Cuffing Kate (4 page)

Instead I went as myself.

* * *

Jules was waiting for me on his front porch, beer in
hand.

I could hardly speak English when he opened the front door for
me. I might have said Hello but the word was erased by the sound of a truck
rumbling by on the road, and I didn’t try again. Jules waited like a gentleman
for me to step inside and came in after me. Was I really here? Was this really
happening? I turned to look at Jules. He smiled, as if he could read all the
thoughts that were in my head. But he couldn’t possibly. There was no way that
he could know how often I’d thought about him, and the dirty things I’d imagined
him doing to me.

He set his beer down on the table in the entryway. I set my
satchel down on the floor. We stared at each other for a moment, and I wondered
if this was going to be easy or awkward or…

“This way.”

Easy. I let him lead me once more, this time to the bedroom. I
thought of Sonia, thought of her hot-tempered reaction to his initial
suggestion. How different I was, meek and willing, desperate.

“You look in the mirror,” he said when we got to his room, “but
you don’t see the truth.”

“What do you mean?” His room was all white. White walls, white
furniture. But the bed had a black spread on the mattress, and there were framed
black-and-white posters on the walls. I was secretly thrilled to see several
that I owned, as well.

“You don’t see. You can’t possibly. Or you wouldn’t behave the
way you do.” As if to prove his point, he spun me around, so I was facing a
gilded oval mirror hanging above his bed. I looked down. He tilted my chin up. I
shut my eyes. He brought his mouth to my ear and said, “Don’t disobey me. If I
want your eyes closed, I’ll use a blindfold.”

His words made me instantly wet. Did he know? Could he
tell?

I sucked my lower lip between my teeth and bit hard. I wished I
could be eloquent with words the way Sonia was, able to put arguments into
clean, precise phrases. Able to fight when someone tried to dispute me. Not that
I wanted to fight Jules, but I wanted to understand, and I wanted to be able to
voice my…my…fears.

“I watched you in class. You soak up everything, but you don’t
respond. And then I realized, it’s all in there. You keep you emotions within,
sublime and tight. You don’t know how to let things out.”

“So you’re going to tie me down to teach me how to let go?”
There. That was a little voice, right? Jules smiled again. God, he had a nice
smile.

“She’s learning. Quick, too. That’s not all I’m going to do,
Kate.”

Had he said my name before? Like that? Outside of my fantasies?
I didn’t think so. He’d always called me Red. I wanted to hear him say it again.
Please, say Kate again
, I silently willed.

“What else are you going to do?” And how had I gotten myself
backed into a corner like this? Somehow, I had managed to wedge myself
completely into one corner of Jules’s bedroom. My arms were crossed over my
chest, and my hands rested on my shoulders as if I were trying to mimic a mummy
in a sarcophagus.

“What do you want me to do, Kate?”

Oh, like that. The way he said my name struck a chord within
me. I wanted him to press his lips to my ear and whisper my name over and over.
Instead of telling him this, I shrugged, feeling the walls on both sides. He was
waiting. Clearly waiting. Finally I whispered, “I want you to do what you
said.”

“What I said to who?”

I sucked in my breath. “I read Sonia’s diary,” I confessed. “I
want you to do to me what you said you’d do to her.”

I didn’t have to ask him twice.

* * *

He had cuffs like the second pair I’d purchased:
regulation, steel handcuffs with a silver gleam. I knew what they were going to
feel like. I’d held them. Cradled them. Caressed them. None of that prepared me
for the sensation of having Jules strip me of my clothes and position me in the
center of his bed. I thought I’d been so smart doing the research, buying the
toys. Turned out, I hadn’t learned a fucking thing.

“Arms over your head.” I was naked on his mattress, and I felt
his warm hands on my wrists before the cold steel closed tight.

I took a breath. I could come from this alone, I thought. Why
had I needed to cheat every other night? Simple. Because Jules hadn’t been in
the room.

He stared down and me, and his face looked different than all
of my sketches. “You bought the cuffs when I told you to do research, didn’t
you, Kate?”

“Yes.”

What had been missing from my drawings? The warmth in his eyes
that I saw now. He was handsome, yes, but he was more than that. He looked
pleased with me, as if I’d risen to some challenge.

“And you tried them out?”

