Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Avery
When he releases me, I walk forward into the bedroom and he shuts the door behind me, leaving me alone. The silence presses in on me, oppressive in a way I can’t describe.
I avoid silence. It’s part of avoiding stillness. There’s always music, movement, something to do or think about so that I don’t have to be in my own skin. In my own life.
Not here. Not now. I look around the room and the hardware on the bedframe suddenly makes sense. He’s into bondage and he probably uses it to secure his subs to the bed.
He’s had other subs here.
I feel like that should comfort me. In some ways it does. In others, it serves as a sobering reminder for what this is. I conveniently match his kink. But he would happily have any woman who does.
A weird thing to be upset about, since you’re the same.
Any Dom would do. Or so I told myself when I signed up for the app.
Now as I stand in the center of the room—the sun shining through the windows, the trees swaying in the breeze outside, goosebumps rising up on my arms, my breathing coming in shallow, even bursts—I wonder if that’s true at all.
I close my eyes and listen.
I breathe in, then out, and I hear a sound rise up in the silence of the room. Quiet music that would sound right in a spa, and not a sex dungeon.
Of course, while I’ve never been in a sex dungeon, this isn’t the black velvet, red silk, manacles, and chains I’d have assumed I’d find in one.
Soft bedding, natural light and ambient music is a surprise.
You think you know anything…
The door opens behind me and I feel my whole body go tense, my posture straightening as I react to his nearness.
My heart is beating so hard I’m sure that he can hear it.
I expect him to say something. To move to me. To touch me.
Wolf.
I think about that word, and all that it means.
I think about how dangerous he feels – how dangerous he’s always felt.
The wolf in the woods who eats young women for breakfast – how very fitting.
I remember reading somewhere that the wolf in fairy tales is a metaphor for predatory men who want to steal women’s chastity.
And those stories were meant to teach women to run away. To protect themselves. Protect their virtue. It’s a special kind of idiocy to put yourself right in the path of the ravening beast, I think.
But here I am.
He moves almost silently, and I sneak a glance and realize he’s taken his boots off. His hat is gone too. He walks to the dresser and turns on a diffuser, a cloud of vapor rising up out of it as a faint lavender scent fills the room.
He opens a drawer, the slide almost silent, and I watch him as he takes out three coils of red rope and sets them on the surface of the dresser. I remember what he sent me in the text.
He said that for our first scene he wants to tie my hands and arms, and make it so I can’t move. Make it so I can’t escape him when he takes me.
In my imagination, that was a hot, furtive, desperate act, but watching him now as the music swells around us, chimes and strings and sounds designed to soothe, not frighten, it feels incongruous.
He picks up one of the coils of rope, moving his hands over it methodically, as if he’s testing the length and the weight of it.
Need slams into me, hot and hard. I want him to touch me.
This is torture. This makes me feel like running away.
Looking at Caleb Flynn—the man I’ve sworn to hate for all eternity—barefoot and handling that rope while he looks at me in my underwear—planning, watching, calculating—is the single most out-of-body experience I’ve ever had.
At the same time, I feel oppressively in my body. I feel like I’m so aware of every part of myself I want to unzip my skin and run away.
Instead I stand rooted to the spot. Waiting.
He sent me his physical plans, but there’s still so much I don’t know. Will he talk to me? Roleplay? Will he kiss me?
I want to kiss him. I want to lean in and have him wrap his arms around me. Get familiar with the taste of him, touching him.
He moves closer to me and for one moment I think that might be what he means to do.
Then he reaches behind me, takes ahold of my braid and tugs. Hard. “Down,” he says. “On your knees.”
I obey without a second thought, the pleasure/pain intersection where he’s holding my braid tight has my chest tight and my clit throbbing with need. My eyes water as I make it all the way down to where he’s ordered me. He releases his hold on my hair and it falls heavy down my back.
“Good,” he says, his tone low and almost soothing. Reassuring. That puts me even more on edge, because he’s never been soothing or reassuring to me in my life.
He moves around behind me and I look down at his feet as he does.
He pauses and undoes the clasp on my bra, letting it fall loose down my arms. Then he continues the slow rotation around me, coming to the front and pulling it away, a low growl reverberating in the back of his throat as he tugs it free, leaving me exposed to him.
