Page 75 of Dominion's Guard
I raise my arms. He steps behind me, close enough that the scent of his cologne and the leather of his pants reaches me, warm and dark and layered with something underneath that is just his skin. He guides my wrists into the upper cuffs and buckles them with a practiced efficiency, firm enough that I feel the leather press against bone but not tight enough to cut circulation. The position spreads me wide, pulling my shoulder blades apart, my body forming a V against the upper beams with my weight settled on my feet.
He doesn't touch the lower cuffs. He leaves my ankles free without a word, without a glance at the empty restraints, without the slightest acknowledgment that he just honored a boundary I set minutes ago as though it were carved into the framework of the wood itself.
That undoes me more than the bondage does.
"I'm going to undress you," he says, his mouth close enough to my ear that his breath moves the hair against my neck. "Color?"
"Green."
His fingers find the laces at my back and work them loose with the ease of a man who has unlaced a corset before and is in no rush to finish. Each tug loosens the boning against my ribs by fractions, the constriction releasing by degrees until the leather falls open and he pulls it free of my body. The air hits my bare breasts and my nipples tighten, the sensation acute enough to make me pull against the cuffs in an involuntary flinch. His fingers hook into the waistband of my boy shorts and drag them down my hips and legs. I step out of them, my bare feet pressing into the smooth wood of the platform.
I am naked on the St. Andrew's cross on the main floor of Dominion. My arms are spread above me, the corset and boy shorts discarded on the platform, and I am open—exposed—to every pair of eyes in the room. The wood presses against my breasts, smooth and cool against the heated flush already rising across my skin, and I am hyper-aware of the contact: the beams against my collarbones, the lower edge biting into my hips, the grain of the wood flush against my stomach, the platform under my bare feet. My back is bared to the amber lighting, the whole naked length of my spine and ass on display to anyone who turns their head.
I can feel eyes on me. The awareness sits on my skin like a second layer of heat.
Andy moves to the implement wall. He selects a flogger, soft leather falls with a weighted handle, and returns to face me. He holds my gaze while he lets the flogger trails drag through his hand, letting me watch the leather strands slide between his fingers in a gesture that is clinical and obscene at the same time. The leather is dark, supple, and I can smell it from where I stand,the rich animal scent mixing with the polished wood and the faint cedar of the implement wall.
"Color?" he asks.
"Green."
He circles behind me. The first touch is the trails of the flogger dragged across my shoulders, a whisper of leather strands that raises the hair on my arms and sends a ripple down my spine. He drags them lower, tracing the channel of my spine, letting the individual strands catch and separate across the ridges of muscle along my back. The touch is exploratory, mapping me, and my body is tuned so high that each strand registers as a separate line of sensation.
The first real strike lands across my upper back. The leather fans wide across the muscle, and the sting blooms warm and immediate, a sharp bite that dissolves into spreading heat within seconds. My breath catches. The impact is controlled, calibrated, precise enough to tell me he knows the difference between warming skin and punishing it.
"Count for me," he says.
"I thought you were going to enjoy the mouthing off."
"I am. Count anyway."
"One."
The second strike lands lower, catching the curve where my shoulders meet my spine. The leather wraps my ribs on the follow-through, the tips of the falls catching the outer swell of my breast, and the sting is sharper there, more intimate, a place Arnold never hit because Arnold never aimed for anything that might pull a genuine reaction.
"Two," I say, and the word drops half a register lower than my normal voice.
He builds slowly. Each strike is placed with a precision that tells me he's reading my body the way he reads evidence: the flush spreading across my skin, the involuntary arch of myspine, the way my hips roll forward against the wood when the flogger catches a new patch of sensitized flesh. He varies the rhythm, keeping me from settling into a pattern, a hard strike followed by a light drag of the tails across heated skin followed by a strike in a completely new location. My body cannot predict him. My body can only respond.
By the fifth strike, the warmth has built past the surface and is radiating inward, converting from sting to a deep, pulsing heat that travels down my nerve endings and settles between my legs with a heaviness I cannot ignore. The pain-to-pleasure translation is a process I know from years of impact play, the endorphin flood that converts surface pain into a full-body high. What I have never experienced is the translation happening this fast, this completely, as if Andy calibrated each strike to feed that specific pathway.
"Five," I say, and the word comes out thicker than I planned.
"Color?"
"Green. Very green. Aggressively green."
His laugh is low and brief. Then the flogger falls harder across the swell of my ass, and the crack of leather on bare skin carries across the main floor loud enough to cut through the ambient music. What comes out of me is not a count. It is a gasp that carries to the east side of the floor, ragged and bitten off, and the flush that crawls up my throat and across my breasts has nothing to do with the leather. That was public. Everyone within earshot just heard what he pulled out of me.
"That sound," he says, low enough that the words exist only between us and the wood. "Make it again."
"You can't just order a sound, Andy. That's not how involuntary responses work."
The next strike catches the crease where my ass meets my thighs, and the sting is exquisite, sharper in the tender skin,and the gasp rips out of me before I can finish the thought. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't need to.
"I hate you," I manage.
"You keep saying that. Your body keeps disagreeing."
