Chapter 21
After the opera,Tristan opens the door of the Pullman limousine, and Mark and I get in. Tristan is about to close the door and go to the front passenger seat to sit next to the driver when Mark makes an impatient noise.
“Back here with us, Tristan. I won’t bite.” And then: “Well, maybe.”
Tristan’s eyes meet mine, and then he looks away as he crawls in after us. “Yes, sir.”
Tristan takes the rear-facing jump seat across from me—and I know why he did it, because even in the spacious Mercedes-Maybach, his legs and Mark’s legs would be all over each other—but it means that his shoes are nudging at the hem of my dress, and the feeling is so distracting. Because just above those shoes would be his ankles, that place where the muscle-and-bone architecture of his body is so evident, and then his calves, fleeced with dark hair. And then his knees, with those tempting spots just above and to the side, where the hair of his legs has been rubbed away, leaving only smooth skin behind.
Last night, Mark punished my backside until the air hurt it, and then he edged me with relentless fingers on my clitoris until I came with my face smashed against the leather spanking bench I’d been trussed to. I’d ached all night from how hard my core had contracted as I’d released.
I’ve been deprived of nothing, nothing at all—not punishment, not sex. Not even a pair of heavy arms around me as I sleep. But somehow Tristan’s shoes against my hem are enough to make me squirm.
I’m loathsome. To hunger when there is no famine? To crave when there is no lack?
It points to some kind of perversity in me, I think. To want the forbidden—to want to devour the kind, well-behaved man in front of me and to make him as wicked as I am. And it’s not that I want Tristan in place of Mark—it’s that Tristan is beautiful and he makes me feel less alone and here is the one line in the sand that Mark has drawn, the single thing he has made taboo.
Cheating.
And now it’s all I can think about.
Mark is reminding me that there will be people waiting for us at Lyonesse—some people from the opera, like Arjun and Evander, a visiting diplomat, a celebrity and her husband. We are taking advantage of the warm September night and hosting drinks and debauchery on the roof.
“Yes,” I say in assent to his plans, determined to stop noticing the drift of cooler air against my leg where Tristan’s shoe has pushed up my hem.
“And I think it would be a pleasantly salacious display if we walked up there and I immediately showed off your wet cunt.”
It should not be shocking after the last two weeks, after what I’ve done as his wife, but somehow it is. It could be a testament to how piously I was raised…or it could be the reason I find myself so infected with him. If I am perverse, then he is perversion itself. If I am depraved, then he is the abyssal well of sin.
It’s as ridiculous as a woman falling in love with her own incubus, but here we are.
“That would be fine,” I murmur.
Across from me, Tristan shifts in his seat, his face turned toward the window. I hate that he has to witness the things Mark does to me.
I love it too.
I could not be more reprehensible to myself sometimes.
“Wonderful,” Mark says. “Hike up your skirt and get yourself wet then.”
His words hang in the air, unequivocal, and yet I can make no sense of them. I make the mistake of looking at Tristan again, who now has his eyes closed like he’s in some kind of pain.
“I…” I clear my throat. “Here?”
“We have about ten minutes until we’re pulling up to Lyonesse.” Mark seems genuinely puzzled. “So yes. Here.”
“But—” I can’t look at Tristan again. I can’t.
Mark seems to know the source of my worry anyway. “He’ll be fine,” dismisses Mark. “It’s nothing he doesn’t see in the hall every night.”
“There’s a difference between in the hall and sitting right in front of me,” I try to explain. “It doesn’t feel…polite.” I could almost laugh then. I’m trying to avoid masturbating in front of my husband’s bodyguard—a bodyguard who’s filled me repeatedly with cum—and the only word I can find is polite.
“I’ve consented, Isolde,” Tristan says. He’s looking at me now, but he’s chafing his palms on his thighs, repeatedly. He is the picture of stress. “I agreed when I took this job that I was comfortable seeing this kind of thing. That it wouldn’t compromise my professionalism.”
When he says the word compromise, his shoe nudges ever so slightly against the toe of my high heel. His eyebrows pull together in a kind of wordless plea.
I think he’s telling me to do this. I think he’s warning me that it would be more suspicious not to get my cunt wet in front of him. That a refusal to do so might indicate an aberration of feelings where Tristan is concerned, and I’m not ready for Mark to know about my many Tristan-shaped aberrations just yet.
