Expose, p.9
Expose, page 9
Because I hated standing still, doing nothing, letting her call the shots, I hauled my shirt off over my head. Then I gripped the back of her head, twining my fingers into her hair, tighter and tighter. I yanked her head way back so that her mouth opened and her eyes watered. I studied her face, her mouth. Her expression was serene. She wasn’t afraid of me. Despite everything, she wasn’t afraid.
That made her my perfect fit. My foil.
“Suck it,” I told her, voice low, harsh. “Show me how much you like to suck my cock.”
She opened her mouth wider, waiting for me to release her so she could. I eased my grip and she descended on me, pushing my jeans so they dropped to the floor, peeling my boxer briefs down, before drawing my cock into her mouth. I stared down at her, enjoying the way she flicked her tongue over my skin, the way she made little sounds of pleasure in the back of her throat. You would think she had a sweet treat. A fucking lollipop.
My balls were tight, cock hard from her touch. But it wasn’t the highest form of pleasure for me. That was when I was buried deep inside her body and she was tied up, at my mercy. I let her go for a good long while, let her draw me into a more relaxed state, her slick mouth a nice distraction. She was so cute, so sweet, the way her eagerness increased and she gripped the base of my cock tighter and tighter. She started to squirm, to rub her nipples against my leg. I had no doubt I could reach down and her pussy would be wet and ready for me.
“Do you like to be on your knees? Do you like to bow down for your master?” I murmured.
“Yes,” she breathed. “Oh, yes.”
I tugged her off me. Her lips were shiny, saliva on her chin. She panted softly. “Get on the bed. Bow down to me there.” My belly dancer fantasy was returning. I couldn’t seem to shake it. Maybe I just needed to act it out. Be the sultan. Make Laney my harem of one.
Without hesitation she rose to her feet, sliding her naked body as close to mine as possible. She wiped her lip and drew past me, her nipples firm, her cheeks flushed with arousal. Laney crawled up onto the bed and turned back to me, her head down, hands reaching for my cock.
“Not like that.” I shoved her head straight down onto the mattress. “Like this. Arms in front of you. Head down. Ass up.” She did as I commanded while I shed myself of my clothes fully. The floor was cold on my bare feet but I welcomed the shock. I felt the course of lust in my veins, the pent up energy clamoring to get loose. I bounced up and down on the balls of my feet a few times and pumped my fists.
Then I had the control to pet the back of her head gently, massaging the roots that I had tugged so ruthlessly. “Good girl. So beautiful. So perfect for me.” I ran my touch over her shoulders, down her spine, back up her arms, straight in front of her Superman-style. Part of me wanted to just leave her there for an hour or two, to see how obedient she could be. But today wasn’t the time for that. She had already proved herself worthy by handing me her phone to toss. She had given herself fully over to me. She trusted me.
So I wouldn’t test her. I wouldn’t make her wait. I would give her complete and total satisfaction tonight so we would both sleep hard and well, devoid of thoughts about the future for me. Worry over the past for Laney.
I got up on the bed with her, on my knees myself. I ran my hand down her spine, over the curve of her backside. “Just stay like that, doll,” I told her. “Turn your head to the side if you need to breathe.”
She turned, took a breath like a swimmer, and returned to her original position. Damn it, she was sexy. Such a perfect little submissive. “How does it feel to bow to me?”
Turning her head again, she said, “It feels right.” She sounded breathless, eager. “It makes me feel special. Important to you.”
That felt like a fist around my heart. “You are important to me. I gave up everything for you.”
“I know.” She stayed still, head still facing forward, even though she had it slightly raised to speak. “That’s why I’ll give you anything you want. Everything I have.”
“I want your body,” I said, brushing my fingers feather light over her ass. Then I smacked her backside hard with the palm of my hand. She barely even jumped. She was well-trained now and able to brace herself. “I want your heart.” I leaned over and brushed her hair away from her neck. I pressed my lips there. “I want your trust and obedience.”
She shivered. “You have all of those.”
