Perfection - Kitty Thomas Page 0,28

relax and press against his hand for more comfort.

Sensual piano music begins to play over the sound system. He lays something on the ground next to my hand.

“Explore it with your fingers,” he says.

This isn't a sexual command, but I swear everything he says now sounds like the dirtiest thing any human being has ever uttered. I move my fingers over long strands of leather, interspersed with ribbons. Both the ribbons and leather end in knots.

“It's a flogger,” he says.

He takes it away, and then I feel him standing behind me. I tense.

“Relax,” he says. “Just surrender to this.”

Why haven't I tried to fight him? Is this threat of blackmail really so powerful that I wouldn't fight at all? That I would barely plead? I haven't even done that tonight. I can't bring myself to.

I feel guilty for the thirty-two errors, even though they don't personally affect him. They displease him. I want to erase them. I want to be perfect.

I cringe at this thought, reminded of the movie I watched with Henry and Melinda. Suddenly I’m that neurotic girl on the screen. What would my friends think if they could see me now?

Drink. And then they'd toss back a shot in my honor.

I'm jolted out of my thoughts as he drags the flogger across my back. A tickling whisper of touch. This feels sexual. Intimate. And I realize I would rather he do this than not touch me beyond dancing.

The way he dances with me is intimate, but it's not enough. It's only a tease. Suddenly, I wonder about the women who have danced with him. Did he take them as lovers? I think it would be cruel to them if he didn't.

The flogger strikes in a stinging kiss across my back.

“Count,” he says.

“One.”

It hurts, but in a way I want to move closer to. It's complex, like a finely aged wine. There are layers and notes. Flavors. Like peach and vanilla if peach and vanilla were tactile sensations instead of tastes.

He falls into a rhythm with the flogger, and I fall into one with my answering count. I assume there will be thirty-two. It isn't painful enough for that to seem like torture. Each strike, followed by a number, followed by an echoing throb from my pussy. The longer this goes on, the more excited I get, the more desperately I need him to rut into me like an animal in the middle of the stage floor. All I can think about is that long, thick, hard cock pounding inside me in yet another dark rhythm.

When will he fuck me? When?

“Count!” he says.

“Twenty-seven,” I say. Five more.

Except that the flogger doesn't fall against my flesh again. Instead, he walks a few steps away. I hear some things moved about, and it finally occurs to my addled brain that the heavy thing he set down was some sort of box that he's searching through.

He returns and lays something else beside me.

“Touch it,” he says.

Again, my mind goes to a dirty place even though I know he means for me to touch whatever he took from the box. It is long and thin, hard.

“It's a cane,” he says, as if I would never have divined this on my own.

I understand on a certain level that this man could make any implement hurt if he put enough of his power behind it. Likewise, he can use each implement in a gentle way—in a caress—no matter what that implement is. But a cane is... serious. A cane is meant to hurt. In countries that use these in punishment for crimes, it often scars people for life.

Tears that didn't trouble me during the last few minutes, stream down my face in fear and anticipation of this abrupt escalation in my punishment. He pries the cane from my questing fingers and presses it lightly against the top of my head which still rests on the floor.

“Raise your head and kiss it,” he says.

I do this, my lips pressing reverently against the bamboo as if this act can appease him, as if this obedience will make him say the magic words, I think that's enough for tonight—words I didn't want to hear two weeks ago, but desperately want to hear now.

“Please,” I whimper.

“Thirty-two errors, Cassia,” he says as if this explains everything about why we're here. “You will count. Start at twenty-eight.”

I feel the brush of air as he moves behind me.

A moment later, the cane slices through the air to land against my ass.