Her ankles were attached to a spreader bar, forcing her legs far apart enough to let me see how wet her pussy was. Not that I needed to see it when I could feel it with the three fingers I was currently working in and out of her. Her muscles tensed and bunched as she tried to push back against my hand, but I'd secured her tightly enough that she couldn't move.
"Are you close?" I asked as I rubbed my thumb against her clit.
"Yes," she breathed, the word coming out between harsh pants. "I need more."
I waited a few more seconds, then removed my hand. She made a noise of protest but didn't say anything as I stood. We'd taken a couple minutes to set limits before we got started, so I knew I could push her, and that was exactly what I was craving at the moment. The rush that came with the absolute control over a person's pain and pleasure. I didn't need to wait for inspiration to strike, or worry about losing focus half-way through. This was something I could do, and I did it well.
I knew the options the club presented for its members, so I'd already been choosing my preferred...instruments even as we walked back to the room. I crossed to the far wall and picked up a thin riding crop. Lillian had been open about her masochistic tendencies, so I knew this was a better choice than the softer flogger or cat o'nine tails I would have used on a less experienced sub. I could see the appeal of taking a blank slate, but there were definitely benefits of being with someone who knew her desires were in line with mine.
As I moved back to stand behind her again, I had a moment where it hit me with sudden clarity that all of this was utterly pointless. That the search for control, for pain and pleasure, for dominance and submission, all of it, didn't mean a thing without the deep connection Erik had found.
I shook the thought off almost as soon as it came. I wasn't looking for any of that. I'd tried it before and it hadn't worked. It never worked. I really hoped Erik and Tanya beat the odds, but if anything, what happened between Alix and Sine was proof that it didn't matter how intense a connection felt. It never lasted. And if it couldn't last, what was the point of trying to force something deeper than it should go?
I tapped the end of the crop against the base of her spine, then traced a line down one butt cheek, then the other, letting her prepare herself for what was coming. I would leave red stripes on her tanned flesh, enough for her to feel them for the weekend. I'd use the crop on her pussy and her clit, not hard enough to damage her, but she'd be whimpering by the time I finished. I'd take her right to the edge of her pain threshold, and then I would fuck her, let the pain mingle with pleasure until she came and came, until she screamed my name.
And I'd find my own release, not only physically but mentally as well.
I was using her, I knew, but she was using me too, and that was fine. It had to be. Because there wasn't anything else.
Three
Savannah
Everett looked too damn chipper considering how little sleep he must have gotten last night. He and his boy-toy had been loudly enthusiastic pretty much until dawn. I'd gone out to do some errands before the heat got too overwhelming, so I missed the morning after show, but I'd seen enough of them over the years to know how it went.
"I still don't get why you like this shit," Everett said as he set my drink in front of me. "I mean, Iced Chestnut Praline Latte? What the hell is that supposed to be, anyway?"
"Delicious and much-needed sugar and caffeine," I said matter-of-factly, then practically inhaled a mouthful. "Thank you."
"I heard your boy leaving just after midnight. Seems to me you got plenty of sleep," Everett said.
I glared at him even as a few women passed behind him, clearly checking him out. He really was too attractive for his own good.
"I would have gotten sleep if someone hadn't been making wild monkey love at all hours," I pointed out.
To my surprise, he flushed, then pointed at the plate in front of me. "Eat your Gaeng Keow Wan."
I raised an eyebrow and took a couple bites of my favorite Thai meal. It said a lot about how well the two of us knew each other that he knew exactly what I ordered even though I'd placed the orders while he'd gone to get us drinks at the coffee place next door. We'd been coming here often enough over the last couple years that the owners didn't mind if we snuck in drinks from time to time.
After a few minutes of eating in silence, he asked, "So was that guy not that good? I mean, you certainly weren't howling with pleasure."
I rolled my eyes, but there was no embarrassment. The two of us had gotten past any of that ages ago. We shared everything. Hopes. Dreams. Nightmares. Problems. Struggles. Sex. Love. No subject was taboo. Everett had said more than once that we were true soulmates, two parts of a single whole.
And without the fuck-ups that sex usually brought to a relationship.
"Come on, Sav," he continued, reaching across the table to steal a forkful of curry chicken. "Seriously. When was the last time a guy stay all night because once just wasn't enough?"
I was about to give him a sarcastic response when it hit me. I couldn't remember. And it wasn't that I couldn't remember the last time a guy had been so good that I wanted more. I couldn't remember the last time I'd wanted to fall asleep in a guy's arms. Not just wanted to, but hadn't been able to help myself.
"He wasn't bad," I said finally. "I mean, he managed to get me off, which is better than some of the other guys I've fucked."
Everett's expression sobered. "Is that really what you want? A guy that's just 'not bad' or just better than someone else?"
I raised an eyebrow as I took the last couple bites of my meal, and then I countered his questions with my own. "Isn't that what hooking up is essentially? Finding someone to fuck who was halfway decent?"
He shrugged and looked down at his cup. Poked at his Goong Chu Chee.
"Ev?"
