The Spur Ch. 03

Literotic asexstories – The Spur Ch. 03 by Spartamac,Spartamac
“College is where dorks go to have sex with other dorks.”

Mike Birbiglia

“What does Jamila do for a living?” I asked him, as we spent a lazy late-summer Saturday morning in his apartment. He had made Turkish eggs for breakfast, fried in butter and drenched in a thick, salty yogurt sauce, and drizzled with more butter and some spice I couldn’t identify, with grilled flat bread and fruit. I think he was trying to weigh me down so I’d be too torpid to flee.

“Well, we knew each other way back in the day,” he said, setting down his plate on the oddly-proportioned coffee table, ‘but I lost track of her after she moved to the Mid-west for work.”

“How did you two meet?”

“One story at a time, Grasshopper! And that’s a long one, so you probably won’t hear it today. Anyway, she had already been back east for some time before we ran into each other, and she’s not the most forthcoming person, so I’m a little vague on the details. I know she began belly-dancing almost immediately, but hardly anybody makes a living at that. I’m pretty sure she did some surreptitious stripping over in New Jersey, but the Middle east dance community takes an extremely dim view of that, and she probably would have been blackballed had they found out. So she quit as soon as she could. Now, she divides her time between belly-dance–which she also teaches privately–modeling, and dominatrix work.”

“She’s a professional dominatrix?” I asked, a whole flock of butterflies taking wing in my stomach. He cocked an eyebrow and gave me a look.

“This is of intense interest to you?” he asked, obviously relishing the Mother of All Blushes I had broken into. “So that’s why the hairs on my arms were standing up when you two met–all that electricity in the air!”

“I’m just curious,” I said, lamely.

“You’re just drooling.”

“I am not. Anyway, jealous much?”

“I might could be. May have to lock you up.” He tightened his arm around my waist, and, snuggling into him, I said coyly,

“Promise?” (I also made a mental note about Jamila’s belly-dance lessons.)

“So if you won’t tell me how you and Jamila met, tell me about your first subbie,” I said. He pondered the question a moment.

“You mean the first chick I dated who liked to be tied up or spanked or what-not, or my first no-foolin’ submissive?”

“The second one,” I answered. “Someone else as dumb as me.” (My brat flag was flying proudly by this time.)

“I’ve never known anyone that dumb.” I stuck out my tongue at him. “But gather round, Grasshopper, and I will tell you the tale of my first subbie.”

STEVE

I met Colleen the autumn after I graduated from college. I was sharing the ground floor of a house with three friends from the theater department, all of whom were still students.

The department had hired me to come back and do some actor-musician work for their fall show. One night at a party, I spotted the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. If I had read any Thomas Hardy by that point, I would have said she looked like one of his dark-eyed heroines: lustrous, abundant dark-brown hair falling below her shoulders, full, sensuous lips, and a body that was “the raw material of a divinity”–narrow waist, generous hips and absolutely goddess-level tits.

I sat down next to her on the couch and started chatting her up. In her jeans and flannel shirt, she had more of a post-hippie vibe than your pep-squad…what was the word again? Effervescence. She didn’t effervesce, but she was very attentive, and made me feel like we were alone together in the middle of that crowded room.

After we’d been talking a while, I deployed a party trick I had often used for flirting purposes: I reached out, removed one of her earrings, and put it into my own ear. My women friends generally rolled with this, knowing they’d get their jewelry back before the end of the evening. But Colleen was completely gobsmacked.

“That is so bold!’ she said, reddening a little around her face and neck. I honestly hadn’t thought of it that way–I was just flirting–but it obviously made a deep impression on her. She plainly thought I had claimed her with the gesture, and, as she didn’t seem to mind being claimed, I asked her if she’d like to get out of there. Which she would. So she found her denim jacket and we headed out to my car.

As I unlocked the front door–my housemates were all still at the party–I asked if she’d like a cup of tea. ‘Whatever you say,’ she answered.”

JILL

“Seriously?” I interrupted. “Whatever you say?” Not even deigning to answer me in words, he just cocked that damned eyebrow until I remembered how I’d responded when he first invited me for coffee.

“OK, fine,” I conceded. “You were saying?”

“That bit of smart-assery just cost you the rest of the story.”

“No, please tell me! I promise I’ll be good,” I wheedled, batting my eyelashes.

“You’ll have to wear a nametag, then.” I stuck out my tongue at him again.

