Rendezvous With a Stranger (14 page)

      
His words make me jerk involuntarily as I imagine his every move matching this long discourse of propositions.
 
He sits even farther forward in his chair, so I expectantly wait for him to rise and come to me.
 

      
“You have no choice but to relent to me, Ellen Laurey.”
 
Using that name now, not only mocks my attempts to hide myself from him, it comes out tender as a lullaby sung by a mother soothing her child.
 
“I could make you wait,” he says, “or I could make a feast of you for myself,” he pauses, “or I could pleasure you.
 
Which would be the most distressing?
 
Which one your richest desire?”

      
If I had my mouth to use now, I couldn’t answer his question because all his suggestions please me and all hold such painful promises, I’m sure none could satisfy all of me.
 
I fall against my bonds, realizing my hands ache.
 
He realizes this too.
 
The fire I see sparking in the depths of his eyes simmers.

      
As he rises, I watch his approach, filled with wonder at each move and how it energizes me, thrilling all the atoms not yet permeated with sex.
 
Each piece of me awakened makes the guarantee for pleasure rise another impossible degree.
 
He slowly paces around my hanging body as I feel his eyes inspect the crude designs that remain on the canvas of my skin.
 
Then, standing again in front of me, his hand finds my slit waiting.
 
I gasp, realizing that he fondles me with a leather glove on his fingers.
 
My face screws into a painful expression, more tears form, and while his face is just inches from mine, he watches as the explosion begins, and the new ways I find to contort myself.
 
Even with this hateful ball-gag blocking the sound, preventing the natural grimace from appearing on my face, I communicate my climax to him.
 
I writhe on those leather-covered fingers as the orgasm rockets from my cunt to my spine to the top of my head and the settles around my shoulders with a shudder.
 
I sigh at the finish, the ache in my arms taking away the bit piece of pleasure.

      
Before he releases me, he rubs away the pain in my limbs, and my belly feels the last of the spasms drift on. He knows how I yearn for freedom, but the sadist in him delights in the torture.

      
When he begins to untether me, it’s the ball-gag that goes first.
 
Then I kiss him, reaching out to find his lips, that seem to shy away from the attention, but at the same time demand it.
 
“Your lips have another occupation,” he says, as he unhooks my handcuffs from above.

      
As he backs away, I drop to my knees and negotiate my way three feet toward his boots and jeans. I’m hardly able to make my sorry but submissive-looking trek. He opens his fly because I can’t with my handcuffed hands. With his cock unencumbered, I take all of it into my mouth, drawing it deeply inside, finding the desire to gag almost non-existent.
 
He uses my mouth with a hand holding the back of my head so I can’t back away from the deep-throated satisfaction.
 
I pour myself into his thick meat, let my tongue wind its way about the stalk, tasting the sour and sweet flavors, desiring them all. I lick lavishly as if I’m eating some fine repast. As he ejaculates, I swallow; not a drop escapes my mouth.
 

      
Rocking back on my haunches afterwards, I look into his face, considering him carefully, just as I see his careful consideration of me.
 

      
“You made dinner?” he asks.

      
“Almost,” I say.
 
“How was your meeting?”

      
“I didn’t argue.”

      
“I can see that.
 
You were back sooner than you said.”

      
“I like surprises,” he replies.

      
“I guess I do too,” I add, although I’m so exhausted that I don’t know how I’ll even get through dinner.

      
Before he unlocks the cuffs, he’s risen and poured me a glass of burgundy.
 
I find I can drink even handcuffed, and that he expects nothing from me other than I sit submissively on the hardwood floor and sip the aromatic liquor.
 

      
“Will I eat this way too?” I ask, when I see he’s finished making our meal and two places are set at his table.

      
“Is that what you want?” he asks.

      
He comes to me, and taking the glass from my hands, he helps me rise.

      
“No, I think I’d like to use my hands so I can touch you freely, Nicholas Riley.”

      
Now his name fits.
 
There are glasses teetering on his nose, and he’s almost the professor I met with this afternoon, though there’s much of the stranger in him too.

      
Removing a key from his pocket, he frees my hands.
 
And like the massage he gave my limbs, he restores some of the feeling in my wrists.
 
There are little indentations around them that jar me with the sensation of pain and yielding that remains.
 
I hope they’ll stay a while.
 

      
With my hands free I’m able to dress, though I wait for his permission which he gives me with a nod of his head.

      
Sitting down to a normal dinner almost seems absurd.
 
I should be at his feet feeding him, beneath him, dining on the scraps he scraps into a bowl. I’m beginning to think he breaches the gap between this bizarre sex and the rest of our lives easier than I do.
 
He’s certainly not as grim and dour as he was, and yet I remain in the abject subservient attitude.
 
The blues playing in the background begins to lift my mood with a gentle flood of notes soothing my wounds.

      
During salad and soup, our conversation is augmented by the drama of his eyes.
 
They still hold me firmly in their grasp, and with a hand on my thigh he reassures me that he’s still there commanding.
 
He asks me about my classes, sounding as if he’s interested, and about my husband and if I think I’m really leaving him.

      
“I am,” I tell him simply.
 
I want to tell him that I’m doing this because of him, because he opened me with such a jarring crowbar that I can’t close myself to what he brings me.
 
