Chapter 28
BIRDIE
I wake to splitting pleasure.
I arch, half dreaming still, everything feeling delicious, and then I’m gathered up in powerful arms and rolled onto my stomach, where I’m pinned to the bed and repenetrated with enough force that I feel like I’m being cleaved like a log. I moan.
“Shh” comes a deep voice. “Just a minute longer.”
Bell moves over me, his hips moving slowly, almost lazily, but he’s so, so deep, and I think he played with me before he started using me because I’m wet enough that he can glide in and out with no trouble.
He’s close, his hard form trembling above me, his exhales coming short and fast, the hands holding me down turning demanding and cruel. He goes taut and hisses, his erection thickening and then jerking inside me. He holds me down the entire time and for a moment or two after.
It feels good, being held down, feeling him succumb to his release. In a bizarre way, it even feels good not to climax myself—or not good maybe but hot. By the time he slides out of me with a reluctant grunt, I’m squirming under him, trying to coax friction from any source possible.
He gets up and I hear movement in the bathroom—he’s getting rid of the condom—and then he comes back in and sits on the edge of the bed. I close my eyes as the frustrated desire claws at me and try to remind myself that this arrangement is for him; I’m his plaything. I’ve agreed to that.
It’s just—it would weirdly be easier if it weren’t so exciting to be his plaything, if I could lie back and think of wood carving, then get up and go about my day after, no more affected than I’d been after the gynecologist’s exam on Wednesday.
“Roll over for me,” Bell says in a low voice, and I obey, too drowsy and far too aroused to care about how very naked I am, how debauched I must look with my blushing, wet cunt and mussed hair.
Bell’s eyes practically glow as he looks me over, but instead of touching the places where his eyes linger, he takes ahold of my hand and then guides it to my stomach, where he uses my fingers to draw slow, lingering circles.
“How do you feel?” he asks.
“Like I want to…finish.” Even sleepy, even inflamed past all reason, I still feel clumsy talking about the things we do.
All my life, I thought wickedness must be so effortless for the wicked, and now here I am, a Tamar, a Magdalene, and I can barely speak the word orgasm aloud.
Bell keeps drawing those circles with my own fingers, patiently, deliberately, but his eyes are fixed on my face. “I’ll give you a turn, pretty bird, since I’m nice like that, but what I really need to know is how you feel about being fucked while you’re unconscious.”
Oh. That.
It was the second thing we talked about the night we had intercourse for the first time, that and me learning how to masturbate, and I remember sitting on this very bed trying to absorb this new depravity of his while also absorbing that he was asking for my permission.
Which was simultaneously a glimmer of something better in him and also something darker too, because if I agreed, if I said, Why, yes, Ry, you can use me to get yourself off while I’m sleeping, then I couldn’t pretend he was the only depraved one in this arrangement, could I?
Because he was so explicit and intentional about telling me what he’d like to do while also carving it out from the rest of our free-use activities.
He explained that this would never involve drugs, even something over the counter that could make me drowsy, and he’d never do it if I’d had more than a drink or two before I fell asleep.
He told me that I could say no and he wouldn’t be angry; he told me I could say no and it would in no way compromise the other terms of our agreement.
Why ask for my consent for this when my consent is taken for granted everywhere else? I’d asked him quietly.
He didn’t look away; he didn’t look ashamed of himself or his perversions.
That’s one of the most magnetic things about him, I think, that even when you realize the angel in front of you is only bright because he’s the Morning Star himself, there is such an honesty in his sins, such a generosity in his greed, that you almost feel warmed by it.
Clarified by it. You want it for yourself—that lack of shame, that openness.
You’re grateful to have it directed at you.
Have you forgotten? he asked gently, smile lines fanning out from his eyes and down his cheeks. Any other time, you can tell me you want to leave.
I couldn’t speak if I were asleep; I wouldn’t be able choose.
It might be a distinction without a difference in an arrangement where my role was to be a vessel for his lust, his object to use whenever he wanted, but it was a distinction that mattered to him.
My ability to speak our little code and detonate this arrangement at any time—that mattered to him.
And at the same time, he wanted to do this. Badly. He got hard just explaining what it was that he wanted.