“Okay,” I whisper. I pull up the skirt of my dress, cool and slinky, made heavy with embellished beads that twinkle like stars against the black fabric. They twinkle now hectically, dazzlingly, over my knees. Scatters of prismed light, like raindrops, dance all over the closed-off passenger area of the limousine.
Tristan is looking away again, and Mark is now on his phone, his other elbow braced against the window as he peers down at the screen. Is he truly that bored with the idea of me masturbating right here in front of his pet bodyguard? Or is he trying to give me privacy?
It’s ridiculous that I should want his attention right now. Or Tristan’s. A sign of my degenerate soul. I didn’t lie when I told Mark that I deserved to be punished. I’ve always known that about myself, that I needed to atone. I just didn’t know why until I met him.
I am wearing nothing under the dress, and so it’s as easy as dropping my hand between my legs to find my slit and the nub above. My clitoris isn’t swollen yet, still beneath the hood, and the soft folds of my labia are faintly damp but not slick.
It’s something I never considered a skill, masturbating, until Mark came into my life. I felt desire before him, would sometimes wake up from dreams rubbing myself against a mattress, but the actual competence of inducing orgasm in myself didn’t even occur to me as a thing that other people acquired for themselves, much less as something that they had to work to acquire. And even after my engagement to Mark, I could barely admit to myself that he excited me, that my body needed something from me when I thought about him. It took coming to Lyonesse—to being played with or lightly beaten or bound for hours—to realize that the ability to get myself off would be a useful one.
I strum my fingertips lightly over myself, trying to mimic the way Mark played with me last night when he was teasing me between paddle strokes. I pet up over my vulva; I try working a finger inside.
I would love to be doing as I’m told right now; I would love to be getting wetter. But I’m just…not.
Maybe because Tristan is here, and this feels like we’re a razor cut away from discovery. Or maybe because I wish it were him touching me, or my husband.
Or maybe because I spent my high school and college years determined that all fleshly desires were evil and I was evil for wanting them and that stimulating myself was confirmation that I secretly craved evil things.
I readjust in my seat, sucking in a surprised breath at the pain in my backside, and keep trying. I close my eyes and pretend that I’m alone, that no one is watching me. I try to keep my mind blank, free of any faces or bodies or strong, hair-dusted ankles…
A large hand covers my own, and I open my eyes to see Mark leaning over from his seat, his expression unimpressed. “You look like you’re filing taxes.”
That competitive streak flares in me, that urge to win. I lift my chin. “Maybe you should help then,” I rejoin with some irritation. “Since this was your idea.”
His eyebrow lifts. “If you’re offering,” he says, but he doesn’t push my hand aside. Instead, he gestures at the empty seat across from him like an apologetic usher.
“Tristan,” he says. “If you don’t mind.”
Whether Tristan minds, I don’t know, but he does move, settling himself into the seat across from Mark. Once he does, Mark moves, and I understand too late what’s happening.
“Mark!” I protest as he’s kneeling between my high-heeled feet and tucking my thigh up and over the center console. “You can’t?—”
He’s in the middle of shoving my dress up to my hips now, and he pauses to give me a look that could strip paint. “I can’t?” he asks. “I cannot? This cunt, right here, I’m not allowed to eat it?”
“No,” I say, flushing. “Not that you can’t—eat—I’m not safe-ing out. But Tristan?—”
Mark looks over at Tristan, who is no longer pretending to stare out the window. He is looking at us both with a taut, almost wild expression.
“Will you be okay watching this, puppy?” asks Mark, and the endearment seems to tear at something inside Tristan because he squeezes his eyes closed.
“Yes,” Tristan forces out.
Mark gives me a look like See? and then bends down and gives my pussy a long, savoring lick.
I squirm under the sudden wet pleasure of it, and before I can adjust, Mark finds the swells of my sex with his thumbs and peels me apart like fruit. He presses me open—cool air tickling the entrance of my vagina, my clit, the cinched inlet of my anus—and then licks again, from bottom to top.
I pant.
