Cuffing Kate Read online

  “Everyone knows she’s a lesbian,” Jules said, smiling.

  I couldn’t believe what he was saying.”Break,” I told Dan, “be right back.” Dan gave me the evil eye before stepping up to the counter. He liked making money, but he hated having to work. I walked out of the small structure to find Jules waiting for me at the back.

  “What did you say?”

  He took my hand again. I was extremely aware of his skin against my skin. I wanted to tell him that usually, I touch myself through a barrier. Only when the heat arises do I try skin on skin. To mimic this in real life, we ought to have been wearing gloves. Those were the nervous, crazy thoughts jangling through my brain. Luckily I was wise enough to keep my lips sealed as he led me away from the coffee bar, down a little hill, to a concrete planter. We sat together under a jacaranda tree. All around us were the pale, purple blossoms, the honeyed scent in the air. Maybe this was a dream. I couldn’t, for the life of me, understand what was happening.

  “Sonia’s a lesbian. You know that. I know that.”

  “She doesn’t know that,” I said. Then I backtracked. “Well, I mean, I don’t think she did until last night.”

  “What happened last night, Red?” He stroked my hair out of my eyes, and a fresh tremor ran through me. He was gazing at me in a way that men generally admired Sonia. Which reminded me in a heartbeat that he’d asked her out first.

  “I think she hooked up with Eleanor. But why on earth did you ask her out if you think she’s into women?”

  He stared at me with the same expression I’d seen on his face in class, a look that said he knew something more than the instructor did, had a concept that had yet to be explained.

  “You really can’t guess?”

  I shook my head.

  “You can, but you want me to say the words. That’s fine. I can say the words. I asked her out because I wanted you…”

  “But…” I wanted to believe him. My heart felt too big in my chest. He had his hands on my wrists now. I gave a test tug, pulling. He held on tight. Handcuffs. I saw that word again—this time written in my mind instead of in Sonia’s notebook.

  “But why didn’t I ask you out from the start?”

  I swallowed hard and nodded.

  “I wanted you to want what I was going to give you. I wanted you to be consumed with need. There are rules in a debate,” he said, “but there are always people who cheat.”

  Oh, Christ. He’d played me so well. Knowing how jealous I was of how men responded to her, knowing somehow that I was kinky. How had he known that? How had he known I wanted someone to tie me up?

  “But what if she’d said yes?” I needed to know the answer to this.

  “She wasn’t going to say yes.”

  “What if she had?”

  He shrugged. The lady or the tiger? I would have to choose the decision for myself. Would he have postponed the encounter, or tied her up and fucked her? Did either answer make me want to run? No.

  I stopped tugging. His grip did not relax. He squeezed even tighter, before finally releasing me.

  “Do you know where I live?” he asked.

  I nodded without telling him I’d stood outside his apartment before, staring up at his windows. Considering begging him to handcuff me.

  “Come to my place after work,” he said.

  He would have no debate from me.

  * * *

  I burned myself twice in the next two hours. Exasperated, Dan finally told me to call it a day. I must really have been driving him nuts if he were willing to man the coffee shack by himself. I untied the apron and grabbed up my battered messenger bag. I knew I ought to go home and change clothes—the aroma of coffee permeated my whole being. I could go and snag one of Sonia’s little dresses from her closet, put some emphasis on my figure, something different from my standard uniform of faded jeans and a plain white button-down.

  But when I went to her room and looked in her closet, I was at a loss. How could I put on a costume when all I really wanted was for Jules to see me naked? I headed back to my room. At the very least, I could capture my hair in a flirty ponytail. I might even slick on my one shade of lip gloss, if I could find the tube.

  On my bed sat a book—a book I recognized immediately. Sonia’s diary. That’s why I hadn’t found the journal in the morning. She’d cottoned on to the fact that I was a snoop. Guilt flickered through my body. That didn’t stop me from perching on the edge of my mattress and cracking the spine once more. Her latest entry was written differently this time. It was written directly to me.

