The Ex (19 page)
The first touch of his tongue curled my body up from my toes. With my arms restrained, I wasn’t in a position to move with the motion, and every muscle screamed out in protest. Neil was ruthlessly good at oral sex. Part of it was his genuine enthusiasm. I’d definitely been with guys who’d done it out of a sense of obligation, or who liked it, but got discouraged when I hadn’t come in seconds. Neil didn’t try to hurry me along; he savored me like scotch that had been aged for longer than I’d been alive. He rolled his tongue over me in broad, lazy circles and lapped at my opening to coax my own wetness out. He clearly didn’t feel obligated. He was going to take his time tonight.
A low growl rumbled in his chest when his lips closed over my clit. His tongue probed it, gently pushing the hood back to torment the bare nerve points beneath. My fingers opened and closed on nothing as I twisted, helpless in my restraints. He sucked the whole of the little organ again and pulled his head back slowly, letting his lips drag me until the last possible moment.
Then, he really went to work.
If I could have shut my legs, they would have been squeezing his head until it popped. All I could do was lay there, making pleas in gibberish. I couldn’t have escaped his mouth if I’d wanted to. The tip of his tongue swept up and around my clit. Behind closed eyelids, I tried to paint the paths he took, to discover where he might go next. I was writhing, helpless, and maddened by the erratic contact when he slipped two fingers into me. His mouth fell into a steady sucking, flicking rhythm, and I almost broke my ankles trying to get my thighs to touch. I came, exposed and vulnerable to his mouth, thrashing and screaming his name. His actual name, not “Sir” as I should have. He pumped his fingers harder and lapped at my clit, and the pleasure went on and on, my orgasm seemingly never-ending. My body contracted and spasmed, contracted and spasmed, each wave blending with the next, until I was left a pulsing, quivering rag doll, offering no resistance to my restraints.
He lifted his mouth from me and ordered, “Look at me, Sophie.”
My gaze traveled down my body, over the sheen of sweat between my breasts and the slight curve of my belly, to where he knelt between my legs. His face glistened with moisture, and he slid his fingers from me to show that he’d achieved his stated goal; the fluid proof of my arousal rolled easily down the side of his hand.
He unbuckled the cuffs at my ankles then rose and unchained the wrist cuffs from their eyelet. He left my wrists bound above my head, but asked, as he unfastened his pants, “How are your arms?”
“Fine, Sir.” My teeth chattered, and I concentrated hard to stop them. The sight of his erection as he stepped out of his pants just made the tingling in my limbs more intense.
Slinking his hands between the bed and my back, he repositioned me so he could kneel comfortably between my thighs. He reached up and traced my collar with one hand. “May I come inside you tonight, Sophie?”
Clench
. He’d asked because we’d been with Ian and Gena so recently, and that kind of consideration turned me on like crazy. “Yes, Sir.”
“I believe the answer is, ‘of course, Sir,’” he reminded me. I loved the easy way he could transition us in and out of the game. If I hadn’t given him an affirmative, the subject would have been dropped entirely. Since I’d agreed, he could play with my response.
He leaned over me, his thick, long cock lying against my belly as hard as the iron shaft of the spreader bar. His lips were so close to mine, close enough that I could have kissed him, but only if he’d invited me. He didn’t. Instead, he warned, “It’s going to be a very rough night.”
Bring it on!
I wanted to snark at him, but not while we were playing. Neil didn’t like bratty subs.
He knelt between my legs and lifted my hips. Without any further notice, he shoved into me, too sudden and far too deep, and I couldn’t help my scream. The sound was met with a slap across my face then a palm clamping down roughly over my mouth. “You keep your fucking mouth shut, or I’ll gag you.”
My blood burned, my body shivered. Endorphins flooded my brain, and though I tried, really tried, to keep from crying out, I couldn’t help it, and found myself shouting against his hand. Each thrust battered me, scattering fizzing sparks over my skin. He urged my hips into an undulating motion to match his. Tears leaked down my cheeks, and he pulled his hand away from my mouth.
Before he could ask, I gasped, “Green, Sir. Please, more!”