STEVE

So there we were on my bed, she with her shirt off. Smiling coyly, she said,

“I can’t believe you’ve gotten my shirt off already! You’re a sniveler.”

“A ‘sniveler’?” I replied.

“You know exactly what I mean,” she told me. I wasn’t sure I did, but suspecting she meant I had somehow wormed my way past her defenses and persuaded her, against her better judgment, to allow me to de-shirt her, I made short work of that damsel-in-distress nonsense.

“No,” I whispered into her ear, “You’re a slut!” She looked startled and unsure how to respond, so I added,

“You are gloriously slutty, and it’s making my toes curl, it’s so hot! C’mere,” I added, standing on the rug and leading her by the hand to stand facing me. “I’ll show you sniveling!” Capturing her face in my hands, I cut off further yammering by gagging her with a long, probing kiss. I felt her soften under my ministrations until whatever she had been going to say got lost between her brain and mouth, and a whimper of desire came out instead.

“Sniveling slut!” I said, with what I thought was an evil grin. She grinned back and returned her tongue to my mouth as I reached around her to unfasten her utilitarian white bra. Sliding it off, I began a long, slow, exploratory tour of her upper body, leaving a trail of kisses on her neck, shoulders, arms, hands, tits–my God, those tits!–and lingering a long time over her abdomen: kissing and licking her belly, nibbling her hips, and poking my tongue into her navel to see how ticklish she was. Which was very.

The whole time, I had her tits in my hands, and every time she whimpered or moaned, I pinched her nipples until she yelped. At last she admitted, “OK, I’M the sniveler! Are you happy now?”

“Not yet,” I said, pinning her wrists behind her with my left hand. She gasped, and her breathing became rapid and shallow. With my right hand, I unbuttoned and unzipped her jeans, exposing a big, white pair of “grannie panties”. After she stepped out of her jeans, I picked her up and lay her on the bed. After getting undressed myself, I removing her unsexy undies, saying,

“Not planning on going home with anyone tonight, huh?”

“See?” she said. “I’m not a slut!”

“Sure you are,” I said, grinning and lowering myself onto her until I was propped on my elbows, my face inches from hers.

“Shut up!” she said, dooming her bratty little self.

“No,” I replied coolly, placing my left hand over her mouth and sliding my cock into her engorged, sodden pussy. “YOU shut up!” She gasped through her nose and gave a little muffled cry as I entered her. Checking in, I said, “You OK?” She opened her eyes wide and nodded vigorously.

As we slowly built momentum, her arms came around me, but her hands hovered tentatively over my back, as though she were uncertain whether she were allowed to touch me.

“Are you saving those hands for something?” I asked. “Because I could tie them back out of the way if you don’t intend to use them.” Smiling under my hand, she began running her arms passionately up and down my back, grabbing my shoulders from behind and pulling hard as she bucked her hips, wrapping her legs around mine until I couldn’t have withdrawn if I’d wanted to. Breathing hard through her nose as our tempo increased and her excitement grew, she built up a nice oxygen debt as she came closer and closer to climax. When at last she cried out into my hand and dug her nails savagely into my ass, I released her mouth and reveled in the sound of her post-coital gasping.

But before allowing myself to come, I withdrew and flipped her over onto her belly. Hauling on her hips, I pulled her up onto all fours–but, as soon as I’d entered her, I caught her by the wrists and pinned them in the small of her back. Her head fell into the pillow, and I showed her how much deeper I could penetrate her this way than in ordinary doggie-style. Fresh off her first orgasm, it didn’t take her long to reach her second.

JILL

“You didn’t use a condom?” I asked. “Weren’t you in college during the height of the AIDS epidemic?”

“I was,” he said. “We were. I’m amazed sometimes that I’m still alive. So many of us raw-dogged back then; it was like we were in denial or something.”

“What about pregnancy?” I asked, incredulous.

“Dudes often just assumed birth control was the girl’s responsibility. Things are so much better now, Grasshopper. A lot safer, and much more egalitarian.”

“Damn!” I said. “They’d have to be; they couldn’t be much less.”

“I won’t argue with that,” he replied, “But I will tell you one thing: she did something the next morning that rejoiced my heart.”

“Asked to borrow a sweatshirt?” I guessed. He stared at me, jaw agape.

“Is there some chick handbook I don’t know about?” he asked at last.

