now

“Sir, the Beast is ready.”

The Beast is my car—the presidential car, though there are multiple vehicles that fill the role—and it’s time for the Luther Center Gala. I nod to Belvedere, indicating that I heard and that we’ll be outside shortly, and he vanishes back out of the living room to wait for us.

I’m fastening my cuff links as I walk into my bedroom to find my wife panting and squirming on a chair, trying to stay quiet so Belvedere can’t hear her out in the hallway. Her ball gown is rucked up around her hips, her chest flushed, her knuckles white as she grips the edge of the seat. And the wand vibrator buzzing between her legs makes an ominous whirr against the wood as she tries to shift away from it.

“Sir, please,” she gasps.

I glance at my wristwatch; she’s been on the chair for twenty minutes, forced to sit with her cunt snug against the vibrator duct-taped to the seat and not allowed to come. This is after I spent an hour teasing her with my mouth before my meet and greet, and after I spent another thirty minutes in the shower with her afterwards, slowly fucking her ass until she could barely stand up. She was not given permission to come then either. In short, she is currently a wet, writhing mess, and I plan to take her to the gala that way.

“You may get up,” I allow.

She’s up in an instant, a little whimper of both relief and bereavement coming out of her pretty mouth. Red lipstick tonight, immaculate and classic, just like her, and I can’t wait to smear it all over her face. But for now…

“Knot my bow tie, please,” I order her, and she walks to me on shaking legs, the tulle and silk of her ball gown falling back to the floor and covering up her swollen pussy. God, that cunt will feel so good to fuck later, so puffy and so wet. And when she finally comes, I’ll get to see the way she unravels down to her very soul. It is one thing to break someone open with pain—some might even say an obvious thing, if not an easy one—but it is another thing entirely to break someone open with pleasure. It takes a different kind of skill and care, a different brand of attention to keep someone so torturously aroused for so long.

“You did ask to be mastered,” I remind my wife with amusement as she has to steady herself with a hand on my shoulder.

“I thought you’d belt me,” she admits with a breathless laugh. “Or choke me with your cock. I wasn’t ready for this. It’s almost harder than being worked over.”

“It is harder, and you’ve pleased me very much,” I tell her, lifting her chin with a finger so she looks up into my face. “You are still pleasing me. I’m so very proud of you for taking my cock up your ass and for rubbing your pussy on that toy. I’m even prouder that you could do it all without restraints.”

She flushes happily, and I enjoy lighting her up with my praise. It’s well earned too; it’s hard to endure twenty minutes of that even when you’re bound to the chair, unable to move. But because of the gala and her sleeveless gown, I decided not to tie or tape her—nothing that would leave visible marks. Which meant she had to keep herself on that chair with sheer willpower; every moment she sat on the chair, she was suffering and enduring that vibrator for my sake. For me.

Her smooth, pale arms, free of any mark or stripe from my ropes, display the difference between force and choice, and while both things are delicious to me, right now the choice carries so much more weight. Perhaps it’s because it’s all a choice at its heart—even when I pretend to force her, she has her safe word, she still has a way to escape, and we both know it. But an exercise like the chair strips away all the pretenses and leaves our exchange for the naked, gleaming thing it is.

A decision. A willing surrender. A display of love.

And it’s as she’s slowly knotting my bow tie, her normally practiced movements made slightly fumbling by her hyper-aroused state, that I finally feel like myself for the first time today.

I am a man who loves. A man whose love demands much in return.

And I will survive this.

I mark every flutter of those long eyelashes against her cheek, every tiny furrow of her brow as she pulls the fabric around my neck into the right shape. She’s so fucking beautiful all the time, but now, with her eyes glassy and her cheeks flushed and her full attention on the task I set her to, I’m so fucking in love that I can barely see straight. My young wife, my regal little queen, so willing to be unspooled at my whim.

She finishes with the bow tie, plucks the corners into sharp peaks, and then smiles up at me, all bright red lips and white teeth. I bend my head and bite the small cleft in her chin and she laughs.

“I want to kiss you,” I say, biting her again. “I want to kiss all the air right out of you until the only thing you can breathe is me. But the fucking gala.”

