Crack.
Her hand on my face is bright and fast and stinging. “I hate you,” she whispers, all happiness fled from her face. “I fucking hate you.”
“I know that’s not true,” I say. “And you know that’s not true.”
My cheek feels like it’s blooming with a hot flower of shameful awareness. I think I want her to hit me again.
She doesn’t. Neither does she contradict me.
Instead, she wheels around and leaves.
I pass a sleepless night in the bed.
I’m angry and afraid and ashamed.
And aroused beyond measure. And I’d be lying if I claimed it wasn’t because of that slap. Because even now, her chains tie me to her whim, to her design.
What if they tied me to her pleasure too?
It’s near the winter solstice, and so it feels like the morning will never come to this fog-wrapped island. With the cold mist pressing against the window and my body aching with every feeling it’s possible to feel about someone who was once a lover and now a captor, I give in to the rude urges pulsing through me.
I haven’t needed…this…in years. But it’s Nimue, it’s always been Nimue, and something is so different this time, so potent, that I don’t have any armor against it. It’s like it gets right to the beating heart of me. The chain, the strike. The shame and the pain and the thing between us that’s always, always been about power, even at the very beginning.
She’s no masochist indeed…but what if I am?
This is new.
The kilt makes it easy, too easy maybe, to indulge in this shameful need to fuck. I roll onto my stomach and grind my hips into the mattress, fucking the soft fabric of the kilt until the friction gets to be too much and I have to flip the kilt up around my waist.
I fuck the sheets then, feeling the still-sensitive cheek that remembers the crack of her palm, listening to the melodious noise of her chain fastened on me as the motion of the bed sends it clinking and tapping against the flagstone floor. I think about seeing her for the first time in this life twenty-three years ago.
She’d been eighteen, then.
And I twenty-seven, nearly twenty-eight.
Twenty-seven years of waiting to see my destined lover and death-bringer again, and when I finally found her, she’d been a Catholic schoolgirl with a backpack and Mary Janes. It was appalling how deeply I wanted her anyway, but not surprising. She’d been young in our first life too, barely seventeen when she trapped me.
Not that her age had stopped her from getting—
Don’t. It doesn’t bear thinking about. Not when all I want is a quick, dirty release against this bed.
I can feel the air cool on my ass and thighs as I brace myself up on my forearms, my head hanging between my shoulders as I press my swollen erection into the mattress. The sheets and blankets tangled around my legs swish, and the sound of my own pulse and heavy breathing drown out everything else.
I think about the Nimue from my first life who flirted with coy glances and chaste kisses, these innocent little touches that drove me wild. The Nimue from twenty-three years ago with her frank and unabashed desire for me.
The Nimue now who chains me and threatens me and treats me like a barely loved pet. Strange that’s the thing that I hold onto as my orgasm twines tighter and tighter in the depths of my groin. Not the clumsy advances of a fresh girl or the wild recklessness of the barely-a-woman who rode my lap in her Catholic school uniform. But the restraints and the strike of a woman intent on taking everything I have—my life and my soul and anything else I can offer up along with it—God, that has my belly tight and my balls drawing up hot and ready, and I’m going to spill all over these sheets in a disgusting mess—
A hand, cool and soft, drops onto the exposed curve of my ass, and I freeze.
“No, keep going,” says Nimue. All trace of the pain she felt yesterday seems to have vanished. “I quite like watching.”
Shame and eagerness fill me with equal measure, and I nearly want to obey her. I want her to see me come, I want her indifferent hand on my ass as I fuck the bed in desperation. But desire is a thing I’ve only ever experienced around her, and I’ve had so very much time not being around her. So much practice with reserve and detachment.
So I force myself to get to my knees and cover my nakedness. “I’m sorry,” I mutter, scrubbing at my hair and wishing I felt my age and not like a fresh-faced youth. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“Obviously,” she replies, a smile in her voice. When I look over my shoulder at her, I see the smile on her face as well—slightly too wide for the narrow oval of her face. It’s painfully endearing, and it reminds me of how capable of happiness she’s always been. It’s a strange thing to think of one’s captor—to reconcile all that bubbling, innate joy with the ability to trap and exploit someone—but nevertheless, it’s true. Happiness is in her nature. Just like destroying me is.
To my surprise, she climbs on the bed behind me with one hand sliding comfortably around my hip to hold me in place as her knees come to rest on either side of my own. She’s tall, but I’m taller, and my ass presses against her stomach. I didn’t get a good look at what she was wearing earlier, but it’s something dark and thin and gauzy, and I can feel the firm divot of her navel against my back as I’m pressed against her.
