Chapter 2: The Convincing
Her fingers find the button of my jeans and I catch both her wrists in one hand, pulling them up and away before the zipper can move an inch.
"Not yet."
"But," she starts, and her voice is already wrecked, thick and begging at the edges.
"No." I pull her up off her knees, back onto the couch, and she lands soft against the cushions with a little offended sound that I love. "You don't get to make me lose control. Not after what you pulled today. You're going to starve a little longer."
"That's cruel," she whispers, but her thighs press together and her chestnut curls fall over one eye and she's smiling even as she says it.
"It's exactly what you deserve." I lean in close, my ring cold against her jaw as I tilt her face up to mine. "You made me sit through a phone call with my mother while my head was full of you. Now stand up."
She stands. The TV mutters at us from across the room, some detective interrogating a witness, and neither of us has followed the plot for an hour. The lamplight is low and orange and it catches every curve of her as she waits, arms at her sides, chin lifted in that stubborn little way of hers.
"Take it off. Slow."
Her fingers go to the buttons of the silk shirt, one at a time, and I watch her hands shake slightly. Third button, fourth, until the shirt hangs loose and open and her soft belly and her stiffening nipples are there in front of me, everything she spent a week hiding under a blanket, everything I spent an hour worshipping.
"The pants too."
She shucks the high-waisted silk down her thighs, stepping out of them, and stands there in nothing but her rings and her damp, soaked-through underwear. Her arms twitch like she wants to cover her stomach and I say her name, just her name, and the arms come back down.
"You're the most beautiful thing that's ever happened to me," I tell her, and I mean it so hard it comes out quiet. "Look at you. Look at what you tried to hide from me."
Her eyes shine and her breath goes shallow. "You keep saying that."
"Because you keep not believing it." I stand. "Now undress me. Hands only. And if your hands wander anywhere they haven't been sent, we start over from the beginning of the night."
She swallows and reaches for the hem of my black tee, dragging it up my chest, over my head, careful, reverent, her fingertips grazing my ribs exactly where I put them. The jeans come next. She works the button open this time, the one she was robbed of, and drags the zipper down slow while her eyes stay on mine, testing me. I let her. The denim drops and she steps back to look at me, all of me, and I watch her pupils blow wide.
"Turn around," I say.
She turns, and I get the full view, the big perfect curve of her ass, the heavy soft thighs, and I take one long breath through my nose because God help me. Then I step in behind her, close, so close my chest touches her back and my hard dick presses against the silk-warm cheek of her ass through my boxers, and I wrap my hand around her throat, not squeezing, just resting it there.
"Do you feel what you do to me?"
"Yes," she breathes.
"And you don't get any of it yet." I move us both, steering her by the throat and the hip, and I sit her down on the couch, then lay her back against the cushions, pulling her legs open and hooking one over the back of the couch, the other foot flat on the floor. She's completely open to me now, her soaked underwear dark and clinging. "Keep them just like that. If you close your legs, the night starts over."
"Please," she says, and it's not even a word, it's just air.
I kneel between her knees and I don't touch her yet. I just breathe on her, my mouth an inch from the wet fabric over her pussy, and her hips lift off the cushion chasing me and I pull back and wait for her to settle.
"You made me wait six hours today," I say. "I can wait six seconds."
"You're evil."
"I'm yours. There's a difference." Then I finally touch her, and she shudders like something breaking open. I press two fingers flat against her through the soaked cotton, slow circles over her clit, featherlight, and her head tips back against the arm of the couch and a sound falls out of her that has no consonants in it.
I take my time. I tease the damp fabric aside and slide one finger through her slick folds without entering her, tracing her, mapping her like it's the first time, and she's so wet that my finger comes away shining. I bring it to my mouth and taste her and her whole body clenches watching me do it.
"You taste like Friday night," I tell her. "You taste like every night."
"Please put them in me."
I put them in her. Two fingers, deep, slow, curling up against that soft front wall she loves, and her back arches off the cushions and her hands fly to grip the couch and stay there because she knows the rules. I work her with my fingers and my mouth finds her thigh, the heavy soft inner part she's been ashamed of all week, and I suck a mark into it, then another, and I whisper against her skin how these thighs are my favorite place on earth.
Then my mouth goes lower. I pull the wet fabric aside with my fingers still buried in her and I put my tongue flat against her clit and she nearly comes off the couch. I hold her hips down with my free hand, my wedding ring digging into the soft flesh of her waist, and I lick her slow and steady, exactly the rhythm that builds her, and I feel it start, the tightening, the shaking in her thighs, her breath going to pieces, her voice climbing.
