Magical Mistress Alexandra

"Focus," the mage whispered, his breath warm on Jim's neck. "Go slow. Every movement is a brushstroke. Paint the pieces that define your best reality. Think of everything you want and nothing else. You only get one chance to get it right."

Jim stroked himself slowly until he was as hard and slick as hot ice, and did his best to follow the rest of the mage's instructions. He thought of having the knowledge of a full mystical library all inside his head, the raw power of the elements surging under his fingertips.

The trouble was, as exciting as these thoughts were, they weren't quite the right type of exciting. Focusing too hard on the practical details of his life, even the best version of his life, made it difficult to progress toward an orgasm.

The mage had said to go slow, so he tried to be patient, to let it happen whenever it happened.

But after going over every specification he could think of for his ideal destiny four or five times, a low panic began to creep in that he would never get there.

Before he could bring his mind back under control with a meditation protocol, it flicked away from his carefully considered wishes to his favorite masturbatory fantasies, fantasies that belonged at the very back of his psyche in a box marked "private." Things he'd had no intention of ever manifesting in reality, not even if he found himself wielding all the magic in the world.

His mental deviation lasted only seconds, but as soon as it happened, the elusive orgasm took him by surprise, weakening his knees and ejecting a generous load of semen onto the lid of the jar, right where he'd been aiming.

The thick fluid dripped down through the hole in the lid, where the fate burrower lapped it up.

The burrower did not get bigger with this meal.

Instead, it slammed itself against the side of the jar again, this time shattering it against the basement floor.

It opened its circular mouth full of row after row of needle-sharp teeth, and pounced up to latch itself onto Jim's spent cock.

The magical merging that followed was perhaps the least painful outcome he could have expected.

#

Alexandra held her pumpkin bagel to her forehead for a moment as she processed Jim's story, then lowered it to take a bite.

The exact features of the creature between his legs started to match up to some of the lore she'd read.

"So, you fed your semen to a fate burrower for power," she summed up. "But you tainted your wishes with a stray thought about, let me guess, losing access to your dick?"

Jim ducked his head in a shamefaced gesture of confirmation and filled his mouth with bagel.

"And then, when it inevitably went wrong, you what? Walked out on the new partner who was fool enough to give you the high-risk secrets you wouldn't stop asking for, and came crawling back to me to fix the mess?"

Jim drew out the chewing process.

"Actually, this one kicked me out," he said, once his mouth was clear. "He said the results proved there was something rotten about me."

He laughed a light, false laugh, as if this nonsense had no effect on him.

"Sure, the lad could've warned me if there was a 'pure of heart' clause, couldn't he?"

He sipped his coffee with one eye on Alexandra, waiting for her to comment.

"Moral baggage is known to make fate burrowers fussier," she confirmed. "That might have had something to do with it. It might not."

Jim nodded, clearly not expecting a kinder analysis. "What's my prognosis, then, Dr. Lex?"

Alexandra sighed. "Well, the good news is, there are spells for cleaning up contaminated burrower wishes."

"And the bad news?" Jim asked.

"That's twofold," said Alexandra. "Firstly, it has to be painful. Even if the condition of your soul wasn't offensive to the burrowers in the first place, those creatures are only the bottom rung of the hierarchy of fate. Their bosses will expect recompense from you, for trying to tamper with their work, not once but twice, and for failing to offer your full attention the first time."

"You can say it, Lex." Jim smiled wryly. "I've been a bad boy, and I need to be punished."

"That's the gist of it, yes," said Alexandra.

"What's the second part?"

"That's more difficult," said Alexandra. "I'm going to have to perform the ritual for you. If it were a simple charitable cause, like curing cancer, I could just do it for free. But because I'd be helping you weasel out of the consequences of tampering with fate, I'm going to have to take payment. That's not a personal policy. It's part of how the magic works. And it can't just be a token, either. It has to have value to me."

"I suppose that's only fair," said Jim, setting his half-finished coffee and the last sliver of his bagel on the bedside table.

