CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Tabby
The only light in the apartment was the orange glow filtering through the window from the streetlamp outside. My skin was covered in goosebumps despite the mild temperature of the summer night, and I shivered intermittently. The blankets beneath me were my only source of modesty. Lying at the foot of the bed were the pajamas I’d been ordered to strip from my body. I was overly alert, eyes wide to see the smallest movements, ears pricked to hear the slightest sounds. Anticipation flowed through my veins.
“You are going to scream for me.”
From the shadows, completely nude and wickedly erect, appeared Owen… yet, he wasn’t Owen at all. His flashing eyes were dark, hooded, fatal. The sculpted mouth from which I’d learned to expect witticisms and suggestive threats was still with unspoken promises to steal from me every last ounce of sanity I possessed. Each crevice on his lean, chiseled torso signaled warnings to me as he stalked smoothly past the window through the bath of amber light, and the muscles flexing in his arms urged me to get away now while I had the chance.
I wasn’t getting away. I was captivated, riveted to the spot where I lay with hands at my sides and thighs marginally spread.
“You are going to leave your body because it was never yours to have.” He reached the edge of the bed, and I felt his fingers come to rest on the top of my foot. “You belong to me.”
The fingers tapped… once, twice, three times.
“I want to show you something, and you will not make a sound. Am I understood?”
My head nodded of its own accord. Already, I felt as though my spirit had left my body and I was hovering overhead in the ether, watching the seduction.
He lifted his hand, and for a moment, I thought his demonstration was going to be with my omission. Then, a fingernail scaled my heel. I twitched, but the pressure he applied was well within my realm of tolerance. The nail journeyed north, venturing into the sensitive arch, and I nearly pulled my foot away instinctively. He didn’t take hold of my ankle or even shoot me a glance to remind me he’d commanded my silence. The lack of acknowledgement was perhaps more frightening than a stern detailing of the punishment I would receive if I disobeyed him. It indicated he was leaving me with a measure of control over myself rather than stealing it all from me, and in a startling revelation, I realized I trusted control of my body exponentially more in his hands than my own.
Higher that nail traveled, sliding experimentally across the ball of my foot and easing into the crease beneath my toes. A laugh started rising in my throat, and I swallowed hard to choke it down. He wasn’t done. A second finger joined the first to dance across the pads of my toes and dip into the webbing between them, and the tempo increased. I was overcome with a debilitating need to giggle, to release my ticklishness somehow, but I wasn’t allowed, and the unrevealed punishment was more frightening than the denial of reflex.
Faster and faster he scribbled. Jerks and jolts raced up my leg to my groin, and I felt moisture slipping from between my folds. I was going to break. I could feel it coming in waves, the loosening of determined threads. As if he sensed this, he brought his other hand down, and all at once, ten fingers rocketed across my sole.
I split apart, shrieking with bottled laughter. My knee shot backward to free my foot from his assault, and my thighs burst into flames. Owen didn’t react. He watched me giggle until the last chuckle died from my lips without so much as a wisp of interest. When I’d calmed, hiccupping a little, he placed both hands on the bed around my legs and leaned closer.
“You obeyed me as long as you could,” he said matter-of-factly. “You were able to control your physical reactions and adhere to the single guideline I gave you. Your mind and your body were at odds, and you battled hard for your mind. But you lost.”
Fear fluttered in my belly, and I remembered the tally sheet. If he was going to punish me now, I was sure to suffer immensely.
“I told you before that tickling elicits involuntary response, that it’s primal,” he continued. “Do you remember?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“That’s my ‘interest,’ so to speak. Involuntary response. My pleasure comes from taking you far beyond the boundaries of comprehension and coherence. Reason, logic, and rational response are advanced coping mechanisms developed to understand the world around us and our place in it, but the body is very much capable of discarding those mechanisms when forced. Our primal nature takes over when our survival is at risk.” His explanation was educational at face value, but the purr in his undertones made it more ominous, a foreboding description of what was to come. The space between my legs had become so wet that the air kissing it felt cold, and I shivered both with chill and terrified arousal.
He eased himself over me, crawling his way up the length of my body until his eyes were level with mine and I could smell the spearmint on his breath. Fire raged in his gaze as he lowered his mouth to my lips, and a tremor coursed through me as he shifted sideways to slide his tongue along my ear.
“I’m going to rip orgasm after orgasm from your helpless body,” he murmured softly. “I’m going to make you come over and over until you’re reduced to the quivering, feral animal you are. And when I’m done, when you can’t take any more, when you’re choking on your tongue and shaking more than a felon on the way to the electric chair, I’m going to fill you up and start all over again.”
If I’d had a chance to, I would have moaned from the sheer eroticism of his words, but I never got the opportunity. He closed his lips around mine, pulled my tongue into his mouth with his teeth, and slammed two fingers into my sex.
The unexpected penetration and the vibrations of pleasure it caused shocked me into silence, and I struggled to capture a soothing breath through flared nostrils. Owen mercifully broke the kiss as he hooked his fingers upward to greet my sweet spot.
