October 2026 – Listen Here

“Are you ready for me?”

His text glowed bright upon my screen.

I answered with a single, unimpressed word.

“Meh.”

Which was, of course, an outrageous lie.

My pulse had already taken to battering itself against my ribs like some frantic winged creature, while the rest of me had been dressed with considerably more care than my reply suggested. Black mesh crossed and clasped where it pleased, sheer stockings sheathed my legs in translucent gauze, each marked by that wonderfully indecent 1950s seam running straight down the back, and my feet were imprisoned in the highest stilettos I owned.

He did not, naturally, need to know any of this.

A lady ought to retain at least one weapon.

When his knock finally sounded at my door, I peered through the peephole and left him standing there for the space of several heartbeats, because one must not appear too eager, even when one has spent an embarrassing portion of the preceding hour arranging oneself specifically for the man presently waiting on the other side.

Only then did I retreat behind the door and open it, using the broad panel to preserve what remained of my modesty. There was no reason to scandalize the neighbors before the evening had properly begun.

He stepped inside.

I closed the door behind him.

The latch gave one discreet click.

And then, with the barrier safely between us and respectable society, I stepped out from behind it.

The cowboy stopped.

What happened next startled me far more than I care to admit.

He tore the hat from his head and cast it onto the floor.

His hat.

I had watched this man enter restaurants and place that thing upon an empty chair with greater ceremony than some men afforded heirlooms. Never tossed. Never crushed. Never abandoned carelessly.

Yet there it lay upon my floor, entirely forgotten, while his gaze traveled over me.

And something in his face changed.

It was not anger. That would have been easier to dismiss. Nor was it merely appreciation, though there was certainly enough of that to make the back of my neck prickle.

It was concentration.

The unnerving, unwavering concentration of a creature that had ceased observing and begun hunting.

For one peculiar heartbeat, every feminine instinct I possessed whispered that I had been terribly clever and ought to be very pleased with myself.

Another, considerably older instinct whispered that I had perhaps been too clever.

That may have been the first moment I realized my insolent little meh had wounded his pride.

There was scarcely time to enjoy the discovery.

He crossed the small distance between us and caught my mouth with his, all the restraint he usually carried so handsomely having apparently been discarded alongside the Stetson.

My ankles immediately betrayed me.

There is very little dignity available to a woman attempting to remain aloof while balanced upon several inches of stiletto and being kissed as though she has issued a challenge that must be answered personally. I wavered; he caught me; and suddenly the solid length of him was the only thing keeping me upright.

My back met the front door.

My chin tipped upward.

Whatever clever retort I had intended disappeared completely.

He looked rather pleased by this development.

His hand descended between us, discovering without difficulty the scandalous little suggestion of fabric that could scarcely, in good conscience, be called panties. His fingers followed their narrow lines as though inspecting precisely how much insolence I had hidden, and when they found the hooded pearl they sought, circling with maddening confidence, the sound that escaped me was far less composed than anything I would willingly confess to afterward.

My head fell against the door.

“Oh, Gods.”

There was an almost unbearable impropriety to it – the front hall, the stilettos, my beautiful stockings, his hat lying abandoned upon the floor, and my body already threatening to disgrace me before we had managed to travel more than a single foot into the house.

I was going to come on my own front doormat.

The realization arrived with such absurd clarity that some remaining fragment of my mind actually had time to consider it.

Here? Truly?

Apparently so.

My knees began surrendering their commission altogether, folding beneath me until his body against mine became less seduction than structural necessity, the only thing preventing me from sliding inelegantly down my own front door.

I no longer cared.

My mouth had fallen open against his shoulder, my breath coming apart while his fingers continued their infuriating circles, and every private muscle in me conspired to prove just how fraudulent that little meh had been. I was drawing mortifyingly close now, the crest gathering with that treacherous sweetness that makes rational thought an inconvenience, while some obstinate portion of my Inner Goddess rejoiced because surely this meant I had won. Surely I was going to come before he could stop me.

And then he stopped me.

Completely.

His hand vanished and his body withdrew, the absence of him arriving like winter, while for one bewildered second I remained against the door exactly where he had left me – stockings askew, knees unreliable, bosom panting, my entire body protesting the sudden denial with an indignation bordering upon mutiny.

I stared at him, scandalized.

He merely looked back at me with that foreboding stillness.

