Wanna Be Yours Page 7

  He would roll over and touch her. If he didn’t demand his satisfaction with words, it would begin with the insistence of his hands. A kiss. He would slide his fingers between her legs, inside her, to see if she was ready there for his dick.

  Eric did none of these things. When she eventually roused herself to crack open her eyes and roll onto her side to push up on her elbow and look at him, he was looking at her. Smiling. She took a glance at his cock. It wasn’t hard now, but a small gleam of wetness dotted his belly, proof of his arousal.

  “How did I taste?

  “Amazing,” Eric said. “I could have you for every meal for the rest of my life.”

  Madeline snorted soft laughter and sat up, cross-legged, facing him. “What an offer.”

  Eric shifted to shove the pillows beneath his head, propping himself upward. He reached for her hand to link their fingers. She waited for him to put it on his cock. To urge her to reciprocate.

  “Was it good?” He squeezed her fingers and let them rest on his chest.

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” he said.

  “I asked to hurt you,” Madeline said with some surprise, “but I didn’t.”

  Eric grinned. “There’s still time.”

  She moved to curl up next to him with her head on his chest. One hand on his belly, she toyed with the dark, curling hairs leading to the thicker patch surrounding his cock. When she moved it lower to brush the head of his cock with the back of her hand, he sighed.

  Once, Madeline had owned an entire cabinet full of tools. She’d thrown most of them away and left the rest behind when she moved from Tokyo. It had felt wrong to use them with someone else, and since then, she’d satisfied herself with using cheap toys or household items or the implements her infrequent lovers had brought to their play.

  All she had left was the expensive leather flogger she’d had custom-made for herself, expertly weighted to her hand and shaped to her grip. She’d put it in a drawer, a cabinet, a case beneath her bed or high on a shelf in every house she’d lived in since. Here in this cozy Dayton, Ohio house, the first she’d owned in years that truly felt like home, the flogger remained in its case tucked beneath some heavy winter sweaters in a trunk at the foot of her bed.

  She had wanted to hurt him, but now didn’t feel like the right time. “There’s no rush.”

  The small noise that slipped from his throat sounded like disappointment, and she twisted to look up at him. He’d closed his eyes. He was smiling.

  Ten

  Eagerness had filled him at Madeline’s request to hurt him, but Eric had to admit that he wasn’t entirely upset that she wasn’t doing it. He’d always liked pain, but he still had to get himself ready for it. For now, he was all right with simply resting here next to her in the aftermath of her orgasm.

  “Eric.”

  “Yes,” he said at once.

  “What happened after you hired yourself a domina?”

  He shifted to turn over so he could face her. They shared the pillow. He let his fingers slide through the long dark strands of her hair, falling over her shoulders and breasts.

  “It was strictly a professional relationship. We did make plans to meet in person, but she never showed up,” he said. The memory didn’t sting any more, but it had for a long time.

  “Oh.”

  “She sent a note,” he told her. “Which made sense, since all of it, everything she’d ordered me to do, had been done through notes and messages. The note told me that she was releasing me from her service, I mean, such as it was, since I’d paid for it. Is it a breakup letter if you’re not breaking up because you were never together in the first place?” He twirled her hair around his finger and tugged gently, nowhere near hard enough to hurt her, but her face moved toward his.

  Madeline frowned, and her brow furrowed. “I think…yes. You can absolutely break up with someone with whom you’ve not considered yourself to be in a relationship. So many times we pretend that what we are doing is not a relationship simply because we don’t label it. Not giving it a name might devalue it, certainly, but it can’t take away the truth of it being something, even something we don’t want it to be.”

  “I’m not sure I wanted it to be something with her. Hell,” he laughed suddenly, having never thought of it it before, “she might not have been a she, at all. I never met her in person.”

  “Did she provide you with something you needed, at the very least?” Madeline pressed her knee between his thighs and moved closer to him. Belly to belly. Her soft skin got him hard.