“I know.” I shifted my palm to cover the back of her skull. I turned her head back to supine. It would be so easy to suffocate her now. Just hold her face down into the mattress. She would obey until she realized what was happening and by then it would be too late. All her fight couldn’t fight me off. But I would never do that to Laney.
Shifting my hand, I caressed her neck, her back, before returning to her head. Her hair, her skin, so soft, so welcoming. “But I’ll never claim your mind or your soul. Those are all yours, Laney. Only yours.”
Her thoughts, her emotions, her secret inner self was hers and hers alone. I would never try to prick or pry or climb inside her skull. I didn’t need to know what she was thinking. Only what she was doing.
“You always know what I need, what I want,” she murmured. “I feel like I didn’t understand myself until I came to Alaska.”
Her words were muffled in the blanket but after years of living alone in the wilderness I had a keen sense of hearing. I didn’t even need to strain to hear her. “In death you find life,” I whispered, covering her body with mine, and sinking my teeth into her ear.
I could never get enough of touching her, of running my rough hands over her delicate flesh, crowd her petite body with my large one. I much preferred this, me encapsulating her, to her on her knees. She was still bowing down, but I was over her, around her, enclosing her. Dominating her.
Shifting my hand, I moved between her thighs, stroking inside her wet heat. She was slick with arousal, a throaty moan tumbling out of her mouth at my touch. I could make her come almost immediately. I knew that. It was a huge turn on. I would say the word and she would be there. But I wasn’t ready for that. I wanted to take her first. Take her slowly and intimately and in her sexy position. Bow to the one you serve. That’s what she was doing. Teasing at her labia, I soaked my fingers with her moisture, then used it to lubricate her ass for my entrance.
I moved up, getting into a better position.
When she realized what my intention was, I felt her tense ever so slightly, goose bumps rising on her skin. She was fucking quivering in anticipation. She wanted it, and she wanted it solely because I wanted it. That made my mouth thick with desire, my cock throbbing in triumph. She was tight, her body closing over me when I slid inside her. “I think you’ll like it here,” I told her. I pulled my cock way out then plunged deep. “I want you to be happy.”
She gripped the comforter in front of her outstretched arms, breathing heavily. Shifting her head to the side, she didn’t even try to look at me. Her eyes were glassy, cheeks pink from heat and arousal. This is always when she left me. When she went to a place of intense connection with her body, when I almost became the servant, she the master of her own arousal. She owned it, rolled in it, let it toss her around like a beach ball on the waves.
“I’m happy.”
Reaching my hand around I cupped her pussy, felt the way she almost vibrated with the need, with the lack of stimulation on her clit. I didn’t want her to come because I stroked her swollen clit to a feverish pitch with my tongue or finger. I wanted her to come because of her mind. Because she willed her body to pleasure. So I removed my hand, reveling in the gasp of disappointment she tried to swallow. I stroked, wanting to see how far I could take her, when she would collapse and turn in on herself.
Watching her was meditative for me, soothing. Like a goddamned religious experience. I could do this for hours, always in control of my body. But I knew she was already going to be sore tomorrow. Shoulders, neck, thighs. Ass. So when I sensed she was losing herself, drowning in sensation, I yanked her head up by her hair, raising her onto her forearms to give her relief. Both on her shoulders and in her tight canal. I couldn’t penetrate as deeply this way.
But she gave a cry of disappointment that was followed by a gasp as she realized she shouldn’t have done that. She turned her head, bit her arm, like she was either punishing herself or holding back her inappropriate protests. Interesting. This was new.
“So you want it deep, huh?” I murmured.
“I want what you want.”
That was a lie. She wanted to be back on her breasts, her nipples rubbing the fabric of the blanket, her arms outstretched in supplication, her ass up as a perfect offering to the gods. Take me. That was what she wanted. Even if she didn’t feel she was allowed to admit it.
How could I argue with perfection like that?
Apparently she didn’t want me to be nice. Gentle. They weren’t my style anyway.