There was no apology in his expression, no uncertainty, not even the smugness I expected to find. He watched me attempt to gather myself, his smoldering attention moving over every incriminating detail with the cool appraisal of a hunter who had already discovered precisely how his quarry would run.

A shiver traveled the length of my spine.

I had been teasing him.

“Go to your room.”

He did not raise his voice, which was infinitely worse. The command came low and level, stripped of playfulness, and for the first time that evening I caught the faintest glimpse of the creature beneath all that cowboy civility – the dangerous edge I had apparently drawn out with one flippant response.

The sheer audacity of the man nearly restored my powers of speech.

Go to my room?

This was my house. My front door was presently holding me upright, my bedroom waited at the end of my hallway, and this towering interloper had been inside for scarcely five minutes before developing the astonishing notion that he possessed authority to send me anywhere in it.

My Inner Goddess bristled magnificently at the offense.

Unfortunately, some far more submissive creature buried beneath her indignation had already begun keening at the command, every treacherous inch of me yearning to push away from that door and go precisely where I had been told.

Absolutely not.

If he wanted obedience from me, he could damn well work for it.

So I remained there for half a heartbeat longer, still attempting to recover my balance while deciding just how much further I dared push him.

His gaze darkened.

“Now.”

Oh.

There it was – that tiny, traitorous frisson slipping down my spine even as my Inner Goddess purred her approval.

As if reluctant, I pushed myself away from the door, and only after I had taken my first unsteady step did his voice follow me.

“I have plans for you.”

I glanced back.

I should not have.

He had not moved. He merely stood beside his discarded hat, watching me with that same predatory concentration, as though allowing me the illusion of escape because we both knew perfectly well where I was going.

Then his gaze traveled over the state he had already reduced me to.

“Since this is just meh?”

I was not altogether convinced my legs possessed the structural integrity required to carry me to the bedroom. The distance had never warranted particular notice before, yet now it stretched ahead of me with the proportions of a pilgrimage, and I had no intention of allowing him the satisfaction of knowing how thoroughly he had already compromised my ability to walk.

Besides, two could contend for control, and I was trussed up for battle, after all.

So I gathered myself to my full height and walked ahead of him, letting my hips sway with considerably more insolence than necessity while my stilettos announced each step against the hardwood. Behind me came a low masculine rumble, followed by the unmistakable rustle of denim as he adjusted himself inside his jeans.

Well, that was encouraging, and my Inner Goddess positively preened.

I gave my hips another, rather more extravagant sway, privately congratulating myself upon having reclaimed the advantage.

I was, as it transpired, magnificently incorrect.

The instant we crossed into my bedroom, whatever indulgence he had afforded my performance expired. He was upon me before I had properly registered the change, turning me and sending me forward onto the mattress with such startling ease that I was reminded, rather abruptly, of the disparity between us.

He was huge; I knew this, obviously, as I had eyes. Yet knowing a man towered over me was rather different from discovering how easily he could put me where he wanted me and, more unsettling still, how little exertion it required.

That was where the first forbidden thrill lived – not merely in his size, but in the self-command governing it. He did not thrash or fumble or squander strength proving he possessed it. He simply used it, with an economy that suggested there was considerably more held in reserve.

His hands were everywhere at once – catching straps, pinching my nipples, palming my derrière, his breath scorching the vulnerable curve of my neck while all the finery I had so painstakingly arranged became gloriously misaligned beneath his attention.

Gods, every scrap of strategy abandoned me.

My hips pressed backward, grinding against the formidable length straining inside his jeans, and I found myself pleading for the very thing I had been so certain I could coyly provoke from him.

Forget the play bag. Forget whatever elaborate plan he had carried through my front door.

Just take me. Fill me. Stretch me. Use me…please.

His hand found my pearl again, and my begging dissolved beneath the first circling touch. A moan escaped into the bedding as my body answered with humiliating alacrity, particularly after the preceding week, when I had spent the better part of an hour each night coaxing myself toward even the most grudging release.

And now, after two clockwise circles – perhaps three – the treacherous creature was already preparing to surrender.

I could feel it gathering with astonishing speed, while some absurd corner of my mind spared a thought for my poor stilettos, still planted directly in the probable path of the catastrophic flood I was about to unleash. They had been expensive and were, regrettably, about to suffer for my sins, but there would be time for apologies later because I was – 

Nothing.

He stopped.

Again!!