“I’ve been wanting to taste this pussy,” says Mark conversationally. “Properly. Not like the little sample I had on your father’s desk. I thought maybe I’d save it as a treat for myself, as a reward for winning you over after you agree to be mine for real. But needs must…”
He lowers his head again, this time giving me a long, lingering swirl. His tongue is shockingly strong, and when he pushes the flat of it up to my now-swelling bud, I make a low noise.
On the other side of the car, Tristan opens his eyes.
Mark uses a thumb to pull on the hood of my clitoris, to expose it fully, and then he teases it with his mouth, sucking, laving, fluttering. It had felt incredible when Tristan did this to me on the yacht—very hard for this not to feel incredible, I think, all things considered—but Tristan had been learning everything along with me, had been brand-new to pussy.
Mark is not brand-new—that is very, very clear. He knows exactly what he’s doing, exactly when to tease and when to torture, when to coax and when to apply so much pressure or suction that all I can do is squirm helplessly under his mouth.
My nipples are hard points under my dress; all of me feels hot and restless and alive. The scene in front of me is obscenely decadent: Mark in a tuxedo, large enough that his dress shoes are crowded against the seat behind him, that his shoulders wedge my thighs painfully apart. His hair gleams in the city lights as we drive, a few strands falling forward to tickle my bare mound as he eats me. Like this, I can see the stretch of his back, the firm curve of his ass. When I look up at Tristan, that’s where his eyes are, at the place where Mark’s trousers pull tight over his thighs and rear.
“Hmm,” Mark says, pressing a thumb into my sheath, dragging it back out. Again. Again. I can feel the slippery sensation of my own wetness lubricating his movements, and then his thumb moves lower, to my bottom hole.
I tense. I haven’t had this part of me played with very much. A finger, occasionally, or the graze of a seeking tongue. Mark’s thumb is slick with my arousal, but even slick, it’s a tight, strange invasion.
“Oh,” I shudder out as it slides up to the first knuckle. “Oh my God.”
Mark looks up at my face, a slow, malevolent smile blooming on his mouth. “Darling whore,” he says. “All it took was someone playing with your asshole to turn you sweet.”
“It was your idea,” I remind him through panting breaths. I can feel that thumb in my stomach. “You can hardly blame me for liking it.”
“Oh, I think you more than like it,” Mark says, and before I can argue, he dips his head again. Tongue in my pussy. Teeth scraping teasingly at my outer flesh. My clit sucked and then rubbed with his tongue while he uses one hand to keep me spread open. And all the while, his thumb is in my backside, pressing in every direction, as if testing how tight I am there.
Tristan is watching me now, his eyes raking from my face to where Mark eats me to Mark’s planted knees on the car carpet and then back to my face again. His head is pressed back against his seat, and his eyelids are hooded low. An outrageous erection tents his trousers.
I watch as he helplessly brings his hand to his cock, chafing himself over his clothes, his thighs going wide and his hips starting to lift. Our eyes meet, and his already flushed cheeks flush darker.
I’m sorry, he mouths silently. But his hand doesn’t slow down.
A climax is building low in my core, a heavy pressure surging against Mark’s unfairly skilled mouth and slicking the work of his powerful tongue. I’m going to come, and I’m going to come while my husband is using his gorgeous mouth on me, and I’m going to come while our bodyguard tries to discreetly jerk himself through his suit pants.
“Sir,” I breathe, and I feel Mark pause, a flicker of surprise running through him. I so rarely call him that in private. But he likes it because he gives a vicious growl and crawls up my body to give me a hot, wet kiss.
He’s massive, hunched over me like this, his shoulders swallowing me in shadow, his arms caging me in. When we break from the kiss with a shared shuddering inhale, he’s staring at me with dark eyes. The glimmers from my dress make a thousand points of light in his gaze.
“Please, sir,” I beg, finding his hand and trying to push it against my cunt. “I’m so close. Please let me come.”
“No, I think not,” he says. Blandly. And then gives my cunt a hard swat.
Pain crackles through me, from my clit to my belly button and into my chest, and as I suck in a long breath, Mark gets back into his seat, somehow making crawling around the back of a car look easy and sophisticated.
Tristan’s hand is on his thigh now, but his other hand is a fist by his side. His head is still flung back against his seat, and he’s closing his eyes again, swallowing and swallowing.
“It’ll be better if you’re panting for it,” says Mark, not bothering to refasten his seat belt. “I promise.”
The limousine comes to a stop. We’re here.