So I did what I wanted, since that’s what she wanted. I wasn’t rough but I wasn’t tender either. I took her and I filled her and I owned her.
To live there must be death and I felt, sensed, that every time she gave herself to me, a small piece of Laney died.
What her rebirth would be, I was curious as hell to find out.
As we walked through the town, the stranger was quiet. He’d been entirely silent since the night before, when he had ordered me to bow down for him. I had without hesitation and he had coaxed me into that place, where I felt every cell of my body, every nerve ending in my skin, every beat of my heart. I was nothing but a sentient creature and I languished there for hours after, thoughts empty, body satisfied, heart full.
Usually he showed me tenderness afterwards, but he hadn’t last night. He had just pulled the covers over us and gone to sleep. I had lain awake, disoriented, hazy, body sore, muscles aching. I had been floating, untethered, neither worried nor at peace. Absent of grounding. Missing me.
After I had slept for a few hours and we walked through the quiet town, still under the cover of darkness, I felt less sure of anything. Getting on that plane I had been filled with conviction that this was right, that I was his wife, and we would make a life here. Now I felt lost, stumbling beside him, feet not getting a good grip on the snow. I still didn’t know how to walk in deep snow, and my thighs were sore from my position during sex.
Everything was sore, but that wasn’t what I minded. What I didn’t like was his silence. My fear. Damn it, I hated the fear.
It wasn’t fear of the future or of being caught. It was fear that he wouldn’t want me and that was just stupid. He had told me he had given up everything for me. He had told me my body and heart were his. I had handed them over willingly. I’d bowed down in supplication, the servant to her master, her heart out on a silver platter for him to take.
Yet, here we were, walking past small buildings that could serve any purpose, and he said nothing. The endless night was unnerving. It was eight in the morning and there was no light. It wasn’t complete darkness, but rather an absence of sun. A dusky, starry overlay onto the day. The stranger had his backpack with him, but I had no idea where we were going. I had reached the point where normally I would outright ask him, but something about the quiet, the dark, the silence... I lost my voice.
He turned and pushed open the door of a burgundy building, comfortable with where he was going. He held the door for me, which made me blush for some stupid-ass reason. I went through and realized we were in a coffee shop. There were three guys in their twenties sitting at a table, destroying plates of eggs and tall mugs of coffee. Two were native and one was white. The waitress behind the counter was Chinese, which surprised me for some reason. But all in all, despite the dim and moody lighting, it looked like any other rustic breakfast place.
The stranger pulled out a chair for me to sit and I slid into the seat, glancing around to see if anyone had made note of us. No one was looking and I hoped that given the bigger size of the town, we wouldn’t be noteworthy here like we had been in Rush. He went up to the counter and spoke to the waitress. Then he came back and dropped his backpack down on the second chair.
“I’m going to see my cousin. I ordered you coffee. You can get breakfast if you want.” He bent over and unzipped his pack and pulled out the iPad. “Here, watch a movie or something. There’s Wi-Fi here.”
I took the iPad but I didn’t speak. I was feeling rejected. Abandoned. It was a trigger for me. I could feel my mood darkening, my need to take action, to lash out, grab his attention, elevating. He rubbed his hand over my head. I was still wearing a hat, so even though he made a gesture like he was ruffling my hair, he couldn’t touch it, so my head just rocked back and forth. It was like how a father touches his six-year-old son. It didn’t improve my mood.
Then he was gone and I was left to prop my head up and idly flip through icons on his iPad trying to find something to do. A month ago I would have been thrilled to be given the keys to the Internet kingdom, now I wasn’t sure what to do. Too many options. Nothing interesting. The waitress brought over a pot of coffee and put it down on the table. I gave her a smile. She was in her thirties, thin.
“Thank you.”
But she just nodded and didn’t say anything, further irritating me. Why the fuck was no one talking to me? I felt sour now, mind started to churn to life as I sipped the black coffee. I remembered when I took it with sugar, before I was in a plane crash. Before Michael.
