38. Delilah
DELILAH
Anton won’t look me in the eye when he opens the door.
“Good evening, Ms. Dorsey. Mr. Makov is waiting for you upstairs. Please let me take your coat.”
Even by his standards, he’s being unusually distant. He keeps his gaze fixed down as he takes my purse and coat and disappears around the corner.
Leaving me facing an empty house.
It’s quiet. Too quiet? Eerily quiet?
I don’t know. I guess I’m just used to Kane greeting me with a smile and a kiss, maybe a grab of the ass. Funny how quickly we get used to things we’ve spent our whole lives waiting for.
Tonight, though, it’s just a hallway, a staircase, all of it dark and silent.
I creep up the steps one by one with my heart climbing into my throat. At the top of the stairs awaits a long landing with a thick runner the color of blood going down the length of it.
And at the end of the runner is a set of double doors.
Kane’s bedroom.
I’ve been in there before, but that was on a sunny evening, half-drunk off a bottle of wine we shared over dinner, giggling and giddy. I don’t know why tonight feels different, but it does.
A sliver of light escapes through a thin crack in the doors. When I get close enough, I pull one open and slip through.
All the lamps and overhead lights are off.
Candles cover every surface instead: tapers along the mantel, squat glass jars on the nightstands.
Their flames duplicate themselves in the dark windows until Kane’s bedroom looks less like a bedroom and more like the inner circle of a very sexually charged version of hell.
And who’s the devil?
Why, Kane Makov, of course.
He’s leaning against a bedpost in black trousers and no shirt. The chain is looped around his tattooed neck and he’s toying with it, his ringed fingers glowing and gleaming in the light.
He doesn’t say anything right away, and I don’t, either, because I’m busy looking at him.
The candles transform him. In daylight, he’s just a very big man in a very good suit. In here, the light comes from below and from the sides, and it snags on every part of him that isn’t flat.
The muscle across his chest.
The ridge of his shoulder.
The hollow under his collarbone where the chain sits.
His skin looks warmer than it does in daylight. Almost gold. Against it, the black of his tattoos is a jarring contrast. It looks wet and fresh in the candlelight, like I could drag my fingertips through the art and they would come away inky.
His hair’s damp. He showered before I got here. It’s pushed back off his forehead, except for that one lock that refuses to cooperate. The one imperfect piece.
“Come in, sladkaya. Shut the door.”
I step in only as much as I need to in order to shut the door. My hands don’t know what to do, so I shove them in my back pockets. Then my eyes fall past Kane, to the black bedspread—
—and my breath turns jagged.
On the bed, laid out on the comforter in a neat row, are three things.
A folded strip of black fabric.
A pair of black leather cuffs with a short chain between them.
And a long, padded bar with a cuff at each end.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what they’re for.
“You went shopping,” I say. “I take it this wasn’t a quick run to Target?”
He doesn’t laugh, though. His eyes are deadly serious, and it’s starting to drive my anxiety even higher. I’m hyperaware of every part of me.
The soles of my feet. The tips of my ears. The tingly skin on the inside of my thighs.
He’s got something in his hand, I realize. When he shifts, I see that it’s a black leather riding crop.
He aims at the items on the bedspread like it’s a professor’s pointer stick. “Blindfold. Handcuffs. Spreader bar.”
I nod. “‘Spreader bar’ isn’t the sexiest name in the world, is it? Whoever came up with that name wasn’t exactly a romantic.”
“It describes what it is.”
I tiptoe a little closer. I want to touch these things, if only to confirm that I’m not going to instantly crumble into dust when I do.
“Have you used them before?”
“Not like this.”
“Did you purchase them for me?”
“Yes.”
“And if I decide I hate it?”
“It all goes away.”
I swallow hard and drag my eyes up to his. He’s looking at me with a strange mix of patience and hunger. I don’t think I’ve seen this side of Kane Makov quite yet.
He reaches past me, picks up the strip of black fabric, and holds it out flat on his palm. Not offering it to me, just showing it. “This is a blindfold. Cotton. It sits on your eyes, it doesn’t press on them, and you can push it off with one hand if you need to.”
“Okay.”
He sets it down and picks up the cuffs. “These fasten with buckles, not clips. Two fingers fit under them so they aren’t too tight. The chain clips to the headboard. You’ll be able to move your arms, but not put them where you like.”
“And the third one is a medieval torture device?”
“It’s a spreader bar, like I said.” He picks it up. “The cuffs go around your ankles. The bar keeps them apart.”
He sets it back down and looks at me. “Do you know why I got these things, Lilah?”
