Deep End

LUKAS’S ROOM IS STILL IMMACULATE. I INSPECT IT AFTER HE turns on the bedside lamp, and study the military neatness, unsurprised to note the presence of a headboard and the lack of navy sheets. He sits at his desk, and I ponder shuffling his books out of alphabetical order, just to make a forehead vein twitch.

“So, is the bed here just for the sex, or do you actually sleep on it?”

He pulls me into his lap, unamused. I noticed that he has turned on his desktop.

“Are we working on the bio project?” I ask, angling my knees into his spread legs.

His lips twitch, but he doesn’t reply. Instead he strokes up and down my thigh, presses one soft kiss and a less-than-soft bite into my throat, and when I shiver, he takes his hands away and begins typing.

His healthcare portal is the same as mine. He clicks through a handful of lab results, and I lean toward the screen.

“Okay?” he asks once I’m done.

“Okay,” I reply. I want it to be like last time: my mind wiped, and my body on fire.

Lukas takes my chin between his index and thumb. “After,” he starts. “Don’t just leave.”

My brow wrinkles.

“Wake me up if you need to. But don’t leave without saying anything.”

There are so many objections I could raise. None seems important, though. “Okay,” I say, and after that I hold my breath, ready to be once again reminded of how in control he can be.

“You’re so good at doing what I ask you, aren’t you?”

I nod eagerly, bracing. But Lukas just kisses me lightly on the mouth, so sweet and gentle that his hand slips around my inner thigh almost undetected. He parts my legs, shifts me deeper into his lap. Strokes me lightly, just outside my underwear.

I can’t hold in a needy whimper. His knuckles moving under the fabric of my skirt are unspeakably dirty, and the second he finds me wet, his tongue clicks, like I’m exactly what he expected and also—

“Fucking out of this world,” he rumbles against my throat. His middle finger begins rubbing, and I let out a grateful, pleading exhale. Thank god he’s not making me wait, I tell myself. Thirteen minutes later, I’m still on the edge, and the clock on the monitor laughs at me.

It starts when Lukas pulls down my top none too gently and tells me, “Your tits are spectacular—has anyone told you?”

Something pleased and proud grows inside me. I shake my head.

“What about your idiot ex?” he asks with a frown.

He wasn’t an idiot, I want to protest, but there’s a time and a place to defend a guy who’s in love with someone else. I shake my head again.

Lukas is bewildered. Angry. “I can’t wrap my head around it, Scarlett,” he says, touching my nipple and my clit at the same time, both grazes, both promising more. “He had a treasure and he just . . .” He sounds like he’d like to take it out on someone, but it doesn’t occur to me who that someone will be until his lips curve. “I despise him. I should just be grateful, though. If he wasn’t a world-class asshole, I wouldn’t be able to do this—”

He pinches one of my nipples so hard, I forget how to breathe. Then his finger circles around my clit until I can get the stimulation I need, and—

“You love it, don’t you?”

He twists my nipple, and I come for the first time. He bites the side of my breasts, and—the second. The third happens a little later, when he starts sucking on my puffy, achy peaks, his middle finger knuckle deep inside my cunt. After that . . . it doesn’t matter anymore, and not much is required of me. If I wriggle in his arms, if my ass rubs against his erection, he’ll still me with his teeth and a stern word, his hand heavy against my belly. All I need to do is take the pleasure. Do as I’m told. Listen to the way he whispers soft commands into my ear, like Just one more and You can do it and fragments of sentences that include words like perfect, and just for me, and beautiful tears.

He kisses the corners of my eyes, licking away this delicious pain he is giving. I’ve never felt so hollow. “Please,” I beg. I’m a mess of quivers and aftershocks, trying to burrow into him. His arms and voice are the only things holding me together.

“Not yet,” he says, kind and firm and everything I’ve ever craved. I just didn’t know that someone’s voice could be at once tender and cruel-edged. “You can take some more. My good girl.”

He’s never wrong, not once, and after a while I’m sure that he knows my body better than I do, and what he doesn’t know he’ll teach himself. This time, when he lays me on his bed, he takes off all my clothes. He’s patient with them, patient with how boneless and lazy I am, sprawled, looking up with an awestruck smile, too orgasmed out to help. He folds my skirt, and my top, and even my bra, but tosses my panties somewhere to the back of the room, and it’s so un-Lukas of him, I cannot help the giggle bubbling out of me. “That’s littering and theft.”

