His Obsession Read online

  He didn't.

  Instead he moved, one by one, to the other posts around the bed, securing one end of the ropes to the bed posts before moving on to the next. When he finally had the fourth one in place, he took a step back.

  The room was almost pitch dark. The lights of the city had completely retreated.

  "Beg me to tie you up," he said.

  His voice fell flat and hard into the space between us, and I swallowed with difficulty. But if this was what it took, fine.

  "Please, Malcolm," I whispered. "Tie me up."

  "Louder."

  "Tie me up. Please."

  "Louder. With feeling, Sadie."

  It was almost corny... and yet it gave me a delicious thrill to hear him order me around. Usually I was the one doing the ordering.

  "Please, Malcolm, tie me up. Twist me up and tie me up and fuck me, please, please—"

  He snatched my wrist from the bed, and in only a few quick movements my hand was bound and he was moving on to the next one. Swiftly, with practiced hands, he bound me thoroughly, but not uncomfortably, and when at last I was fully spread and immobilized, I couldn't hide my arousal any longer. My mouth was dry as I panted in anticipation.

  "I'm going to make you come, Sadie," Malcolm told me, and it was so matter-of-fact I wanted to laugh.

  "Why?" I said. "I feel like I'm getting away with something, because I never get to give you—Ah!"

  I shrieked at the sudden lash across my nipples. Sharp. Swift. Something that whistled through the air. A riding crop, I realized. Something for beating horses.

  I should have felt insulted. But instead, I just moaned at the pain as it raced through my body, transmuting into pleasure.

  "Silence," Malcolm said. "I am going to make you come." He paused. "And," he added, and I could just see the faint smile on his face, "If you make any noise at all, except for when I ask you questions, I will delay your orgasm by one minute.":

  "So I have to be silent?" I asked.

  The riding crop lashed over my nipples again, and it took all I had not to squeak with pleasure. "No talking," he told me. "You have bought yourself a minute of agony."

  I bit my lip and said nothing.

  He moved to the wall where something clicked open. A tiny glow illuminated his face, and he adjusted something. The heater, I realized when it kicked on and he shut it again, leaving us in blackness again.

  Warm air caressed my skin, my sore nipples, my pussy so wet it was already coated with the juices of my core. I stared up into the dark and listened as Malcolm began to shuck his clothing.

  I heard the fall of his blazer, the grate of his zipper, the whisper of his trousers as they slid past his hips and to the ground. He stepped out of his pants, removing his hard leather shoes as he did so, and his sigh of relief was like a fresh breeze.

  When at last the bed dipped with his weight, I was hot and ready for him. The heat of his body was a balm on my own burning desire, and he laid against me, over me, every inch of his hard, naked body rubbing against mine. Where our skin met, we melded, and I lost myself. Soft lips found my ear, teased me with breath and teeth. His muscled arms, his broad chest, his trim hips and hard thighs slid against my body, a perfect male specimen. The contrast between his body and mine, a beautiful man and... well... me, made my cheeks heat in the dark in something akin to embarrassment.

  I told myself it was merely a pang of regret rooted in aesthetic sensibility. In the contrast between beauty and decay, I came out on the wrong side of the equation.

  Malcolm rocked his hips into me, his cock heavy and hot pressed against my belly. Then he removed himself, planting hot, damp kisses down my throat and breasts, trailing over my ribcage and stomach, until he reached my exposed pussy. Warm breath puffed over it, and my hips rocked involuntarily toward him.

  He settled himself down between my legs, looping an arm casually over one splayed thigh before cupping the inside of the other in his hand and placing the pad of his thumb on my soft, slick cunt. Then, with slow, deliberate movements, he began to glide his thumb against my labia and clit, and my eyes rolled back in my head in bliss.

  For what seemed like forever, he slipped and slid the pad of his finger over me, exploring my folds and crevices, slowly, inexorably driving me wild. My head tossed with each ripple of pleasure that spiraled through me, and it was pain to stay silent as he sweetly coaxed ecstasy from my body.

