Chapter 20 #2
“What would you like me to read?”
He’s still and quiet for a moment, and then he says, “Jonathan Livingston Seagull, please.”
“Why that one?” I ask as I begin searching for the book.
“It’s the book I was reading when I started my treatment. I got about halfway and never finished it. I’ve always hated that I didn’t get to finish it.”
I take a seat on the settee to his left and open the novella. “Would you like me to start from the beginning?”
He nods. “Yes, please.”
My voice sounds a little strained when I start reading, but not so much that someone else would notice.
At least, I hope not. At first, I’m flustered by the way he’s looking at me, dark eyes fixed and intent.
His gaze is trained on my lips, highly focused and unnerving, only dipping once in a while to the book in my hands.
It hovers there for a second and then quickly flicks back up to my face.
When our eyes meet, his expression softens, and he leans his head against the settee, offering me a tantalizing view of his neck.
He’s wearing a pale-blue Oxford shirt, unbuttoned at the collar. The color contrasts with his hair and eyes, making them appear darker and shinier than usual. His chest looks broad in the garment. It’s pulled tight over his pecs and drapes a little looser over the concave dip of his stomach.
It takes a few paragraphs for me to find my stride, but after a while, words begin to flow easily. After the first chapter, I stop thinking about how he’s looking at me, and the curtain between reality and the sky-blue world seagulls live in dissolves to nothing.
Now and again, I’m aware of the lord moving.
Raising a hip, crossing a leg to get more comfortable.
Eventually, he tosses a throw pillow onto the rug at my feet and stretches out on his back on the floor.
He looks up at the ceiling for a while, a contented smile tugging at his lips.
Eventually, his eyes slide shut, but his smile doesn’t fade. It widens as I read.
After an hour or so, I clear my throat. I’m not used to reading aloud for this long, and it’s left me a little parched. “Excuse me,” I say, patting my chest as a dry tickle travels there.
The lord sits bolt upright, swiveling his body to face me. His expression is one of alarm.
“You need a cup of tea,” he says with the kind of urgency only a British person could muster.
“It’s fine. I have water at my desk,” I tell him, but it’s too late. He’s on his feet, headed out of the room at a brisk pace.
Several minutes later, I’m alerted to his imminent return by the sound of heavy footsteps approaching. Evidently, he has Mrs. Thompson in tow because I can hear her chattering in the hallway. “I can take that for you, my lord,” she tuts. “There’s no need for you to—”
“That will be all, thank you, Mrs. Thompson,” he says firmly before making his reappearance in the library.
The sight of him carrying a tea tray is an odd one. It’s not something I’ve seen him do before, so I now understand Mrs. Thompson’s consternation. He approaches and carefully sets the tray down on the side table next to me. A little milk spills from the jug as he does it.
I pretend not to notice, and so does he.
When the tea has steeped, he pours two cups. He adds a dash of milk to his, and a squeeze of lemon and a healthy spoonful of honey to mine.
He picks up my cup, holding the saucer in both hands, and offers it to me. For some inexplicable reason, my mind reads the gesture as insanely erotic.
“For your throat,” he says softly.
As I sip my tea, he tells me all about what a wonderful reader I am.
“You are so talented, little mouse. Your pacing and expressions are perfect, and your voice has a lovely musical quality.” I smile and nod mutely, frantically trying to wrestle the praise kink that’s raising its head back into the box I keep it in.
“When I closed my eyes while you were reading, I felt like I was flying.”
“Mm, flying,” I say, feeling a little hollowed out and a lot hot under the collar.
His expression is earnest, so sweet and sincere that I find it hard to maintain eye contact. “This is the best afternoon I’ve had in years, Jensen. Thank you.”
“Please.” I gesture liberally in his direction. “Don’t mention it.”
His eyes narrow, changing from sweet to mischievous. “How on Earth can I ever repay you?”
His chin tilts forward slightly as he considers me. I know now that he can read my eyes like a book. I know what he can see in them, and though it does embarrass me quite a bit, I don’t look away.
“Oh.” His brows rise and his lips morph into his version of a very proper shithead grin. “I see.”
He takes my teacup and saucer from me, puts them back on the tray, and then kneels at my feet.
He undoes my belt like it’s everything and nothing.
I lift my hips, one side at a time, to shimmy out of my pants in exactly the same way.
He leaves my shoes on, so my pants and underwear bunch at my ankles, making the situation feel even more precarious than it is.
He picks up the copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull and hands it to me. “Read, little mouse.”
I swallow hard and do as he says.
As soon as I find my rhythm, he places his hands on my bare knees.
The warmth of his touch causes me to lose it again.
He waits until I’ve recovered and pushes my thighs as far apart as my pants will allow.
A short, loud gust of air leaves my lungs.
My dick is swollen, stiffly angled toward my belly.
It peers up at me optimistically as the lord takes hold of my hips and yanks me to the edge of the seat.
The movement is quick and a little aggressive.
It quickens my pulse and causes a little slick to trickle out of me.
I’m left half lying, half sitting on the settee with a book in my hands and my bare ass practically hanging off the seat.
I find my place on the page and start reading, acutely aware that I couldn’t recall a single thing about the plot of the book or any of the characters, even if I were questioned under torture.
“Good boy,” says a velvet voice, unleashing a tremor in me that slices through my larynx.
I give a little cough and keep reading.
My dick twitches visibly when his hand gets near it, but he doesn’t touch it. He strokes my inner thighs instead. Maddeningly lightly. Maddeningly close to where I want him to touch me.
I struggle through several pages in this way. I go back and forth, starting the same sentence over and over again and skipping others completely. It’s a mess. A hot, hot mess. Fortunately, the lord doesn’t seem to mind.
