Deep End(65)

“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 off all my 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, and it’s so un-Lukas of him, I cannot help the giggle bubbling out of me. “That’s littering and theft.”

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 stay that wide 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 say stop. 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’s making it, creating something that wasn’t there .

“Lukas,” I exhale.

“I know, baby.” His voice is taut, like being that hard and taking it that slow is difficult for him, too. He bends down to kiss me, open mouthed and dirty. “What did I say, Scarlett? Deep breaths.”

I don’t think he ever gets all the way in, but he starts thrusting anyway, and I’m not sure what I like best about it. His exhale, loud in my ear. The tinge of hurt that makes the pleasure that much sharper. The rhythm, unhurried but purposeful.

I want to touch him, bury my nails in his shoulders, but he’s holding my wrists above my head, and all I can do is feel him move inside me, feet limply bouncing with every thrust, blindly biting into his jaw as I feel a surge of heat low in my belly.

I come once, like that, slow contractions that are so good, they almost hurt. If he, we, this was normal, I’d assume that this would be it. Faster thrusts, a choked grunt, Lukas’s orgasm, the end. But he likes to dictate when things start and when they end. He kisses, then licks the tear spilling out of my eye, tells me how tight and good my cunt feels to him. He throbs inside me but doesn’t yet come. Instead he tells me, “A little more. You have to take a little more, okay?” and then he’s impossibly deeper and I’m arching my chest and coming again, so hard that on the tail end of it I hear music in my head. Voices. Bells.