Crossing the Lines (7 page)

He paused at the final button. White folds of fabric sloped toward the last point of tension, a rushing river leading to his waist. He spread the tails wide and shrugged free. The shirt fluttered to the floor. Bare flesh. All hers tonight.

“Lie on your side, Alice, facing Jay.” His commanding voice made her tremble. He, too, felt eager. Engaged. Present in the moment.

Obedience was a gift she could offer him. One she owed without question during these hours, as much as she was able. She sank into the sheets, lying on her side, giving up her beautiful view of Henry’s chest.

The rustle of his clothing tempted her as he undressed. The bed dipped behind her. His body warmed her naked back, and his head nestled behind hers on a single pillow. Heaven.

“Tell me your safeword, Alice.”

As he led her through the familiar ritual, her body relaxed, comforted by his voice and his touch.

“Feel, Alice,” he murmured. He brushed aside her hair with his nose. His exhalations puffed against her neck. “Just feel.”

Her eyes fell closed as he stroked her skin. Her body a canvas, his hand the brush, the sensation rose in her like an electrical impulse. Her stomach, first. Expanding to graze the undersides of her breasts and the tops of her thighs, slow and steady and firm, until she trembled with need.

Caressing her breasts, he teased her nipples into tight peaks. He raised her leg and parted her lips. He skimmed her clitoris, and she cried out.

Body arching, she pressed her shoulders and hips into him as her spine pushed forward. And still he didn’t stop, didn’t hurry. He stroked her at the same slow pace no matter how she squirmed.

“My sweet girl, tell me how you feel, hmm?”

“Good.” She hardly had breath to speak, not with his fingers moving over her. “So good.”

“Only good?” His voice teased and coaxed as his fingers did.

“Better.” Incredible. Indescribable. Floating on the edge.

His mouth rested against her ear. “Not feeling unwanted now? No, not my sweet Alice. The center of the world. Jay can’t take his eyes off you, dearest.”

Jay’s sleepy gaze, hazy with drugs and adoration, pulled a moan from her throat. She let her eyes slip closed again as Henry’s voice lulled her with its rhythms.

“And I can’t take my hands off you, can I? You feel it, don’t you, Alice? How much my body wants to touch yours?”

She rocked against him, the two of them sealed together all along each other’s bodies in a hyper-aware coupling. She relished the roughness at her back, the hair on his chest, down the center of his abdomen, and surrounding the thick heat of him.

“I feel it,” she answered.

“Good girl.” He kissed her neck below her ear.

His breath on her neck made her want to beg for the sound of his voice again, but he stayed silent, focused on his fingertips. Her orgasm seemed endless, a full-body climax with no peak. A blissful plateau sustaining itself when his fingers left her and his hips tilted away.

His movements and soft grunt spelled condom. He’d fuck her now. She pulsed with anticipation.

When he pressed against her once more, he spread her lips and buried his cock in one thrust. He rocked with minuscule motions.

“Nothing too vigorous, my dear,” he whispered. “We mustn’t jostle the bed too much, hmm?”

Not too much. They didn’t want to hurt Jay.

“You’re still feeling for me, aren’t you, Alice?” He took slow, small thrusts, barely pulling back at all. Thick. Solid. Sunk inside her to stay. “Tell me about this feeling. Do you know it? Have you felt it before?”

The night in November, when she’d tried to cancel at the last minute, and he hadn’t let her. He’d fucked her slowly then. Tonight he’d tried to cancel at the last minute, and she hadn’t let him, either. Yes, she’d felt it. The closeness. Being special. Cherished.

She’d learned her lesson from Christmas. She needed this. Before Henry, she’d never felt it, not like this. “I, I know it. S’good. Want it. Need it. Feel it. Only…only with you.”

He groaned and covered her neck and shoulders in tiny kisses, nips of his teeth, swipes of his tongue. All the while, his fingers moved over her clit, coaxing her to orgasm in a series of shuddering waves as he thrust inside her. “Sweet Alice. So deliciously wet, so beautifully trusting.”

Finally. She’d missed his voice in the silence. She gave herself over to him.

“Your eyes closed, your body open, admitting your need. So close…you’re so close.”

A steady flow of low, groaning words sank into her ear as he sank into her again and again. “You’ll feel it. Want you to feel it. You’ll get there.”

The combination brought her to a higher peak and took him with her, the two of them quaking as he thrust a final time and stayed deep within her when he came. “I promise you.”

3

Alice strolled back to awareness, enjoying the warmth of the room and the softness of the sheets and the low rumble of Henry’s and Jay’s voices. In no hurry to move, she soaked everything in. Perfection existed right where she lay, sprawled across half of Henry’s bed.

She’d be sore later. Worth every second.

The suede flogger was possibly the object she loved most in Henry’s arsenal. He wielded the tails with such confidence and care. Even lying on the dresser, her suede lit a fire under her skin.

Jay had enjoyed it this time, too. No panic, no special-exception rules, no tears. Something had changed for him. Henry had alternated striking her body with the flogger and dragging it over Jay’s skin while she recovered from the sting. He never struck Jay, but he stroked Jay’s back with the tails and asked him to describe how they felt.

He hadn’t needed to ask her. Between the begging for more and the string of orgasms, her enthusiastic response defied misinterpretation. She’d been mid-climax when Henry had laid the flogger aside and pulled her onto his cock, finishing with a shout, his hands curled around her hips.

She’d drifted in that special kind of hazy bliss, unable to hold a thought as Henry urged Jay to his knees on the bed. Kneeling behind him, Henry had wrapped his hand around Jay’s cock. Jay had splashed his thighs and the sheets and Henry’s hand sliding on his flesh when he came.

