Beyond Limits Ch. 03

She opened her eyes and looked at me. They had been closed. "Alright," she said. "If that's what you want." She started to sit up.

"No, never mind." I gripped her shoulder and pulled her back down. "I'm too tired. Stay where you are. Come here."

I pulled her toward me and kissed her. She felt soft and boneless and thoroughly fucked in a way that made me proud, even though I'd teased her terribly with what I'd done.

The thought struck me then though that there was no way she could substitute for Lexi. I knew she would try, and I knew she wanted to, and I knew someday I would have feelings for her that might be just as deep, but they would never be the same. They wouldn't be the feelings I had for Lexi. I'd never have those feelings for anyone else. I loved Lexi in a way I'd never loved another woman and now I was losing her and I was doing my part to speed that along. Instead of making me get up out of that bed and away from April, these thoughts made me hold her tighter. I was filled with self-hatred. I held her and let her kiss me.

"I don't know what this means, April. You know that? I can't really promise anything."

She was leaning over me, kissing my chest. Her hair hung over her face, shielding her, but her kisses where ghostly and achingly tender.

"I know that," she said. "and that's alright. I know you're in love with Lexi, but you're not the only one with a dual life, you know. I have someone else too. Someone I love very much."

I raised my head. "Oh?"

"You're surprised?"

"Well, yes. I suppose I am. I had no idea. Jesus, April! I'm sorry."

"Sorry? Why are you sorry?"

It had been a stupid thing to say. I hadn't been thinking. "I don't know. I guess I don't want to think of myself as a home wrecker, an adulterer. I know. It's kind of silly."

That's what I said, but in reality I was upset she had someone else. Self-centered idiot that I was, I thought I was her only one. I thought she really loved me. How could she offer me anything I wanted when she loved someone else "very much"? How much did she love me, then? I'd gone into this as a throw-away relationship, but I realized now some part of me took it very seriously. I was hurt and jealous. It struck me how spoiled and juvenile I was.

She put her head back down on my chest. "Well I don't want to be a home wrecker either. It's no secret about you and Lexi, so I have no excuse for getting involved with you, and that bothers me a lot. I like Lexi, and I hate that I'm doing this to her, I really do. But she should be giving you what you want, Russell, she really should, and I hate to see you treated like this. I'm sorry if I'm nosing in, but it's pretty obvious what's going on and she should be giving it to you. It's not like you're some maniac or sadist or something. A man has needs. Does she even read your work?"

Of course she did, but my work had little to do with her, at least as she saw it.

"Who is he?" I asked.

"Who? Oh. His name's Brandon. He's in law school in Madison. Near the top of his class, brilliant guy. He doesn't know anything about this side of me, though. He'd flip if he did, I think. Why? What's wrong?"

"Nothing. I'm just surprised. You don't seem like the kind for a double life."

"I don't think it's a double life.. People just assume I'm Miss Clean-cut. It's always been like that. It takes me a while to disabuse them of the notion."

"So is that the only reason you come to me? For what you can't get from him?"

She rolled partway over and lifted herself up to look at me. "You're not offended are you? Russell, I would have come after you even if you'd been pure vanilla anyway. You're a very sexy man. You do it for me. I want to do unspeakably filthy things with you."

She held my gaze as she lowered her head and bit me, right on the ribs, making me squirm. That made her smile.

Her pussy was full of my semen and she was sharing my bed. Has evolution inserted some sort of gene in us that makes us irrevocably love women who fulfill these criteria? I rather think so. Plus this was a beautiful woman and a woman who'd guaranteed me she'd do anything I wanted, use her mouth or her hands on me, give me any orifice in her body to use as I wished, the kind of woman who's the product of a successful D/s relationship. I was strongly prejudiced in her favor.

I watched her lips as she spoke and proceeded to bite me, the ripe, warm flesh of her lips, the eyes above them, the body, all ten trillion cells of her set toactive sex mode, the most beautiful setting for the human being there is.

"Brandon won't give it to you?"

She raised her head and shook her head to clear her insolent hair from her face. "He thinks it's sick. I got him an erotic board game once. The kind where you have to do what it says when you land on the squares? I finally got him to tie me up and he thought it was so funny he almost peed himself laughing. I didn't have the heart to ask him after that. Typical lawyer. If he's not fucking you, it's not sex."