“For the, uh, obvious reasons?”
“No.”
“Then no, I don’t know.”
He sets the crop down on the bed next to the bar and takes a step toward me. I have to tip my head back to keep looking at him.
“Every time I touch you, you flinch. Did you know that? You cover yourself. You cringe away.”
My face goes hot. “So this is punishment for hiding from you?”
“No,” he scolds. “It’s the opposite.”
“How do you figure?”
“Because you can’t hide with your hands buckled to a headboard.” He picks up the blindfold again and lets it drape off two fingers. “And with this on, you can’t watch my face and wonder what I’m thinking. You do that, too. You look for the moment I change my mind about you.”
I open my mouth to argue, but he’s right, isn’t he? I do look. I’ve been looking since the first night.
Waiting for The Shift.
“And the bar?”
“So that all of you is visible and you have no choice but to embrace the bliss and agony of being truly seen.” He strokes my cheek with the back of his hand.
“I want you laid out on that bed where you can’t cross an arm over your stomach, or turn a light off, or bury your face away.
And I want to keep you there until you believe me when I tell you that you are beautiful. ”
“And if I never believe you?”
“Then we’ll do it again and again until you do.”
I stare at the three things on the black comforter. The fabric. The cuffs. The bar with its little buckles hanging open.
My heart is going so hard I can feel it in my throat. “This is the craziest thing I’ve ever done,” I whisper.
He holds out a hand. “Would you like to try?”
I look at his hand. Then at the bed. Then back at his hand.
“Okay,” I say. “Yes.”
He doesn’t smile or make a joke about it.
He just takes my hand and pulls me the rest of the way in.
“Before we can start, we need a safe word. Pick something that you won’t say by accident.
Whatever you choose, it’ll be the kill switch.
You say it and everything stops at once.
I’ll never ask you to explain or punish you for using it. ”
“You’ve thought about this a lot.”
His mouth twists cruelly. “If you truly knew how much I think about you, Lilah, you’d run away screaming.”
The skin-crawling feeling is intensifying with every passing second.
“A word,” he says. “Anything you want.”
I cast around, but it’s like I’ve forgotten what words are.
Then a memory occurs to me. Maybe it wasn’t the first time I ever thought about Kane in a sexual way, because I’m pretty sure my vagina was like I’ll take two of him, please from the second I first inhaled his cologne in my mother’s pantry.
But it’s the first time that I can remember him looking at me in that way. Putting his hands on me. Making me keenly aware of how many lines he’d be willing to cross if I let him.
It was when he reached out and wiped the streak of sugar from my face, then sucked his thumb. The night we met, Christmas Eve, all alone in the kitchen of my bakery.
“Sugar,” I say. “That’s my safe word.”
“Sugar,” he echoes. He nods. “You have the power tonight, Lilah. Never forget that. Are you ready?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be,” I joke.
But Kane surprises me when he frowns and shakes his head. “No. That won’t work. It’s either a full-throated Yes or it’s nothing at all. There is no room for half-measures in a game like this. Do you understand?”
“Yes. Sorry. Yes, I’m ready.”
“Good. Then take off your clothes and get on the bed.”
I undress hurriedly. It’s not actually that sexy, and yet somehow it’s maybe the sexiest thing I’ve ever experienced? I don’t know how to explain it.
Rules as an abstract concept don’t exactly rev my engine. Neither does disrobing like I’m at the gynecologist.
But a shirtless Kane in a candlelit room with a bedspread covered in devices designed to do some pretty aggressively sexy things to me?
Yes. That’s hot.
So I strip everything off, pile it all up off to the side, then get onto the bed and lie down on my back with my head on the pillows.
He kneels beside me. He takes my right wrist and buckles the cuff, then works two fingers under it and pulls to check it.
Then the left. Then he reaches up and clips the chain to the wrought-iron spindle in the middle of the headboard.
I test it. My hands go up and a little out to each side, but they do not come down to my body.
It’s fear and relief at the same time, wound together so tight I couldn’t separate them with a paring knife.
“Alright?” Kane says.
“Yeah.”
“Words.”
“I’m alright. I’m— Yes. It’s good.”
He picks up the blindfold and holds it above my face. “Last chance to change your mind.”
“Put it on.”
The last thing I see is his solemn scowl before everything goes dark and soft. I can still see a faint orange glow around the bottom edge, the candles making themselves known, and I can hear him breathing. The mattress moves as he shifts his weight, and I have no idea where he’s about to touch me.
Then his mouth is on my knee.
“Oh,” I say.
“You flinched.”
“You surprised me!”