“We could cancel,” she suggests with a coy smile. “Pretend we’re sick.”

“Naughty thing. You just want to be fucked sooner.”

“I would never presume, Sir,” she says in a voice that says she would do exactly that.

I sweep her into my arms, honeymoon style, and carry her out of the bedroom.

“My shoes!” she protests, feet kicking adorably under all that tulle. She’s also not wearing underwear, but she’s smart enough not to ask for it.

“I’ll have Belvedere get the shoes,” I tell her with a smile. “I like having you in my arms too much to put you down.”

She sighs, resting her head against my shoulder. I can smell all the sweet aromas that come with a woman—soap and perfume and the faint smell of skin and arousal underneath it all. “I love you, my Greer,” I tell her. “And do you love your Sir?”

She nods against my shoulder. “I love my Sir with all my heart.”

“Even tonight?”

“Even tonight.” A pause. “How long until you let me come again?”

I laugh and pinch her ass for her impertinence, and then I carry her out into the hallway towards the limo.

* * *

There’s something quite thrilling about fucking a woman in a ball gown. It’s like having a secret that no one else knows, a sin that no one else can see. Of course, no one else can see us in the Beast anyway, but it still feels sweetly illicit to have Greer’s skirt fluffed and bunched around us and my cock inside her underneath it all. I savor the picture she paints like this—hair coiled into perfection, makeup like art, the gorgeous gown—but she is a hot, greedy thing under her skirt, her snatch tight around me and her clit a hard, plump bud against the muscles of my groin. She’s under strict orders not to come or make a single noise, and I can tell that both are testing her discipline at the moment—her fingers are digging into my shoulders and her teeth are digging so far into her lower lip that I wonder if she can taste blood.

I’m enjoying it very much.

“…And that’s another year on the timeline, thanks to the coalition,” the new British prime minister is saying into my ear. I’m on the phone with him, ostensibly to congratulate him and his party on their victory, but it’s gone beyond congratulations into an unwelcome digression about his goals, and it’s taking more than my usual reserve of self-control to listen to him fully. Not the least because I have my wife on my lap, repeatedly impaling herself on my penis.

But listen fully I do, and when I hang up the phone, I take a moment to lift up Greer’s skirt and reward myself with the sight of us fucking, watching my thick organ disappear into that tight cunt and reappear again, the wet pink of her hugging me even as she lifts away, as if her body doesn’t want to let me go. I lean back and watch this for a few minutes, considering rather lazily if I’d like to come inside her now or wait and savor the anticipation, and then I decide that she’s been such a good wife for me today that I’ll reward her at the gala itself, whisk her off into some dark bathroom upstairs and fuck her until she screams. And that is the moment I want to come inside her, when she is completely and utterly outside of herself with release.

“Up,” I say with a stern swat to her ass. “We’ll finish this later.”

I can see a faint mist of sweat along her hairline as she nods dazedly, clambers off my lap, and reaches for her purse.

“Don’t clean yourself,” I say. “I want to know that you’re wet.”

“Yes, Sir,” she manages. I enjoy the effect of denying her very much, but I still give her the last few minutes of the ride to compose herself and let her mind clear a little—I always play to tease, sometimes even to test, but I would never actually jeopardize her ability to do her job—and by the time we reach the Luther Center itself, she is able to smile and wave calmly enough as we leave the Beast and trail past the red carpet into the crowd.

“Don’t forget,” I whisper in her ear before I go to find the event coordinator. “I want you wet and ready for me later. If I like what I find, then I’ll reward my good little girl.”

“And if you don’t like what you find?” she whispers back, a little nervously.

“Then it’s going to be long night for you,” I say with a quick kiss to her temple. And I mean it. I’m not without mercy, but I always keep my word. Always.

Greer lifts her chin a little. “You’ll like what you find.”

“My little queen is determined to please me,” I say, smiling. “And I am determined to give her everything she needs to be a happy girl.”

She stops walking and turns to straighten my tie and smooth down my jacket, the flat of her palm running teasingly over my hidden erection as she does.

I catch her wrist. “Bold, naughty girl.”

