Page 108 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
“Do you know?” she asks, one brow raising into a perfectly curved arch. “Because if you do, then you should also know that I’m the only one who gets to put marks on your body. I’m the only one who gets to hurt you, is that clear?”
I’m still melting. I’m still defensive. I’m a mess, all clamoring, querulous contradictions. “You know I love being yours, Bex. Mistress.” I add the last part after I see the dangerous glint in her eyes. “But I also love my job. I can’t jeopardize it by being fussy or difficult.”
“There has to be a way that you can still do shoots and not look like you’ve been in a bad dungeon after,” she says. “You are mine alone to hurt. Mine to pleasure, and mine to keep safe. No one touches you unless I allow it.”
I open my mouth to argue some more—the sentiment itself is very sexy, but my job doesn’t work like that, it just doesn’t—when she presses her lips to mine in farewell.
“I have to go, pet. Be good.”
“Tomorrow night?” I plead into her kiss. “Please?”
“Tomorrow night,” she promises. “I know you want it. And I think—” she slides a hand between my legs, her fingers grazing against my clit and making me shiver “—you need it too.”
I do, I do. I do need it, I need all of it, I think—to come, yes, but also to have that shivery kind of hurt which turns all other hurts into soft, manageable things. Just like kneeling, the hurt gives me back my choices and my strength. It reminds me that someone sees me and cares about me enough to help me digest my pain.
I nod, closing my eyes to savor her touch. “Tomorrow night.” I’m already clinging to the idea of it like I clung to the idea of getting in the shower earlier.
A small squeeze on my most intimate skin, and then my mistress is gone, leaving me alone with a wet flannel and a still running shower.
And the knowledge that more than twenty-four hours separate me from shuddering, blissful relief.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Delphine
After my shower, I want to drink a bottle of champagne and sleep for sixteen hours, but I can’t. I have a podcast interview later this afternoon, and a conference call with a publicist from a charity I rep, and then I have my biweekly phone call with Mummy and Daddy. They’re on some pseudo-business, pseudo-holiday trip to Cyprus, and are already sunburnt and blotto by the time I ring. But they’re still as sweet as ever, and when I change into pajamas and curl up in Rebecca’s big bed alone, I find myself truly and achingly homesick.
Not for home necessarily, but for Mummy and Daddy and Gimlet and Rumswizzle, our springer spaniels. For laying on the sofa with my head in my mother’s lap, for listening to Daddy read something aloud to us while Gimlet snores next to him.
I hug a pillow and fall asleep before Rebecca gets home.
When I wake up the next morning, she’s already woken up, dressed, and gone.
My head hurts from too much sleep, but I burrow back under the blankets anyway. I feel empty and gummy inside, like mascara left uncapped on a sink. Like a jam jar with only a thin layer left at the bottom.
Just make it until tonight.
I close my eyes and imagine, in great detail, being tied up, cropped, paddled, flogged, anything, anything with my Mistress. I imagine what it will feel like on the stage with her, all eyes on us, knowing once and for all that even if she doesn’t love me, at least she’s not ashamed of me. I imagine how good it will feel to turn all this chaotic emptiness into something explicit and distinct—turn something intangible into welted stripes no wider than my thumb, into pink handprints, into rope marks, into ruined knickers. Something I can point to and say, see this? I chose this. I felt this. And someone I love helped me feel it.
I stay in bed long i
nto the afternoon, wrapped in fantasies of tonight.
Emily Genovese: I see you.
I look up from my phone to see Emily striding across the lobby of Justine’s, and I greet her with my customary kiss to the cheek, which seems to take her by surprise. But she’s smiling when I pull back.
“Thank you for inviting me tonight,” she says. “This is much better than dinner alone at my airport hotel.”
“It’s my turn to be hospitable,” I say, struggling to sound cheerful. “How was your film festival?”
“Equal parts dull and brilliant.” Emily searches my face, her smile fading. “Is everything okay? You seem upset.”
It’s rude, it’s shockingly rude. And yet something in me blooms under the scrutiny of her stare and the directness of her question. “The last two days have been . . . disagreeable,” I admit.
She tilts her head to study me even more, and I flush. Not entirely with displeasure.
“Where is your Mistress?” she asks finally. “Or do you often come here without her?”