"And you're serious with him?"

"I don't know. I love him, yeah. He's really a good guy. But I've also got financial insecurity disorder and he's mercenary as hell. On top of all the money he's going to make, his family's filthy rich. His father's a corporate lawyer. He's always giving me things, and I'm easily bought."

"Mmm."

"You're really bummed. I'm sorry."

I tried to laugh. "No. Well, yeah. I guess I am. I guess it's a dom thing. We like to think we're the only ones."

"Don't make me tell you you are. I'd never be able to face him again. He's never been able to make me climax. I guess that makes me a monster, doesn't it? He thinks he wants to marry me."

I looked at the girl I'd just whipped and fucked. So she was loved, used, a user, a fucker; scared, brave, terribly familiar, naked, waiting for me to accept or reject her. I held her closer.

"I'm really sorry for this whole diversion with the dope," she said.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I suppose I could have just flushed it away. I really didn't have to get you involved in the first place. I was just looking for a way to get next to you."

"You were?"

"Kind of. Yeah. I mean, it's all true, and my cousin is insane, but I could have just flushed it."

"That would have been an expensive flush."

"Yeah. That's true."

I looked down at her. "He doesn't know about this, does he?"

"God no! In fact, I think part of it might have been a kind of death wish of mine, to get caught so he'd know and that would be the end of us."

"Jesus! Are you kidding? Now you tell me?"

"Oh, I'm not that deep. I'm a conniving bitch but not that deep. Still, I deserve to be punished."

I laughed softly. "Of course you do. Your typealways deserves to be punished. That's the whole idea, isn't it?"

She smiled. "Pretty much, yeah." She had a lovely smile, wide and complex with a little pout in it before it broke with a sly gleam to show her even teeth, like pearls in the moonlight.

She took my right hand and placed it on her breast, then arranged it so my fingers were on her nipple.

"Pinch," she said. "Please, Master.Hard. I like it hard."

I looked at her for a moment. She was lying on her back with her hands just below her collar bone curled into loose little fists like paws. Her nipples were surprisingly womanly, with sizeable nubs and generous areolas, but still more pink than brown. I took the nub and squeezed gently. She smiled and shook her head and stretched in the bed, reaching over her head and extending her arms. I increased the pressure, then increased it some more.

Her nipple yielded, exposed as it was. I got to the point where my fingers were starting to hurt before she responded, sighing, twisting and caressing my leg with her stockinged foot, and then she was moaning and pushing her sticky wet cunt against my leg, smearing me with our combined love-juices. I was seriously afraid of injuring her, of rupturing her nipple or crushing the tissue (and also I was just running out of finger strength) so I slowly relaxed the pressure and let her go. I realized I'd been holding my breath

April sighed deeply. She took my hand and opened it and licked the palm with a long, slow sweep of her tongue, like a cat. She opened her eyes and fixed me with a look that was pure female fire, incandescent lust, that masochistic flame I was to come to know so well from her later in our relationship, but now struck me with such erotic force that I felt a rush of what must have been pure testosterone gush into my bloodstream. I'd never dealt with a masochist and always thought them sick and deranged. I never knew how it could work on me, how the urge to hurt beauty works. I just grabbed her behind the head and kissed her violently, my tongue sweeping into her mouth and raping her throat. My sleeping cock twitched to life, overwhelmed by the gift she'd just given me, but I couldn't, I couldn't. We were both too tired and it was too much too soon with the sheets still damp with sweat from our last fuck, but suddenly I had a new appreciation for April's erotic armament and the way she might use it. I saw how she worked now as I looked into the fiery invitation of her eyes and I was suitably impressed. I'd always told myself that masochism was a disease and masochists were to be pitied and I'd never get involved with it, but now I had a new understanding of the dynamic and its appeal.

I kissed her nipple where I'd hurt her and sucked it just a little in apology and she wrapped her arms around my head and soothed me, forgiving me, telling me it was alright, then we slipped under the blankets and I straightened up, and with her resting her head on my shoulder, we fell asleep.

