After the Fall Ch. 04

When they weren't working on the project, she was making notes on a pad of paper. He looked through it one day while she was in the shower. There were lists of people, lists of supplies, lists of buildings, building diagrams, rules to consider for the people coming in, topics to look up in the Central Database, and a school curriculum.

During "working hours," as Michael had come to think of them, Mariah adopted a manner of coolly friendly professionalism. She smiled when appropriate, laughed when appropriate, and avoided arguments. After they finished their work for the day, they had dinner. Michael had given Marcus instructions that they would be eating upstairs until further notice. Dinner was a strained affair. She only spoke to respond to his questions.

Unless Michael made a specific request after dinner, she went to her room. The morning after she fielded his knock at the door with a demand to know whether he was there about security, secrecy or sex, he reminded her that her third condition included companionship. He was surprised when she apologized for the incident. She didn't say whether she was apologizing for faulty contract interpretation or for her rudeness.

Since then, she participated in whatever activity he requested. She even engaged in conversation, as long as he picked a topic and took the lead. With the exception of talking about the project, he hadn't found a way to get her to discuss anything because it was of interest to her. Once he vetoed all project-related conversation after "working hours," she would only respond to topics he introduced.

Despite his intentions to the contrary, it was only two days before he invoked his entitlement to sex under the third condition of their agreement. He thought sex might help him break through her barriers in a way he hadn't been able to accomplish by talking to her. She had often been evasive when he talked to her, but her sexual responses had always been honest. Now, he found something had changed. She performed beautifully, without complaint, but it was nothing more than a performance, the satisfaction of an obligation that she was determined to honor. Her responses were choreographed, and sex became an ironically lonely experience.

The first time he made use of his privileges after he implanted the tracking device, he called her into his bedroom to suck his cock. Remembering how distracted by it she was before and how content she seemed afterward, he thought it might put her in a better frame of mind. He hoped they could talk while she was calm and happy. Besides, he was aching to feel her mouth on him again.

It felt amazing until he made her look up at him. Her eyes were sharp, alert, and didn't hold a trace of emotion. He stopped making her look at him after that. Her tongue was as wickedly talented as he remembered, and her lips felt just as good wrapped around his shaft. She had gotten better at letting him push into her throat like he taught her. He was able to enjoy her throat rippling around his cock longer before she started trying to push away to breathe. After she swallowed the last drop of his cum, he searched her face for any hint that it meant something to her. Nothing. He sent her back to her room. The pleasure she had given him was fleeting. The hollow feeling that remained would last longer.

The next night, he wanted her spread-eagled on his bed. He did not intend to stop until she surrendered to his mouth. When she laid back gingerly, he realized that positions on her back were out of the question until the stitches were removed. He supposed he could have found another way to do it, but the dread on her face when she realized what he intended left him with no interest in pursuing it.

It drove home what he had lost. Her first night with him, not even a week ago, he orchestrated her pleasure, guiding her from one orgasm to the next like movements in a symphony. She hadn't been able to disguise her need for him, and after she fell apart beneath his lips and tongue, she had looked up at him with something akin to wonder. Now, her aversion sliced at his pride and his heart. He was hurt, but he was also angry. She had given him something precious and then stolen it back.

Refusing to be denied, he had her climb onto the bed on her hands and knees. The way she slinked her way up the bed left him nothing to complain about. She didn't meet his eyes, and he didn't make her. After her unspoken rejection of his effort to give her pleasure, he didn't waste time with preliminaries. It had been only days since he made her admit that she needed him to touch her, but it felt like something long ago, between two different people. When he climbed on the bed behind her, he was laser-focused on getting himself balls-deep inside her. She wasn't as aroused as she normally was, but she was wet enough.

He sank into her with a sigh, and his eyes closed in satisfaction. When he opened them, he was looking down at the bandage on her back. He closed his eyes again, but his mind supplied the details obscured by the bandage. When he checked her incision that morning, the bruises were starting to fade from purple-black to brown and yellow. The black stitches still looked like spider legs sticking out of her skin. He couldn't look at her back while he fucked her.

He laid back on the bed and told her to ride him. That was exactly what she did, with a perverse pleasure in following his instructions as literally as possible. She rode his cock the way she wanted to do it, and he felt almost dispensable to the process. She contorted herself into a backward bend that he wouldn't have thought possible, with her hands backwards on his thighs and her back bent so sharply backward that his view of her ended where her breasts rocked back and forth on her chest. She had managed to find a position in which he was invisible to her.

He could tell from her breathing that she was enjoying herself, but her grinding motion on his cock wasn't giving him the stroking stimulation he needed. When he touched her clit, she sat up with a start. She was so oblivious to him that his participation startled her. He was thoroughly pissed off and thoroughly aroused at the same time.

He made her lean over his chest and rock up and down his shaft to the rhythm he dictated. She didn't complain. He fondled her nipples and got no response. He squeezed them harder, then much too hard. She still didn't complain. She held herself beautifully arched for him with her hands braced against his shoulders. Without prompting, she squeezed her pussy around his cock and rotated her hips when he paused. It was an excellent technical performance. When he was ready, he held her by the waist and jackhammered up into her. When he came, he felt triumphant. When she gathered her clothes and left, he felt defeated. It was what he asked for, but it wasn't what he wanted.