“Hurry, Mr. President,” she murmurs, looking up at me through her eyelashes. “I feel like I could come just from your command alone right now, I’m so wound up.”

My dick, still heavy and hard and wet, jolts against my zipper at her words. I’m grateful for the concealing effect of the tuxedo jacket, but I do press into her so she can feel the ramrod length of me against her belly. “I like this idea very much,” I murmur back to her. “Of you coming from my command alone.”

“I’d rather have you inside me,” she whispers plaintively.

“Mmm. Me too. Are you sure I have to go give this speech?”

She gives a sighing little laugh. “I suppose you must.” She fiddles with my bow tie once more and rises up to kiss me gently on the mouth. “You’ll knock them dead.”

I kiss her back and then leave to find the coordinator.

* * *

The speech goes well—the Luther Center probably would have preferred that I spoke mainly about the arts and sciences, but Uri and I included several sections about education as well, in anticipation of a school reform initiative I hope to push through later this year. Afterwards, there is the usual array of handshakes and pictures and conversations, there is dancing, there is the expected bevy of powerful people hoping to speak into my ear. In short, it is a typical night in Washington, and ordinarily, it would take tremendous powers of focus and memory to distinguish it from any other night afterwards.

But three things set it apart.

The first is—painfully and inevitably—Embry. While at the White House today, I kept myself busy and sequestered with my wife, and even with the few meetings I couldn’t escape, I purposefully stayed free of my phone and any chatter from my staff. But as the night goes on, it becomes clear that the rest of the political world exploded after Embry gave his official resignation speech today.

“Did you know?” people ask. “Did you want him to leave? Did you make him leave?”

No and no and fuck you if you think I would ever make that man leave me, but I can’t say those things, I can’t deliver those honest answers with all the bitter pain they deserve. I have to make polite noises and vague explanations and benign well wishes for his future, and how do they not all see? How do they not hear the trickle of my heart’s blood dripping out of my chest, how do they not see the scooped-out pain in my eyes, how can they not hear every desperate plea and every rasping sob I’ve let out in the last twenty-four hours?

Merlin rescues me eventually, inserting himself into a cloud of speculation and curiosity that no amount of calm, noncommittal statements on my part can clear, and he pulls me away on the pretense of discussing something confidential. But when we reach the edge of the room, he merely hands me a flute of champagne from a circulating tray and says, “Drink this.”

“I’m fine,” I insist.

“No,” Merlin says. “You were performing fine, and doing a wonderful job at it, but another five minutes of that and the seams would’ve started to show. Take a minute to breathe.”

“I feel like I’ve been taking a minute to breathe all day. I’m ready to stop breathing and start fixing things.”

“Well, you’ve already stopped breathing,” Merlin observes with an edged perception that makes me uncomfortable. “Perhaps you haven’t breathed properly since last night. Which is all the more reason for you to breathe now. Take comfort in your queen. We can discuss preliminary election strategy later this week.”

The casual way he says it strikes some new and horrible understanding into me. Embry is gone, and his leaving is now so permanent and acknowledged that it’s almost mundane. Business as usual. Just one more angle to fold into the strategy. Don’t worry about that hollow echo in my chest, let’s just turn to item two in the handout…

“Drink,” Merlin says. “Do it for me if you won’t do it for yourself.”

I have no energy left to argue. I drain the flute in one movement and set it on a nearby table. Merlin gives me a moment or two to compose myself, and then he says, “Better?”

I’m not actually, but I believe very stridently in not making my unhappiness or discomfort another person’s problem. I’m also not a liar, so I simply say, “I will be.”

“Yes, you will.”

“It embarrasses me to admit this,” I say, looking out over the dim ballroom, “but no matter how cautiously I spoke or thought about it, no matter how much I told myself I was prepared for the possibility of something different, beneath all that, I never doubted that I would win again. And I am only realizing this now as it becomes apparent that I might lose.”

Merlin makes a skeptical noise. “I hope this doubt isn’t because of Embry?”

“Why shouldn’t it be? He’s a decorated soldier, he’s become a skilled politician, he has all the right connections. He’s more charming than me, besides.”

