Page 9 of After Dark
“Wait for me at the chair,” he told her, his voice that dark lash that spurred her on from behind. Almost as good as the actual lashes he liked to play with, and mark her with, when he was in one of his more wicked moods.
That he was sending her to his chair made sense too, and settled in her in the same way, like a deep breath. Arlo’s apartment was a penthouse with a long entry hall ofpolished hardwood that her knees remembered all too well. But even if they didn’t, the hard wood made itself known down its whole length.
She would bruise. She could already feel the tenderness beginning to bloom. But then, he wasn’t the only one who liked it when she bore the marks of this thing of theirs. Josette collected them like souvenirs, loved them while she had them, and sometimes mourned them when they were gone.
At the end of the hall, the apartment opened up. There were windows everywhere and this high up, there was no need for any kind of shades. That was why many of the windows were fitted with some of Arlo’s favorite things. Like O rings everywhere, because who could say where or how the urge would take him? Who could foresee the various ways he’d like to tie her up?
He had always been endlessly creative.
“Face down, ass up,” he told her when she made it into the great room, as he had hundreds of times before.
Josette waited to feel that sense of suffocation, of claustrophobia — all those powerful, negative, emotions she’d felt so intensely on her last night here that they had chased her out of their bed. Forced her out into the night on sent her on the run like a fugitive from her own panic.
But she didn’t.
Instead, she just felt that sweet settling sensation inside her, as if her entire nervous system was coming back online after the fight-or-flight she’d been in all this time. As if she wasfinallygoing to be okay.
She crawled over to his favorite chair, a big armchair with wide, flat arms that served a variety of purposes in the games they played, and placed herself directly in front of it where she knew he liked her. There was a rug on this partof the floor, thick and cozy, and she’d spent more hours here than she could recall. He’d taught her how to assume all his favorite positions here. How she should stand, bend, present, kneel. All the funny formalities that reinforced who they were to each other without words, letting them both slip directly into their dynamic no matter what the outside world had done to them that day.
Even now, despite everything, it was second nature to put herself into child’s pose, her ass in the air and her face on the rug, with her hands flat on either side of her head.
Then she waited. Josette could feel her own heat dripping out of her pussy. The breeze from the air conditioning she could feel on that part of her body made her think her skirt had gone up too high. Or had gone exactly where Arlo liked it to go, since he was the one who loved these skirts and had insisted she wear them.
I don’t like to wait,he’d told her, that silver fire in his gaze.
She took a quick inventory of her body, from the faint abrasions on her knees that she knew were deliberate on his part to the rawness in her throat. She could still taste him in her mouth, all of that bright salt that she woke up craving sometimes in the middle of the night.
Her mouth felt used and her lips felt stretched, and Josette thrilled to all of it. After so long, it amazed her that it took less than an hour for this man to make her feel likeherselfagain.
Arlo settled into the chair above her and she felt her whole body prickle into that high-octane, high-alert awareness because he was near. He didn’t say anything, but she wasn’t new to this, or to him. Even on the other side of an eighteen month hiatus, she knew he was studying her,looking for her weaknesses, and dreaming up new, deliciously depraved ways to exploit them.
All in service to that intimate connection he wanted so badly and she had never quite been able to give him.
That still ate at her.
But Josette told herself that what she needed to do this time around was accept that surrender was the point. That it didn’t make her weak. That there wasn’t anything wrong with her that she craved these things.
And on the other side, that all she could do was give him that surrender as much as she was able. It would either be good enough or it wouldn’t, and there wasn’t anything she could do about that.
She had tried so hard to be someone she wasn’t. She wasn’t going to do it again. She couldn’t.
“Rise,” Arlo told her in that firm, cool voice. “Strip.”
These were old rituals, and she thought it was something of a gift that he was giving her. To crawl inside this home she’d left, to position herself for his pleasure the way she always had. To follow his commands, sinking deeper and deeper into their dynamic with every word. He had always done that so well. He had always transitioned them from whatever might have held their attention outside into this interior world so completely, so seamlessly, because he’d always followed the same steps.
Patiently. Deliberately. Intently.
Oh, she’d tried to convince herself that there was something bad about this ritual at various points. That what it was really doing was breaking down barriers so that she would be susceptible to anything he asked, and it wasn’t that she was wrong about that. She wasn’t.
But also, it was hot.
And having removed herself from this for all thosemonths, she could understand now that it also felt safe. That every part of this felt safe. That when Arlo ordered her to strip down, it was to find her. Therealher.
Now Josette knew that she wanted that too. More than anything. More this time, because she knew how easy it was to lose herself instead.
She sat back on her heels and rose, keeping her eyes respectfully lowered. She removed her shirt first, undoing the buttons and slipping it off her shoulders and then sneaking a peek so she could enjoy the way his gaze narrowed at the sight of her breasts, her nipples already tight and hard. Then she folded the shirt carefully and set it on the arm of his chair. She stepped back again and shimmied out of the skirt, stepping carefully out of it because her heels were still so high. She folded it too and placed it on top of the skirt.
Then she stood before him to step out of one heel, then the other, before placing them to the side of the chair. Neatly side-by-side, because he insisted on order and that meant even mundane tasks like putting away the laundry became a sensual act.
