Chapter Fifteen • Tease • Damien
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What’s taking her so long?
I drop my head back and stare at the ceiling, knee bouncing in the quiet room, the distant sound of crashing waves metronomic in my peripheral awareness.
Lillith really does make me feel like a rookie sometimes. I’m a bit of a fuckboy. I feel that this has been well established. But it bears repeating because I have been to strip clubs. I have been to dungeons. I have been to orgies and swinger parties and rope socials.
None of those prior experiences have wound me up the way waiting for Lillith to change into lingerie is. It certainly hasn’t helped my patience that she folded into submission so sweetly for me when I gave her instructions. It was graceful. Almost elegant. Easy as breathing.
I close my eyes and heave out an exhale remembering it.
The wet, malleable curve of her lower lip—the taste of her tongue—the shift of her throat as she swallowed against my grasp around her neck.
There is something just so compelling about such a lovely woman begging to be told how to please me.
Buying lingerie just to put it on. For me. Just to drive me out of my mind.
It feels powerful. It feels like greed. It feels like security.
My eyes are still closed when I hear the sound of Lillith closing the curtains over the windows.
I lift my head, finding her almost too clothed.
The dress she’s wearing hugs the slope of her waist. The skirt flows all the way to the floor, hiding her shapely legs.
Her sleeves hang past her hands, something I found adorable when I met her at the show, but now it only makes me want to discipline her.
I prop my chin on my folded hand, watching her see to each window—feeling the tension in my brow grow as she makes me wait. When she finally comes to stand in front of me, she won’t look at me, which only makes my frustration grow.
“What’s this shyness all of a sudden?”
She still doesn’t meet my gaze, but I see the moment her lower lip disappears between her teeth. It’s the same moment I start a steady, impatient tapping of my foot.
“I—” she whispers.
“—Lillith, you look at me when you’re speaking to me,” I say. “And you speak loud enough that I can hear you.”
She looks at me through her lashes, the angle of her face still at a downward tilt. She hugs herself around her middle, her finger twisting the lace of her dress bodice around a manicured fingertip.
“I’ve never done anything like this,” she tells me. “It all sounded exciting until I got the clothes on, and now I’m terrified I’m going to look stupid. I can’t really dance—not like a stripper or a burlesque performer.”
“Should I talk you through it?” I ask.
“Would it even be appealing to watch a show when you know the spoilers ahead of time?”
“Would I have offered it if it didn’t appeal to me, Lillith?”
The angle of her head shifts again. This time she’s looking at me sideways.
“What did I tell you before I sent you off to change?” I say. “What did I tell you about your house?”
Her pink tongue appears to wet that maddening lower lip of hers. “That it’s my house, but you’re in charge.”
One nod. That’s all it takes to release the spool of tension from her high shoulders.
Pulling my phone out of my pocket, I fuss with the settings until I’m connected to her speaker.
I scroll through my playlists until I find the one I put on when I want a nice, slow fuck.
The one I use when I want to watch a woman writhe and beg beneath me as I drag each thrust as long as I can while I hold her hips down to hold her still.
I toss my phone aside after turning on ‘do not disturb’ and recline again. I heave out a sigh, tilted.
“The dress. It’s covering too much.”
“It’s... a skirt. And a top.”
“Hm,” I say, rubbing my chin in thought. “Let me see your legs.”
She pulls up her skirt and I put a single hand up. “Slowly, sweetheart. Don’t overthink it. You know how sexy you are. You know your assets.”
She processes that for a moment, her grey eyes flickering before lighting up.
Pride curls inside of me when her toes find a perch on her coffee table. I have to take a deep breath as she smooths her palm over the curve of her upper thigh, her well-shaped calf. She catches the hem of the skirt between her middle fingers then pulls it up slowly.
I feel like a lech from the Victorian era with the way I thirst after the glimpse of her ankle.
My mouth goes dry as the hem travels up to her knee, then her upper thigh.
Her pale skin, robed in shiny black nylon.
The curve of her ass appears only briefly before it vanishes behind a cascade of black gossamer.
When I look up at her face, she’s smiling. Mischief clear in the way her eyes crinkle.
“I thought you said you were an ass man,” she says.
“And you thought it was a good idea to deny me access to my favorite part?”
“Best for last?”
“I thought you needed help,” I say. “Seems like you’re comfortable enough to me.”