He takes off his T-shirt. His pants. “In Sweden you’d be arrested and sentenced to hard time for it.” He lowers himself on top of me, a blanket of heat and flesh, and adds into the soft skin behind my ear, “For littering, I mean.”

I didn’t expect to laugh with him. Sex was fun and carefree with Josh, but I always assumed it to be a by-product of being in love with one’s partner. And yet here I am, giggling my amusement into the throat of a man who, for all I know, might still be in love with another woman.

He breathes me in. Tells me how good I feel under him. Soft. Pretty—a ridiculous word that has me arching closer. “I should stretch you out with my fingers, before,” he says, the rumble of his chest vibrating against my breast. “How I usually do it. Barest courtesy. But with you, I’m not going to. I’m going to make you take me without.”

I shiver. Let him spread me out and gasp at the shock of it. Diving and flexibility go hand in hand, but I feel it in my muscles, the way he pins each of my thighs to the sides, palms hooking under my knees. The strain of forcing my hips to stay that wide open for him.

“So obedient,” he tells me, pleased, and I smile, the pleasure of his praise warming me from deep within. He dips his fingers in the absolute mess between my legs, letting out a breath that’s followed by a foreign, melodic word, and uses it to slick himself.

I consider reaching out. Being a more active participant. But with Lukas, the rules under which I’ve operated most of my life don’t hold true. I lie back, watch him watch me, feel the heavy weight of his cock on my pubic bone, as he uses the palm of his hand to press the underside of it into my abdomen, my cunt. I’m light. I’m eager. I’m ready, because he said so. Malleable.

Floating.

I once read somewhere that power-exchange sex is a farce. Scenes and plays. Scripted shit. Acting. To me, though, this buoyant feeling of soaring is the definition of honesty. Knowing that he’s in charge, my wrists pinned above my head by his hand, I can be simple. Artless. My true self, away from blame and judgment.

“Look at you.” Lukas presses a sliding kiss into my lower lip, adjusts himself with a hand between our bodies. “A fucking dream.” His hips push, and after a few tries, the round head of his cock slips inside me.

He lets out a hot gasp, somewhere around my cheekbone.

My breath hitches as I tip back my neck.

He’s inside a couple of inches, but there’s nowhere else to go. “Relax,” he orders. I nod. Make myself pliant. He thrusts again and advances, just a little. The burn of the stretch is terrible. Everything I ever wanted. “Deep breaths, Scarlett.”

We make some progress. I struggle. Lukas watches my face for every second of it, drinking in my bitten lips and my choppy breathing and the winces that slip out of me.

“Too much?” he asks.

I nod, a little desperately.

He halts, pulling out a bit. Instant panic spreads through my stomach. I didn’t say stop. I didn’t ask him to stop. We agreed that he wouldn’t—

“That’s too bad,” he says, his voice at once mean and fond, like he contains every multitude I’ll ever need. “Since you’ll take what I fucking give you.” He rocks back inside, knocking any sense of self out of me. My entire body tightens around him, around his words, and I think that maybe I’m—“Oh, sweetheart. Already? Just from this?”

A few contractions. Low-pitched laughter. He manages to get farther in, and there is no space, but he’s making it, creating something that wasn’t there.

“Lukas,” I exhale.

“I know, baby.” His voice is taut, like being that hard and taking it that slow is difficult for him, too. He bends down to kiss me, open mouthed and dirty. “What did I say, Scarlett? Deep breaths.”

I don’t think he ever gets all the way in, but he starts thrusting anyway, and I’m not sure what I like best about it. His exhale, loud in my ear. The tinge of hurt that makes the pleasure that much sharper. The rhythm, unhurried but purposeful.

I want to touch him, bury my nails in his shoulders, but he’s holding my wrists above my head, and all I can do is feel him move inside me, feet limply bouncing with every thrust, blindly biting into his jaw as I feel a surge of heat low in my belly.

