Hey! I edited some of my book! Thanks to Emily, I just spend an hour redoing the beginning!
Sometimes, Brian reflected, fantasies simply don’t measure up to reality.
For example, the smiling white teeth on the beautiful dark skinned woman standing in front of him. Framed by long black hair flowing over her shoulders, her eyes wide and almost glowing golden with the flickering candlelight, focusing intently on him. She was a doppelganger of the first crush he’d ever had, on an Indian woman on his paper route. He’d looked forward to seeing her smooth skin, fantasizing about the secret knowledge in her hands as she’d hand him the money, somehow imagining that tingling energy that shot through his arms would last long enough to get home and spend some time in the bathroom with the lotion, trying not to make noise with his mother right outside the door.
His fantasy, though, hadn’t included the knife that this woman now held poised over the tatters of his shirt. His arms hadn’t been tied over his head in his fantasy, thick leather straps dark with unidentifiable stains on them binding his wrists. And the woman on his paper route, in his fantasy, had not looked so hungry as she watched the trickle of blood run down his collarbone where she’d just cut him.
The blade had been so sharp that he hadn’t even felt it go in, thinking it was just another slice of shirt. Then a slight burning pain had slid along the line of his clavicle, a trickle of warm blood, black in the dim flame of the candles, running down his pectoral. His eyes had grown wide, and as he’d looked up, disbelieving, that was when she’d smiled.
It was not a smile of comfort. It was a hungry smile, and Brian felt suddenly like a rather underdone piece of meat.
“Are you enjoying yourself, Man?” She spat the word, harshly. “Don’t you want to dance with me anymore? You seemed eager enough at the Inferno, when all you felt was my hot little yoni wrapping around your thigh.” She emphasized her sarcasm with a mocking bump-and-grind, a grotesquely exaggerated version of the dance that had attracted her to him back at the club.
Perhaps he should have realized then that her welcoming smile had been more feral than eager, but the connection they’d felt dancing had made it seem totally natural to follow her home, let their embraces get more intense, more sensual stroking. He wondered, as he hung there in the door frame, if she’d given other signals that she was a psychopath. He couldn’t think of any.
Hanging there with his shirt in ribbons, he licked his lips, and tried to keep his voice as reasoned and calm as he could. “Actually, I’ve never been into blood play. Nothing wrong with it, when you’re keeping things sanitary” Please, God, let that knife be sterile “but it’s just really not been my thing. In fact,” he tried to let a chuckle, hoping it didn’t come out too much like a sob, “I’m not all that into being a bottom at all. I’m pretty much entirely of the dominant persuasion.” He used words common to the alternative sexuality literature, hoping it would remind her that the two of them had not negotiated this, not really agreeing to anything beyond his wrists taken up in the dark leather straps. Dark? That
annoying voice in his psyche piped up again. Dark with what fluids, exactly, do you think?
She just smiled wider. Ok, then, unsafe, insane, and nonconsensual. Great work, Brian. You sure know how to pick ‘em. “Red?” he tried, as she drew the knife close again. It was a peculiar double-bladed shape, as if two daggers had been merged, their edges perpendicular, a large ball pommel protruding from her clenched fist.
“Red! RED!” The common safeword had no effect as she drew a thin and wavy line just under the first, outlining the slight curve of bone. It didn’t hurt very much, but the invasion of his body by the blade was beginning to fray his calm.
This, buddy-boy, is headed nowhere you want to go.
“Red?” she softly chuckled, looking with satisfaction at the lines of blood slowly wending their way down his chest. “Red is the only color left to you, Man. You are in Kali’s hands now, and” she drew a quick, slightly deeper line down his sternum, punctuating her statement with a small puncture wound just under the xyphoid process, “Kali has no safewords.” She hissed the last and through his gritted teeth Brian wondered how he’d ever thought her attractive.
As if she could read that in the look on his face, she laughed again, an ugly percussive brassy sound. “You, Man, are ruled by your lingam, and will go wherever it leads. Sniffing around any yoni you catch a whiff of... and in this case, your lingam has led you into my arms, blessed by Kali. Enjoy it
while you can, Man, for your sacrifice will be the final joy you ever have.”
The hell of it was, his body did seem to enjoy it. Before she had begun slicing his shirt off of his chest, she had stroked him, once, just behind his ear, a caress stroking along the back curve of his skull with a nail suddenly biting into his neck just where it met the skull. Brian’s head had seemed to flash, somehow, and as he shook his head to clear his vision, he had realized that his cock was rampant, pushing out the fabric of his slacks, throbbing with sudden and unexpected need.
That had been two hours ago. Now his shirt was in tatters, his arms burning from the strain of holding them up, and he was realizing that she wasn’t going to stop with the slicing of his shirt. Hell, she might not stop with the slicing of your skin . But his cock was still visibly excited, and was in fact starting to ache from the strain of being erect for so long. There was no sexual pleasure in it, it simply was there, oblivious to the increasing pain and tension in the rest of his body.
He tried again to put a reasonable, calm, and authoritative tone to his voice. “I’ve got to give you lots of credit for edge play. You’ve pushed every limit I have and then some. But regardless of what my penis says, I’m telling you no. Remember, ‘No means no’? This has to stop, now. I am not consenting to any further play of any kind with you. However, if you let me loose now, I will not press charges, or even mention it again.” He realized that he was beginning to babble, and cursed inwardly as her smile grew wider as she seemed to feed on his fear.
Drawing a breath, Brian tried to make his voice deeper, more authoritative. “But if you continue, I will tell you that not only me, but the full wrath of the law will come down on your beautiful head with a fury that you will not believe. See, I may be kinky, but I’m also the son of a sheriff, and if I turn up” missing he did not say “hurt, they will come after you. And you know how many people saw us at the club... ”
Brian’s voice trailed off as he realized that she was enjoying his struggle with control. As he watched her face, that had seemed so erotically exotic in the club, it became something other than human—less or more he could not say. His arms shook a little from muscle fatigue of having them up that long, and his legs were long past discomfort and into the burning sensation of lactic acid buildup. She drank it all in as she wove the knife in strange patterns in the air, occasionally flicking close enough to feel the air disturbed as the blade passed by his skin.
Tomorrow, 4:30, Ground Zero, I'll be doing more. She's brilliant with her rotating writer idea: a different coffeehouse each day. Feel free to join me, but...I'll be writing, so attempts at conversation will be met with growls. And not the good kind...
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