And even though he wasn’t ashamed, I could sense a struggle in him. As a devil would, he loved transgression; as God would, he cared about not pushing me past what I could bear. He wanted to do unconscionable things to me; he couldn’t escape his own conscience.
About this at least.
I did agree, though. I did free him from his concern.
At the time, I told myself it was because I wanted to keep him happy, wanted him to feel like he was getting his money’s worth from me, because in so many other ways, I was a severely deficient mistress.
I wasn’t overtly sensual; I was too timid to take initiative.
I had no roster of sexual delights or tricks.
I had nothing except the bare reality of who I was and the gift of enjoying being forced by a man who liked forcing me.
But as the next two days ticked by, I found myself more and more preoccupied by the idea of him using me for sex while I was asleep.
Waking up with him behind me, his face in my hair, his strong thighs pressed against my own.
Waking up with him on top of me, already sweat-damp and close.
Being played with and posed. My dreams turning erotic and strange while I was unaware of what he was doing.
I finally asked about it this morning, after he filled a condom taking me against the door and then another one while I was bent over the back of his couch.
I asked why he hadn’t done it yet.
I wanted to give you a little more time to settle in, he replied with an upward hitch to his lips. A little time for your cunt to adjust. But if you’re ready now…
He had me go to bed naked and also promised he’d use lube if I wasn’t wet enough, which was such a sick, warped promise and also humiliatingly made me wet all on my own.
And now here I am, with him drawing circles on my stomach with my own fingertips, his eyes on my face, aware of every flicker of my features as he waits for my answer.
“I liked it,” I finally reply, my cheeks hot. “I know I shouldn’t. But I liked it.”
“You probably like it precisely because you shouldn’t, my sweet Catholic girl,” he says.
But despite the lightness in his words, his eyes still don’t leave my face.
“You won’t upset me if you don’t actually like it, though.
If you don’t want to do it again. I’ve known people much, much kinkier than you can even imagine who won’t touch somnophilia with a ten-foot pole.
It’s fucked up, and it’s dangerous. I want you to be sure. ”
“Ry.” I use that name deliberately, knowing how much he likes it when I do. “I’m sure.”
His lower lip slides briefly between his teeth. “You can tell me at any time you don’t want to do it again. I’d like to trust that you will do that. That you know this is…extracurricular to our other terms.”
“You can trust me.” I think of how much he seems to crave my thoughts, so I offer a little more.
“I would sometimes have dreams like this, that something was tormenting me while I was asleep, tainting me. Making me…respond. And I would wake up so worried something was wrong with me and also secretly hoping I’d have more dreams like it, because it always felt so good inside the nightmare, even while I knew it was wrong, while I knew it was damning to dream about an incubus or something using me for sex.
Doing this with you, it’s almost exactly like my dreams. Pretty demon and all. ”
His eyebrows lift and his eyes are sparkling, and I wonder what part he could be so delighted by since I’ve basically just implied that he’s a demon until he asks, “You think I’m pretty?”
I give a disbelieving exhale—a soundless laugh. He glances down at my stomach, which has just moved under our joined hands, and then back up to my face.
“Ry,” I say, sounding more like a teacher than I ever have in my life. “You already know you’re pretty.”
“Well, obviously I know I’m pretty. I want to know if you think I’m pretty.”
It’s late afternoon, and the windows—darkened while I was sleeping—are letting in so much summer sunshine right now.
His features are trimmed in light—even the beauty mark above his mouth looks angelic—and his bared shoulders and chest and torso look like they belong in a painting.
He is all grace and symmetry and gold. It’s only those eyes—a forget-me-not seen just before dawn, sea ice under the moon—that betray what’s under the beauty, and then only if you know how to look.
“Yes,” I say. “I think you’re pretty.”
The answering grin is immediate and wide as a peacock’s tail. He bats his eyelashes. “Birdie, you’re so forward.”
That makes me laugh—and not just laugh but giggle. Bell’s smile flickers with something so hungry that I worry he’s going to take a bite out of me.
“Now. We need to address the other topic of conversation from Wednesday,” he says before I can start worrying if I sounded inexperienced or stupid with my giggling. “Have you masturbated yet?”