A wounded sound escaped me as his hand retreated, leaving my body poised upon the precipice he had brought me to for the second time that evening.

“This is what bratty girls get.”

His voice came from behind me, preternaturally even.

“You get to come when I say you get to come.”

It was both command and statement, and the part of me aching to obey immediately went to war with the contrary creature who wanted to disobey merely to prove I still could.

Traitorously, my body had already chosen its allegiance.

I pushed my hips backward in search of him, offering what I considered a compelling argument for clemency, only to encounter empty air.

Then came the sound of a zipper.

Not his.

I frowned, a pout already forming upon my lips as recognition arrived.

The backpack.

Ah. The play bag I had so recently suggested we forget.

My bravado suffered its first genuine crisis.

Fabric whispered somewhere behind me, and then coral silk passed over my eyes, extinguishing the room before being secured behind my head. The blindness altered everything at once. My bedroom – my sanctuary – became an unseen expanse measured only by the mattress beneath my palms, hardwood beneath my stilettos, my own breathing, and the whereabouts of the feral man I could no longer watch.

That last part mattered more than I expected.

When I could see him, I could read the set of his shoulders, the movement of his hands, that almost imperceptible change in his face before he reached for me. Blindfolded, all of it vanished, and what remained was far more disconcerting than mere size.

His presence.

I could feel him in the room without knowing where he was.

Worse, he was perfectly content to let me wonder.

A primitive warning stirred beneath my skin.

I had wanted the predator.

It was rather different once I could no longer see whether he was stalking me.

For several seconds there was only that oppressive awareness of him somewhere behind me, while I strained to steal the smallest intelligence from my own sanctuary: the displacement of air, the faint complaint of a floorboard, a change in the cadence of his breathing.

Nothing.

He was making me wait.

And that was when I understood the menace of him.

It was not violence. It was not his height or the breadth of his hands or even the knowledge that I could not physically overpower him. It was the unfaltering self-possession of a man in no particular hurry because he already knew I was staying exactly where he had told me. 

The thought sent a current of mingled alarm and arousal through me.

Then one hand settled at the base of my head and pressed me into the mattress.

There had been no warning.

No betraying footstep.

One moment I had been searching the darkness for him; the next I was pinned beneath his palm, unable to see what he intended to do next and acutely aware that getting away would require his permission.

That atavistic warning flickered again.

And…

I grinned.

The first smack landed across my backside.

His bare hand.

Oh.

That was unexpected. Not a toy, then.

The next arrived with enough force to pull a startled cry from me, followed by another, each one blooming across already sensitized flesh while my lingerie remained askew, coral silk covered my eyes, stilettos clung stubbornly to my feet, and my earlier meh was answered one emphatic syllable at a time.

This was certainly not meh.

When his hand finally ceased, my cheeks were well-rubbed and smarting, while the damp evidence of my response upon the bedding before me made my earlier indifference increasingly indefensible.

I heard him move.

Then the air itself split behind me, followed immediately by a heavy strike across flesh his hand had so thoroughly abused.

Leather? A padded glove?

My Inner Goddess, possessing neither good judgment nor the smallest inclination toward self-preservation, practically sat up in anticipation.

The next impact carried a different weight, deeper and heavier after the sharper sting of his palm, and I arched toward it, helpless not from pain but from wanting more.

Definitely not meh.

The blindness made every sound enormous: his breathing somewhere behind me, the measured shift of his feet against the floor, leather cleaving the air, my own increasingly incriminating responses. Yet it was the intervals that unsettled me most, those stretches in which he became unnaturally still and left me searching the darkness for evidence of him.

Uncertainty never betrayed him; neither did he reveal what he intended before he intended me to know it. 

And gradually I understood that this was what frightened me – the magnificent self-possession of a predator so assured of its quarry that pursuit itself had become unnecessary. 

Then the leather disappeared.

The room became still again, and I waited, every nerve listening, unable for several heartbeats to determine where he was.

The faint thread of fear returned – not enough to make me want him farther away, merely enough to sharpen every sense I possessed. 

A floorboard murmured.

Then his body descended over mine.

His chest settled against my back, surrounding me with that same restrained strength, and suddenly I understood that he had been close enough to touch me all along.

That realization was considerably more unsettling than hearing him approach would have been.

His mouth found the tender shell of my ear, his teeth closing there before his voice reached me from the darkness, low enough that I felt the words against my skin.

