4. Maxim
MAXIM
She recovers before I do. It’s cute in a way, insulting in another. The fact that she can speak so soon after means I’m not finished.
I’m flat on my back with my pulse still concluding its business, and beside me, the woman who threw wine at me has already found her voice again. It comes out changed. The nerves from the elevator have burned off, and what’s left is loose, warm, and meandering.
“… so, I told him the fountain was hideous, but he didn’t listen.
Neither did the vendor—you should have seen his face when I said it.
And then, the ice sculptures that were invoiced were swans but delivered as geese.
The invoice said ‘swan-adjacent,’ which should have been my first warning, because nothing good has ever been adjacent, and so what comes off the truck is basically two hundred pounds of frozen goose with attitude, and I’ve a vendor on the phone telling me that from the correct angle—”
“Thea.”
“—from the correct angle it reads as swan, which, no angle exists, I checked, I walked all the way around it—”
“Thea.”
She stops. In the glowing light, her shining green eyes find mine, and there’s no apology anywhere in them.
I’ve never seen their equal. They appear as if they’re lit from within, a shade one might call mint.
I call it the Light of Venus. When I was a boy, the planet was depicted as green on old science fiction book covers, and here I am, next to two of them.
Two of them paired with a mouth that cannot stop rambling.
Every part of her tells a story, from her glassy cocoa-brown hair to her generously curvy body. The faint strawberry birthmark at the nape of her neck begs to be nibbled and sucked. Each freckle on her shoulders demands the same. Her body speaks to me, none more so than those succulent lips.
I’ve spent years in rooms where every person calculated each syllable before troubling me with it, and this woman narrates ice poultry at one in the morning because the thought arrived and she saw no reason to detain it.
It’s as though her very soul wishes to communicate, but never had the chance.
“You’re not a talker,” she says. “After. Some people are, some people aren’t, it’s fine, I’ll just—”
I put my hand over her mouth.
Her eyes go wide above my fingers. Not with fear. I know what fear looks like at close range, and this isn’t that. This is interest. Beneath my palm, I feel her decide not to bite me.
Instead, she waits.
“I’m not interested in conversation, pet. I say this without insult. The geese were a fine story. But it’s one in the morning, I’ve been awake for thirty hours, and there’s exactly one thing in this city I want to do with what remains of the night, and it doesn’t involve waterfowl.”
She says something into my hand. Muffled, interrogative, two syllables. I lift the palm an inch.
“Then what is it that you do want?”
“Wait here.” I retrieve my box of tricks from my luggage, and when I turn back, she’s pushed up onto her elbows in the ruin of the sheets to watch me, and her attention moves from the small carved box to my face and back, doing math. “Tell me, pet, do you wish to play further?”
Those pouty lips slowly spread into a wary smile as she nods.
I open the box and reach inside. I dangle the tie where she can see it plainly. “Be very sure.”
Her defiant chin comes up. “I don’t say things I’m not sure about. What’s the—”
“Wrists.”
She extends both arms. Just that. No further negotiation, palms up, chin still raised, and I’ve watched hard men take longer to commit to lunch.
“You’re new to this.”
“That wasn’t a question.”
“Tell me.”
She swallows. “Yes… Does that mean we have to stop?”
“Hardly.” I bind her wrists to the headboard with a knot I trust, firm, quick to release, and I check the slack with two fingers, because her circulation is now my responsibility. “It means you are fortunate to find someone who knows how to do this right. If you had agreed to play with an amateur—”
“So, you do this professionally?” she teases.
“Among other things, yes. I’ve bound people professionally.”
“Oh.”
“I did warn you about me, pet.”
Again, she gulps. “Yeah. You did.”
She watches me pull out the pocket square, folded once. I hold it up, a question. “I wish for you to hold this in your teeth. Will you do that for me?”
She opens her mouth, an answer, and I set the silk between her teeth, and she settles back against the pillows and looks up at me, waiting patiently.
“You will keep that in your teeth for as long as you are able. If you drop it, I read that as a signal to stop whatever I’m doing. A safeword of sorts. I assume you’re familiar with the concept?”
Her eyes narrow over the gag, half rolling, as if to say, “Duh.”
I find I can read her fluently already. That bodes well. I sit back on my heels and look at her, bound and bare in a stranger’s bed on the twelfth floor, and I take my time about the looking, because the looking is mine now and no one is going to interrupt it.
“Some honesty, since you cannot interrupt. It’s been a long time since I did this. Not for lack of offers. For lack of hours, and lack of interest, and a schedule that’s eaten larger men than me. There’s been work, and more work, and rooms full of people I couldn’t turn my back on.”
The last woman who spent a night beside me lived in Marseille, and that was long enough ago that the harbor there has since been rebuilt.
Since then, the calendar has offered nothing but flights, negotiations, and the kind of company a wise man does not undress in front of.
I didn’t miss any of this, is what I told myself, the way a man tells himself he doesn’t miss salt while his doctor is in the room.
Her eyes track me. I take her ankle in one hand, and her breath jumps at the contact.
“And then some gorgeous, exhausted woman drenches me in front of a few hundred people,” I say, pressing my thumb into the arch of her foot, dragging it slow, watching the shiver run the whole length of her, “and lectures me about club soda while her hands shake, and offers me a night with no names attached. So, pet, I intend to enjoy myself. Thoroughly. At my own pace. That’s the agenda, and you are famous for respecting an agenda. I saw it at the party.”