“I’ll never tell. But then you knew that she wanted…”

“…wanted to see me again!” he finished, bowled over that he hadn’t personally discovered this classic ploy. Boys are dumb.

“She came to the theater that evening early,” he continued, “and gave me an earring–one of those that creates the illusion of a chain passing through the earlobe–and asked me to wear it in the show. I was touched.”

“So you had matching mis-matching sets, then,” I said.

“Precisely.”

STEVE

That happened to be closing night, and at the party, as soon as the speeches were made and the recognitions given out, I came up behind her, pinned her wrists in back, and whispered,

“Hey, gorgeous! Guess what time it is.”

“What time is it?” she asked, leaning back into me, a happy captive.

“Time for me to take you home and do depraved things to you.”

“‘I’ll get my jacket,’ she said.

“I love that about you!” I answered, releasing her. I said some hasty goodbyes, and we left for my car. On the way to my place, we talked about the show, her hometown– anything but how crazy we were to be naked together again as soon as possible.

Back at the house–which, again, we had to ourselves–we pulled off each other’s jackets and kicked off our shoes, and I scooped her up over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry. She squealed in surprise, but offered no resistance as I carried her down the hallway to my room. I put her down on her feet, turned her around to face the bed, gave her shoulders a “stay right there” squeeze, closed the door, and sat on the bed facing her.

“OK, pretty girl,” I said. “Let’s see how obedient you are.” Her eyes got deliciously big and apprehensive, but she awaited my orders without speaking.

JILL

“How dutiful,” I said.

“I’m preparing a curriculum for you based on her,” he answered.

“Whatever you say,” I giggled.

“I’m going to get a chalkboard, so we can start running a tab on your smart-asseries.”

“So there she was,” I prompted, “awaiting orders…”

“In exquisite silence,” he added, then continued.

STEVE

“Take off your shirt,” I told her. “Don’t pull it off over your head–unbutton it all the way. Fold it neatly and lay it on the dresser.” She took a deep breath and obeyed, trembling a little but visibly excited, too. I was pleased to note that she had on a lacy black bra this evening. “And eyes on me,” I said. “I want to see those big, beautiful brown eyes at every moment.” Locking her eyes on mine with just the shadow of a coy smile, she finished her first assignment and awaited her next.

“Now your pants and socks,” I continued. “Fold the pants and place them next to your shirt, with the socks on top.” She wriggled out of her jeans, peeled off her socks, then stood facing me again–in sexy, high-cut panties that matched her bra–waiting.

“Now remove your bra and place it on top of your jeans.” Again she obeyed, then returned to the spot where I had placed her.

“Turn around and step to the door.” There were about a half-dozen neckties hanging on hooks on the inside of the door. “Choose a necktie and bring it here to me.” She chose a plain black narrow tie, like the New Wave musicians were wearing.”

JILL

“Wait a minute,” I said; “how old are you?”

“How old do you think I am?” he asked.

“Thirty-three or thirty-four?” I answered.

“That’s generally what people say. But I’m forty-two, in fact.”

“You’re twelve years older than me?” I squeaked. “Shall I make you some pudding or something?”

“It’s your own pit of despair you’re digging, you know.”

“I’ll try to dig it quietly so you can nap.”

“That’s it!” he said, pulling me face-down across his lap. (There may have been spontaneous spanking at this point.)

He resumed.

STEVE

“Good girl,” I said, taking the tie from her hands. Her nipples were fully erect, and there was a flush on her neck and chest.

“Now turn around and face the door again.” Again she obeyed. “Cross your wrists behind you,” I instructed, and heard her breathing grow heavy. She gasped very satisfyingly when she felt the silk slip between her wrists and the small of her back, and panted audibly as I tied her hands. I slipped my hand between her legs, and she moaned as I explored her swollen lips and felt how wet she already was.”

JILL

“Are you sure you want all this detail?” he asked suddenly.

“Every word!”, I said. Hearing him relive these memories gave me a voyeuristic thrill. Also, I was learning about him, and what he liked in a sub.

STEVE

OK, then. I slipped off my belt and buckled it around her upper arms and under her breasts, pulling it tight. Which is, as you know, my custom. Taking a step back, I said, “Now turn around and look at me.” She obeyed, her lips parted and bosom heaving as much as her bonds would allow. I drew her into my arms, and, taking her ass in my hands and squeezing hard, kissed her luscious mouth, her face, her neck. I bit her ear and heard her suck in air through clenched teeth. Her glorious breasts rose and fell as her breathing thickened, and I teased one of her nipples with my tongue before nipping it with my teeth, drawing a moan from her. I pulled her head back sharply by the hair, plundering her mouth as she moaned into mine. I slowly kissed my way down to below her navel, where I lingered a long time. I find a woman’s belly endlessly erotic.”

