Between the Sheets Read online

  Title Page

  COCKTALES

  BETWEEN THE SHEETS

  Selected and edited by Miranda Forbes

  Publisher Information

  Published by Accent Press Ltd – 2010

  Digital Edition converted and published by Andrews UK Limited 2010

  www.andrewsuk.com

  Copyright © Accent Press Ltd 2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers: Xcite Books, Suite 11769, 2nd Floor, 145-157 St John Street, London EC1V 4PY

  Unique Visitors

  by Rachel Kramer Bussel

  I’m lying naked on my back on a king-size hotel bed, my wrists and ankles bound with cuffs and rope respectively. The sheets are soft beneath me, sumptuous, luxurious, but I can hardly appreciate them with my arms above my head, my armpits exposed, my ankles tied behind me, leaving my pussy exposed, stretching me wide open. Being tied up like this forces you to experience every sensation more acutely: my feet and knees and back caress the sheets, my ears pick up the stray sounds of traffic far below. My eyes take in the room, one I’ve never seen before, one of an endless series of hotels I’ve become acquainted with since Ned and I started seeing each other. I see Ned as well, Ned with the black hair that falls in his face like some rock star, even though he’s more businessman than guitar hero, Ned with the serious eyes and thin arms which do little to showcase the strength they possess. Ned in jeans and a button-down blue-and-white checked shirt, nothing special, nothing glamorous, except what lives inside his head, the twisted fantasies he’s brought to life for both of us that bubble up from inside. Those are things you can’t see, even if you’re looking hard, like I am, even if you know him well, like I do. So I stop looking, because he will show me what I need to see in good time.

  I swallow hard, the motion traveling through the studded collar tight against my neck, tasting the traces of the Coke I drank earlier; a lingering sweetness along with a trace of fear tickle my tongue. I breathe in deeply through my nose, but the room is so clean, that’s all that reaches my nostrils, remnants of a maid’s work. That is all I can do: blink, smell, swallow, maybe open and close my hands, as the realization that I cannot go anywhere, by my own choice, sinks in. I have chosen to give myself to Ned like this, to give him all of me, to let him contort my body in whatever ways he sees fit. That is truly the most damning part about being bound: that when those trickles of tension, nerves, and fear mingle with your arousal, you have no one else to blame. Or at least, I don’t; my lover is simply giving me everything I’ve asked for, everything he knows I want from him.

  I tug against the soft silk sashay cuffs wrapping me in place, but when Ned notices me straining, he gives me a look. The Look. The don’t-disappointment-me look. The you’ll-be-sorry-if-you-do look. The you’re-never-going-to-escape-from-me look. I stare back at him and swallow again, the Coke sensation almost all gone, feeling tears starting deep inside me as his hand moves to my cheek. He’s leaning down to stare at me, hovering over me as he makes up his mind. Is he going to stroke me, pinch me, slap me, dig his nails into my skin? I never know, and that’s just how I like it. The collar is tight, but he manages to move it aside enough to place his finger on my neck, his thumb pressing into a spot that I know will be sore later. My pussy clamps and my hips rise, then press down into the bed.

  I don’t realize I’ve shut my eyes until I hear, ‘Open your eyes, whore.’ They flutter open right away and I really look at him, let him see the tears, the ones hovering right on the surface, and the ones inside. I resist the urge to bite my lip; he doesn’t like me to fidget. He makes sure I see his hand before he raises it to slap my face, his fingers hitting the side of my cheek, making me gasp as that act always does, no matter how wet it makes me. His hand presses deeper against my neck and he does it again, the blow seeming to reverberate through my face, to land all the way on my opposite cheek. No matter how many times he slaps me, it always feels like the first time, like I’m not expecting it even when I’m waiting for it, hoping for it; and I’m always hoping for it. You’d think maybe the skin of my cheek, the skin I pay good money to get buffed, moisturized, softened into submission, would know what was coming, but lucky for me, it never seems to learn. His hits always feel like kisses, like the song says, but the kind of kisses that involve teeth and tongue, the kind that claim your mouth with their power.

