24
Upstate New York
THEY KISSED FOR a long time, Elle and Kyrie. Nothing but kisses, gentle and sleepy. Elle had forgotten how pleasurable, how sensual, the simple act of kissing could be. She wasn’t designed for chastity. She needed a body in her bed other than her own. She needed to touch and be touched. And she needed this girl, this beautiful fragile little girl in her arms as she needed air and water and food.
“Do you want me to touch you?” Kyrie asked between kisses. “I mean, like you touched me?”
Elle shook her head. She couldn’t stomach the thought of being touched intimately yet by anyone other than herself. “No, you don’t have to. I already had an orgasm tonight.”
“Were you masturbating?” Kyrie asked, a fair question.
“Dreaming,” Elle said. “I woke up from the dream having an orgasm.”
“You said you were dreaming about the night you got pregnant. You know exactly when it happened?”
“I do,” she said without hesitation. “I remember the day Søren left for Rome. I remember the day I went to the doctor because of my kidney infection. I was on antibiotics for two weeks. When I felt better, Kingsley and I had sex. The next night we only had anal. Can’t get pregnant from anal. The next morning he left for a few days. I remember...” She paused, closed her eyes... She could feel Kingsley inside her again, see him underneath her. And she missed it. Him. She missed him.
“I’m sorry. We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
“We can talk about it. But you’re the nun, and I’m the unrepentant slut. It’ll probably bother you a lot more to hear about it than it’ll bother me to talk about it.”
“I’m not...” Kyrie paused. “Let’s just say I haven’t made up my mind about abortion the way the Catholic Church has. I can’t imagine it’s ever an easy choice. But I can imagine that sometimes it’s the only choice you’d have.”
“It was the right choice,” Elle said. “But no, I wouldn’t call it easy.”
“Why did you do it?”
“When I was seventeen, God and I had a long talk. I told him that I would never ask Søren to leave the priesthood if God would let Søren and I be together. Something happened that night and whatever childish dreams I’d had of marrying him and having his children burned to ashes. I have new dreams now. Children aren’t part of my dreams. Is that selfish?”
“Children aren’t part of my dreams, either. How can I judge you without judging myself?”
“Even if I did want children, I don’t think my life is...was the sort of life you should bring a child into.” She rubbed her forehead and laughed. “You know what Friday night is at Kingsley’s house?”
“I don’t know? Game night?”
“Orgy night,” she said. “He throws these wild parties on Friday nights and all the rich beautiful people of Manhattan show up and get off. You walk around and there are naked women everywhere with men fucking them over and on top of every piece of furniture in the place. Except the piano. The piano was off-limits.”
“Why not the piano? Is Kingsley some big music lover?”
“The piano was Kingsley’s gift to Søren.” Kingsley had bought the piano even before he and Søren had reunited. A gift? More like an altar.
“What about Kingsley?”
Elle sighed heavily and closed her eyes.
“Kingsley...that’s the only knot I can’t quite untie. Kingsley wants children. He always has. I took that chance from him.”
“He’ll have other chances.”
“I tell myself that. I hope I’m right.”
“It’s not your job to provide a baby for every man who wants one,” Kyrie said. “If God wanted women to be baby makers, He wouldn’t have called so many of us to religious orders.”
“Kingsley’s special,” Elle said. “And he would never have wanted me to have a child against my will. I know that. But I also know that he wished I’d wanted it. That’s what still hurts, knowing he’s still hurting.”
“So when did you realize you were pregnant?”
“It was a few days before Søren was due to come back from Rome. He was defending his dissertation at the Jesuit university there. PhD number two.”
“Two PhDs? That’s crazy. He must be really smart.”
“He’s the most intelligent man I’ve ever known. And such a nerd,” Elle said, smiling. “But he’s a Jesuit. PhDs are like catnip to Jesuits. They pop a boner around academic degrees like a teenage boy with his first Playboy.”
“Oh God, my great-uncle’s a Jesuit.”
“Sorry,” Elle said, wincing. “How many PhDs does he have?”
“Three. Which is probably the same number of boners he’s had since becoming a Jesuit.”
Elle laughed.
“Not the sexy, vow-breaking kind of Jesuit then?”
“Dry as dust and about as sexy,” Kyrie said.
“Søren is sexy,” Elle said. “You’ve never seen a more beautiful man in your life. Blond hair. Darker than yours but still very blond. Handsome. Strong nose and jaw. Gray eyes like the color of a cloudy morning. And he’s tall—six foot four. Tall and strong. I used to sit on his back while he did push-ups in the morning. Five hundred of them without me. Or one hundred of them with me.”
