Roxy Harte (6 page)

“Darling, come to me,” he called, his normally smooth accent sounding thicker, more guttural, his hand waving me to meet him halfway. Somehow, I managed to make my legs work and followed him the short distance to his bike. The damp stickiness between my legs sickened me.
I am such a slut.
Putting on his sunglasses, he was already mounted and expecting me to climb on behind him.

“Darling?” I demanded.

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“In public, yes…in private, slut, Sophia, or any other name I choose.”

I used to be such a nice girl, a good girl.
“Can I ask a question?”

“First answer me this, how much weight have you lost?”

I was sure my whole face frowned, forehead, eyebrows and all, but I answered, shrugging, “Thirty-two pounds.”

“Jesus,” he swore, demanding, “Since I took you home from Garrett’s the day he threw you out?”

I shrugged again but answered, “Yes.”

“You didn’t have half that much to spare. You look like shit.”

I shook my head, looking at the ground, asphalt more appealing than the judgment I saw in his eyes. I didn’t need this man to tell me I was ugly. His hand lifted my chin and I struggled, losing badly. He wiped the fresh damp track made by a single tear from my cheek and lowered his own head to make eye contact.

Reading my mind, he promised, “You are still very beautiful, Sophia, I didn’t mean that, but you need food. You need sleep. And I'm going to take a wild guess that you haven’t been getting much of either.”

I nodded, agreeing.
Sleep? What is that?
If it was a struggle to sleep before meeting Garrett, post-Garrett I don’t sleep. For a while, at least, I made an effort. Lying, tossing, turning…thinking too much…wanting him to take me back, if only to hurt me. Hurting me would be so much better than ignoring me. At some point, I stopped dressing for bed, stopped crawling under the sheets. Instead, I wrote all night…memories? Memoirs. I didn’t tell Lord Fyre any of this though. I just looked past him to the swings, wondering if he too would make it onto the written page of my life.

Lord Fyre still held my chin, forcing eye contact. “I am taking you to a place away from here, a place where we can be alone, without memories or distractions that would interfere, but I will not start the process until you’ve gained at least five of what you’ve lost. So plan to eat, plan to sleep. Do not expect pleasure or pain until you’ve gained some weight. Understood?”

I nodded.

“Being my slave isn't a tea party. I'm tough.”

I never doubted it for a minute.

Looking over the top of his shades, he prompted, “Ask your question now.”

“Whose benefit was that show for?”

“You don’t know?” he asked incredulously.

“You wanted to prove I would let you touch me, even if he watched, but why?”

“You’re a smart girl, Sophia, your brain is wired just like mine. No why. Just because. Just as you said,
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to prove you would. Now, kneel before me.”

Nervously, I looked over my shoulder at the woman and children on the swings to see if they were looking. His fingers bit cruelly into the bite mark on my forearm, his thumb pressing into the spot between the two big bones, but he had my attention. He jerked me around to face him with just the pain radiating through my arm.

“That hurts,” I cried out, trying to pull away, his fingers biting deeper, until I dropped to the asphalt, my bare knees scraping against the hot pavement. “Please, stop,” I begged, hoping for release, but he didn’t release me right away. I writhed in agony on my knees, finding no escape from the strength held in just one of his hands. “You’re hurting me!”

“Isn’t that the point, Sophia? I can hurt you. I will hurt you, whenever I want. This pain isn’t because you didn’t obey me with immediate obedience, although you would have earned it for that reason alone, this pain is to make you focus. I am the center of your world now. No one and nothing else will distract you from me.”

I laid my forehead on his knee, saying “I’m sorry.” I think I meant it, but more I was just trying to escape the power of his eyes and the truth caught there.

He released my arm to rummage in his saddlebag, I kept my head on his knee, soaking in the warmth of his leg, beginning to feel how right it could feel to sit, neck bowed, on my knees. With my head in his lap, I wondered, if I surrendered completely would it stop being role-playing? It seemed like with Garrett it was role-playing.

