Harvest of Sighs

Chapter 12-2

Rebecca makes another one of those punched gasps, like the very existence of me is enough to bruise her, and then we’re moving, she’s pushing me as she kisses me, and I’m shoved against a bookshelf hard enough to make a book rock off the edge of the shelf and fall to the floor. We both ignore it, too lost in each other, too desperate for more. No single kiss is enough—so much so that the moment a kiss starts, we’re already chasing the next one, and the next, already grabbing, already seeking, tilting, taking.

I’m not supposed to grab. I’m not supposed to take. It’s not why I’ve been trussed up in leather and made to kneel. But every time I use my teeth, every time I squeeze a slender hip, cup a firm breast, I’m rewarded with growls and scratching embraces and eager presses of her pelvis against me, and so how can I stop? How can I stop when she’s like this—wild and insensate with wanting me?

“You,” she breathes, tearing away from my mouth and ripping at my bodice with shaking fingers. She can’t even wait to get a cup all the way unlaced before she shoves her hand inside to feel me, and then she can’t even wait to properly feel me before she’s replacing her fingers with her mouth, seeking out my soft flesh amid the leather and then making a satisfied noise when she finds it. Growling with pleasure when she draws my n****e into her mouth and it’s already tight and hard for her.

“You,” she says again, a groan, a plea, her normally deft fingers frantic and desperate as they unlace my other cup, and then once both my t**s are exposed, she can’t seem to pick where she wants to be. Sucking on my breasts or my neck, biting my jaw, licking into my mouth. Her hands everywhere, restless and greedy, squeezing at my hips and bottom and thighs and stomach and all the places I’ve let shame live for years and years, and I almost want to laugh, because so many tears and therapy sessions and Xanax pills and an entire influencer career has gone into my feelings about those parts of me, and still it’s never, ever occurred to me that those parts of me could make me happy. That they could make a lover happy. That someone could be so f*****g wound up and horny over me that they go mad and slam me against a bookshelf so they can maul me properly.

“Mistress. Rebecca . . . ” They’re not even words, they’re breaths instead.

She’s replaced my oxygen with the sounds of her name.

And then her hands find my mound—they find where the leather opens to frame my cunt—and she shudders so hard that all the breath seems to leave her in one shredded exhale. Her fingers play over the unyielding leather, over my curls, tracing the slutty outlines of it. She finds where my c**t has swollen past my lips, a pouty little bud, and she plays with it a moment. It’s a toy meant for her, not for me, and knowing that has me whimpering, mindless, begging for more with pawing hands and arching hips.

“So wet,” she murmurs. “So wet for me.”

Her hand comes up and she takes in a short, quivering breath as she presses her fingers to my lips. I lick them, tasting myself, at the same time she starts licking too. Our lips and tongues meet between her fingers, a tangle of slippery kisses that taste of me. And her. Of s*x and faintly of mint.

I squirm as we kiss through her fingers, heat pooling so low and fiery in my belly that I can’t believe I haven’t gone up in flames. My cunt aches without her touch; I know it will ache more with her touch but that doesn’t stop me from chasing it, from rubbing against her, from making small keening noises in the back of my throat.

There’s this beautiful suffering right behind my c******s, right in the heart of me, a twinging and yearning inside my body. It’s agony, but it’s the kind of agony that’s the opposite of hurt. It’s the kind of agony that makes me feel more alive than I’ve ever been, and it’s because of her. It’s because she’s raw and ravenous, powerful and demanding. Sovereign.

And it’s as I catch a glimpse of her eyes—dark and avid and exposed—it’s as I hear her breath hitching with my name—Delph, pet, pet, oh Delph—that I realize the Rebecca we always see, the Rebecca we take for granted as being calm and untouchable always, she’s not the real Rebecca, not really. The real Rebecca has messy joys and hungers, the real Rebecca is more like Thornchapel than the orderly corporate gardens she designs.

She is fierce and alive and unconfined, and I want her always like this, always this ruthless and ferocious with me.

I drink her in as she steals kisses, as she returns to suck viciously at my breasts while she palms my s*x. I drink her in, and I pray that this is real, that this hungry woman won’t slip away from me and retreat back into her shell. Into the place where I cannot reach her, I cannot know her. Into the place where I can’t even tell her I love her without her dismissing me.