“Wow, that is seriously strong.”
“Once we spent the night at Kingsley’s and Kingsley took over push-up duty. He stood barefoot on Søren’s back. Søren only made it to fifty Kingsley push-ups, but that’s still pretty good. Kingsley’s six feet tall, weighs about one-ninety, I think.”
“Oh my God. I weigh ninety-five pounds. He’s exactly two of me.”
Elle gave a wistful sigh. “I was living in this erotic Paradise. If Søren was busy there was always Kingsley. If Kingsley and Søren were free at the same time, it was both of them in the same bed. All night long.”
“It sounds perfect. Apart from the men. Change them to beautiful women, and it’s my secret Heaven.”
“It was as close to perfect as you can get in this life, I guess.”
Kyrie rolled onto her side and sat up halfway. She rested her weight on her right hand and looked down at Elle. Her nightgown fell off her shoulder and Elle had to fight off a wave of desire for her.
“So why...why if everything was so sexy and perfect, why did you say you’ve had ‘not okay’ sex?”
“What?”
“You know.” Kyrie shrugged. “After you and I were done having sex...” She blushed as she spoke. “After we were done, you said it was fine if I wasn’t okay. You said you’d had ‘not okay’ sex before. That doesn’t sound like Paradise to me.”
“Why do you care so much?”
Kyrie flashed hurt eyes at her.
“Because it’s you, and I care about you. Do you think I would be in bed with you if I didn’t care about you?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Elle, you loved him, right? Your priest?”
“Yes.” She couldn’t deny it so she didn’t bother denying it.
“You loved him, but you still left him. That scares me.”
“Why would it scare you that I left him?”
“Because if you can leave someone you’re that much in love with, how much easier would it be to leave me?”
“Kyrie...” Elle pulled Kyrie close to her and wrapped her arms tight around the girl’s thin shoulders. “Listen to me. There is no way in Hell you will ever make me as angry at you as I am at Søren. And I’m not going to leave you like I left him. I can’t stay here forever but remember, you’re the one in the convent, the one who’s taken a vow of chastity.”
“Temporary vows,” Kyrie said.
“But you’ve got final vows coming up.”
“In two years.”
“Okay, in two years, you’ll take final vows and go back to the abbey in California, right?”
“I know. I’m sorry. This is all new to me.”
“It’s new to me, too,
” Elle said. “I’ve never been in a relationship with another woman before. We’ll have to figure it out together. But I’m not going to run away from you, so put that thought out of your pretty little head.”
Elle tapped her on the forehead between the eyes. Kyrie’s eyes crossed and Elle laughed.
Kyrie stretched out again along Elle’s side and laid an arm across her stomach.
Elle took a deep breath.
“I did love Søren,” she said again. “And I do love him. Still. Do you know how hard it is to leave someone you’re in love with? To walk away from them? Or worse,” she said, remembering the near-crippling pain she’d been in that night, “to crawl away?”
“I can’t imagine. I don’t want to imagine...”
“I think about it all the time. Why I left Søren. Why I haven’t gone back yet. I need to think about it otherwise maybe I’d forget why I left him and then...”
“You’d go back?”
Elle nodded.
“And I don’t want to go back. Even if I did, I shouldn’t go back. So I think about bad times, the bad things about being with him. It’s a short list but...”
“What’s on the list?”
“Not getting to spend as much time with him as I want to. Not getting to go out in public as a couple. We’ve never spent Thanksgiving together, you know? He spends it with his sister Claire at her place with her family. She knows about me but bringing me along would be asking for trouble. All it takes is one person making one phone call, and we’re front-page news, Søren and I. But it’s not just stuff like that.”
Elle felt Kyrie’s eyes on her but didn’t meet her gaze. She raised a hand to her forehead and rubbed between her eyes.
“I’ve never told anyone about this,” Elle finally said.
“Told anyone what?”
“The list of things I tell myself to keep me from going back to him... Something happened once—only once—but once was enough. If it had happened twice, I think I would have left him a long time ago.”
“What did he do to you?” Kyrie asked, the same question Daniel had asked her. This time Elle would answer.
“It’s not easy being the sexual property of a sadist,” she said with a tired smile. “It’s sexy. It’s fun. It’s intense like you can’t imagine. Fear makes it potent. Doing something dangerous makes it potent. But there’s always a risk that you can go too far and someone can get hurt.”
“You got hurt?”
Elle nodded.
