all those pretty muscles of yours to keep from charging out onto the stage. ”
His smile widens, and I realize that I must have pouted even more.
“It’s not fair that I’m such an open book to you, and yet I never know what you’re thinking.”
He presses down on my lip enough to see my tongue and then lets go. “No one is really an open book, Tristan. And I can tell you exactly what I’m thinking right now: that I’d like to see how sweaty I can make you in the next two hours.”
I take a sharp breath.
“And even if I didn’t want to fuck you tonight, which I very much do, my wife does, and after what she went through, I’m rather inclined to give her whatever she wants.”
I look at Isolde, who is awake and staring at me with subspace-glazed eyes. She reaches for me, the blanket sliding down to reveal marked arms and shoulders, and I take her hand with mine and kiss her fingers.
“Let’s not waste the night,” she whispers.
“Are you sure you can?” I ask. She’s still slumped against Mark’s chest, her expression made up of equal parts lingering euphoria and post-scene languor.
“This might be our only chance.” She falters a little as she speaks, and I know why. Because she doesn’t just mean our only chance while I’m here at Lyonesse but our only chance at all. Our last chance.
I look up from her face to Mark’s. His smile has faded, but his expression is otherwise neutral.
“I don’t want you to think me miserly, Tristan,” he says. “I’ll share my toys. Why don’t you slide a hand under the blanket and feel what I got to enjoy in front of the entire club tonight?”
When I catch Isolde’s eyes, she’s already nodding, shifting under the blanket to spread her thighs in Mark’s lap and finding my hand once again.
But when she tries to pull me straight to where I’ve been ordered to go, I rebel a little.
I pull my hand free and drop it onto Mark’s knee, warm and anchored with heavy muscle, and then slide it under the blanket to find her foot.
It’s been too long not to savor this. Not to feel every part of her.
I pull the blanket aside so I can watch as I graze over the incline of her foot to her ankle and then from her ankle to the curves of her calves, which are shockingly firm.
The three of us watch as I make it to her knee and then replace my fingers with my lips, kissing the tender spot right where her thigh begins. I nuzzle the soft skin just above it.
Her legs are parted enough for a wandering hand but not for more, and Mark arranges her so that she’s got her back against his chest and her legs draped and hooked along the outside of his knees.
Mark slides a hand down her stomach to her pussy and pushes two fingers in with no preamble at all. She’s still wet from earlier, both her own arousal and his satisfaction, and when he pulls his fingers free, they glisten with pearly ejaculate.
He doesn’t ask and he doesn’t have to. I part my lips and accept his fingers like a sinner awaiting communion and then shudder at the taste.
Sweet and a little bitter, the two of them together, something I’ve only tasted a few times, and yet a taste I’d recognize until my dying day.
It tastes like the only thing I could ever want. It tastes like true love.
“You want to clean her up?” Mark asks softly, and I nod, dip my head immediately to her cunt. I can’t breathe when he lets me do things like this. When he lets me play breeding games.
At the first trace of my tongue, Isolde gasps, squirms until Mark finds her rope-bitten hips and holds her firmly in place.
I appreciate it because I want my own hands free.
I press my thumbs to the soft outer labia and spread until the pulsing lights outline the slick hole and the small pink berry at the top, nestled under its hood.
I lower my mouth again and kiss her cunt like I have seduction in mind, unabashedly making love to it.
I can taste Mark inside her; I’m greedy for it, and I swirl my tongue to find more of it.
I use my thumb to plug her opening while I service her clitoris and then suck my thumb when I pull it free.
I want to fuck where Mark has been. I want it so badly. I want to go bare inside her and pump her so full that she’s dripping. I want Mark to go bare inside me…I want him to breed me like he paid for me.
“Tristan,” Isolde breathes. “ Please .”
“If you make her come, you can fuck her,” Mark says, magnanimous and casual.
I flick my eyes up to Isolde’s, and she manages an assenting smile through her whimpers.
I waste no time and return to my work—not that there’s much left to do.
I use my tongue to caress the tender pearl of her clitoris, I fill her with my fingers, turning them so I can gently press upward, and she starts quivering almost immediately.
Her hands find my head and press me closer; with my hair trimmed this short, I can feel each and every fingertip, the warmth of her palms. She’s holding my mouth against her pussy, trying to buck against Mark’s iron hold, and the noises she’s making are the noises of unutterable agony, of torment beyond reckoning.
I’m so hungry for more of her taste, for more of those noises, that I don’t stop as she shudders and bucks even harder, even more jerkily, my name on her lips between her broken groans.
I grab the insides of her thighs and suck harder, lick faster, feeling her on my chin and my nose, wishing I could get closer, taste deeper, be part of her.