Chapter 12 #2
He had two cuffs this time. Both of them. The cream shearling warm in the lamplight, the leather dark and supple, a short steel clip between the two buckle-rings. In his other hand, the black silk blindfold, folded as cleanly as the pocket square of a man who folded his own pocket squares.
He showed me each.
“Yes or no. Each one. Take your time.”
I looked at the cuffs. The smallest size — the one he had fitted to me in the toy room, the one that had held my pulse under his fingertip for thirty seconds while neither of us breathed.
“Yes.”
“Full sentences, please.”
“Yes to the cuffs, Daddy.”
He laid them on the bed beside me. Held up the blindfold.
I hesitated.
He waited.
He did not push. He did not coax. He did not sweeten the question. His eyes stayed on my face and he let the silence hold, and in the silence I located what I needed to ask for.
“Yes,” I said. “But your hand stays on me the whole time.”
“My hand stays on you the whole time.”
“The whole time, Daddy.”
“I promise you.”
He laid the blindfold on the bed beside the cuffs. Picked up the first cuff. Knelt.
“Left wrist.”
I lifted my left hand off the mattress. My shoulder ached a little from the stillness.
He turned my wrist over, blue vein up, and laid the cuff across it.
Closed the buckle. Same notch as yesterday.
The shearling pressed soft against the pulse at the inside of my wrist and he tested the fit with his finger the way he had tested it before.
“Good?”
“Good, Daddy.”
“Right wrist.”
I gave him my right wrist. Same ritual. Same care. The shearling warm on the second pulse, the leather snug without bite.
He clipped the two cuffs together at the buckle-rings with the short steel tether.
My arms came together in front of me, wrists joined at a comfortable distance—four inches, maybe—my shoulders unstressed, my hands free enough to lift but not free enough to part.
I tested the tether with a small pull. It held. I did not pull again.
He picked up the blindfold.
“Close your eyes.”
I closed them.
The silk settled across my face. His fingers at the back of my head, tying the knot, gentle through my hair.
He adjusted the fit—a finger inside the edge of the silk, checking against my temple, loosening it a fraction so it did not press—and then the knot was set and his hands left my head and the world was black.
I had not expected the silence to arrive with it.
My skin became enormous. I felt every inch of air against it, the slight cool from the hallway when the door had opened, the warmer pocket where his body had been a moment ago.
His palm settled between my shoulder blades.
The promise kept. Warm, broad, flat against my spine, the heel of his hand at the base of my neck, the fingers spread down between my shoulder blades. I exhaled a sound I did not intend to make.
“I’ve got you.”
“Yes, Daddy.”
He laid me back.
His hand stayed where it was on my upper back as my shoulders met the mattress, guiding me down, and then when I was flat his palm slid—did not leave me, slid—up to the center of my chest and rested there between my breasts with the same steady weight.
I felt my pulse jump under his hand. I felt his thumb make one small, slow stroke at the base of my throat.
Then the sounds began.
The faint metallic tick of a belt buckle.
Leather sliding through loops. The soft thud of the belt landing somewhere—not on the floor, I thought, on the armchair, folded, of course folded.
A button. Another button. The low dry sound of cotton being drawn off a body.
A soft whisper of fabric—his shirt going onto the chair on top of the Henley, on top of my bra, a stack of folded clothes accumulating three feet from where I lay blind.
The clink of the belt buckle again, louder this time, when the belt was set down properly.
His trousers. The specific friction of wool sliding over thighs. His socks. A pause. A soft exhale.
Somehow, through the whole thing, he kept a hand on me.
The mattress moved.
His weight on my side of the bed first—the side he had turned down for me — and then the long shift as he came over.
His palm had not left my chest. He used it to anchor himself as he moved, and when he settled the palm finally slid — slid, did not lift — down to my stomach, and I felt the length of him along my side, bare skin against bare skin from his ribs to his knee, and a warm hard press against my hip that was not ambiguous.
I made a sound.
His mouth found my throat.
The warm soft pressure of his lips on the hollow of my clavicle. The darkness of the blindfold gave me nothing to do with the sensation except receive it. His hand did not leave my stomach. His hand was a map pin. The point of contact I had asked for and been given.