  Eric nodded, thinking of kissing her but not sure he should assume the privilege. “Yeah. It was a kind of messed up time for me. I was sort of seeing a woman while all of that was going on, and it wasn’t something I could tell her about. We’d just met, she lived in my apartment building, and it didn’t feel like I could tell her about this weird, kinky sex thing I was doing when she and I had barely gotten started.”

  “How long did you see her?”

  “Not long. A few months,” he said. “Her name was Paige.”

  “What happened?” Her fingers traced the line of his jaw.

  “Not sure. It kind of just...fizzled. She got back together with her ex, I think. We never really talked about it, and she moved out and we lost touch.”

  Madeline pursed her lips. She drew a line down the center of his chin. Then from his forehead down to the tip of his nose. She tapped her fingers last on his lips and let them rest there until he parted them and she slipped the tip of her thumb inside for just a moment.

  “I’m going to suck your cock,” she murmured.

  A groan twisted out of him. His cock twitched. “Fffffuck.”

  “I’m going to bring you to the edge,” she told him. “Perhaps more than once.”

  “Oh, God.”

  Madeline sat up and grinned at him. Her dark eyes sparkled with a wicked glee that sent shivers of anticipation all through him. She moved slowly down his body, keeping her gaze on his, and hovered her mouth over his thickening cock.

  Eric tensed, but she used only the tip of her tongue to tease the head. When he pushed upward with his hips, she shook her head with a frown and gripped his thighs to keep him still. A moment later, she bent and took his entire length in her mouth until his cockhead nudged the back of her throat.

  “Oh, fuck, oh…God. Yes!” The shout burst from him before he could stop it.

  She had him on the edge in a minute, and he strained toward his climax even as he clenched his fists into the sheets, praying she would do as she’d promised and edge him without letting him come. The heat of her mouth left him. He gasped out a protest, a plea, a prayer, a promise.

  Her hand moved slowly on his shaft for a few lingering seconds. The sudden digging pinch on the sensitive flesh of his inner thigh startled him into another low shout, but the pain also pushed the pleasure all the way from his balls and up his shaft until it centered in the head of his dick. He didn’t come, only because Madeline had gripped him hard just below his cockhead.

  “Spread your legs,” she said, and when he did, she pinched the inside of his other thigh harder than she had the first.

  His asshole clenched. His cock got rock hard. A surge of precome overflowed the head, providing no release. Only tension and rising desire and wild, helpless ecstasy.

  Madeline went down on him again. Her tongue swirled as her mouth engulfed his length. One hand on his dick, stroking in time to her sucking, she used the other to pinch him over and over again in a line all up the inside of his thigh. The back of her hand brushed his balls; he tensed, terrified she would pinch him there and not ready for the agony of that, but instead she drifted a finger down the smoothness between his balls and asshole. She pressed the magic spot there, and he almost came again and did not because she stopped licking and sucking and stroking and went very, very still.

  Eric wanted to shout out but managed no more than a guttural cry. He pulsed against her fingers from the inside. Another surge o
f fluid leaked from him. He was going to come, oh, fuck, oh yes, he was going to go over.

  He didn’t.

  Madeline eased her mouth off his dick. It leaped, jerking, and a string of silver precome dangled from the head to puddle on his belly. She drew a finger through it and brought it to his mouth. He sucked the offering from her finger, tasting himself, his arousal, tasting the flavor of her skin, and again, he almost-but-did-not come.

  “Please,” he found the voice to say.

  A third time, she took him in her mouth. Slowly, so fucking slowly, she sucked him. Eric wanted to thrust but remembered her earlier, unspoken but unmistakable, command to stay still. He dug his fingers deeper into the sheets, into the mattress beneath. He rode the pleasure and the stinging pain, and he strained toward release and was denied a third time. Gasping, he arched, desperate and aching, but whether it was for release or more denial, he couldn’t be sure.