  When I saw you on your bed like that, I couldn’t get the image out of my mind. I went and told Eleanor what I’d seen, and Eleanor spoke to me differently than anyone ever had. Do you want that? she asked me. Want… She hesitated.

  To be tied down, or tied up?

  It’s no coincidence, is it? You read my diary. You saw what he said. You knew what he did.

  The guilt was back. I was shivering all over.

  But I’m not angry, Kate. Because last night with Eleanor was the best fucking night I ever had. The best night fucking, too.

  Now, I smiled.

  Oh, yeah. And do you think we could borrow your cuffs sometime?

  I put down Sonia’s diary and grabbed the pretty faux-fur, leopard-print cuffs from my bottom drawer. She’d like these best, I thought. They went with her style. I set both the cuffs and key and diary on Sonia’s bed. Then I looked at my clock. Jules had said to meet him after work. Maybe I ought to have changed—turned myself into someone else. Like in one of those fairy tales I used to read when I was a kid. But I didn’t have a godmother.

  Instead I went as myself.

  * * *

  Jules was waiting for me on his front porch, beer in hand.

  I could hardly speak English when he opened the front door for me. I might have said Hello but the word was erased by the sound of a truck rumbling by on the road, and I didn’t try again. Jules waited like a gentleman for me to step inside and came in after me. Was I really here? Was this really happening? I turned to look at Jules. He smiled, as if he could read all the thoughts that were in my head. But he couldn’t possibly. There was no way that he could know how often I’d thought about him, and the dirty things I’d imagined him doing to me.

  He set his beer down on the table in the entryway. I set my satchel down on the floor. We stared at each other for a moment, and I wondered if this was going to be easy or awkward or…

  “This way.”

  Easy. I let him lead me once more, this time to the bedroom. I thought of Sonia, thought of her hot-tempered reaction to his initial suggestion. How different I was, meek and willing, desperate.

  “You look in the mirror,” he said when we got to his room, “but you don’t see the truth.”

  “What do you mean?” His room was all white. White walls, white furniture. But the bed had a black spread on the mattress, and there were framed black-and-white posters on the walls. I was secretly thrilled to see several that I owned, as well.

  “You don’t see. You can’t possibly. Or you wouldn’t behave the way you do.” As if to prove his point, he spun me around, so I was facing a gilded oval mirror hanging above his bed. I looked down. He tilted my chin up. I shut my eyes. He brought his mouth to my ear and said, “Don’t disobey me. If I want your eyes closed, I’ll use a blindfold.”

  His words made me instantly wet. Did he know? Could he tell?

  I sucked my lower lip between my teeth and bit hard. I wished I could be eloquent with words the way Sonia was, able to put arguments into clean, precise phrases. Able to fight when someone tried to dispute me. Not that I wanted to fight Jules, but I wanted to understand, and I wanted to be able to voice my…my…fears.

  “I watched you in class. You soak up everything, but you don’t respond. And then I realized, it’s all in there. You keep you emotions within, sublime and tight. You don’t know how to let things out.”

  “So you’re going to tie me down to
teach me how to let go?” There. That was a little voice, right? Jules smiled again. God, he had a nice smile.

  “She’s learning. Quick, too. That’s not all I’m going to do, Kate.”

  Had he said my name before? Like that? Outside of my fantasies? I didn’t think so. He’d always called me Red. I wanted to hear him say it again. Please, say Kate again, I silently willed.

  “What else are you going to do?” And how had I gotten myself backed into a corner like this? Somehow, I had managed to wedge myself completely into one corner of Jules’s bedroom. My arms were crossed over my chest, and my hands rested on my shoulders as if I were trying to mimic a mummy in a sarcophagus.

  “What do you want me to do, Kate?”

  Oh, like that. The way he said my name struck a chord within me. I wanted him to press his lips to my ear and whisper my name over and over. Instead of telling him this, I shrugged, feeling the walls on both sides. He was waiting. Clearly waiting. Finally I whispered, “I want you to do what you said.”

  “What I said to who?”

  I sucked in my breath. “I read Sonia’s diary,” I confessed. “I want you to do to me what you said you’d do to her.”