“You’re looking at him with a lover’s eye,” Merlin says frankly. “And not looking at yourself at all. I think this reelection could be personally uncomfortable, but politically quite easy.”

“All the same,” I say, putting my hands in my pockets and scanning the room for Greer. “I want to meet with Kay and Trieste about how much of our agenda we can get accomplished this term.”

“Maxen, that agenda was calculated precisely for two terms. Even then, it’s almost certainly too ambitious. There is no way we can accomplish the rest of that list in the time we have left.”

I finally find Greer, a glint of near-white hair under the golden lights of the dance floor. The band is playing a waltz now, and the music is a shard of glass against my throat. How many times had I held Embry in my arms to music just like this? Can I number all the times I’ll never get to dance with him again? Do I even want to try?

I was even listening to Strauss when he came to me last night, when I saw him standing in the doorframe of my office, looking beautifully brooding, as only he can. God how I love him, and it took only one blue glance before I was coming toward him, pressing against that firm, flat chest of his and guiding his long, elegant fingers to the place that waited for him. One blue glance before I was completely open and undone for Embry Moore, just as I have always been, just as I have been since the first day I saw him spoiled and scornful in the mountains of a strange land. I would walk barefoot over every jagged rock of that cursed country if it would bring Embry back to me. I would crawl.

“I’d be a fool if I planned on a second term; I’m not owed it,” I finally say to Merlin. “I’m not entitled to anything more than what I’ve earned here and now. I have to get as much done as I can in case I have to leave.”

“Poverty, sexual assault, education, climate change, stability overseas—you think it’s merely a matter of willpower and focus to effect those changes? No, these are projects that require huge amounts of bipartisan leverage and cooperation and favors—not even Penley Luther himself could have done it.”

“I’m not my father,” I say with perhaps more sharpness than necessary.

“And I thank God for that every day,” Merlin responds blandly. “Nonetheless, it can’t be done. Give up this idea of cramming six years of work into two, and focus on getting elected again.”

I look over at Merlin, and I’m surprised to see something almost goading in his face, although it’s not truly goading…a challenge, maybe? A dare?

But that’s not quite right either. It’s almost less like a dare and more like he’s delivering lines from a script. There’s something mechanical in the way he insists it cannot be done. It’s cursory, an actor running through the kinds of expository lines that require little emotion or effort. Like he knows he must say these things to provoke me into saying the opposite, but when I examine his face, all of that vanishes, and he is the picture of polite and reserved calm once again.

I can’t resist the script either, if scripted this moment is, and I find myself saying exactly what would have been laid out for me on the page. “I’m doing it, Merlin. Even if it kills me.”

* * *

The second thing remarkable about tonight is my wife. Her dress—some strapless confection of gold and white—renders her into a shimmering vision of light, a drop of sunlight playing over water, and she draws people to her simply by existing as she does, sublime and sovereign. I catch glimpses of her face—kind, serious, almost tormentingly lovely—through the crowd as I make my way to her, and I’m reminded of a John Collier painting I saw once in England of Queen Guinevere gathering flowers on May Day. Like the painting, she is clad in white and gold and surrounded by a crowd; like the painting, there is something aching and lonely in her face.

I had once teased her that one man wasn’t enough—that she needed both Embry and me to feel loved—and she had shaken her head and pressed her hand flat against where my heart beat in my chest.

Don’t you see? she’d implored. It is because I love you that I love Embry. We fell in love with each other by loving you.

It was just as well. My love was—and is—implacable and cruel to those it chose. I had been glad that they could take comfort in one another, however envious the idea made me. And I feel quite the same now, although my wife’s face reminds me that she may not get any comfort from Embry any time soon. His absence has gouged a hole in our marriage just as surely as it’s gouged a hole in our three.

When I reach Greer, however, and take her wrist in my hand while she’s talking to the governor of New York, that lonely look vanishes and is replaced with something so warm and yielding that I have to kiss her on the mouth, lipstick and onlooking governor be damned.

“Mr. President,” she says, half laughing and half gasping under my mouth.

“Mrs. Colchester,” I return, lifting my head but pulling her into me. “I’m so sorry, Governor Jarrett, do you mind if I steal my wife away for a few moments?”

