“Because I broke a rule,” I said. My voice came out smaller than I meant. “On purpose. No working past the shake.”
“Why did you break it?”
“Because—” I made myself look at him. “Because you won’t be straight with me. And if you won’t be honest, I won’t be handled. You don’t get the half that suits you.”
He nodded, slow, like I’d handed him something he’d expected.
“That’s fair,” he said “We’re going to talk about the curb. I promise you we’re going to talk about it, and you’re going to hate the answer, and we’ll get there. But that’s not what this is.” He held my eyes. “You told me you trusted me. And then you took that and you pushed it. You damaged yourself to make a point. You worked yourself to the bone to punish me, knowing I’d have to watch, knowing I couldn’t make you stop without breaking the one rule that says you can rip it back any time you want.”
“Yes,” I said. Because it was true. All of it was true.
“So this isn’t because you asked the question.” His voice gentled, somehow, and got harder at the same time. “You get to ask the question. This is because you said you trusted me and then you acted like you didn’t.”
“Yes,” I said again, and my eyes were stinging, and I didn’t know why, except that being seen that clearly is a thing close to being held.
“I’m going to put you over my lap,” he said. “My hand. Only ever the hand. You can stop it any second. You know the word.”
“Kataifi,” I said. To prove I had it. To prove I wasn’t going to use it.
“Good girl.”
It went down me like it always did, warm water down the spine, and he reached out and took my wrist, gentle, and drew me over.
He arranged me over his lap with his hands, careful, unhurried, the way he turns the chair, and I went where his hands put me because there was nothing else to be, my hips over his thigh, my palms flat on the cold floor, my hair falling forward, and the position was so undignified and so absolute that the want spiked clean through the nerves and left them behind.
I felt his hand at the waist of my work trousers.
He drew them down. Slow. Over my hips, down my thighs, and the air of the office touched the backs of my legs, and then his fingers hooked the green lace—the lace he’d chosen this morning—and he drew that down too, and I was bare over his lap.
I knew what he could see. I knew my pussy was up at him, peeping, the most exposed I’d ever been, and I knew—because I could feel it, slick and warm and undeniable—exactly how wet I was. He must be able to see it. There was no hiding it. I was laid bare and dripping over a man’s lap, and the shame of it and the heat of it were the same thing, braided into one current, impossible to pull apart.
The tension was too much. I didn’t understand it and I didn’t want it to stop.
His hand came to rest on my bare backside.
Just rested there. Warm, heavy, the work-roughened scarred palm I’d watched all day every day spread flat on my skin, weighing me, and I sighed—a sound I didn’t decide to make—and quivered, the whole length of me, a fine shiver running up from where his hand was.
“Look at you,” he said, low. “Already.”
And then the hand came up, and it came down.
It wasn’t hard. It was a beginning, a placing, the way he’d shown me where the edge was that first time—but the sound that came out of me was a yelp, surprise and something else, something that wasn’t pain even though it stung, that was so close to pain you couldn’t have got a knife between them. The sting bloomed across the curve of me and then, all at once, in a rush I had no defense against, the heat went down. Down through me, the dawn over the valley, slow and total, pooling low where his hand could see how wet I was, and my whole body woke up at once like a thing plugged into the wall.
I was trembling. Coming alive. Lit up.
“Good girl,” he said.
And I moaned—out loud, helplessas his hand came down again.
This one was harder.
And the one after that harder still—surer, more deliberate, his hand finding a rhythm the way he found a rhythm in everything, the way he’d worked me with his mouth on the marble, building it, and my body answered every single one. The sting landed and bloomed and turned, fast, into heat, and the heat ran down and pooled low and molten where he could see, and somewhere in the third or fourth strike I lost the line entirely between the sting and the wanting. There wasn’t one. The pain was the pleasure. They were the same thing arriving through the same nerve, and I couldn’t have told you which was which if my life had hung on it.
I was grinding against his thigh.
I didn’t decide to. My body kept doing things my head hadn’t approved, the chair, the fold, the hips pushing back on the marble, and now this, my hips rolling forward against the hard muscle of his thigh between each strike, chasing the friction, shameless, helpless, a woman who runs everything reduced to one long animal want. And he let me. He let me grind against him and he didn’t stop and he didn’t shame it, he just kept hisfree hand spread warm and steady on the small of my back—the only fixed point in a world that had gone completely liquid, the one thing that held still while everything else came apart.
“Good girl,” he said, low, every time the hand came down. “Good girl.”