Safe Word: An Erotic S/M Novel (25 page)

"He may not say anything at all," I answered, and told
him about Ariel.

Which just shows how little I'd scoped out Arthur, who's
one of those people who lives for the sound of his own voice.
And-which is much more rare-one of the very few who gets
away with it, because he's that good and interesting a talker.
Except, I suppose, when he's alone with Ariel, and she makes
it abundantly clear how little he has to say about anything
that really matters. It probably clears his head, like wasabi.

You would have enjoyed hearing him, Carrie, rolling out
his elegantly formed sentences, while he knelt at the table on
a padded footstool he'd brought along with him. He couldn't
sit, evidently. I mean, it seems that while Tom and I'd been
whacking a ball around the racquetball court, Ariel had been
doing similar things to his ass and back. So he'd come to
dinner in a loose, elegant silk robe, carrying his stool, and
slowly lowering himself down onto it, settling into a comfortable position from which to hold forth on semes and memes.
Well, for openers, that is, before he segued into the genetics of the trans-human body, after briefly checking in on the
Renaissance, particle physics, and a shortcut he was working
on for mastering the two thousand Japanese kanji. He had
me and Tom enthralled, as we all tucked into Kate's cook's
expertly prepared monkfish, served by Sylvie and Stephanie
and Randy-wearing nothing but their collars, gold sandals,
and slender gold chains around their waists.

Ariel was wearing a little leather skirt, thigh-high boots,
and a transparent black blouse. Her breasts were tiny, almost
nonexistent, and she'd painted her nipples the same pale silvery
blue as her lips. She ignored Arthur, pushed her food around her
plate, and tried to pretend she wasn't obsessed with Kate-who
was under the table nuzzling our feet, accepting our pokes and
caresses and kicks and the occasional scrap of food.

"Is it okay with everybody," I asked, as Randy started
clearing our plates from the table, "if we have dessert and
coffee by the fire in the other room?"

Because the other room was nicely set up for it, with comfortable armchairs arranged around a large glass coffee table
that held a low silver bowl of round, old-fashioned roses, big
crystal ashtrays, plates of cake and fruit, and a delicate black
and silver coffee service. The heavy glass was nicely balanced
on the backs of Sylvie and Stephanie, who had little rubber
suction cups attached to their shoulders and the cheeks of
their asses, and who knelt so motionlessly that you wondered
if they were breathing. Randy set out the coffee and brandy,
and stood by to pour and serve. Arthur brought his stool, and
Kate sat up at my feet.

But conversation was waning, our eyes all falling on
Kate. Even Arthur seemed to be winding down. It was a comfortable silence, though, laced with coffee and brandy, the
warmth of the fire and our mutual and separate anticipations
of how the evening might proceed. Tom did us the service of
moving things along.

"Great meal, Jonathan," he said, "and great conversation," he nodded cordially at Arthur. "But," turning back to
me, "shouldn't you be feeding that puppy?"

"I suppose you're right," I smiled, "unless you'd prefer
to do it."

I handed him the leash. He looped it around his wrist
while he undid his pants.

"In fact," he murmured, pulling Kate to him, and decisively clamping her head down over himself, "if the food and
conversation had been any less great, it would have been
utterly unbearable...."

And then there was just the sound of his moans, and our
clicking coffee cups and saucers.

He finished quickly, and handed Kate back to me, nodding to Randy to button his pants and straighten his clothes.

"But you know," I said thoughtfully, "I think the puppy's
still hungry Well, she did have that long run out on the trail
this afternoon. Arthur?"

He looked eager, but unsure, glancing at Ariel for
instructions.

She was frowning. Good. I'd hoped to engineer a little
confusion for her.

"Sure, Arthur," she said flatly, "knock yourself out."

He did, too, though Kate had to work a little harder at
him than she had at Tom. Still, he smiled delightedly afterward, handing the leash back to me.

Okay.

"Ariel?" I said politely.

She nodded and took the leash, shooting me a tiny, furious look.

She tugged Kate toward her, between her slender legs in
their big suede boots. And the room was dead silent while
we all watched. I was glad she'd chosen the armchair she was
sitting in, angled so that Sylvie and Stephanie could both turn
their heads and see.