“More?” He slapped me again, the other side of my face, and I bucked against him. The natural silk duvet was like needles on my skin; the contrast between the nagging discomfort and the unfathomably deep pleasure I was lost in only drove me further under. All thought fled, and I was left with a jumble of sensations—wet, hot, spilling, pressure, stretching—to guide my body toward my peak. I pulled at the restraints, my legs clenched around his hips.
He reached above me and unclamped the shackles, freeing my wrists not only from the bed, but from each other. I whimpered as he pulled out of me, then gasped in shock when he lifted me bodily and flipped me over. There was no time to move myself into position. He hauled me up by my hips and was inside me again before I could take my next breath. In this position, with my upper body braced on my elbows and my knees driving into the mattress, he could be utterly brutal. He alternated a few shallow thrusts with a forceful, deep one, confusing my body so that I couldn’t prepare myself. He muffled my screams with a hand over my mouth, jerking my head back. My collar dug into me, a loving kiss of cold, cutting pain against my collarbones.
With his other hand, he spread the cleft of my ass apart. I heard him spit the moment before I felt his saliva land between my cheeks. It was the only warning I got before he drove two fingers in.
“Make yourself come, Sophie,” he ordered me. “And I want you to moan like the filthy little whore that you are.”
He uncovered my mouth so I could follow his command, choosing instead to wrap my hair around his fist and tug, hard. I reached between my legs and felt him there, spreading me wide. My clit was a hard, slippery knot. It took me all of a few seconds before I was teetering on the edge. The spearing pain of his cock battering me, the rough plunge of his fingers in my ass, enhanced the sweetness of the pleasure. Both built and built in a moment that felt like an hour, until I couldn’t balance at the tipping point any longer. In a white-hot instant, I was overwhelmed with the ecstasy of glowing pleasure and violent pain. My climax made me weightless, then boneless. I collapsed, sobbing.
He withdrew his fingers and followed me down, pounding into me so hard the bed shook. With a last, deep shove, he shouted and fell against me, his cock twitching as he spilled into me. His hips kept mine pressed to the bed. His body jerked atop me.
He leaned up and slapped my ass. “Roll over.”
I almost protested that I was too weak and tired to keep going, but when I flipped onto my back, he settled down beside me with his head on my hip, one arm thrown over my thighs. I felt so warm and floaty in the clear peace of my lingering subspace that I was content to let him keep going with anything he’d like.
“Spread your legs,” he rasped, still breathing hard. I did as I was told, and he pushed two fingers into my swollen vagina. My pelvis hitched upward; the contact was
more
when I’d already had too much. Every stroke of his fingers was like sandpaper inside of me, and I sobbed aloud.
“Shhh,” he soothed me, moving up my body. A gush of fluids, his and mine mingled, trickled from my cunt in the wake of his fingers’ withdrawal. He brought them, shining and dripping, to trace my lips, coating them. My slowing breaths still pulled at my chest, and my body writhed beneath his. “Open up.”
My lips parted obediently, inviting his fingers inside to suck them clean. The moment he pulled them free, his mouth was on mine, the taste of us between. He kissed me long and slow, as if he were savoring my mouth. It reminded me of the kisses he’d given me when we’d first started dating. Time had taken some of the desperate, hungry edge off of our fucking; it was good to get reacquainted with the basics, sometimes.
“What can I get for you?” he asked, brushing my hair back from my tear-stained face.
“Ice pack for my cheek, so it doesn’t bruise.” I didn’t want to have the domestic-violence-intervention-turned-kink-coming-out discussion I’d read horror stories about on FetLife. My mom had just gotten slightly understanding of my relationship with an older guy; she probably would have a harder time understanding that part of the draw was having that older guy slap me across the face and call me filthy names.
“Easy-peasy.” He kissed my nose and moved to get up.
“Wait.” I stopped him as he sat on the edge of the bed.
Tossing me a look over his shoulder, he leaned over to find his boxers. “Yes?”
I sat up and drew my knees to my chest, giggling at the obscene gush between my legs. I mentally complimented myself on my skill at getting the wet spot on his side of the bed. “Can you…be my Sir for a little longer?” He looked puzzled, so I went on, “You know. For the aftercare. Sometimes, I feel like you don’t need any time to return to real life. You come out of that frame of mind faster than I do.”