She nibbles on her lower lip, shrugging a single shoulder. “I... had an idea. But I don’t know if it’s weird.”
“Oh, no, are you telling me you might want to do something weird with the kinky, tattooed guy with a split tongue and sharpened teeth?” I ask dryly.
Her face flushes scarlet, realizing her mistake. Hopefully realizing I would do just about anything with her. Hopefully not realizing the absolutely filthy things I want to do to her, because I want all of those to be a surprise.
She drops her foot to the floor again and reaches into her cleavage, pulling something out that’s small enough to hide in her hand. She stands between my spread legs and says. “Close your eyes? Put out your hands?”
As much as I want to be a hardass right now, I can’t help the charmed smile that stretches my lips. I close my eyes as requested and hold out an open palm. A cool, smooth weight lands there. When I open my eyes again there’s a simple, black pocket knife in my hand.
My next exhale shudders when it leave my lungs. That hot-cold sensation—the feeling that tells me I’m entering Domspace—flushes through my whole body.
She lifts the knot in her corset laces. It’s a monstrous, tangled thing sitting clumsy and ugly at her navel.
“I’ve always been bad at tying these things,” she says, the words thin and breathy.
It takes me a moment. I have to tent my free hand over my eyes. She shifts her feet. I know because the fabric of her skirt brushes the inside of one knee, then the other. I hear the click of her teeth against one of her acrylic nails.
“I’m—s-sorry,” she whispers. “We don’t have to—ahh!”
She exclaims because I use the same hand over my eyes to grab her by her corset laces. I tug tightly before twisting my wrist, cinching it tighter around her middle. So tight it almost meets in the middle.
“I hope you don’t like these fucking clothes,” I snarl. Even I don’t recognize my voice. Brutal and dark and mean.
She braces one hand on my shoulder, mesh gloves appearing there beneath her too-long sleeves. “Those first,” I say. “Take them off.”
Her breaths come in shallow gusts as she clumsily divests them. There’s nothing sexy or seductive about it. Her hands shake and she throws them somewhere unseen with jerky movements. It’s hotter than any of the lap dances I’ve ever gotten.
I flick the knife open with my thumb, careful to check the edges of the blade, ensuring only one side is sharpened before I light the unsharpened side against the hollow of her throat. A wild flush blooms across the expanse of her collar bones, up her neck, across her cheeks.
Little sounds escape her lips, making my cock strain against the inseam of my jeans.
Yet I don’t know for sure if this was the intensity she’d been hoping for. This girl. She makes my mind melt and I keep losing grip of my own reins. “Such a sneaky little thing you are,” I grunt. “You’re supposed to be stripping for me. And now you’re making me cut you out of your clothes?”
I make myself smile. Make it reach my eyes as I drop the blade from her neck.
“I don’t know if you want this enough,” I say.
It’s not great. This method still falls firmly in the world of dubious consent at best. But having her like this is better than any kind of inebriation.
Better than all the sex I’ve had in my life.
I can’t break the scene. I don’t fucking want to.
“I—w-want it,” she chokes out. “Please.”
My brain goes languid and warm as I nod, lighting the dull edge against her neck and dragging it down over the curves of her breasts. I catch the gossamer with the point and slice a clean line from below her breasts to the neckline of the blouse.
“Show me,” I command. She lifts shaking hands to push the sleeves of the blouse off her shoulders, pooling the fabric just underneath her perfect tits.
I heave out a sigh, leaning back to admire the mounds of alabaster skin swathed in black lace. Her pert, pink nipples press at the center of lacy cobwebs, just sheer enough that I can make out the soft dunes of her areolas. My mouth waters as I look up at her.
“You want me to put these in my mouth, don’t you?” I ask her. “Because you wouldn’t have packaged them so pretty for me unless you wanted me to worship them with my tongue, right?”
She whimpers, biting on her lip as she nods, her breaths still shortened gusts.
I pull her closer with the hand still tangled in her corset. She stumbles as she clumsily sits astride me. The wide spread of my legs forcing her flush against my hips. I drop my head, swirling the tips of my tongue over her nipple before filling my mouth with her lace-clad flesh.
She lets out a pained noise and I reward her with a careful, focused roll of my tongue across her nipple, trapped between my teeth.
“Fuck,” she whimpers, thighs shaking.