Page 30 of Wristlocked
“Not yet.”Fuck.She’s the most perfect thing I’ve ever seen, suspended in my chains, trapped and furious. I want to absolutely annihilate her. Her wildfire hair hangs in her eyes, and a small welt is forming at her temple where one of the tails whipped her on the way down. Something of what I’m feeling must show on my face because her eyes widen and she presses her thighs together as I stalk toward her.
“I’m serious, Gale,” she warns, yanking on her wrists again. “Whatever you’re thinking, I’m not looking to be dominated or degraded.”
Degraded? I almost laugh. I pity the guy stupid enough to try that shit with her. Dominated? That’s another story. I reach up, gripping the chains above her clenched fists, letting myself loom over her.
“I know exactly what youthinkyou want,” I tell her. “You’re used to being the one in control. But this is my show, sweetheart,and I’m not your pretty boy.” I lean down and put my lips to her ear, dropping my voice. “And you never answered my question.”
She stops fighting the chains and goes still. I pull back to study her face, wondering if she’ll try to play dumb or lie to me.
“I wasn’t entirely sure what you were asking. And you didn’t exactly give me a chance to find out.” The memory of her lips opening to mine and the taste of her blood on my tongue floods my cock, and I shift, putting a little more distance between us. I need a real answer from her, and I’m not letting myself get distracted again. I give the chains a shake, eliciting a low whimper.
“You showed up at my tryout when you knew you had no business being there and then offered Chace up like a sacrifice to the gods of cirque to convince me. Why?”
“Are you calling yourself a god, Shepard?”
“For you? I could be. Now stop fucking around and answer the goddamn question.”
Without warning, she surges forward, bringing the lush line of her body flush against mine. The fragile tether of my self-control burns away like a lit fuse, and my hands slide down of their own accord in a desperate quest for contact. She opens her fists and threads her fingers into mine, and I’m no longer sure which of us is the fucking captive.
“I’mhere,” she says, blue eyes fearless and each word clear, “because if we ever figure out how to turnthis”—she squeezes my fingers and grinds herself against my cock—“intoart, we’re gonna burn the world down.”
My brain combusts, and I want to kiss her again so badly I can feel it in my teeth, an ache at the back of my throat. But if I start now, I won’t stop until I’ve fucked every hole in her tight little body, and we’ve got work to do first. I can’t help but grinat her expression when I pull away and her hips sway after me, savagely smug that at least the devastation is mutual.
Once I’ve lowered the chains enough for her to work her arms free, I grab the extra carabiners from my bag and make the hand loops. While I work, I explain the move I want to try.
“On the chains?” she asks, rubbing her hands over the red welts at her wrists with a small shudder I definitely don’t miss. “Won’t that be kind of…distracting?”
“Probably.” I give her a wicked grin and grab the back of my shirt, tugging it off over my head. “But the first one to getdistractedloses the game.” I toss my shirt in the corner and arch a brow, knowing she won’t be able to resist the challenge.
“Fine,” she says, then echoes my movements, stripping down to her sports bra. “Get ready to lose.”
I almost forfeit right there. She has ink sprawled down one side of her exposed torso, a series of black birds in flight—maybe ravens?—captured in soft lines like a dream her skin is drifting into. They trace along the arch of her ribcage and down over the delicate range of her abs, the last one disappearing into her shorts below the hollow of her navel.
Before I can follow them, another image hits me with a wave of déjà vu. Lyot Chace on his knees, peeling his shirt off to reveal the same birds, drawn bold and primal against his smoky skin. Jealousy washes over me in a hot wave. Not because they share the same ink—that doesn’t even surprise me—but because he got to be there when she went under the needle. Rib tattoos are seriously fucking painful, and the sensation of having another person carve art into your body is already erotic as fuck, even if you’re not into a little pain. Gia in the chair must’ve been a sight to make angels weep. A groan I can’t quite suppress and Gia’s throaty chuckle pull me out of the onslaught of unholy images and back to reality.
The move we work on is one I dreamed up in the gym one day, spying on Gia working handstands with her two rope friends. She has a killer fucking press up, and all I could think about, watching her with her ass in the air and her toned legs sweeping through the wide straddle, was what those legs would feel like wrapped around my hips.
So of course I put the fantasy in the act. It might not be the smartest move to work on, given our current game, but for me, at least, the chains are an advantage. Every time she plants her palms in mine and draws herself up my body or drops from the handstand onto my chest, her shifting weight grinds the back of my hands into the metal links. Fighting the pain keeps me from getting lost in the scrape of her damn fishnets locked around my waist or the slick caress of her abs against mine. Even with the discomfort, I’m semihard the whole time, a fact I have no way of hiding since she spends half the trick pressed against me. Every time she brushes against my cock, she gives me a knowing smile.
The sequenceworks,though, or maybewedo. By only the fourth run-through, she’s got her body placement down, shifting her weight to help me on the back roll and catching the base of my skull to counterweight the planche without losing her grip. She plays around with different shapes for her pose at the end, each one more provocative than the last, while I hang above her, dripping sweat onto her freckled breasts, insanely jealous of each drop.
As her confidence grows and the moves demand less of her focus, she starts teasing me, taking advantage of the fact that my hands are locked in the loops and dragging out every point of contact. When Viktor barges in without warning ten minutes before our session is supposed to end, Gia is wrapped around my torso and giggling, and I’m licking a line of sweat from her neck.
Her head snaps up, and she scrambles down and away from me like a startled kitten, while I curse and untangle my hands from the chains.
“What the fuck do you want, Mikhailov,” I snap, keeping my back to the door so he doesn’t get a look at my raging hard-on. Gia is standing with her arms crossed, eyeing him warily, and I want to tell her to put her fucking shirt back on while he’s staring at her but manage to keep that particular impulse to myself.
“Costa told Celeste you didn’t show up for class today,” Vik says, smug satisfaction dripping in his voice. “She wants to see you in her office.”
Fuck. Celeste doesn’t give a shit about me missing class; she’s pissed I ditched out on her last night without permission.
“Tell her I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” I can’t look at Gia, afraid to see the expression on her face.
“I’m supposed to bring you now.”
“I don’t give a fuck, Viktor. Wait outside.”
He leaves, and I retrieve my shirt from the corner, still avoiding Gia’s eyes.