"I'm close, I'm close, please, please."
I pull my mouth away and my fingers out, all at once, and I sit back on my heels.
She makes a sound like I've broken something in her. "No. No, no, please, I was right there."
"I know exactly where you were." I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand and look at her, spread open and ruined and trembling on our couch, and I feel like the luckiest man alive. "And you're going to be right there again. And again. All night." I stand up over her and reach down to trace one finger slowly along her hip. "Now tell me how badly you want it, wife."
"So badly I can't think," Marta says, and her voice cracks on the last word. "I've been wet since the third denial. I ache, baby. I ache inside. Please touch me."
"Where?" I trace the finger up her hip, over the soft swell of her waist, slower than slow. "Use your words."
"My pussy. Please. Touch my pussy." Her hips roll up off the cushion, offering herself, shameless now, past the point of pride. "I'll do anything. I'll keep my hands where you put them. I won't close my legs. Just please put your mouth back on me, or your fingers, anything, I'm dying."
I watch her beg and I have to lock my jaw because my control has a lifespan and she's spending it fast. Her chest is flushed pink down her sternum, her nipples hard as pebbles, her thighs trembling with the effort of staying open the way I left them. She's the most beautiful wreck I've ever made.
"You'll do anything," I repeat.
"Yes."
"Then stay still. Perfectly still. That's the price."
She nods fast, bites her lip, plants her feet. I lower my head and blow cool air over her soaked, swollen clit, and she whimpers and holds, her fists gripping the cushion instead of me. Good girl. I reward her with one long, slow lick from her entrance all the way up, flat and broad, and her whole body shivers but she doesn't move. She holds. She's learning the shape of the night.
I eat her like that, slow and methodical, my tongue circling her clit in exactly the pattern that winds her up, my fingers back inside her pumping shallow and curling. I suck her clit into my mouth and her breath hitches in these broken little pieces and I know every one of them, I have a map of her sounds, and I can feel the orgasm assembling in her, her thighs quaking, her stomach tightening under my ringed hand.
"Don't stop, don't stop, don't stop," she chants.
I stop.
The sound she makes is not human. It's grief. Her hips buck into the empty air, chasing my mouth, and tears actually slide out of the corners of her eyes and down toward her ears.
"I hate you," she sobs, and her legs stay open. "I hate you so much, please, I was so close, I was right there, I felt it starting."
"Right there," I agree, wiping my chin. "And it's still there. It's not going anywhere. Neither are you." I stand over her, drag my boxers down, and my cock springs free, hard and heavy, and her eyes fix on it and her mouth actually opens on reflex.
She catches herself and looks up at me with those wet brown eyes. "Can I. Please. Let me put my mouth on you. I want to taste you so bad it hurts."
I let her. Because the truth is I'm weak and I know it. She leans forward off the cushion and takes me in her mouth, hot and wet and eager, and I thread my hand into her curls and just hold her hair, letting her work, feeling the discipline of the night strain against the fact that my wife's mouth is a national emergency. She pulls off with a gasp, stroking me with her ringed hand.
"Break," she begs. "Break for me. Just take me. I want you to lose it. I want you to throw me down and fuck me until I can't walk. Please, baby, break."
For a second I actually consider it. My whole body is voting yes.
"No," I breathe, and I pull her mouth off me and push her back down onto the cushions. "But you just earned yourself one thing."
"What?"
I strip her soaked underwear down her thighs, off her ankles, and drop it on the floor. Then I slide back between her legs and press just the head of my cock against her opening, not inside, just resting there, hot against her soaked slit, and she cries out at even that much.
"That," I say. "Feel that? That's real. That's what's coming. But you don't get it until you've been right there and been left there one more time." I rock my hips, dragging myself slowly through her folds, over her clit, slick and maddening, and her back bows clean off the cushion.
"I can't, I can't take one more, I swear I can't."
"You can. You're my strong girl. You lasted six hours today." I keep rocking, my tip massaging her clit with every pass, and I watch the orgasm build in her face for the third time tonight, her jaw slack, her eyes rolling, her legs starting to shake out of her control. "Come right to the edge for me one more time and hold it."
"I can't hold it."
"You can."
