Chapter 32
NIA
L ast night was a fever dream.
My body aches inside and out. My mind is reeling.
Brody Montgomery is standing in front of me in nothing but a pair of boxer briefs as he steps into his slacks. The bulge in those boxer briefs serves as a reminder that he was inside of me last night. He kissed me.
He called me his.
I find it hard to focus on anything else as I quietly slip back into my dress, sparing a glance toward the paddles hung on the wall and the singular hook left empty of a paddle that’s been sent for cleaning. My skin tingles at the memory as Brody approaches me.
“What are you doing?” I ask him as he crouches in front of me, brandishing a pair of shears not unlike the ones that we use at the hospital to remove casts and clothing.
“I told you,” he says, wearing a wicked smirk. “Everyone here is going to know who you belong to.”
“You were serious about that,” I accidentally think out loud. At the arch of his brow, I swallow. “So you’re my Dom now.”
“If you’d like me to be.”
I barely let a breath pass before blurting out, “Yes.”
The rough sound of the shears against my dress fills the room as he slices it clean through the middle, stopping only a few inches from the waistline.
He works with a careful precision to cut a straight line all the way around, leaving me feeling more exposed than if I were to simply take off the dress and walk out of here in my underwear.
My teeth tug at my lower lip as he throws the discarded fabric over his shoulder before taking the shears back to their designated place.
When he returns to me, his hand lands at the small of my back before he pulls open the door, and I inhale deeply as we step through it together.
The overhead lights are on, bathing the entire space in a warm daylight that makes me acutely aware of not only my outfit, but also of the fact that I am wearing Brody’s dried, hours-old cum on my thighs as some sort of perverted fashion accessory.
“Bravo, you two, bravo ,” Isla calls out, approaching us with a slow clap of her hands. “What a show.”
She’s no longer in the outfit that she had on last night, but a silken robe and a comfortable pair of slippers. Her makeup is still in place, far more pristine than the remnants of my own.
“You’re welcome, dear,” Brody chuckles.
My eyes flit between the two of them as something heavy sinks in my chest.
Seemingly catching onto my concern, Isla offers a wave of her hand. “Just a nickname, love. I’m dear, he’s darling. It pokes fun at our families.”
“Right,” I chuckle, “of course.”
Brody’s fingers flex against my back as Isla leans in to quickly press her cheek against mine. A look passes between the two of them like a conversation that I’m not a part of, and I find myself leaning into Brody’s body as he walks me toward his SUV waiting for us in the parking lot.
As we settle into our seats, his hand comes to rest on my thigh, offering a gentle squeeze.
“What sounds good to you right now?” He asks.
“A hot bath, maybe a movie,” I tell him, “and honestly, an entire tray of brownies would be amazing.”
“We can do that,” he nods. “How are you feeling?”
I pause, fidgeting with the new, homemade hem of my dress. “Like I might have decompression sickness,” I admit.
His hand moves to my knee with a squeeze as a warm, sympathetic smile crosses his features. He already knew the answer to the question; he was testing me.
Why, I’m not sure.
The ride to my house is quiet, and he takes a different route than normal. It takes longer, but it avoids the busier main roads and louder areas of the city. His hand doesn’t leave my knee until we’re pulling up onto my driveway and he’s opening the front door for me.
When we get inside, we finally come to a stop in the bathroom attached to my room, and Brody reaches in to plug the bathtub and start the water. His hands carefully work to slip off my shortened dress, following with my bra and my panties.
Reaching for my hair brush on the counter, he brings it to my head, gently working through the remaining knots, careful not to pull too hard when the brush catches. He doesn’t stop brushing until the tub is full, at which point he takes my hand and guides me into the water before taking a seat on the floor outside of the tub.
He quietly reaches past me for my loofah and a bottle of body wash, loading the soap onto the white ball of mesh and scrubbing it between his hands until suds form before lowering it into the bath to wash the insides of my thighs.
“So this is sub drop, and it’s normal,” I clarify, leaning against the back of the tub, “I’m not crazy.”
“No, sweet girl,” he assures me, “you’re not crazy.”
I rest my head against the wall, closing my eyes while he works the suds across my body, dunking the sponge beneath the water and squeezing it out to rinse them off. Heaving a breath as a wave of sadness wraps its hand around my heart, I quietly say, “Can I ask you something personal?”
“Of course,” he tells me.
Reaching for my shower head, he brings it down to the tub, releasing the water flow and testing it against his hand before he brings it to my hair.
“Why did your marriages end?”
I think, normally, I would feel bad for asking. It would feel like I was prying for information that I wasn’t owed and certainly wasn’t entitled to.
As his fingers sink into my hair to massage shampoo against my scalp, though, I feel a door open between us that hasn’t been opened before. It was always there, I could always see it, but it was locked down tight with no sign of life behind it.