"There's not a single piece of magic you're better at than me," said Alexandra. "And if this is anything like your last seven breakups, you came here with all your worldly possessions on your back. What could you possibly have to offer me?"

Jim cracked his knuckles theatrically, shifted onto his knees beside Alexandra, and tugged the comforter off of her.

"You have a strangely selective memory," he said, leaning down to hover his face mischievously over her lap.

"You're just assuming I'm going to allow you back between my legs?" Alexandra asked, crossing them sternly, along with her arms.

"No, no, I fully understand that you could reject the only tribute I have to give." Jim blew gently on the skin of her inner thighs, sending reflexive tingles all the way up her body. "You could leave me in this cage forever, refuse me any chance to earn my way out, and you'd deserve my thanks for doing that much. My future is in your hands, and you owe me nothing."

He looked up at her face, and could not have missed the sight of her nipples hardening under her satin nightie in the foreground.

His grin of triumph began half a second before she sighed, "Fine!"

Jim grabbed her legs and pulled her from a sitting position onto her back.

She allowed it. If he was offering so enthusiastically, she might as well enjoy a little compensation for the mess he'd dragged her into.

He started by pulling down the loose spaghetti straps of her nightie to expose her breasts to the air. Just the way he used to, he brushed his fingers ever so lightly around them, weaving wreathes of caresses, working his way inward. When he reached the first hint of the puckered skin of her areolas, he stopped and started over, stroking her sternum and collarbones and slowly approaching again.

Goosebumps rose all over Alexandra's skin, multiplying its sensitivity tenfold. By this point, he could touch her with nothing but the faint aura of warmth around his hands, and she felt it more intensely than a firm massage.

The third time he reached her nipples, he rolled the left one back and forth twice with one fingertip, then pinched it, hard.

It was the best kind of pain, harmless and shocking, demanding of all her attention. For a second, nothing existed except the thrill shooting along her nerves, signaling her vagina to contract and moisten in a violent hurry.

Then Jim let go, and left her untouched for several long seconds.

"I said 'fine,'" Alexandra said, summoning her commanding dungeon tone. "Are you going to give it to me or not?"

Her voice rang false, and Jim was not fooled.

He lifted the skirt of her nightie and kissed her very softly along the upper border of her panties.

"Do you want me to do it fast," he asked between kisses, "or do it right?"

The nerve of him, making her wait.

The audacity of knowing how much she liked it.

Jim's hunger for knowledge, and the power that came with it, had never been limited to magic. Whenever she instructed him on the eccentricities of her body, or when he discovered by experimentation how to make her feel something, the recipe was indelibly etched into his memory.

"I am your keyholder," Alexandra reminded him with half-joking indignation.

"Technically, you are," Jim agreed, finally pulling her panties down and off.

"Technically?"

"Well, you have the key, but you can't use it, can you? You couldn't let me out right now, even if you wanted to. Not safely. Not yet."

He began trailing his fingers up her thighs, along the valleys of her hip joints, stopping just short of the parts that most wanted his attention, just as he had with her breasts.

"I think it's in my best interests," he said, "to make you think about what I could do for you with my full set of tools."

Trailing his way to her labia, he slipped one finger easily inside her and then pulled it away just as quickly, before it could do her much good.

As intended, it left behind a nostalgic craving for exactly what neither of them could have -- that perfectly ordinary cock of his, applied with the same extraordinary precision as his hands.

He returned to tracing slow, light circles around her vulva.

Part of Alexandra still wanted to put a stop to this line of play, for no reason except that Jim had initiated it. She wanted to remind him of his situation, of how it and so many other things were all his fault, and collect her payment by treating him like a toy.

But she had toys. Two drawers full of them, to enjoy whenever she wanted.

They could synthesize almost any kind of physical sexual pleasure... except for exactly what Jim was doing to her now.

Like trying to tickle herself, there was simply no solo substitute for a teasing caress she couldn't control or predict. Even when she brought home a partner, there was a learning curve to getting them to do it right, to the point where she usually just asked for something else.

How did you tell someone who was all ready to worship you, "Give me what I want, by not giving me what I want"?

Jim not only understood that paradox in the abstract, he knew the exact balance it struck inside her particular body.