“In kink, we have a thing called a ‘safe word.’ It’s nothing special, just a word that means ‘Stop, I mean it.’ If you’re doing heavy role-play stuff and you want to be able to say ‘Oh no, not that. Don’t put your big cock in me, sir, and force me against my will to have an orgasm. Anything but that,’” Elle said, putting the back of her hand on her forehead and pretending to play a pearl-clutching virgin. “You know, stuff like that. You need a word that means ‘stop’ that isn’t stop. Mine is Jabberwocky.”
“Good word. Sounds nothing like stop.”
“Easy to remember, too,” Elle said, glancing away from Kyrie’s searching gaze. “Unless you get so freaked out you forget it in the moment.”
“Is that what happened? You forgot your safe word?”
“We’d only been lovers a couple weeks,” Elle said. “I was a virgin until Søren, a virgin until I was twenty years old. But after our first night together, I felt like we’d done everything there was to do. But we hadn’t actually. We hadn’t even scratched the surface of everything...”
“Did he put his entire hand inside your vagina?”
“Not that night.”
“Then I still win.”
“You win,” Elle said, touching Kyrie’s face, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear. She kissed her again but Kyrie wasn’t to be deterred or distracted from her question by so obvious a ploy as a kiss.
“What happened?” Kyrie asked, and Elle knew she had to answer.
“It was after our third night together, a Thursday night. I remember that because Søren didn’t have anything to do until noon on Fridays so we could actually stay in bed together longer, spend the whole night and the morning after together. And it was a rough night. Rough in the good way. Lots of kink. Lots of sex. Afterward we were curled up together in bed. I was laying on his chest. Laying? Lying? I can never remember which. And we were talking.”
Elle closed her eyes. And when she opened them she lay on Søren’s chest, her head against his heart.
“How are you feeling, Little One?” he asked as he stroked her back with his fingertips. He’d left her covered in welts from his cane and even his gentle touches burned. But she didn’t stop him from touching her. She would never stop him from touching her.
“Sore. Happy. You?”
“Happy,” he said.
Søren happy was her favorite sort of happy. She knew everything there was to know about his past, his pain, everything he’d suffered growing up. To know that right now in this moment he was happy, that the darkness was outside the room tonight and not in it, that made her happier than her own happiness ever could.
“I want to make you happy,” she said, kissing the center of his chest.
“You please me very much.”
“Is there anything I can do to please you more?” she asked, hoping the answer was yes. Whatever it was, she would do it, allow it, enjoy it. Anything for him.
He sighed heavily and she grinned as she rose and fell on the wave of that big breath.
“There’s something I’d like us to do together. When you’re ready.”
“What is it? And I promise, I’m ready.”
“You don’t know what it is yet,” he said, rolling onto his side. She lay on hers and faced him. “So how do you know you’re ready?”
“It’s like the numbers game we play when you make me pick a number between one and ten and you don’t tell me what I’m picking. One kiss? Ten kisses? One strike of the cane? Ten strikes of the cane? I pick a number and you do whatever it is you want to do.”
“This is different.” He reached out and ran his fingers through her unbound hair. He caressed her face, traced her bottom lip with his thumb.
“Is it something you want to do?” she asked.
“Very much. It’s been a fantasy of mine since I saw you.”
She smiled at him. Her eyes were bright with the untold secret. She even bit her bottom lip, an act that he punished by kissing her and biting her bottom lip for her.
“I’m yours,” she said into the kiss. “Do anything you want to me, my sir. My body is yours...”
“Yes, it is,” he said, stretching out on top of her and deepening the kiss. “You’re all mine. Now and always...”
Whatever it was, she wanted him to do it to her right then, right there. She’d waited years to be with him and now that they were lovers, she wanted him all the time. She couldn’t get enough of his body inside hers, couldn’t get enough of the pain he gave her. Nothing made her feel more beautiful than to kneel naked at his feet and let him mark her with welts and bruises. And to know he’d fantasized about doing something to her since the day they met excited her beyond reason.
“Please...” she whispered as he pulled her back against his chest and settled into bed once more.
“Not tonight. But soon.”
“Never soon enough,” she said as he ran his finger around the edge of her white leather collar. She would fall asleep in it tonight and by morning he would have taken it off her and put it away. And she drifted off to sleep in the safety of his arms.
* * *
“What was it?” Kyrie asked. “What was his fantasy?”
Elle took a deep breath and smiled as Kyrie rose and fell on the wave of that breath. Now she was the Dominant and she had her a little Sub all her own. And she had no idea what to do with her.