Chapter 32
THIRTY-TWO
Sophia
It only took ten minutes to get back to my apartment building, because Eric told our Uber driver that he would write out a personal check for five thousand dollars if he got us here in less than fifteen. It was a terrifying ride; but thrilling, all the same.
I throw the door to my apartment open and stumble inside with Eric right behind me, already working at the zipper on the back of my dress.
The two of us giggle like a couple of schoolgirls while we move through the apartment and Casey watches us from the couch, wearing a look on his face which says that he’s trying to determine if he needs to be in protective brother mode or if he should just let it ride.
“Hi Casey! Bye Casey!” I shout to him.
Eric flicks a hand up toward him in greeting, keeping the other firmly on my zipper. “Davis, nice to meet you, man,” he laughs, pushing me over the threshold into my bedroom.
He kicks the door shut behind us while he works to pull my dress down the length of my body, leaving me in just my strapless push-up bra and my panties, and he groans as soon as the dress hits the floor beneath us.
His hands clamp down on my sides, his mouth finding its way to my neck to bite down hard on my flesh, and I let out a low moan in response.
I love the way that it feels every time he does that, like he’s laying claim to me and marking me as his.
With the Ecstasy still running through my veins, every touch is magnified, intoxicating, and all that I can think about it melting into him.
“I don’t have any rope, or much space to run,” I breathe, “but I have enthusiasm.”
“I have a belt,” he tells me, “and you have a bed frame.”
My lips turn up into a feline smile and I turn to face him. “I just thought of my prize.”
“What?”
“For winning the quiet game,” I tell him. “I know what I want.”
“And what might that be, Sugar?”
I slip my hands into his jacket, slowly peeling it away from his body, and I let it drop the floor.
After pulling the bottom of his shirt from its tucked-in position, I work the buttons on it one by one until I’m met with his bare chest. I drop the shirt to the ground along with the jacket and stand on my toes to press my lips to his tattoo.
Fumbling with the large, triple-skull embossed buckle of his belt, I open it and slip the smooth leather from around his waist, tossing it onto the bed next to us before I unbutton his slacks and slip them down his legs.
“It’s your turn,” I tell him. I grab the belt from the bed and hold it out to him. “Whatever you were gonna do with this for me, do it for you.”
“That’s your choice, huh?” He asks, taking the belt from my hand.
Without moving his eyes from mine, he expertly wraps the belt into itself and through the buckle until two perfect leather loops rest in his hand.
I take the makeshift restraint from his hand as he climbs up onto the bed, dropping onto his back, and he lifts his hands up in front of the wrought iron frame.
“Alright, Sugar, wrap ‘em around there and get it tight around the wrists.”
A thrill shoots through me like wildfire while I climb over him, straddling his hips. I slip one of the loops around one of the wrought-iron bars, hesitating for a second. “Do you need a pillow, or…?”
Eric laughs so hard that it shakes the entire bed, dropping his hands from their position over his head to cover his face.
And he doesn’t stop fucking laughing. His knees curl up toward his body while he howls his amusement, and I bring my fist down onto his chest with a playful punch, fighting back my own laughter. “You’re being mean!”
“Aw, I’m sorry, Sugar,” he says, cupping my face while he tries to calm his laughter.
“I’m sorry, start again.” I glare down at him while he brings his hands back to their position in front of the headboard, and I slip the loops of the belt around each wrist, securing them in place above his head.
“A little tighter,” he instructs me with a smile. “You won’t hurt me.”
I pull the restraints tighter, until he seems impressed with the snug fit, and he tugs against it to check the resistance, throwing me a wink when it passes his little test. He won’t admit it, but I think there’s a little piece of him that likes being on this side of it for a change; being the one to surrender control.
He’s so used to having the control that I’m not sure he realized before that in surrendering control, you can hold more power than you think.
That’s what I feel when I submit to him; why I like to do it. I have all of the power. One word from me and everything stops. In submitting to him, I control his needs; I control his pleasure, just as much as he controls mine.
I lean forward, meeting his mouth with mine, and his laughter comes to a dead stop while he deepens the kiss with a soft groan. My hands trail from just above the waistband of his briefs, up to his chest, and I run my thumbs over his piercings before sitting up on his lap.