“Ah.” A flush crept up his neck. “I’m quite embarrassed. I should have thought of it—”
“I could have communicated it earlier.” And there were the waterworks. Right on time for the sub drop express.
“Sophie.” He adopted the low, dangerous tone of my Sir, and my emotional plummet halted a little. “I am going to get cleaned up then I’m going to the kitchen to get you some ice for your face. When I come back, you are going to let me take care of you. Keep that fucking collar on, or you won’t come for a week.”
“Yes, Sir.” It was that easy. From the verge of tears to calm with a few stern words. I lay back and ran my finger over the track of diamonds at my throat. It was getting harder for me to separate my sexual self from my regular self; in fact, my mind rebelled at the thought of them being separate beings. Whether that was a healthy thing remained to be seen, but for now, just belonging to my Sir was enough.
I had to work the next morning, so I was out of the house before Neil woke. I still had to tell him about the book, but I wanted to do it at a time when I wasn’t rushing out the door. For the first time in my life, I was beginning to understand what people meant by “juggling career and family”. My guilt was a hard ball in my chest the whole time I was at the office. I knew Neil wouldn’t find the book, but it felt like my dirty secret.
When Penny knocked on my office door, I jumped.
“Gosh, you startle easy today,” she said with a giggle. “Expecting someone else?”
“Mm, no. Unfortunately, Mr. Sophie Scaife isn’t in the city today.” I leaned on my elbows on my desktop. “You’re in a good mood.”
“Yeah. A little.” She smiled her adorable smile, a dimple showing in her cheek. The fact that there was only one made it somehow more endearing. “I got a fantastic fortune at lunch. ‘If you can shape it in your mind, you will find it in your life.’ It went into the keeper basket.”
Penny believed in signs the way I believed in the enduring aesthetic of t-strap heels. She picked up pennies, got her palm read in the park, and trusted the advice of fortune cookies like the word of an old friend. She kept a jar of the paper slips on the corner of her desk.
“And your lucky numbers?” I asked, teasing.
She looked at me like I was nuts. “Come on, Sophie. That would be just silly.” She tapped something on the screen of her iPad. “Your four o’clock with Davis from Apostrophé had to be rescheduled for Friday, but he swears he’ll have his piece basically finished by the time he comes in.”
Davis was a stylist at a boutique salon, and he was our seasonal style tips guru. He was also super hard to pin down for a meeting, which I normally found obnoxious as hell. Today, though, it was perfect. “Call for my car, then. It’s a perfect day to go home early.”
“You’re going home early? Hi, Penny,” Deja said as she came to the door. “You’re going home early again?”
“Sorry?” I was taking off, leaving Deja again. Juggle, juggle. “I know I’ve been doing that a lot lately—”
“I’m not your boss, Sophie,” Deja reminded me. “You’re getting stuff done on your end.” She nodded to Penny then to the door. When our assistant left us, Deja closed my door and leaned against it. “Okay, spill.”
“I can’t really spill. It’s not my thing to share. I promise, I’m staying in the city for the rest of the week, until we’ve got this issue pulled together.” I tried to imagine how I would feel if Deja were constantly taking off and leaving office operations to me. “Hey, why don’t you consider taking some time off? I mean, when the wedding is closer, I’m going to be ditching school left and right. It’s only fair if you get to play hooky, too.”
“If we keep playing hooky, we’ll be fucked. And I don’t want to be fucked.” Deja’s gaze dropped to the floor. “If this magazine falls through, I don’t have a plan B.”
Like you do
, was the unspoken reminder hanging there. Once again, I was slapped in the face by my own selfishness. Here I’d been running off like this wasn’t a real job, just my little hobby magazine. People’s livelihoods depended on my ability to show up to work and take things seriously. Sure, I was getting my work done, but I wasn’t pulling the one-hundred-and-then-some percent I’d seen Gabriella and Neil devote to their jobs.
I was fucking up.
I glanced at my phone. I could call Neil and tell him I was on my way home. Or I could kill some of the to-do list I’d planned for tomorrow.
“Can you excuse me a second?” I asked Deja, and when she left, I pulled up Neil’s contact number.