I thought of the fiasco with Sonia walking in, and I turned my
head away from his. He gripped my chin and forced me to meet his gaze. “When I
want you to look away from me, I’ll tell you,” he said. There was a beat of
menace to his voice. But that made me wetter still.

“Yeah, I tried them,” I admitted.

“That’s what she told me.”

“She?” The words weren’t making sense.

“I was helping her prepare for her debate. She told me that
she’d found you.”

“I thought she was never going to talk to you again.”

He shrugged. “There’s
never
and
then there’s
never
. After she got together with
Eleanor, she called and wanted to talk.”

“So she told you…” He’d known the answer before he’d asked the
question.

He grinned. “I would have liked to have found you like that.
Walked in. Discovered you bound to your bed all by yourself. The games I could
have played with you.”

I would have turned my head away, but he’d told me not to. I
would have shut my eyes, tried to hide by embarrassment, but he’d already warned
me. Instead I simply stared back at him, forced to face my fears. My stomach
tightened. This was much more difficult than I’d expected.

“Good girl,” he said, just as he had before, words that warmed
me inside as if he’d banked my internal furnace. “Don’t turn away from me. Don’t
ever turn away from me.”

Then it was like every fantasy I’ve ever had and ones I never
thought of before. He started by kissing me, his lips on mine, kissing hard. I’d
been kissed by other men—but maybe what I’d felt previously should be given a
different name from kissing. Those were pecks. Smooches. This was real. This was
what kissing is all about, a definition from a dirty dictionary. I felt his lips
part against mine. I felt our tongues meet. I wanted this to go on forever, at
least until he slid one hand along my body and began to stroke my pussy.

“You’re wet,” he said.

“I know.”

That changed everything. Now, I wanted something else,
something new, something more. Jules began to kiss his way down my body. He
didn’t leave any part untouched. If his mouth was caressing my nipples—one, then
the other—then his hands were busy stroking and fondling every inch of my skin.
I felt beloved, admired, adored.

And still I wanted more.

Greedy. That’s what I was. Jules didn’t seem to mind.

Finally he slid between my legs and parted my pussy lips. “Oh,
God,” I sighed, unable to keep quiet.

“Go on,” he said, “make noise. Let it out. When I want you
quiet, I’ll use a gag.”

I hadn’t gone there mentally before. A gag. A ball gag? A
leather strip? Would I have to make another trip to the sex toy store? Maybe.
But I had the feeling I wouldn’t have to go there alone. I imagined what the
tattooed, wise-ass clerk would think if I walked into the place with Jules at my
side, and then I fell back into reality as he started to lick my clit. For once
reality was better than my fantasies. Jules knew exactly how to work me. He
seemed to understand how sensitive I was, and he began slowly. But he didn’t
stay slow for long.

“You like that?”

I looked down at him. His lips were glossy with my own juices.
That realization brought a fresh tremor of excitement throughout me, and I
bucked on the bed as a way of answering. Jules was having none of that. “Answer
me when I ask you a question,” he murmured.

“Yes,” I told him. “Yes, I like that.”

He made sensuous circles with the point of his tongue. Then,
“Tell me. Tell me what you like.”

I couldn’t believe it. He actually wanted me to speak at a
moment like this?

“Tell me, Kate.”

“Everything,” I said, hoping that would satisfy him, but
knowing somehow that it wouldn’t.

“Tell me exactly.”

“What you’re doing,” I stammered. “The way you’re making those
circles.”

Oh, it felt so good. He spiraled his tongue in circles that
grew smaller and smaller until he was focused right on my clit. The pleasure and
the pressure were intense. I would have pulled away, but I couldn’t. Not
handcuffed like that. Was that the point? I’d always thought of bondage as
something you did in a dungeon—an atmosphere of darkness and chill pervading.
But this was all heat and wet. I rattled the chain. He licked me harder.

Fuck, that felt good. As soon as I thought the words, I said
them out loud. “Fuck, that feels good.” My voice had become the blending of a
moan and a sigh. Jules continued, bringing me higher and higher until I could
almost taste the bliss of the impending climax.

Then he stopped.