The next idea comes to me so clearly and urgently that I have no choice but to listen. My body will allow nothing less, and I think I’ve been wanting this for a long time but haven’t known how to ask for it.

I spread my legs more and reach for her hand, and I press her fingers all the way past my folds and into my opening. We freeze there a minute, both of us rocked by the feeling of her fingers only a knuckle deep.

More, my greedy s*x demands. More and more and more.

Rebecca meets my eyes. The afternoon sunlight slants in gray and cloudy, and it adds a silvery shine to her high cheekbones, her small, queenly nose. I can see the pulse banging at the side of her throat, and I can see as she swallows once, as if for control.

“You’re sure, pet?” she says hoarsely.

“Yes—” That’s all the negotiation we have. I haven’t even finished saying the word, and she’s over my mouth again with a searing kiss. As I open my lips to let her tongue slip inside, she slides her fingers deeper. Another inch, slippery but still hard-won.

I can’t concentrate on kissing now. Pleasure roils from my center, pleasure mixed with a trace of pain.

I worried—I still worry. What if the pain makes me feel like I did in Audra Bishop’s garden? What if my body doesn’t know the difference between what happened to me then and what’s happening now? My therapist warned me, my support group warned me, and now all these warnings froth up like soap bubbles in my mind—

Only to pop one by one as Rebecca f***s me with filthy, expert intensity. The trace of pain only grows as she finally fits her fingers in to the bottom knuckles, stretching me in places I’ve ignored for years, and stokes the slow, unbearable ache in my core. But the pain feels good too—it’s wanted, it feels just as wonderful as being spanked or flogged or bound. It weights down the pleasure so it’s not so oppressively delicious.

Like salt on caramel, like chili powder or cinnamon in hot chocolate.

And I should have known. I should have trusted.

Nothing from Rebecca could ever feel bad.

Rebecca buries her head in my neck and feasts on my jaw, my throat, the skin between my neck and my shoulder, f*****g me between the legs all the while, her clever fingers changing to slow, grinding strokes with twisting and a pressure against my front wall that has my eyelids fluttering. The heel of her palm grazes and grinds against my bundle of nerves as she goes, and she only stops kissing me in order to look down every few moments. Her expression is one of base, biological greed as she watches her hand moving in and out of me, as she plays with her submissive’s cunt like I know she’s been wanting to for weeks.

The orgasm, when it comes, kicks me in the chest and buckles my knees. The pleasure twists and twines around her fingers until it’s no longer pleasure at all, but something even better. Something necessary and perfect and human and also divine—something I feel in my soul as much as I feel in my s*x—something that cuts through me like floss, cuts me right in two.

Hard, hot contractions grab at my womb; curling waves of sweet sensation spiral out from my c**t and cover me everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. I feel this climax in my thighs and belly and chest, I feel it in my tingling lips and in my seizing lungs and near-sightless eyes. I’m overpowered by it, consumed, and I don’t even realize I’ve crumpled to the floor until I hear the thud of Rebecca’s shoes being toed off, until I hear the impatient zipper of her cigarette pants, and she’s crawling over me, straddling me and finding my hand so she can use it how she wants. She’s so wet, so f*****g wet—wet enough that I think she must have been thinking of this all day, for hours and hours. And it’s so unlike her to be like she is right now—no formality, no plan, no toys or ties. No, it’s only us, struggling for kisses as she rides my fingers, struggling for that indefinable more—more friction, more teeth, more taste, more of each other. Nothing is enough, not a kiss, not a buck of her hips, not a rub of my thumb over her c**t, none of it is enough until we’ve tasted each other’s hearts.

That’s what’s different today, I think dizzily.

Rebecca’s heart is here. It’s beating outside her chest.

It’s seeking mine.

She comes like a woman being unwound from the outside in, she comes like someone on a clattering, rocketing roller coaster—laughing, gasping, terrified but alive. She comes like it’s the only thing she’s ever wanted in this life, and she milks each and every jolt, riding my hand until it cramps a little, until her body is finished and until her slick channel is completely and utterly still.

Until my hand is soaked and she can finally take a long, deep, very relaxed breath.

She slides off of me and tumbles to my side, looking more mussed and well-f****d than I’ve ever seen her. Her eyes slide closed and her long lashes rest on her cheeks like a doll’s. A smile plays at her mouth.

