I kept a loose grip on the leash as she did, spooling it out so she’d have plenty of slack, licking my lips at the swollen perfection exposed between her legs. When we got home, I wanted to worship her with my mouth, I wanted her coming on my tongue again and again. She deserved it, my little lamb, for going to such lengths for me, creating this little game where I could take and take from her. Yes, after this, I was going to reward her.
But as for right now…
I got on the floor behind her, also on my knees, and because the music was so loud, I don’t think she heard. She was bent completely over, her face to the floor, her ass high in the air, and I took my dick and shoved into her with one rough thrust, all the way in, slapping her hard on one ass cheek as I did.
She squealed—a happy noise—and that was enough to keep my conscience at bay as I fucked her harder than was purely gentlemanly, not fast necessarily, just hard and deep, the kind of deep that made her toes curl and my balls swing against her clit.
And then the snake slithered again, that angry, bitter snake, as I remembered that I was not the first man to do this to Poppy here, that she’d been fucked before like this, in this very place, and then that anger was itching at my palms and coiling in my pelvis.
I wanted to punish her. I wanted to hurt her the way she hurt me with making me care so much, but instead of hurting her, I pulled out and stood up, my cock wet and as hard as fucking steel, throbbing with the need to screw the pussy still raised up in offering to me.
I didn’t want to be Herod. Not really.
I sat down on the chair. “Come here.” I jerked my head towards my cock so that she knew what I wanted, and she didn’t hesitate to climb up my lap and then impale herself on me, sinking down with her tight, hot cunt, her tits right in my face.
And here, now that I could see her face, now that I couldn’t be brutal, I confessed. “I can’t, like that. It makes me want to…”
But I couldn’t get the words out. They were too awful. Instead, I buried my face in her breasts, smelling the lavender smell of her, the clean fabric of her bra.
She tugged at my hair so that my head was pulled back. “Want to hurt me?”
I closed my eyes. I couldn’t look at her. She must hate me, but she was still fucking me, rocking back and forth like women do instead of up and down, using my dick to get her off as if the rest of me was irrelevant.
God, that was hot.
“I guessed as much today,” she said. “That’s why I brought us here.”
My eyes flew open. “What?”
“You’re a man, Tyler. It doesn’t matter what I tell you or even what you choose to believe…there’s always going to be this Neanderthal inside you that wants to claim me. Reclaim me, if necessary, and I thought here…” She slowed her movements, looking uncertain for the first time. “I thought if we played like this, it would be easier for you to let go. To satisfy that part of you that you don’t want to acknowledge. That part that you hide from. Because it’s a bigger slice of you than you think.”
As if to underscore her point, she scratched her fingernails down my stomach—hard—and my hand spanked her ass so fast that I barely knew what I was doing. She gave a little moan and ground herself down on me.
“See? You need this. And I need this. I’ll take you to every place I’ve ever been and let you fuck me there, so you can rewrite my history as your history, if you want,” she promised. “Let me give that to you.”
I looked at her in amazement. In gratitude. She was so astute and so giving and of course I hadn’t needed to watch out for her well-being. As always, she had both of us under control when she surrendered her control to me.
“I don’t know what to say,” I admitted.
“Say yes. Say that you’ll finish the game.”
I’d been wrong. She wasn’t Salome right now. She was Esther, using her body to save her kingdom—our kingdom of two. And how could I act out my primal need to claim her knowing that? Knowing how generous and brave she was?
“It doesn’t feel right, to treat you like this…to claim you like some sort of property. And more importantly, I don’t want to hurt you.”
“I want you to claim me like property,” she said, leaning to whisper in my ear. The change in position squeezed her cunt around my length and I sucked in a breath. “And if you hurt me, I’ll tell you. You trust me to say stop, and I’ll trust you to stop if I say it. Sound good?”
Fuck yes, it sounded good. It sounded too good to be true, but then again, that was my Poppy, a woman made like God himself had designed her for me. And maybe He had.
I decided to trust her. Trust Him.
Mind made up, I grabbed her thighs and stood, keeping her pelvis pinned to mine as I stepped over to the sofa. I kissed her—a soft, searing kiss—a reminder of how much I loved her before the rough part of me took over, which it did right after our mouths broke apart. I set Poppy down and flipped her over the arm of the sofa, so that her ass was higher than her head, and then notched the head of my dick in her entrance.
“Press your legs together,” I commanded. “Make it tighter.”
She obeyed, and I sank in with a groan. “So tight like this,” I managed. “You make it so good for me.”