“This is what bratty girls deserve.”

Ah.

So the cowboy intended to make a lesson of it.

Blindfolded, chastened, still aching from everything he had refused me and everything he had administered instead, I felt my Inner Goddess bare her teeth behind the veil.

Very well.

I would take my punishment like a good girl.

But I would make this stubborn man work for it.

And it was most assuredly not meh when the paddle appeared.

Whatever he had wielded before was replaced by something broader and decidedly less forgiving, the first heavy strike landing across already afflicted flesh with a resonant force that sent me onto the tips of my stilettos, a cry muffled into the bedding as fire radiated outward in bright, spreading ribbons.

He never permitted the rhythm to become predictable, and that, I discovered, was part of his cruelty.

He would administer several punishing blows and then cease, leaving my skin singing while I waited in blindness, uncertain whether another strike was already descending. Instead his fingers would return, finding my pearl with damnable accuracy, circling just long enough to transmute the lingering sting into another kind of ache altogether.

And I remembered what he had told me.

You get to come when I say you get to come.

A charming theory.

Unfortunately for him, I had developed one of my own.

I would come when I wanted.

The declaration existed nowhere except inside my own rebellious skull, but my Inner Goddess seized upon it with militant enthusiasm. He might have the blindfold, the paddle, the advantage of sight and that unnerving reserve of his, but surely there remained one dominion he could not commandeer.

My own body.

Surely.

So I waited for my opportunity.

His fingers circled again and I bore down into the mattress, swallowing every betraying sound I could manage while the ascent began with positively insulting haste. Once more I was astonished by the difference between this and the previous week, when my own hands had required nearly an hour of persuasion to coax release from a body obstinately determined to remain unreachable.

Now I was scarcely being granted minutes.

I edged closer, blindfolded and aching, my breathing turning ragged as triumph began unfurling inside me. This time I had him. I was certain of it. Indeed, I had already begun composing a heartfelt apology to my bedroom floor and, naturally, to the expensive stilettos standing directly in the disaster zone.

I was there – so close that my Inner Goddess was practically preparing a victory speech.

And the bastard knew.

Of course he knew.

At the very instant I crossed from there into soaring, his hand vanished. His body retreated. The gathering storm, the fire, every glorious thing that had been climbing toward inevitability simply – 

stopped.

Again.

A piteous cry tore from me before I gasped into the bedding, stranded there in thwarted disbelief, every part of me clamoring for the completion he had now stolen for a fourth intolerable time.

Before I could summon a sufficiently outraged protest, his hand closed into my hair and drew my head backward, denying me even the refuge of burying my frustration in the mattress.

“You don’t get to come until I say so.”

Gods, that voice.

His baritone descended over me with the same authoritative command as his hand – deep, resonant and unvarying, without the slightest requirement for volume. At this distance I could feel its vibration against me, each word entering through my skin rather than my ears, and that faint animal alarm returned before my rebellious mind could object.

The threat in that voice came not from chaos, but from its complete absence. 

That was what made it so effective.

He sounded like a man who had already decided how this would end.

The cruel words reverberated through more than my ears, while my Inner Goddess practically growled back from wherever she prowled inside me, bristling with impudence and still absurdly convinced that we could wrest control from him if only given another opportunity.

We could not.

This was becoming increasingly evident.

Even when he stripped away what remained of my lingerie, leaving the costly scraps indecently entangled around my ankles, even when the paddle resumed and my chastened flesh burned with such vivid awareness that I had rarely felt more alive inside my own skin, some mutinous portion of me continued plotting.

If he refused to finish what he had begun, then perhaps I would do it myself.

My fingers slipped between my thighs in the interval between blows. Surely I could steal a few seconds. I required surcease, and he had proved himself far too cruel to grant it voluntarily.

Unfortunately, subtlety has never been the natural province of a blindfolded woman bent across her own bed in stilettos while attempting clandestine rebellion beneath the notice of a man who had spent the evening anticipating nearly every move she made.

I was not nearly sneaky enough.

His hand caught mine immediately and wrenched my fingers away, pinning my arm to the bed above my head before I had accomplished anything worth celebrating. Then he leaned over me, bringing that implacable presence with him until there was nowhere left for my awareness to go except backward – toward him.

The coarse denim of his jeans dragged across my chastened backside.

I cried out.

Gods, that was cruel.

