Chapter 34
THIRTY-FOUR
Sophia
Goosebumps work their way to the surface of my skin under the impossibly delicate touch of Eric’s fingers while he ties a length of rope just below my breasts. He works slowly, methodically, as if tying his perfect knots is part of the excitement for him.
“How long have you been doing this?”
A smirk tugs at the corner of his mouth. “Since I realized sex could actually be fun,” he tells me. “First time I did it, I didn’t get why everyone loved it so much. It was so fucking boring.”
“How old were you?”
He secures a beautiful knot between my breasts, looping the rope together as he trails it over my shoulders, making the beginnings of a bridge between the arms held behind my back. “Probably too young,” he laughs. “You?”
“Probably too old,” I counter.
His lips come down on the crook of my neck, trailing kisses up toward my jaw while he binds my arms together. “How old?”
“More than halfway through twenty-three,” I answer, and he freezes.
“Hold on. That was after—”
“Yep. My first night working VIP.”
Eric’s not behind me anymore; in less than half of a breath, he’s standing in front of me, his darkened eyes flooded with both rage and concern. His throat bobs and I watch the muscle along his jaw flicker as it tenses. “Did the guy know?”
“It was probably pretty obvious,” I laugh – but Eric doesn’t.
“Did Nash know?”
I shake my head, wishing that I had use of more than just my forearms so that I could touch him and calm the rage swirling through his features. He looks the same way that he looked the night that he killed Ethan, and before he left the table at dinner tonight.
“He didn’t ask, and I was too afraid to say.”
His eyes scan my body, as if he’s checking me for injury, as if there would or should be some visible damage left behind on my body that he should have seen before now.
Even though he doesn’t find anything – because there isn’t anything to find, even though I haven’t used my safe word, he digs through the drawer of his nightstand and pulls out a set of safety shears, coming toward me with them, and he grabs onto my bindings.
“Stop,” I tell him, “don’t cut it. Keep tying.”
“Sugar…”
“I didn’t use my safe word.”
He taps the tip of the shears against his palm, thinking, and a proud smile creeps across his face. “Alright. Fair enough.”
After putting the tool back in its resting place, he takes up his position behind me again, continuing the bridge of rope that binds my upper arms together. He follows by crossing my forearms over each other, working to tie a thick portion of rope around them, like a braided wall.
“I want names, you know,” he tells me. “I wasn’t just sayin’ that, before.”
“I know you weren’t.”
Working his way back around to the front of my body, he wraps the length of rope around my stomach and over my hips, letting his fingers graze my skin with every electric movement.
“Especially that guy.” As his hands trail over my hips, he leans in closely to me, his voice a low growl.
“I’ll take his eyes out for looking at you.
” The rope around my hip is pulled down past my thigh, securing my ankle to it, and heat pools between my legs with an ache.
“I’ll peel his lips off for kissing you.
” A knot is secured, and he moves to the other side.
“I’ll cut his tongue out for speaking to you.
” The rope is pulled around my ankle in a similar fashion to the first side.
“I’ll saw his fucking fingers off for touching you.
” His mouth is less than an inch from mine.
“I’ll cut his dick off for fucking you. And when I’m done, I’ll turn what’s left of him into ground fucking beef with my bare hands. ”
I lean forward, pressing my lips to his with a smile. “I love you, too.”
He doesn’t scare me anymore, when he’s like this. I welcome it. He has become the safety net that I didn’t know I needed, the protector that I didn’t know I’d craved, and the piece of me that I didn’t know I was ever missing.
I’ll never tell him that it was Leonard; because he was nice to me that first night.
It wasn’t special or romantic or anything at all that I wanted it to be, but he was nice.
It was all of the nights that came after, once he decided that having my virginity meant that he now owned an all-access pass to every inch of my body and the right to make decisions for me. Those were the hard nights.
I’ll never tell him that I had to down my weight in shots to tolerate those nights, or that I went home feeling empty and discarded afterward. There are things he doesn’t need to know. Things he doesn’t get to know.
“Change of plan,” Eric announces.
I watch as he steps toward his nightstand again, reaching not for the shears this time, but for the magic wand that I’ve become very fond of. He twirls the handle of it around his fingers like a baton while he plugs it in, and still as he approaches me again.
Flicking the power button fills the space with a soft whirring sound that makes me ache, and I find myself squirming side to side while Eric brings the head of the wand toward the inside of my knee. “You’re gonna come until you can’t anymore, Sugar,” he tells me.
“What are you gonna do?”
“I’m gonna count.”
His mouth moves forward to claim mine, fierce and hungry, his tongue slipping past my lips to tangle with mine. I feed him a moan while he carefully moves the vibrator up the inside of my thigh, painfully slowly, until he grazes my pussy with it before moving it up the plane of my stomach.
As the head of the vibrator meets my nipple, Eric bites down on my lower lip, forcing me to suck in a sharp, shuddering breath.
