Page 46 of After Dark
“Yes, sir,” she said, and he could hear the emotion in her voice. He could see it in her eyes.
“Vanilla people make vows, and maybe they mean them,” Arlo continued. “But you and I act them out. You and I take the ideas of wedding vows and make them into our particular games, fuck them in and out of each other, and make them our world. I don’t want this to change, Josette. I know that we will age, and the world will turn, but I promise you that I will always look at you this way.”
“And I will always surrender,” she said. And smiled. “Eventually.”
He pulled that last item out of his pocket and watched her react to it. Her eyes went wide. And then there was no holding back her tears, because they rolled down her cheeks and she made no move to wipe them free.
“Put your hands behind your back and arch so that your breasts jut out, please,” he said.
She obeyed him immediately and he moved forward to carefully, deliberately, place the heavy collar she’d removed eighteen months ago around her neck. Where it belonged.
It was a choker with an O ring in the center. It was not subtle. He fingered it where it sat.
“You will wear this color for five years,” he told her. “I have no doubt that we’ll be fine, but you still have doubts. You will master these doubts, you will stay with me, and in five years’ time we will exchange this collar for one that is not removable. Except with a key. That you will not have. You may thank me for this in advance.”
She was flushed and still crying, but she was smiling too. “Yes, sir,” she said.
“Bend over, please,” he told her. “I want that ass.”
She did as he asked and then lay there as he lubed up the butt plug, her favorite, because it was hard to handle and she always loved that. Then he walked around and took his time inserting it, while reaching around and playing with her pussy.
He intended to keep her ripe for him every single day for the rest of their lives.
That was exactly what he did.
That day, he paddled her after their wedding ceremony, face fucked her for a while, and then came deep inside of her, pounding her into the floor so that she could really feel the effect of that paddling.
They spent the rest of their wedding day in bed. He hadn’t set up any scenes, because they were too busy tangling themselves around each other and having the kind of sex that had no beginning or end, but rolled on and on.
That night, he marched her out to the ottoman and laughed when she scowled at him.
“You already paddled me today,” she said.
“I didn’t ask for notes,” he replied. “And I’ve decided that there will always be nightly spankings, Josette. Unless we’re apart. In which case, you can be certain that I’ll find other things for you to do. I think that you like them.”
She opened her mouth to reply— his wife, his submissive, his lover, his everything. He shook his head. “It won’t end if you lie,” he told her. “We’re past that. But I guarantee you, you won’t like what happens.”
Josette blew out a breath. Her gaze was deeply reproachful, but she lay herself over that ottoman and presented him with an ass already delightfully red, and he honored that sacrifice by giving her a full twenty new strokes.
Hard.
Somehow, in thirteen days, they’d fixed not only the eighteen months she’d been gone, but the misunderstanding of the previous three years.
Arlo didn’t fool himself into believing that their life would be without problems.
But he knew now, at the base of it, was this.Them.
And he loved all of her, so he didn’t need her to loom around the house, living some kind of trad wife ideal. Unless that was what she wanted, but he knew better.
So didn’t surprise him, when, lying in bed on their wedding night while he smoothed that healing salve all over her ass, talking about possibilities and dreams they’d never quite believed could come true, she very shyly suggested that maybe, just maybe, she might be the perfect person to talk finances with submissives who were either afraid to speak or unused speaking about such things at all.
“I think that it would be hard to imagine something better suited to you,” he told her. “Or more of a gift to the community.”
He thought he could see their future there, cracking over her face like dawn over the water. She lit up. And he knew why. Because he was making it clear that not only did he love her, but that she had the same community that he did.
It was all connected. This was their life, their people, their world. She didn’t just have him, she had everything else too. And she’d earned it by simple virtue of being her.
On the night of the club’s opening, he proudly showed her off to all of their friends — naked, collared, and his.
With a wedding ring besides—and theirforeverstamped like red paddle marks into both of them, visible from across the room, marking them indelibly.