“Already so wet,” he purred. I could hear the approval in his voice, but he added almost tauntingly, “You’re in for a long, long night if you’re so close to climax so soon.”
I groaned, and he nodded, appreciation shining in his eyes.
“Already clenching my fingers like a lifeline,” he smirked. “Oh, sweetheart, this will be so much fun.”
He slipped his thumb upward toward my mound as he continued to massage my G-spot, and I whimpered when he flipped back the canopy covering my clit to rub the tiny sphere hiding underneath. I was amazed how turned on I was with so little introductory stimulation. The gymnastics routine of tumbling and springing had already begun in my stomach, indicating I was on the verge of an orgasm, and all Owen had done was explain his fetish.
Somehow, he knew I was racing toward the edge, and I could tell by the sparkle in his eyes he was excited by it. There was no doubt in my mind he’d meant every word he told me. He was going to make me come relentlessly, and I was going to be left a shell of a woman at his capable hands. I couldn’t think of anything else in the world more horrifying, more deranged, or more arousing.
His thumb started sliding across the surface of the bead, dragging down as if to meet the fingers burrowed inside me, and the muscles in my legs hardened. I was so close, dangling over the cliff and looking down into the chasm below, only a light push away from falling to my imminent doom. And he knew. He wanted me to fall. He was hungry for my demise.
“Don’t hold back on my account, kitten,” he growled. “I haven’t even gotten started yet.”
He bent, and flicked his tongue across my nipple before taking it between his teeth.
I shattered.
My insides gripped each other with vicelike power. Pleasure rocketed through every nerve in my body. The nipple he’d licked rose to meet his mouth as my back arched and my hips retracted. I was flying.
“Good girl,” he praised through my haze. I shuddered as the orgasm faded and looked down at him with foggy vision. His fingers had paused for the briefest of seconds to allow me to come down, for which I was grateful, but the smirk on his lips was a visual sign I was foolish to feel such gratitude. Without warning, he began stroking and caressing me both inside and out, and he commanded firmly, “Again.”
So soon after my climax, I was overly sensitive, and I writhed on the bed to try and get away from him. He grabbed one of my hips with his free hand and held me in place with a smug shaking of his head. I wailed, my clit and my G-spot buzzing, but before the noise had even left my throat I was thrown headfirst into a second and infinitely more intense orgasm.
My legs were pushed back, forcing my knees up to my shoulders, and I was emptied. Hot, slick saliva met my labia as he sucked the folds into his mouth. His tongue drove inside me where his fingers had just been, and the digits coated in my lubrication slipped over my clit in place of his thumb. The sensations were twice as overwhelming, and I had to slam my hands against the mattress to stop myself from yanking full clumps of hair out of his scalp. His tongue swirled around, meeting every inch of my walls, a movement he mirrored with the fingers tracing my clit. But what claimed me for the third time was when he growled against me with predatory demand.
I had no idea how long it had been since he’d first started ravishing me, but if my body was any indication, I would have estimated hours. It wasn’t possible, though, because the natural light of nighttime hadn’t changed in the slightest. I realized in the midst of a fourth orgasm it had probably been less than ten minutes, and already my limbs were like jelly. The chances I would survive an entire night of climaxes were minimal.
“Oh, don’t get tired on me now,” he chided when the fifth leap into oblivion left me gasping for breath and virtually limp. “You’re capable of so much more.”
“I’m not,” I protested through trembling lips. I didn’t even have the energy to shake my head to emphasize the point.
“I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t speak so negatively about the woman who gets me this hard.” He leaned over, and a cloud of smoky relief billowed throughout me for the break. I heard him pulling the creaky drawer in my nightstand out and the clattering sounds of his shuffling within. When he sat back up, he was smugly displaying my only sex toy, a pink silicone bullet and its accompanying remote.
If I wasn’t so exhausted, I would’ve snatched it from him out of embarrassment. As I was, however, I couldn’t do anything more than ask in astonishment, “How did you know that was in there?”
“Sweetheart, everyone knows the nightstand is where women keep their secrets.” He flicked his finger, and the sound of buzzing took the place of the sound of his voice.
The bullet was pressed flat against my clit, and he maneuvered my legs over his shoulders, draping them down his back to allow him to fully bury his mouth in my mound. I gasped the second he wriggled his tongue through my cavern again. The brief break I’d received while he fetched the vibrator had somehow allowed the nerves that had grown numb from overstimulation to revive themselves, and I was much more sensitive now than I’d been. Lights popped behind my eyes. I moaned hoarsely, rocking my hips involuntarily against the shockwaves and meeting his lapping stroke for stroke.
This euphoria gripped me more quickly than the others had. Within thirty seconds, I was screaming my pleasure to the ceiling, clutching my sheets with all I had and bucking mercilessly. Owen didn’t pause, didn’t miss a beat, didn’t even slow down. Deeper and deeper, he forced his tongue, raking it across my blessed spot repeatedly while pinching and rolling my clit between his fingers. My mind went black for a second, almost like that moment after taking one too many drinks of alcohol, and when I came back into reality I was paralyzed.