"I'm gonna, I'm gonna," she babbles, and I pull back completely, my cock slipping wet up my own stomach, and she screams in frustration into her own arm, actually biting the cushion, her whole body convulsing around nothing.
I let her come down. I let her breathe. Then I gather her up, boneless and trembling, and pull her into my lap on the couch, her back to my chest, my arm banded across her soft belly, my mouth at her ear.
"You did so good," I whisper, and she shudders at the praise. "So good for me. All night you've been perfect." I kiss her jaw, her ear, and she tilts her head to give me more, pliant, ruined, mine. "Now here's what happens. You're going to sit in my lap, full of nothing, starving, and we're going to watch our show. And every commercial break, I'm going to touch you. Once. Just once."
"That's torture."
"That's the night you built today." I reach for the remote and turn the volume up, and the detective drones at us while my wife whimpers in my lap, her soaked pussy open and empty against my thigh, my hand resting flat and possessive on her soft stomach that she hid from me under a blanket an hour ago and that I now claim in front of the whole dark room.
The first commercial hits. I slide two fingers back into her, deep, and her head falls back onto my shoulder.
Her hips buck against my hand before I can set the rhythm, greedy, chasing my fingers, and I feel her walls clench around them immediately, hot and slick and furious for it.
"Uh-uh." I press my palm flat against her mound, pinning her down against my lap, holding her still from the outside. "What did I say? Once. And still."
"I can't be still when you do that," she pants, her head lolling against my collarbone. "You know what your fingers do to me."
"I do. That's why I use them." I curl them once, slow, dragging my fingertips along that soft ridged spot inside her, and her whole body jerks and then fights itself back into stillness, trembling with the effort. "Better. Sit there and take it."
The commercial drones on about car insurance and I finger my wife in our dark living room, unhurried, my arm banded across her stomach so she can't buck, can't roll her hips, can't do anything but sit in my lap and be touched exactly the way I decide. I add a third finger and she whimpers, her hand flying to grip my forearm, nails digging into my skin.
"Words, Marta. What's the rule?"
"Hands stay where you put them." She moves her hand back to the cushion, fist closing on nothing.
"And?"
"Don't come." Her voice cracks. "God, don't let me come."
"No. Not yet." I work her faster now, the wet sound of her filling the room under the TV, obscene and loud. She's soaked past the point of slickness, dripping down onto my thigh, and I can feel it pooling against my skin. "But you're close again, aren't you. I can feel it. You're sucking my fingers in like you're starving."
"I am starving," she sobs. "You've left me on the edge four times. Four. My whole body hurts."
"Good. That means it's working." I feel the flutter start, that telltale ripple high in her walls, her breath going to those broken little pieces I know by heart, her thighs beginning to shake on either side of my hand. I let her climb. I let her get louder. I let her toes curl and her spine arch and her voice climb to that keening note.
Then I pull my fingers out and hold them up, glistening, while she cries into the dark.
"You had them in your lap for forty seconds and you nearly came. You're getting dangerous, wife." I paint her own wetness slowly across her lower lip and she shudders, licking it off, and I feel her swallow hard.
"I hate this show," she whispers. "I hate commercials. I hate you."
"Say it nicer."
"I hate you, sir." It comes out honeyed and broken and shameless, and my cock jumps against her ass hard enough that she feels it and laughs, wet and wicked. "There it is. I felt that. You like it when I say that."
"I like it when you mean it."
"I mean everything right now. I'd mean anything. I'd get on the floor and bark if you asked."
"I'm not going to ask." I bring my fingers, the same ones, back down and rest them against her clit, no motion at all, just a warm heavy point of pressure, and she moans low in her chest. "I'm going to make you sit here, full of my hands, empty of everything else, and wait for the next break."
The second commercial is an eternity. She squirms in my lap by millimeters, tiny careful shifts of her hips that she thinks I can't feel, her wetness smearing over my thigh. My other hand stays flat on her belly and I feel every flutter of it, every clench of hunger underneath the softness she tried to hide. I lean my mouth to her ear.
"Do you feel how soft this is? How much there is of you to hold?" I press my fingers in, just slightly, claiming the flesh. "I think about this stomach when I'm at work. I think about it more than I should admit out loud."
"You have a strange idea of reassurance."
"I have an honest one. Is it working?"
"Yes," she admits, small. "It's working. It's been working all night. I believe you. I believe you so much that I can barely stand it, and it's making everything worse, because now I'm not just desperate, I'm desperate and I feel beautiful and I want you to ruin me about it."