The sound she makes behind the silk is indignant and pleased at once. I kiss the inside of her ankle, and the sound stops.
I begin there because the beginning is the beginning, and I work upward by inches. I’m not fast. Fast is for men with somewhere better to be, and for the first time in years, there’s nowhere better. I use my mouth and my hands and the time until she’s so wet, her pussy gleams.
“Your supple calves deserve poetry,” I murmur as I kiss up them. “They’ll receive profanity because fuck, they’re perfect.” I reach the backs of her knees, soft divots that imply plump thighs. Tenderly, my fingertips skate across the satin there. “These are a scandal. Too precious.”
The soft width of her hips beckons, and I grip them with both hands and tell her the truth when I lift my eyes from her beauty. “You’re fucking magnificent, every inch of you. I intend to enjoy them all.”
She writhes, her eyes unsteady.
It’s my job to steady her. I pin her hips flat with my forearm and continue, unhurried. “None of that. You will lie still and take the compliment along with anything else I decide to give you.”
The noise she produces could strip varnish. Somewhere in it, there’s an indignant laugh, strangled by silk, furious about existing.
I map her ribs with my tongue and teeth. Her tits are glorious, fleshy mounds that’ve just the right amount of hang to them, and while I tweak her pretty nipples, she’s pulling at the headboard hard enough to make the wood whine.
Her eyes have gone glassy and murderous with wanting. Her body answers everything. Every pass of my hands gets a report, a shiver, an arch, a muffled syllable.
I didn’t know how starved I was for this.
I find the strawberry mark at her nape again when I turn her jaw aside to taste beneath her ear.
“This mark is under new management.” I lick her there, relishing the way she twitches and groans beneath me.
She snarls at me. Bound, gagged, flushed to the collarbones, this woman snarls at me, and my heart, that decommissioned machine, turns over like an engine left too long in the cold.
I fucking love this.
By the time I arrive where she’s been trying to steer me for the better part of an hour, she’s trembling everywhere at once, and the first touch bows her clean off the mattress with a cry the silk barely holds.
There are other toys in my box, ones that could send her to another stratosphere. But I don’t believe she’s ready for that just yet. This is her first playtime, and I won’t scare her from seeking these amusements again. She’s too young to be jaded that way.
Perhaps just the one toy… I hold up a dildo from the box, and her pretty eyes go wide. “Unless you spit out the gag, pet, I’ll be fucking you with this now.”
Her chest heaves at the thought. But she keeps the gag.
So, I torment her with it, tooling the toy around her wet pussyf until she trembles.
Then I settle between her thighs once more, bring her to the edge with my mouth and slide the toy into her sweet pussy.
I bring her back to the edge and then pause to ask, “Are you still thinking of the ice geese now?”
Her brows lift in question, and I flick my tongue over her clit, making her shake for me again. She grinds forward, a silent plea for more.
“Patience,” I murmur against her.
She communicates, with a single sustained glare, precisely where I may file my patience.
When I finally let her come, she falls hard and long, and I keep her there through all of it, working her through the first and straight into a second, because the first one was mine and the second is hers.
She comes apart magnificently, nothing polite in it, nothing managed, none of the ballroom competence anywhere in sight.
Just her, wrecked and shaking, hair defeated, wrists twisting in silk, and the sight of it is the finest thing the world has shown me in years.
I pull the knot loose with one hand and free the gag with the other. Her arms come down around my neck before I can ask whether she wants them free, which answers the question, and I take her again while she’s still shaking, slow this time, face to face.
Her wrists end up pinned in one of my hands above her head because she pressed them into my palm herself and left them there.
Her body is hot and soft, and fucking her is like sinking into Heaven itself.
She fucks like she communicates—like she’s been dying to do it, but no one’s ever let her.
When I release her hands, her fingernails claw down my back while her legs wrap around my waist. It’s as though every part of her needs every part of me.
This woman’s a fucking gift someone else forgot to unwrap.
What finishes me is nothing athletic. She looks at me. That’ffs the entirety of it. Those unsettlingly green eyes open, watching my face come apart the way I watched hers, greedy for it, and I swear as I erupt, because I feel her erupt, too.
My mind takes a long time to reassemble. The city hum comes back first, then the weight of no sleep threatens to sink me, then the fact of her, warm along my side, real, still catching her breath.
She doesn’t try to talk again. That surprises me, and I’ve been keeping count of tonight’s surprises, and the tally is now high enough to constitute a trend.
Instead, she lies against my side with her cheek on my chest, one fingertip tracing the ink across my shoulder, following the lines of the star without asking what they mean.
She has questions. I can hear her not asking them. But her breathing goes long and slow anyway. It catches once, rebalances, and then deepens. Against my chest, most of the way gone, she mumbles something that ends in “geese.”
I lie in the dark with a stranger’s weight on my chest and my hand resting on her back, rising and falling with her breath, and I stay awake a while longer for no reason.
Outside the glass, the city goes on glittering, all of it unaware, and for one more night, nobody in it knows I’m home.
Nobody but my idiot son.