It would be slow, I knew. She wouldn't be able to take
a lot of sensation at once. And I knew that Kate knew that
too, that she'd build up as absolutely slowly as Ariel's tightly
wound sensorium needed. We watched Ariel's blue eyes lose
their focus, her face relax, her jaw loosen. And then the first
sigh-I think I sighed along with her, and I heard a tinkle of
crystal, as the tabletop trembled slightly.

She started to moan. "Oh, oh shit," she said once, and
her hips began to buck. And her hands began to clench and
unclench and then she dropped the leash. She looked sweaty.
And she moaned and screamed. And kicked. Arthur looked
troubled, disoriented, at first-I was afraid that I'd messed up
his game for him-but, like Liz and her boyfriend that morning, he pulled himself together, looking, well... honored, I
guess you'd have to say

Her movements were almost convulsive-one more
scream-well, not a scream, kind of a hoarse bellow, from
very deep in her belly, and she collapsed in the chair, her blue
lipstick bitten off, and her hair matted with sweat.

She closed her eyes for a minute. And when she opened
them, it seemed as though she'd lost all her guile, and that
she really was just nineteen years old. Or maybe ten, or fiveshe looked like a refugee child who'd just tasted her first ice
cream cone.

She groaned a little, smiling ruefully, peering down at
Kate, who was calmly wagging her tail. "Oh shit," she murmured softly to herself, in a kind of exaggerated, sitcom tone.
And then she picked up her glass from the coffee table.

"Uh, more brandy. Randy," she called. And she giggled
at how silly that sounded. We all laughed, and Tom raised his
glass to her.

He's a talented guy, Tom. I mean he can size up the way
things are going and move them in the right direction. So
he began making gentle, joking conversation with Ariel. He
didn't seem to need to outhip her, like I probably would have.
He just said a lot of trivial, amusing, comforting things to her,
giving her time to regain her equilibrium.

I turned to Arthur, picking up the thread of an earlier conversation. The splendid Pazzi Chapel in Florence,
designed by Brunelleschi. Or maybe not by Brunelleschi after
all, Arthur said. He'd heard there was some new research....
Ridiculous, I answered, tugging at Kate's leash for emphasis. But we agreed that it was a wonderful building, and we
thought we might go look at it together, some weekend, in
off season.

I stroked Kate's hair roughly, pinched her breasts,
squeezed her between my knees, and let her rest her chin
in my lap while I talked to Arthur. Her face was wan and
exhausted, her eyes serene and accepting. "Water," I called
to Randy, and he poured some into a little black saucer, putting it at my feet for her to lick. We all knew the evening was
drawing to a close, conversation becoming fragmentary, the
fire burning down.

I nodded to Randy to begin clearing the coffee table.
And Tom took his cue, yawning ostentatiously, while Arthur
started his slow progress off his knees and onto his feet.

"I'm as tired as Tom is," he said. "And at my age, that's
saying a great deal. I think we'd better go, Ariel." In a mild
voice that allowed no room for discussion.

And she'd regained enough of her cool by then to mutter
something as she also got to her feet.

I was grateful to all of them.

"Take the girls, Tom," I said, as Randy lifted the tabletop
off them. They kneeled up, presenting themselves in Tom's
direction, eyes lowered as usual, and only the subtlest of signals-an unwonted pinkness on Stephanie's breasts, and on
Sylvie's cheeks below her freckles-to show how much they'd enjoyed the evening. And Tom would enjoy them, I thought.
He deserved to.

"And tell Steve to have you harnessed tomorrow morning," I said to Randy, "so this lady"- I nodded to Ariel-"can
practice her driving. She's quite ready to take you out by
herself, I think." Ariel shrugged, implying that it was all the
same to her, and I knew I'd scored a hit. And Arthur probably
wouldn't mind sleeping in.

Another round of thanks and compliments at the door.
And they were finally gone, and I picked her up and carried
her to bed, wordlessly removing her cruel little mittens and
kissing her fingers, unstrapping her legs, massaging the stiffness from her knees so that she could get some sleep. So that
that we both could sleep, that forty-thousand-dollar Saturday
night, in the middle of an enormous bed, our bodies and
breaths as commingled and intertwined as they'd been in that
little sleigh-shaped one, a million years ago.