I would have done anything, said anything, promised anything
for him to continue. But he backed off the bed and went to his desk. He returned
with a stack of white paper squares, paper I recognized, napkins I’d drawn on.
He showed me the pictures, one by one, and I felt my cheeks burn. Now I did look
away. Jules’s tone made me turn back to him.

“You told me what you wanted,” he said, “without ever saying a
word.”

“But why…?” I was in that hazy state of almost coming, yet I
still needed to ask. “Why?”

“I told you before. If I’d just asked you out, you’d have been
nervous and jittery. Unsure. You might have run away when I told you the things
I hoped to do to you. Instead you came looking. You came to me.”

“Where’d you get the napkins?”

“Dan.”

I thought about my mercenary co-worker. Before I could ask the
next question, Jules said, “A dollar a napkin. He’s been saving them for
me.”

He stripped off his own clothes and then crawled back on the
mattress. We were surrounded by my pictures, drawings of people fucking, of
couples overlapping, of handcuffs, and blindfolds and toys. There was him. There
was me.

Jules moved up my body and parted my legs. I could not wait for
him to thrust inside me. My whole being was poised on the edge of that
precipice. Was he going to tease me some more? Make me beg? Demand I tell him
exactly what was running through my mind? Thankfully, no. He slid the head of
his cock inside me, and I sighed and relaxed. Oh, this was sweetness. This was
heaven and light. And then he started to move, pounding into me, thrusting hard.
I had never felt anything like this. I was captured by the cuffs, but my body
could still respond, my hips raised to meet his, my thighs spread apart. He used
one hand to touch me, running his palm over my ribs, over the flat of my belly,
then down to my pussy.

“Oh, yes,” I hissed. “Just like that.”

Lust bloomed bright within me.

As he fucked me, he stroked my clit, light and easy at first,
then rougher as the passion built between us. I shut my eyes tight, but he said,
“No, Kate, look at me.” And then, “Please, Kate. For me.” Surprising me because
he sounded almost as if he were the one begging.

I opened my eyes. I stared at him.

We were connected, bound together somehow, even as I was the
one bound down. The handcuffs rattled as he thrust inside of me, reminding me
with every beat that I was his captive. And yet somehow, somehow, I felt as if
we’d set each other free.

How neatly our bodies fit together. I’d never paused to wonder,
to worry, whether we’d be compatible. If his parts would interlock with my
parts. Thankfully they did. Perfectly. His cock seemed made for my body. Each
time he drove forward, I felt my muscles contract, as if wanting to hold him to
me forever. My hands were useless, but I possessed plenty of other powers. My
legs around his body, pulled him to me.

Jules used his thumb right against my clit as he fucked me,
finding a rhythm that made sense—the rhythm of my blood, of my heart, or maybe
of our hearts beating together. We were in complete synch. He worked me
steadily, and I kept our connection solid, gazing into his deep blue eyes—the
color of cobalt, rich and dark. Even as I wanted to hide, even as the pleasure
became almost insurmountable, I kept staring into his eyes. Seeing him. Really
seeing him. How was he doing this? How did he know?

“I’m going to…” I gasped, teetering right on the cusp.

“Yes, yes,” he said. “Come for me, Kate. Come
with
me.”

The climax was different from any I’d ever had. Better.
Beautiful. I felt electrified, as if every single part of my body was coming at
the same time, as if I were all lit up with fairy lights. Jules bucked hard
inside me, fucking me so hard I felt the bed shake. Then he stilled, his strong
arms coming tight around my body, his cheek pressed to my cheek.

“I found you,” he said. “You showed me the keyholes. I had the
key.”

I realized he was right. He’d played me.

And we’d won.

* * * * *

If you liked this story, don’t miss Alison
Tyler’s
A Taste of Chi
Available now from Spice
Briefs wherever ebooks are sold.

I’d been with Andrew for seven years—and we hadn’t made love once.
You would think two expert yoga instructors would have incredible sex, but he
believed it was a waste of chi, a loss of vital life force. And slowly he made
me think the same way, taming the sexuality that was once so fervent in me.

Then Cormac Smith walked into one of my classes. Suddenly seven
years’ worth of pent-up emotions and sexual frustration stirred, making me
realize just how much I had sacrificed—and what Cormac could give me
instead....

Anthologies edited by Alison Tyler:

Alison’s Wonderland
With This Ring, I Thee Bed