Page 85 of Deep End

It starts when Lukas pulls down my top none too gently and tells me, “Your tits are spectacular—has anyone told you?”

Something pleased and proud grows inside me. I shake my head.

“What about your idiot ex?” he asks with a frown.

He wasn’t an idiot, I want to protest, but there’s a time and a place to defend a guy who’s in love with someone else. I shake my head again.

Lukas is bewildered. Angry. “I can’t wrap my head around it, Scarlett,” he says, touching my nipple and my clit at the same time, both grazes, both promisingmore. “He had a treasure and he just . . .” He sounds like he’d like to take it out on someone, but itdoesn’t occur to me who thatsomeonewill be until his lips curve. “I despise him. I should just be grateful, though. If he wasn’t a world-class asshole, I wouldn’t be able to do this—”

He pinches one of my nipples so hard, I forget how to breathe. Then his finger circles around my clit until I can get the stimulation Ineed, and—

“You love it, don’t you?”

He twists my nipple, and I come for the first time. He bites the side of my breasts, and—the second. The third happens a little later, when he starts sucking on my puffy, achy peaks, his middle finger knuckle deep inside my cunt. After that . . . it doesn’t matter anymore, and not much is required of me. If I wriggle in his arms, if my ass rubs against his erection, he’ll still me with his teeth and a stern word, his hand heavy against my belly. All I need to do is take the pleasure. Do as I’m told. Listen to the way he whispers soft commands into my ear, likeJust one moreandYou can do itand fragments of sentences that include words likeperfect, andjust for me, andbeautiful tears.

He kisses the corners of my eyes, licking away this delicious painheis giving. I’ve never felt so hollow. “Please,” I beg. I’m a mess of quivers and aftershocks, trying to burrow into him. His arms and voice are the only things holding me together.

“Not yet,” he says, kind and firm and everything I’ve ever craved. I just didn’t know that someone’s voice could be at once tender and cruel-edged. “You can take some more. My good girl.”

He’s never wrong, not once, and after a while I’m sure that he knows my body better than I do, and what he doesn’t know he’ll teach himself. This time, when he lays me on his bed, he takes offallmy clothes. He’s patient with them, patient with how boneless and lazy I am, sprawled, looking up with an awestruck smile, too orgasmed out to help. He folds my skirt, and my top, and even my bra, but tosses my panties somewhere to the back of the room, andit’s so un-Lukas of him, I cannot help the giggle bubbling out of me. “That’s litteringandtheft.”

He takes off his T-shirt. His pants. “In Sweden you’d be arrested and sentenced to hard time for it.” He lowers himself on top of me, a blanket of heat and flesh, and adds into the soft skin behind my ear, “For littering, I mean.”

I didn’t expect to laugh with him. Sex was fun and carefree with Josh, but I always assumed it to be a by-product of being in love with one’s partner. And yet here I am, giggling my amusement into the throat of a man who, for all I know, might still be in love with another woman.

He breathes me in. Tells me how good I feel under him. Soft.Pretty—a ridiculous word that has me arching closer. “I should stretch you out with my fingers, before,” he says, the rumble of his chest vibrating against my breast. “How I usually do it. Barest courtesy. But with you, I’m not going to. I’m going to make you take me without.”

I shiver. Let him spread me out and gasp at the shock of it. Diving and flexibility go hand in hand, but I feel it in my muscles, the way he pins each of my thighs to the sides, palms hooking under my knees. The strain of forcing my hips to staythatwide open for him.

“So obedient,” he tells me, pleased, and I smile, the pleasure of his praise warming me from deep within. He dips his fingers in the absolute mess between my legs, letting out a breath that’s followed by a foreign, melodic word, and uses it to slick himself.

I consider reaching out. Being a more active participant. But with Lukas, the rules under which I’ve operated most of my life don’t hold true. I lie back, watch him watch me, feel the heavy weight of his cock on my pubic bone, as he uses the palm of his hand to press the underside of it into my abdomen, my cunt. I’m light. I’m eager. I’m ready, because he said so. Malleable.

Floating.

I once read somewhere that power-exchange sex is a farce. Scenes and plays. Scripted shit. Acting. To me, though, this buoyant feeling of soaring is the definition of honesty. Knowing that he’s in charge, my wrists pinned above my head by his hand, I can be simple. Artless. My true self, away from blame and judgment.

“Look at you.” Lukas presses a sliding kiss into my lower lip, adjusts himself with a hand between our bodies. “A fucking dream.” His hips push, and after a few tries, the round head of his cock slips inside me.

He lets out a hot gasp, somewhere around my cheekbone.

My breath hitches as I tip back my neck.

He’s inside a couple of inches, but there’s nowhere else to go. “Relax,” he orders. I nod. Make myself pliant. He thrusts again and advances, just a little. The burn of the stretch is terrible. Everything I ever wanted. “Deep breaths, Scarlett.”

We make some progress. I struggle. Lukas watches my face for every second of it, drinking in my bitten lips and my choppy breathing and the winces that slip out of me.

“Too much?” he asks.

I nod, a little desperately.

He halts, pulling out a bit. Instant panic spreads through my stomach. I didn’t saystop. I didn’t ask him to stop. We agreed that he wouldn’t—

“That’s too bad,” he says, his voice at once mean and fond, like he contains every multitude I’ll ever need. “Since you’ll take what I fucking give you.” He rocks back inside, knocking any sense of self out of me. My entire body tightens around him, around his words, and I think that maybe I’m—“Oh, sweetheart. Already? Just from this?”

A few contractions. Low-pitched laughter. He manages to get farther in, and there is no space, but he’smakingit, creating something that wasn’t there.

“Lukas,” I exhale.

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