Bound to Accept (15 page)

Suddenly, I feel very tired. “May I be
untied now?”

“
Let me clean you off
first.” His soft towel rubs against my breasts, and I mewl a little
at the contact. He blots more gently, taking extra care around my
nipples, and then removes what's on my neck and face.

I wrinkle my nose as I catch a whiff
of the come-covered towel. “Do you know what I just realized semen
smells like? It smells like that artificial butter they put on
popcorn at the movies.”

“
Fuck. You just ruined
movie popcorn for me forever. Now I'll be thinking the grease spots
look like come stains.” He unties my blindfold, and I see that he
is smiling, regardless. “Hello, popcorn-ruiner.”

“
Hi,” I say
shyly.

“
What did you think of my
clamps?” He lightly touches one of my nipples. A dull throb of pain
shoots through my breast, an echo of the pleasure I just
experienced. “Were they worth trying?”

“
Uh-huh.”

“
What about when I fucked
your breasts with my cock? Did you like having me come all over
you?”

I'm not exactly sure how
to respond to that. When he puts it in those words, it sounds
gross, but that's not how it
felt
at all. “I liked knowing you wanted me so badly,”
I say at length. “It made me feel sexy.”

“
You are,” he assures me,
kissing me on the mouth. “So much so that I can hardly stand
it.”

“
Did you really sneak away
from work to masturbate?” My lips brush against his with every
word.

“
Maybe.”

His penis is still poking through his
fly. I watch it jerk a little. A human lie detector.

Tristan sees where I am looking and
shakes his head. “Stop staring at my cock, you insatiable hussy.”
He carefully tucks himself back into his pants, biting down on his
lower lip as he does. The bulge remains quite visible, causing the
zipper track to swell outwards.

He reaches around me to unbind my
wrists. “Make sure you massage your arms a little,” he says. “It
helps get the feeling back in.” He goes to work on my legs. “I
tried not to tie them too tightly. That's bad form—it damages the
nerves.”

I collapse back on the bed when I'm
free. After being confined, it feels good to stretch out. My nerves
feel fine, though. Tingly, and smoldering, but unharmed.

Tristan lies beside me, propping
himself up on one arm. His eyes rove over my body. “Just look at
you,” he says softly. “What a picture.”

“
Huh?” I glance at him.
“What do you mean?”

“
Lounging around, with
your pants unbuttoned and your top off, letting me ogle you like a
dirty old man. That's what I mean.” He pushes a lock of hair off my
face. “You were so shy at first. Now you look so relaxed. I like
seeing you look so at ease in your own skin. It's very sexy. It
means that you trust me.”

“
I do trust
you.”

He studies for me a moment. “Do
you?”

“
I let you tie me up,
don't I?”

“
You certainly do that.”
He frowns for a moment. “I think we're ready to have sex now. I've
managed to stretch you a little. You don't cringe as much when I
finger you anymore. That first time, you were thinking about using
your safeword. I could tell. But you didn't, and I thought that was
brave. Now you seem to like it.”

He's right. When we
sixty-nined, he slid two fingers inside of me and it hardly hurt at
all. Granted, I had other things on my mind—
and in my mouth.

“
Why are you blushing?” he
asks curiously.

“
I was thinking about how
your cock felt in my mouth when we had oral sex at your
place.”

Tristan gets that expression I am
quickly learning means that he is both horny and amused. The one he
gets when he's torn between teasing me and going into Dom mode. He
struggles with that for several seconds, and it's pretty
entertaining, seeing that fleeting loss of control. “Well, the good
news is, I no longer have a semi. The bad news—it's a fully loaded
automatic.”

“
Just make sure it doesn't
go off in your pants.”

“
You are an evil
creature.” He slings a leg over me, and uses it to pull me closer,
letting an arm fall over my waist when I'm in reach. “Diabolical.
You deserve all the punishments I give you, and then
some.”

There's a beat of silence.
I can feel his heart tapping out a frantic rhythm against the back
of my head. Is he nervous? Do
I
make
him
nervous? I snuggle against him, and his heart
rate increases. “So,” I say. “Sex.”

“
Yes, sex.” His fingers
drag along my hips, dipping beneath the waistband of my shorts. “Do
you want to?”

“
Yes.”

“
When?”

“
Soon.”

“
Now?” he asks, skittering
his fingers back up my waist to tickle me.

I slap his hand away. “No, not now.”
My laughing subsides, and so does my breathing. Feeling his slow
breaths puff against my ear is very relaxing. Before I know it, my
eyes start to slip closed. “How about Saturday? You don't work this
Saturday, right?”

I feel him shake his head.
“No.”

“
Then let's have sex on
Saturday.”

“
Sex on Saturday,” he
murmurs. “Sounds like the name of an emo band.” He nuzzles my ear.
“I'll clear my schedule, then. The whole day will be just for
you.”

My newest book is done.

I don't think I've ever written a book
this quickly before. Of course, I've never had this much raw
material to work with for my erotic scenes, either.

I'm calling it
Black Masque
.

It's a little cheesy, but basically I
went with the woman-who-dances-at-a-strip club idea and mixed it up
a bit. Now it's about a woman who works at a strip club to pay for
her little sister's medical bills. She's in love with her best
friend, but since he's rich and she's not, she pretty much assumes
that he'll never look twice at her—at least not in That Way—because
of her dire straits.

Obviously, when said best friend comes
into the strip club and pays her manager a million dollars to have
sex with her, she is horrified and disgusted…but also very aroused.
Especially when she discovers all the weird kinks he's interested
in, and that he calls her name out when they have sex, even when he
doesn't know it's really her.