“I don’t think my first wife or myself were ever romantically interested, honestly,” he tells me, “but we spent two years seeing each other through surgeries and treatment. We talked a lot about God and trying to maintain our faith, so when we went into remission at the same time, we took that as a sign from God that we were supposed to marry each other.”
“You got married when you were nineteen? ” I practically shout the question.
“Yes,” he chuckles, “and divorced a few months later when we’d realized what a mistake we’d made. How’s that water?”
“It’s good,” I tell him, melting into his touch as he gently rinses the shampoo from my hair.
Bottles knock against each other as he reaches for my conditioner bar. He studies it for a few moments before working it between his hands, and I stifle a laugh at the befuddlement on his face.
“I met my second wife through Isla,” he tells me as he works the conditioner into my hair. “April had some traumas and for her, those traumas became kinks that aligned with mine. When the source of those traumas was no longer existent, it…flipped a switch somewhere, and the first time that we decided to scene after that, it was triggering for her.”
Warm water hits my scalp again, his fingers working through the length of my hair to rinse out all of the conditioner.
“Nothing that we tried after that worked for both of us, so we decided that we didn’t need to have sex. It wasn’t the end all, be all of our marriage. We went eight months without it and we were a little tightly wound, but we were fine.
“But April decided that having children was important to her, and I couldn’t give them to her, and neither of us were comfortable with using a donor. I still didn’t want them, regardless, so adoption wasn’t…we didn’t want to bring a child into a home like that.”
A flash of guilt crosses his features. I don’t have any delusions as to why that is.
“That was the right choice,” I tell him quietly, “even if it was a hard one to make.”
“It was,” he tells me with a soft smile. “She has two boys now and she seems very happy.”
Bringing himself to a standing position, he reaches for the robe hanging on the back of my bathroom door. The robe which, the last time he saw me wearing, I was sobbing in, asking him to climb into my bed and hold me.
Today, he does just that. No concern about wherever else he may need to be or what he may have planned, no care that it’s only ten o’clock in the morning and the day should be in full swing.
No, instead of all of those things, he pulls back the blankets on my bed and instructs me to lay down.
He kicks off his shoes and peels off his shirt before climbing into the space next to me, and I scoot closer to rest my head on his chest as he raises his tattooed arm to lay it behind him.
“Tell me about her,” I say, reaching over to trace the woman pictured on his skin with my fingertip.
“That is the first one that my little brother did for me – he owns a tattoo shop down in Florida,” he tells me. “She’s Our Lady of Lourdes. The bird on her shoulder is a kingfisher; they’re meant to be symbols of transformation and resilience.”
My fingertip traces over every curve and outline, dotting every detail of the ink in his skin while his fingers lazily draw circles against my back.
“Do all of them have a meaning?”
“Only a few of them,” he chuckles. “Most of them just mean that I missed my brother.”
My eyes drift closed with a satisfied sigh as my hand moves to rest on his chest, his skin warm against my palm. We must fall asleep, because the next time that my eyes open, the sun has dipped in the sky and Mean Girls is replaced with my TV’s screensaver.
I’d tried to turn on The Notebook , but that was vetoed as soon as I made a comment about it making me cry every time I watch it.
Brody’s arm is still wrapped around me, but now his free hand is resting with his fingers in my hair. Every now and again, I feel them flex as if he’s barely conscious but trying to massage my scalp.
This is the third time that I’ve fallen asleep in his presence, but I’ve felt relaxed around him much more than that.
I read a study once that said when a person is touching someone that they feel secure with and that they trust, the brain floods the body with a rush of oxytocin and it makes them relaxed and sleepy. I know that’s true in my case, and looking at the sleeping man beneath me, I can only hope it’s true for him, too.
All it took was one look from me for him to know that I wasn’t a hundred percent when we left The Haven, and he immediately put me at the center of his focus. He hasn’t even been able to take a real shower or change out of yesterday’s clothes, and he didn’t seem bothered by that at all.
He opened up to me, today.
I can’t help but to think about something he’d told me early into our agreement.
‘A Dom’s job is to take care of their sub, above anything else.’
But who takes care of him?
“What are you doing?” Brody’s voice is thick with a sleepy gravel as he rounds the corner into the kitchen. His hand scratches at the dark hair sprinkled across his chest, which trails down the center of his body to duck behind his slacks.
Dusting my hands on a dish towel, I toss it onto the counter and turn to him with a smile. “I’m making a pizza,” I tell him. At the stunned rise of his brows, I say, “I just threw on the toppings. The dough’s premade.”
“Do you always make meals?” He asks, stepping closer to me.
“When I have someone to make them for,” I shrug. “Katie’s been in a ‘corn dogs and mac and cheese’ phase for a while and I’ve been letting her get away with it, because…” As I gesture vaguely to the world around us, Brody offers a soft smile of understanding.