I come once, like that, slow contractions that are so good, they almost hurt. If he, we, this was normal, I’d assume that this would be it. Faster thrusts, a choked grunt, Lukas’s orgasm, the end. But he likes to dictate when things start and when they end. He kisses, then licks the tear spilling out of my eye, tells me how tight and good my cunt feels to him. He throbs inside me but doesn’t yet come. Instead he tells me, “A little more. You have to take a little more, okay?” and then he’s impossibly deeper and I’m arching my chest and coming again, so hard that on the tail end of it I hear music in my head. Voices. Bells.

Except they’re not in my head.

“Abysmal timing,” Lukas groans before closing his teeth around my collarbone. “Coming home while I’m having the best fuck of my life.”

His roommates. They’re back from the party.

Are we going to stop? God, no. I want to whine. I do whine.

“Can you be quiet?”

He wouldn’t believe a lie, so I shake my head.

His smile twitches. “We’re gonna have to train you to come a bit more silently, Scarlett. In the meantime.” His hand wraps around my mouth like last time, and my brain swims. Yes. Yes. Is it sick that I like it this much, knowing he controls my ability to breathe and scream? “I’m going to fuck you for real now, okay? All the way?”

I nod, my eyes a supplicating yes, and that’s when I realize how little it would have taken him to just shove in through my muscles from the very start. He lets out a hiss of pure, undiluted pleasure, so deep my legs tremble. I feel invaded beyond comprehension, and wish I could tell him the truth, that this is something I’ve wanted since before I could put my desires into words.

“I knew you could do it,” he growls in my ear, and that’s enough for me to come again, his praise and his fingers wrapped around my cheeks and the sound of him bottoming out, hips slapping against mine. Lukas, I try to say against his palm, but I’m lightheaded and I cannot think about anything but him, him, him.

One thrust forward and his muscles tense aggressively, like he’s fighting his own orgasm, but he freezes. His face twists. When he comes, he lets go of my wrists and scoops me up, holds me even closer, and none of the rough things he chants in my ear are in English—except for my name.

It takes centuries for my heart to go back to normal. Hasan and Kyle talk as they make their way upstairs. Doors opening and shutting, a hushed phone call, running water mark the passage of time. I burrow under Lukas, his arms that won’t unwrap, my cooling sweat and labored breath mirrored in him. Blood that beats steadily against mine. I could fall asleep. I could stay here forever.

When he finally rises on his palms, he looks like I feel: wobbly, shell-shocked. A little humbled. We look at each other with the vague surprise of two people who have had sex before, good sex. And yet.

“Okay?” he asks me, deep, raspy. I should say something witty—That’s my line—because he looks undone. But what feels natural is reaching up, cupping his face, lingering until he turns his head to press a hot kiss against my palm.

It hurts a little when he pulls out. Lukas notices in the frown of my brows, the twist of my face, but this time he soothes me, checks my wrists for bruises, runs his mouth along them. “Relax.” He folds over to kiss my abdomen, once, sweet. One of his hands finds mine, palm to palm. “Deep breaths.”

There is a bathroom attached to his room. I lie on the bed while he disappears inside. The faucet runs, and he comes back with a washcloth that he wipes across my cheeks. They feel ravaged, sticky with tears, and the warmth is a balm.

He spreads my legs gently, but I wince anyway. He comforts me with a hushed, foreign word, but what he finds there has him breathing deeper and putting the washcloth aside, mostly unused.

He stares and stares, and I try to imagine what he’s seeing. When he’s looked his fill, he closes my legs together again, as if to trap it there. “Will you spend the night?” A hoarse rumble—a request, this time. How easy it is, to transition from the animals we can be into the frequency of civilization. From hierarchy to equals.

“I would like to, yes.”

He almost smiles. I almost do, too. It’s so easy, slipping under the duvet, burying my face into his neck, savoring his sigh of relief as I settle in his arms. He surrounds me, contains me, presses me into himself, like he needs to hold me as much as I need to be held.

I should pee. Bathroom’s right there. It’s just so warm, here with Lukas, and there’s so little peer-reviewed evidence supporting a link between peeing after sex and UTIs. There should be more studies investigating the matter. I could do a study.

And a few minutes later, in the middle of plotting it, I fall asleep.