“You’re not quitting on me already,” Owen hissed. He lifted the bullet just long enough for me to catch a breath, then replaced it.
Something was happening to me I’d never thought possible. My body was sacrificing its need for a refractory period in order to remain coherent. Owen’s statement about pushing me past coherence swelled at the forefront of my mind, and I realized he hadn’t just told me all of that to educate me about his fetish. He’d said it for this very moment, the moment when I began losing my grasp on sanity and peeked behind the curtain into my primitive self. He knew I was going to remember it and that it would ring like bells between my ears as he took strand after strand of my control with each orgasm, and it would make my slip into incomprehension that much sweeter.
I barely felt his tongue slip in again as the vibrator pulled me into ecstasy once more. Images flashed across the panorama of my consciousness. Dark, dangerous eyes. Black leather upholstery. Playing cards. Guttural noises poured from me as easily and constantly as the Mississippi current. My limbs bent and flailed and contorted in ways I wouldn’t have been able to manage in any other circumstance. The beast I saw in Owen when he was craving me had left his body to devour mine, and I could feel its teeth sinking into my being.
“Yes,” he whispered. He drew the word out over several syllables, a white noise backdrop to my surrender. “Your eyes are fading, sweetheart. I’m taking you.”
I sank deeper. What little color I could make out in the unlit room dimmed until I saw nothing but blackness, as if the fabric draped across the Club walls had been laid over my face. I didn’t notice Owen’s fingers gripping my chin until he jerked my face up toward the headboard. I was blind, but I could feel his breath on my cheeks.
“Tell me I have you,” he growled.
I had no idea if I opened my mouth. I didn’t know if I obliged him. It wasn’t until he jarred my chin again that I realized I hadn’t said anything at all.
“Tell me,” he insisted. “I need to know you’re still here.”
“You have me.” My words were nothing but air.
He released my chin roughly, bit my shoulder with relish, and thrust his entire length inside me. “I do now,” he groaned. “Come.”
I did. Hard, and on cue. He wasn’t even touching me aside from his dick buried deep and unmoving within my core. My body had officially become his.
He began rocking his hips back and forth, stroking all the way in and pulling all the way back. My senses were fading, but my nerves were igniting, and I mentally collapsed. Whether he was making love to me or not, I didn’t have the slightest idea. The only thing of which I was aware was the total and absolute claiming of my existence by the gluttonous gods of pleasure and erotica. I wasn’t even human anymore. It wasn’t possible. Humans didn’t fly through space and glide across existential planes. There was no transcendence for the mortal, not of this kind where nothing and everything happened at once and the dead danced amongst the stars and there were no words.
The last thing I remembered was a brilliant streak of ice-white light. The next thing I knew, I was on my side, sheets pulled up to my shoulders and firm warmth against my cheek. Something slow and gentle caressed my hair from scalp to ends. A faint scent of cologne feathered my nose each time I inhaled.
“Are you back, sweetheart?”
Warm and low, the voice was sugar in my ears. I blinked twice, unsure how to move my jaw to reply. It was then I realized I was lying with my head on Owen’s chest. We were curled up in my bed, naked and sweaty. He was running his fingers through my hair in perhaps the most soothing gesture he could’ve performed, and his other hand was resting lightly across my hip.
“I think so.” My voice was croaky, either because I’d injured it with excessive moaning and screaming or because I’d basically forgotten how my entire body functioned. Bits and pieces of what had happened since he’d shown up at my door were starting to fall into place, though a large portion was missing completely from my memory. A horrible thought occurred to me. “Oh my god, did I pass out in the middle of sex?”
He chuckled and turned my head very slightly, pointing to the window. “Look at the sky, kitten.”
Sunrise. I was missing a solid eight hours from my brain, and how much of that eight hours was sex versus sleep, I didn’t know.
“God!” I exclaimed. “I’m so sorry!”
I tried to push myself upright, but my limbs failed me. I couldn’t even shift my body off him, not that he intended to let me. His arms tightened around me, and he shook his head firmly.
“Absolutely not, sweetheart. You need to go back to sleep. Trust me.”
“But what about you? You’ve been up all night, haven’t you?” He nodded. “You must be exhausted. Sleep. I’ll fix something for breakfast.”
“When you figure out how you’re going to fix breakfast when you can’t even roll over on your own, I’ll let you up,” he said. “Until then, you’re staying right here.”
I wanted to protest, but to be honest, I was too exhausted. My energy had been sapped, and I was barely left with enough to speak — and that was after hours of recuperating slumber. I sighed and surrendered. He was right, anyway. There was no way I was going to be able to stand up, let alone cook.
“Sleep,” he urged, placing a delicate kiss on my forehead and resuming the stroking of my hair. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Neither was I.