JILL

“I’ve noticed!” I interrupted. He smacked my ass peremptorily. (I may have still been laying across his lap.)

“I’m getting bored sitting on this couch,’ he said abruptly. “Ima skip ahead a bit. Stand up, Grasshopper, and I’ll show you what we did the next morning.”

A little startled, I got off his lap and stood up.

“Go into the bottom drawer of my chest of drawers and bring me the coiled length of rope you find there.” I felt my heart start to race as I obeyed.

“Take off your tank top” he said. “Fold it up neatly and lay it on the coffee table.” I did as he said. I wasn’t wearing a bra. He led me over to the full-length mirror on the inside of his bedroom door.

“After she had showered and put her bra on, but before she had put on her shirt, I had her put her hands behind her head,” he said, indicating that I should the same. As he described what he had done to Colleen, he demonstrated by doing it to me.

“I brought the ends of the rope together, then found the loop in the middle, placed it between her shoulder blades in back, then ran the doubled rope over her breasts and back around through the loop. After snugging it up, I reversed directions and ran the rope under her breasts, threading the ends once again through the loop. How are you doing?”

“Fine!” I answered, a little light-headed and sounding as though I had just run up several flights of stairs.

“Good. You can lower your hands now, if you want. Up over the right shoulder, under the rope beneath her breasts, then up over the left shoulder, forming a V, which I snugged up. Then back through the loop again, tying it off with an overhand knot. Voila: a basic chest harness!”

“Where did you learn how to do this?” I asked, admiring for the hundredth time the way the rope looked on my skin, and enjoying the slightly constricting feeling. There is something so peaceful about being tied up with rope; there’s nothing like it.

“Somebody had tucked a bondage magazine into the rack at my allergist’s office,” he replied. “Since I was going to class after my appointment and had my backpack with me, I smuggled it out. I figured it was only fair to spare the other patients the shock of finding it.”

“Very considerate of you,” I said.

“I live to serve. And the magazine had some useful how-to’s in it. I later learned that a local leather shop carried the magazine, so I bought one now and again and learned stuff. If there were classes and workshops back then, like there are now, I didn’t know about them.” He took hold of the harness in back, pulling me a little off balance.

“I explained to her that the harness could be used for attaching a lead to,” he continued, pushing and pulling me forward and back and side to side, keeping me off balance, “for tying her to a stationary object, or for tying her hands and/or feet to. I then gave her a turtleneck of mine to wear, and told her I expected to find the harness still in place when I saw her again that evening.” He stopped jerking me around and slipped his arms around my waist from behind. I leaned back into him, my pussy tingling with anticipation.

“When I dropped her off at her dorm, I reached through the sweater and grabbed the harness, giving it a tug and saying, ‘Think about me a lot today!’

“‘How could I possibly not?’ she answered.

“‘That’s the spirit!’ I said, and kissed her. When I saw her that evening and she still had the harness on, I knew she was mine to command.

“Bravo!”

“Thank you,” he said with a bow. However, you’re tinier than she was, and there’s considerably more rope left over on you than there was on her. So I’m going to solicit your help in a little research project. Are you game?”

“For science?” I asked with wide-eyed mock innocence.

“Of course!” He assured me, tying my hands behind me in reverse prayer. Then he turned me around to face him.

“That’s a flattering look on you!” he said, eyeing my thrust-out tits appreciatively. (Blushing and rolling your eyes at the same time isn’t easy, but I managed it.) Putting his arms around my waist, he drew me to him and kissed me, hard, with a pent-up urgency he had obviously been hiding. He wound my hair around his right hand and unbuttoned my shorts with his left. I moaned as he slid his hand into my underwear, resisting the urge to kick him when he grinned smugly at how wet I was.

He slid my knickers off, gave my bare ass a sudden, resounding smack, and said, “Wait here.”

A moment later, he slipped a leather blindfold onto me from behind, then pushed gently outward on the inside of my thighs, indicating I should spread my legs. Without warning, on the inside of my right foot–in that little hollow between the ankle and the heel–I felt a sharp, pricking sensation. It became more intense as he applied more pressure.