He sighed and raised his head. "I'm thinking that maybe I want something more."
"Really?" I didn't bother to hide my surprise. "You sounded like you were having plenty of fun last night."
"I did," he admitted, his fingers shredding his napkin. To my continued amazement, his cheeks stained red. "And I asked Cal if he wanted to go out tonight. Like on a real date."
"His name is Cal?" I leaned forward and covered his hand with mine, a big grin spreading across my face. "From the way you were yelling, I thought his name was oh fuck me harder."
"Bitch," Everett muttered good naturedly, a smile playing on his lips.
I laughed and tossed a balled-up napkin at him. "Seriously though, if that's what you want, good for you."
"But that's not what you want?"
I leaned back in my seat and shook my head. "Come on, Ev, you know me better than that. Besides, with my new assignment starting tomorrow, I have enough to focus on."
"That's right," he said, his eyes lighting up. "I want details about this artist you've been gushing about."
"You'll have them as soon as I do," I promised. "But I doubt it'll be anything as exciting as your fuck me harder Cal."
His returned lob of my napkin hit me square in the forehead.
Four
Jace
"Fuck!" I shouted as I tossed my paintbrush at the canvas. It left a smear of deep maroon across what had been a sea of blue.
I'd spent nearly two hours with Lillian on Friday night, and by the time we parted ways, we'd both been sated. Physically, at least. But the turmoil in my mind hadn't truly calmed. On the surface, I'd had some peace – enough to sleep – but when I woke up on Saturday and tried to sketch out a new picture to paint, the paper remained blank.
By evening, I'd resigned myself to failure. Again. I picked up a book on Monet and managed to lose myself for a few hours. Yesterday, I hadn't even bothered to try. I sat in the dark and shadowed living room, staring at a TV I didn't really see, and wondered how I'd lost the thing that had always been my safe haven.
I could still remember the first time I picked up a paintbrush. I was six years-old, and Mom and I had gone to a mi
ssion on Christmas Eve because we barely had enough money to keep the lights on, so presents had been out of the question. We hadn't even had a tree. We'd hung lights and ornaments on coat hangers, and pretended it was a game. But Mom had said she wanted me to have at least one gift, so she walked up to one of the women there and asked where the gifts were...for teenage girls. Because she had a daughter who was still at work, and she wanted to get gifts for both of us.
I'd watched my mom eagerly pick through the choices until she'd found a manicure set, complete with nail polish and fake nails. Then she glanced over at me, walked over to another table, grabbed the first thing she saw and shoved it at me. As we walked away, I remember wondering if I should have told the lady that I didn't have a sister. Then I'd looked down at the box my mom handed me, and it had been like everything else disappeared.
It had been an introductory art set. And not just simple watercolors that would've been appropriate for a child my age. It had watercolors, finger paints, and a couple tubes of more expensive water and oil based paints. There'd also been different brushes and sponges, a few sketching pencils, charcoal pencils, and even a palate knife. And the sculpting clay that even now I tried to forget.
It hadn't been until I was in my teens that I realized someone had spent a lot of money putting that box together. I even tried to find out, but I'd never been able to learn who had been responsible for saving my life.
Because that's what happened. As my mother had spent more and more time with her various boyfriends, I'd lost myself in the world of colors and textures. I didn't just love how the colors played off each other. I loved how different techniques could give the identical picture a completely new look and meaning.
When I'd been picked up by Child Protective Services after spending a month and a half by myself at the age of ten, painting had been my solace. When my mother had come with a man she'd introduced as my father, I'd expressed myself through art. When my father sent me to boarding school because he hadn't known how to handle having a child, painting had come with me. When he'd had a stroke in the middle of my senior year of high school and had lingered in the eight years that followed, art had been my salvation.
It was the one thing in my life I'd been able to count on. It had never abandoned me...until now.
"Son of a bitch," I muttered as I kicked at a crumpled paper towel. The still-wet paint on it left a smudge of green on my bare foot. I'd been trying to create something with the paper towel as a medium, but I'd lost the vision partway through, just like I had with everything else.
It had never been this hard. Not in this way. It was work, like all art, and anyone who said otherwise either didn't know what the hell they were talking about, or they'd never seen anyone who'd created anything of quality. I'd heard someone once compare art to exercise. No matter how much you loved it, and how much natural ability you had, it still needed blood, sweat, and tears if it was going to be any good.
But it had never been like this before.
Like I was reaching deep inside me for something that had always been there, and I'd come up empty. Even the desire to create was waning, and with its loss came the fear that it would never return. That I would lose this refuge.
I was thirty-three years-old and hadn't needed to worry about money from the moment Benjamin Gooding accepted me as his son. I was his only heir, so I'd been in control of his massive estate since his stroke. When he finally passed, I inherited it all, including a villa in the south of France, a share in a Napa Valley winery, a house in the Hamptons, and the family mansion on the Upper East Side, which was where I lived most of the time.