  After a while, he switched his focus and began to move with more purpose, more intent. Gently he smeared my juices over my pussy and asshole, and I quivered and ached in anticipation. When he finally slipped his pinky finger past the tight ring of muscle of my puckered entrance, I gulped and licked my lips. Then another finger—I couldn't tell which one—slid into my pussy, an easy, swift entry. His thumb alighted on my clit, and I remembered how he had stroked me to orgasm in just this way our very first time. The memory alone caused a moan to well in my chest, and I was only able to bite it back at the last second.

  Gently, without hurry, he began to play with my clit, and my already sensitized flesh hummed and buzzed with delight. It was hard, so hard to remember not to groan or speak, and when his other hand alighted on my leg, smoothing its way up my thigh, over my hipbone to my ribs, I thought nothing of it other than how good and warm he felt.

  "Tell me about your phoenix."

  My eyes shot open. I hadn't realized I'd closed them. Glancing down, I tried to find his eyes, but the room had become pitch black. Even so, I felt him tracing the outline of the phoenix tattoo on my side with the tip of his finger as though the room were as bright as day. How was he doing it?

  The photos, I realized. My phoenix was one of the bigger ones, all gorgeous, garish colors, rainbows and flowers and fire licking up the left side of my ribcage from a pile of bones and dead wood on my hip. It was stunning. Of course he'd remembered it.

  I licked my lips and he flicked his thumbnail over my clit, making my hips jump into his hand. "What... what do you want to know?" I asked.

  "Did you design it?" The pad of his thumb soothed the aching nub at the apex of my pussy, and I tried not to melt into incoherence.

  "Mm, yes... I... I designed all my tattoos," I managed to get out.

  "And why did you choose a phoenix?"

  Really? My brain scrabbled for an answer that wasn't too pat, but in the end I had to settle. I was just too distracted. "A phoenix is a... a symbol of rebirth," I said as his thumb began to circle faster and I felt my core begin to tighten. He really knew the perfect ways to play my body, as though I were an instrument.

  "And why did you choose that particular symbol of rebirth?" he asked me casually. My orgasm built, a swell in the ocean about to become a tsunami. "Um..." I ran my tongue over my teeth as bliss buffeted my mind. "Because... because everything you were burns away, and you come out new..."

  "Mmm," he murmured. His hand slid over the place where the tattoo lay, soft and hot, and I shivered under it even as he stroked my clit harder and faster, until I was coiling up, aching and ready to come—

  —and he paused.

  My building orgasm faded. I couldn't help myself; I cried out with the loss.

  "Another minute," he said, and it took all my strength not to scream in frustration. When the mounting pleasure had faded, he began again, expertly plying my body, and this time the orgasm built faster and harder and I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from shrieking.

  Then his hand moved up to just beneath my right breast and he traced the tattoo there, and as he did, his fingers found the jagged scar hidden beneath the ink and followed it tenderly. But he didn't ask about the scar. "Tell me about your sparrow," he said instead.

  My mouth fell open. The sparrow was so small compared to my other tats that it was a wonder he remembered it at all. But then his finger ghosted over the sparrow's beak—exactly where it was—before retreating and stroking against its breast and in a sudden flash of insight I realized he had memorized every tattoo of mine.

&
nbsp; The thought shocked me, stunned me.

  "Ah... uh... a sparrow... they say the gods mark the fall of a single sparrow..." My voice was a whisper.

  "I see," he said. His thumb moved faster and faster, until I was on the brink again, and again he stopped. This time I kept my wits enough about me that I was able to stifle the moan of frustration. It died in my chest, strangled before it was born.

  Malcolm waited for my quivering body to subside. "Good," he murmured. "Well done." His thumb resumed its pace and I thrashed and strained against my bonds as he traced his hand up to my throat and the tattoo winding over it. Words this time.

  "And this one?" he asked. "What does it say? The script is so elaborate I could hardly make it out." And his fingers trailed over the scar beneath it. The red smile I was supposed to wear down to the grave.

  "It says, 'Might as well live.'" I told him, my voice so soft I could barely hear it.