“Hello, beautiful,” he answered. He sounded so upbeat, my heart hurt. Was I really going to break the book news to him today?
“Hi, baby.” I contained my sigh of regret. “It looks like I won’t be coming home tonight. I’m sorry.”
“Oh no! I was going to make baby fennel and corona beans for dinner.” It was legitimately cute the way he got excited over food.
“Is there any chance you could make it in the city?” I suggested, biting my lower lip in a wheedling expression he wouldn’t see, anyway. “I have something I really need to talk to you about, but it would be better if we were alone. AKA, not interruptable by my mom.”
“This sounds rather dire.” I sensed the uncertainty in his pause. “All right. It’ll give me an excuse to drive the McLaren with the new tires on.”
“And it’ll give you an excuse to spend the night with your super busy girlfriend,” I reminded him to straighten his priorities out. “I’ll get to the apartment at around eight. Keep dinner warm for me.”
“Yes, darling.” His sarcasm was noted.
I had to return fire. “I’ll expect my slippers and martini at eight fifteen on the dot.”
“Shall I wear pearls and heels to vacuum, as well?”
“Hmm…” I pretended to consider. “Nah, I don’t think you can pull off pearls. Wouldn’t mind seeing you in heels, though, so long as you’re not ruining mine.”
He chuckled and said, “All right. I’ll see you at eight. Or, if we’re going on Sophie time, I’ll see you at eight-thirty.”
“You know, this ‘Sophie is late all the time’ schtick is getting old,” I warned him.
“Five thousand dollars says you’re not home before nine.” He laughed.
“You’re on.” I hung up on our immature bet—our money was all lumped together, anyway—and resolved that I would get home at seven-thirty.
* * * *
I got to the apartment at nine-thirteen.
Neil was in the living room, reading in front of a deliciously warm fire. He didn’t bother to look up. “Right on time.”
I dropped my purse and laptop bag by the living room door and threw my coat over them. I went to Neil’s side and dropped a check, written for five-thousand dollars, into his lap. “I wrote it in the car.”
“You should have written it while we were on the phone.” He looked up and gave me a wink as he tore the slip of paper in half. “I didn’t wait for dinner. I thought I might starve to death before you arrived.”
“Ha ha.” I collapsed beside him on the couch, and he put an arm around me so I could lean against his chest. “I have to break some bad news to you.”
“Well, it’s probably going to be better if you say it all at once,” he advised, working his fingertips into my hair to massage my scalp.
I was loath to stop the petting. “There’s an advanced copy of Steven’s book. Valerie gave it to me last night. I didn’t want to ruin your birthday.”
His hand went very still, his body slightly rigid. “You…you didn’t read it, did you?”
I sat up, so I could look him in the eye and promise, “No. I will never read that book without your permission to do so.”
He seemed to ease up a bit. “Thank you for telling me about this now, rather than weeks from now.”
“I’m showing progress.” I paused. “There’s more. The book is going to come out in June. As in, the June when we’re getting married and Emma is having the baby.”
“He never was good with timing.” Neil was going for grim humor, but he didn’t quite make the humor half. “I suppose I’ll have to read it.”
“I don’t think anyone would expect you to.”
“No, I have to read it,” he insisted. “I need to know what he’s going to say about me, and our relationship. I don’t want it to come as a shock if I’m asked about it. Our wedding is going to bring us a bit of attention, and I’d like to prepare my response should this come up.”
“Probably smart.” I quirked my lips sympathetically and put a hand on his knee. “I’m going to get my food. Do you wanna come with?”
He set his iPad aside and we went to the kitchen, where I found a container of fennel and beans waiting for me. My stomach was eating itself. I put the food in the microwave and hit the button.
“So. Are you okay?” I asked, reaching into the beverage cooler for a bottled water. I leaned against the fridge to drink.
“I think so?” Neil hopped up to sit on the island countertop.
“Oh my god, get down! What are you, nine?” I spluttered, mid-swallow.
“Yes, mother.” He rolled his eyes playfully, but obeyed. “I’m strangely energized by this. Maybe, because I’ve been dreading it so much, it’s almost a relief being closer to getting it all over with.”