I wouldn't cry, I told myself. Not, I supposed, that it would
have mattered, since he wasn't really looking at me across the
small restaurant table. He was looking past me, or through
me, back to that Saturday night, or even further back.

He blinked, focused, smiled at me apologetically.

"Well," he said, "I hadn't really meant to lay that last
little bit of middle-aged sentimentality on you. Let's just say
that the weekend continued hot, and, and, well, meaningful,
to us......-

And late Sunday afternoon, I handed her a check for forty
thousand dollars-it might have been a sentimental journey,
but there was no question of not paying up.

But the money part worked out okay, too-having less
income of my own to live on gave me more impetus to get my
business going again. I put in some seventy-hour weeks, but
I enjoyed it-it was a relief to find out I still liked being an
architect. And Kate had meetings in the city that summer and
fall-she and Brewer were overseeing the design of the new
computer system the association was building. So we'd meet,
lunch hours, which helped, because I was too busy to drive
up to Napa every weekend. But we both learned to juggle our
schedules, and we played more than we had in years, sometimes just the two of us, and sometimes she and I and all of
them. Even Steve. Things went well. I stopped smoking.

And early last December, we celebrated my thirty-seventh
birthday together. Lavishly. And exhaustingly Well, not just
my birthday. A design of mine, something I'd been fooling
around with for a long time and finally figured out how to
complete, had won a prize. Just a commendation, really, but
Kate made a big fuss about it.

Anyhow, she'd finally sent Sylvie and Stephanie and
Randy to bed, but she and I were too tired to pick ourselves
up off the rug in front of the fireplace in her bedroom. It was
a nice warm fire, which was good, because we couldn't seem
to make it across the room to where our bathrobes were.
It was about all we could do to sip Armagnac and touch
and smile and sort of giggle stupidly from time to time. She
began inspecting the bruises I'd acquired earlier that day no, not what you think; she'd bought me roller blades, and,
well, there's a knack to it, I'd discovered, the hard way-at
least to stopping, on some of those slopes, in the hills of her
place.

I picked up her hand, which had been tracing the edge
of a quickly gathering black and blue mark on my thigh. I
kissed her fingers. And then I moved closer to her, pulling
her toward me.

"Stop," she murmured. "I want to give you your birthday
present."

I laughed. "You mean those skates weren't present
enough? Don't tell me you've got Ariel hidden behind a
curtain, ready to beat me." Ariel worked for Kate now, though
she'd insisted on maintaining a separate arrangement with
Arthur.

Kate laughed too. "We're saving that for when you turn
thirty-nine, sweetie," she said. "And don't even try to imagine
what I've got planned for your fortieth."

I rolled over on her, pinning her down, my cock stiffening between her thighs. I kissed her slowly, cupping the
cheeks of her ass in my hands. She kissed me back, running
her hands lightly over my back. And then not so lightly. And
then I guess we both decided that the present could wait a
little longer.

"It's nice," I said afterward, "being the boss lady's boyfriend,
I mean. I think I've finally adjusted to it after all these years."

She nodded, just a little grimly. Well, it's taken you long
enough, the expression on her face said, and it took me some
effort to completely kiss away the little line between her eyebrows. She pulled herself to her feet. "Your present," she said.
"I almost forgot."

I rolled over on my belly, watching her ass sway as she
walked across the room to her desk. That ass was present
enough, I thought. I couldn't imagine what she could give me
that could make me feel any better than I was feeling right
then.

So I took my time, untying the curly rainbow-colored
ribbons and undoing the silver paper wrapped around the
flat, rectangular package, while she sat a little distance away,
hugging her knees.

"Come on," she hissed anxiously, "tear the damn paper
for once."

"I don't like to," I said. "You know that."

I finally did get the thing unwrapped. Legal papers. And
I knew exactly what they said-what they had to say-before
I began to read them. I went hot. Then cold. Honestly, I
started to shiver, though I knew that the air in the room was
perfectly warm, from the fire.