Night Owl(32)

Hannah began to shudder in her bonds, fighting and making obscene sounds. I checked her hand. She held the marble fast. I felt a surge of admiration for her, and dark gratitude.

"I know," I whispered into her ear. "You wish you weren't gagged so you could lick up all that cum, don't you? Or maybe you'd like to come as well. I told you last night that I would go easy on you if you made a mess for me, and you did. You squirted for me like a bitch in heat."

Hannah's cheeks flushed. I jostled her nipple clamps.

"I recorded that little show last night. I thought about making you watch it today, but I couldn't wait to get you blindfolded. I love you like this. You love it, too. If I wanted to be cruel, I would make you wait for release until I'm hard again. But you've been perfect, Hannah. Now beg to come. Beg for something inside. Do your best, lover."

With a few deft tugs, I loosened her gag and tossed it away.

Hannah sucked in air like she'd been drowning.

"Please!" she sobbed. The word sent shivers through me. I grabbed her long purple vibrator and dialed it up to the highest speed.

"Ins—inside! Inside me, god! Let me come, M-Matt, let me, in... please, I—"

I allowed myself one last look at Hannah bound, Hannah in the throes of desperation, and then I slid her thong aside and plunged the vibrator into her sex. I didn't even need to move it. As soon as I pressed the curve of it up into her G-spot, she began to come.

Pleasure gripped Hannah the way it gripped me—first in a powerful paroxysm, then rolling waves of bliss.

I watched her face as she came. No wonder they called it the little death. Her pain sounded so much like her pleasure, or her pleasure like her pain, and the ecstasy on her face could have been agony.

She moaned and wet my hand with her desire, and I held the toys against her until her struggling ceased.

We slept in a sweaty tangle. The ties and toys lay strewn around the edges of my bed. For the first time, I held Hannah's naked body as she held mine. Our hearts slowed together. Our breaths grew even and deep.

When I woke, Hannah was exploring my body with her small hands. I realized I had been feeling her touch as I dozed, like the touch of some curious animal, on my face, my hair and neck, my shoulders, my back. I sighed and she paused.

"Keep going," I whispered.

Her feathery touches grew urgent. She pawed at my ass; she squeezed the lean contours of my torso and smoothed her hands over the hard planes.

When she scooted down to hold my thighs, she began to lap at my cock.

We made love as the evening sun burned away.

We touched all of one another, tasted everything. We were slow, gentle, and quiet. We took what we wanted. We gave it up. Hannah rode my face, I wriggled my tongue into her ass, she pinched and licked my nipples. My eyes watered with the force of my climax. We drowsed and woke again. I mounted her. She mounted me. Our skin glistened.

Again and again we went there together—tumbling over the raw edge, touching the live wire, collapsing, exploding, dissolving like dead stars.

CHAPTER 14

Hannah

I WATCHED MATT sleep in the morning sunlight. He lay sprawled on his stomach with his head beneath a pillow and an arm around my middle.

He was beautiful.

He was more beautiful now than I had ever seen him. My gaze lingered over his long body, the line of his spine, his thighs and calves. I felt the wildest urge to roll him over and kiss my way down his golden treasure trail.

God, I felt amazing. I felt tattered in the best possible way, like our violent passion had blasted me clean. When I eased off Matt's arm and climbed out of his bed, I knew that I was leaving something behind. It was my old skin. He'd taken me for all I was worth.

I pulled on Matt's dress shirt and buttoned it once. I crept down the hall and guzzled water from the tap, then wandered into the library.

Wow, had I ever been right about this guy's reading habits. The room looked like the inside of a professor's office, only larger. The wall-to-wall shelves held reference books, fiction and nonfiction, translations, titles in foreign languages, books on CD, poetry, plays, maps—in short, an abridged library.

I trailed my fingers over the book spines, some so old they were flaking.

I found a large Willa Cather section. I grinned as I plucked My ántonia off the shelf. Ha! I felt like a detective.

There was the Virgil epigraph, which Matt had circled. I flipped to the end of the book. He had highlighted the whole last paragraph and then, in pen, underlined the last sentence: "Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past."

In the margin he'd scribbled "epi?"

I frowned.

Epi? Epigraph? This was, I knew, the epigraph to The Silver Cord by M. Pierce.

My frown shifted to a smirk. Was Matt a secret M. Pierce fan? That might explain why he kept hassling me for liking the author—because he was a fan boy and too much of a literary snob to admit it.

I scanned the fiction, my eyes zipping toward the P section. Walker Percy, Sylvia Plath, Thomas Pynchon, Puzo, Proust—huh, no Pierce...

"Hannah."

I jumped.

Matt stood in the doorway. His face was pale and his hair was crazy. A pair of black lounge pants clung to his hips.

"Matt, hey." I gave a shaky laugh. "You scared me..."

Fuck, his eyes were so deadly serious. Girl in a tiger cage. Girl about to be devoured. He looked between the shelf and the book in my hands.