“I had such plans,” she murmurs, eyes still closed.

I arrange myself next to her, so our sides touch. The floor is hard and cool and we’re sticky and smell like s*x, but I don’t care. My heart is flailing against my ribs. My stomach is floating somewhere in my chest.

She doesn’t love you, I remind myself.

But oh—oh how it feels like she might right now.

It feels so much like she might.

Rebecca’s eyes open and she gives me a fond, lazy grin—the kind of grin I’ve never seen her wear before. It opens her face completely, showing off that delicate jaw and those inky eyes, revealing a hidden dimple tucked into her cheek and displaying the mathematically perfect curve of her lower lip, the two subtle arches of her cupid’s bow. She has a mouth that would make a makeup artist weep with joy; she’s got the kind of bone structure that women chase for years with scalpels and contour kits.

And yet she’s never looked more beautiful to me than she does right now. Loose and smiling at the world like she’s about to roll it like a marble between her palms.

“I walked in and saw you in that outfit, and my cerebral cortex forgot how to cortex.”

“You like it?” I ask shyly. I don’t know why I need to hear it, why I crave anything more than seeing her turn into a greedy fiend for me, but I do.

Rebecca turns and props herself up on her elbow. She runs a hand over my half-exposed breasts, over the places where the straps meet over my belly, over my naked cunt. Even lying down on my back, the leather makes a topography of me. Rivers of leather, hills of silky, bisque body. Swells and valleys, all softness. A map of Delphine.

“You look like dessert,” she says.

“Yeah?”

“Like I want to eat you alive.” She ducks her head to nuzzle at my breast. I feel her mouth pull on my n****e, hot and wet, and my c**t jumps in response. “God, I want to f**k you again in this. Like right away.”

A warmth nestles in my chest at her words; it surrounds my thudding, hopeful heart. Maybe the concierge was right: it’s that simple.

Although maybe that’s not right either. It’s not simple at all . . . but it’s worth it anyway.

And what more can I ask for than that?

Soothed and stirred by Rebecca’s touch, by her mouthing over my breast and toying with my cunt, I say, “I worship you even more like this.”

Rebecca lifts her head. The window is behind her, and her eyes are unreadable. Shadowed. “Like what?” she asks.

There’s a wary note in her words. It wasn’t there before.

I ignore it. Why would she be wary? We just had the best s*x ever, and we’re in a happy, clumsy tangle on the floor—wariness has no place here. “Like, I don’t know, looser and everything. Rougher. It was like you were worked up about something and then took it out on me. Like you were letting me help you. I loved it.”

For a single moment—for one mercilessly short moment—I see something wistful flit through her eyes, like she’s looking at something she’s wanted her entire life and it would cost her everything to reach out and take it.

I love you. I almost say it, unwelcome though it might be, because not saying it feels wrong. It feels like an impiety. It feels like not smiling when the sun is on my face or not drinking when a champagne flute is tipped to my lips.

I love you.

But the words die on my tongue, because Rebecca’s face shutters and her gaze cools. When she speaks, her voice is distant. Not upset or brittle, just . . . distant. Like she’s locked that wild, hungry queen somewhere deep inside of herself, and I’m outside at the gates, not allowed in.

“We should get ready for the gala,” she says, rolling up with the ease of a dancer and getting to her feet. The hand she offers me feels impersonal. Perfunctory. Even though it’s the same hand that was just inside me. The first hand ever to be inside me.

I think I’m going to cry.

“Rebecca,” I say, and I hate that my voice isn’t like hers, that it’s not steady and aloof, that it shakes a little.

She doesn’t look at me as she pulls on her knickers and her pants. “We don’t want to be late. I’ll take you back to the flat now.”

I think I should say something here, I should do something. If someone asked me on a live video for advice, I would tell that person to speak their truth. Set boundaries. All that good stuff my therapist talks about.

But it turns out those nice-sounding self-care maxims don’t apply here. Because what good will crying do? Accusing? Clinging?

No, I have known Rebecca nearly all my life, and I know the worst thing I can do is pull at her hem and beg for attention—or guilt her into more affection. At best, I’d get pity. At worst—well, I don’t even want to think about the worst. I don’t think I’d survive it.

So I nod at my mistress, swallow down my misery, and start to get dressed.