Page 47 of Unbind

If her body is a vision, then her face is a picture, eyes wide and lips parted. She’s breathing almost as heavily as me as she takes in the sight of me looming over her and the filth of my words. God knows how beautiful she’d look trussed up and restrained for me.

Earning that level of trust from her is a privilege I can’t conceive of, so I focus instead on her eyes, her mouth, her tits, the soft, supple skin of her stomach, and the need in me makes my body shake and my scalp prick with sweat and my abs spasm, and veins are surely popping in my neck and forearms as I jack the everliving fuck out of myself, fucking my hand as violently as I can, panting like I’m running a bloody marathon as my body prepares to deliver the most staggering orgasm.

The heat that floods me as it does is like molten treacle coursing through my balls, my veins. I jerk and jerk and come, shooting rope after thick white rope over her hips and stomach and tits, painting her with the creamy evidence of my astonishing desire for her. Her gasps ring in my ears alongside the wet smacks as I brand her, and it’s beautiful.

I thrust and thrust into my hand until I’m spent and I’ve adorned Natalie with all my arousal. ‘God,’ I say, looking down at my creation.‘Fuck.’

She watches in what appears to be stunned, breathless silence as I release my dick and use my fingertip to trace shapes on her skin with my cum. I swirl it in. I rub it over one dusky nipple and then the other, which has her moaning softly. I wish I could lower myself on top of her and kiss the breath out of her lungs while my seed lies sticky between us. I wish I could drag her into what I know to be an excellent shower next door.

But I know, even through my post orgasmic haze, that I’m on borrowed time here.

I’ve been on borrowed time all night. This has been a stolen moment, a fleeting portal to another kind of existence with Natalie.

My eyes flicker to hers, and I see peace in them. Satisfaction. She’s not embarrassed—yet. She hasn’t come to her senses—yet.

And I’d rather get her sorted out and into a cab before I see that hatred return to her eyes again.

‘Let’s get you cleaned up,’ I say, running cum-slicked fingertips down from her breastbone to her navel. ‘And I’m going to need a serious running commentary on how to get you back into that corset.’

Her little laugh tells me she appreciates my attempt at levity, however lame my joke might be.

But as I reluctantly extricate myself from between her legs and climb off the bed in search of a washcloth, I can’t help one last glance at her laid out like this on the sheets, covered inme.

I can’t help but commit it to memory.

27

NATALIE

When anxiety strikes, keep busy. That’s my MO, anyway. If my anxiety is a maelstrom inside me this morning then I’m a whirling dervish, whizzing around the studio like a cartoon character inside one of those tiny cyclones that keeps them spinning. Keeps them productive.

My ridiculous orgasm should have helped. God knows, the concussion-slash-bliss lasted as Adam cleaned me up and put me in a fluffy robe so I’d be covered up while I wove all that ribbon back into my corset, loosely enough that I could step into it.

It endured as he escorted me outside and bundled me into a black cab which he insisted on paying for up front as he instructed the cabbie to take me all the way home.

It endured as he leaned into the cab almost shyly before pressing a kiss to my cheek.

And it even endured through the shower I took when I got home—a brief one, because my tiny, grotty bathroom in my tiny, grotty flat is fucking freezing.

But this morning, I’m in the weirdest mood. It doesn’thelp that all my worries from yesterday have come rushing back in, more taunting and insidious than ever. It’s as if that hour in that room with Adam was a stopper that plugged the dam momentarily, and once that stopper was removed, the deluge was waiting to do its worst.

It also doesn’t help that I feel really odd about what happened last night. It’s part shame—the kind of guilty,how the fuck could I have done thatshame my girlfriends have complained about countless times after drunken one-night-stands, the kind my forced sobriety has mostly protected me from. I have no idea what I was thinking, what possessed me to go along with it, what gave me the courage to say the stuff I said.

I told him to come on my boobs, for God’s sake!

It’s part vulnerability, too. I feel fragile and exposed and a bit shaky. It seems Adam Wright is getting all my most vulnerable moments, the sexy and the not so sexy.

But I’m self-aware enough to know what it isn’t: regret. Because every time I allow myself to think about what went down in that room, I get this delicious, fluttery clenching low in my stomach. It was so ridiculously hot I could never, ever regret it.

It’s possible the memory of Adam looking at me with hooded, hungry eyes from between my legs is branded on my brain forever. And the visual of him jerking himself off more aggressively than seemed possibleoradvisable while looking positively feral will live rent-free in my head for the rest of my days. Dear God, it was so damn big, that thing. Soangry.

I made him lose his self-control, and he was a beast, and it was bloody fabulous. All of which makes it pretty difficult to regret.

‘So we now know the Loch Ness Monster is an actual thing,’ Evan muses. He’s been obsessing over the final version of a paper pattern for a bias-cut evening dress all morning. Once he’s happy with it, Carrie will digitise it and send it to the grading agency to be reproduced across the spectrum of women’s sizes. Actual Haute Couture brands tend to make each pattern from scratch, but as a demi-couture, we re-use our most iconic patterns and definitely the “blocks” off which they’re based.

He’s also been obsessing over Adam’s penis all morning, which is as irritating as it is unhelpful… and as unsurprising. He was intrigued by the nighttime boner situation, so it stands to reason that Adam having unleashed the full force of it on me last night has made him unbearable.

‘Mmm-hmm,’ I say absently, my eyes glued to the browser window showing our bank balance. It’s horrifying. Beyond horrifying. I need to pay one of our French mills tomorrow before they’ll release the three hundred metres of excruciatingly expensive custom jacquard we ordered, but paying it will mean there aren’t enough funds for payroll next week unless we have a bonanza weekend on our website, which I doubt.

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