It was the last thing I ever could have imagined. Far more shocking than depravity. Far more powerful. I made an embarrassing sound into the phone. A shocked, wanton, needy little moan.
God, to be wanted in that way by Caspian Hart. To be claimed, protected, cherished. So that, for a little while at least, I didn’t have to be scared or small or lonely or failing.
I could be his.
Until I could be my own again.
I briefly thought about telling him he’d got it wrong. That I wasn’t extraordinary at all. But, honestly, I’d rather he kept his flattering delusions. Even if they made me feel like a con man. Like I was leprechaun gold and he was going to see me clearly at any moment: just a handful of pebbles.
“Can we”—I asked—“c-can we pretend I’m yours?”
He let out a long, not-quite-steady breath and I thought he was going to refuse. I wouldn’t have blamed him. I don’t think I could have come across as more stupid or pathetic if I’d been actively trying.
“Um, sorry, you don’t ha—”
“Yes.”
And just like that I was breathless. Unable to think of a damn thing to say. And, apparently, neither was he. The limitations of the phone had never seemed quite so eerie, even when he’d been nothing but a voice to me. Now that I’d seen him, felt him, tasted him, being only able to hear him felt noticeably less.
“If you’re mine,” Caspian murmured, “you have to do what I say.”
Fuck, I just couldn’t read his tone. I went for coquettish. “Oh really? Is that the rules?”
“It’s my rules.”
“I’m not very good at following rules.”
“But you like doing what I tell you.”
He had me there. I did like doing what he told me. I liked it a lot. Something stirred beneath my frazzled nerves. Oh, hello, libido. Guess you’re not dead after all. “It’s…” My mouth had gone dry on me. “It’s pretty rewarding.”
“You’d think differently if you knew me better.”
“Why? You have a dungeon you want to show me?”
“I don’t have a dungeon.” His most severe voice.
“Then you shouldn’t tease a boy.” He laughed and I relaxed a little. His or not, pretend or not, we were still us. Whatever that meant. However fragile and unlikely it seemed. “So…um…is there anything you’d like to tell me to do now?”
“I’d tell you, quite insistently, that you’re going to be fine. Finals aren’t as important as you think they are, and even if you came away with nothing, if you decided you couldn’t bear to sit a single exam, I’d still think the world of you. And then”—that enthralling tenderness vanished abruptly—“I’d point out that it’s very late and tell you to go to bed.”
“Oh.” I pouted to my empty room. “You’re right. That’s not very rewarding.”
“You might feel differently when you’re not exhausted tomorrow.”
“I’m trying, but as soon as I close my eyes, my brain starts whirling and I start dreading everything and then I just get overwhelmed.”
“But you’re with me now. Lie down, Arden. Rest.” And there it was. That irresistible mixture of authority and gentleness. Seducing and conquering and soothing me at the same time. “I’m not going to leave you.”
Balancing the phone as best I could against my shoulder, I unrumpled my duvet with my feet and wriggled under. I closed my eyes, trying to brace myself for a fresh flood of panic. Sure enough, even with the whisper of his breath over the line, the first image my mind conjured was a finals paper. A jumble of unintelligible word-spiders crawling over white. “This isn’t going to work. And you can’t stay with me all night.”
“I would, if you needed me.”
I was warm under the covers, so my shiver was all surprised pleasure. “You shouldn’t. I’m really not going to be able to sleep.”
“What do you normally do when you feel restless?”
“I…um, get up again, until I don’t?” There was no answer. But I could imagine his expression easily enough. The rebuke in the set of his mouth. The chill of his eyes. “Or maybe read a book? Wank myself into a stupor. The usual stuff.”
“Does it help?”
“Depends on the book.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Ngh. His voice. That note of command, cool and unyielding, like chains wrapping me up tight. “Um, yes. Tends to quiet my brain. If nothing else, it’s distracting.”
There was a silence. Distorted, as ever, by the medium of our communication, and unreadable.
“Then perhaps you should try that,” he offered.
“Are you telling me to?” It was out before I could think better of it.
My toes curled hopefully. Yes, I was still probably going to vomit hysterically over the steps of the Exam Schools and then fail all my papers, but that was tomorrow. Tonight there was phone sex with a billionaire. At least, I thought there might be. Or I’d just hideously embarrassed myself.
Was this a good pause or a bad pause?
If only I could see his face. Maybe he’d been joking? His manner was so controlled, it was hard to tell sometimes. Or maybe he’d meant for me to hang up politely and then proceed with the solitary vice.
“Yes.”
Oh phew.
Except shit.
I’d never done this before. And now I felt silly and unsexy and very conscious of the fact I was wearing a pink Superman T-shirt and a pair of leopard-print boxers. Rather than, say, a silk dressing gown or rouge and a leather collar or whatever else would be exciting for him.