That was an exceptionally rare treat, and Alexandra couldn't resist it.

She waited patiently, accepted every pause, every denial and deferral he imposed. She squirmed for him, even let her frustration manifest in undignified little cries, allowing him to read her level of agitation, like an expert pilot monitoring the instruments.

"We're not in any danger of using too much magic on you today, are we?" Jim whispered.

"No."

"Good."

Jim lifted his hands off of her, rubbed them together, and blew into them to form a simple golden ribbon of magical energy. He merged it into a loop, endlessly flowing in one direction, and wound it around both her nipples in a figure-eight.

When he let go, the ribbon hung in place, glowing and moving, warmly brushing her skin without pause.

Finally, finally, he lowered his head to kiss her desperately neglected-feeling clit.

Alexandra's patience broke when he paused after that first gentle kiss, and she reached down for his hair to pull him closer.

Jim caught both her wrists and pinned them down at her sides, but then mercifully kissed her again with a little more pressure.

He ran his soft, warm tongue back and forth over the hood of her clit, first slowly, then rhythmically, careful to avoid the underside, which he knew was always too painfully sensitive for direct contact, even when she was this ready.

Alexandra sighed with relief.

Jim relaxed the weight he'd been putting on her wrists and interlaced the fingers of his left hand with her right, instead.

His own right hand, he brought back to her vulva, sliding in one finger again, and then a second. He rubbed them against the front wall of her vagina while he continued to lick her, working at her clitoral nerves from both sides at once.

This part was far too good to last, of course, especially after so much leadup.

Inside of a minute, Alexandra's whole body seized up with an orgasm too strong to be concealed in a discreet nighttime marathon.

She stuffed the corner of her pillow into her mouth to muffle a scream than would definitely have been audible from the next suite over.

Jim said something shortly afterward that Alexandra utterly failed to comprehend. She barely felt capable of comprehending the concept of spoken language.

She tried to tell him so, to ask him to wait, and only nonsense syllables came out.

He laughed with a self-satisfaction that needed no words, and gestured to dissipate the magic ribbon.

After several seconds of heavy breathing, the pleasure cloud parted enough for Alexandra to ask, "What did you say?" And then, "Are you okay?"

Jim's laughter had subsided, and he was now lying beside her, holding his cage very carefully in one hand. The creature was struggling and drooling harder than ever, and no adjustment Jim made seemed to ease his discomfort.

"I'm fine," he said, wincing. "That was... a little overexciting."

He took a moment longer to recover himelf.

"I was asking you what I just bought with that payment," he said. "What do you have to do to me?"

Alexandra sighed, slashed a rift in empty air with one fingernail, and reached into the pocket dimension she used for storage.

Summoning the right book to her hand, she propped it open on the mattress between them, to make sure she was getting all the details right.

"It starts with what you have to do," she said. "You have to unravel something that holds sentimental meaning to you, then weave its material around three willow wands, and soak the whole thing in a salt bath."

"Honoring the value of what fate has already woven, and the weight of the task of reweaving," Jim guessed accurately at the meaning of the spell's parts. "Invoking the strength of the three high fates who hold all reality together, and cleansing the new construct of the residual energies of the old one?"

"Correct," said Alexandra. "And then, when it's done, I chain you up and thrash you with it until you bleed."

"Yeah, I sort of had a hunch that was where this was headed."

Alexandra rummaged in the pocket dimension for her chest of essential ingredients and selected the three willow wands for him, each one about five feet in length, tapering from the width of a finger at one end to a fine point at the other.

At present, they were dry and brittle, but after a long enough soak, they'd be durable and almost flexible enough to break the sound barrier in flight.

Jim sighed and pulled his sweater up over his head. "My gran knitted this, you know."

"Good," Alexandra said humorlessly, getting up to grab him a robe. "You should thank her for saving you. If you didn't own anything unravelable with enough significance, you'd be stuck like this forever."

#

Alexandra sprawled out on the bed with a novel while Jim laboriously wove yarn around wood in the intricate pattern prescribed in the spell book, careful not to miss a single loop.

