Chapter 14 #2
The fourth pass across her stomach makes her hips lift off the table. Involuntary. She presses them back down, and the effort drags a moan out of her that vibrates through both of us. Low and helpless. A woman whose body has outrun everything she thought she controlled.
I can see her arousal. The flush darkening on her throat. Her thighs pressing together then releasing. The slickness between her legs visible and spreading.
My own arousal is a constant, brutal pressure. I'm choosing to hold it because what matters is her. What she's giving me. What I'm accepting while she doesn't know I've figured out what she's hiding.
I trail the wand above her stomach. Close enough that the heat reaches her. She holds perfectly still, lying beneath a lit flame and choosing not to move because I told her not to.
She trusts me with fire. Neither of us is telling the other everything, but right now, the weight of what I'm holding is heavier than what she's keeping from me.
I kill the flame and reach for the squeeze bottle. A thin trail of alcohol from her sternum to her hips.
"This one will be longer," I say. "Don't move."
She nods. Her eyes are wet.
The wand touches the trail. The flame catches and races from her sternum to her hips. This burn lasts longer, and the warmth floods her entire torso.
Her body strains against the table, held by the command alone. Her hands grip the table's edge. The collar glints at her throat. The cry she releases is half word, half plea.
I put both hands on her hips and hold her down. Press my thumbs into the heated skin above her hip bones. She's trembling.
I've watched this woman hold herself together through conversations that would've broken someone less disciplined. Right now she can't hold still because of what I did to her body with a flame and my hands.
"Color?"
"Green." The word is barely there.
I lower my mouth to her hip bone. Kiss the heated skin. Drag my lips across her stomach where the flame traced. A broken whimper escapes her, and her thighs fall open.
I run two fingers through her folds. The slickness is immediate, coating my hand, the arousal audible when I spread her. She's drenched.
The fire didn't just prime her nerve endings. It burned through every barrier between her body and what it wanted.
I circle her clit with slow, deliberate pressure. Her hips roll toward my hand.
I did this. The fire, the hands, the mouth. I took a woman who walks into this club armored in composure and reduced her to this. The satisfaction of it is dark and specific.
"Sebastien." My name torn from her. She said it in the shibari too, but that time it surprised her. This time she knows what my name on her lips does to me, and she's giving it anyway.
"Not yet."
I press two fingers inside her. She clenches around me immediately, tight and slick and hot, the walls gripping my fingers in rhythmic pulses. I curl forward and find the spot that makes her entire body seize.
Her hands leave the table. Reach for me.
"Hands. Down."
She forces them back. Her hips are moving against my hand now, and I let them. The pace is mine but her body is chasing it, and the desperation in the motion is visible across every muscle she has.
I work her slowly. Curling, pressing, withdrawing to circle her clit and then returning. Building a cadence designed to keep her at the edge without letting her fall. The fire play taught her body to process intensity in waves. Now I'm using the same pattern with my hands.
She starts to tighten. I feel the contractions beginning, the threshold approaching.
I stop.
"No." The word rips out of her. "Don't stop."
"Who decides?"
Her breathing is ragged. The color in her skin extends from her face to her navel. She's shaking with the effort of not moving.
"You do."
"Then wait."
I let her come down. Give her enough time for the trembling to recede but not stop. When I touch her again, she flinches with sensitivity, and the flinch becomes a moan that carries across the floor.
I build her again. Slower. The patience is deliberate, and the cost of it presses against my leathers.
She's close. She's been close since the flame traced her stomach, and the denial is writing itself across her body in ways I can read like text.
Her hands are on the table. Her eyes are closed. Her lips are parted, and the sound of her breathing is the only thing I can hear.
She stops trying to manage the outcome. The observer inside her goes silent, and what's left is presence. The woman who watches everything has stopped watching.
She's lying beneath my hands with nothing held back.
I held fragments of what happened at Elysium and couldn't put them together in time. Now I hold the pieces, and the woman beneath my hands is the sister who came to finish what Claire started.
"Come for me."