No self-handling allowed yet. Not with the supportive wrap on Jay’s wrist.

After two weeks, the bruises from his accident had faded, and the stitches had come out of his leg. He’d shown her the leg at their regular Tuesday lunch with pride. Layered patches of fake skin-like stuff protected the almost-healed road rash. He’d complained in jest about Henry’s insistence that he wear the wrist wrap for another week.

All of which had made Jay more observer than participant tonight, prohibited from putting much weight on his right hand or bending his wrist. Not permitted more than the lightest brush of suede on his skin. If he even wanted more. From his reaction the last time Henry had used it on her, months ago, she wouldn’t have expected Jay to want it touching him at all.

Her sister’s voice floated up from memory, last week, their most recent video chat.
“What’s the deal with your not-boyfriends? Are you still letting smoldering art guy hit you? Don’t you want to tell him to stop sometimes? Do you get to hit him back?”

She’d laughed off Olivia’s questions. It wasn’t as if Henry hit her with things every Friday they spent together. But the questions played in a loop now, because the answer was no.

No, she hadn’t wanted to tell him to stop. She’d wanted him to keep going. If he’d threatened to stop, she’d have begged him not to.

That was weird, right? They’d been in this arrangement for six months, and she only spoke her safeword when Henry asked her for it. Confirming she knew how to stop. Never using her escape clause.

What did that mean? Did it have to mean anything? Was Henry just that good? Was she that messed up? Shit. She fumbled for the euphoria slipping away.

“You’re tense again, Alice.”

Henry’s hand came to rest on her head. He sat with his back against the headboard, beside where she lay on her stomach. She pressed against the reassuring presence of his leg. Jay lay on his other side, an unseen bookend.

“We three put a good bit of effort into relaxing you this evening, an endeavor that seemed a screaming success, no?” His voice teased. He lifted strands of her hair as he soothed and petted. “Yet here you are, tense once more.”

He’d ask her the cause if she didn’t answer his indirect invitation to talk. His control was never heavy-handed—mmm, no, she’d loved the heavy hand he’d used on her tonight. But he never started with a heavy hand. He’d rather they came to him first. A demonstration of trust? Loyalty? Lo—affection? “Is it weird I haven’t used my safeword yet?”

The hand in her hair stopped moving. Fuck. Her brain should’ve thrown the mouth-override switch.

“Have you wanted to, my dear?” Deliberate and bland.

She might’ve angered or upset him somehow with the question. But he took so much care to emphasize safeword use, so why—oh.

“No.” If she’d wanted to but didn’t, he might consider it lying. “That’s the thing. Is it weird that I haven’t wanted to?”

His hand relaxed on her scalp. “Everyone is different, Alice. The fact that you have had no cause to stop events could mean any number of things, not all of them about you.”

“Yeah,” Jay said, his voice muffled. “It could mean Henry-the-dominant is a sex god.”

She half laughed, half snorted. “I know that.”

“Shameless flatterers, both of you. I ought to take you over my knee next time.”

She wriggled and stretched. As a punishment, spanking didn’t sound so bad. It sure as hell had made a fantastic birthday present.

“But Jay does, accidentally, I suspect, have a point.”

The answer leapt to her tongue. “That you’re a good dominant.”

“That I pay attention,” he corrected. “I enjoy it, and my role with you both demands it. That you have not felt the need to stop might indicate I have not yet discovered your limits or I have correctly gauged the depth of need in you and met it.”

He brushed her shoulder, fingertips trailing fire across sensitized skin. “I admit, I’m pleased that our activities have neither hurt nor frightened you thus far. I hope I am able to continue satisfying you without doing so.”

She rolled onto her side. He took the invitation, his hand following the top of her shoulder down to her breast and squeezing.

“Some submissives refuse to safeword, considering such behavior a point of pride. It’s a dangerous practice, my dear, and one I will not tolerate.” He tweaked her nipple with his fingers and soothed the sting away in a single fluid motion. “A dominant must be attentive to such things, to nonvocal cues from a submissive’s body. Even the things they seek to hide.”

She’d better not be giving off cues about things she wanted to hide. Things like wanting more than hot sex every two weeks. Like pancakes and laundry and arguing over whose turn it was to take out the trash.

Besides, trash duty would always be Jay’s turn. She nuzzled Henry’s thigh and tasted salt on his skin. Flogging her was a workout for him, too.

“To answer your question, Alice, no, your behavior is not ‘weird.’ It is entirely
you
. So long as you are honest with me when we play, it’s fine that you have not used your safeword.”

The conversation lapsed into silence. She refused to voice the obvious question. Whether Jay ever used his safeword wasn’t her business. What he and Henry did on their time was private. She wasn’t part of it. She might never be.

“I have,” Jay piped up. “Safeworded, I mean. All the time when we started, just to be sure I could. I was…trust was hard.”

“With good reason,” Henry murmured.

“Is that why…” She paused. Pushing Jay without understanding what triggered his bouts of fragility might hurt him. But Henry rubbed encouraging fingers over her arm. Maybe talking would do Jay good.

Her back burned, muscles pulling where the flogger had danced, as she breathed too deep. “The first night Henry flogged me. You were upset.”

The sheets rustled as Jay shifted. Henry reached out and stroked his back. A hand for each of them, now.

Jay started slow. An oddity, because words drained from his mouth in a steady stream, like sand in an hourglass. When he ran out, flipping him over and getting him going again took no effort. But not tonight.