  He gave a low, quiet laugh. "Dorothy Parker," he said, and with a flick of his thumbnail I was coming, hard and aching around his fingers, my body lost in ecstasy as I yanked against the ropes, but inside everything was tumbled and torn, rent asunder and filled with pain and anger.

  He knew my tattoos. Every single one. I was raw and exposed. He'd seen the scars beneath them, and he knew they were important in some way. We were dancing around them, around their significance, and it frightened me. But all he did was wait for my orgasm to pass before moving on to the next. Gently he stroked each one in the dark and asked me, as he circled my clit with his thumb, what each one meant to me.

  "The leaping koi fish?" His hand stroking the inside of my upper arm.

  Breaking free.

  "The cherry tree shedding its blossoms?" My shoulder, the wafting petals spiraling across my chest.

  Impermanence.

  "The spider? The hand of Fatima? The vulture?"

  Infinity. Protection from evil. Cleansing.

  And beneath each one, he found the scar, running his hands over it as he brought me to orgasm again and again.

  When at last he had received a response for each tattoo and was satisfied, he untied me and he fucked me, gently, as though I were fragile. My exhausted body wrapped around him, clung to him, and we rocked with the ocean and I came around him again and again until at last he found his release and we fell asleep on the swell and fall of the sea.

  Chapter Twelve

  Time at sea takes on a new meaning. The hours stretch out into days, and a single night can yawn as wide as a week. The sun comes. The sun goes. The water passes by.

  We sailed south.

  Malcolm and I joined together again and again, and the sea blurred the edges of our time, until it was hard for me to say if we'd been drifting on the water for a day or a hundred days. We met and coupled constantly, and when we weren't fucking Malcolm tried to capture me in art, searching for the elusive thing I carried within me that he thought would reveal the secrets of the universe to him. And when he grew frustrated, angry, enraged at his own inability to speak without words he would throw his sketch pad away, toss his canvas to the ground, squash the small clay statuette he had been fashioning and launch himself at me, wherever I happened to be, and he would force me down to the ground, up against a wall, into the strangest positions, and we would fuck again until we were sore and raw.

  "When am I going to stop falling over?"

  "When you get your sea legs. You will become accustomed to the rocking of the ship soon. You will be able to walk on the deck as if it were dry land. You simply need practice."

  "Practice makes perfect, I guess."

  "Not, it seems, when we are talking about pastels."

  "I told you, they are a pain in the ass. Stop trying to use them."

  "But the colors..."

  "Color says shit. Work in black and white if you want to tell everyone life is meaningless."

  "Not life. My life. My life is meaningless."

  "Only if you use pastels."

  I wore his clothes, mine having been left behind in our flight. The sun was warm and the boat was heated well, so I wore his underwear. Malcolm had literally fifty pairs of boxers on board, and they mostly fit me due to my ass being roughly twice as huge as my waist. At the very least they didn't immediately fall down. His shirts hung on me like smocks.

  "You have a lot of underwear," I said as I modeled it for him. "What's the deal?"

  "I used to have a lot of guests on this boat," he said. "Underwear was often misplaced."

  I winced. "Misplaced?"

  He smiled at me. In his hands he was slowly shaping a lump of clay into something that might have been my likeness, if my parents had been Ewoks. "When you are on a boat and get lost in the moment, sometimes the sea wind sweeps by and carries your fine silk boxers out to sea. Quite a few guests lost their unmentionables that way, even after I told them it took only a moment to weigh them down." He raised his brows. "Since we are going to be in short supply of everything, I expect you to remember that tidbit."

  I cocked a hip and put my hand on it. "Seriously?" I said. "Thanks for the tip, mom."

  He didn't smile at that. Instead his face went still as he pushed and pulled at the lump of clay, his brows drawing down into a frown. "My mother wouldn't have thought twice about throwing such expensive things away," he said at last. "She wanted the world to be disposable. I recommend you not be like her."

  Touched a nerve. A deep one. "Don't worry," I said. "I once wore a pair of gym shorts as pajamas for five straight years and didn't throw them out until they literally fell apart in the wash."

