Chapter 12 #3
It wasn’t hard. It was a beginning, a placing, the way he’d shown me where the edge was that first time—but the sound that came out of me was a yelp, surprise and something else, something that wasn’t pain even though it stung, that was so close to pain you couldn’t have got a knife between them.
The sting bloomed across the curve of me and then, all at once, in a rush I had no defense against, the heat went down.
Down through me, the dawn over the valley, slow and total, pooling low where his hand could see how wet I was, and my whole body woke up at once like a thing plugged into the wall.
I was trembling. Coming alive. Lit up.
“Good girl,” he said.
And I moaned—out loud, helplessas his hand came down again.
This one was harder.
And the one after that harder still—surer, more deliberate, his hand finding a rhythm the way he found a rhythm in everything, the way he’d worked me with his mouth on the marble, building it, and my body answered every single one.
The sting landed and bloomed and turned, fast, into heat, and the heat ran down and pooled low and molten where he could see, and somewhere in the third or fourth strike I lost the line entirely between the sting and the wanting.
There wasn’t one. The pain was the pleasure.
They were the same thing arriving through the same nerve, and I couldn’t have told you which was which if my life had hung on it.
I was grinding against his thigh.
I didn’t decide to. My body kept doing things my head hadn’t approved, the chair, the fold, the hips pushing back on the marble, and now this, my hips rolling forward against the hard muscle of his thigh between each strike, chasing the friction, shameless, helpless, a woman who runs everything reduced to one long animal want.
And he let me. He let me grind against him and he didn’t stop and he didn’t shame it, he just kept his free hand spread warm and steady on the small of my back—the only fixed point in a world that had gone completely liquid, the one thing that held still while everything else came apart.
“Good girl,” he said, low, every time the hand came down. “Good girl.”
And every time the words went through me like the hand did, down to the exact same place, two strikes landing at once, one on my skin and one somewhere deeper, somewhere that had been waiting my whole life to hear it.
The year started pouring out of me.
I felt it go. Under his palm, with each strike, the whole rotten weight of it.
There was less of me to hold with every strike.
Less of the boss. Less of the books and the loan and the fucking impossible loaf.
Less of the woman who decides everything down to the koulouraki count.
He spanked it all out of me, and what was left underneath was small and shaking and bare and held, and there was nothing in it that had to manage anything at all.
I was babbling.
I heard myself doing it and couldn’t stop, the words coming out half in Greek, the language that comes when I’m flustered or grieving or talking to my father’s ghost, please, parakaló, please, and I didn’t even know what I was begging for, more or less or stop or never stop, the want had run so far past sense that the begging had no object, it was just the sound a body makes when it’s been opened all the way up.
Then his free hand left the small of my back.
It slid down—between my thighs, which I opened for him without being told, the obedience so clean now it didn’t even feel like obeying, it felt like the only thing my body knew how to do—and his fingers found me, found how wet I was, the whole soaked aching length of me, and he groaned.
A low sound, torn out of him, and I felt it travel up my spine.
“Look at you,” he said, his voice wrecked. “Christ. Look what this does to you. This is what it does.” His fingers dragged through the slick of me, slow, devastating. “All that running. All that holding. And you fall apart over my lap like you’ve been waiting for it your whole life.”
I had. God help me, I had.
Two fingers slid into me and I keened. His palm settled against me, the heel of it pressed exactly where I needed it, and then he braided it—the spanking and the stroking, woven into one rhythm, his right hand coming down on my skin while his left worked inside me, the sting and the pleasure arriving together, again and again, until they were one single unbearable thing rolling through me in time, and I was climbing, climbing fast, too fast, the edge rushing up at me out of nowhere the way it had on the marble.
“Tonio—I’m—I can’t—”
“You don’t come till I say.”
Flat. Certain. The soft-steel gone all the way to steel, and a broken sound tore out of me, frustration and need braided as tight as everything else, because I was right there, I was right on it, and he held me on the lip of it with his fingers moving and his palm working and his hand stinging my skin.
“Yes—yes—okay—” The words came out shredded, and underneath the desperation was the relief, the same relief as the chair, the same relief as I’ve got the counter—the relief of not even getting to choose this, of having even the last thing taken, the weight of my own pleasure lifted off me and held. “Yes, Daddy—”
The word fell out of me, and I felt it hit him, felt his whole body answer it.
He worked me right to the edge and held me there, trembling, suspended, his fingers and his palm and the sting all keeping me pinned at the screaming point, and I was begging in two languages now, no shame anywhere, nothing left of me to be ashamed with.
Then his hand came down again, harder than any of them, and his mouth was at my ear.
“Now, Baby Girl.” Low. Rough. Absolute. “Come for me. Good girl—now.”
I shattered.
My whole body convulsed over his lap, my back arching, a broken cry tearing up out of me.
The tension he’d built and pinned and built again snapped all at once and rolled through me in waves I couldn’t have stopped if I’d wanted to, his fingers buried in me, his palm hot against my stinging skin, and I came apart with a force that left nothing standing.
He worked me through every wave. Gentling, slowing as the storm ebbed, his fingers easing, his palm going from sting to a slow warm circle that soothed the heat it had made, his voice low and constant—I’ve got you, that’s it, good girl, I’ve got you—until I was boneless.
Wrung out. Draped across his lap with my hair in the gray and my face wet and my breath coming in long ragged pulls.
He gathered me up. Off his lap and into his arms, careful, the way he’d carried me up his stairs, and held me against his chest in the closet that was barely big enough for the chair, and pressed his mouth to my hair.
“There you are,” he said.
My face was wet and my skin still sang where his hand had been and my mind—my kitchen, my burning, racing kitchen that never once went quiet, not at three in the morning, not in a year—
My mind was silent.
Completely, blessedly silent. For the first time I could remember, there was nothing in it at all but the warmth of him and the sound of his heart, and a dog grumbling somewhere through the wall, and the ovens ticking down into the dark.
The curb was still out there. The secret was still kept. We hadn’t fixed a single thing.
But for that one held minute, draped across him with nothing left to carry, I didn’t have to.