  ‘I hope you’re ready for today,’ he says as he moves his hand away from my stinging cheek and down between my legs, holding his fingers right against my pussy lips, the ones I’ve just gotten waxed earlier today, thinking about him as the hot liquid poured over my skin, wishing he could be there to watch me take the heat, watch the pain wield its way from my most sacred centre on outward. Knowing that watching would surely make him hard only has a ripple effect on my arousal, so much so that I have to stop thinking about him, lest my wetness give me away and have the woman applying the wax think it’s her I’m gushing for. That would be awkward. I wait until I’m home to apply those few strokes of my fingers I need as I picture Ned applying the wax, Ned revelling in smearing its sticky heat onto me. Maybe someday he will. Right now, I’m still tender there and his fingers make it worse, and better. He runs one finger lightly along my slit and I gasp again, this time because I’m so fucking wet I almost can’t believe it. Again, I should know, we both should, that’s what he does to me, but I never do. I always forget the power he has to turn me inside out.

  ‘I’m ready,’ I say, my voice calm and steady even though I have no idea if it’s true. Suddenly I have this urge to break out of my bonds and wrap my arms and legs around him, to pull him onto me, into me, as close as possible. I want his reassurance that I’m still his, even as he turns me over to those who most decidedly aren’t him. I don’t say anything, though, just wait for him to read my mind, in that expert way he seems to do. It’s why we don’t use a safeword, because I trust him to know what I need better than I do, and he’s never let me down. He rolls on top of me, crushing me with his weight, my favourite position of all. I’m a little ashamed to admit how much I love not being able to move, how much I think about being right here when we’re apart. When I slide beneath other men’s bodies, they feel puny compared to his heft, like I could push them off merely with a roll of my hips. Even unbound, there’d be nothing I could do to push Ned off me if he didn’t want to move.

  ‘You’re going to be my whore today, aren’t you?’ he asks quietly. I look up at him and nod, dead serious. I feel a shudder run through me even as I am again tempted to tell him to call things off, to take it back to the realm of a hot fantasy we whisper about in between him whipping me and shoving me onto my knees to take his cock between my lips. Does it count as being close to him if I let the people he’s picked out come inside and fuck me? Will he watch, or will he walk away and leave me at their mercy? What has he told them about me? Has he actually charged them money for the chance to have me as their plaything? I don’t know any of those answers, just that I want to make him happy. Well, that’s not all, of course. There is something freeing in being so open, so helpless. I’d stopped seeing anyone else, save for, technically, my husband, in the last six months because no one else had come close to giving me what he gave me, but I’m not really a one-man woman, and I’m curious to see who would be joining us, whose cock would be entering me. Would it look like his, wide and thick, the perfect size for taking deep down my throat? Would it be so long that it intimidated me? Would he be circumcised? Would he even be a he
? There are so many questions I have, all that I keep to myself, not because Ned doesn’t like questions – I’m sure he’d have loved to hear the fear in my voice – but because I don’t really want to know. I want to leave the mystery in the air for as long as possible, to taste it on my tongue when I open my mouth, hear it echo in my mind as he stares me down.

  I can feel his hard cock between my legs, but maybe because he knows just how badly I want it, he doesn’t enter me, doesn’t even let me suck him off before our first guest arrives. ‘If you do a good job,’ he says, ‘I’ll let you have my come. And if you don’t, I’ll make you watch from right here while I give it to another girl.’

  ‘Oh god,’ I say, torn between wanting to be the very best whore I can be, and between wanting to watch him overpower another girl, watch his cock sink in and out of her sweet little mouth. By now I know his type, can eyeball a crowd and tell which one(s) he’d want to play with, which women would make him reach for his belt and make him purr a little. I like this knowledge, even as a part of me doesn’t want to know, doesn’t want to go there. I wonder if he ever has those moments, if he liked it when I told him about other guys I’d been with, if he misses that, if he’s going to watch me get fucked today and jerk off.