  I didn’t have to ask him twice.

  * * *

  He had cuffs like the second pair I’d purchased: regulation, steel handcuffs with a silver gleam. I knew what they were going to feel like. I’d held them. Cradled them. Caressed them. None of that prepared me for the sensation of having Jules strip me of my clothes and position me in the center of his bed. I thought I’d been so smart doing the research, buying the toys. Turned out, I hadn’t learned a fucking thing.

  “Arms over your head.” I was naked on his mattress, and I felt his warm hands on my wrists before the cold steel closed tight.

  I took a breath. I could come from this alone, I thought. Why had I needed to cheat every other night? Simple. Because Jules hadn’t been in the room.

  He stared down and me, and his face looked different than all of my sketches. “You bought the cuffs when I told you to do research, didn’t you, Kate?”

  “Yes.”

  What had been missing from my drawings? The warmth in his eyes that I saw now. He was handsome, yes, but he was more than that. He looked pleased with me, as if I’d risen to some challenge.

  “And you tried them out?”

  I thought of the fiasco with Sonia walking in, and I turned my head away from his. He gripped my chin and forced me to meet his gaze. “When I want you to look away from me, I’ll tell you,” he said. There was a beat of menace to his voice. But that made me wetter still.

  “Yeah, I tried them,” I admitted.

  “That’s what she told me.”

  “She?” The words weren’t making sense.

  “I was helping her prepare for her debate. She told me that she’d found you.”

  “I thought she was never going to talk to you again.”

  He shrugged. “There’s never and then there’s never. After she got together with Eleanor, she called and wanted to talk.”

  “So she told you…” He’d known the answer before he’d asked the question.

  He grinned. “I would have liked to have found you like that. Walked in. Discovered you bound to your bed all by yourself. The games I could have played with you.”

  I would have turned my head away, but he’d told me not to. I would have shut my eyes, tried to hide by embarrassment, but he’d already warned me. Instead I simply stared back at him, forced to face my fears. My stomach tightened. This was much more difficult than I’d expected.

  “Good girl,” he said, just as he had before, words that warmed me inside as if he’d banked my internal furnace. “Don’t turn away from me. Don’t ever turn away from me.”

  Then it was like every fantasy I’ve ever had and ones I never thought of before. He started by kissing me, his lips on mine, kissing hard. I’d been kissed by other men—but maybe what I’d felt previously should be given a different name from kissing. Those were pecks. Smooches. This was real. This was what kissing is all about, a definition from a dirty dictionary. I felt his lips part against mine. I felt our tongues meet. I wanted this to go on forever, at least until he slid one hand along my body and began to stroke my pussy.

  “You’re wet,” he said.

  “I know.”

  That changed everything. Now, I wanted something else, something new, something more. Jules began to kiss his way down my body. He didn’t leave any part untouched. If his mouth was caressing my nipples—one, then the other—then his hands were busy stroking and fondling every inch of my skin. I felt beloved, admired, adored.

  And still I wanted more.

  Greedy. That’s what I was. Jules didn’t seem to mind.

  Finally he slid between my legs and parted my pussy lips. “Oh, God,” I sighed, unable to keep quiet.

  “Go on,” he said, “make noise. Let it out. When I want you quiet, I’ll use a gag.”

  I hadn’t gone there mentally before. A gag. A ball gag? A leather strip? Would I have to make another trip to the sex toy store? Maybe. But I had the feeling I wouldn’t have to go there alone. I imagined what the tattooed, wise-ass clerk would think if I walked into the place with Jules at my side, and then I fell back into reality as he started to lick my clit. For once reality was better than my fantasies. Jules knew exactly how to work me. He seemed to understand how sensitive I was, and he began slowly. But he didn’t stay slow for long.

  “You like that?”

  I looked down at him. His lips were glossy with my own juices. That realization brought a fresh tremor of excitement throughout me, and I bucked on the bed as a way of answering. Jules was having none of that. “Answer me when I ask you a question,” he murmured.

  “Yes,” I told him. “Yes, I like that.”