Still, I don’t want him to think that I
have
to have him, that I’m doing this only for him, that if he plans to drop out of sight after this night, I’ll be shattered. I know that whether or not our affair continues, my life with Robby is over.
  

      
Nicholas doesn’t reply to my confession about my broken marriage.
 
He seems to know everything anyway and it’s not necessary for me to speak.
 
Moving the conversation along he compliments me on my salad then finally says, “You will spend the night here.”

      
I am feeling transported now, nurtured by the curious content of our minutes together.
 
There’s this schoolgirl whimsy developing in my toes, a giggle of delight knowing that he wants me in his bed.
 

      
I’m beginning to understand more about who he is when he’s not capturing me.
 
His style is direct and without great embellishment, though what embellishment he chooses really matters, because it’s a statement of himself.
 
His apartment reflects that statement with the masks, the spears, the hand-carved wood, and the African rug hanging on the wall.
 
The rug’s one of the few pieces with color; the rest just endless shades of brown and tan.
 
Even so, the blue is a muted tone, and the ochre and vermilion shades blend into the soft light and exude mellowness so characteristic of the man. I love the feeling of a man who is comfortable in his surroundings, comfortable with himself.

      
When we finish eating, I clear his dishes and clean his kitchen while he spruces up the fire, and lights a pipe, which he puffs contentedly as he waits for me to be done. I think back on the afternoon, when he handed me his key and I felt more like his wife than lover.
 
It feels that way now, being with him.
 
I can hardly believe that he just had me strung up and dripping sweat in the center of his living room, or that he once had me tied to a chain-link fence in a cold basement, or that this image of harmony has pursued me as much as my desire has pursued him.
 
I would think, by the casual way this night has proceeded since he uncuffed my hands, that he’s aloof to my passions; his own seem hardly engaged.

      
As I come to his living room where he sits by the fire in a great leather chair, I sit on the floor at his feet and gaze into the flames.
 
It’s not meant as a submissive act, but a familiar one that tells him I’m comfortable with him even if this seems so utterly absurd.

      
“I’d like to know what you want of me?” I ask him.
 
I can’t get my mind off our afternoon’s conversation.
 
I can’t ignore the need for him beyond the sex we share.

      
“What I want doesn’t matter until you’re disentangled from your husband,” he answers.

      
“And if I do that this weekend?” I say.
 
“Then will you tell me what you want from me?”

      
“Yes, I probably will.
 
But you can be sure of one thing now; I don’t want anything more from you than sex, unless I can have all of you.
 
Let’s wait until you can give it all before I answer your question.”

      
I sit by the fire and stare into the expanse of flames.

      
It’s late.
 
Once he finishes his pipe, he tells me to get naked and go to bed.
 
I do this happily, glad for another moment to lie with him, the length of me pressed against the length of him and our arms wrapped around each other, even if words of love aren’t yet ready to be spoken.

      
In his room, I undress before a lengthy mirror on his bathroom door.
 
Seeing marks on my breasts, I move closer to inspect them.
 
When I turn, I find others have cut into my ass and there are bruises forming at the center.
 
Turning back, I wonder that my face is so soft.
 
The endless stream of thoughts that pour into my brain have ceased for the moment. I can think of nothing but the stranger’s hands on me and his face beside my face.

      
When I feel him move behind my nakedness with his, I do shudder, though I’m not so fearful of him as I once was.
 
His hands glide with grace over the skin he flawed with his birch.
 
The surfaces quake in anticipation.
 
A commotion of desires enlivens me everywhere his hands make contact.
 
At the crook of my neck, along the baby smooth skin under my arms, and the tentative sides of my waist where I’m prone to be ticklish, his deft hands move with ease.
 
I stare in the mirror at myself as he places his fingers against the marks on my breasts.
 
One finger runs over a blemish.
 
That stripe of red still holds the energy of the slim sapling, and the powerful arm that laid it against my skin.
 
I think of it as a piece of him he’s burned into me that will never go away.
 
Even when the mark disappears in time I’ll still hold the memory of it within.
 

      
His hands move on to my ass, caressing the soreness contained within the orbs that took so much of his punishment.
 
Turning inside his arms, I look back over my shoulder into the mirror, so I can see where he’s touching the marred places.
 
The bruises and scorched skin were for some moments broken.
 
For an instant or two there was blood, though no blood is dripping now.
 
He watches in the mirror too, as he runs his hand low, along the crack of my ass, finding the wet cunt and the throbbing anal hole and all the sensation they store within them.

      
The lights go out in the room and the mirror disappears and until we become used to the inky night there is just our body’s touch between us and the smell of our mutual heat to share—that and the sound of our labored, sex-flushed breath.

      
He takes me to bed as the light from the night outside begins to cast a glow to navigate by.
 
The puffy down blanket on his bed is swept away with the broad reach of his arm.
 
Once lying inside the silky sheets, it falls around our shoulders warmly burying us inside its comfort.
 
His body lies with mine, the solidness of his thighs part my legs wide and my cunt opens for the stab of his penis into the center.
 
His lips move freely about my face while his cock moves freely within my cunt.
 
I throb on the erection and hear him groan.
 
Looking into the starlit darkness of the room, I see the pale light of his face over me.
 
The blue of his eyes is nothing but black in the night though there’s a glint inside those small spheres that makes me think of the earth-bound animal essence he brings to my body.