I think that's a bit icky, thinking
about someone other than the person you're sleeping with (even
though in this case they are one and the same), but I'm sure my
readers will eat that up. They love the drama. Several of them have
already messaged me, telling me they've pre-ordered the
book.

I'm still in the process
of the final editing, transcribing some of the stuff I wrote down
in the notebook from those times when I was out with Tristan, but
it's going well. My cover looks beautiful—a midnight blue mask
studded with rhinestones that look like beads of dew, surrounded by
thick, soft feathers—and the sex is, well,
hot
. And kinky.

Thinking about hot and kinky sex
reminds me of what Tristan and I talked about earlier today,
though, and my mind goes blank. I can still feel the taut pull of
the clamps as he yanked the chain with his teeth, rubbing me
between the legs until I was raw and needy for him.

After everything we've done together,
it is still difficult to believe that we haven't already done it. I
know what he tastes like. I know what he smells like. When I close
my eyes, I can picture his face when he's about to come. And yet,
we haven't had sex.

I wonder how he's going to fuck me,
whether it'll be rough, gentle, or some combination of the
two.

I wonder if he's going to tie me up,
or if he's going to leave my arms free for once so I'll be able to
explore his body, touch him with my hands the way I've been dying
to. I wonder how much it's going to hurt.

Chapter Ten

I spend Friday evening getting
ready—shaving, tweezing, washing. Laying out an outfit. Changing my
mind. Repeating the process about twenty more times.

This is like high school
all over again. Except I was far more immature in high school, and
the word “penis” was likely to send me giggling from the room. I
can't imagine what I would have done if I'd actually
seen
one. Probably
giggled even harder, or said something totally cringe-worthy, like,
“But it looks like a
Goomba
.”

(Lydia told me that's what she said
when she had sex for the first time. She was thirteen, and was
convinced that her boyfriend's penis was a trick, and that he was
hiding the real one somewhere else.)

I buy a bottle of Cabernet since I
know that he has always preferred the reds, and has been buying the
sweet whites for my sake. I also buy a box of condoms (in case he
forgets, not that he will), and a little something extra for
Tristan. That little something stays folded up in the bottom of my
purse, and just thinking about it, and what he'll do when he sees
it, makes me feel fluttery.

By this time tomorrow, I will no
longer be a virgin.

It probably goes without saying that I
don't get much rest. My thoughts writhe and undulate like the naked
bodies in my imagination as everything I've learned from sex ed.
and romance novels floods my head in a tantalizing rush. Sleep is
the furthest thing from my mind. I must have gotten some, though,
because at some point I close my eyes, and when I open them again
it is daybreak, and quavery gray light floods my window.

Tomorrow has become today.

Tristan said he was coming
by at four-thirty, which means I have six hours of limbo to endure.
I fill the gaps with meaningless tasks. I work on
Black Masque
. I feed
Garfield. I obsess over what may or may not be a zit. I brew coffee
and then become too nauseous to drink it.

Every minute is an hour. Every hour, a
lifetime.

At 3, I get dressed. I ended up
deciding on a simple blue dress with an empire waist. I am told it
makes my boobs look big and my waist look small. It's also very
comfortable and looks good with my flats.

I keep my makeup very simple—mostly,
because I'm terrified of messing up anything too complicated and
not having time to redo it. Liquid eyeliner. A bit of blush.
Rose-gold eyeshadow that brings out the reddish motes in my hazel
eyes. Baby-pink lipgloss. Simple. Easy.

I don't bother eating anything; I'm
too nervous. My stomach is twitching with what feels like the
entire Monarch butterfly migration. Every time I open my mouth, I
half-expect to see one of the orange-winged critters fly
out.

Tristan and I are going to have
sex.

I have thought about this moment,
desperately wished for this moment, for fourteen fucking
years.

So why am I terrified out of my
mind?

My phone buzzes. As I pick it up, the
clock on my phone ticks to 4:30, exactly.

I'm here.

He's here.

He's
here
.

Is my body ready?

Garfield tries to run past me as I
lock up. I push him back with my foot and shut the door. I can hear
him scratching against it even as I turn the key.

Slowly, I make myself face the street.
My heart gives a nervous leap in my chest. Tristan's black Honda
Civic is parked at the curb.

I walk to the car, grip the handle of
the passenger door. My fingers feel like blocky bits of
wood.

Here it goes.

I pull the door open—and gasp in
surprise. There's a bouquet of tigerlilies and pink roses on the
seat.

Pink and orange, just like the
categories he set for me in our contract. I wonder if that was
intentional.

I pick up the flowers and hold them
out of the way as I carefully slide into my seat. “What's this
for?”

“
I'm going to woo you,” he
informs me.

“
I can't believe you just
said 'woo.'”

“
Of course I said woo.
This is cause for celebration. That's why we're going out to
dinner. And a movie—”

“
Oh
no
.”

“
And then back to my place
for coffee.” He eyeballs me in a way that would have the MPAA
clamoring for an R-rating. NC-17, if a montage of his thoughts also
happened to be included. “By which I mean sex.”

NC-17 might be too tame for Tristan,
though.

“
I figured.” I shake my
head. “You don't have to do all that. I'm happy just getting food
from a drive-thru and watching something at your place.”

He jabs a finger at my necklace as he
pulls away from the curb. “What does that necklace mean,
Kelly?”

I look down at the silver handcuffs.
“I'm yours?”