She breaks apart. The orgasm takes her entire body, bowing off the table, her hands gripping the edge. The contractions around my fingers are rhythmic and fierce. I stay with her through every pulse until she collapses against the padded surface and goes still.
Silence settles over the stage. The ambient sound of Dominion returns around us: music, conversation, the distant clink of glasses from the bar.
My hands are shaking.
I withdraw carefully. Clean my hands with the wet towel.
She's bare except for the collar, on a stage in the center of Dominion's scening area. I wrap the blanket around her shoulders before she can register the exposure. Press a water bottle into her hands.
"Drink."
She drinks. Her eyes are half-closed, her breathing still unsteady. I check her skin while she recovers. The fire marks are diffuse warmth, no blistering, no lasting redness. Every surface the flame touched responds normally to my fingertips.
"Anything hurt?"
She shakes her head. Then she looks at me. The look is direct, stripped of the analytical distance she usually rebuilds within minutes of a scene ending.
Her eyes travel from my face to the front of my leathers, where the evidence of what tonight has cost me is impossible to miss.
"Sebastien."
"Yes."
"I asked you once about reciprocity. You said no."
"I remember."
"I'm asking again."
In the shibari, declining was the correct call. First scene. The right decision, made cleanly.
I'm done making that decision.
I pull the blanket tighter around her. Lift her off the table. She weighs nothing against my arms, or she weighs everything. Her head settles against my shoulder, and the collar presses into my collarbone through my shirt.
The floor parts for us without being asked.
I carry her across the scening area and through the lounge.
As we pass the bar, her face turns into my throat.
Not shame. The reflex of a woman becoming aware of the room she just surrendered in.
She stays there for a breath, then lifts her head.
Looks at the club she just let see her break apart.
She doesn't look away.
Renata glances up from behind the bar. Her expression doesn't change. Marion raises her wine glass a fraction from the archway and goes back to her conversation.
Dwayne is near the stairwell. He sees me carrying her and doesn't blink.
"Room four is open upstairs," he says.
"Thank you."
The stairs are narrow. She curls tighter against me. Her fingers hook into my collar, and the grip is the grip of a woman who isn't finished with what this evening started.
The room upstairs is simple and well-appointed. A wide bed with Egyptian cotton sheets. Low lighting. A lock on the door.
I set her on the bed. She lets the blanket fall. The collar is the only thing she's wearing, and in the low light, the ruby catches fire.
I strip the leathers. Pull the shirt over my head. The relief of the pressure against my cock is immediate and not remotely sufficient.
She watches me undress with an attention that has nothing academic in it. Her gaze moves from my shoulders to my abdomen to the length of me, and the hunger in it is open, unapologetic.
I come down over her on the bed. The weight of my body above hers. Skin to skin for the first time since the fire play, and the contact runs through me like a current. Everywhere her fire-heated skin meets mine, the warmth radiates.
I take her wrists. Both of them. Pin them above her head with one hand, my grip replacing the rope from the shibari. Her fingers flex against my palm.
"Color?" I ask.
"Green." Her voice is raw and certain.
"Don't move your hands until I say."
She nods. Her wrists stay where I put them.
I press myself against her entrance. She's still slick from the orgasm, still swollen, and the heat radiating off her body meets mine. I push inside her slowly. One long stroke that seats me completely. A low, shattered noise breaks out of her.
My forehead drops against hers. I hold still. Let her body adjust. Let mine.
I've refused this the first time, and the second time it didn’t come up. Kept the focus on her body, her response, her surrender. Held the line because control demanded it. She asked again tonight, and I'm done holding the line.
She's tight around me, and the fire has stripped her skin bare to sensation. I can feel each small contraction as her body accommodates me. Entering her after holding myself through the entire fire scene is enough to blur the edges of my control.
"You feel—" She doesn't finish.
I pull back slowly. Push in again. Deeper. "I know exactly how you feel."
She gasps, a fractured thing. Her body lifts toward mine, and the angle shifts. I sink further into her. Her wrists strain against my hand. I hold them.
"Still."
She goes still. The effort of it is visible in the tension across her stomach, the trembling in her thighs. She wants to move. I'm not letting her.