When in Rio (13 page)

I giggled, not quite at ease yet but willing to get there if he really meant everything he said. “I don’t have much of one. I don’t do parties or BDSM gatherings or anything like that. Just friends, word of mouth. I’d dated in high school and college, just the usual sort of thing I guess everyone does. Then I had one boyfriend in grad school who turned out to be into a little bit of everything. We started out pretty normal, whatever that is. Then he started suggesting things and reading me things and…well. You know.”

“He corrupted your innocent vanilla heart with his evil ways?”

“Sir,” I said coyly, “I don’t think I was
ever
vanilla. Just under-informed.”

Jack laughed aloud, a wonderful sound ringing through the marble-floored suite, and I smiled and snuggled in closer.

“You look extremely good in a full set of cuffs, by the way,” he said, picking up one of my wrists by the restraint still attached and waggling it before dropping it again. “The thigh cuffs are especially nice. You’d look great in a harness. You ever done any rock climbing?”

“No, but I’ve always wanted to learn.” It was the truth. It looked like a blast and was a good skill for a naturalist to have, as it increased the number of remote places one could access to observe rare wildlife.

“If you’re serious, I’ll teach you. It’s a great workout. And then there’s the fun equipment. But you were telling me about your evil past. I suspect there’s been more than just that one guy in grad school?”

“Not all that much more. We were only together about six months. The next guy I dated wasn’t into any of that and…” I paused, not sure how to express it.

“It left you cold?”

“Big time. Um, Sir. Sorry.”

“That’s okay. I really only need to hear that when I’m in a certain mood anyway. Just go on.”

“I liked him. He was nice, we had a lot in common. I tried. For about a year, actually. I don’t think he ever figured out why I actually broke up with him. But I couldn’t bring myself to tell him what I felt was lacking. So. Anyway. A while later—this was about five years ago, right after I moved back to Houston after my masters was done—I was in this place in the Montrose and I saw someone I knew from grad school. Buying stuff. Very, very naughty stuff.”

“Oops.”

“Right. And of course, so was I. So we did the whole, ‘oh my gosh, you too?’ number. It had never happened to me before. I was so mortified I thought I was going to die. Now of course it’s just funny, but that first time? Yikes.”

“I was renting my first and only bondage porn the first time it happened to me,” Jack reminisced.

“Really? I never rent porn. Hmm. So I finished buying, um…something not all that naughty, come to think of it. It was actually that silver bullet you just took away. One of my very first toys. But at the time it seemed so daring to just walk into a store and buy it. Then my friend asked if I wanted to come out that night, meet some people, and so I went with her. Hoping like hell that I wouldn’t see any of my friends from high school or anybody my parents knew. Because I hadn’t made that magical leap of logic, of course—”

“If you’re seeing them
there
, they’re sure as hell not going to mention it, because they’re there for the same reason you are.”

“My friend was
subby
too. And she was with a Dom who was interested in…well, he convinced her to talk me into hanging out with them a lot over the next few weeks, and it turned out he really just wanted… I suddenly feel incredibly awkward telling you this, Jack.”

Jack grinned, pushing me back onto the bed and pinning my legs with one of his, playfully pinning my wrists down as well. “Tell me,” he said forcefully, but still obviously playing. “Tell me about the threesome. I can just
hear
the threesome about to happen.”

“It is the most boring threesome story in the history of sex. No, really.”

“Boring…threesome. See, those two words just don’t go together.”

“No, no, really. Because listen. I was the guest star, you know?”

“Yes, I know the concept of the guest star in a threesome. Keep talking.”

“Well. So I’m at their apartment one night,
the
night. We’ve finally agreed to do this, things are proceeding and Kelly, that’s my friend’s Dom—ex-Dom, actually—isn’t quite sure what he wants us to do. We don’t even have all our clothes off, and he’s changing his mind about who goes where and who kisses who.

“Well, Annabelle has her clothes off already, of course. She stripped down to her collar as soon as we walked into the apartment that night. Which pretty much set the tone. Anyway, so once her clothes are off she starts calling Kelly—who’s this weenie little guy with about eighty tattoos—‘Master’. Which I can’t handle because, for me, it always just makes me think of Igor. ‘
Yeeees
,
Maaaaasterrr
’”

Jack actually fell over laughing and I landed on top of him, going on with the story more as a form of gleeful torture now.