The governor waves an amused hand. “By all means, save me from this gorgeous, interesting woman,” she says. “It was unbearable company anyway.”

We laugh, we say goodbye, we make more excuses as we squeeze together through the crowd, and then Luc is escorting us out of the ballroom into the small art gallery off the north wing of the Luther Center.

“We’re not to be interrupted,” I tell him at the door after I send Greer inside.

“Yes, sir,” Luc says, his expression betraying nothing.

I clap him on the shoulder. “Good man,” I say, and then follow Greer through the doorway and close the door behind me.

Inside, the world is small and quiet. A wall of windows frames a spill of Georgian buildings and thick trees; beyond the rise of stone and leaves, the white finger of the Washington Monument presses into the purple-clouded night sky. Huge canvases of modern art stud the all-white walls, shadows leak from the windows onto the blond wood floors, the noise of the gala is a muffled memory.

We are alone at last.

When Greer hears my footsteps, she turns to face me and the lights from the city outside catch on the gold of her dress and in the gleam of her hair. She sinks to her knees in a cloud of tulle and silk as I approach, her neck arched as gracefully as a swan’s as she trains her eyes on the floor.

I take a minute to enjoy her, strolling around her kneeling figure with my hands in my pockets, taking in the elegant line of her neck and shoulders, her perfect posture, the delicate curve of her collarbone. The corona of white and gold silk around her knees. The excited heave of her breasts under her bodice. The ring glinting off her finger, better than any collar. A thousand possibilities scorch through me all at once—my cock down her throat; her face in the floor; the nylon tie of a stocking around her wrists. The sound of her begging voice echoing off the empty walls.

Without saying anything, I cup the back of her head with my hand as I stand beside her, and she leans her head against my thigh. Not kittenishly rubbing or bucking as before, but merely resting, enjoying the simplicity of the contact. I enjoy it too, standing above her, looking down on her with pride and pleasure. Both of us exactly where we need to be, and how we need to be.

If only…

If only my little prince were here.

I allow myself the grief and the splintered hurt, even as I refuse to vent it on Greer. If only Embry were here. If only it were the three of us in this gallery, the only entrance guarded, our privacy secure. I’d make him watch me fuck my wife, and I’d fuck her slow, slick, grinding, so that he would see every slide of me inside of her, every quiver of her stomach, every gasping part of her pretty lips, and know that it was me doing it. I’d make him lick her clean after. I’d make him beg like a dog, I’d make him cry for me. I’d leave a bruise for every minute I loved him that he didn’t love me back.

I’d spread him out and kiss every inch of him. I’d spread Greer’s hair over his flat, muscled stomach just to see the contrast, I’d tickle the soles of his feet until he laughed, I’d press and nuzzle into every corner of him—elbows and in between toes and the hollows under his arms—until he knew that every part of me belonged to him. I’d pin Greer between us and together we would love her the way she needed to be loved, I’d spread her legs and allow him to take his pleasure there, and then when he came inside of her, I would watch and my heart would be full.

Beside me, Greer makes a small, unintentional sigh.

“What is it, pet?”

She looks up at me. “I’m missing him right now.”

“Me too, angel.”

“How are you so calm about it?” she asks. “How do you hold it all inside yourself?”

Hold what? I want to ask. My own fucking heart, torn into bloody tatters? My every foolish hope for a future with both my queen and my prince? My kingdom, which was built with Embry at my side?

Can’t she see the broken bones pushing through my skin? The garish, crimson wounds all over my body? What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven; can’t she see me crawl? Can’t she see me weep? If I could press my fingers into my veins and claw out any acceptable and worthy sacrifice, my soul, my blood, my past and my future, then by fucking God I would have done it.

Anything, anything, anything.

I get to my own knees in front of my wife. I see the shock on her face when I turn my palms up towards the ceiling, the backs of my hands resting on my thighs as I sit back on my heels in an unmistakable submissive’s pose. This isn’t the spontaneous gesture of need and adoration from the Residence this morning, this is a deliberate posture of submission and humility and I’ve never assumed it in front of Greer.