“Um now?” It came out a weird little squeak.
“Unless”—I imagined the sardonic arch of his brows—“you’re otherwise engaged?”
“N-no, I’m good.”
“Take off your clothes.”
I mustered my failing bravado. “How do you know I’m wearing any?”
“Take off your clothes, Arden.”
“Yes, Mr. Hart.” I meant to sound cheeky, but it didn’t come out that way at all. Turned out he’d been wrong when he’d said I liked it when he told me what to do. I loved it. It made me feel everything he’d promised. Safe and taken and filthy and free.
I put the phone on my pillow as I dragged off my T-shirt and shimmied out of my pants.
“And no hiding under your duvet.”
How had he known? I pushed the covers out of the way. And settled gingerly back on my bed, completely alone, yet feeling more naked than I ever had in my life before. My skin prickled with a kind of wild awareness, heat rushing everywhere, making me shudder and flush and gasp.
“Are you ready?”
I nodded. Before remembering that nodding was stupid. “Um, yes.”
“Here are my rules.”
“I…I do what you say?”
“You do what I say. You touch yourself only to my direction. Your body is mine, your pleasure is mine, your hands perform my will, not yours. You don’t come until I allow it.”
I was already breathless. Already ridiculously aroused, my cock bobbing about like a superfan in a mosh pit.
“Put the phone on speaker and keep it close by.”
Fumbling, I did as he said, damp fingers sliding ineptly over the touch screen. “Okay.”
“Oh, and, Arden?”
He sounded farther away, a little tinny, and I missed the odd comfort of holding on to the thing that connected us. But probably he had other things he wanted me to hold.
“Yes?”
“Don’t keep anything from me. I want it all. Every sound you make.”
His voice was rough with need and power, but there was the faintest trace of…I suppose I would have called it uncertainty. Which was when I realized that even if he wasn’t arranged starkers on his bed with a raging hard-on, he was—in a way—just as exposed as I was. It was so close to being ridiculous, what we were doing. So impossibly tenuous. But he was trusting me. He was trusting me to listen, to obey, to accept.
To believe.
To let this be as real for me as if he was here in the room.
And I wasn’t going to let him down.
“I’m yours, aren’t I?” I said. “That means everything.”
“Yes. Mine.” Something like a groan crackled over the line. “God, Arden, I wish I could see you.”
“I…I…um…could tell you if you like? Or…send a picture?”
“You shouldn’t do that. These things always get out.”
“Yeah, because Random Naked Nobody is totally going to go viral.”
“You might be somebody someday. Tell me instead. How you look and how you feel.”
I opened my mouth but I had no idea what I was going to say. This was way more awkward than I’d thought it would be when I’d suggested it. “Well, uh, you kind of already know? I’m kind of short and skinny and…squinting down at myself is not the most flattering because all I can see are my ribs, and my cock, and my tattoo, and my rainbow toenails, and my knees look super-knobby.”
“Are you hard?”
“Yeah. Like fucking titanium.” I stared at my own dick, which was straining so urgently the foreskin had pulled almost all the way back, exposing the head, which looked shiny and vulnerable and glisteny with precome. I blushed in some crazy combination of desire and anticipatory embarrassment. I was going to have to tell him. “And…uh…dripping. I’m really, uh…I really want you.”
I was quietly dying, but he practically purred at me: “Well, I’m not ready to touch you yet.”
I closed my lips on a sound of frustration but then remembered my promise and let it free. And there I was: alone in my room, horny as fuck, and whimpering into my phone for the pleasure of a man in another city.
“What else?” he asked.
I let my head push against the pillow, exposing my throat to nobody but imagining the heat of his breath, the brush of his fingers, my pulse jumping to meet him. “God, I don’t know. I’m just me.”
“I wanted to see that day in Oxford. Strip those jeans off you, though they didn’t exactly leave much to the imagination.”
“Im—” My breath caught, thinking of him thinking of me, all those dark thoughts locked behind his cold eyes. “Imagination is overrated.”
“Your nipples are pierced, aren’t they?”
“How did you know?”
“I could see through your T-shirt. I think you had a butterfly in one.”
My nipples were tingling now, peaking like the attention-seeking little sluts they were. “Yes. Just a rainbow pincher in the other. It’s rings tonight, though.” Oh God, if he didn’t let me touch myself, I was going to die. Combust right there, leaving behind only ashes and quirky body jewelry.
“Put a finger in your mouth.”
It was what I’d been waiting for but still the instruction—the fact I was being instructed—startled me. But I did it, of course I did. I actually groaned, even though it was me I was tasting, me pressing past the barrier of my lips and into the damp heat of my mouth.
“Make it wet.”
I imagined it was him. Taking all the slick, tender places inside me.
“Touch your nipples. Gently though. Just a brush, a slide. The way I would.”