“I was a macaroni and cheese kid, too,” he says, stepping closer to me until his hands rest on my hips. “She’ll move onto something more sophisticated soon enough.”
My hands move to rest on either side of his neck, and I stare into his eyes while my thumb lazily strokes his beard. I watch his eyes for much longer than I intend to, waiting for that steel wall behind them to drop back into place at any moment.
For the door to slam shut and lock me out.
For him to be afraid of this again.
I let my hands trail across his chest as I bring my lips to his, letting the warmth of his skin and the steady beat of his heart meet my palm.
“This has to be a secret, doesn’t it?” I ask him.
Offering me a wistful smile as he tucks my hair behind my ear, he says, “Yes, until you’re no longer my client.”
“I should have made him sign a prenup,” I grumble. With a pat to his chest, I slide past him to pull the pizza from the oven. “I should have left him years ago – the first time he let his mom make one of her little comments about me, I should have been out. I should have left when he started making little comments, but they were so small, I didn’t even…”
I shake my head as I reach into a cabinet for a pair of plates, moving toward the dining room.
“Nia,” Brody says. His voice is low; gentle, but warning. “Stop.”
“I was an idiot,” I say with an aggravated shrug, mostly to myself, I think. I set the plates onto the table near the vase centerpiece before turning back toward the kitchen. “I let him get away with so much crap, and now, I’m letting him do it again.”
A hand wraps firmly around my throat as I near the threshold of the dining room, stopping me in my tracks.
“I told you to stop,” Brody warns. “What label did you assign insults to your intelligence?”
“Hard limit,” I mumble.
“It’s a hard limit,” he echoes with an affirmative nod. Inclining his head toward the dining table, he says, “Apparently, you haven’t yet learned what happens when you disappoint me.”
“I’m sorry, Sir,” I breathe.
“It’s too late for that,” he tells me. “You chose to ignore my warning.”
I move slowly and carefully toward the edge of the table, planting my palms against the top of it as my body tenses, already bracing for impact. I’m sore, and almost certainly bruised after last night, but I’m not as afraid of what’s to come as I think I should be.
Whatever fear exists inside of me is somehow almost…sweet.
It wraps itself in a blanket of excitement as Brody steps toward me, and as he works my sleep shorts down my legs to leave me in nothing more than my top and a pair of panties, it feels like taking the first bite of my favorite birthday cake.
It might be bad for me, but it melts on my tongue and it spreads pure joy throughout my chest and across every part of my body.
Brody’s hand rests between my shoulder blades to force my body closer to the table, making the edge of it dig into my thighs. As he gets me into position, that same hand wraps itself into my hair, yanking it to force my head backward.
Part of me expects him to hold back, but his palm lands against my ass with a hard smack that makes me gasp, the sting lingering as it burns through every layer of my skin.
My knees buckle as his palm makes contact for a second time, forcing a whimper to claw its way from my throat.
Again and again, he spanks me, and all the while, the only thing that I can bring myself to think is how grateful I am to feel his hands on me. To know that he’s punishing me for saying something unkind to myself.
His hips press firmly against mine as he finishes doling out my punishment, and I’m almost certain that he’ll fuck me over the table, but he pulls me up by my hair instead and turns me to face him.
His eyes are dark and heated, boring into mine as he cups my face. “What will you never let me hear you doing again?”
“Insulting myself, Sir,” I answer him.
A proud smile crosses his face as his thumb strokes across my cheek. “Whose job is that?”
“Only yours, Sir.”
“That’s a very good answer, sweet girl,” he tells me. “Would you like to be rewarded?”
I nod as his hands carefully work the buttons on my shirt, releasing them one by one as his mouth meets mine in a slow, deep kiss. My hands work through his soft coffee-colored locks as I swallow the taste of him.
“Nia, I want to make one thing very clear to you,” he tells me as he breaks from our kiss and hoists me onto the table, working to pull off my panties. “I don’t get on my knees for anyone.”
No, I guess he doesn’t. He crouches, he squats, but his knees never do touch the ground, do they?
His lips make contact with the skin of my jaw, sucking and kissing as he trails down my collarbone and my chest, stopping to flick his tongue over my nipple before grazing it with his teeth. I draw in a breath at the contact, almost disappointed when he leaves it to continue his trail of kisses down my body.
His hands jerk me toward the table’s edge as he lowers himself to the ground, pressing soft kisses against my knee.
“You’re making an exception for me,” I breathe.
“I’m making an exception for you.”
His lips work their way so, so slowly up my inner thigh as he caresses my skin, and I let my head fall backward, bracing myself against the table with my hands.
“Can I trust that you’ll be a good whore for me and soak my face, sweet girl?” He asks, looking up at me through his thick lashes.
“Yes, Sir,” I pant.