I decided to do a search on Michael. I would just erase the history before the stranger got back. There was no telling how long he would be with his alleged cousin and I was fucking stuck until he decided to show back up. A prisoner in a coffee shop. He might even assume I would look, but I was irritated enough to want to keep it my secret. My thoughts were my own. He had admitted that.
There was a two-line article online that a native of Seattle who had moved to Alaska six months earlier had been found dead of an apparent snow machine accident. It was connected to an article on snow machine safety. I also found his obituary. The words on the accident felt like nothing to me. But the obituary with the details of his life had me clicking the minimize button immediately, my heart racing, breath shallow. All I could think was that I had never meant for any of this to happen. None of it.
It wasn’t my fault my mother was a selfish bitch who left me alone in a locked closet. It wasn’t my fault that I had been in a plane crash. But Michael was my fault and I didn’t know how to live with that. How did the stranger live with having killed Stephanie? Did she plague his dreams, his waking thoughts? Had she struggled in the end? I tried to imagine letting go, accepting my death. Craving it. I would fight for my survival, I was sure of it. I was in the middle of wherever the hell I was because I wanted to survive. It was hard to picture myself floating in warm water, naked, allowing his hands to hold me down under the water.
I would leave my eyes open to watch his while he took my life from me. Stole my breath. Maybe that’s what bothered me about Michael. I had surprised him. He literally hadn’t known what hit him. My stomach clenched. When the waitress handed me a menu, I decided I wanted breakfast. I needed eggs and toast to fill the hole in my gut.
As I was sopping up the inside of over easy eggs with white toast, feeling like I’d fallen back into the depths of my childhood at Grandma Jean’s house with such a traditional breakfast, I did something brazen. Defiant. I checked my email. I logged in and scanned. There were a half dozen emails from Sammy. There was a theme. She was worried. She wanted me to call her. She wanted me to come home.
I was touched. I hadn’t thought she cared that much. I had assumed that I was a passing friendship of convenience. That we would call ourselves besties and have squad goals, but in ten years after we donned bridesmaid dresses and talked shit about each other as bridezillas, we would drift apart. Relegated to drunken selfies together, mutual poor choices, and pathetic texts sent to guys who weren’t worth it.
One email stood out. She’d heard about Michael.
Some sheriff guy is looking for you... he has called me like five times.
So Harry the Harasser had figured out my past. Connected the dots to Sammy.
I have really terrible news. Michael was found in the woods. He had a snow machine accident, and Laney-poo, he’s dead. I’m so, so sorry. This is why you need to come home.
I didn’t understand her logic. Me being in Alaska this time had nothing to do with Michael. The thought gave me pause. Actually, everything, but from Sammy’s perspective, it should be irrelevant. Michael’s death didn’t mean I needed to go home.
The sheriff told me about Michael.
That was a lie. But I continued with it.
I’m in shock. We’re in Fairbanks with Cody’s family so I can’t even do anything about it. I don’t have Michael’s mom’s information so I haven’t called. I feel terrible.
I sent it then started another email.
How many times do I have to tell you I’m fine? I’m where I want to be. With who I want to be.
My breakfast was decimated and my stomach was pleasantly full. I felt better and I realized maybe my mood earlier had been lack of food and being dehydrated. Plus, I always felt drained after sex with the stranger. It was spiritual being with him.
After refilling my coffee cup, I looked around the shop again. The three guys had left. Now there was a woman and her two small children there eating and an elderly couple. I wondered how I could figure out where I was without sounding like a complete idiot. So I checked maps on the tablet and zoomed in on the screen. We were in the North Slope, in a town that seemed to have multiple names. I wasn’t sure which one was accurate. But I could see there was a high school with an active wrestling team. A fishery. A sophisticated water plant that pulled water from the sea. Electricity was heavily reliant on wind power. I wondered if this was the stranger’s inside joke. He had mocked me when I had intended to leave with Michael. He’d told me I should marry Michael and live a suburban lifestyle.
