Page 53 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
Rebecca strides toward me, and I try to imagine what will happen next. She’ll say she’s pleased maybe, and I’ll get to feel that sweet warmth in my chest at making her happy. Or maybe she won’t say anything at all, but have me present my body for inspection, and I’ll know I’ve pleased her by the curl of her mouth or by the satisfied flick of her eyes.
I’m not ready for what actually happens.
Rebecca makes a punched, gasping noise like she’s about to fall from some great height, a noise that’s as needy as it is stunned, and I’m surprised into looking up at her.
We meet eyes across the room, and for a moment, we’re both still, her lips parted and her eyes glittering, and before I even know what’s happening, before I can prepare to be bossed around, made to crawl, paddled on the backside, whatever, she’s on me. She’s in front of me and she’s yanking me up by the leather straps of my bodice and then she’s devouring my mouth like a woman starved. She’s molding her lips to mine as her hands find my hair, my waist, my arse, and she’s seizing me to her like she’ll rip this city apart if she can’t use me right now. Like she’ll set the world on fire if I’m not hers.
The kiss is like no other kiss we’ve shared. There’s a feral life to it, a desolation, and when I open my lips to say something—I don’t even know what—she steals inside my mouth with her tongue, and all my words leave me anyway. She’s too hot, too soft and slick, and each stroke of her tongue against mine sends thrills chasing through me, skating do
wn my spine to the soles of my feet and skipping to the tips of my fingers. Breathing is an impossible thing, it’s all stolen wet gasps and shuddering exhales, and I’m dizzy, I’m so dizzy with it, but in the best possible way, like being on a sailboat that’s turning too fast, like dancing at a club so hard I can’t breathe, like watching thorns bite into my hand as they make me bleed.
Rebecca makes another one of those punched gasps, like the very existence of me is enough to bruise her, and then we’re moving, she’s pushing me as she kisses me, and I’m shoved against a bookshelf hard enough to make a book rock off the edge of the shelf and fall to the floor. We both ignore it, too lost in each other, too desperate for more. No single kiss is enough—so much so that the moment a kiss starts, we’re already chasing the next one, and the next, already grabbing, already seeking, tilting, taking.
I’m not supposed to grab. I’m not supposed to take. It’s not why I’ve been trussed up in leather and made to kneel. But every time I use my teeth, every time I squeeze a slender hip, cup a firm breast, I’m rewarded with growls and scratching embraces and eager presses of her pelvis against me, and so how can I stop? How can I stop when she’s like this—wild and insensate with wanting me?
“You,” she breathes, tearing away from my mouth and ripping at my bodice with shaking fingers. She can’t even wait to get a cup all the way unlaced before she shoves her hand inside to feel me, and then she can’t even wait to properly feel me before she’s replacing her fingers with her mouth, seeking out my soft flesh amid the leather and then making a satisfied noise when she finds it. Growling with pleasure when she draws my nipple into her mouth and it’s already tight and hard for her.
“You,” she says again, a groan, a plea, her normally deft fingers frantic and desperate as they unlace my other cup, and then once both my tits are exposed, she can’t seem to pick where she wants to be. Sucking on my breasts or my neck, biting my jaw, licking into my mouth. Her hands everywhere, restless and greedy, squeezing at my hips and bottom and thighs and stomach and all the places I’ve let shame live for years and years, and I almost want to laugh, because so many tears and therapy sessions and Xanax pills and an entire influencer career has gone into my feelings about those parts of me, and still it’s never, ever occurred to me that those parts of me could make me happy. That they could make a lover happy. That someone could be so fucking wound up and horny over me that they go mad and slam me against a bookshelf so they can maul me properly.
“Mistress. Rebecca . . . ” They’re not even words, they’re breaths instead.
She’s replaced my oxygen with the sounds of her name.
And then her hands find my mound—they find where the leather opens to frame my cunt—and she shudders so hard that all the breath seems to leave her in one shredded exhale. Her fingers play over the unyielding leather, over my curls, tracing the slutty outlines of it. She finds where my clit has swollen past my lips, a pouty little bud, and she plays with it a moment. It’s a toy meant for her, not for me, and knowing that has me whimpering, mindless, begging for more with pawing hands and arching hips.
“So wet,” she murmurs. “So wet for me.”
Her hand comes up and she takes in a short, quivering breath as she presses her fingers to my lips. I lick them, tasting myself, at the same time she starts licking too. Our lips and tongues meet between her fingers, a tangle of slippery kisses that taste of me. And her. Of sex and faintly of mint.
I squirm as we kiss through her fingers, heat pooling so low and fiery in my belly that I can’t believe I haven’t gone up in flames. My cunt aches without her touch; I know it will ache more with her touch but that doesn’t stop me from chasing it, from rubbing against her, from making small keening noises in the back of my throat.
There’s this beautiful suffering right behind my clitoris, right in the heart of me, a twinging and yearning inside my body. It’s agony, but it’s the kind of agony that’s the opposite of hurt. It’s the kind of agony that makes me feel more alive than I’ve ever been, and it’s because of her. It’s because she’s raw and ravenous, powerful and demanding. Sovereign.
And it’s as I catch a glimpse of her eyes—dark and avid and exposed—it’s as I hear her breath hitching with my name—Delph, pet, pet, oh Delph—that I realize the Rebecca we always see, the Rebecca we take for granted as being calm and untouchable always, she’s not the real Rebecca, not really. The real Rebecca has messy joys and hungers, the real Rebecca is more like Thornchapel than the orderly corporate gardens she designs.
She is fierce and alive and unconfined, and I want her always like this, always this ruthless and ferocious with me.
I drink her in as she steals kisses, as she returns to suck viciously at my breasts while she palms my sex. I drink her in, and I pray that this is real, that this hungry woman won’t slip away from me and retreat back into her shell. Into the place where I cannot reach her, I cannot know her. Into the place where I can’t even tell her I love her without her dismissing me.
The next idea comes to me so clearly and urgently that I have no choice but to listen. My body will allow nothing less, and I think I’ve been wanting this for a long time but haven’t known how to ask for it.
I spread my legs more and reach for her hand, and I press her fingers all the way past my folds and into my opening. We freeze there a minute, both of us rocked by the feeling of her fingers only a knuckle deep.
More, my greedy sex demands. More and more and more.
Rebecca meets my eyes. The afternoon sunlight slants in gray and cloudy, and it adds a silvery shine to her high cheekbones, her small, queenly nose. I can see the pulse banging at the side of her throat, and I can see as she swallows once, as if for control.
“You’re sure, pet?” she says hoarsely.
“Yes—” That’s all the negotiation we have. I haven’t even finished saying the word, and she’s over my mouth again with a searing kiss. As I open my lips to let her tongue slip inside, she slides her fingers deeper. Another inch, slippery but still hard-won.
I can’t concentrate on kissing now. Pleasure roils from my center, pleasure mixed with a trace of pain.
I worried—I still worry. What if the pain makes me feel like I did in Audra Bishop’s garden? What if my body doesn’t know the difference between what happened to me then and what’s happening now? My therapist warned me, my support group warned me, and now all these warnings froth up like soap bubbles in my mind—
Only to pop one by one as Rebecca fucks me with filthy, expert intensity. The trace of pain only grows as she finally fits her fingers in to the bottom knuckles, stretching me in places I’ve ignored for years, and stokes the slow, unbearable ache in my core. But the pain feels good too—it’s wanted, it feels just as wonderful as being spanked or flogged or bound. It weights down the pleasure so it’s not so oppressively delicious.
Like salt on caramel, like chili powder or cinnamon in hot chocolate.
