I carried her to the bath and washed her clean with my dirty hands.
In spite of my thoughts, my desires, I could tell I said something wrong when she tried to leave before dinner and only barely cajoled her into staying for a meal.
I lost all of my usual finesse with this woman; the charm I counted on seemed to have no effect.
She was close-lipped and distant, but I managed to wrestle small bits of information out of her.
She didn't trust me, or expect much from me, but I meant to change that.
I had her again, taking her on the table with dessert.
I shouldn't have. I knew it. I'd used her roughly her first time, but she swore she wasn't too sore, and I didn't have the self-control to keep from slaking my thirst with her luscious body a second time.
I kissed the rope marks on her wrists. "I love seeing this on you," I spoke against her skin, voice thick with something far stronger than mere desire.
I pushed her back flat against the surface of the table, spreading her legs wide.
I moved between her legs, my c**k a whisper from her entrance.
"Look at me," I commanded. When her eyes met mine, I continued, "Watch me. I'll punish you every time you look away from me when I'm inside of you."
She nodded, lips trembling, pale eyes steady and relentless, claiming pieces of my soul with but a look.
"Ask me for it," I ordered, stroking myself.
"Please, Mr. Cavendish, f**k me."
I obliged, pushing into her roughly.
I couldn't contain a deep groan as I began to thrust in earnest.
"Does it hurt?" I asked without slowing.
"It's perfect," she moaned.
Even after we'd finished, I stayed inside of her, carrying her up to my room while I bounced her on my insatiable cock.
"Let me know if you reach your limit," I told her roughly when I'd carried her back to my room. I still held her, still buried deep. "You should be sore and tender after your first time. I should be considerate and let your body recover."
"Please, don't."
That nearly undid me, combined with her needy tone.
"You want me to finish you like this, standing up and impaled on my cock?" I asked, anchoring her to me as I worked her up and down my stiff length.
"Y-yes please. Oh, yes."
She was on the edge, and I was right there with her when I clipped, "Come, Bianca."
She fell apart, and I fell with her.
I stayed up all night.
I'd worn her out, and she slept like a baby. I'd worn myself out, and somehow it wasn't enough. I wanted, needed more.
I left the bathroom light on, door open, and left the room illuminated enough to watch her, touch her, and stare at the ceiling, wondering what the hell I was going to do.
This, this was what my agnostic mind pictured the spiritual mind feeling when it attended confession. A leaking out of all that was bad and a flowing back in, a joyful inhalation, of the most substantial life-sustaining nourishment.
So much of this ritual had become a habit; one that I knew was designed in part to avoid intimacy. If our bodies were temples, the things I did to my subs were meant as sacrilege.
This was not that.
This was beyond the ritual, beyond the habit. I had wallowed in her, basking, reveling, and in my revelry, I had slaked beyond my physical thirst and delved into another need entirely.
This was different.
This was intimacy. This was sacred.
I couldn't get enough. I couldn't stop, even when I knew it should be enough, that I was overusing her unused body.
Somehow, I knew, just knew, deep in my gut, where certainties held the most sway, that I would never have enough of her.
I was lost. I was found.
I, James Cavendish, unrepentant dominant, sexual deviant, and prolific slut for more years than I cared to count, was in love.
I'd taken her virgin body, but just as surely, she'd taken my virgin heart.
CHAPTER FIVE
MY DESPAIR
PRESENT
To believe in that perfect love, and your whole life know that it isn't for you, that what you've been shaped into makes it fundamentally impossible, then one day you blink, and there it is, someone so perfectly formed to complement your own complicated needs.
It was heady, a rush like nothing else.
And like all highs, the low was more than its match, a despair so harsh, the teeth it sunk in me so jagged and sharp it had my breath dragging in and out like it was a physical affliction that ailed me.
I bent over her sleeping form, waiting for her to wake up.
Even I couldn't have said at first if I was merely holding vigil or outright praying, but it was a fact that that is exactly what it turned into.
It brought to mind something Tristan had said to me once, just after his rehab days, as he'd been coming to terms with the things he'd lost, and I hadn't been able to hide my surprise about his newfound need for spirituality.
'I get that it's not for everybody, but it's helping me,' he'd explained. 'God doesn't need us, James. You don't have to believe in him to keep him relevant. That's not the issue. We need him. Listen, I'm not saying I have all of the answers, but I have enough to take it a day at a time.
I have lost so much, and I have only myself to blame for it. I could destroy myself with the guilt of that. Trust me, I have that inside of me. But by some miracle, I did not do that, instead, I opened my heart and my arms and begged for help, and that's when I realized: God doesn't need us, but when we need him, no matter what we've done, how far we've fallen, or how long it takes us to find him, he's still there for us.'
At thirty, bent over with the weight of my heavy burdens, more exhausted and weary than I'd ever been, taking up residence on an uncomfortable chair in a Vegas hospital, for the first time in my life, feeling wretched and despairing, I opened my heart and arms and found some small bit of peace as I waited through the hardest hours of my life.
CHAPTER SIX
MY MADNESS
PAST
I felt so stripped of every normal, rational part of me with her that it was almost unpleasant at first.
Like air on a fresh wound.
I had so little control of myself where she was concerned. It was madness like I'd never known. Trembling urgency. Crippling desperation. Undiluted frenzy. Savage abandon.
It was an alien feeling, and I wondered sometimes why I didn't fight it. Why I didn't withdraw from it, why I never even considered staying away.
I couldn't quite believe how much I'd lost it, couldn't understand this total upheaval of who I was, this assault on my peace of mind, and most of all, couldn't comprehend how I could love it, crave it, need it so.