He hadn't attempted sex again after that. He'd had enough of her diligent performance of the terms of their agreement. The only reason he even insisted on her company in the evenings was because he wouldn't give her the satisfaction of getting out of it. It had been seven days since the ill-fated implant of the tracking device, and things were only getting worse. He went to bed that night without hope that the next day would be better.

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Mariah woke up the next morning feeling slightly less miserable than she had for the past week. It was the day she could get her stitches out. She sterilized a pair of scissors from Michael's office and knocked on his door. It was a little earlier than usual. She didn't usually disturb him until after she had taken a shower and needed a new bandage.

He opened the door and eyed her skeptically. She was wearing one of the skimpy pajama sets he had chosen for her. That was nice. When she came to him for a new bandage after her shower, she always wore the bathrobe and let it slide down her back to give him access to the site. She was carrying scissors. That was concerning. He didn't want to hear Nate say, "I told you so."

"Could you please take my stitches out? It's been a week."

He had forgotten that they came out today. "Take your shirt off and lie on the bed."

He tried not to stare. He didn't need another case of blue balls. He took her bandage off. The bruises were fading, but it would probably be at least several more days before they disappeared. He was looking forward to getting rid of the stitches, probably even more than she was. He cut each suture and pulled out the thread. Good riddance.

"Okay. They're out."

She thanked him with what might even have been a genuine smile before she left to take her shower.

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Mariah sighed under the hot water. It felt so much better to take a shower without plastic wrap taped to her back. She needed every pleasant experience she could get right now. Since Michael implanted the tracking device, his behavior toward her had become increasingly surly and often downright mean. She was surprised by how much it hurt her feelings. She had wanted him to stop playing at romance. Now he had.

After Paula told her about Michael's history, she could see where a lot of his behavior came from. That didn't excuse it, though, and Michael had enough enablers in his life without her joining their ranks. She shouldn't have to pay the penalty for his tragic childhood. Still, she had been prepared to give him another chance if he had given her a reason to do so. An apology would have been a good start. An offer to remove the device he thought was still in her back would have been even better. But he made no effort to try to fix what he had done. He hadn't even bothered to tell her that he couldn't really flip a switch and kill her with his precious transmitter.

Instead, he played silly games and hid from her, yelled at her, threatened to lock her up, tried to limit her socialization, and kept her with him constantly, even though he could hardly stand to be around her. She knew she shouldn't have been, but she was devastated when he demanded sex from her. It was always part of their agreement, but it had never been so callous. He could barely stand the sight of her and he knew all she wanted was to get away from him. She wondered if his insistence on sex under those circumstances was intended to be dehumanizing, or if he bothered to think about how she would feel at all.

Her feelings now were the price she had always known she would pay for allowing herself to become too fond of him. She knew from the beginning that she wasn't doing herself any favors by allowing him to pretend affection toward her. When he ignored her subtle efforts to distance him, she should have been more direct. She should have been less concerned about hurting his feelings and more concerned with how miserable he could make her life if things got bad between them.

It was stunning how quickly things had deteriorated. She had only been here eleven days. It felt like months. It could take two years or more before their project was far enough along for her to leave with confidence that it would continue. At the very least, it would take a year, and that was probably much too optimistic. Every time she thought about the time stretching out before her, she felt like she was drowning. Like she felt now. Her chest was tight and there was a roaring sound in her ears. When she closed her eyes, she could see little silver sparks flying around behind her eyelids.

She decided she had better sit down to finish her shower. She gathered the shampoo and conditioner and detached the shower wand. The next thing she saw was the floor of the shower at eye level. She was lying in a heap and the side of her head hurt. She must have passed out from hyperventilating. She could not have been out more than a matter of seconds because the shower wand was still banging against the wall where she dropped it.

She pushed herself to a sitting position and grabbed the wand to stop the noise it was making. Acoustics in the shower were great for singing, terrible for banging and clanging. Shampoo was pooled on the tile floor. She picked up the bottle and replaced the top. Nearly an entire bottle of high-end shampoo that some rich jerk had hoarded was oozing toward the shower drain. She scooped up enough to wash her hair.

When she rinsed her hair, the shampoo was still flowing sluggishly toward the drain. She aimed the shower wand at it to help it along. She backed up against the wall so she could rinse away the part of the shampoo puddle that she had been sitting in. Some of the water streaming from the wand hit her pussy. The wand's pressure setting was on "jet," so the water hit with enough force that it was stimulating, even against the outside of her pussy.

She turned the stream of water to her nipples, but jerked it away immediately. The water pressure was too high and her nipples were too sore. Michael bruised them a few nights ago because he didn't care for the way she interpreted his demand that she ride his cock. Something had possessed her to give him a taste of his own medicine. She hoped he had learned how it felt to be used like an object for someone else's gratification, but she doubted it.

