Page 142
I begin the altered sentence.
Heather rides me faster this time. The book shakes against my palms, blurring the words behind my glasses.
“Her darkness closed around me like velvet bars,” I read. My voice catches when she circles her hips at the base of my cock. “And some faithless part of my soul had always known I belonged behind her locked doors.”
“Again.”
I start over. She pulls the glasses from my face halfway through the first clause. The print loses its edges, black lines spreading across white.
Heather takes the book next and throws it onto the chair beside Simon. “Keep reading.”
I know the sentence now. “Her darkness closed around me like velvet bars, and some faithless part of my soul had always known I belonged behind her locked doors.”
Heather’s body tightens around me. Her nails drag down my chest as she comes, and her hips refuse to stop through it.
I drive upward before I can prevent it.
She catches my throat. “I didn’t give you permission.”
My body is close enough that stillness hurts. I grip the bedding instead of her hips and wait while she uses the last of her orgasm on my cock.
“Again,” she says.
I repeat the sentence while Jamie watches from the foot of my bed and Simon listens from the chair. Heather keeps her hand at my throat, feeling every word move beneath her palm.
She changes the pace beneath “faithless.” She takes me deeper at “belonged.” By the time I reach “locked doors,” the sentence no longer sounds like prose. It sounds like something the room has heard me admit.
Heather leans close enough that her mouth touches mine. “Now you may come.”
Permission breaks the control she required me to hold. My hips drive into her before her hand forces me back against the mattress. I come inside her while she holds my throat and makes me finish the sentence again. The final word breaks in my mouth, but I give it to her whole.
Heather continues moving until my body tries to escape every downward stroke. She keeps me inside her and turns my face toward Jamie, then Simon, ensuring I see both witnesses before she finally stops.
Nobody speaks.
Heather releases my throat and reaches for my glasses. She puts them back on my face with irritating care, then retrieves the paperback.
“You remembered,” she says.
“You made me repeat it.”
She studies me.
I recited someone else’s surrender. It isn’t the same as giving her mine.
She opens the paperback to the marked page again. “Next time, Oliver, you’ll use your own words.”
CHAPTER 42
Simon
Heather waits eleven more clean inspections before she opens the front door for me. By the eleventh night, the bruise has faded from my throat, my ribs no longer catch when I turn, and her hands find nothing on my body that I put there myself.
She rewards me with her thumbnail pressed into the soft place beneath my ribs. The pain comes clean and bright, exactly where she chooses, and disappears before my body can settle around it.
“Tomorrow, you’re coming to the store with me,” she says. Then she leaves me hard in the red room and locks the door.
The pill is missing from my place at breakfast. I look beneath my plate in case Heather has decided to make me hunt for it, but she sets a folded piece of paper beside my fork instead.