He adjusts his position, moving a little closer to me, and taps the pad of a finger firmly against my opening. It’s warm and threatening in the very best way. It causes me to drop the book onto my lap and swear viciously.
I pick the book up in a rush when I notice he’s gone still.
I understand the game. I invented it, after all. It’s a fantasy he read in my eyes—the lord only touches me when I read, when my voice rings out and a story about taking flight flits about the room.
I find my place on a page, any page, and start reading again.
I make a complete hash of it, but the lord smiles at me like I’m someone he’s terribly, terribly fond of.
It’s his gorgeous expression, his gorgeous face, his gorgeous eyes looking at me that’s harder to survive than the physical torment of his teasing.
When he finally slides two fingers into me, I groan embarrassingly loudly. Like I’ve been punched. Like I’ve been unexpectedly knotted. His eyes flit up to the door of the library, and I follow them.
The door is wide open.
“Can you be quiet?” he whispers.
I nod and shake my head at the same time before rethinking my response and nodding firmly. While I do all that, my asshole repetitively clamps down on the thickness of his fingers.
I can’t say how much it turns me on that he touches me like this. A little rough. A little gentle. A little too much. Just enough.
He thrusts deep into me a few times, loosening me like he means business, and then he slows, beckoning gently inside me, stimulating my gland in a way that makes me see stars.
“Relax, little mouse,” he says as though he honestly thinks that’s achievable while I’m in this state.
In my defense, I do try to relax my hole, but I can’t.
I’m horny in a way that seems to exist beyond me.
A way that makes my belly ache. A way that twists my insides and struggles desperately to strangle the moan that’s rising inside me.
I writhe on the settee, hips snaking from side to side as I try to get close to him.
My teeth clench.
My dick leaks and aches.
Leaks and aches.
My peak approaches quickly. A big, rounded wave that floods me from bottom to top. Top to bottom. I lean into it, feeling the breath of promised pleasure on my skin.
My heart convulses. My balls tighten.
He pulls his fingers out of me abruptly and says, “Keep reading.”
I blink in confusion and my hole flutters in indignant shock at finding itself so suddenly empty. The lord gets to his feet and starts wandering off. I don’t understand what happened. I can’t piece it together because my mind is complete devoid of sensible thought. “W-where are you going?”
“I’m locking the door.” As always, he’s polite and articulate. Nonchalant and seemingly unrepentant about the fraught state he’s left me in.
I choke and splutter as slick spills out of me. “Whyyy?”
I note with concern that I’ve adopted a horrible, whiny tone. One that’s bathed in something that makes me sound quite the opposite of intelligent. I’m not sure what, if anything, to do about it.
“Because,” the lord replies matter of factly, “you’re about to make a lot of noise, and I don’t want Mrs. Thompson or Sid to hear you.”
By the time he returns, I’ve kicked one shoe and pant leg off, I have a hand tucked under each knee, and I am holding myself as wide open as I possibly can.
It’s a shameful pose to adopt in front of one’s employer, and I’m sure it’s going to humiliate the hell out of me later, but right now, I can’t say I care.
There’s a hot pool of lava burning in my groin and my balls are throbbing in time with my heart. I need to come now, and I need to come hard.
“Would you like me to show you something?” he asks as he returns.
“I-in the library?” I ask dumbly.
“No.” He smiles, kneeling again and slotting his fingers up my ass all the way to the knuckle. He taps my prostate firmly. “In here.”
“Nngeep,” I reply.
He correctly interprets it as “Fuck yes,” and thank God for that.
He fingers me slowly, then fast. Shallow, then deep.
He fingers me until my vision doubles and my hand is clamped around my dick.
When I try to stroke, he takes me by the wrist and moves my hand away, tucking it back under my knee with a firm little pat.
Though he doesn’t tell me not to move, I know I can’t.
I know from the way he’s looking at me. From the way he’s touching me.
From the way he’s breathing in my direction.
I’m helpless in a way I’ve only ever fantasized about.
Awake and dreaming at the same time. My body is so sluiced in ecstasy that it’s like nothing else has ever existed.
The lord makes me ride the wave as pleasure rises and crests, only to save me from it before it hits.
He lets the tide find me and take me. He lets it get a hairbreadth from pulling me under, then he guides me back to the shore.
He does it over and over, getting me so close that I forget language. Books. Words. I forget thoughts, and that anything before or after this moment exists.
A year passes.
Then another.
Decades roll by.
I die and am born again.
Every time it happens, every time he takes me to the edge and retrieves me unbroken, he smiles as if he likes me very much and his deep, rumbling alpha voice soothes parts of me I didn’t know needed soothing. “Good boy.”
I can’t respond verbally because I’m garroted by pleasure, but eventually, my need becomes so great that I beg for what I need with my eyes.
Because he’s in my body, in my mind, he understands that I’ve reached my limit a millisecond before it happens.
“You’re going to come this time,” he tells me, and I nod feverishly, whimpering in gratitude. “But here’s the thing, little mouse…” His voice deepens and begins to vibrate. It pierces old parts of me that have been hurt before and sews them back together. “I want you to come harder than ever.”
He pulls his hand back, almost withdrawing from me completely, meeting my gaze and giving me a small, almost imperceptible nod when the peak that exists inside me has morphed into a blade that could cut through ice.
Then he thrusts into me so hard it draws a soft grunt from him.
My spine arches. Every joint in my body contracts. A blinding stream of blistering pleasure blasts out of me. It pours. Shooting and spraying, burning through things that have bothered me in the past, leaving me shaking. Naked. And new.