Chapter 10
EVANGELINE
We drink the tea across the stove from each other.
Max sits on the floor in front of the woodstove in a dark henley and dark jeans, her legs out, her boots off, her back against the sofa.
She is gorgeous in the most handsome masculine way with her dark hair a little falling forward over her face.
I sit in the armchair with the robe pulled around me and my knees up under it.
The light in the living room is amber from the stove glass and gold from the single lamp.
The rain has started again, very light, on the cedar of the roof.
She talks.
“OK, I’m just going to say some things and I want you to say yes or no. Whichever answer feels right for you, I just want you to say it. And if its more complicated than yes or no I want to hear anything that runs through your mind.”
I nod. I wonder what she is going to say. I don’t have much sexual experience. My list of lovers before my husband was brief and forgettable. Sex with my husband was forgettable. I have never been with a woman.
But I am turned on. Really turned on by her. By the idea of her.
“My hands and fingers on your body and inside your pussy,” she says first beginning the list that is living in her head.
I nod. I feel wet just thinking about it.
“I need you to say it,” she says.
“Yes,” I reply. This is important to her and I want to get it right.
“My mouth and tongue on every inch of you?”
Oh god, I feel myself heating up. I want this so badly. “Yes,” I nod eagerly.
“My tongue on your anus?”
Not what I was expecting and not something I have ever experienced but certainly I’d let her lick me anywhere. “Yes,” I say confidently.
“My fingers in your anus? I would use lube and only go at a level you were comfortable with.”
“Yes,” I find myself saying, surprising myself a little. The thought of it makes my clit throb between my legs.
“A strap on dildo. It is a silicon dildo that goes in a leather harness around my hips. I would fuck you with it vaginally and perhaps anally if you enjoy my fingers in your ass.”
I’m vaguely aware of what a strap on is, but I appreciate the explanation. “Yes to vaginal. Maybe to anal?” I say unsure of my answer.
“OK, noted,” she says. She takes a breath. I look at her hands. They are so big and strong. Her fingers look capable of anything. I imagine them inside me and it feels good to imagine.
“Rope. For bondage. I would tie you with it. Bind your wrists and ankles so you can’t move.”
Again, this is something I have never done, never considered. I take a minute to consider it. I don’t really want to say no to anything given that I don’t really know what I am saying no to. My curiosity gets the better of me.
“Yes,” I say. “I don’t know how I would feel, but I would like to try if it is something you like to do.”
“OK, so I don’t know if you have heard of Safe Words.
A Safe Word is something you can say to stop me at any time.
I usually go with Red. If you said Red, I would just stop whatever is happening and take care of you.
If you said green, that would mean you like it and you want more.
If you said Amber, that would mean you don’t want to stop completely but more like a pause for discussion- there is something you want to change/say. Does that make sense?”
Again, this is not something I have heard of, but it makes a lot of sense. “Yes. I can do that. That would work for me.”
“OK, she smiles. I think that might cover us for tonight.”
I smile at her. “I’m really very turned on,” I say.
“I know.” She smiles back at me the laziest sexiest smile I have ever seen. “Bedroom. Lie on the bed, leave the robe on.” It is a command and oh god, I want to obey.
"Yes."
"I'll be in after you."
"All right."
I stand. I walk to the bedroom. I do not look back at her. I close the door behind me three quarters of the way, the way she leaves it.
---
I lie on the bed.
I lie on top of the quilt. I leave the robe on. I lie in the middle of the bed with my head on the pillow and my hair loose and my hand flat on my stomach over the robe, and I listen to the cabin.
My whole body is one long wire of waiting.
I have been waited on in bedrooms before.
I have been waited on by a husband and I have been waited on by staff.
I have never waited for a person this way.
I do not know if this is how other women feel before they are taken to bed by somebody who wants them so badly.
I have no reference. I have my husband, who never wanted me this way, and I have men who looked at me at parties, who wanted an idea of me.
Max wants me. She wants the specific me in this specific bed tonight, and her wanting is not a flattery and not a performance, it is a thing she has been holding inside and now she is letting it out.
I feel my heart in my ribs. I feel my breath come short.
I feel the soft of the robe on my skin. My nipples are up under it.