  That coaxed a little smirk from him. "Oh?" he said.

  "They were like Swiss cheese."

  Putting the little lump of clay down, he leaned back on the couch and tilted his head, studying me. "I would have liked to see that," he said.

  "It was the least sexy thing in the universe," I assured him.

  "On you, anything is sexy," he said. I tried to ignore the blush that rampaged across my face at his words. "Come here, Sadie. I like to see you in my clothes."

  I swallowed and walked toward him. My bare feet sank into the plush carpet, and when I reached him I crawled onto the couch and straddled his thighs. "Yeah?" I said. "We have the same size butt. That's totally sexy."

  "It is sexy," he insisted. His hands found said butt and squeezed, massaging my ample ass cheeks, and suddenly I swear I thought my ass might actually be sexy too.

  "Oh," I murmured.

  Reaching up, Malcolm pulled me down into a kiss. His teeth nibbled at my lips, grazed over my jaw, teased my throat, and all the while his hands squeezed and kneaded, pulling me close until his cock, hard and straining, pressed into the soft hot space between my legs. He rubbed me over himself until I couldn't take it any more and pulled him off the couch. We landed on the floor with a teeth-jarring thud, and he tore his own boxers off me and fucked me as I lay beneath him in his white linen shirt, my hands holding his hips in place as he took his pleasure and gave back to me in return.

  "What are you painting?"

  "The sea."

  "I hate to break it to you, but that's been done a million times before. I thought you wanted to say something totally new."

  "I'm working on it."

  "I can see that... hey, wait. That's me. That's the sea in the shape of me."

  "You can tell?"

  "I'd recognize that pear shape anywhere."

  "You are as beautiful and strong as the sea."

  "Then you're hardly saying nothing with this painting."

  "...I might still have things left to say. Let me say them first, before I can no longer speak. I thought you weren't in a hurry to silence me."

  "I thought you were."

  "...As tumultuous as the sea, too. I cannot predict you."

  "Neither can I sometimes."

  "Kiss me, Sadie."

  "What will I get out of it?"

  "This... and... this..."

  "...Oh."

  One day I tried to make
waffles. It did not go well.

  "I burned the waffles," I told Malcolm when he came to investigate the smoke.

  "I see that." He stared at the blackened corpses of several failed waffles. "I could smell it, too."

  "Sorry," I said. "I'm a really lousy housewife."

  "Boatwife," he said. "You are a lousy boatwife."

  "Yeah. That."

  He ran his finger over my chin and raised a brow. "Even more of a lousy boatwife because you don't know I hate waffles."

  I stared at him, incredulous. "Then why do you have a waffle iron?" I asked. "It's just sitting here, begging to be used."

  "Every kitchen should have a waffle iron," he said.

  "Even if you hate waffles?"

  "Especially if you hate waffles. Every time I see it, it reminds me of how lucky I am to not be eating waffles right now."

  I stared at the black waffle discs. "I suppose we could play frisbee with them."

  "Or just throw them into the sea."

  "That was the eventual goal, yes." I put my hands on my hips and blew my hair out of my face. "Well, what do you want to eat instead?" We were well-provisioned with dry and canned goods, but pre-processed crap was getting awfully old. The waffles, at least, would have been fresh made.

  Malcolm grabbed me by the hips. "I can think of one thing I'd like to eat," he said and lifted me onto the counter top before sliding the boxers down my legs and letting them pool on the floor.

  He knelt down and began to lick my pussy, quick and sharp. I gasped, my head lolling. "I... I think this violates some sort of health regulation..."

  He paused. "Good thing we're in international waters, then." His smile was wicked, and I didn't object when he returned to his task.

  "So how did you become so fucking rich? This boat is still blowing my mind."

  "My father made me get rich."

  "Haha! Oh, you're serious."

  "I am. Hold still, you are going to mess up the exposure."

  "But my nose itches!"

  "Suffer for art."

  "You. You are the one who's supposed to suffer, not your model."