“This is revenge, by the way,” I tell him.
“What do you need revenge for?”
I reach forward to push my fingers into his mouth, wetting them against his tongue, and I bring them back toward my body. Trailing my hand down the plane of my stomach, I answer, “For making me watch you for so long while you touched yourself.”
I slip my hand into my panties, strumming gentle circles over my clit, and the sensation combines with the ghost of the Ecstasy left in my system to shoot rockets through my nerves at the contact, making me gasp.
I roll my hips against my fingers, feeling his cock swell beneath me, and a grin ticks up the corner of my mouth.
“Why don’t you put that pussy on my mouth instead?” He asks.
“Uh-uh,” I say with a shake of my head. “There’s no revenge in that. You like it too much.”
I work my fingers faster, supporting myself with my free hand braced against Eric’s knee. With every moan and whimper that slips out of my mouth, I can feel his cock harden; and every time that it does, it spurs me on. I slip my fingers inside with a loud moan, throwing my head back.
“Take off your panties,” Eric orders, his icy eyes fixated somewhere between my tattoo and my pussy.
His body is so tense underneath me that I think he’s on the verge of hulking out – and if he does, another part of me thinks that he might actually be able to break through the belt, or even the bars of my headboard, if he wanted to.
He loves his belts – each of them custom made with the intent to be used for both fashion and impact – but he loves sex more.
I ignore his orders, instead working my fingers faster while I roll my hips against him.
“Sugar.”
“You really want them off that bad?” I ask, and he nods as if he’s desperate. I use my free hand to quickly slip them off and past my legs. “There.”
I stuff the panties into his mouth, forcing a groan out of him in response that sends heat flooding my veins.
I grind my ass against his lap, and he leans his head back, squeezing his eyes shut.
I hold out until his eyes are back on me before I let myself fall apart, crying out his name while I come.
“Have you suffered enough yet?” I ask him breathlessly, massaging my hands into his chest.
A muffled groan, accompanied by a desperate nod, is his only answer.
Fighting back a smile, I reach for the band of his briefs, evidence of my orgasm coating them, and I slowly pull them down his legs, freeing his cock. I wrap my hand around his shaft, trailing soft kisses along the underside of it from the base to the head, and it twitches in response.
“What was it that you told me that night?” I ask, stroking my thumb against his shaft. “That you were going to ‘use me like a toy’?”
I settle myself over his lap, guiding him toward my pussy. I lower myself onto him as slowly as I can possibly stand, taking every inch of him, and his head falls backward with a muffled sound that I’m fairly certain is him trying to say ‘fuck.’
I brace my hands on either side of his chest, using my thumbs to play with his piercings while I roll my hips with a moan.
He struggles a little bit beneath me, as if trying to get back the control and power that he’s so used to having.
Another muffled sound comes out of him; I think he’s trying to talk to me.
To negotiate some more. Chuckling, I bend down to kiss and bite at the skin of his neck, the way that he always does to mine, and the contact pulls a long moan out of him.
I ride his dick until lava flows through my veins instead of blood, and my nails dig into the skin of Eric’s chest. My head falls backward while I chase my orgasm, and he jerks his left hip up, bringing my attention back to him.
He nods in approval, his eyes roaming from my face to my pussy and back again while he watches me.
My eyes glue themselves to him, too; watching while his stomach tightens, listening as his breaths come out rough and fast through his nose. My nails drag down the length of his body, leaving angry red scratches in their wake, while I let a second orgasm take me.
“Oh my god,” I cry out, forcing a hand forward to pull my panties from Eric’s mouth.
He breathes hard, looking more than a little relieved to have use of his mouth again.
“Let me hear you come, lover boy,” I order him, my voice strained while my pussy tightens around him.
“Fuck,” he groans. His cock pulses inside of me, his breath coming in ragged, shaky exhales while he pumps me full of a comforting warmth. “Ohh, fuck, Sugar.”
I keep him inside of me while the two of us come down, reaching forward to unbuckle the belt keeping his hands bound together.
He slips them free as I loosen it, letting one of them fly up to wrap firmly around my throat.
Pulling my face toward his, he drags his tongue from my chin up to my nose, then nibbles at my jaw.
