Game

In the cage frame of his arms, my body slumps. My core burns and blooms, ribbons of sensation unfurling inside me, gushing out to join the combined waters of his tongue and the hot water pipe. I become a fountain.

My splashing self slips down to the tiled shower basin. I want to lie there while the droplets cover and bathe me. But Lloyd has other ideas.

Still on his knees, he clears his throat and looks forlornly down at his erection.

His hair plastered to his scalp, his eyelashes brimming with water-sparkles, his face clean and shining, he looks too completely fucking adorable. I can’t resist him. I haul myself to my knees facing him and take his testicles in my hands, testing them for firmness and fullness. Lloyd has seemingly endless supplies of testosterone, as his cock testifies.

I suck him gently at first, then with increasing urgency, pinching the base of his shaft, squeezing his balls, getting my lips down lower and lower until he is deep in my throat. My cheeks are wet when his thick load of cream shoots into my mouth, but the shower isn’t the only reason for that. There’s a saline element to the damp patches, a stickiness.

When I lie back in his arms, letting the water engulf us both, I hope he hasn’t noticed, but the way he traces a finger beneath the lower lid of both my eyes suggests he has.

Chapter Three

‘Someday my prints will come,’ I sing, checking through the mail while Lloyd pores over a spreadsheet at the desk. ‘But not today.’

He glances over. ‘No sign of the photos? She said it would be a couple of weeks.’

‘It’s been a couple of weeks.’

‘Yeah, fourteen days exactly. Cut her some slack. She probably wants to hang on to them a bit longer for her own personal use.’

‘Ugh, shut up. I don’t want them used as masturbation aids. Unless it’s by me.’ I open a big A4 envelope. ‘Cool, Fashion Forward wants to do a shoot in the restaurant and a couple of the penthouse suites. They’ve sent a contract.’

‘Uh-huh. What’s that one?’

He points to a less glamorous envelope, a thin brown one tossed aside to be dealt with once the post with posh watermarks has been opened.

‘Dunno, looks like … it isn’t stamped.’ I look sharply up at Lloyd. His face answers my question, a little bit tense, a little bit excited.

He feigns absorption in his spreadsheet, but I can tell he’s watching me from the corner of his eye. I slide a fingernail under the loosely gummed flap, watching him back.

A compliment slip flutters out, one of the hotel’s own.

On it, in Lloyd’s handwriting:

Whip me, hurt me, any way you want me

As long as you want me, it’s all right.

I hold it out to him. ‘What’s the meaning of this?’

‘I booked one of the dungeons at Fetish Fantasy.’

‘We’ve done that before. More than once.’

‘Not this way. As the note implies, I don’t want to be in charge this time.’

‘You never are in charge.’

‘I don’t want to play at being in charge this time,’ he amends. ‘I want you to get your kinky boots on and practise flexing that whip hand.’ He leans forwards in his chair, his pupils skittering from side to side, his lips wet. ‘I want you to hurt me.’

He sounds like he means it. But …

‘When have you ever been interested in pain?’

‘I’m not. I’m dreading it, actually. I’m hoping you’ll be more into the mental domination stuff.’

‘I’m not really into any domination stuff,’ I point out. ‘I’ve only ever been on the receiving end.’

‘Well, that’s what makes it a challenge, isn’t it? It’s new, it’s exciting, you get to wear loads of fucking sexy gear … you don’t look convinced.’

I blink at him, trying to imagine what his face looks in pain. I don’t want to imagine it, though. I really don’t.

‘Come on, Soph. You’d have killed for the chance to do me some serious damage not so long ago. Now’s your chance to let it all out. Show me the red-in-tooth-and-claw Sophie, the take-no-prisoners Sophie, the woman who’s always one hundred per cent in control.’

‘That’s why I like submission,’ I grumble. ‘It’s a holiday from all that.’

‘Well, have a busman’s holiday then. Or am I sensing the delicate aroma of …’ He sniffs the air. ‘Failure.’

‘Fuck off. It’ll be easy enough. Just … I don’t know. Nothing. It’s fine. Let’s do it.’

Lloyd claps his hands with apparent delight. ‘Can’t wait for you to walk all over me in your spike-heeled thigh-high boots,’ he claims.

‘I’m not sure I believe you. But neither can I.’

‘Great. I’ve booked it for midnight. They suggest you get there half an hour beforehand to pick out your costume and select your instruments of torture and terror. I’ll see you there.’

He launches himself out of the chair, kisses me passionately until I almost fall over, then waltzes off to take his lunch break.

I sit myself down in the chair he has vacated and stare at the computer screen, a sea of meaningless figures in rectangular boxes.

It strikes me now as more than a little odd that I’ve never done anything like this before. Call myself a hussy … Yet somehow I’ve always managed to signal my desire to submit rather than dominate before the action has reached its crisis. Nobody has ever asked me to hurt them, though one man once wanted me to tie him up and tease him. That was easy enough, though, just a bit of fun.

This seems much more serious.

***

By eleven thirty I am in the giant fancy-dress wardrobe at Fetish Fantasy, being shown around by its proud mistress, Zuleika.

I have in mind something skintight and shiny, and she obliges by finding the perfect figure-hugging number in wet-look latex. Once she has talcum-powdered and trussed me into it, I peer at myself in the mirrored wall, searching for bulges of unforgiving flesh, but the rubber nips it all in, giving me a catwoman silhouette I think I might wear more often.

When I turn around and look over my shoulder at the generous swell of my bottom, I almost purr with satisfaction. Lloyd is going to love that.

But he’s going to have to be content with looking at it.

Tonight, he gets nowhere near my arse.

‘So, I think we were thinking of killer heels,’ I tell Zuleika, but she is well ahead of me. Already she has picked out the ideal pair, and she sets to work lacing me into them, threading through the hooks and eyes until I am crisscrossed to the thigh and towering on five inches of potential murder weapon. The world looks different from up here.