Even though it was far too large for just me, I kept it because I knew how important family had been to my father. We hadn't been close, and I'd been a handful, but he never made me feel like a burden, not even when I spent a couple years in boarding school. By the time I was sixteen, he turned half of the first floor into a studio for me, putting in massive windows to allow in as much natural light as possible. He also added a private entrance and private staircase to the third floor so that I could come and go as I pleased without worrying about disturbing him.
I scratched my head as I wandered over to one of the floor-to-ceiling windows. Maybe the problem was that I needed to get out of the city. I could go to the Hamptons for a while. I had a smaller studio there. Or maybe I needed to get away from the East Coast all together. My friends and I shared a house in Aspen that might be just what I needed. Mountains could give me a new perspective.
Except I knew the problem had nothing to do with where I was. It was me. I was off-balance, as if the axis of my world had somehow shifted without me knowing it and everything was off-kilter.
I'd read somewhere that a true explorer might use a compass, but that he also knew how to navigate using the stars. There were things that could throw off a compass's ability to find true north, but if a person studied the stars and their places in the sky, he could never really be lost.
And that's what it felt like, I realized. Like I'd spent my whole life using a compass to find direction and had never bothered to learn any other way, so when something had come along to mess with it, I wasn't able to regain my footing.
I needed to look to the stars.
The idea of constellations and planets whirled through my head, as if searching for some spark of life, of creativity, to give it form. It was right there, just out of my grasp, and I knew there was some essential part that hadn't quite clicked into place. A part that was necessary before I could see the big picture.
I was still musing over it when the sound of the doorbell interrupted my thoughts. I'd ordered lunch from my favorite restaurant and asked them to bring it to the private entrance, so I didn't bother looking to see who was there. The moment I opened the door, I wondered why the hell someone who looked like that was delivering my samosa and chicken tandoori.
She was just a couple inches over five feet tall and slender, with the sort of delicate features that immediately made me feel like someone should be protecting her rather than letting her wander around the city by herself. She wore a simple steel gray blouse and a plain black skirt that seemed way too fancy for such a mundane job. Her rich, sepia brown hair was pulled back from her face, with a couple escaping curls that I was far too tempted to twist around my finger just to see if it was as silky as it looked. Her eyes were an extraordinary light gray that reminded me of pure, pale ash that could almost be mistaken for snow.
Well, damn.
Five
Savannah
I'd been so nervous about my first real assignment that I barely slept at all. By five o'clock, I'd known it was completely useless to stay in bed, so I'd gotten up and gone for a run. I wasn't a runner by nature, but it was as good a way as any to work off stress and clear my mind.
By the time I was showered and had gone through every outfit in my closet, and even a couple of Everett's shirts, my nerves were back, but they were at least manageable.
"I like it," Everett said as I walked into the kitchen. "But you might want to put on a bra under that shirt. Unless your plan is to let Jace Randell see your nipples on the first day."
I stopped, mouth hanging open, then ran into the bathroom. Shit. He was right. I'd forgotten to put on a bra, and this blouse was so thin that without it, my nipples would be pointing at everyone who saw me.
I was still flustered when I sat down at the table, and the fact that Everett was smirking didn't help matters much. I couldn't eat but a few bites no matter how delicious the French toast was that Everett had made.
"Don't you have to be at work soon?" I snapped, the words coming out harsher than I intended.
He kept grinning. "Day off."
I glared at him and managed to eat another bite of food. Everett already had his BS in applied physics, but was currently working on his Masters. He was also a maintenance worker in the NYU physics department, but I was fairly certain he spent most of his time flirting with any guy who caught his eye.
/> His antics, however, did manage to take the edge off my nerves, so as I got out of the cab on 69th Street, I finally felt like I could handle this. After all, I'd gone to school for this. A journalism degree from NYU with a minor in art history, all with the intention of becoming an art critic – every minute of study had been pointing toward this moment.
I'd worked my ass off on all the shitty assignments my boss gave me over the past eighteen months, pretty much all of which involved proofreading and fact gathering for the pretentious puff pieces he wrote. Through it all, I kept my eye on the prize. This prize.
I took a slow breath and made my way up the sidewalk. I'd been told to use a side door, so I bypassed the front and rang the doorbell. As I waited for someone to answer, I mentally prepared myself to meet the artist whose work had inspired my career.
I was a junior in high school when our art teacher had taken my class to Indianapolis to see a gallery his sister had just opened. In it, there were three pieces by a brand new artist. I must have stood there for two hours, looking at them in turn, and then back again. I'd written my senior thesis about them and gotten a near-perfect grade.
Then the door opened and...well, damn.
I'd seen pictures of him, but they'd clearly all been staged, because while he looked good in a suit and tie, this was clearly the true artist.
Ash blond hair possessed little streaks of maroon that matched the flecks on the tight black shirt that showed off the amazing definition his suit jackets had hidden. Jade green eyes and hints of tattoos peeked out from under his short sleeves. His long legs were covered by a pair of paint-stained jeans that I didn't even want to see from behind because I just knew they'd hug the tightest ass I'd ever seen.
"How much?"
My eyebrows shot up. Well, that was one way to keep me from ogling him. "Excuse me?"