* * * * *

I can tell you how Lexi's night ended too. Thanks to her expert memory and her honest desire for openness—openness in the relationship, openness in its demise and most-mortem period—she shared all the details with me some weeks later. She remembered her night with Cormac in excruciating detail and she told me everything. Lexi's a great believer in openness, as if nothing bad can ever happen as long as it's talked about. Which is simply absurd. There's a reason they give you anesthesia when they're cutting off your legs for example, or pulling the nerves out of your teeth. But Lexi apparently doesn't believe in that.

Cormac apparently lost some of his foul-mouthed edge after his first orgasm inside her and showed a gentler, more charming side. He showed her some pictures of his ex-family and they reviewed some of his scrapbooks detailing his brilliant career. He held forth in a monologue punctuated by frequent bouts of frenzied love-making, so that Lexi was charmingly embarrassed about how "sore" she was the next day. Of course, it wasn't all beer and skittles. Inside she confessed she was deeply troubled about her betrayal of me.

How deeply? Actually, I shouldn't be too cynical. I suppose she felt with Cormac something like I felt with April. She had a new piece of ass and it was great, and if anything bothered her, it was how little guilt she felt about it. What really consumed her was the things this man had done to her with his insults and orders and his humiliation. He'd just blown her skin off and revealed a new, hypersexual Lexi she'd never known before, never even suspected she had inside her. It was a new world now and nothing was the same, and it was all due to Cormac, Cormac, Cormac.

The first thing she did when she got back to Ashcroft Hall after her night with him (by taxi. He couldn't be bothered to drive her. He called her a cab and gave her money.) was shower and write in her diary what had happened. She still thought it was odd, freakish. She wasn't in love with him yet, not by any means, in fact he amused her; she almost pitied him. But she wrote down everything that had happened as if that could help her understand it. She was on fire with ideas, with things he'd told her. He'd slept with her as part of her training, he'd said. He was going to make her into a great actress and for that she had to submit to him totally. That part she liked and that part she'd humor him on. She had to call a Terry Bateman in Madison Wisconsin to be her acting coach, then she had to start taking dancing and singing lessons.

All this made her suddenly exhausted and she went to bed and slept for ten hours. When she woke up, she couldn't stop thinking about Cormac. She thought about me too and she wanted to see me (this is what she told me) but sheneeded to see Cormac. She needed to feel him look at her with disdain and hear his insults, because she knew he saw her as she really was. Well, notreally. She wasn'treally like that, but she needed to feel him see her that way. It felt good, right. Like someone at last saw through her and understood her and wouldn't fall for her bullshit. Cormac was someone she could at last respect.

But she remembered that I'd be home around midnight, so she dressed and she went over to the apartment at about nine. She played solitaire for a while and then started telling her fortune with the cards but couldn't get the answers she was hoping for, so she quit. She was restless so she took a shower and changed into a skirt and sweater and made herself a drink of some of my whiskey, which she rarely does.

When I asked her later what she'd been thinking about while she was waiting for me, she said she kept on thinking she couldn't wait to tell me about what had happened with Cormac, as if I were some girlfriend she could open her heart to, as if I'd already slipped from being a lover to being a friend. But she said no, it wasn't like that. It was more like she still didn't believe she was in love with him and still thought their night together had been some kind of aberration or freakish accident that deserved being shared with me, that it would never happen again and that I'd explain it to her as the result of certain stresses or strains in her life and make it all go away and we'd be back together again as normal, going on as before. She was certain she couldn't be the person he'd revealed her to be.

* * * * *

I got home at eleven fifty, the ride back being uneventful. I kissed April goodbye in a sweet and promising kiss, telling her I didn't know when I'd be able to see her again and she repeated that she understood, that she was there for me whenever I needed her. I told her I'd let her know as soon as I heard from Sandra and we parted in my car and I watched her go into her building feeling terrible, feeling like I was messing with three lives, mine, Lexi's and April's. Then I pulled away and headed home.

The sight of Lexi stunned me. She looked so good, so together, so complete in her skirt and sweater, like some parthenogenic animal that can self-fertilize its own eggs. I knew something was wrong and I thought at first my betrayal showed on my face and that she knew what I'd done. Her kiss was warm but formal, her questions about the trip to the city, disinterested. Mainly she said she was famished and wanted to know if we could run down to Seymour's and get some food. She said she had a lot to tell me about her dinner with Cormac Grehen, who'd turned out to be a fantastically interesting companion, but she'd pass out if she didn't get some food in her.