Between my legs I am already wet from the conversation at the stove, from the word yes in my own mouth so many times, from the way she said bedroom and did not move toward me yet.
I hear her in the kitchen.
I hear her cross to the bathroom. The bathroom door. A drawer. Water at the sink. The drawer again.
I hear her in the hallway.
I hear her stop. One beat. Two.
I hear her at the door.
I hear the door.
Max walks into the room.
I turn my head and I see her and my breath stops.
She is naked. She is naked except for the black strap around her hips.
Her body is broad and scarred and plain and muscular and the most beautiful body I have ever looked at on a woman in my life.
Her shoulders are square. Her breasts are small and high, darker at the nipple than I had imagined.
Her stomach is flat with the line of an old surgical scar across the lower right that I did not know about.
The scar on her forearm shows clean in the lamp light.
Her thighs are heavy and strong and her calves are a runner's.
Between her legs is the dildo.
It is dark. Not skin colored. Black silicone.
Medium size, curved up a little at the head, resting where her own pelvis would be.
It is strapped to her with a leather harness at her hips and a strap between her thighs.
She looks at home in it. She is a woman who has worn this before.
She stands in the doorway and she lets me look.
I look.
I look at the length of it and at the curve and at the way the harness sits on her hipbones, and I feel a thing happen low in me that I did not know a thing like that could do in a second. My breath goes out. My thighs part a quarter inch. My hand on my stomach presses down without me meaning to.
"Thank you," Max says. Low. "For looking."
"You're welcome."
She is holding something in her left hand.
Rope. Soft. White. Coiled small. Cotton by the look of it, braided, the kind of thing you would use on a boat.
"May I," she says, lifting the coil a quarter inch.
"Yes."
"You remember what I said about safe words?”
“Yes, if I say Red, you will stop and untie me.”
“Yes. Two hitches. I pull, it falls off straight away. If you don’t like it or feel at all uncomfortable, I want you to say.”
I nod. I feel wet. Wetter and wetter. More and more turned on.
She crosses the room.
"Sit up," she says.
I sit up.
"Robe off."
I pull the belt. The robe opens. She puts her hands at my collar and she slides it off my shoulders and down my arms, turning me gently to get it free from behind me. She folds the robe once and sets it on the end of the bed.
"Lie back," she says.
I lie back.
"Hands up."
I lift my hands up. She brings them to the top of the bed above my head, palms together, the bandaged one cradled under the other.
She wraps the rope around my wrists one time, around again, and then across, and she ties two hitches in a way I do not watch.
She pulls on the wrap to test it. It holds.
"Pull," she says.
I pull.
The rope tightens at the hitch and then gives. The hitch slides. The rope comes free of itself. She redoes it.
"You pull if you want out."
"I won't want out."
"Pull anyway when we're done. So you know you can."
"All right."
She loops the free end of the rope around the headboard behind me. Not tight. Loose enough that my wrists are not held against the wood. Held, but held with room.
She looks at me.
I am naked and tied and she is naked and strapped and looking at me, and I am so wet the insides of my thighs are wet, and I have never in my life been wet like this.
"You're so beautiful," she says and her eyes move over my body settling between my legs.
Not performative. Plain. The way she said I want to wash you.
"Thank you."
"I'm going to touch you now."
"Please,” I gasp.
---
She starts at my mouth.
She kneels on the bed beside me. She puts her hand at my jaw. She turns my face up. She looks at me a count. She bends and she kisses me.
It is not the first kiss of a romantic novel.
It is the first kiss of a woman I have spent a day wanting desperately.
She kisses me slow and she kisses me deep and her mouth is soft and hot and she tastes like the mint of the tea we drank.
I make a small sound into her mouth. She smiles against me.
She kisses me again. Her hand at my jaw moves down to my throat, light, not pressing.
Her thumb traces the hollow. Her other hand comes up to my breast.
She touches me.
She touches me the way her hands on the bathtub rim promised she would touch me.
She drags her palm over my nipple and the nipple comes up hard and the line of heat goes straight through me to where I am wet.
I moan into her mouth. She pulls back an inch and looks at me.
Her eyes are the bedroom blue of the chair this morning, but darker now. Darker for me.
"Yes?" she says.
"Yes. Green.” I am sure. I want her so much.