The sun pounded into my back, heating me, baking me, but I didn’t lift my head. A drop of sweat trickled down the side of my face, but I didn’t wipe it away, and even when my knees were too sore to kneel any longer and my curiosity got the best of me because he held something in his hands that I felt him twisting, I didn’t move. I didn’t look. I surrendered to the nothingness that pressing my forehead into his knee afforded me. With no thought, no cares, I seemed to float and even the pain in my knees disappeared.

“Lift your face to me.”

I obeyed.

“I think you need something to focus your attention, so I’ve made you a collar out of hemp rope.” He held it out to me. “Feel it.”

I touched it and it felt rough. It looked like something I would have created in junior high art, macramé or something very similar. I watched him lift it, fitting it around my throat like a choker, adjusting it until he was satisfied. “Bend your head down.”

I did and he cinched it down, looping the ends to close it, completing the knot pattern with it on my neck, leaving no loose ends, nothing to untie. It was a solid circlet of rope.

Swallowing hurt, the roughness of the rope pressed directly over my larynx. “It’s too tight,” I complained.

“You’re not turning blue, it’s not too tight.”

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“It hurts when I swallow,” I tried to explain.

“Then it’s perfect. Every time you swallow, you’ll remember that I am the center of your universe.”

“For, what other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!”

-Nathaniel Hawthorn, The House of Seven Gables

Thomas

I enter her small room, but she is unaware I am here. Caged, her head droops, cushioned only by the cervical collar I added to help her sleep.

She is beautiful in sleep, beautiful always, but especially asleep. I hate to wake her. For the first time in months, she glows. She is healthy, well-fed, eating six to eight high-protein, high-carbohydrate meals a day, and oddly, caged, she sleeps.

Kneeling by her cage, I stroke her face, softly, until she becomes aware.

“Wake-up!” I shout.

She blinks and rolls her eyes up at me, but doesn’t move her head. Wide-eyed by her abrupt awakening, her ocean-colored eyes remind me of the blue-green waters surrounding my homeland. Her eyes are made even more exotic by their almond shape and the utter trust that rests in their depths.

It is hard for her to lift her face to meet my eyes, her joints painful and tight from lack of movement. The last twelve hours she has barely moved at all, and when she does, I see the pain written on her face. The next hour will be the worst for her. I don’t plan to make it easy.

Dialing the combination on the four locks holding the cage closed, I watch her, and her eyes follow my every move. Her tongue darts out to lick her lips in anticipation of her freedom. If she knew how badly freedom was going to feel, she would beg to stay caged.

I pull up on the top of the cage and fold it back on its hinges. Kneeling before her, I twist my fingers into her hair and pull her face up to look at me. She squeals in pain, her neck having been supported by the collar for almost a week. “Are you ready to leave your confines, slave?”

“Yes, Lord Fyre.” Her eyes appear glazed, still wavering between sub-space and reality.

“And have you learned your lesson?”

“Yes, Lord Fyre,” she answers automatically, confusion filling her eyes.

“Crawl to me slave,” I command, backing away three feet and watching her attempt to crawl. She lifts her right hand and looks at it as if she is unsure what to do with it before placing it on the carpeted floor in front of her. Only then does she realize that she cannot crawl forward, she must crawl backward to escape the cage. Tentatively, she moves one leg back, followed by her hand, which she places in the middle of cage for support, a good start. Another crawled motion backward though and she is falling. I let her.

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“Get up!” I growl.

She presses against the floor with her hand and I see the agony of using her muscles rip through her eyes. She grunts but it is a shrill grunt, almost a scream as she pushes up onto all fours to crawl toward me. Each motion forward is agonizing as blood circulates and tissues stretch. As she gets closer, I back away.

Opening the door, I step into the hallway and walk away several feet from the room, turning to call to her, “Hurry up!”