  “Shh.” Madeline soothed him with her voice. She rested her hand on his belly again and moved upward to tuck herself against him with her face in the curve of his shoulder. “Shh, shhh.”

  “You already own me!” He bit out, arching to try and get her hand on his dick.

  “No. I don’t. And you shouldn’t give yourself away so quickly, with so little disregard.”

  She really wasn’t going to let him come. Also, she’d rejected him. Angry, Eric shifted away from her before stopping himself. Madeline moved herself to his chest. She would be able to feel the hammer throb of his heart beneath his sweating skin. Embarrassed, he tried to slow it, but could not. He concentrated instead on slowing his panting breaths. Stilling the tense shaking of his muscles.

  “You’re upset,” she said when he’d finally calmed.

  “Well…yeah, I mean…”

  Her fingertips found his nipple and tweaked it. “I told you, I like denial.”

  “I told you that I don’t, really.”

  “But you need it,” she said. “You need to have someone else deciding for you. You need and want to give up that control.”

  Eric closed his eyes and covered them with one hand. “Fuck. Yes. That. But right now, I want to finish.”

  “Right now,” she told him, “I want your aching balls and heavy cock to remind you, every day until I choose otherwise, that I decide for you.”

  “What if I decide to just jack off when I go home? You just said it. You don’t own me.” He wouldn’t do that, and he thought she knew it, but some reluctant part of him forced him to say it like a threat. Her rejection had stung.

  Madeline sat. “You’re free, of course, to do as you choose. I would hardly even know, would I? But if that’s how you want to play, Eric, this isn’t going to work. You offer your cock to me, you offer for me to own you, but you won’t actually give up to me, not when it goes against what you want for yourself.”

  “I know.” He sat too, wishing away his erection, still demanding to be satisfied.

  “Look,” she said after a small hesitation. “We’ve had some fun. It’s been lovely, but we can each walk away from it right now, without hard feelings.”

  He frowned. “Is that what you want?”

  “No. But I decided that I would no longer participate in a relationship with someone who claimed he wished to submit to me, but refused to actually do it, or insisted upon forcing his own desires on me as paramount.”

  “I’m not…that’s…I’m sorry,” Eric said, hating the idea of it, especially because he knew he’d edged close to making that the truth a few minutes ago.

  Madeline shook her head. “You offer yourself up for me to own as the most casual thing, and yet you make it meaningless when you become angry the first time you don’t get what you want.”

  “I’m sorry,” he told her again, meaning it, watching her expression to see if she showed any sign of believing him.

  “I’m sure you are.” She sighed and looked away from him, her gaze distant. “When you don’t get what you want.”

  “That’s not fair,” he said quietly. “You’re judging me without giving me a chance to prove anything other than the idea you have in your head already.”

  She twisted to look at him, her eyebrows lifted. Her lips thinned. He’d gone too far, he thought, but didn’t wish he’d stayed silent.

  “Wanting to submit and serve doesn’t make me a pushover,” Eric said.

  Her lips parted, her expression surprised. “No. I would never think so. I know better than that, and at any rate, I don’t require or desire weakness.”

  “Good.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said with a lift of her chin. “To be honest, I am predisposed to harshness when I feel as though I’m being manipulated. I’ve been hurt, fiercely, by someone I loved who wooed me outrageously to get what he wanted, then became dismissive and cold after he’d had it. I shouldn’t judge you by what he did. I’m sorry.”

  The idea of anyone hurting her curled his lip. “I hate that for you. You deserve so much better than that.”

  “Do you want this? With me? This way?” She studied him, her expression neutral although he hoped there might be the faintest light of interest in her gaze. She didn’t smile, and Eric didn’t like knowing that he’d been the one to put a frown on her face.

  “Yes, Madeline. I want this with you. This way.” He shook his head. “I don’t want to be a prisoner to my dick.”

  She nodded and leaned to kiss his cheek before sitting back. She took both his hands in hers. Linked their fingers. Squeezed.

