All the Things We Need Read online

  In response to his naughty teasing, I pressed a slick finger to his asshole, making him gasp. “You want this?”

  “Oh…yes. Please, please, please… Por favor!”

  I tested the glass by pressing it to my lips. Still cool but not shockingly so. I held it up. “You want this?”

  He tried to answer and only a soft and desperate noise came out. I grinned, running it along his leg, and let it rest on his belly for a moment so he could feel the weight of it. His smile grew lax, gaze distant.

  I’d known women who prided themselves on making their pets cry or wail, but even as a little girl I’d never liked breaking my toys. I liked it so much better when the man beneath me writhed and begged for release not because I was hurting him, but because I was making him feel too impossibly good. Creating desire fed something inside me I’d never been able to fully explain or understand. All I knew was that I craved it and loved it, and Esteban gave it to me. Another few strokes of his cock and he would explode for me…but not until I let him.

  That was power. That was control. In that moment, I owned him.

  And really, what woman would not love being made a goddess?

  Again the throb of desire pulsed between my legs, easing as I coated the toy in lube and pressed it slowly against him. He hissed in a breath, tensing, and I soothed a hand along his cock.

  “Open,” I whispered.

  The plug was so perfectly designed that it practically seated itself, the curve pointing upward toward his belly so that it could press on his prostate. The flared base had a ring to keep it from slipping too deep inside, and also for gripping, so I could rock it back and forth. Esteban cried out when I did that, a low and guttural noise that mimicked pain. I knew him and all his sounds well enough, though. It might be a little uncomfortable, but he liked it more than he didn’t.

  I let go of the toy and ran my hands once more up the insides of his thighs. I didn’t touch his cock, but I did draw a finger through the thick clear liquid that had puddled on his belly. I moved up his body to drag my fingertip over his lower lip then tucked it again into my own mouth and relished the taste of him.

  “Tell me what you want,” I murmured in his ear.

  He turned his face toward me, his breath hot. “To please you.”

  I was already working my panties over my hips and thighs to kick them off. I inched my skirt up to show him my bareness and the stockings and garters framing it. His cock leaped, tapping his belly—if you’d told me even a few years before that erections did move on their own, that it wasn’t something made up for sexy novels, I’d have laughed. But I knew very well now how a man’s cock, aroused to the point of spilling without so much as another stroke, could throb and jerk.

  “I want your mouth on me, Esteban.”

  He moaned, his hips rocking so that his cock thrust upward into empty air. His ass would be clenching on that toy, too, I knew. A long string of precome clung to his prick, and I paused again to admire it. Then, facing his cock, I straddled his face so he could get his talented tongue and lips on my hard clit.

  It was my turn to gasp and moan when Esteban’s mouth moved on me. I ground onto his tongue, my hands braced on his hips as I leaned forward. I let my tongue swipe the head of his cock, but didn’t take it in my mouth. I wanted to tease him, but also myself, and I knew the second I let myself take him inside my mouth, I’d be lost and out of control.

  He put his hands on my hips, and I didn’t deny him. I liked them there, gripping. He might leave a mark or two of his own.

  Lower, I reached to curl a finger in the plug’s handle. As I moved on his face, letting his lips and tongue urge me toward climax, I steadily rocked the plug—not thrusting in and out, like I was fucking him, but instead a gentle, steady pressure, on and off that internal pleasure spot. He pushed his cock upward, and I nuzzled the tip for a moment until he gave a muffled cry against me. Then I stopped. I slowed. I rolled my hips to push my clit against him in time to the steady pressure I was giving his prostate.

  “Feel it,” I said with a hitch in my breath. Words were hard to form, my voice nothing close to steady or stern. But I wanted him to hear me that way, breaking, so he knew how much he was pleasing me. “Do you feel it?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Oh…”

  I pushed up with a hand on his hip, the bone hard beneath my palm. His dear cock was thick, straining for release, the color shading darker the harder it got. He was uncut, something that had been new to me with him, and I let my fingers tease the velvety foreskin that had retracted from his erection.

  “I love your cock,” I told him matter-of-factly. I raised myself just far enough that he’d have to strain to reach my flesh, but my body was clenching and pulsing, so close to the edge that I wanted to hold off for a moment longer. “This thick, beautiful cock.”

  “It’s yours,” he told me, and I let him lie to me because we both wanted to pretend that was true. “I’m yours. I belong… Oh…”

  Another string of muttered Spanish, a few words I did recognize, eased out of him on a desperate, gasping sigh. The sound of it, his words, the edge of hungry, mindless pleasure in his voice, was at last enough. I gave him my pussy again and let him feast on me as I sat up, hands on his chest, to ride his mouth until I came.

  My body shook with it, hard spasms of pleasure. Esteban’s hands gripped me hard, fingers digging. His cock leaped. He cried out against me, and as my vision went blurry from the pleasure, I watched thick come jet out of him to splatter his belly. He came without me even touching his cock, and I went mindless myself at the sight. I came again, hard enough to feel faint, and as the surge of orgasm eased away, I rolled onto my back next to him and splayed, boneless and content, on the king-size bed.

