As the lift rises, the sound of her laughter fills it.
Chapter Twenty-Five
DAN
Her office could’ve belonged to anyone. Bar the certificates on the wall bearing her name, nothing denoted that she spent most of her week there. No photos from home, no potted plants, not even tennis shoes for the commute.
We sit on compact leather sofas almost at right angles to the other, chatting with inconsequence. As we do so, I realise I hadn’t kissed her in greeting. Hadn’t taken her in my arms. Crowded her space. In fact, I hadn’t laid a finger on her.And that was wrong.
As our small talk petered to an end, an awkward silence begins to grow. Then lengthen. And consume. Louise excuses herself to go to the bathroom.
While Louise was up to whatever in the bathroom, I walk to the window, enjoying the view over the Thames. The sun is setting, though from the grey, dreary skies, it’s almost hard to tell. I have a sudden urge—a longing—to feel the heat on my skin. Maybe I need a holiday, a break from everything. Fleeting images filter through my head; Louise draped across a monstrous bed, swathed in white linen, the bottom half of her bikini discarded on the floor as I push the other half up over her chest. She’d be sun warmed, sweat glistening, and sugar-sand coated. Only, as my eyes rise along her body, I can’t picture her face. I can only see Belle.
Collapsing back into a chair in front of the desk, I run a hand down my face as my mind slips unbidden to our very first holiday. It had been a few months after our relationship had begun.Was it Tenerife or Ibiza?The crux of my thoughts don’t so much centre on the country, but the destination we’d reached in that very bed. It has been a defining moment—crystalline, if you will. We were already fucking—her legs wrapped around my waist as I’d pounded her into the mattress—when she’d opened her eyes and whispered something I couldn’t quite comprehend.
‘Hit me.’
The bed had moved away from the wall because we’d been fucking so hard, but I did as I thought I should. One hand on the headboard, I’d snaked the other under her arse, bringing my hips into her harder still.
She’d moaned, hands balled into fists full of pillow at her head. But this time, she’d closed her eyes and turned her head to one side. ‘Hit me,’ she’d repeated through gritted teeth. ‘Properly. Do it now.’
I’d pulled out a little, drawing back and trying to understand, to will her words to make sense. She’d opened her eyes and looked at me then, honesty and truth spilling, along with one salty tear.
‘I want you to hit me.’ She lifted my hand to her cheek. ‘I want you tomake me hurt.’
I couldn’t be sure if I’d drawn back my arm, or if Belle had pushed it for me. Drawing it back further without the presence of my brain, I’d brought it back down and across her face with reasonable haste.
Her moan amplified through the room, her torso twisting and rising from the bed. I felt conflicted. Captivated by her writhing.
Pulled under by the pulsing motion gripping my cock.
Undone by her hot intake of breath.
Fascinated and revolted by the instant red bloom on her face.
You don’t hit girls.The phrase had echoed through my head even as my hips had driven hard, making her cry out again.
And so it had begun—an incline? A decline?—to debauchery. Hard and fast fucks in restaurant bathrooms. Belle on her knees in grim alleyways with a mouthful of my dick. Ours became a gradual slide into depravity until that kind of sex became our default mode. Sex and violence went hand in hand, and it was a very slippery slope.
Belle is the daughter of someone quite famous, her father an actor who’d turned to politics the year she was born. She’d grown up in the limelight, a nation’s darling. It’s undoubtedly one of the reasons she is so spoiled. She’d been a dancer once, too—a good one. Though lacking in height to be truly successful, she’d always kept a dancer’s poise, which was fun. I’d contort her body while she’d twisted my mind because it had taken me years of munches and parties to realise I was the principal in a ballet she’d almost solely choreographed. A ballet for one.
I’d bought the club at her encouragement, branching out from property development. Times were good. The front house already brought in enough to make it a sound investment, adding the members-only area in the back made it even more so. The days before Grey and his red room were heady ones, and we were trailblazers of sorts. It had seemed only natural for us to begin playing there. Natural and certainly much more practical after one of the tabloids had threatened to print pictures of a somewhat compromised Belle. I’d never found out how much it’d cost her dear old dad to buy those images. A close call, though privately, I’ve always thought Belle believed it as some great adventure.
So the club provided security, if not anonymity. A place to screw with an audience if one at all cared.
The membership list quickly filled, and Friday parties became all the rage. Members paid highly for the privilege—some came for the cabaret and some purely to play. Some wore elaborate outfits while others walked around naked with collared slaves. But by the end of each Friday evening, the great social equaliser of nakedness became king, and most took part in some kind of fucking. Minds, orifices; that kind of thing.
It was the perfect setup for us, or so it had seemed, and we’d agreed to play exclusively within the realms of the club. As time wore on, I saw fit to implement a couple of rules.
Firstly, no fucking without the knowledge of the other. Or to put it into words Belle understood, if she wanted to fuck someone, my permission had to be sought. She wanted to be dominated, and I liked to think I alone fulfilled that role. In that vein, she had to ask.Usually on her knees.I’m not at all sure how we’d strayed from monogamy, and it would no doubt sound strange to others, but for me, trust was the central spoke from which our marriage spun.
My second rule was to protect Belle from herself. God knows she needed the help. I’ve known the thrill of having sex in public spaces, the kick of excitement. The thrill and tension rooted deep in your belly. Will you be caught? Will you be heard? Exposed? That thrill for me had waned shortly after we had been exposed.Those damned photographs.But I’d done it for Belle—fucked her in spaces not made for sex, though the theory and the reality were different for me. It was never about an audience, or so I’d thought. In fact, an audience, I’d later found, put me off. But Belle was so impulsive. And spoiled. She had to be watched out for.
Following the clubs fit out, the flat above had been tailored for that very use. Private parties above a members-only club? An exclusivity to beat all. Those invited often looked like they’d died and were headed for sadistic heaven. A night with either Dan or Belle.Sometimes both.
Am I old fashioned? Belle, at least, began to think so. Perhaps that was when things started to go wrong.
Small transgressions at first, those I forced myself to believe I could live with. Swallowing the bitter pill and trying for adjustments in attitude. Following her punishment, of course. Difficult when I’d walked into the club unexpectedly some time following our honeymoon. She’d been naked and the centre of attention in a little bukkake. It had been more difficult still when she’d stepped from that same centre covered in cum.
