Her Secret Pleasure (3 page)

“We’ve talked about this before and I’m fine. I don’t care. We don’t have that kind of relationship and to be honest, I don’t want one and neither do you. Give me a call later this week and we’ll see what’s going on.” I forced a laugh as he grabbed me around my hips and hooked his fingers around the edge of my panties. He was tall and beautiful as he gazed hungrily down at me.

“You were gorgeous tonight, Kara. Some nights I can barely keep up with you.” He leaned down to kiss me and I turned in time to catch it on the corner of my mouth. He held my eyes and brushed a wild hair from my face. “There’s something else. I don’t know if I should tell you this.”

I stiffened in his arms and leaned back, but he kept a firm hold on my hips and forced me to gaze into his dark eyes. “What is it? Just say it already.”

Marcus closed his eyes, pulled me in close to him, and touched his forehead to mine. “You cried his name again.”

Embarrassment flooded my face. I jerked back from his grip and pressed my hands to my mouth.

Guilt. Horror. It had only happened twice before, but every time I saw the hint of hurt in Marcus’s warm eyes. He was the man I gave my nights to. He was the one I wanted. To cry another man’s name while he controlled me was beyond inexcusable.

“Oh, Marcus, oh I am so sorry. I never realized. I don’t even remember.” Marcus pulled me in and I pressed my face into his hard, warm chest.

“You were deep in what was happening to you. It’s forgivable. And he was your first. That’s something that never goes away between two people. It doesn’t matter that he’s been gone for a long time now. I forgive you. And hell, kiddo, I have no room to complain if I have to escort other women to my events instead of the woman I sleep with nearly every night.” His voice rumbled against my ear, the
thumpthump
of his heart echoed between each word. I closed my eyes and let him hold me and for a moment what we had felt real.

But then Sean’s beautiful, boyish features flooded my thoughts. His smile, his long, sinewy muscles and strong jawline. His stark, glass-blue eyes. After six years, I could still smell his cologne and remember the soft feel of his dark brown hair between my fingers.

I shook my head to clear it and gazed up at Marcus’s guarded features. He was darker, older, more experienced than the Sean in my memories. They were so different, how had I mixed them up while Marcus was inside of me?

“It’s not fair to you. It won’t happen again, I promise.” He nodded, though neither of us could be assured it wouldn’t. Of all the things that could anger him, this was never one of them. Maybe it was our great equalizer. He took other women as his date in public and in my secret heart I loved someone else.

“Sure you won’t stay?” he asked and I nodded reluctantly.

“I should go.”

He walked me to the door after I finished dressing and I didn’t look back at him until the front door closed and I knew he was no longer watching. The empty front door meant something. He had his life when I went home. I had mine.

I didn’t know how they could ever be the same.

3

____________

 While Marcus tied me down, it had rained. The streets were wet and black and within the few blocks to the subway station, my pants felt damp against my ankles.

The smell of him lingered on my skin while I walked.

For Marcus and me, it was never meant to go on this long. We’d met at a fundraiser for the public library. He’d apparently spent the whole party following me around with visions of sexy librarians dancing in his head. He approached, all cocky and self-sure of himself, and somewhere in our benign, boring conversation he’d leaned in close, touched his lips to my ear, and told me he wanted to take me home.

Things like that didn’t happen to girls like me. They just didn’t. A handsome, wealthy man excited by the sight of me? It had felt like a dream, like a more literary version of Pretty Woman but without all the hookers. Somewhere between his smooth voice and my trembling thighs, I’d acquiesced to his request. It should have been a one night stand, but then he discovered how much I craved a dominant man and I discovered how lonely he’d been for a girl who thrived on pleasure and submission. That one night stand became a nightly occurrence for weeks.

I had always been practical and disbelieving, and my relationship with Marcus was no different. Eventually he’d want to settle down and it would have to be with someone who photographed well.

It was late enough that the subway station was empty when I arrived. I swiped my card, crossed through the turnstiles, the
chunkchunkchunk
amazingly loud in the quiet underground. My heels squeaked on the tiles and every fourth light flickered like a horror movie. A whole life time riding these rails at all hours of the day and night and I still felt nervous when I was alone.

I was a little early for the next train so in the dim, quiet station I found a seat along the back wall, wincing when I sat down, and waited. My wrists ached tonight too, so did my thighs, especially where his last whip had fallen. We’d been at it a long time, and the hours showed on my pale skin as I pulled my jacket cuff up my arm. Bruises, soft but visible, colored around my wrist where I’d been tied. Despite their inconvenient placement, I smiled and touched them gently. I rarely bruised and had never been interested in that level of play, but tonight they felt strangely comforting, like taking a picture of a memory. I could still feel him inside of me if I closed my eyes.

But when I closed my eyes, I also saw Sean Castle.

We collapsed against the navy blue sheets, panting but saying nothing as our orgasms lingered, each wave punctuating our heavy breathing. I crossed my arms beneath my face and snuggled my cheek into them, blissful. Sean always left me feeling drugged by his ravishment. Some nights I hovered in this foggy, dream-like space where my orgasm kept me pulled under. Minutes or hours might pass before I came through to the other side, always in Sean’s arms, always cared for until I was myself again.

Tonight we were in it together. We’d tried something new, a toy, and I’d raged twice in the last thirty minutes alone. I could barely move and my exhaustion was pure joy.

“You’re beautiful,” Sean whispered against my birthmark before falling onto his side beside me. I didn’t answer because I really believed it sometimes when he said that and I didn’t want to spoil the rush of pleasure squeezing my heart with a dose of disbelief. He propped his face on one hand and with the other he stroked the sweat-slick skin from my shoulders to the sway at the small of my back. “And you’re glowing. You really liked that.”