Psalm Fifty-One. The adulterer’s psalm. The psalm of a father mourning a son that should not have been conceived. That’s what I quote. “You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it.”

Greer stares at me with silver eyes in the dark.

“You do not take pleasure in burnt offerings,” I continue. “My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit. A broken and contrite heart which You will not despise.”

A single tear tracks down my queen’s cheek, and I don’t wipe it away. I let it fall as I keep my hands open and empty. “Do good to Zion in your good pleasure; rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. Then you will delight in right sacrifices.”

Another tear spills over onto my favorite face in the world, and my chest squeezes in shared pain. All the ways I’ve failed her and Embry, I won’t fail them any more. I won’t fail her. I will love her until the stars burn themselves out and hang like cold rocks in the lightless sky.

Right sacrifices, I remind myself. The Lord only delights in right sacrifices. What a bleeding, sluggish world this would be if we all indulged in martyrdom; what a luscious fucking lure to bite—to brood and wallow and feel. But the world was not made to be bleeding and sluggish, and those lures are just baited traps for the moody and the vain. The world must spin, the battles must be fought, the grails and the quests won’t chase themselves. However tempting a sacrifice for its own sake might be, however tempting self-flagellation and melancholy and grasping, needy gloom—it is not a right sacrifice. It would only serve me, and I’m pledged to serve so many others.

The world must spin.

And yet…

And yet for just a moment, I wonder what it’s like on the other side. I wonder what it’s like not to have to serve everyone else, what it would be like to chase my weakest impulses to their selfish ends. What it would feel like to give in. To yield. To—just for a moment—drop the crown and the sword to the floor and carry my heart in my hands.

“I hold it inside of me as best I can,” I finally answer her. “And I’m afraid I’m not holding it very well right now. But I must, Greer, I must, even if it dissolves my bones and eats me alive. Even if I sometimes fantasize about not holding it at all.”

“Let me,” she begs. “Let me hold it for you. Beat me or fuck me or anything you need.”

Anything I need. Does she realize that’s everything right now? I need everything. I’m a gaping, sucking void of need.

“Can we try something?” I ask. My heart thumps uncomfortably in my chest; my mouth feels dry. Clumsy. I feel like a boy asking someone on a date for the first time. “Can you…can we, I mean…I want—”

I clear my throat, looking down at my hands resting on my thighs.

“Tonight I want to be your submissive,” I say. “I know I prepared you to be mastered today, and I will keep my word to do so if you like. I just thought…” I falter, my words slipping away from me. I tilt my head all the way back and stare up at the ceiling. “I just want to know what it feels like. Not to be the one to carry it all.”

Greer’s dress rustles, I hear her breathing. “I can try,” she offers. “But it won’t be—I’m not you, Ash. I’m worried it will feel awkward. Like a child pretending.”

I drop my head to look at her. “You’re perfect,” I say softly. “Anything you do will be perfect.”

She bites her lip and I read every uncertain flicker in her moon-sea eyes. She’s worried she’ll be clumsy, that I’ll inwardly be judging her performance, that she’ll fail to please me. And I understand—mastering is far more complicated than being mastered. A Dominant not only has to plan, but to assess, to read what a submissive needs in that scene, and they must adapt and adjust and continually monitor a submissive’s progress through pain and pleasure. It’s a heavy weight—a joyful and pleasurable one, often—but a weight nonetheless. And here I’m asking her to trade places in the middle of a day-long scene with no warning and no chance to prepare.

But I’m ready to break and crumble, and if there’s any person on this planet I feel safe doing it in front of, it’s Greer Galloway Colchester.

“Please,” I whisper. I bow, moving so that my palms are flat on the floor in front of her knees and then I press my forehead to floor. “I want to feel free of it. Only for a few minutes.”

“I’m nervous,” she admits. “I’ve…I mean, with Embry I sometimes can, but you aren’t him. With you, it’s like all of me responds with the urge to obey. It’s beyond my control.”