If you’d asked me to rate my nipples by sensitivity, I’d probably have gone fair to moderate. Maybe a bit more since I’d had them pierced. But when I danced my damp finger lightly over the left one, it felt like I’d been hit by lightning. Hit by lightning in a good way, an awesome way, arching my spine and crackling through my skin and dragging this sound out of me, needy and frantic. “Fuck. God. Caspian.”
He answered with a groan of his own. “I wish I really was touching you.”
“You are, oh you are.” I clenched my hands in my sheets to stop them acting without his direction. I could feel traces of drying moisture as sharply as if they were grains of sand. A deep, helpless shiver rolled through me. “Please touch me again.”
“Yes. Softly though. Tease.”
Maybe I should have been more aware of just how fucking weird it was, tormenting myself for a voice on the phone, but self-consciousness was dissolving, leaving only this dazed and desperate arousal. The same desire to please I’d felt kneeling at his feet.
I’d never really paid much attention to my own nipples. Well, who did? My lovers had sometimes. Sort of in the fashion you swing into a motorway service station: very much a waypoint on a journey. But, right then, they were tight and aching, magically transformed beneath the lightest caresses of my own fingers and wired directly to my cock, my arse, all the places I wanted to feel him and be possessed by him.
“OhGodohGod, Caspian, I need more.”
“Do you now?” There was something dark in his voice. Maybe I should have feared it, but I wanted it. The promise of exciting and terrible things sending little shocks of fearful pleasure all the way through me. “Pull on the rings.”
Whoa, I’d meant more touching. Not—
“Hurt yourself for me.”
“Oh no, please…I can’t…” Except somehow the need in him, the rawness of it, meant my hands were already there. “Don’t make me.”
But, of course, I wanted him to make me.
I wanted to be commanded.
“Do it, Arden. Do as I say.”
I was whimpering, gasping, and I’d barely done anything. It was the anticipation, more than anything, knowing what I was going to do. What I was going to choose to do. I liked it rough, sometimes, but it was different when it was somebody else. Pain, that was probably closer to shock, disappearing into pleasure almost as soon as it was recognized.
I squeezed my eyes shut and…tugged. Tugged hard. A metal-bright flash of sensation that tasted hot and coppery and forbidden. Made me yelp and groan, not sure whether I wanted to push into it or pull away or whether it held me bespelled and frozen in an all-feeling moment. A spill of dampness across my stomach that I thought meant I’d come, but thankfully turned out to be just a gesture of exuberance on the part of my cock.
“Ah. God. Arden, my Arden. You’re so good.” Barely audible, Caspian’s words rushing to me in an incoherent flood. “So beautiful.”
He couldn’t see me, of course. But I’d pretty much forgotten.
I was beautiful. I was alive. I was fucking fabulous. Tingly and blissed out and softly full of fading hurt.
“You…you want me to do it again?” I asked with perhaps unbecoming eagerness considering I was seeking permission to torture my own nipples.
He laughed at that. Not his usual laugh, but something rich and deep, full of joy and sex and wickedness. “Oh yes please.”
A hot dread rose up the moment he said it. Kind of a mindfuck. Wanting it and not wanting it, feeling terrified and daring all at the same time. I squirmed, fingers trembling, breath catching. “Ohnonononopleaseno.” And then I did it.
And it was glorious.
Kaleidoscopic free fall: my skin all full of impossible lights and my eyes full of tears. Thighs pushing wantonly wide. Cock slicking precome as if it was monsoon season down there. I wished he could have seen me, hot and wild and spread for him.
“Nrggh,” I said. Not sure if I could bear the awful bliss of it if he told me to do it again.
But he soothed me, murmuring the sweetest nonsense down the phone, telling me how brave I was, how strong, how much he wanted me. It should have been odd, the context, and the contrast, but somehow it seemed all of apiece, his cruelty and his tenderness, his darkness and his light.
“You deserve a reward,” he told me.
“I think…I think I’m already getting one.”
And then we were both laughing, both shaken, the rhythm of our breaths meeting in ways we couldn’t.
He made me touch myself then.
The stubble-rough line of my throat. The sensitive spot beneath my ears. The smooth interior of my forearms. My ribs and sides and flanks, the crease of my groin. The inside of my thighs. The inside of my elbow. The places behind my knees.
Everywhere.
Everywhere but my fucking cock.
My brain was blank and the noises I was making were practically animal and the pleasure felt as pure, as bright as pain, and I wasn’t sure if I loved it or feared it. Maybe both.
Then he said, “Beg me, Arden,” naked just like me.
And I did that too. I begged for the privilege of touching my own cock because, right then, I belonged to him and he needed it as much as I did. “Oh God. Please. Let me. I need it. Need you.”