He worked down from my throat in a slow deliberate line.
Collarbone. The inside edge of my collarbone where the bone dipped to meet the sternum.
The skin over my breastbone, the skin between my breasts, then the curve of the left breast, slow, his mouth finding the peak of it and closing over it warm and unhurried, his tongue doing one patient circle and then another, and I arched up off the bed and the tether between my cuffs snapped taut and held my wrists together above my head where he had laid them.
He moved to the right breast. The same slow attention. The same circle. The hand on my stomach slid down by an inch and pressed me flat again, and I stayed flat, and the sound I made was small and broken.
He moved inward. Downward.
The inside of my elbow. The soft skin at the hinge, his mouth warm and open for one second held. A sound left me that belonged to someone with less shame than I had ever been allowed to have.
Ribs. The long plane of them under his mouth, one by one, the shallow valleys between them, my skin twitching under him everywhere.
Below my navel. The delicate skin where a body folds when it sits.
And then lower.
His hand left my stomach for the first time—not to abandon me, his other hand had already arrived at my hip, the point of contact migrating without ever breaking—and his shoulders parted my knees and I let them.
The tether held my wrists together above my head.
The blindfold kept the world dark. My knees fell open on their own.
His mouth found the center of me.
I was already shaking. I had been shaking since his mouth had left my ribs.
He did not tease. He went where he was going with the patient expertise of a man who had already made a study, and the flat of his tongue worked me open in one long slow pass and I made a sound that was not a word and was not a moan—it was the sound of every piece of restraint I had ever built coming apart at once.
He worked me with two fingers and his tongue and the rhythm built and built and the edge rose up to meet me faster than I wanted it to—I wanted this to last, I wanted it to never stop, I wanted him to do this to me every day for the rest of my life — and when I was close, so close the muscles of my belly were locking, he slowed.
“Not yet. Breathe.”
“Daddy—“
“Breathe, baby girl.”
I breathed. The edge retreated. My body protested in a long helpless tremor.
He started again.
The same rhythm. The same exact perfect rhythm, built patiently back up, and I climbed again, and when I was at the edge the second time I begged.
“Please. Please, Daddy. Please let me. Please.”
The begging left my mouth without passing through any of the places I had ever filtered my voice.
The blindfold made begging easier—there was no face to perform to, only the dark—and the cuffs joined at my wrists made begging necessary because my hands could not do the work of asking.
I said please three more times and then I said I need you.
I said I need you inside me, Daddy, please, I have wanted you all day, all week, I can’t—
He slowed again.
“Shh.”
The bed shifted. His body rose up over mine. The weight of him settled above me, braced on his arms, and I felt the warm broad head of him at my entrance and I made a sound that was so raw and so open I would have been ashamed of it if I had been capable of shame.
He entered me slowly.
Oh he was big. I’d had him in my mouth but this was different—overwhelming.
He was so slow that I felt every inch. Slow enough that my body had to take him in stages.
He was huge and I was wet and he pushed into me with a patience that nearly undid both of us, and when he was finally fully inside me I could feel him everywhere—in my belly, against my cervix, in the bones of my hips, in my throat where his breath was hot, and I had wanted to be filled and I was filled, and the filling was the thing I had been looking for my whole life and had not had the vocabulary to name.
He did not move.
“Feel me.”
I felt him.
“Who’s inside you, Sera.”
“You, Daddy.”
“That’s right.”
His hand found my jaw in the dark. His thumb stroked my lower lip.
“Tell me what you need.”
“More. Please. More.”
He gave it to me.
He drew back, slow, and pushed in, slower, and drew back, and drove in a little harder, and the rhythm built, and my joined wrists stayed above my head and the tether bit when I pulled against it and I pulled against it because I wanted my hands on him and could not have them, and the not-having was its own pleasure, was the shape of his refusal, and I rolled my hips up to meet him and he groaned above me and the groan was a sound I had never heard him make and I understood that I had earned it.
He reached up.
His fingers found the knot of the blindfold at the back of my head.
“I want you to see me.”
The silk slipped off.