She tries to move faster, I can see the effort, the determination written in her creased brow. She moves agonizingly slow, arms and legs stretching, hips swaying. Without realizing it, she couldn’t move any more provocatively if she tried. She definitely has animalesque down to a science. I wonder if Garrett taught her to crawl like that, or whether it is pain making her limbs reach longer, her muscles stretch more seductively than if she crawled normally.

Entering the hall, she mentally sags when she sees how far she has to crawl to reach me. I shout at her to hurry up then growl, “Lift your face to me, slave.”

She lifts her sagging head and makes eye contact.

I back away another two steps and her head moves side to side, warning me to stop. Her eyes glare.

She continues her long-limbed, stealthy approach, shaking her head side to side. She is like a mountain lion, pacing toward me, left hand reaching long, stretching the muscles of her arm taut, her right knee sliding forward only a fraction of a second behind the hand movement. Her hips sway slowly with her long, right-hand reach. She is exotic and mine, if only borrowed. Mine, for now. How did Garrett ever let her go? He only possessed her three weeks…

I have three months, and yet, after only a week, I am possessive.
She is mine.

Until this moment, I have kept myself in check, but even reading the pain each movement causes her, I want her. My cock hardened with the first long stretch of arm, the first sway of her ass, and the jiggle of her small, tight breasts. My hardness is caught painfully behind unyielding denim. I embrace the ache of it, letting it clear my mind just a little, but then the lust comes back three-fold.

I press my back against the closed door to my bedroom, feeling the pull of energy coming off her, passing between us. I wonder if she knows the power of seduction that she possesses. I’d planned to get her to crawl into the bedroom and point her toward the bed. I planned to close the door and leave her alone to rest and recuperate. Now, victim of her siren’s lure, I am not thinking about her recuperation…though in the back of my mind I remember the promise I made to her that I would not touch her until she gained at least five pounds, but truly her health is the last thing on my mind.

She pauses only two feet away, sitting back on her ass, knees pulled up to her body, arms planted in front of her. I’ve seen her do this before, at the club, but don’t remember what it means. Sitting, she glares, eyes narrowed, but not in anger—something else—like she is thinking too much.

I take a step forward, toward her, and she hisses, showing her top teeth, raising her right hand in mock strike.

It all comes back to me, her tabletop sideshow, and all the feral cat antics that followed, all because
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Garrett had forgotten her, forgotten her basic needs—food, water, bathroom breaks. I’ve hand-fed her three times today, so I know that she isn’t hungry. We overcame her embarrassment of her losing control of her bodily functions the first day of her confinement in the cage. I’d gone in to check on her after the first couple hours, to see how she was tolerating the utter isolation, the bondage.

I’d knelt beside her. “How does the cage feel?”

“Tight,” she answered. “The wire isn’t pleasant.”

“It isn’t supposed to be pleasant,” I mocked her and stood to leave the room.

“Wait,” she cried out and I was surprised to think she was breaking down after only a few hours.

“I have to pee,” she whispered as if someone other than me might hear.

“I’m not stopping you from answering the call of nature,” I answered.

“Will you release me?” she asked me. “You can put me right back into the cage when I’m done if you’d like.”

I laughed outright and walked back into the room. I folded into a cross-legged position beside her. “It will be much easier if we come to an understanding right now. I am not planning to release you, not tonight and not the next. If you have to use the bathroom, you will do so in your cage. Here, you are no more in control of this situation than an animal. Here, you are my animal, my pet. At Lewd Larry’s, you pretended to be a feline persona, isn’t that what Garrett said to you when he collared you? Here, with me, you are going to forget what it feels like to be human.”

She gasped, understanding dawning in her mind. “Really, I have to pee, please release me. Is that what you want? For me to beg, because I’ll beg.”

“I don’t want you to beg. I want you to pee, right here, right now.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You will,” I promised, then I sat and waited, ignoring her tears, ignoring her curses, waiting for the moment she would break down, waiting for the moment, as I cupped her between her legs, holding her in my hand just tightly enough for her to know that I was, her urine flowed.