  We both lay still for a moment or so, the sound of our breathing the only noise—though the pounding of my heart had been loud in my ears, it was fading. His hand had moved to rest on my shin. My head was close enough to his leg that I could turn my face to kiss the side of his knee. I sat up, moving on numb legs to grab one of the hand towels he’d taken earlier from the bathroom and put on the bed.

  “Slow,” I said quietly as I eased the plug out of him and wrapped it in the towel to take care of in a bit. I used the edge of the other towel to gently clean him off, and when I was done, him naked and me still fully clothed except for my panties, I curled up next to him with my head on his shoulder to cuddle him.

  We breathed together. I laid my hand on his belly, the skin still warm and a little sticky. He’d gone flaccid, but something in the intimacy of this moved me more than I expected, and I cupped him for a moment before pressing a kiss to his shoulder. My eyes closed. I took in his scent, knowing I would leave with it infused into my clothes. I would carry it with me for the rest of the night, until later when I would shower him away. But for now, I felt and smelled Esteban all over me, and for now, I didn’t want to move.

  He would shower before he left. He always did. Always careful to leave without any evidence that we’d been together, unlike the way I let myself stay covered in him for hours. I never asked him why. I didn’t want him to tell me, because then I would know.

  His phone buzzed from the nightstand. Neither of us looked at it. His hand came up to stroke my hair and pull me a little closer, something I noticed. Believe me, I did. He chose to cuddle me closer rather than to answer his call, and that might have meant nothing or everything.

  A few seconds after the phone stopped buzzing, the trill of a voice mail tone sounded. He sighed. He kissed my temple.

  “I need to go,” he said.

  I nuzzled against him, considering being stern again, but the truth was that I could order and command and demand, but in the end, he would only do for me what he wanted to do. I kissed his shoulder and gave it a small press of my teeth to make him hiss in a breath, then sat to let him get up. When he came o
ut of the shower, his hair rubbed briskly dry and a towel wrapped around his lean hips, I held out the final gift to him in the palm of my hand. Esteban sat on the edge of the bed next to me and charmed me with the pink tinge on his cheeks and the tips of his ears, endearingly exposed by his short haircut.

  He took the sleek silicone plug, similar to the one I’d used earlier but smaller and more lightweight, into his hand and curved his fingers over it. He didn’t look at me at first, though he leaned into me. I put an arm around him as he pressed his face into the curve of my neck.

  “You’re so good to me,” he said.

  “I want you to think of me during the days when we aren’t together.”

  He paused. “I think of you every night before I go to sleep.”

  “You do?” Pleased, I nuzzled his cheek. When I tried to pull away, Esteban held me close for a few seconds longer. I stroked his hair, petting him.

  “I don’t want to leave,” he whispered.

  So don’t was the answer that rose to my lips, but I didn’t say the words aloud. Briskly, I pushed away from him and cupped my hands around his. It wasn’t the first time I’d given him a task to complete while we were apart, but it was the first time I’d added a prop.

  “I want you to wear it for me.” I squeezed his fingers around it. “At work. Not every day. But when I ask.”

  And then, as I’d known he would, Esteban nodded and gave me what I asked for.

  He said yes.

  CHAPTER 2

  My partner didn’t want to work. I wanted to get paid. It was kind of an old argument.

  “One of us is not independently wealthy,” I told him sharply as I pushed his feet off my desk. “Unless you intend to fully support me in my old age, you’d better get working on that long, long list of things I told you needed to be signed off on before the weekend.”

  Alex Kennedy could’ve made a career out of being charming, and he knew it. “C’mon, Elise. It’s Wednesday. Hump Day!”

  “So hump yourself over to your desk and sign these files!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Alex told me with a cheeky grin.

  I rolled my eyes, refusing to give in to his relentless charisma. “Doesn’t work on me.”

  “Sure it does.”

  “Not from you, it doesn’t,” I said and pushed a folder toward him.

  “Damn it. It works on everyone else.”

  I lifted a brow. “I’m not everyone else.”

  Alex got up to pace in front of my desk. “Work is boring and annoying, and we’ve been doing it all day. Let’s go out for a late lunch. My treat.”

  “Far be it from me to turn down free lunch, but we have to get all of those clients squared away first. Paperwork.” I held up a hand at his groan. “Yeah, yeah, I know. Bane of your existence. I get it. But you’re the one who has to sign off on this stuff, or else none of it will go through.”

  Alex sighed. “Fuck my life. I thought starting my own business meant I got more time off.”

  “Sign this shit!” I waved the folder at him. “Then take all the time off you want! Buy me lunch, too, that’s all good. But get this stuff done, so I don’t have to deal with a bunch of pissy voice mails about transactions that didn’t go through because you were too busy dancing around to sign anything.”

  He did dance then, wiggling his ass and giving me another grin. “Dance, dance, dance…”

  A short rap at the door turned us both. Olivia, Alex’s wife, poked her head around the door. She laughed at my expression.

  “Is he giving you a hard time again?” she asked.

  “Baby.” Alex went to kiss her. “I’m trying to take her out to lunch. I’m trying to be nice.”