I shoved in again, hard enough that her feet came off the floor, and I kept going like that, her beautiful ass filling my hands and her satin cunt around my cock and her moans as she ground her clit against the firm arm of the sofa.
And in this moment of her Esther-like love for us and a future that was so ephemeral as to be nonexistent, it came to me that there was no sin here. This was love, this was sacrifice, the opposite of sin, and maybe it was fucked up to feel like God was here with us in the back room of a strip club, but I did, like He was bearing witness to this moment where Poppy opened herself to the worst of me and erased it with her love, just like God did for us sinners every moment of every day.
That feeling that Poppy and I had felt in the sanctuary, that God-feeling of presence and promise, it was here right now, making my chest tight and my head swim with the potency of the air itself, and once again I felt like a bridegroom, the man shouting his joy for all his friends and family to hear, and this room was our chuppah, our marriage tent, the faint blue lights the lamps of the ten virgins, our bodies echoing the joining God had already forged between our immortal souls.
How was this not marriage? How was this not more binding and more intimate, us bare with each other in the presence of God? At the very least, this was a betrothal, a promise, an oath.
I spanked my betrothed, wishing I could drink her squeals like Scotch and eat her moans afterward. I fucked her hard, taking in the blue hair tumbling over her back, the delicate lines of her small waist as they swelled into her perfect hips and ass, her wet cunt gripping me, and the pink aperture of her asshole—all of it mine. I was the monarch of all I surveyed—no, I was the master of all I surveyed, and I spanked and scratched and stabbed her over and over again with my cock until finally, finally, she made a noise that was half gasp, half wail, pulsing around me, her hands scrabbling at the leather as she was lost to everything but her body’s response to me.
I was lost to it too—this moment where I had rewritten history, her body’s history—where I had made this room belong to me and the orgasms that I’d given her. Where I’d made her mine and no other man’s, where I had taken an oath of marriage in my heart, and it was that mine that made me pull out and force her on her knees. I wanted her to witness my orgasm, I wanted her to see what she had given me.
The leash in one hand, the other hand with its rough grip and brutal pressure on my cock, using the wetness she’d left on me as lubrication, and it only took a few rough tugs before I shot streams of semen on her waiting lips, on her swan’s neck, on the fringes of her long eyelashes.
The tip of her tongue, pointed and pink, licked a drop off her upper lip, and then she gave me a soft, happy look that sent one more jet of come out to land on her collarbone.
We both breathed heavily for a moment, pleasure still thick in the air, but it was the only thing thick in the air now: the tension and bitterness and anger from earlier were gone. It had worked—Poppy’s game had worked. I had burned away the jealousy and primal urges, and in the interim, also burned away something else. My guilt maybe, or the feeling of sin. Something had shifted, like it had for me those moments on the altar, where the line between sacred and profane blurred completely, and I felt like I’d just participated in something holy, just pressed my naked hands to the mercy seat in a cloud of incense and sweat.
I knelt in front of her and untied the silk leash, using the material to carefully dab my climax off her face. “Game over,” I said gently, running the tip of my nose along her jaw.
“Who do you think won?” she murmured.
I wrapped her in my arms and pulled her into me, kissing the top of her head. “Do you even have to ask? It’s you, little lamb.” She nestled into me, and I rocked her back and forth, my precious one, my sweet woman. “It’s always you.”
CHAPTER 21
The autumn night pressed against the outside of the car as we drove home, and I kept my eyes on Poppy’s profile, which was lit by the lights on the dash and silhouetted against the velvet night outside.
What had happened in the club…it had been dirty and cathartic and galvanizing, although I couldn’t articulate to myself exactly why. The answer hovered just out of reach, shimmered beyond a veil that I could only graze with the fingertips of my thoughts, and as we passed out of the city and into the countryside, I stopped trying and just let myself take in the majesty that was my Esther, my queen.
I wanted her to be my bride.
I wanted her to be my bride.
The thought came with the clarity of cold steel, certain and true and no longer something I felt in the moment of sex and God, but something I felt sober and calm. I loved Poppy. I wanted to marry her.
And then the veil finally fluttered down and I understood. I understood what God had been trying to tell me these past two months. I understood why the Church was called the Bride of Christ, I understood why Song of Songs was in the Bible, I understood why Revelation likened the salvation of the world to a wedding feast.
Why had I ever felt like the choice was between Poppy and God? It had never been that way, it had never been one or the other, because God dwelled in sex and marriage just as much as He dwelled in celibacy and service, and there could be just as much holiness in a life as a husband and a father as there was in a life as a priest. Was Aaron not married? King David? Saint Peter?