Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Avery
I can’t stop thinking about what he said out on the trail. He went back out to work afterward, and I decided to make dinner for us both.
I feel uncomfortable about the idea of talking to my dad. I’m not going to do it. But what he said about how people should be worried about disappointing me sticks with me.
I turn it over and over in my mind. He doesn’t come in for dinner, and I wonder if I should go. He mentioned that I could spend the night but I didn’t obey him as far as telling my father what I was doing, and I’m not sure if the offer stands if I don’t do exactly as he says.
My heart beats faster, my body feeling numb as I worry about whether or not I’ve done the right thing. About whether or not I’ll please him.
I’m standing at the kitchen counter, and I hear footsteps behind me. For some reason, I don’t turn. I just stand there, looking at the counter.
He walks up close, reaches around and grabs my arm, pinning it hard against my back. And just like that, I know. The reason that I didn’t turn when he walked in was because it was a scene. I could sense it.
I feel almost triumphant that I’ve managed to feel it. On instinct.
He grabs my other hand, pinning it firm against my lower back.
Very quickly, he ties my wrists, but these aren’t the soft ropes that he normally uses. These are rough, scratching against my skin, much more like a lasso, much more like I had initially imagined bondage with a cowboy to be.
It’s a quick, one-handed knot that does its job, effectively disabling me.
My hair is loose, and it hasn’t been this whole time we’ve been together. He brushes it to the side, wraps it around his fist and pulls as he angles my neck, and leans in for what I think is going to be a kiss. But it turns into a bite. “You need to be reminded,” he says. “Who decides.”
This is my punishment for yesterday. Yesterday, which was wonderful, but punishment doesn’t always come because a Dom isn’t pleased. It comes because there’s pleasure to be had from it, and I know enough about the dynamic between the two of us to know that’s what’s at play here.
He turns me around to face him and backs me up hard against the counter, the edge of it biting into my back, into my arms.
Then he reaches up, grabs the collar of my shirt, and takes it between both hands to tear it open.
He rips it to shreds, the only way that he can get it off my body now that he’s bound my hands. The ferocity, the feral nature of his actions, leaving me immobile and speechless.
He takes a knife off the counter and my heart stops as he presses it beneath the fabric of my bra, the blade cold against my skin as he turns it and slashes my bra free.
It meets the same fate as my shirt, going into as many pieces as it takes but with the blunt edge of the knife rather than his hands.
My heart is fluttering like a trapped bird, fear and desire and shock all warring together. He’s found a way to make this even more than it ever has been. To shock me.
I like it. I like him like this, I realize.
Maybe you aren’t supposed to want your Dom out of control, but it feels like mine is right now, and I am living for it. “Get on your knees,” he says.
I obey him, going down to the hard kitchen floor as he wraps the rough rope around my neck.
I gasp, arousal driving itself hard between my thighs as he ties a secure knot that makes it so the rope is loose enough around my neck, so that it isn’t in danger of choking me.
But it rests there, heavy against my breastbone, the end of the knot pressing the base of my throat.
A feeling of ownership, of intensity, making it feel like my heart might burst through my chest.
The floor is brutal against my knees, and I’m frozen there while he makes art with these torturous ropes that he’s brought to me.
He lashes them down either side of my breast, and then on the other side, framing them and squeezing them tight, the blood flow concentrated now.
The rope goes tight at my rib cage, my midsection, around my hips.
He makes a harness for me out of those ropes.
The placement of each and every cross and knot intentional. Pressing just so.
He cuts me out of my jeans, ruthless and not caring if they’re my favorite, or even asking if he can.
Then I’m naked, and that allows him to continue on with his makeshift harness.
He does the same thing he did to me two days ago, fastening the ropes just so between my thighs so that my pussy is fully exposed to him.
Open. My hands are bound and I can’t cover up.
Though I can still squeeze my legs together if I want to.
Then he moves behind me, his large hand going between my shoulder blades as he pushes me down, my breasts flat against the hard floor.
He grips my ankle, pushes my leg back so that my heel is touching my ass, and begins to lash the back of my calf and the back of my thigh together, so that my knees are stuck bent, separated and open.