“Ow!” I finally said. “What is that?” Letting up on the pressure a little, he began to slowly move the little parade of prickles up my calf. My calves are super ticklish, and I squirmed as the sensation made its way slowly upward.

“This, Grasshopper, is a Wartenberg pinwheel,” he said in his pedantic teacher voice. “It was originally used to test neurological response–for instance, to find numb spots where a nerve might be constricted or damaged. Now,” he went on, rolling the instrument of torture back and forth over the sensitive back of my knee, “it is just a rather intense sensation toy, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Yes!” I replied, too distracted by the prickles to think of anything clever to say. Wherever the spikes went, the whole of my attention and awareness went with them.

He rolled the wheel up the inside of my thigh, which made squirm even more. Each little pin seemed to find a nerve ending all its own as it made its excruciatingly slow progress up my leg.

“Well, Grasshopper,” he said, in a calm, clinical voice that made me want to hit him with a stick, “I am relatively new to this device myself. So I want you”–here he reset the wheel back on my inner knee–“to describe what you feel for me, in as much detail as you can.”

“Are you sure you want to hear what I feel for you right now?” I asked through gritted teeth. He chuckled.

“Just your sensations for now, thank you,” he said, proceeding to run the demon wheel over every inch of my body for what seemed like forever, varying the pressure from a ticklish rolling over the surface of my skin to torturously digging in the sharp points. Bony parts, fleshy parts, nervy parts; my lips, tongue, labia, belly, collarbone, hip-bones and every rib, my ass and thighs; he even made me kneel and did the bottoms of my feet. (I nearly died.) It was a strange, indescribable blend of pain and pleasure unlike anything I’d ever experienced, which I tried to put into words for him even as he was inflicting it on me.

He stood me back up, saying “Best for last!” The prickles circled and criss-crossed my breasts, with the nipples garnering special attention.

“Mm…that’s nice…” I murmured. Then he apparently lay the wheel on its side and drew it across my left breast like a tiny, very sharp rake, which was more pleasurable than it sounds. OK, I thought; I can deal with this.

I was surprised again by the sudden, sharp pinch of a nipple clamp, first on my left, then on my right tit. He tugged lightly on the chain connecting them, pulling me to him, and gently folded me in his arms. After a long, sweet kiss, he said formally,

“Thank you for your help with our research. The knowledge gained here today will be used to develop all manner of devilish fuckery!” I laughed at that, knowing how true it was, and already looking forward to it.

The next thing I knew, his mouth was on mine, his right hand rolling the wheel over my ass and back, his left hand applying pulsating pressure to my clit. Caught off guard by the sudden deluge of stimuli, I whimpered into his mouth and rolled my hips pleadingly.

He picked me up and set me, kneeling, on the bed, and I heard him undress quickly.

He then maneuvered himself under me, bending his knees as he so often did to keep his cock out of reach.

“Well,” he said, “are you feeling properly tenderized?”

“Yes, Sir!” I panted. He grabbed my harness by the V of rope between my boobs, and deciding (I thought) that I’d been tormented enough, raised his hips into a bridge pose, lifting me off the bed as he entered me. The feeling of him suddenly filling me up, the stability of his grip on the rope versus the precariousness of my perch–it was all so much to process, especially blindfolded, that it made me actually swoony. I began to rock my hips, a warm glow radiating from between my legs into my belly and thighs, when he said,

“Let’s see how tender you are!”

AND HE BEGAN TO TICKLE ME.

This can NOT be happening, I thought. Surely I have suffered enough!

I couldn’t even beg him to stop–not that that had ever had much effect in the past–because I was, in fact, so tenderized that the tickling seemed to be electronically enhanced, sending all my nerve endings into a frenzy and robbing me of breath. His left hand still gripping the harness, he worked my ribs and belly with his right until I would have screamed if I’d had the breath.

Whenever I had been tied up before, I never really struggled against the bonds. I basically just accepted my immobility and helplessness, tugging at the ropes or cuffs or scarves just enough to keep the feeling vivid and exciting. But now, I fought desperately to free my hands from the rope–pulling against the knots and thrashing madly to get away. But damn him; with all my weight balanced on his cock, my struggles only made me more wild for an orgasm. This was humiliating, which was itself a turn-on; I entered an upward spiral of overstimulation, struggle, outrage, humiliation and unhinged horniness.

But it was going to get worse.