The second commercial hits and I don't make her wait this time. I shove two fingers back into her and grind the heel of my palm against her clit and she cries out loud enough that I glance at the window, reflexive, and her laugh at that is ragged and delighted.
"Nobody can hear you. Keep going."
"I'm going to be loud. I'm going to be so loud when you finally own me. I want the neighbors to know exactly what you do to me."
I pump into her, fast now, cruel, my fingers curling hard with every stroke, and she comes apart fast, the fourth edge arriving in under a minute, her thighs clamping around my wrist, her hips finally bucking free because I've stopped holding her down, because I want to watch her fall.
"Right there," I murmur. "That's it. Stay right on it. Don't go over."
"I'm on it. I'm on it, I'm on it," she chants, breathless, shaking, her body balanced on the razor point I've been keeping her on all night.
And I take my hand away.
She screams into the cushion of the couch arm, actually turns her head and bites down on it, and her whole body shudders through the empty aftershocks of an orgasm that never landed, and when she lifts her head her mascara has smudged and her curls are stuck to her temple and she looks absolutely destroyed.
"I've never wanted anything the way I want you right now," she says, and it's not begging anymore. It's a fact, stated flat, like a woman reporting the weather.
"I know." I bring my soaked fingers to her mouth and she suckles them clean without being told, her tongue soft and thorough around them, and I watch her do it and feel the last of my discipline thinning to paper. "Here's what's next. You're going to stand up."
She blinks. "Stand up?"
"Stand up and bend over the arm of the couch. Legs apart. That's the position you're going to be in when I finally give you what's yours." I lift her off my lap and set her on her feet, and her legs wobble and I steady her with a hand on her hip, and I can see the hope and the terror fighting on her face.
"Is this it? Are you finally breaking?"
I look at her, bent over the couch arm, dripping, marked on both thighs, trembling, and I pull my ring off my right hand just to flip it back around and look at it shine.
"No," I say. "This is the view. This is what I get to look at while I tell you how the rest of the night goes." I drag one fingertip down the center of her, from her clit back to her soaked entrance, featherlight, and she moans like the touch is electric. "But it's getting close. I can feel my control going, and when it goes, wife, you had better be holding onto something."
I pull her upright by the shoulder and turn her to face me.
"New idea. You're going to undress me. Slowly."
"But you're already..."
I pick my tee off the floor and pull it back on, and her laugh comes out ragged. "Cruel. You're cruel." Her hands find the hem anyway, dragging the cotton up my stomach inch by inch, her knuckles grazing the skin above my waistband.
"Slower."
"You're punishing yourself," she whispers, baring my chest, her fingertips tracing my ribs like they're something holy. "You're making me touch you, and you're the one dying."
The tee drops. Her mouth presses to my sternum, open and hot, and my breath leaves me in a rough gust that betrays everything. She smiles against my skin. "There it is."
I grip her hair and pull her head back, and her grin goes soft and drunk. "Not so fast. You don't get to taste me for free. Not tonight."
"What do I have to do?"
"Beg. Ask me for permission like you mean it. Tell me what you want and why you deserve it."
Her throat moves under my ring as she swallows. "Please let me put my mouth on you. Please, sir. I've been good all night. I held still, I kept my legs open, I took every denial without closing up once. I want to make you feel half of what you've made me feel."
"That's a start." I drag the head of my cock along her bare hip, teasing, and her whole body leans toward it like a compass needle. "Go on. Louder."
"Please let me suck your cock. I need it in my mouth, I need to feel you getting close because of my tongue. I want you so deep I can't talk. Please, baby, please let me."
"Wet eyes, dirty mouth, still my polite girl." I release her hair and step back one deliberate pace. "On your knees. Rings on."
She drops fast, no grace left, just hunger, her knees hitting the rug with a thud I feel in my chest. Her hands hover at her thighs, waiting, palms up, wedding gold and engagement diamond catching the lamplight.
"Touch me."
Her fingers close around my shaft and her exhale shivers out of her. She leans in and presses her lips to the head, soft, open-mouthed, and the heat of her breath alone makes my thigh jump. She feels it. Her eyes flick up, shining and triumphant, and I know exactly what she's thinking.
"Careful, wife," I say, fisting her curls. "You've almost got me."
"Almost," she whispers against me, and takes me into her mouth, slow, slow, all the way down, while my control sits there on the edge with her, waiting to see which of us breaks first.