Page 38 of For Real

For a moment, I was frozen, caught between instinctive surface resistance and the deeper-set, more powerful desire to do whatever he asked. Bend my will to another’s pleasure.

As always, desire won, leaving me filled with a strange energy and an even stranger peace.

I’d left my clothes in a pile nearby, something only a nineteen-year-old dom would likely have let me get away with. I leaned over to pick up my tie and—

“Uh, Laurie, did I say you could use your hands?”

I shuddered, freshly aroused and freshly shamed, and bent down to lift my belt between my teeth. Toby made another of his breathless, excited noises, which gave me just enough strength to go through with it. A handful of seconds later, he was taking it from me, his thumb stroking over my lips in praise and reassurance, soothing the sting of mortification.

“Now your tie.”

I struggled again, but he didn’t push me or rush me, and so—somehow—I did it. The repetition didn’t make it any easier, but it took me a little deeper, drew me away from myself, towards Toby and the submission I wanted to give him.

He draped my tie over a shoulder and stood for a moment, turning my belt between his fingers, sliding the end through the buckle and twisting it this way and that. “Right.” He frowned. “Okay.”

He didn’t seem to be talking to me, but he’d given me his patience, so I gave him mine. In truth, I would have been content to wait at his feet as long as he wanted. Even the rub of the carpet was fading into the experience—the pleasure of pleasing and the sharp edge of anticipation.

“Right,” he said, more decidedly this time. Then he stepped behind me, still holding my belt, and crouched down.

The heat of his clothed body rushed over my naked one, and heedlessly, I leaned back, seeking him. I expected a rebuke—I surely deserved one—but his arm went round me, steadying me, holding me tight. I trembled against him, as helpless in the face of kindness as command. I turned my head a little, his name spilling from my lips before I could stop it.8

His mouth grazed the corner of mine. “I’m here. Can I have your hands?”

I gave them without a thought. Just then, I would have given him anything.

I had no idea what he’d managed to do with my belt, but the cool glide of leather encircled one wrist, then the other. He pulled somewhere, and both loops tightened, cuffing me, trapping me. I drew in a short, sharp breath that seemed to bring no air to my lungs.

God. Naked and helpless. The fear went straight to my cock.

Toby kissed my neck. “This okay?”

No. No. No. But all I uttered was a breathy, lust-soaked groan. And when Toby reached around to drag his hand up the straining, dripping length of me, what I said was, “Oh yes.”

He released me, and I whimpered, rocking my hips in pursuit of his touch.

“Fuck.” Toby’s breath was hot against the skin of my shoulder. “You’re fucking amazing when you’re desperate. But you don’t get to come, okay? Not until you’ve shown me you’re sorry.”

Perfect. Yet again. I nodded miserably, my cock already aching.

His nails scraped lightly over a nipple, and it was all I could do not to beg. I had no idea what for, but it would have been a release, of a kind, to unravel mindlessly all over him.

Then he slipped the tie over my eyes, and I lost everything in silk and darkness. “T-Toby…I–I don’t want—”

“I know.” His voice shook like mine, the same mixture of excitement and trepidation.

He didn’t move, holding the tie rather than knotting it, leaving me a moment to accept the powerlessness he was giving me. “I don’t… I’m…” Afraid. But I couldn’t say it. In case he stopped.

I wanted to be afraid for him.

“I know,” he said again. “But I want this, so you’ll let me.”

I closed my eyes behind the blindfold. Darkness within darkness. “Yes.”

He pulled the silk tight and tied it into place, kissed me again, and stood. I tugged at the belt wrapped around my wrists, testing. It held. That comforted and frightened me in almost equal measure, swirling into the gathering maelstrom of desire and submission.

“Laurie. I can totally see what you’re doing.”

What was wrong with me? I never fought, never pushed. At least not for years. Not with the strangers to whom I had given, in retrospect, so little. I had with Robert, but that had been different, part of the rhythms of what we did together. And now it was different again. Not some hollow performance or the shadow or something I’d shared with someone else.

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