“Ever seen True Grit?” he asked, pausing the onslaught.

“What? No! Why?…”

“You should,” he said, taking the chain connecting the nipple clamps between his teeth. Then, in what I assumed was his best John Wayne impersonation, he drawled around the chain, “Fill your hands, you son of a bitch!”, and before I could even think “What the fuck?”, he had clamped his hands on my hips and begun digging his thumbs into the crease between my legs and groin–absolutely the most horribly ticklish part of my whole anatomy.

I became frantic, pulling at the ropes and kicking my feet in a vain effort to get away–but without his steadying hand on the harness, and only a pair of nipple clamps keeping me from falling, I had to stop thrashing. I had to hold still and take it while he tickle-tortured my most sensitive spots.

And damn him again, if that didn’t push me right to the humiliating brink. Mercifully, he took hold of the harness again, slowed down the tickling to a gentle stroking (which, as sensitized as I was by then, was still pretty intense) and lowered his hips to the mattress, dropping the chain from his mouth. He began a slow, measured, steady pumping, gradually increasing in speed, poising his free thumb so that it pressed rhythmically into my clit at every stroke, which made want to speak in tongues or something, and just as the wave of sensation crested, he lifted me off the bed again, and, bearing down on him, I seemed to take flight. He pulsed his cock inside me as he held me up, and the wave broke, and I was like water spreading out over the sand, disappearing into him.

* * *

“Hey there, Sleeping Beauty!” he said when I awoke from our unplanned late-morning nap. Gently stroking my cheek, he asked, “How are you doing? That wasn’t too rough, was it?”

“Well,” I said, “you almost killed me, but I would have died with a smile.” He chuckled and kissed me, and we laid back and cuddled.

“So what happened with you and Colleen?” I asked. With a sigh, he said.

“We didn’t last long. It was my fault. She gave me crabs.”

“How is that your fault?”

“Well, of course the crabs weren’t my fault–what was my fault was I was an immature, feckless jerk about it. Instead of showing her some grace and looking for a way to work things out, I ended it. Didn’t even confirm she was on the pill before fucking her, and got into a self-righteous snit over crabs. I was an idiot,”

I pulled him closer to me and kissed him on the cheek, “We’ve all done things we regret,” I said, “Don’t beat yourself up.” (But that really was a shitty way to behave, I thought.)

I had another question, and I knew it would take some coaxing to get an answer, so I began running my nails gently over his chest and belly, which he loved. When he looked what I judged to be sufficiently blissed out, I asked,

“Who is ‘Laura’?”

“Why do you ask?” he replied, his expression unreadable.

“You say her name in your sleep.” A brief moment of something like panic flashed faintly behind his eyes.

“Often?”

“All the time.” He stared into the middle distance for a while, then said,

“She’s just a girl I used to know.”

That hurt.

“Come on, Steve,” I said, “if you don’t want to tell me, don’t tell me, but please don’t patronize me.”

He turned his head and looked at me, almost as though seeing me for the first time.

“You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry. That was dismissive.” Looking back at the ceiling and collecting his thoughts, he said, “Our relationship was very…formative for me.”

“How so?” He went on rummaging for the right words.

“It’s a cliché,” he finally said, “but I guess you might say she ‘made a man of me.'”

“You mean you were a virgin when you met her?”

“Not precisely a virgin,” he said, “just a huge dork.” He glanced over at me, and that you-are-so-busted look came into his eyes.”

“Y’know,” he said, “you have a seductive way of biting your lip that drives me absolutely wild.”

“Do I?” I said, the picture of wide-eyed innocence.

“And you also have an ‘if I say what I’m thinking, I’ll get into huge trouble’ way of biting your lip that is something else altogether.”

“What? I was thinking a perfectly harmless thought. Pious, even,” I said.

“And that is?”

“‘Why is tonight different from all other nights?'”

Through the tickling, I shouted, “I regret nothing!”

* * *

STEVE’S JOURNAL

I have never taken such delight in any sub’s brattiness as I do in Jill’s. She’s sharp, clever, and altogether delightful. And punishing her is always so satisfying for both of us.

Strange thing; I bent to retrieve a dropped fork in the museum restaurant, and while standing back up I became so dizzy I actually fell to the floor. It made quite a scene; I felt bad for Jill. She made light of it, but it was embarrassing. I didn’t want to write about it at the time, but now it seems like I should be documenting these things.