“You’re actually fine with this?” Whether I believed him or not, I would still be running in full-time observation mode. He’d been doing so well with not drinking, I felt like I had to protect his progress.
He put his hands in the pockets of his jeans and shrugged. “At the moment. Five minutes from now, who knows?”
“Fair enough.” The microwave beeped, and I retrieved my dinner. I was so hungry I starting eating while standing there in front of the open door.
“You worked quite late. How are things at the magazine?” he asked, sitting on one of the tall stools on the other side of the island.
“Busy. But I kind of brought that on myself.” I covered my mouth with the back of the hand that held my fork as I talked around my food. “I’ve been taking a lot of time off lately.”
“You have,” he agreed. “I blame myself for most of that.”
“Nah. I just need to buckle down and get ahead of things, instead of keeping up with them.” I set my plate on the countertop and reached for my water. There was a heartbeat of silence between us before I swallowed and asked, “How did you do it? Balance work and family?”
He inhaled and lifted one hand to cup his chin thoughtfully. “I didn’t. Valerie was always better with that, even though she had Emma less. Emma spent more time with her nanny than with either of us, because we were both working so much.”
I shook my head and looked down. “Ugh, that was not the answer I wanted.”
“What answer did you want?” he asked, laughing gently. “Starting a company is difficult, but it’s even more so when it becomes very successful, very early. Your magazine is starting off well, and that creates certain demands. I think you’re doing wonderfully.”
“I thought we moved to the Hamptons to settle down, but we’re still fighting to make time for each other.” I couldn’t find the magical key to controlling the situation, and it was driving me batty. “You retired so we could be together.”
“We’re certainly together more now than we were when we were both working,” he argued. “This is just one of those challenges that come along with having such a wide age difference. It was always going to be that I was retiring while you were still working, whether it was at fifty or at sixty-five.”
“Yeah.” That didn’t mean I had to like it. “I just feel guilty. People are depending on their jobs, and I’m running off, doing whatever. We have our honeymoon coming up—”
“We are not going to cut our honeymoon short,” he warned. “I desperately need sand. And cold drinks.”
I gave him a minute to correct himself.
“Or not, I suppose, if therapy continues to go well.”
“Iced tea?”
“Sophie, that’s disgusting,” he admonished.
“I’m not going to cut our vacation short. But I am going to be spending more time here, I think.” My lower lip wobbled. I was tired and over-emotional. This was the worst time to talk about this.
“Are you going to cry?” he asked gently.
I wiped my eyes with the heels of my hands, remembering my eye makeup a fraction of a second too late. He came to my side and turned me to cradle my head against his shoulder.
“A few nights apart won’t hurt us. Perhaps you can make it a point to come home on weekends, and I’ll come here a couple of times a week. We could always close the house up and move back here temporarily—”
“No!” I stepped back and swatted furious tears from my cheeks. “No. We just spent millions of dollars on that place. And it feels like home now. This place does, too, but our house… That’s just ours.”
“This place is ‘just ours’ as well.” He looked genuinely confused that I didn’t feel the same way.
Ugh, I hated having to explain things that made me sound jealous. “It’s not, though. This is the home that you established with Elizabeth. You guys picked out this furniture and the…the freaking crown molding.” I pressed my fingers to my temple. “Don’t get me wrong, I like staying here. I’m comfortable here. But it’s never going to be home to me in the way that our house is, because we didn’t do this together.”
“I hesitate to suggest this, with a very expensive wedding coming up—”
“No, no.” We didn’t need the added stress of a remodel or redecorating, which I was sure he was going to suggest.
He finished his sentence over the top of mine. “—but we could sell this place and buy another. Something not so posh as a Fifth Avenue address?”
Okay. So, the whole “remodel” thing sounded a lot better now. “You know, why don’t we just redecorate, like normal people?”
His raised eyebrows were a dead giveaway that he had not thought it through. “If that’s what you’d like to do, I’m sure we could manage it. If you don’t feel your plate is too full.”
“No, it’ll be fine.” I already had some thoughts for the foyer. It looked like a damn hotel. “Let’s do your plan. We’ll spend some time here, some at the house. I wanted to start this magazine, and I’m not going to throw it away to be attached to your hip.”