After an hour, she had turned only two pages.

Although Jim was sitting on the floor with his back to her, she was intensely aware that he was intensely aware of her, whether by hearing alone or by some other trick.

"If you're enjoying the silence, tell me," he said suddenly. "And I'll leave it alone."

Alexandra grabbed the remote and turned on the TV, flipping in search of some neutral background noise.

"Talk to me, Lex," said Jim. "Please."

Alexandra turned the TV back off and put her book aside with a sigh.

"I was just thinking that maybe I should ask one of my colleagues to hold the whip," she said. "While I focus on the rest of conducting the ritual, channeling the magic and everything. There's no rule in the book saying one person has to handle it all."

"Oh," said Jim. He paused for a moment, and then returned to his weaving. "Too much work for one person to juggle?"

Jim had read the ritual as closely as she had, so she couldn't lie.

"No," she said.

Jim nodded, still with his back to her. "And I assume it's not because you're feeling unqualified to perform a service that other men pay you handsomely for every day?"

"Actually, yeah," said Alexandra. "I kind of am."

Jim turned sideways, leaning his shoulder instead of his back against her bed, so that he could look at her while his fingers continued their repetitive work. He waited silently for elaboration.

"I've been wanting to punish you for a very long time," Alexandra admitted. "And I'm scared that makes me exactly the wrong person for the job. If I let this become about me, instead of about you, I could really hurt you. Magically. Physically. All different ways."

Jim looked back down at his work, nodding at the skein of gray wool as he wove it nimbly between the wands.

"For what it's worth," he said, "I didn't run off because I'd been using you and I was done, or anything like that."

"Obviously," said Alexandra. "If all you cared about was what I could teach you, you'd never be done. You could have spent the rest the rest of your life studying at my feet, barely scratching the surface."

Jim didn't argue.

"I really could have," he said, after a while. "I'd always pictured myself traveling the world, collecting skills, never the same experience from one day to the next. Never anyone who really knew me, so I'd always get the benefit of more doubt than I deserved. And then--"

"You caught feelings and it scared you," Alexandra summarized ruthlessly. "I know. Is that supposed to make it better? Kissing me goodnight like everything was fine and then disappearing in my sleep, leaving me with theater tickets for two?"

"The sun wasn't even up before I wished I could take it back," Jim said earnestly.

"Stop looking at me like that," Alexandra told him, feeling his gaze erode her ability to think.

He dropped his unsettlingly blue eyes back to the work.

"I trust you more than any stranger," he said, straightforwardly, without looking up. "And if I can pay a bit of my debt to you at the same time as my debt to fate, that's a better deal than I could have asked for. Good enough to be worth some risk. So, if I get any vote at all, I want it to be you."

#

When Jim had finished constructing the whip and set it to soak in the bathtub, he made sandwiches in the kitchenet of Alexandra's suite.

The two of them ate and watched a movie while they waited, joking about nonmagical filmmakers' ideas on magic, and spooning on the bed the way they had in the earliest days of their relationship.

Only the unyielding lump of Jim's cage pressing against Alexandra's lower back shattered the illusion of having slipped back in time.

When the time came, Jim removed his robe and knelt on the floor, facing the foot of the bed, so that Alexandra could cuff his hands to the posts.

She arranged and lit a circle of white taper candles around the perimeter of the room, and then stood behind him with the whip in one hand and the spell book in the other.

Without needing to coordinate, Jim and Alexandra started the same way they always did in their formal shared spell craft.

One long breath, to release the tendrils of the outside world from inside themselves.

A second breath to form a protective shield to hold it out.

The power inside them became visible light as it stretched beyond their bodies, to mix and hover in a dome around them, anchored to the floor by the circle of candles.

There would be no distractions.

"Why are you here?" Alexandra asked Jim, following the script of the spell.

"To submit myself to the mercy of fate," Jim recited. "And to beg its permission to correct my error."

"What correction do you beg for?" asked Alexandra.

"I beg a safe separation from the burrower I fed with a careless thought," said Jim, "And the restoration of what I mourn losing."