Page 45 of Honey Cut
As if I hadn’t just—quite literally—thrown my safeword to the side. As if we hadn’t discussed the elements of this performance in excruciating detail during the week leading up to our wedding.
“Hyssop.” The first leather cuff is buckled around my wrist. He checks how much room there is under the cuff and then presses on my fingernail—checking for capillary refill, I assume.
“If you feel shy about saying it because of the image we need to present,” Mark tells me quietly, “use our sign forstop. Your thumb and forefinger. I’ll know to back off then, and I’ll make it look like my choice.”
I nod. I want to protest that I don’t need it, that I can take anything he wants to do to me, but I know he needs the reassurance that I will stop him if I need to.
Not because he is good, but because he isnot.
And I want to prove to him, beyond our game, that I want this. That I want him. Not only in public, for the crowd, but alone too.
I promised once that I would make you feel every hour that I’ve abstained from possessing someone—it is exponentially truer now. You will suffer for it.
Doesn’t he understand that I’ve always wanted to suffer? For God? For Mark? Even loving Tristan is the jagged pain of breathing in ice-cold air, and I can’t get enough.
My other wrist is cuffed. Dizzy lust spins inside me, and when I think about how we look right now, me in my torn wedding gown, one breast exposed and the skirt caught around my thighs, and Mark straddling me, the lust spins even faster.
Mark drops a kiss to each of my cuffed wrists, leaning over me to do it, and then levers himself off the bed with an easy, athletic grace.
“Tristan,” he says, and I hear the steady, measured strides of the soldier we’ve both had sex with.
I can’t help but look as Tristan approaches, his eyes going almost helplessly to me on the bed, a spasm of pain around his mouth before he returns his gaze to Mark.
“Hold this for me,” my husband says casually, unfastening his wristwatch and giving it to Tristan.
Tristan takes it with a nod, appearing meticulously professional from far away. From up close, however, I can see the softly wounded look in his eyes, the swallow of his throat. The shape of an erection distending the lines of his suit jacket. He looks at me once more and then leaves the stage, Mark’s watch held carefully in his hand.
Mark regards me as he unknots his bow tie, not looking at the crowd at all while he does, and then he pulls it free. It’s tossed onto the stage next to my hyssop bouquet.
He undresses carelessly, his jacket stripped off and dropped, his dress shoes toed off and left where he was standing. He steps closer to the bed as he works his shirt buttons open one by one, gradually exposing more and more skin: the cut of his collarbone, the hard chest, the tight abdomen below. Blond hair dusts over his pectorals, makes a gilded whorl around the flat rim of his navel, and then arrows down to the waistband of his pants.
He slides the shirt from his body with the noise of imported cotton over skin, and it gets dropped just as carelessly as everything else. It’s a show—I know it’s a show because there is nothing he’s not letting the audience see, and there’s no movement that’s not played with an exquisiteness of balance, of strength, of the kind of casual power that reminds everyone watching that he has utter control over their attention. Over their eyes, their thoughts, their wandering hands as they watch our bedding ceremony unfold.
It is a gift, I think, to still look predatory when you’re pulling off a pair of socks.
Finally, he is barefoot and padding to the edge of the bed, his trousers unfastened at the top but not unzipped, his hair unimpeachable despite being mostly undressed.
He cuffs my right ankle to a bottom corner of the bed and then my left, and with each restraint, his fingers go under the cuff, checking the amount of space there, and then he strokes up my calf to the inside of my knee. It tickles, and I jerk in the cuffs, but I can’t actually move. His lips quirk as he watches me try.
And then I’m cinched into place. Spread into anXon the black sheets, a sacrifice for the man now straightening up and dropping his hands to his zipper.
It is cruel of him to give me his full nakedness for the first time when I can’t touch him. To give me the sight of his back when I can’t run my fingers over the furrow of his spine or the tight curves of his ass. To give me the first glimpse of the tattooed words on one of his narrow hips when I can’t lean closer to read them.
And last night I only glimpsed it in the dark, but tonight I see it illuminated by candlelight: a livid red wound on his shoulder, just barely healed, a thing of danger and mortal violence.
The hair on his thighs is the same gold as on his chest, and when the tuxedo pants are all the way off and thrown to the side, I can see that the darkest gold of all is around his erection. It’s as beautiful as I remember from three years ago, straight and thick and lightly veined, the crown tight as stretched silk and wet along its slit. It juts up, moving only slightly as he returns to the bed and braces his knee on the edge.
He crawls over me, sleek muscle and warm skin, and dips his head to bite my exposed breast. The pain is shocking, quick, and I barely suppress the noise it summons. The pain recedes as he lifts his head to look at me, but my breathing stays fast and shallow, and my muscles stay tight.
It is thrilling how alive I feel right now. How close to something like real.
“Did you like that?” asks Mark. He speaks loudly enough for the microphones to pick up, for the crowd to hear. “Do you like it when I hurt you?”
What can I say to that?Yeswhen the hurting leaves broken blood vessels and purple bruises.Nowhen the hurting leaves me alone in a dark bedroom, gutted and sobbing.
But I can hardly say that in a room full of strangers.
“Yes,” I tell him. “I like it so much.”
