Chapter 20 #2
“Eyes closed,” I said, and she closed them, and I laid the cloth over them and tied it gentle at the back of her head, easing her hair out from under the knot, and I watched the room go out for her—watched her face change as the candlelight and the bed and my face all disappeared and left her in the dark with only her own breath and the hush of the warm room around her.
“Still here,” I murmured, close to her ear, and felt her shiver. “I’m right here. You can’t see me, but you’ve got my voice. That’s the only thing you need to track now. My voice. You hold onto it the whole way down, and I’ll hold onto you. Understand?”
“Yes, Daddy,” she breathed, into the dark, and reached out blind, and I let her find my chest with her hand, and laid my own over it, and the night began.
Istarted with the feather and nothing else.
I drew it first up the inside of her arm, from the wrist where the burn scars run pale all the way to the soft of the inner elbow, slow, barely touching, and she shivered the whole length of it and her breath went out of her in a thin uneven stream.
The arm she hauls flour with. I traced it like it was the most delicate thing in the world.
“There you go,” I said, low and steady, my voice pitched to be the only fixed point in her dark. “That’s it. You don’t have to do anything tonight. You don’t have to know what’s coming. You just feel it.”
I lifted the feather away. Let her hang there a second with nothing, the absence of it loud, and then I touched it to the hollow of her throat where her pulse was already going hard, and she gasped and her chin tipped back on instinct, blind, offering me the line of her neck.
I drew it down. The hollow of the throat, the dip between her collarbones, down the center of her, the sternum, between her breasts where the lace gave way to bare skin, and I made it so light that even I lost the line of it, so light that when I leaned in and breathed warm across the same path she couldn’t tell my breath from the feather, couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began, and her whole body strained up toward the sensation trying to pin it down and failing.
“Can’t tell, can you,” I murmured against her ribs. “Feather or me. Doesn’t matter. Stop trying to tell.”
I never put it the same place twice. The moment she’d lifted her hip to where she thought it was going, I lifted the feather away and set it down somewhere she hadn’t braced for—the inside of her knee, the soft underside of her wrist, the dip of her waist above the lace—and she’d jolt and chase it and lose it again, and I watched her try to run the choreography the way she runs everything, get ahead of it, control it, and I watched the exact moment she gave that up.
It went out of her shoulders first. I watched it drain out of them by degrees as the feather kept refusing to be predictable, watched the rigid set of her ease and soften and finally go, until her shoulders dropped into the bed and her hands stopped fisting in the sheets and opened, palms up, and the Little came up into her face under the blindfold—slack, young, undefended, the proud meticulous woman set all the way down.
“There she is,” I said, and my chest ached with it. “There’s my girl. You let it go. Good. So good for me. You don’t have to hold anything. I’ve got the line.”
I trailed the feather down across her belly, around the soft of her navel, and lower, skating the edge of the bare lace frame, close, so close, and her hips lifted off the bed reaching for it, looking for a touch where she needed it most, and I kept it just out of reach.
Just a breath of it across the crease of her thigh, the very inside, where the heat was coming off her now, and she made a sound—a high helpless thing from the bottom of her—and her thighs fell open blind, offering, begging without the words yet.
“Easy,” I told her, soft, and I could see how wet she was, the lace soaked through and her bare and slick where the front fell away, glistening in the candlelight, her whole body gone liquid and pleading from nothing but a feather and my voice.
“I know. I know what you want. Not yet. We’ve got all night and you’re going to feel every second of it. Just stay here with me. Stay soft.”
I drew it back up, away from where she ached, up over her hip and the dip of her waist and the underside of her breast, circling the nipple without touching it until the peak stood hard and dark and desperate, and only then the lightest brush of the feather’s edge across the very tip, and she cried out and arched clean off the bed, the sound braided through with the moan, that same nerve, the place where the want is so sharp it’s nearly its own kind of ache.
“That’s it,” I breathed. “Let yourself feel it. Let it build. There’s nowhere to get to.
There’s no rush. Just you and my voice and what I’m doing to you.
” I let the feather rest a long moment against the racing pulse in her throat, feeling her heartbeat through the quill.