My heart begins to beat faster. I feel trapped.
Truly trapped. Before when he’s tied ropes, enough of me has still been free.
But I am bound, from the base of my neck all the way down to my ankles.
And he takes his time. The floor is hard and it’s nothing like being tied up on the bed, where I can lose track of time and forget that I’m being held in stasis.
No. My rib cage aches, the knots on the front of my body digging into my skin, the exercise of discomfort and endurance much more pronounced than the fun of surrender it has been all the other times we have been together.
It’s like he’s taken the dial and turned it up.
And I’m suspended between my fascination, my desire to give him everything he wants, and my fear.
When he’s finished tying my legs in that kneeling position, he takes another rope suspended between my ankles and ties a knot there, binding my legs to the rope that goes down my back.
My hands and feet are both caught there and I am completely and totally unable to move.
He picks me up, an improbable bundle, and every time I struggle all I do is create pain.
If I pull too hard, the ropes tighten around my breasts.
If I flex my feet they press down hard on my pussy.
If I arch my back the rope by throat goes tighter. Like his hand is there. Like he is everywhere.
He holds me against him as he carries me up the stairs, taking me into the bedroom. He pushes me down on the bed, his hand hard on the back of my head. “You need to be punished for what you did,” he says.
He puts his hand between my legs, and pushes two fingers inside of me. I’m wet. In spite of how frightened I am. Wet in spite of my fears.
I don’t know still if I want this, or if it’s too far. I don’t want it to be too far. If he wants this, if he needs this, then I want him to have it.
But this is pushing me out of my own fantasy. Out of that feeling that I can be good and used just as I am. It’s making me afraid. For what happens next. Because he could take this wherever he wants it to go, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
That’s a balancing act for me. Because part of me likes it. Part of me likes knowing that he could do whatever he wants. That he could do something I don’t like and I’m powerless to stop him. It even turns me on. I don’t know what that says about me.
I don’t even know why.
Why this hot rush floods me at the idea of being at his mercy. It’s not even an idea. It’s reality. I am absolutely and completely at his mercy.
Two fingers become three, and I am filled deliciously. And then it’s four, and I have to bite back a cry of pain.
Then he withdraws from me, his open palm coming down hard on my ass.
The rope bites into my skin. He doesn’t have a lot of space where there isn’t rope crossing his way, but he finds it unerringly and brings his hand down for another swat.
And another. We haven’t done this. Explicit pain hasn’t been part of our game together.
But I’m lost in it, in this maelstrom of sensation. Good and bad, pleasure and pain, fear and anticipation all merge into one delicious song that echoes through my body. I feel him everywhere, in every bite of the rope, each and every sting of his palm against mine.
My arms are asleep, my legs numb. And my ass feels like it’s on fire. I’m teetering on the brink of an orgasm and I almost don’t want it to come. That’s when it hits me.
It’s not gentle. I’m not sure anymore if it’s even pleasure, or if the hard contact of his hand on my bare ass is the pleasure, or maybe it’s all pleasure. Maybe it’s all pain.
I scream as my climax tears through me, and then he pushes three fingers inside me as and pushes me back up to the peak again.
He moves in front of me, and I can see him only for a moment before he puts a blindfold over my eyes. I’m suddenly afraid. Everything is black and I can’t see him. He’s not touching me.
“You don’t seem to have learned your lesson,” he says.
I hear him move behind me, and then the next strike is harder than any of the ones before. Not his hand. A riding crop. He brings it down hard on my already tortured skin. I cry out, and tears start to run down my cheeks as I come again, gasping, sobbing.
“God dammit, Avery,” he growls.
And he does it again. And again.
I might die.
I might want to.
It’s too much but I don’t want to quit. I want him to get what he needs from this. I want him to have everything he needs.
I can do this.
I can endure it.
I grit my teeth and I ride the wave, the darkness pressing in on me. And then he stops.
It’s quiet.
I can’t move, and he’s not there. I can’t hear him. I can’t sense him. I imagine myself like that in the room, bound up and unable to move and abandoned.
Panic flutters in my breast, worse than any of the pain that’s come before this.
“Wolf?”
There’s no answer.