  I earn another handful of slaps across the cheek for the look on my face. ‘You want that, don’t you? You want me to bring home another whore and make her take my cock.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, because it’s partly true, though ‘home’ is relative for us. I do want to see that, as long as she knows exactly where she belongs in our little universe, as long as she respects who I am in the sexual chain of command.

  Then his fingers are stuffed inside my pussy, stretching me. ‘You better be ready. Your pussy has a lot of work to do today.’

  I have no idea who’s going to be knocking on our door, how many guests will be gracing this borrowed bed, what kind of party the hotel staff’s going to think we’re throwing. We’ve only ever been alone together in hotels, a random assortment of beds that don’t belong to us laden with pillows and soft sheets and anonymity. In its own way, it lends an intimacy to what we do there, letting us leave our mark on these mystery beds and take our memories with us rather than having them live in the place we lay our heads. There are nights when I wish it could be otherwise, but there is also a comfort in the clean, calm serenity of these quiet rooms that hide our secrets.

  We don’t use our names to check in, and I can only imagine what he’s told the people who will arrive today. Unique visitors, I think, and laugh silently to myself. It’s the term we use for the traffic we live and die by at work, each of us; we’re heads of rival internet empires, always pitted against one another in the press, mortal enemies on the front lines of business. We’re cordial in public, giving polite backhanded compliments to each other’s companies, smiling with our spouses on our arms at charity events. And for many years our sparring took place on the battlefield that I thought truly mattered, the marketplace. Even when my search engine company was at number one, all I wanted to know was that we were beating his, that we had the best statisticians, engineers, designers, that we were the best. It wasn’t even personal, just that drive I’ve always had to get to the top.

  Until Ned showed me how much pleasure I could get out of being on the bottom. Going as low as I could go, to a place where the only fighting I’ve tried to do is clawing my way out from beneath him, something I’ve utterly failed to achieve but enjoyed trying immensely. I’d always been so hard-driven I hadn’t realized that the life I’d built was lacking anything; my business was booming, my marriage was stable, I was constantly on the go. And then one night he sent me a congratulatory note about making the front page of our city’s paper. The note was simple, as was the invitation to lunch, but lurking underneath I wondered just what he was inviting me to do with him. That lunch ended quickly, after a few bites of a salad for me and his fingers probing between my legs, before we retired to the first of many hotel rooms where he pinned me to the door and fucked me there slowly, agonizingly slowly, making sure I knew he could keep me there, on the edge, for as long as he wanted. He touched me in ways my husband hadn’t done in twelve years of marriage, in ways no man had ever done.

  In my professional world, unique visitors became what we were known for, branching out into web design, trying to reach as many customers as possible, broadening our user base and making sure that we were on the pulse of the tech world. That was the part I liked best; getting to know exactly what was at the heart of our clients’ businesses, what their brand personality was, and how we could bring that out for users to access. The concept of uniqueness was something we played on time and time again, opting for the memorable design rather than the most practical in some cases. We wanted our image, our brand, our company’s personality stamped across every site we worked on, multiplying the power of our image and raising our stock among tastemakers in the industry.

  Meanwhile, I knew our competitors were breathing down our neck, and Ned was chief among them, yet there had always been something different about him. He wasn’t quite as cutthroat, but was every bit as driven. Looking back, I wondered whether there’d always been a flirtatious edge to our interactions, but if there had, I hadn’t noticed until it had been staring me in the face, or rather, riding its way along my thighs.

  Both of us are ambitious, but it’s only when you crack the surface that you see the toll it’s taken on each of us. My husband is proud of my success, of course, but not as excited about the long hours it requires. He doesn’t quite get the rush of overseeing a team of people all racing toward a goal, the clamour to stay at the top of my game, to push myself beyond what I think I’m capable of.

