2
ELLIE
Whoever owns the closet has too many stinky sneakers for their own good and enough clothes to sink a ship. My outstretched hands make contact with a rail, and I stop, not wanting to touch anything. This closet is cavernous, and I can see nothing through the blindfold. Clearing my throat, I wait for the dude who’s trapped in here with me to say something.
Instead, the lightest graze of fingers against my wrists makes me jump. Before I have a chance to tell them they need to keep their hands to themselves, the fingers trail up the soft skin of the inside of my arm, and I shiver.
I actually shiver. My hair is lifted off my shoulder, and a soft kiss is pressed there. Warm breath caresses, then another kiss, and for a moment, I wonder why I have whirled away from wanting to stay on the opposite side of this closet to wanting to get closer. What about this stranger’s touch makes me want to lean in and feel more rather than less?
The lightness of it. The surety.
I can’t explain it.
Maybe it’s the sensory deprivation and the anticipation it brings.
A soft exhale of breath leaves my parted lips as fingers trail up my bare arms. “Relax,” a husky voice whispers. The vodka makes my head swim, or is it him? This man who’s made me warmer between my legs in three seconds than the two poor excuses of men I’ve dated.
“Relax,” he says against my skin, his tongue making a whisper of contact.
Even though it’s pitch black, I close my eyes, needing to switch off just one sense before I overload.
A hand touches my thigh, just the flick of a cat’s tail, but it’s enough that the air catches in my throat. For a second, I think I feel the brush of another body, but it can’t be, can it? Seven minutes in heaven is a game played by one girl and one boy. Except, I’m not a girl anymore, and whoever is touching me like a maestro playing a sonata is definitely not a boy.
Lips press against the inside of my thigh, and I jump as hands clasp the tops of my arms to steady me. “Relax,” the voice behind me says, this time close to my ear.
One mouth whispering, another mouth kissing. Impossible, but not.
Two men cloaked in the darkness of the closet—two men whose touch is shudder-inducing.
Before I can say we need to stop, lips press against mine, trapping my words with teasingly gentle kisses.
Three men.
Oh god.
My pussy squeezes between my legs, aching and heavy with arousal.
I feel like I’m in a dream where my feet aren’t quite touching the ground, and my brain has drifted away with the fairies.
I should stop this.
I didn’t want this. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say I didn’t expect this. In high school, seven minutes in heaven was more like seven minutes of fumbling and embarrassment.
Not seven minutes of teasing. Seven minutes of swooning. Seven minutes of bliss.
A hot mouth presses against my pussy, warm even through the fabric of my dress and panties, and my hand instinctively reaches out to touch the head of whoever is down there. Soft curls meet my fingertips as he breathes in and out, heating my skin and maybe breathing in my scent. There’s a moan, and it sounds so loud in the confines of this dark space. His pleasure seeps into my bones and reddens my cheeks, and they only flame brighter when the hem of my dress rises.
Am I really going to do this? Am I really going to let this unspeakably intimate thing happen with three strangers?
A tongue on my clit is the only convincing I need. And a mouth on my tightly puckered nipple. My hands are held too, as though there’s a fear in the group that I might bolt.
That uncertainty prompts just the smallest of aches in my heart.
“Just let go,” the voice behind me whispers. His hips press against the round curve of my ass, and I can feel just how much this stranger needs to let go, too. His cock is like a security guard’s flashlight, and I’m surprised to find myself wishing that seven minutes could morph into at least an hour so that I could discover exactly what he’d do to me with that thing.
My dress is hitched up to my waist, and my black lace panties are shifted to one side with a roughness that makes me tremble.
It’s delicious to sense their urgency. As delicious as the first hot flick of his tongue against my soft flesh.
As one man suckles and squeezes my breasts, another teases me to the point of disaster. Fingers probe my entrance, and the slickness he elicits is enough to coat his hand and my thighs.
“Fuck,” I hear him mutter, as though the discovery of my wetness is driving him to distraction.
I’ve never been this wet, this ready. I’ve never felt so close to falling over the precipice of pleasure into the blackness of ecstasy.
“Don’t think,” the man by my ear whispers. He shifts, bringing my right arm behind my back and pressing my palm to his cock. It’s a moment of selfishness. A desire for him to feel just a flicker of the pleasure he and his friends are giving me. He doesn’t realize that the fierce way he forces my fingers to close around his huge, thick length is the very thing that achieves the unachievable.
The sound that comes out of my mouth when I come is something so foreign that I don’t recognize it as me. His grip on my hand increases, but I willingly squeeze his erection as though it’s the only thing preventing me from falling. I feel the smile of the man whose mouth is over my nipple and a swift exhale of cool air against my sensitized clit that feels a lot like relief.
Relief he got me off.
What he doesn’t know is that I’m relieved too. So relieved that hot, stupid tears spring to my eyes.
I thought I was broken. Simon, the last asshole I let between my legs, hinted as much. At first, he tried hard to get me to orgasm. After a couple of failed attempts, his attention became cursory at best. A few licks so he wouldn’t feel like such an asshole for fucking me just for his pleasure.
Now I know it wasn’t me. It was him.
My body is capable of the ultimate release.
I’m capable of letting every annoying, tension-inspiring part of my life drop away so that I can float on a helium balloon of pleasure, and that knowledge feels like freedom.
A tear escapes my eye and rolls down the side of my nose beneath the blindfold- a cool line of realization - and I feel so stupidly grateful that my chest hitches with a sob.
All around me in the darkness is silence. Surprised or shocked? I’m not sure.
Then, before any of us can say a word, there’s a loud knock on the door.
“That’s it, Ellie. Times up.”
Dornan’s voice is booming and amused, and within the blackness around me, three men inhale in a rush.
The man behind me drops my hand like it is scolding him. The hem of my dress is tugged down, and the top is pulled up as though they’re hurriedly packing me away.
Dornan rattles the door handle. “It’s not eight minutes in heaven, guys. Wrap it up. I need my girl back to party with.”
Pulling away, I yank at the blindfold and stumble past the man at my feet, the one at my back and the one looming to my right, fumbling for the door handle and shoving it open. The light in the room wasn’t bright when I left, but it seems bright now. My eyes don’t work for a second, and I turn back to the closet, searching for the welcoming darkness. That’s when I see just the flash of a hand in the gloom before Dornan slams the closet door shut.
A hand with a familiar tattoo of a lion with a huge shaggy mane. A tattoo that graces the skin of my stepbrother.