As if rewarding me for giving him the right answer, his tongue makes a slow, deliberate stroke along the length of my pussy, and I let out a gasp. His hands work to throw my thighs onto his shoulders, trailing down the length of them to massage into the cushion of my ass as he licks me.
He hums his approval as he brings his tongue to a point, carefully circling my clit with his eyes locked onto mine. I’m not sure if he can even see me, without his glasses on.
I’m not sure where they ended up, lost somewhere between my punishment and my reward.
All I know is that when I look into those eyes, my entire body feels like it’s on fire.
The oxygen in my lungs makes a quick and seemingly permanent escape as Brody slips two fingers inside of me, quickly finding and gently brushing against the sweet spot waiting for them.
His free hand is an extension of the tongue licking delicious pleasure through my body as it explores my skin, touching and teasing to force loud moans from my lips.
As my hand reaches for the back of his head and my fingers tangle in his hair, I worry for a moment that I’m pulling too hard, that I’m being to rough with him, but his response is focused suction to my clit that makes me feel like I might fall through the planet itself.
My toes curl as he increases the speed of his fingers, forcing me to cry out against my own will as my hips rock against his face, riding the wave of pleasure until I finally start to come down.
Brody rises from his knees, proudly wearing my arousal smeared across his face, and he cups my jaw as he brings our lips together. I taste myself on his tongue as it slides against mine, and I don’t think I dislike it; in fact, I might even enjoy it.
It’s hard to catch my breath with him kissing me like this. Like I’m the only person in the world who exists for him. Like if he doesn’t have me, he can’t get by. It’s an incredible feeling, and it doesn’t come with any caveats. There are no trade-offs or ultimatums, it’s just the two of us melding together into one complete being.
As his slacks are abandoned at his ankles and he draws me once again toward the edge of the table to pull me onto his cock, it hits me.
It’s sex.
Brody communicates through sex.
Any time we’d start to get close, he shut himself down, but after our lessons…
He shared more of himself with me on the floor of my bathroom than I think I ever expected him to. Both of us are afraid of being hurt again, but I think for him, there’s more to it.
I’m pulled back into the present as Brody’s hand firmly grips the back of my jaw, forcing it to drop open as he watches himself makes slow, deliberate strokes inside of me. “You’re making a mess on my cock,” he scolds.
“I’m sorry, Sir,” I pant.
“Look at yourself,” he orders as he uses his hands to spread my thighs as wide as he can, bringing my heels onto the table’s edge. He slowly pushes every inch of his cock inside until his skin is flush with mine, and I shudder and gasp as I stretch to take all of him, reaching behind him to claw at his back. “So, so greedy.”
The legs of the table squeak under the force of his thrusts while he fucks me, and I drop backward onto the table, knocking my head into the vase at the center of it.
Securing my wrists above my head in his left hand, he uses the right to pinch and twist at my nipple, earning a whine from me in response as he adds just enough pressure to make it sting.
I don’t care that two-week-old flower water is soaking into my hair. I’m not sure I care that the water might be damaging the finish on the table. I don’t care about the pizza going cold in the kitchen.
I’m not sure that there’s even a thought in my mind right now other than Brody and the shockwaves of pleasure that he’s sending through every corner of my body.
As my eyes drift closed and my back arches against the table, a hard smack lands against my cheek before Brody’s hand takes a firm and commanding hold of my jaw. “You look at me while I fuck you,” he orders, his voice breaking on a moan.
“Yes, Sir,” I whine, making sure to angle my head so he knows that I’m looking directly at him.
Watching his chest heave. Watching sweat bead on his brow and a flush creep onto his cheeks as he gets close.
Trying not to giggle at the frustrated crease in his brow and the subtle squint in his eyes that tell me he’s trying to watch me come for him.
My ankles wrap themselves around his waist, holding his body tight to mine as my fingernails bite into my palms. He doesn’t release my wrists when my body tenses; instead, he moves his free hand between my legs to give focused attention to my clit.
My back arches in a way that makes me worry it might snap me clean in half, and my lungs seem to refuse to pull in a breath. All they’re willing to offer me is small, rapid inhales as my orgasm crests.
My hips roll against his as he stills, bending forward to take my mouth while he comes and groaning against my lips as he spills into me. His lips don’t leave mine when his hand finally releases its hold on my wrists, wrapping around my back instead to pull my to a sitting position.
“You made a mess,” he tells me, balling my hair in his hand. “Clean it up.”
I obediently slide off of the table to settle onto my knees in front of him with his grip still tight at the back of my scalp. Taking the base of his cock in my hand, I slowly slide my tongue across the length of it to clear away the evidence of our shared orgasms.
Brody watches, waiting until I swallow before he releases his grip on my hair and allows me to stand.
“You are a pleasure to use, sweet girl,” he tells me, wearing a warm smile as he pushes my dampened hair behind my ear. “You’ve made me very proud.”
“Thank you, Sir,” I smile.