“Valerie,” he said. His voice had shifted into something I had begun to recognize—a tone that felt neither casual nor angry but weighted with intention. Formal, almost. The way a minister might speak during a service. “Are you wearing panties under your nightgown?”
The question sent a bolt of heat through me so intense that I felt my inner thighs go slick. He already knew the answer. He’d told me the answer, and enforced it, and watched me perform it, literally. But he wanted to make me say it—making me participate in the ritual of my own submission, the way Kevin had made Stacy participate by spreading her own cheeks.
“No, sir,” I whispered.
“Why not?”
My breathing had gone ragged, shallow little pulls of air that didn’t seem to reach my lungs. I could feel the wetness gathering between my legs—fresh, immediate, summoned by nothing more than his questions and the terrible vulnerability of standing before him in a nightgown that hid nothing.
“Because you told me not to, sir.” The words came out thin and trembling.
“That’s right.” His thumb continued its slow circle on my wrist. “And why did I tell you that?”
I swallowed. My mouth had gone dry even as everything below my waist went liquid. “Because… because a wife’s body should be accessible to her husband. At night. When she’s in bed with him.”
“Accessible,” Chris repeated, as if tasting the word. “Accessible for what?”
Oh, God.My face blazed. I could feel the flush spreading down my throat, across my chest, visible even through the sheer white fabric. Between my legs, the wetness was unmistakable now—I could feel it on my inner thighs, could feel the cool air of the bedroom meeting the slickness there, and I knew that if Chris looked down—if he lifted the hem of this gossamer nothing of a nightgown even an inch—he would see everything.
“For… for whatever you decide, sir.” My voice cracked on the last word. “For your hands. For… for discipline. For… for you to… to take me. However you want.”
Something shifted in Chris’s eyes. That look of wonder again—the one I’d seen earlier, when I’d told him about the ceremony,about Stacy, about what had aroused me most. As if my halting, mortified obedience was more beautiful to him than any polished performance could ever be.
He pulled me closer by the wrist—gently, but with enough force that I had to take a step forward, then another, until I stood between his parted knees. His other hand found the hem of my nightgown.
The fabric rose under his fingers like it weighed nothing at all, because it did weigh nothing at all. He gathered it slowly, his knuckles grazing the outside of my thigh as the gossamer cotton climbed—past mid-thigh, past the point where the cool air told me everything was about to be exposed, past my waist. I made a small, strangled sound in my throat, but I didn’t move. I didn’t try to stop him.
His hand slid beneath the lifted fabric and cupped me.
Just… held me. His broad palm pressed against my mound, his fingers curving gently between my legs, cradling the swollen, slippery mess I’d become with a tenderness that made my knees nearly buckle. He didn’t rub. Didn’t press. Didn’t seek out my clit or push inside me. He simply held my pussy in his hand the way someone might hold a small bird—with infinite care, as if he were protecting something fragile and trembling.
It seemed unbearable.
A whimper climbed my throat. My hips twitched forward of their own accord, trying to grind against his palm, to create the friction my body was screaming for. But his hand didn’t respond. It stayed exactly where it was—warm and steady and impossibly, maddeningly gentle against my soaking flesh.
“Chris,” I breathed. “Please… sir… I need…”
“I know what you need.” His voice was calm. Almost meditative. His thumb shifted—the barest movement, a fraction of an inch—and even that tiny adjustment against my outer lips made me gasp. “But you’re not going to get it tonight, as you know. If you want it tomorrow, when you give me your anus, I need you to answer my questions more fully.”
I nodded frantically, my hands gripping his shoulders for balance. Anything. I would answer anything if it meant he would move his hand.
“And what is it called,” Chris said, his eyes holding mine with the same ceremonial steadiness, “when a husband takes his wife?”
The question hung in the air between us. I knew the answer he wanted. Notlovemaking. Notintimacy. Not any of the euphemisms I’d learned in New Modesty wellness class.
“F-fucking,” I whispered. The word felt enormous in my mouth tonight, though Chris had made me say it so many times already: obscene and electric and shameful and thrilling, all at once. My pussy clenched against his motionless palm as I said it, and I saw his jaw tighten almost imperceptibly. “It’s called fucking, sir.”
“Good girl.” His thumb moved again—just barely, a feather-light stroke along the seam of my outer lips that made my vision blur. “And what does a man call the places where a husband takes his wife?”
My breath hitched. The question was so clinical in its phrasing, so deliberate—and yet what it demanded of me was anything but clinical. Chris’s palm still cupped me, warm and maddeningly still, and I could feel my pulse beating against his fingers like a confession my body was making without my permission.
“The… the places?” I repeated, stalling, my voice barely above a breath.
“You know what I’m asking.” His thumb grazed along my seam again—that ghost of a touch that sent lightning forking through my belly. “You watched Stacy’s husband name them. You heard me name them. Now I need to hear them from your mouth.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. The words existed in my mind already, branded there in what had happened in Chris’s and my bedroom many times already. But still they sat on my tongue like hot coals—words I’d been raised to believe no decent woman would ever speak aloud, words that belonged to locker rooms and dirty movies and the kind of men my mother had warned me about.
Words that made my pussy flood against Chris’s palm the instant I thought them.