Then suddenly I’m being lifted up off the ground and my instinct is to thrash against him, to fight as he pulls me against his rock hard chest. I’m not scared, and I don’t want to use my safe word, but I want to resist him. I want to do something with the overwhelming energy building inside of me.
And this feels right.
His arms are uncompromising. They might as well be made of iron.
I’m so weak against him, like that night he caught me on his property and took hold of me, holding me fast. It all blends together – that night and now – and I manage to wiggle up over his shoulder and then find myself crashing down onto the mattress, his big body over the top of mine, his hands pinning my wrists down to the mattress.
“You can fight all you want, Dove. It’s not going to get you anywhere.”
He pauses then. Waiting. I know he’s waiting for me to use the word. Giving space to the fact that the game took a turn, but I told him already I wanted this. I really had no idea how much I wanted it.
He’s so hot hard and over me, and I arch up against him, feeling his hard cock against my thigh as he pushes me down deep into the mattress.
Then he rises up and grabs my braid with one hand, his other hand splayed on my hip as he turns me over onto my stomach.
I make it easy for him, moving with him as I instinctively try to minimize the pain from him pulling my hair.
My heart beats hard against the mattress, against my breastbone.
“I can’t do this to you on the floor,” he says, moving away from me. “Yet. You don’t have the stamina for it. Hold still.”
I can feel him get off the bed. My cheek is resting against the mattress, I can’t see him, but I can hear him moving.
He grips the back of my underwear and drags them down my legs, a satisfied sound in the back of his throat making me squirm. He wraps his arm around my waist and lifts me up slightly, and I try to follow his lead, my face still on the mattress, my ass in the air.
“Like that,” he says. “Let me see that pussy.”
I widen my stance just slightly and hope I’m doing what he wants. God, how weird is it that I want to please him?
“I’m going to bind your hands,” he says.
I’ve been imagining it like calf roping. Like he’d jump right in and bind me in seconds, then take me, but for some reason now I’m beginning to understand it isn’t going to go that way. It’s taken this long for him to get me on the bed. His every movement is methodical.
Panic flutters in my breast as part of me feels compelled to keep pushing, to make it go faster. So that I know everything will be okay. That I’m fine and I survived it. Liked it. Did it. Can check it off my list.
Suddenly I feel myself descending into a panic spiral.
“Stop thinking,” he says.
The words are short, sharp. Direct.
“I…”
“I said stop, Dove.” He puts his knee on the mattress and leans forward, over me, and I can feel his hard denim-covered cock pressing against my ass as he reaches forward and takes hold of my hand, drawing it tight against my back, and then my other hand, pulling both back so they’re resting against the dip in my spine just above my rear.
“You can relax.” He curves his arm around my waist and guides me so I’m kneeling on the mattress now.
“You’re not going to do anything. You aren’t going to move.
You’re just going to let me do what I want, understand? ”
“Yes,” I say. “Wolf.”
He leans in and I feel a sharp, hot sting when he bites me on the shoulder, just hard enough that I feel a graze of pain that echoes from where his teeth touched me down between my legs.
“Holding the position might get uncomfortable. Even on the mattress, your legs are going to start falling asleep. Don’t focus on the discomfort, focus on me. ”
He gets off the bed and I can feel he’s standing behind me now. He touches my shoulder with something. “This is the rope I’m going to use to tie you.” It’s softer than I expected it to be. Again I think my thoughts were informed by lassoes and cowboys, and this is something else entirely.
The rope slides over my skin and around my rib cage, just beneath my breasts. “I’m not going to check in with you the whole time, I prefer not to talk while I’m doing the rigging, so you need to tell me if something is out of your comfort zone, understand?”
I don’t tell him I’m too stubborn to use the safe word he gave me. That I’d rather be miserable the whole time than give in. It’s how I live my life. I’ll just do it, and eventually you get through it, no matter how bad it is. I’m not going to start complaining now.
He pulls on my braid. Hard. “I asked you a question.”
“Y-yes,” I say. “I understand.”
That satisfies him and he continues his methodical work with the rope. He loops it up over my shoulders, around my breasts, and I don’t know if it’s placebo or not but it feels like they get more sensitive from the tightness around them and I feel like I’m standing on the edge of a cliff.