  “Lunch?” she asked. “At this hour?”

  “We’ve been hard at work all day,” he said.

  “Well, one of us has. He’s being lazy,” I told her.

  She gave me a face that told me she knew exactly what dealing with that was like. When Alex tried to dance over to her, she held him off with a hand on his chest, though when he dove in to kiss her neck, she giggled and gave in for a minute before pushing him away. Over his shoulder, she said, “I sent you a link to your album with the shots I worked on for the calendar project. I marked the ones I thought came out the best, but you let me know if there are any others you’d like me to work on.”

  I’d started modeling in college when a friend taking a photography class had needed someone to pose for a final project. The pictures hadn’t been very good—my friend was no artist. But as it turned out, I was a very good model. Other people in the class asked for help with their projects, one thing led to another and before I knew it, I’d collected quite a portfolio. And, because I was up for anything, most of the pictures were what my mother considered “filthy.” I’ve never considered being naked on camera porn, but I guess that’s in the eye of the beholder.

  A few years ago I’d been new to the D/S scene, just getting my feet wet, so to speak, when I’d attended a munch, a purely social meeting sponsored by a group of women and the men who liked to serve them. The munch had been held in a local art gallery, hung with Scott Church’s work. He was looking for people willing to pose for a series of BDSM-themed portraits. I agreed. We’d done lots of shoots together since then, from sweetly provocative lingerie cheesecake to hardcore portraits. I liked working with Scott, never for the money even if sometimes there was some, but because I liked having my picture taken. In some ways, modeling, like the things I did with Esteban, was all about control, except that when I posed for pictures, I wasn’t the one in charge. And there’s power in that, too, sometimes, giving someone else what they want to take from you and make their own.

  I’d met Olivia at one of Scott’s photography seminars, where I’d been one of the models. Shortly after that, she’d been asked to participate in a local annual calendar project for a Harrisburg charity, and though it wasn’t exactly the type of shoot I’d been doing before that, it was for a good cause. The pictures Olivia had taken had turned out to be so much fun and so well received that we were back for a third year.

  “Hey, pictures. Can I see?” Alex came around my desk to look over my shoulder, though I hadn’t even opened the email from his wife, much less the online album.

  “Since apparently you’re not going to bother doing any real work,” I told him as I found the link and clicked through, “I guess so.”

  Alex leaned closer as the screen populated with thumbnails of the shots Olivia had taken. He pointed. “I like that one.”

  I enlarged it. “Me, too.”

  Olivia grinned as she looked to see which we’d both picked. “I figured.”

  Together, we’d done a re-creation of a famous Vargas portrait, the artist known for his pinup paintings of women in various situations showing off their garters and stockings. This one was me in front of an apple-bobbing barrel, my hands tied behind me as I captured an apple in my teeth. Pretty vintage skirt, stockings, a lady with her hands tied. No innuendo about it, this picture was meant to be sexy.

  “It’s a little too bondagey for a charity calendar,” I said. “But it’s fun.”

  Alex looked at me. “It’s sexy as all hell, that’s what it is.”

  “You’re right, my darling perv,” Olivia said, scrutinizing it. “But so is Elise. It’s too sexy for the project. The ones I marked would work better. Elise, let me know. I have to run now. I have a shoot scheduled with a set of newborn twins, and their mother tells me if we don’t catch them at nap time, it will be impossible to get any good shots. I tried to tell her I could work with kids, but hey, she’s the client.”

  She kissed her husband and gave me a wave before heading out. Alex was now clicking through the rest of the pictures she’d taken. All variations of some kind of pinup imagery, though all far tamer than the first he’d picke
d. He paused on one of me with my head tipped back and eyes squinted closed, laughing. It had been a good day in Olivia’s studio.

  “You could do this full-time, you know. Why are you crunching numbers and doing data analysis for me?”

  “Because I’m more than just a pretty face?” I posed it as a question, adding an innocent blink and making dead doll eyes. “Because I like to pay my bills and do things like eat and buy stuff?”

  “Bills, schmills,” Alex said.

  I rolled my eyes. “Says the bazillionaire.”

  “Pfft.” Alex leaned over my shoulder again to scroll through the pictures then nudged me. “Seriously, I know my wife’s a bloody genius with the camera, but you…look at you.”

  I looked over the photo he’d pulled up. Critically, I could see what he meant. False modesty is a worse sin than vanity, I’ve always thought. I was pretty. I’d been pretty my whole life.

  “There’s more to me than eyes and mouth and tits, Alex.”

  He stepped away as I swiveled in my chair, and though Alex could be counted on to make light of nearly anything, this time he looked solemn. “Yeah. You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have to be sorry.” I shrugged, looking again at the pictures. “I like having my picture taken. I like working with Olivia. I like the idea that something we’ve done together goes to raising money for something useful. It seems to make it worthwhile.”

  “And if you hadn’t met Olivia in Scott’s workshop, you’d never have met me, and I’d never have been able to convince you my life would not be complete without you by my side.” Alex put his fists under his chin and fluttered his eyelashes at me. “So, lucky me.”