We were still able to get mushroom soup and broiled whitefish and a bottle of chardonnay from the kitchen—whichalways has mushroom soup and broiled whitefish and chardonnay, 24 hours a day, I swear—and we sat at a table in back and ate bread and butter and guzzled wine waiting for the food and she talked and I listened. She told me about all the things he'd told her about himself and about acting and her talent and what she needed to do to improve it, and from her words I tried to piece together a picture of what actually had happened in their dinner together in terms of a man and a woman—my woman—that is, any sign that Cormac might be homosexual or asexual or not sexually targeting her, or, if sexually targeting her (and how could he not be?), just how he was doing it, looking for familiar moves and gambits—the compliment, the boast, the noble-suffering ploy, the misunderstood-artist move, the I-can-help-you shuffle—all those ploys I knew so well. To my way of thinking there was still some chance that he might just be some kind of perverse egomaniac who wallowed in worship rather than sex.

Of course she told me nothing of what really happened, of him basically browbeating her into a puddle of liquid submission and ordering her to his room where he fucked the holy hell out of her, so her report was strangely curtailed and incomplete and skewed toward what a gentleman and a fine and sensitive dinner companion he was, which gave me a bad feeling even then, because it simply didn't ring true. She was hiding something and something big. She simply wasn't that good an actress off the stage, ad libbing material as she went. But then, I was sitting on a secret of my own and I could hardly demand an honest accounting of the last 24 hours for fear that she would demand the same. By the time we finished dinner, it was clear there was a lot she wasn't saying, so she started asking me questions, and it was equally clear there was a lot I couldn't remember about last night as well.

So when we left Seymour's at one thirty, the padding was pretty thick between us, and we hardly said a word as we walked the few steps back to my place. The snow was still there in patches and a new wind was blowing threatening more, smelling like cold iron. The moon looked chilled, hanging in the bare branches. I took her arm and guided her over the slick patches on the sidewalk, past the hardware store and dry cleaner's and the empty storefront where the card store had been, the window a black mirror now, showing two fucking liars bundled up against the cold, reflected against emptiness. I opened the door and we walked up the stairs.

"I'm going to have a drink. You want one?" I asked her as we took of our coats.

As I said, Lexi rarely drinks whiskey, and that's all we had in the house except for beer.

"Sure," she said. "That sounds nice."

I threw some ice in two glasses and poured, then ran some water into hers while she hung up her coat. She came into the kitchen rubbing her hands together against the cold and took the drink. She looked so good in the dark, so adult in her skirt and sweater, coming in from the restaurant where she'd told me about her dinner with another man. We toasted, clinking glasses. I kept the lights off. You could hear the wind at the windows as we drank.

"God that tastes good," she said.

"Yeah. It's cold out. It'll be winter before we know it."

"Winter's such a bitch up here."

We drank. The wind battered at the windows like a fist.

I was leaning against the sink. I put my glass down. "Come here, Lexi."

"Oh, Russell..."

We kissed before we could start crying. We just fell together, our mouths open, searching, needing each other. We both knew. We both knew everything. Maybe not the details, but we knew how things were between us, and we clung to each other in the dark, her arms around my neck, her body pressed against me, as if we could stop the thing at the windows that was coming for us. I crushed her against me—my baby, my baby, everything to me, my Lexi—and I held her and kissed her, turned myself inside out for her, my lips at her mouth, her face, her throat; my hands on her ass, pulling her against me. Remember me? I asked her. Don't you remember me? Who I am? What I am to you? No, I was never your master. You'd never let me be that, but still, I was your lover. I was your pleasure. You yielded to me. You gave me everything you had. I'm still that to you Lexi! I can still make that claim on you!

My hand closed on the rich, dark fall of her hair and I bent her head back for my kiss. I held her, held her as my victim as I claimed her mouth, bit her and licked her and devoured her, just ate her up. Lexi could claim she wasn't submissive and never had been, but why did she always soften this way, sucking me in, inviting me in to rape and pillage her mouth and body when I leaned on her like this? She yielded now, not with strength and not with her body, but with some inexpressible sense of attitude, backing up under my onslaught and pulling me along after her. I pulled her to me and she leaned against me, her body molded to mine and I remembered how she fit, like a second skin.