  He made sensuous circles with the point of his tongue. Then, “Tell me. Tell me what you like.”

  I couldn’t believe it. He actually wanted me to speak at a moment like this?

  “Tell me, Kate.”

  “Everything,” I said, hoping that would satisfy him, but knowing somehow that it wouldn’t.

  “Tell me exactly.”

  “What you’re doing,” I stammered. “The way you’re making those circles.”

  Oh, it felt so good. He spiraled his tongue in circles that grew smaller and smaller until he was focused right on my clit. The pleasure and the pressure were intense. I would have pulled away, but I couldn’t. Not handcuffed like that. Was that the point? I’d always thought of bondage as something you did in a dungeon—an atmosphere of darkness and chill pervading. But this was all heat and wet. I rattled the chain. He licked me harder.

  Fuck, that felt good. As soon as I thought the words, I said them out loud. “Fuck, that feels good.” My voice had become the blending of a moan and a sigh. Jules continued, bringing me higher and higher until I could almost taste the bliss of the impending climax.

  Then he stopped.

  I would have done anything, said anything, promised anything for him to continue. But he backed off the bed and went to his desk. He returned with a stack of white paper squares, paper I recognized, napkins I’d drawn on. He showed me the pictures, one by one, and I felt my cheeks burn. Now I did look away. Jules’s tone made me turn back to him.

  “You told me what you wanted,” he said, “without ever saying a word.”

  “But why…?” I was in that hazy state of almost coming, yet I still needed to ask. “Why?”

  “I told you before. If I’d just asked you out, you’d have been nervous and jittery. Unsure. You might have run away when I told you the things I hoped to do to you. Instead you came looking. You came to me.”

  “Where’d you get the napkins?”

  “Dan.”

  I thought about my mercenary co-worker. Before I could ask the next question, Jules said, “A dollar a napkin. He’s been saving them for me.”

  He stripped off his own clothes and then crawled back on the
mattress. We were surrounded by my pictures, drawings of people fucking, of couples overlapping, of handcuffs, and blindfolds and toys. There was him. There was me.

  Jules moved up my body and parted my legs. I could not wait for him to thrust inside me. My whole being was poised on the edge of that precipice. Was he going to tease me some more? Make me beg? Demand I tell him exactly what was running through my mind? Thankfully, no. He slid the head of his cock inside me, and I sighed and relaxed. Oh, this was sweetness. This was heaven and light. And then he started to move, pounding into me, thrusting hard. I had never felt anything like this. I was captured by the cuffs, but my body could still respond, my hips raised to meet his, my thighs spread apart. He used one hand to touch me, running his palm over my ribs, over the flat of my belly, then down to my pussy.

  “Oh, yes,” I hissed. “Just like that.”

  Lust bloomed bright within me.

  As he fucked me, he stroked my clit, light and easy at first, then rougher as the passion built between us. I shut my eyes tight, but he said, “No, Kate, look at me.” And then, “Please, Kate. For me.” Surprising me because he sounded almost as if he were the one begging.

  I opened my eyes. I stared at him.

  We were connected, bound together somehow, even as I was the one bound down. The handcuffs rattled as he thrust inside of me, reminding me with every beat that I was his captive. And yet somehow, somehow, I felt as if we’d set each other free.

  How neatly our bodies fit together. I’d never paused to wonder, to worry, whether we’d be compatible. If his parts would interlock with my parts. Thankfully they did. Perfectly. His cock seemed made for my body. Each time he drove forward, I felt my muscles contract, as if wanting to hold him to me forever. My hands were useless, but I possessed plenty of other powers. My legs around his body, pulled him to me.

  Jules used his thumb right against my clit as he fucked me, finding a rhythm that made sense—the rhythm of my blood, of my heart, or maybe of our hearts beating together. We were in complete synch. He worked me steadily, and I kept our connection solid, gazing into his deep blue eyes—the color of cobalt, rich and dark. Even as I wanted to hide, even as the pleasure became almost insurmountable, I kept staring into his eyes. Seeing him. Really seeing him. How was he doing this? How did he know?