Riding him like that felt good, though. Not nearly as good as it would have felt if she had any emotional investment in what she was doing, but it was the most pleasure she'd had in days. When she arched backward, his cock was pushed against the front wall of her pussy. She loved the pressure there, and she could increase the effect by grinding her hips. Then Michael had ruined it by reminding her that he was still there.

The injury to her nipples was very minor, but the swelling and increased blood flow from the healing process kept them distractingly sensitive to stimulation. In the right context, it might have been enjoyable, or at least titillating, but this was not the right context. Under the circumstances, it was just an itch that could not be scratched. She considered the wand again. Maybe she should at least try to scratch it.

She experimented with the water flow settings on the wand until she found one that concentrated the water in a single stream that was neither stingingly strong nor ineffectually weak. She was ambivalent about trying to bring herself to orgasm. It was rarely very satisfying, but her real irritation was the suspicion that she was only considering it because she had just come from Michael's room.

He had answered the door in sleep pants. His hair was rumpled and the anger hadn't settled into his eyes yet. Out of recently acquired habit, she dropped her gaze to avoid eye contact as soon as he looked at her. Her gaze had landed on the line of hair that started below his navel and trailed down past his low-slung pajama bottoms. She wished she had not noticed. It made her remember how attracted she had been to him before he turned nasty and hateful.

"Fucking Michael!" Her voice sounded too weak when it echoed around the shower, so she threw the soap at the wall for emphasis.

Michael nearly jumped out of his skin when he heard Mariah curse him. When she fell, he heard the noise and came to investigate. He had been standing in the open doorway trying to figure out whether he needed to intervene. A week ago, nothing could have stopped him from immediately checking her over. Today, he was looking for a reason not to investigate further.

When he got to her bathroom door, he saw her sit up in the shower and grab the shower wand that was banging against the side. She was conscious, at least. He waited to hear or see something that would tell him whether she was hurt. She hadn't moved much, but he could hear the shower wand cycling through settings. He was ready to assume she was uninjured and leave when he heard her curse him. Then he heard a thud.

He thought at first that she had seen him, but she didn't say anything else. He was still trying to figure it out when he heard her suck in her breath. His ears pricked. He knew that sound. Not long after, it was followed by a soft moan. The glass walls of the shower enclosure were clear and untextured, but they had steamed up. He only had a semi-clear view where the water rinsed the steam off the glass. Behind the steamed portions of the glass, he could see little more than her basic shape.

Then, she dropped the shower wand and it spun around before she could catch it. It sprayed the lower walls of the shower, rinsing away the steam. He could see all the way up to her chin now through the minor distortion of the water on the glass. He saw her train the water on her breast. She hissed and redirected the stream. He guiltily remembered what he did to her nipples.

He was distracted from his guilt when she crawled to the other end of the large shower to retrieve the soap. The way she moved on her hands and knees was provocative even when she thought she didn't have an audience. When she sat back against the wall of the shower, she started soaping up her breasts. She was using the soap to allow her fingers to slide across her nipples without hurting them. Her head tilted back against the side of the shower and he heard her moan again.

His cock throbbed. He freed it from his pajama bottoms and stroked it just enough to relieve the ache. His focus was on the scene in the shower. He saw her cup her breasts and run her thumbs over her nipples. He knew what they would look like if he could see them clearly. They would be so swollen that they looked tight. He could see through the glass that they were reddened. He missed keeping them sensitive all the time.

She moved the showerhead to aim the water against her pussy. Her knees were bent, with her feet planted shoulder-width apart. The leg nearest to him fell to the side and she reached down with one hand to spread her labia. When the water hit her clit, her hips jerked. He could hear her whining as the water played up and down her slit.

From the beginning, he had enjoyed how vocal she was, but now he realized she had been holding back. She was so quiet that he wouldn't have been able to hear her if he hadn't been standing in the doorway, but her little noises went on nearly nonstop. Her whimpers blended with moans and gasps and mewls. He wouldn't even know what to call some of the sounds she made, but their meaning was unmistakable. They were full of need. He wanted her to make those unfiltered sounds of pleasure for him.

She began to pant, and he knew she must be nearing her climax. Her head was thrown back again, and her back slid down the wall of the shower each time her hips rocked forward. He could see that her pussy was spread wide between her splayed fingers. He wished he could see more clearly. She brought the showerhead closer to let the water beat down on her clit.

He started to make out words between her moans. She had never talked to herself like this during sex with him. She wasn't coherent. He heard "please" and "more" and "need it." It reminded him of how he made her admit she needed him to touch her, to make her come. Then he heard his name, and his hand tightened around his shaft. He had a fluttery feeling from his throat to his stomach. Not coming was starting to feel like trying to stop up a fire hose.

Her cries grew higher in pitch. There were no more words -- just a keening that sounded almost pained. Then she went silent. He could see the wand shaking in her hand as she came. When it was over, he heard her sigh with the same kind of relief he desperately needed. The shower wand fell back against the tile wall. He arranged his pants and was preparing to leave when he heard her throw the soap across the shower again.

"Fucking Michael."

He retreated to his shower to seek his own release. It was intense. It still wasn't what he really wanted, but for those seconds while it lasted, he was aware only of the blinding pleasure. His legs were still shaky when he finished his shower.