Page 87 of Savage Daddy
“Sit,” I said. “Down. Now.”
She sat. She didn’t fight it, which told me how far the day had taken her.
I had food waiting. Of course I did. I always do—it’s the language we both speak perfectly. I’d kept a plate warm, pasta with the garlic and the chili she loves. I set it down in front of her I crouched with my good hand on her knee and waited until she looked at me out of the grief.
“Eat,” I said. Soft. “All of it. The day’s over.” I picked up the fork and held it to her. “Now you put it down. The grief, the responsiblity, all of it. Don’t make me invoke the contract.”
She smiled, slowly.
“Good girl,” I said, low, and watched it go through her—the color up her throat, the breath catching, the whole proud meticulous woman gone loose for the held second of it.
When the plate was clean I took it and set it aside and I tipped her chin up with two fingers, and I let the steel come into it, soft, the soft-steel she’s stopped being able to fight.
“Tonight’s mine,” I said. “You just feel what I do to you and you let me.” I held her eyes until I was sure she had it. “Understand?”
“I understand,” she breathed.
I reached behind me to the doorway, to where I’d carried the lace through, and I held it up in the candlelight where she could see it. The black. The bareness of it. Her own secret self, folded in my palm, six months in the drawer.
I watched her recognize it. Watched the pink flood up her throat and the breath go short and the want she’d cut out ofherself the year her father died come up bright in her eyes anyway, because she’s been learning, all this time, to let it.
“Go put these on,” I said. “Just these. Nothing else. And come back to me.”
She took them. Her fingers brushed mine over the lace.
“Yes, Daddy,” she said.
Shecamebackthroughthe door and I forgot how to breathe.
That’s the truth of it, and I’m a man who breathes for a living, who fills rooms with sound the way other men fill them with silence, and she came out of that bathroom in the black lace with the front cut away and nothing else, the candlelight running gold up the strong line of her thigh and the soft of her belly and the bareness the lace framed instead of hid, and every word I own in three languages went out of my head at once. I just looked. Top to bottom. The shoulders that haul flour sacks, the burn-scarred forearms, the dark hair down and loose for once instead of scraped up and escaping. She stood in the candlelight and wore those panties just for me.
My cock thickened, heavy, against the seam of my trousers. I let her see what looking at her did.
“There she is,” I said, low. “Christ, sweetheart. Look at you.”
She bit her lip. She didn’t know where to put her hands—she never does when she’s not allowed to work—and she let them hang.
How I was going to make it through the slow part without burying myself in her in the first minute, I genuinely did not know. But the slow part was the gift. The slow part was the whole point.
“Come here. Sit.”
I sat her on the edge of the bed and I knelt in front of her so our faces were level, my hands on her bare knees, and I made myself talk instead of touch.
“There’s new things tonight,” I said. “I’m going to tell you all of them before we start. No surprises you didn’t agree to. You with me?”
“Yes.” Barely a breath.
“First—I’m going to tie something over your eyes.” I watched her face for the flinch and it didn’t come, just the breath going shorter. “Soft. Dark. So you can’t see what I’m doing or where I’m doing it. That’s the point—you can’t get ahead of me, can’t run the choreography, can’t be the boss of it. You just feel it. My voice is the only thing you’ll have. You hold onto my voice.”
“Okay,” she whispered.
“Second—I’m going to use things on you. Not my hands tonight. Things.” I reached to the nightstand without taking my eyes off her and I lifted them one at a time so she could see. “A feather. Just to start. Light, all over you, so you never know where it’s coming.” I set it down. I lifted the next. “And this. A candle.” Her breath caught hard. “I light it, I let it burn till there’s a little pool, and I drip the warm wax on you. From up high, so it’s cooled to just-warm by the time it lands. It stings bright for a second and then it’s gone, and I chase every drop with my mouth. Hot, then cool. Then later I peel the cooled wax off your skin, slow, and that’s a whole feeling of its own.”
She was breathing like she’d run up the stairs. Her thighs had gone restless under my hands. Already excited, already halfway down, my good girl, and I hadn’t laid a finger on her yet.
And then I did the thing I’d been turning over all week.
“Look at me,” I said. “I need you clear for this part. You remember the rule you wrote? Early on. Your own hand.”
