Page 8 of The Year of Us: March

“Settle,” he whispered, petting his hand down the small of my back, his talented fingers smearing sweat around the base of my spine and lower still.

“You make this so much harder when you talk to me like that,” I said through gritted teeth.

“I know,” he replied softly in that same smooth and even tone. “You’re doing so well.”

I groaned, dropping my head into my hands. My sheets were tangled and my bed unmade, and Cory hadn’t said a single thing about the state of my apartment. He’d walked in and kissed me like he owned me, then he’d stripped us both out of our clothesand took me over his knees like that had been the plan all along. Maybe it had been his, but it was never mine.

“It’s okay, Reese,” he said next, pulling a drip of sweat down between my ass cheeks. “You’re still breathing. You’re still okay.”

I inhaled and exhaled deeply, chest expanding to full capacity with every breath. I knew if I wanted Cory to stop, he would. I didn’t need to give him a color or a special safe word. The only thing I needed to do was tell him to stop and all of this would end. For now, maybe not forever. Maybe he would pull me up onto his lap and kiss me until I didn’t want to crawl out of my skin and question everything I knew about myself and the kind of man I always thought I was.

“Do you want me to stop?” he asked.

Yes.

Maybe.

No.

NO.

“Don’t stop,” I whispered.

Cory let out a quiet laugh and tapped his fingertips against my ass. “Would it be too much to ask for you to call me Sir?”

“Probably.”

“Maybe next month then.”

And he spanked me again.

Pain radiated through me, starting in the shape of his palm and spreading to the length of his fingers, and further still. It didn’t so much hurt me physically as it did mentally. For so long, I’d associated spanking with an act of submission, one I’d been on the giving end of for years.

Back when I’d first gotten into the scene, my former mentor made sure I was on the receiving end of most things at least once, but even then the spanking had been performative. The intention was for me to know what a hand felt like versus a wooden paddle compared to a leather strap. Nothing Rich hadever done to me was meant to actually take me into subspace or even to truly push me into submission. Cory’s spankings came with real intent, and every connection of his skin against mine drove the point home. Every echo of his hand against my ass shoved me that much closer to the blank slate of a mind he wanted me to reach.

Time slowed, then stopped.

I knew my cock was hard and leaking, sandwiched between my stomach and Cory’s smooth and slender thigh. He had one hand working my ass into a frenzy, the other resting softly at the back of my neck. His fingers were tangled in my hair, but that sensation was as much a part of me as my own fingers and my own hands. He was connected to me in a way no one had been in a very long time, and that on its own was enough to send me headfirst into a panic.

“You’re thinking so terribly loud,” he whispered, voice louder than my own heartbeat. “How can we help you forget for a little while?”

“I don’t want to forget a single thing,” I answered.

Cory hummed. “No. I don’t imagine you do.”

He traced shapes across my gooseflesh-covered ass, undoubtedly waiting for my pulse to slow and my breathing to return to normal. Considering the circumstances, I worried neither would ever happen.

“I want to keep spanking you until your cock is so hard it hurts my thigh,” he said, lifting his leg and pressing it up into me. “And then I want you to put it inside of me and fuck me until you come.”

I groaned, threading my fingers into my hair and burying my face back into the sheets.

“Can you do it?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

He chuckled, a condescending sound that made me more aroused than it had any right doing. “I don’t think you understood, Reese.”

“Enlighten me.”