Maybe it should have been embarrassing. Well, it was, except the embarrassment was muddled up with everything else, so things that I would have expected to feel weird, things I would have expected to feel scary—like being exposed and vulnerable and mindlessly horny—felt powerful instead. And sexy as hell.
“God help me,” he murmured, “you’re perfect.”
I was pretty out of it. Could hardly hear him over the thundering of my heart and the rasp of my breath and the hunger in my skin. Later, I’d remember how sad he sounded when he said it. How broken. But all I did at the time was scrabble against the sheets, hands reaching for nothing, and my head thrown back to bare my neck to my not-there lover. “Please, Caspian, please please, make me—”
“Now.”
It was the shortest wank of my entire life. It didn’t take much more than a couple of strokes and I came noisily, blissfully, and gratefully in this epic, spine-cracking, toe-curling rush. It was like my whole body was in it, not just what you’d imagine to be the relevant bits: all of me, mastered and consumed by pleasure.
By his will. Without even the brush of his fingers against my skin.
For a few seconds after, I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, couldn’t think. Complete mental and physical whiteout.
Incredible. Terrifying.
And then I noticed the silence. Sat up like the kid in The Exorcist. “Caspian?”
After a moment, he answered, “I’m still here.”
I flopped back onto my pillow. “I thought you’d gone.”
“I…no.”
“Like a sexual hit-and-run.”
Another pause. “Are you all right?”
“There’s come in my eyebrow. I think that counts as pretty fucking good, don’t you?”
His soft, slightly uncertain laugh. “If you say so.”
With one limp, still trembling hand, I pulled the duvet up to my chin. Felt it settle against various sticky places. I should probably have cleaned up, but I was too fucked out and I didn’t care. I curled up next to the phone and closed my eyes. Some parts of my brain tried to remind me that I had an exam tomorrow. But the only coherent response I could form was mmmmmmm, my mind as languid as a cat in the sun.
Suddenly, I thought of something important and wasn’t sure how to ask it. If it was even okay to ask, despite what we’d just done. “Um, Caspian?”
“Yes?”
“Did you…are you…can I…”
“I’m fine, thank you.”
“Yes, but—”
“I’m fine.”
Well that was crushing. “It…uh…didn’t do anything for you?”
“No, it did,” he said with mollifying swiftness. “I just have no intention of becoming a man who masturbates in his office.”
“It’s nearly midnight. You’re still working?” It didn’t seem a particularly glamorous image anymore. It seemed a lonely one.
“Not right now, clearly.”
I snuggled down. My limbs felt heavy and light at the same time. It was a good, blissy feeling, deep satisfaction and this…pride? Peace? “But you’ll think of me later, won’t you?”
“Arden.”
It was his stern voice but I was too sleepy, too content to heed it. “Don’t Arden me. You totally will.”
“Yes,” he said at last. His own small surrender. “I will.”
“And then I’ll think of that. It really is the gift that keeps on giving.”
He sighed in this put-upon way that—even over the phone—I could tell he didn’t mean.
I wish you were here so you could cuddle me.
“I…ah…I’m not very good at cuddling.”
Shit. I’d said that aloud? Sex had clearly blown up my brain. “There’s nothing to it. You’d just hold out your arms and I’d find some little nook to—” Okay, Arden. Stop. Reality check. “I’m never going to see you again, am I? Again.”
“No.” It was bewildering the way something you expected and understood could be still be fucking painful. “I can’t. What we did tonight was—”
“Amazing.”
“You…” His voice wavered and then steadied. “You make me want things I shouldn’t want.”
Sex? A relationship? “Why shouldn’t you want them? Everybody else does.”
“I’m not like everybody else.”
I yawned. I’d picked a bad moment to try and make a convincing or coherent case for keeping me. “Your tutor was right. You really do have a serious case of hubris.”
He laughed at that. Amused but also…not. Sad again. “You need to sleep. I think you can now.”
I let the reality of finals rise up from wherever Caspian Hart had banished it. Still scary, for definite, but the raw panic, the frantic, lonely distress: all gone. “Yeah I can,” I told him.
“You’re going to live a wonderful life.” I wasn’t quite sure how to answer that, but he went on. “And thank you for tonight. You gave me something very special. I will treasure it always.”
And then he hung up.
I was already half unconscious, but I did try to imagine him: his perfect hand on his perfect cock, his mind all full of me. Where would he be? In the shower? In his bed? What did his bed even look like? Probably some kind of handcrafted designer fantasy with a gazillion thread count Egyptian cotton sheets.
Except I couldn’t quite picture it. Picture him.
I wanted to. Wanted to imagine him relaxed, debauched, and dreaming of me. But I kept coming back to the balcony. The shadows curling around him as he smoked his solitary cigarette.
My hand was still clutched around my phone as I drifted into the most effortless, welcoming sleep ever.