“So I keep trying not to snicker at that, and then Kelly takes off his pants and he actually has a giant tattoo of
Frankenstein’s monster
on his thigh! Are you with me? On his
thigh
. With a background of scary monster-lab electricity bolts and stuff. It’s not like I could just ignore that. How could Annabelle not make this connection?
Yeeeees
,
Maaaasterrrr
.

“But at this point I was sort of committed to the deal, and I figured he wasn’t
my
master, so I just wouldn’t call him anything and I’d try like hell not to look at his leg. But as it turned out, it didn’t matter. Just then they got a phone call, and Kelly had to go and bail his little brother out of jail.”

“You are joking.”

“I’m totally serious. Saved by the bell. I think he was suspicious that Annabelle and I were going to get busy in his absence, even though I’m not really into girls and she wasn’t either at the time. We’re still friends, by the way. She’s into girls now, of course, just not me. So he makes her put on—wait for it—a
chastity belt
. Locks it up, three little padlocks, and takes the keys with him.

“Okay, I’m hip, whatever works for them, right? But what is truly awesome is that after he leaves, she peeks out the window to make sure he’s gone, goes into the bedroom, gets a spare set of keys and just unlocks the damn thing and takes it right off.”

“He let her have spare keys to the chastity belt?”

“No. She stole them from him one day and had the spares made before he had a clue they were missing. She thought the belt was ridiculous, she just wore it to humor him. But she always took it off as soon as possible. He thought she wore it, like, all the time.”

Jack shook his head at the many layers of stupidity obvious in the relationship.

“I know, but she’s better now. Really. So since she was obviously not all that impressed with this guy anyway, I thought the time was ripe to explain my ‘
yeees
,
maaaasterrr
’ problem. And point out how much worse this was made by the tattoo. They broke up the next day.”

“You were a home wrecker!”

“As threesomes went, boring as hell. As a fascinating study in human behavior, however, that story never gets old.”

“Wow.” Jack flopped his head back on the pillow, patting my sore butt thoughtfully and considering this. “Weren’t you glad you didn’t have sex with him? You don’t really strike me as the type anyway, to just do that with someone you didn’t really know or at least like.”

I nodded in agreement. “I was so glad. But I wasn’t actually planning to have sex with him. I was the guest star, remember? I had some hard limits. He was going to have sex with Annabelle and both of them were just going to fool around with me. If all went according to plan.”

He looked a little glassy eyed. Perhaps envisioning the fooling around.

“Mostly I was just confused about what it meant to be a little freaky. But I got over the idea that I was going to have to go to bondage parties and whatnot pretty quickly, once I actually met some of those people. Mostly those lifestyle people are just…I don’t know, it’s boring after a while. I mean, it’s fun in a way, but with some of them, it’s like they don’t have any other hobbies. They never talk about anything else. And they can be sort of oddly competitive about the whole thing. Like who can be the most serious about it.” I had my arms folded across his chest and was resting my chin on my forearm, so I was close enough to see his eyes crinkle up even in the dark.

“I don’t do the whole ‘scene’ thing either,” he said. “I think I’m mainly a spanker with pretensions anyway. Actually…”

“What?”

“I don’t know. I’ll tell you later. Keep telling me about your exploits, little Katie. I want to hear more about Katie in the Montrose, fearless slayer of threesomes.”

“No more threesomes, I’m afraid. I had a few other times. Not boyfriends. Just…whatever. Partners, whatever. When I was trying to figure out the party thing. Very ‘safe, sane and consensual’, very educational. Lots of parameters. Mostly just boring though. I felt like it wasn’t enough. I kept trying to stop and just go out with guys who weren’t into that, but I couldn’t keep away. Annabelle kept telling me that what I really wanted was somebody full time, somebody who would be in total control. Not just for sex or scenes. She kept trying to hook me up with people. And I guess it had a certain appeal in theory. Although she didn’t really seem all that happy when
she
was doing it.