  “I don’t want you to be a prisoner to me, either,” she said.

  Eleven

  A week. Seven short days made endless with Eric and his submission to her, his amazing, delightful obedience. When would she stop wondering if this would end? Perhaps never, Madeline had to admit, since certainly everything else always had, but surely after only a week she was still allowed to wonder.

  Eric had gone out of town for the weekend, the first time since the night of Alex and Olivia’s party that she wouldn’t see him. Madeline hadn’t pressed him for the details and the reasons for the trip, although she guessed he might have told her, if she had. There was still something of a mystery between them about who they were, and she liked that, for now. She wanted to keep it that way. The more she asked him to share with her, the more she would be compelled to share with him. It was her own mystery she wanted to keep, more than his.

  When her phone rang, jangling with the familiar tune she’d set for her daughter Mitsoku, Madeline answered the video call at once. Mitsoku’s grin filled the screen before she pulled back to set her phone on something solid, keeping herself in view. Madeline recognized the bland decor of a hotel room. Mitsoku worked for her father’s company and often traveled, but she was supposed to be on a vacation with her long-term boyfriend, Callum.

  “Hi, Mom,” Mitsoku said in Japanese. “What’s up?”

  “I wasn’t expecting to hear from you for at least a week!” Madeline also spoke in Japanese. She raised her glass of red wine and turned her phone to show Mitsoku the room around her before settling the view back on her own face.

  “It’s been raining every day here. Callum went out to get us some takeaway, and I thought I’d check in with you. We’re planning to visit over Christmas. I know it’s a few months away, but I wanted to be sure that was okay.” Mitsoku paused, her lips pressing together for a moment. “To come to your house in the States.”

  Madeline nodded. There’d been some rocky times with Mitsoku in the past. “Of course. My home is your home. You and Callum are welcome. Have you talked to your brother?”

  Kenji was harder to get in touch with than his sister. He spent months out of every year touring, performing as a DJ and singer, and although technology should have made it easier to text or video chat or email or, at the very least, “like” pictures on social media, her son had never been very good about any of that. He sent packages every so often, full of souvenirs from places he’d been, and he was apt to simply show up on her doorst
ep, sometimes with a friend or lover in tow, but more often alone.

  “Nah. He’s in Israel, I think. Jerusalem? He promised to get us backstage when he’s in Berlin, but I don’t know if we can make it.”

  Her children had become world travelers, the way Madeline had. It put them all so far from each other, and although she didn’t often let herself dwell on that, or how long it had been since the last time they’d all been together, she felt that pang now. Frowning, she touched her daughter’s face through the phone screen. “I miss you, Mitsoku-chan.”

  “Are you all right?”

  Madeline had been raised in America, England and Japan by her British mother and Japanese father, but Mitsoku and Kenji had been solely raised in Tokyo. Japanese displays of emotion were made with actions, rarely words. She’d told her children she loved them over and over, but she hadn’t been able to override the society in which they’d grown up. Both of them had always been more reserved.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I simply haven’t seen you and Kenji…and Callum…in such a long time. I’m looking forward to seeing you all in the winter.”

  Mitsoku chattered on for a while about her work, vacation, her trips to visit Callum’s family. There might be a wedding in the future, closer rather than further away, Madeline thought, and was uncertain how she’d feel when the time came to be a mother of the bride. Proud, of course. Nostalgic, definitely.

  “…and you?” Mitsoku had paused in her monologue to stare directly into the camera at her mother.

  “Me?”

  “You. What’s happening there, with you?” Mitsoku’s voice dropped and her expression turned to concern.

  Madeline finished her glass of wine and thought about mentioning Eric, but it was too soon for that. Her children were adults with lives of their own, but even when they were younger, she’d never made a habit of bringing them into her love life. The divorce from their father had been traumatic enough, his death had brought more pain and grief, and although they never spoke of her time with Hiro, Madeline had always had a suspicion that Mitsoku, at least, had known about it.