I push aside the prideful sting that comes with hearing his name. She and I have endeavored not to have any secrets from one another, and so I know all about their times alone—Carpathia and her office at Georgetown chief among them—and I know that together, the two of them have a much more traditional dynamic. Giving and taking in equal measure, unspoken negotiations of power—the way equals fuck each other. I should be happy for them, happy that without me they can find some normalcy and intimacy in sex without resorting to degradation and a degree of suffering, and I am happy for them, but also I grieve. Envy curls. I got my teenage wish to become the Goblin King, but wars and sisters and lovers and my dead wife have finally planted all the guilt and shame I never used to feel about it, and sometimes I hate myself for the things I need. I resent my lovers for not always needing them. I hurt for wanting to hurt them. I want the other side of it, I want the other side of it right now.

“Pretend, then, that I’m ordering you to do this. I’m ordering you as your Sir to take control, and you are simply obeying me.”

“Okay,” she says, above me. And then she takes a deep breath and says clearer, louder, “Okay. Yes, Sir.”

I see the froth of white and gold fabric move around me, and then I hear her stand, hear the click-thunk of her heels dropping from her feet and the pad of her steps on the floor. Then silence.

I stay where I am, my eyes on the wood grain of the smooth floor, my body pulling uncomfortably in the unfamiliar posture. This is what it must be like for Greer. The waiting. The pregnant stillness. The creeping uncertainty. It takes so much willpower simply not to move, not to act, when moving and acting are my defaults.

At the club I’d joined after Jenny’s death, they require all Dominants to undergo certain kinds of training in order to play there, and I’d done them all quite willingly, because I’d been eager to learn, I’d been eager to know how to do all the things I wanted to do safely. And in order to do that, I had to know how they felt. I’ve been whipped, cropped, paddled, flogged, edged, bound, gagged, and once—just once—fucked in the ass with a toy.

And countless other things, but right now I’m remembering the very first time I was made to submit as part of my training, and it was something very like this. Kneeling with my head pressed to the floor for almost two hours while the Dominant training me watched. I’d just won the election and I was going to be the leader of the free world and I was spending my spare time getting beaten by a man named Mark. But in that room, it didn’t matter. Actual kings and queens had been there, crown royalty, billionaires, generals, dignitaries—secular power meant nothing in Mark’s kingdom, which was the entire point.

Those two hours on my knees, it had felt like an academic exercise, like I was taking a tour. A visitor to the land of kneeling. And although I made notes in my head about how long it took for parts of my body to fall asleep, about the ways my thoughts wanted to stray, about what I could see and perceive from my deferential position, it never felt real. It never was real. It was research. A game.

This is not a game.

Every step Greer takes sends ripples of awareness through me, every brush of her dress against my legs turns into a blessing. I am noticed. I am touched. Each glance of her fabric is a gift. And when she finally deigns to run her fingers over the tuxedo jacket pulled tight over my back, I let out a ragged exhale of relief.

“I want to see your face,” she murmurs. “Back up on your knees.”

I raise myself back to my knees, not lifting my eyes until I’m expressly asked to, putting my hands palm-up on my thighs once again. A model submissive. It feels forced, but it feels nice as well. Nice not to have to worry about anything. Nice to be responsible for nothing but myself.

“I—” she swallows. “I want your mouth on me. Lift your face.”

I lift my face like she asks, catching her eyes with my own. She looks uncertain, concerned that maybe she’s doing something incorrectly, and I smile reassuringly at her. “Yes, Mistress,” I answer.

She nods, almost absent-mindedly, and for a moment I consider taking pity on her and ending this pointless request of mine. It was selfish to ask for and there’s no reason Greer needs to suffer for my broken insanity, but then she steps close to me, raising her dress, and her bare, wet pussy is right in front of my face, like something out of a dream. Framed by white and gold, the barest glimpse of pink peeking out from her cleft, and I can smell her. My cock strains against my pants, fully hard since the first time I knelt, and for a second I relish the unfamiliar sensation. To be hard and to be kneeling.

It’s strange but not unpleasant. Like driving someone else’s car.

“Eat me,” my wife says, and I keep my eyes on hers as long as I can as I slide my hands up the back of her thighs to steady her. My instincts are still to take care of her, to make sure she’s safe, and it’s jolting to realize I can still do this from my knees, perhaps as well as I can as when I’m standing.

