The affair is not a gentle thing. It is not candlelight and whispered endearments. It is intensity and edge and the honesty that surfaces when two people have dispensed with pretense entirely.
He learns exactly what undoes me with the focused efficiency he applies to everything, and I find I’m not remotely embarrassed by this, which tells me something about how far gone I already am.
On a Thursday evening, he has me pressed against the length of his desk, his voice low at my ear, deliberate in the register he uses when the answer matters to him. His hand is on my throat—not squeezing, but claiming. “Say you’ll keep this between us.”
Not a request, not quite an order, something in between.
Ropes burn around my wrists and ankles, each bound to part of his desk as I lean back to accommodate the rope. It’s a tight pose, but I like it. I am naked and utterly at his mercy. It’s been a long time since I’ve played like this, but I never added interrogationor conversation into rope play before, and the combination is doing something interesting to my subspaced brain.
“I will,” I pant, still close to my climax. He’s halfway in me, and I want the rest of him. I’d say whatever he wanted to get that.
“Promise me,” he grits out, and his hand tightens, and the city lights swim at the edges of my vision. He gives me another inch.
“I promise,” I tell him, and I mean it completely.
He pulls back just enough to look at my face, and something moves through his expression beneath the satisfaction. Something heavier, something that looks almost like a relief. “Good. The secret will keep you safe,” he says quietly, like he’s saying it to himself, and then doesn’t say anything else for a while, and I stop thinking about words altogether the moment he gives me what I want.
He arches back, his cock digging into me just right. There’s sweat on his brow now—we’ve been at this particular game for a while. I didn’t know he wanted to take things this far, but I like it.
I like it a lot.
He bends forward just enough to take my nipple between his teeth as he fucks me in long, slow strokes. Heat flushes through me, concentrating in my middle. This won’t get me off—we both know it. But he’s playing my body like an instrument, and I don’t have it in me to complain.
I’m too lit up. Too far gone.
“I like you like this,” he snarls around my nipple. “Helpless. My private fuck toy.”
“Yours. Only yours,” I groan.
Was that too far?
He releases my nipple and loosens my leg restraints, then brings my shaking legs around his waist. “They stay there, pet.”
I don’t know how I can keep them around his waist when they’re so weak, but I’ll try.
Then he wraps his arms around me, hands under my ass, which pulls my arms back harder. I can’t touch him, and it’s killing me. But then he adjusts the angle, and my arms are the last thing on my mind.
I come in two strokes. He comes in ten.
Afterward, I lie still in the quiet of his office and stare at the ceiling and let the evening settle. He said it so naturally, woven into everything else, and at the time I’d let it wash over me. But now, in the stillness, the specific shape of his words surfaces and stays.
Not keep us safe. Not keep this safe.
The secret will keep you safe.
I’ve worked closely enough with him to know that every word he chooses is the exact word he intended, and safe is a word with a specific shape, and that shape implies something specific is not safe, or that something is threatening it, or both.
He’s a private man with a complicated life, and the need for secrecy has a hundred practical explanations. It’s part of the intensity he brings to everything, the way he holds things close.
I don’t blame him for wanting privacy.
But keep me safe? Safe from what, exactly?
Pavel is already back at his desk, jacket on, a document open in front of him as though the last hour was simply something that needed attending to. I sit up, reach for my dress, and locate my professional composure, which has been through a considerable amount at this point and deserves some kind of commendation.
“I should head out.”
He looks at me with those pale, careful eyes. “For the night?”