My hands fight for freedom, even though I don’t actually want them to have it; I love being tied up on Eric’s bed.
Completely at his mercy and every second of my pleasure under his control.
He can dole it out or take it away whenever and however he chooses, and that is thrilling.
I whimper when the wand makes contact with my other nipple, and let out a low moan when he finally lowers it between my legs, meeting my clit.
“Don’t move it,” I plead, trying to roll my hips against the pleasant buzzing, and his fingers sink inside of me in response.
The first orgasm hits like the Ecstasy that we’ve shared more times than I ever thought we would; like a blanket of warm euphoria that swallows me whole under the heated gaze of his icy eyes.
I let myself drown in them while I come, crying out his name like it’s the lifeline that the man who owns it has become to me.
The next three are almost overwhelming; my arms fight for their freedom through the fourth, desperate to cling onto Eric, who just watches my hips buck against the wand and his hand with a proud smile on his face.
The only things betraying the cool calm on his face are the nipples peaked hard under his shirt and his cock visibly straining against the fabric of his jeans.
He’s in complete control, not only of me, but of himself.
My mind races with memories of that day in his kitchen, when he told me that I’d made him ruin his jeans.
That I was why he’d lost control. The restraint he’s showing now is such a contrast to that day; he could have held out if he’d wanted to.
He made himself come that day.
As soon as I get out of this rope, I am tearing his clothes off.
Or, so I thought.
Before I even have the chance to come down from orgasm number four, Eric trails the vibrator along my thighs before pressing it back into my clit, sending a vibration throughout my entire body, and orgasm number five pokes her vicious little head out at the corner of every nerve, begging to take over.
“Kiss me,” I plead with him through the almost-painful electricity stabbing into me.
His hand withdraws from me and wraps tightly around my throat while he pulls me in to claim my mouth with his, swallowing the moans that I feed him.
My body writhes against its restraints until I break free from Eric’s mouth, crying out.
I lean forward, pressing my forehead against his shoulder while I shatter into pieces.
As if he can tell that I’ve had enough, his free arm drapes around my body and holds onto me tightly, the hand controlling the magic wand only relinquishing its control when the climax comes to an end, sending me off into the clouds with it.
“Need to call red?” He asks, as if it’s the most casual conversation he’s ever had, and all that I can do is nod against his shoulder in response.
I expect him to laugh at me, but he doesn’t.
Instead, he works to untie each of the knots, stopping to ask every couple of minutes if I need him to cut it, but I can’t talk yet, so I just shake my head.
I almost feel like I’m drunk; like my head is floating somewhere away from my body and I’m looking down at myself, watching the world happen around me.
As soon as my arms are free, I throw them around Eric’s neck.
I don’t care that there is still a ladder of rope covering my body.
I don’t care that he’s still working to untie it.
His lips meet the side of my head, and as soon as the rope is off of my body and thrown to the side, his arms wrap around me, pulling me close to him.
I wrap my legs around his waist, resting my head against his chest with closed eyes.
“Come on,” he tells me, moving a hand to support my ass while he hoists me off of the bed.
He carries me into his kitchen, still wrapped around him, and I hear him open his refrigerator, followed by the sound of a few bottles clinking together – beer, one of the few things he actually keeps in his fridge.
He orders most of his food to be delivered or goes out to eat.
I think I saw a bag of barbecue flavored potato chips in one of his cabinets once, but that was it.
I keep myself tucked tightly against him while he carries me back to his bedroom; it’s like this is the most normal thing in the world to him, like I’m not physically glued to his body because I was so overwhelmed by pleasure that I’ve ceased to function.
He lowers the two of us onto the bed and presses something cold against my arm.
“Hydrate.”
When I finally peel myself away from him, I take the Gatorade from his hand and crack open the lid, sucking down half of it in just a few gulps.
The next hour is spent in quiet – Eric keeps it quiet.
He doesn’t turn the TV on, he doesn’t blast music through the room.
He just lays with me, letting me float on the cloud that he sent me to.
I can feel the tension in his body, and I know that all he wants to do is fill the silence, but he tolerates it for me.
His fingers stroke my hair while I lay sprawled across his chest, and I close my eyes, letting myself drift off into a twilight kind of doze.
Still awake, still listening to the hard beating of his heart, but close enough to sleep that he believes me to already be there.
He waits – for minutes, he waits, until he seems certain that I’m asleep.
“Sug?” Nothing more than a soft whisper, like it is every night that we spend together anymore.
Like I do every night that we spend together, I pretend that I’m in a deep sleep and can’t hear him.
Like he does every night that we spend together, he whispers to me again. “I love you.”
The only thing different about it tonight is that I told him my secret; I know that he knows. But he doesn’t know that I know his. He doesn’t know that I dug and dug for it until I trudged up the truth about the worst day of his life.
And in this moment, I make a vow that he can never know.