“That was killing you, wasn’t it?” I laugh.
“You have no fucking idea.”
·
Eric lays on his stomach, his arms crossed under his head as a makeshift pillow – as if I don’t have enough pillows on my bed for him to use.
My bare chest presses against the skin of his back while my fingers trace over the smaller scars littered on his skin, eventually finding their way to the darker scar that mars his shoulder blade.
I think about the story that he told me, how many houses he must have gone through before he found his home and what this scar could have possibly come from.
I think about all of the possible cruelties that he could have faced and what asking him about it might bring to the surface for him.
I tell myself, just for a moment, that it isn’t my place to ask; but then I think about the way that he let me in, and my heart warms.
“What’s this one from?” I finally ask him.
I expect a pause, to feel his body tense under mine; I wait for him to dive behind a wall to protect himself, but instead, I feel his body vibrate underneath mine with a laugh that pours out of him.
“Being a stupid kid and having my shoulder blade rebuilt,” he tells me. “If you feel around enough, you can feel the plates in there.”
“Let me guess – you were on some sort of crazy drug and dove off of a building like Superman or something,” I chuckle, pressing my fingertips into his skin to try to find the titanium plates underneath.
“Nah, I wasn’t that cool until I hit twenty,” he laughs.
“I was fifteen? I think? And Bill wouldn’t let me drive his car because I didn’t have my license yet.
So I stole it. And I crashed it, because I didn’t know how to drive yet.
” He moves his right arm, just a little bit.
“There used to be a scar somewhere over here, too, ‘cause I popped a lung. Didn’t get grounded for stealing the car until after I was done with physical therapy.”
I lean down to get a better look at it, and sure enough, there’s a pair of small blemishes there. They’re smooth, and faded enough that they wouldn’t be visible if you weren’t actively looking for them.
“And this one,” he says, reaching behind himself to point in the general area of one of the smaller scars, “is from losing a game of pencil sword fight with one of my foster brothers.”
“He stabbed you?”
“Well, yeah,” he laughs. “That was how you won. I got him on the next round.”
I reach for the bottle of lotion on my nightstand and squeeze a dollop of it into my hand, rubbing my palms together to warm it up a little bit before I smooth the lotion onto Eric’s skin. His beautiful, flawed skin that tells the story of his life.
He tenses for just a second under the contact, relaxing into it just a breath later. I add pressure, massaging the lotion into his skin, and he sighs as if he’s never actually taken a breath in his life. “What are you doing back there?” He asks me with closed eyes.
Digging my thumbs into the firm muscle of his back, I bend down and press a kiss to his temple. “I’m marking you with my scent,” I joke, and he lets out a laugh that makes my heart swell. “Mystic Gardens, to be specific.”
I work my hands into his skin, massaging away knots and tension that I’m not sure he knows that he holds onto, until I feel all of him relax beneath me, and his breaths come in long, even beats.
This might be as close to asleep as I’ve ever seen him; in all of the time that we’ve spent together, I always seem to fall asleep first. Or he doesn’t sleep.
I’m not sure which of the two is more likely.
Eric’s hand reaches back to find my thigh, and his voice is quiet and thick with exhaustion when he tells me, “Get back down here.”
I do as I’m told, climbing down from my perch on top of him, and I settle into place with my back pressed against his chest. His arm snakes around me until his hand settles on my breast, and he tucks his face in against the back of my head while he kneads my flesh.
“I love you,” I tell him.
His lips meet the back of my head in response, and I know that he’s saying it back to me.
I reach forward to turn off the lamp sitting on my nightstand, shrouding the room in complete darkness other than the soft light coming off of the TV. I consider, for a second, turning the volume on it up for Eric, but knowing him, if he wanted it louder, he would make it happen.
The rise and fall of his chest against my body soothes me into a state of heavy drowsiness, and after no more than twenty minutes, I can feel myself starting to doze off, but not before I hear Eric whisper against my hair.
“You awake, Sugar?”
I don’t move, I don’t respond. If I do, it will scare away the thing that I most look forward to every night.
I feel the hard beating of his heart against my back while he somehow manages to pull me in closer to him; or maybe it just feels closer because of the way that his muscles tense up.
“I love you.”