“You’re so beautiful like this. You know that?
Gone soft, gone open, not running anything, not holding anything up. Just mine. Just feeling it.”
She was strung tight now from her crown to her heels, every muscle in the strong working body of her drawn taut, her breath coming in those short uneven pulls, her hips rolling slow and helpless against the air, soaking, gone soft in the head the way she gets when she’s all the way down, when the words come loose from her and the careful drains out and there’s only sensation left.
I’d watched it happen over my lap a hundred times, the boss going under, the Little coming up—but never like this, never this far, never this open, because she’d never handed me this much before tonight.
I leaned in and pressed my mouth to her hipbone, just once, just to feel her jolt and gasp and reach blind for me, and then I drew back, and I set the feather down on the nightstand where she could hear the small soft sound of it leaving my hand.
She went very still at the sound. Listening. Waiting in her dark for what came next, fully down, fully open, strung and soaked and gone, exactly where I wanted her, exactly where I’d been bringing her the whole slow time.
“Good girl,” I said. “You did so good. You ready for the next thing?”
“Yes,” she whispered, blind and trusting, her voice gone young and far away. “Yes, Daddy. Please.”
And I reached for the candle.
I struck the match where she could hear it.
The little rasp and flare of it, and I felt her go still all over again at the sound, listening with her whole body. I held it close enough that she’d smell the sulfur and the small honest burn of the candlewick catching.
“That’s the match,” I told her. “That’s the candle lit. I’m going to let it burn a minute, get a little pool of wax going, and then it comes to you. From up high, like I said. Warm by the time it lands. I tell you before every drop. You never get one you didn’t hear coming. You hold onto that.”
She nodded, blind, her lips parted, breathing.
I let it burn. I held the flame high over her, watching the little pool gather gold and liquid at the wick, and I tipped the candle the smallest amount so the light of it played across the bare lace and the soft rise and fall of her, and I lined up the first drop over the swell of her breast, above the dark hard peak the feather had left aching.
“Here,” I said, soft. “Breathe.”
And I let it fall.
The drop came down bright and small and she cried out and arched clean off the bed, the lace pulling taut across her, and the sound that came out of her had the moan braided all the way through it—the same nerve, the exact place the spanking had always found, the sting and the want come up indivisible, pain and pleasure so close together she couldn’t pry them apart.
I watched her face under the blindfold, fast, for the line, for any flicker of too much, and what I found instead was a woman flying.
“Good girl,” I breathed, and then I leaned in and put my mouth on it, on the warm wax cooling on her skin, and I chased the heat of it away with my lips and my tongue, hot then cool, and she shuddered under the change of it, the edge of the wax and the care of my mouth one after the other so close she could hardly tell which was which.
“You feel that,” I murmured against her breast. “Sting, then me. Sting, then me. Every time. I never give you the one without the other. I never leave you on the edge of it alone.”
I worked it slow. A drop high on the other breast and my mouth chasing it warm and gone.
A drop in the soft hollow below her ribs and her stomach jumping under it and my lips smoothing the place after.
I read her the whole time, the catch of her breath, the lift of her hips, the small involuntary sounds, watching for the place I wouldn’t cross and never finding it because she’d opened so far past it tonight, handed me so much off her own page, that there was only the up of it, only higher.
I painted her in points of light.
That’s how it looked in the candle-glow — the cooled wax going pale and matte across her skin in little blooms, up the swell of her breasts, the line of her sternum, the soft of her belly, a scatter of them, every single one soothed after with my mouth so that she was a map of sting-and-care, edge-and-tenderness, and she was shaking under all of it, fine tremors running through the strong working body of her, head tipped back, throat working, gone.
“Daddy—” It came out of her thin and high and broken. “Daddy, I—I can’t—”
“You can,” I told her, and I set the candle down and brought my free hand up to stroke her hair back off her damp forehead, that one tender thing while the warmth still cooled on her skin, and I felt her turn her cheek into my palm blind and desperate.
“You can. You’re doing it. You’re so good, you’re taking it so good for me, look at you.
You’re not going anywhere I can’t reach. Stay with my voice.”