“Oh yes, mmm.” I purred and squeezed my thighs, causing a final shiver to pass through me. “Let’s add that to the box.”

The box. We it hid under my bed where his brother wouldn’t accidentally discover it at his place and my roommate was never home enough to notice it. Sean had found it at an antique store and it was large and heavy with fairy tale engravings along the top and sides. Three bears danced with a girl, a dragon climbed across the lid with mermaids, monsters, and beanstalks. The Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter perched atop two metal corner brackets at the front of the lid. A line of wicked witches danced naked around a raging fire.

We’d both fallen in love with it and because we couldn’t decide which of us saw it first, decided it would be our first purchase together.

We filled the box with all the pieces of our secret pleasures we chose to keep. A weathered black belt he’d worn since he was in high school. A thick, heavy flogger we’d found at a specialty store. Music that turned us both on. Dried flower petals from a particularly romantic scene we’d played early on. Rope. Letters we’d exchanged detailing our fantasies and fears. A flash drive of very private pictures. A camera. A thick spool of burgundy ribbon. A gag and three different blindfolds.

Now we could add the narrow, thin vibrator we could start exploring anal play with, something we were both scared and excited to try out. Anything that either of us did not enjoy never made it into the box.

He growled playfully and nipped my shoulder. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

I smiled and closed my eyes, enjoyed the sensation of his eyes on my body.

“I could watch you all night long like this. You’re shaped like a violin. Classically beautiful.” He traced my shoulder, down to my waist and back over my hips and ass. I laughed softly, felt a blush flushing my skin.

“A cello, maybe.”

Sean said nothing and moved in close to my body. He laid his head against my back and curled his arm around my waist. We drifted in and out of sleep like that for hours, missing our first classes, forgetting about the rest of the world.

A young couple shared my subway car, but otherwise we were alone. She sat in his lap, tiny hips fitting snuggly into his arms. She rested her head against his body and he stroked her hair while she slept. They looked like they’d been out all night long, city dirt clinging to their wet pants. She trusted him utterly and he would protect her from the dark city with his whole being.

I watched them until the train pulled into my stop and not once did they release each other or notice me.

Jealousy clouded my heart. I’d never had that. Not just that I wouldn’t fit on anyone’s lap, but that openness, that shameless affection. Sean and I…no one knew about us. Eventually I confessed our relationship to my best friend Maris, but only after it was over. It wasn’t that we lied, but we were too busy dealing with the nature of our sexual relationship, our exploration of his dominant side, my submissive needs, and all the complications and rules we had to figure out along the way. We couldn’t explain that to anyone. We didn’t even know what to call it ourselves.

And…I suspected like Marcus, he’d have to face the obvious question of why anyone as beautiful as him would be with someone like me. Me in my oversized clothes hiding my large breasts and hips. There wasn’t a stylish, manicured bone in my body. I floated through college with a tote bag of books and laptop in one hand and an open book in the other.

Sean, well, he drew people to him. They wanted to know him, to soak in his personality. He wasn’t just smart, he was ambitious and with his brother they were a powerhouse on the soccer field, in the classroom, at parties. Girls loved them, though Zach was the playboy while Sean disappeared when it came to actually choosing one. He dated some before we started sleeping together, but if he dated while we were together he was careful to never show them off.

It was safe to say I wanted more, but at the time I didn’t have it in me to say so. I didn’t want to press my luck and lose what I had. Six years later and I wasn’t really sure I’d changed much in that department.

In my head I knew I should have asked for more. Demanded it. It was one thing to love myself, another to believe someone else might want to, too.

With Marcus and Sean it also didn’t help that they came from money and I’d never known what it was like to not worry about how to make it from paycheck to paycheck, at home with my mom or on my own.

I left the couple at my subway stop and walked the wet streets home. It was after one in the morning and I was alone when I climbed the stairs to my little brownstone apartment building. I splashed my way up the steps, grabbed my mail, and headed to the second floor, trailing water the whole way. Ms. Glass from downstairs would have a fit in the morning.

Molly, my little midget cat, hopped off the back of the couch and ran to greet me as I fell into the apartment, dropping my bags by the door and my mail on the table next to it. I gave her a pet and was about to make a beeline for the bedroom to collapse from exhaustion when something in my mail pile caught my eye.

I don’t know why I stopped and pulled the glassine envelope from the others. I received advertisements sometimes for new restaurants or boutiques opening in my area. My neighborhood was trendy, filled with young out-of-college professionals, so we tended to be a plum target for marketing campaigns. I rarely went to any of the places and the adverts ended up in the trash more often than not.

But there was something about this one. The foggy, almost transparent envelope hinted at gorgeous purple stationary hidden inside. It was hand addressed to the Residents of the Philomel Neighborhood.

I broke the seal and removed the purple parchment. The words
EAT ME. DRINK ME.
were written in glossy black text at the top, surrounded by flourishes that wove down and around the rest of the invitation.

Welcome to Wonderland, the newest, most arousing restaurant to make its home in the big city. Wonderland is an adult experience - a lush, decadent atmosphere paired with unusual dishes and exotic wines that will take you far from the real world into one of exploration, pleasure, and need.

Every meal feels like dessert. Every ingredient uniquely picked with your desires in mind. Let us inspire you. Follow us down the rabbit hole and discover what breathless compulsions wait for you. All you have to do is say yes.

My hands shook as I pulled the small, glossy postcard from the envelope. The restaurant, a dark, exotic looking building, was featured on the front. Metal laser cut trees grew up from either side of the doors, limbs curling long and fairy tale-like flourishes across the face of the building. Purple light glowed from beneath the wooden double doors. The advertisement promised luxurious decadence, fairy tale pleasure, and feverish infatuation.

I turned the card over and my heart squeezed its way into my throat and threatened to suffocate me.