  Ned and I have taken that drive and transformed it into something powerful, and now we are about to open that private bond up. I wonder if it will change things between us, will crack the cocoon we’ve drawn around ourselves, the secret place we’d carved out in a fast-paced world that seems to move even faster every day. I guess I’m about to find out.

  ‘I’m going to use this vibrator on you until the bell rings,’ Ned says. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to respond; after all, I don’t really have a choice. By now, I don’t even know if I want that teasing or not, because it will surely be interrupted. Yet I forget about that the minute he starts pressing the buzzing toy against me. He insists that I bring at least one vibrator, sometimes leaving the decision up to me, sometimes requesting a specific one. I shut my eyes to focus on the sensation as the tremors start running through my body, looping around since they have nowhere else to go. It’s almost as if I can feel the vibrations running along the ropes holding my ankles together, even though I know that’s not what’s happening. Ned kisses me while he presses the whirring head of the innocent-looking purple bear against my clit. ‘Should I give our guests this to torment you with?’ he asks, a rhetorical question if ever there was one. Besides, the word my mind zooms in on there is ‘guests.’ There will be more than one. Two men? One man and one woman? Two women? I don’t know who he’s selected for me, for us, just as I don’t know which combination I’d prefer. No, that’s not true; I’d love to have a woman joining us, feel a woman’s nipple stuffed unto my mouth, smell her perfume hovering around me. If he’s invited another couple, or anyone in our industry, that’s courting certain danger. One whiff of this and the press will have a field day, both about our rivalry and our kinky proclivities. Yet he has as much to lose as I do, so I’m not truly concerned. Anyone he welcomed into our relationship would have to have good reason not to out us.

  But still … the noise of the doorbell startles me, especially since I’ve been so close to climax. This time, he doesn’t ask if I’m ready, whether because he doesn’t care or because he knows it’s irrelevant, I’m not sure. The vibrator is turned off and stored in Ned’s pocket. I get one last kiss before door number one is opened to reveal what I hope will be a prize worthy of a win
ning game show contestant. I shut my eyes and hold my breath and when I open them I feel like I really have won a million dollars: standing before us is a stunning couple, one I recognize well from both business conferences and the national news.

  They are the heads of what was a small start-up that wound up taking on some pretty giant companies around it and being bought for millions. That’s all I can say without compromising anyone’s identity. They are familiar, of course, but not as familiar as they are going to be … and certainly not the types I’d associated with kink and debauchery, but then again, seeming them is a good reminder that you never know. I take a deep breath and smile, because while I didn’t know it, again, Ned did: They are exactly who I needed, she with her flowing red hair and flirtatious smile, he with his calm, serious manner. ‘Welcome, Brad, Natalie, please join us,’ Ned says magnanimously, like he’s inviting them in for coffee. ‘You know Carla, of course … but feel free to call her whore tonight. She likes it.’

  Ned took their coats and my eyes lit up at the wrap dress that emphasized Natalie’s large breasts and trim waist. ‘May I?’ she asked, walking over to me, but addressing Ned.

  ‘But of course. What’s mine is yours,’ he said with a chuckle. They all laughed, while I squirmed … or what amounted for squirming in my position.

  ‘Hello, beautiful,’ Natalie said, bending down to kiss my cheek before moving on to my nipple.

  ‘Hello,’ was all I got out before she was pinching one nub and sucking on the other, which I guess was another way to say hello. And odd as it may have been, to see this beautiful, famous, powerful woman’s lips wrapped around my nipple, it was also, in the bizarre world in which I’d found myself since Ned and I had started our affair, perfectly normal. You can’t offer yourself up completely without assuming some kind of risk, and by now, I knew the risk of my extramarital activities being exposed was slim. The risk I took now was humiliation, not the hot and sexy kind, but the kind that might make me ashamed of who I was: a slut. Ned’s slut. His plaything. His toy. It certainly wasn’t befitting a woman of my supposed prowess in the workplace, a woman who was supposed to be finding ways to innovate the tech field and was given awards by prestigious groups supporting female advancement and shattering the glass ceiling.