“Then I actually met someone. At a regular party, not a party with my friends who were into all that. Just a friend of a friend from school. It was a coincidence. Or maybe not. He approached me and I guess I’m pretty easy to read in that regard. We started out chatting and ended up sitting there talking until about two in the morning, about movies, travel, books we both liked. About nothing, really. He was a history professor.
Is.
Still is a history professor. We left the party together and we were together for almost two years.”

“So what happened?” He was holding me lightly, carefully. Even his voice sounded careful.

“Not much at first. Nothing scary, anyway. He did have some pretty interesting equipment, a whole dungeon full of stuff. But more for flash, I think. He’s sort of a collector. I just thought it was a bit over the top, but it wasn’t like he had flesh hooks or anything. Just more and better floggers, a spanking bench, that kind of stuff. It really didn’t impact me much. I mean, I was usually either working or at home, we just got together on the weekends and played. And he did talk about other subjects. We went on normal dates too, so it seemed more balanced somehow than what I’d been doing. He met my family and everything. I don’t think they loved him, but they thought he was okay. They didn’t really get what I saw in him, I think. And obviously I wasn’t telling them what I
did
see in him.

“But over time he wanted…more. Really, he wanted a slave. Not like a figurative love slave, or even just a slave for scenes or for a D/s lifestyle. I mean a
slave
slave
. No safe words, no limits. He had just started reading the
Gor
books, and he thought being a
Gorean
was a great idea. You know the whole
Gorean
thing?”

“Oh yes.” His distaste was evident, which was a relief. They weren’t in quite the same category as people one met at bondage parties, but
Goreans
were considered extreme even by many hardcore BDSM enthusiasts, and you never knew when you were going to run into one.

“Well, I didn’t get it. And it started to just suck all the fun out of it for me in pretty short order. He didn’t even want to have sex much anymore. Just make me learn a bunch of different ways to kneel on command, cook his dinner and wash his clothes naked or wearing stupid little silk toga things. Wanted to whip me for not ironing his shirts and stuff. I mean,
please
, I work full time. I don’t even iron my
own
shirts. I take them to the cleaners for that. I don’t have time for domestic discipline. Or…I don’t know, it just isn’t my thing. When he started using words from the novels all the time and making real-life
Gorean
friends, I was out of there. I’d just lost all respect for him. It all seemed so silly. But he took it all so very seriously.”

Jack nodded, studying my face. “You don’t take most of this very seriously, do you? Tell the truth.”

Trick question?

“I don’t. Not usually. Not like
that
kind of seriously, anyway. Tonight, just now, that was…”
Why do I find it so hard sometimes to complete a sentence around this man?

“Yeah, that was pretty different. Later. We’ll talk about it later, little one.” He combed his fingers through my hair, twisting it up, bundling it first over one shoulder then the other as he spoke. “Talk about it out of here somewhere, where I’m thinking clearly. Unlike now, when I’m distracted by having a beautiful, naked girl draped over me.”

His kiss was languid, patient, sweet. He didn’t seem distracted to me, although I knew I was. Pushing me by the shoulders until I sat up astride his waist, Jack started taking the cuffs off me slowly—wrists, ankles and thighs, the rip of the closures sounding too loud and harsh in the still of the room. He tossed them carelessly off the bed to one side and gently stroked the skin they’d chafed, finding it by touch, feeling for the heat.

Sensing that the rules had been cast aside for now along with the restraints, I reached down and placed my palms on Jack’s chest, cautiously moving my fingers in exploration of the smooth planes of muscles there, the changes in texture from soft skin to hair, from smooth pectorals to tight-tipped nipples. He was sensitive there, and made that throaty sound between a groan and a grunt that never failed to thrill me. I bent to suckle at each one in turn, and was rewarded with more delightfully inarticulate sounds of enjoyment. The freedom to play with him felt wanton, indulgent.

Jack indulged too, mapping every inch of my body that he could reach, finally bracing one hand at my hip and rocking me slowly back against his erection, which now rested firmly against my bottom as I straddled him. The tickle of his crisp hair against my aching skin, the stealthy foray of his other hand to rest just in front of my clit, so that each rocking motion forward brought me into brief contact with it…