I press my mouth against the soft lips of her cunt, which she keeps bare at my asking, and then I part my lips the tiniest bit and let my tongue tickle against her clit. I feel her knees weaken and nearly collapse at the touch, and I smile to myself and do it again. Her skin is so soft, almost like satin against my lips, and she smells like the delicate lavender soap she uses until I nuzzle my nose into her and inhale. And then she smells like herself, sweet and warm, if warm can be a scent.

I press my face harder against her, angling so that my tongue can begin sweeping lines along the folds of her slit, and a whimpered Ash drops from her lips. I relish it, this sign of her pleasure, and I slide my hands up to her ass and over her hips and down her thighs again. She’s all silky skin and garters and stockings, and then when my hands find her from the front and gently spread her lips apart, she’s all wet, quivering flesh. Flesh I’ve been fucking and denying all day, and the thought of her carrying all that slippery need around in public, just tucked up inside her all aching and heavy, has me so fucking hard.

This position too, has a certain kind of intimate appeal. Normally I enjoy her cunt while she’s tied to my bed, or perhaps bent over a table with a spreader bar between her legs. Normally, I use my fingers to part her as wide as I please, exposing her sweet hole and the firm berry of her clit and the tight pleats of her anus. I lick and taste at my leisure, I nibble and I suck at whatever pace I deem fit, all while she’s wide open for me like the good girl she is.

But this is so much more immediate, so much more desperate. Even with my hands helping, I have to nuzzle and force to get at her most secret spots when she’s standing like this. There’s barely any part of my face that goes untouched by her—her thighs against my cheeks, my nose buried in her mound, my chin wet and glistening, and then her hands are in my hair, yanking and pulling and she’s rubbing against me, grinding her face against me. She and Embry did this, I remember. In her office at Georgetown. I made her tell me all about it as I fucked her afterwards, I made her tell me exactly how Embry looked with his face between her legs, exactly how his expensive suit bunched and strained as he stayed on his knees for her, exactly how hard she came on his tongue. How wet his face was after.

I don’t like admitting to myself how much jealous pleasure I feel in overwriting this experience for her; it’s a toxic tendril of satisfaction knowing that whenever she thinks of having a man on his knees, she’ll have to think of both of us now. There’s nothing he can do to her that I can’t also do—no pleasure he can give that I can’t also give. Even now, with this huge hole ripped in our lives, I’m still jealous of him. I’m still so possessive of her that my bones threaten to crack with it. She is mine. Mine against my mouth, mine on my tongue, mine as I fuck her and beat her and cherish her in every way that a man can cherish the keeper of his own soul.

I don’t know how it happens, exactly, except that maybe thinking of Embry triggers it, but somehow I end up taking control. On my knees, my face buried in between my wife’s legs—and buried there at her command, no less—the Jareth inside me takes over, and my hands move the way I want them to move, digging points of pain into the tender flesh, finding all the places where I can push and press, all the places that resist. The lips of her pussy, the silky skin running back from her slit to her rear entrance, the hard cords of tendon connecting her thighs to her pelvis. The firm swell of pubic bone and the plush handfuls of her ass.

She shudders above me, the slight tease of pain ratcheting her tighter against my face and wetter against my tongue, and all of her body seems to twist into me, towards me, tugged on a tide that formed between us the moment we met. She opens and peels apart when I treat her like this, and it’s more than the pain—although admittedly the chemicals released by the pain help. But it’s me she responds to—my ownership, my possession. My desire pouring over her like water, like darkness, my heart pushing up naked and needy against her own, and demanding her heart in return.

And so we end up with her edged against a display case, one leg slung over my shoulder, with her barely hanging on for the ride and me tasting and touching her exactly like I know she needs. And what she needs is how I give it—a little demeaning, a little authoritative, a lot selfish…at least selfish in that imperial, demanding way she loves so much. I’ve got her folds spread apart, and I’m holding her open for me to lick in the way that satisfies me: deep inside to taste her, down to her anus to make her squirm in embarrassment, up to her clit to make her moan.

And then that word I dread hearing.

“Maxen.”