Every place the paddle had left aching could suddenly distinguish each rasping thread of denim as he pressed himself against me, and beneath that abrasive torment was the unmistakable hardness I had been begging him to give me from the moment he entered the room.

My rebellion promptly became negotiation.

“If you won’t let me come…” I managed, the words breathless and increasingly bereft of pride as I pushed backward against him. “Then take me. Please.”

The denim rasped across me again, and whatever remained of my argument deteriorated into supplication.

“Impale me. I don’t care. Just – please.”

For one terrible moment he gave me nothing but his body grinding against mine, his breath molten on my neck, and the knowledge of what he was still withholding, while that deep baritone reached my ear again and reminded me, with galling certainty, that begging had not altered the terms.

The reprimand required no lengthy speech. His grip, the confiscation of my rebellious hand, the punishing abrasion of denim and the implacable authority in his voice made his position abundantly clear: my release was not mine to steal. My Inner Goddess vehemently disagreed, because the Cowboy plainly failed to appreciate the depth of our grievance. 

It had been one brattish text.

One.

Meh.

That was all I had done.

And really, when one considered the matter fairly, I had gone to considerable lengths for this man. I had selected lingerie. I had reconsidered that lingerie. I had tried on not one but two outfits before his arrival, an expenditure of feminine labor that surely ought to count as mitigating evidence before sentencing.

Yet here I was, blindfolded and thwarted for the fourth time, being treated as though meh constituted an offense against the Crown.

Surely the punishment had exceeded the crime.

I had taken it. My backside smarted, my lingerie hung uselessly around my ankles, the coral scarf still imprisoned me in darkness, and every attempt at insurrection had been discovered and summarily crushed. I had endured my sentence and, by any reasonable accounting, earned compensation for exemplary suffering.

My Inner Goddess agreed vociferously.

I keenly deserved my just reward.

“Just let me come!” I wailed.

Even as I lay there feeling extraordinarily vulnerable and exposed, all my beautiful trimmings reduced to an indecent tangle around my ankles, he stepped away, and the paddle clattered onto my dresser.

Good Lord, the stories my bedroom furniture could tell. If dresser and bedstead ever developed voices, they would undoubtedly sit together like a pair of scandalized old hens, exchanging every salacious detail of my private affairs while pretending to be appalled by them.

I had heard him remove his shirt earlier, muttering that he had far too many clothes on, and the memory returned with unfortunate clarity. I had arched backward then, trying to entice him nearer, wanting the naked warmth of his chest against my back and hoping that somewhere amid my punishment he might finally abandon his infernal plan and take me right there against the side of the bed.

The Cowboy, however, had evidently understood my strategy and had refused to divest himself of his jeans, maintaining that vicious, selfish barrier between me and what I wanted.

Until now.

A zipper descended behind me, and never in the history of modern engineering had so commonplace a sound possessed such beguiling promise.

A helpless mewl escaped my throat before I could prevent it. My afflicted flesh still burned from everything I had endured, my thighs rubbing together as though they might furnish what he so mercilessly withheld, while my body quivered with the aftermath of all those stolen climaxes and the humiliating knowledge that I had reached the stage where the mere sound of a zipper could make me ache.

I could not see him, which made everything infinitely worse.

There came the unmistakably slick sounds of him stroking his cock to full iron somewhere behind and slightly to the right of me, followed by the faint crinkle of foil, my ears supplying what the coral silk denied my eyes. I knew what he was doing. I knew he was preparing himself, taking his own insufferably leisurely time before rolling protection over the length I had spent what felt like an eternity begging him to give me.

And still, the infernal man made me wait.

He knew.

Worse, he could see.

He could see everything the coral silk concealed from me: the evidence of what he had done to my body, the costly lingerie abandoned, the way my thighs pressed together and my hips kept searching backward whenever I thought he had drawn near. I had ceased caring several denials ago what desperation might look like; if he intended to stand somewhere behind me and watch me wordlessly plead, then he could damn well witness the consequences of his handiwork.

So I pushed backward again, searching for him, offering myself to empty air, begging without language because language had already failed me spectacularly.

He gave me nothing.

My Inner Goddess was becoming homicidal.

My fingers itched to tear away the blindfold, turn upon him, leap into his arms and wrap my legs around his hips, impaling my body on him, taking for myself what he so archly refused to surrender. The fantasy was magnificently satisfying for perhaps half a heartbeat before a far more alarming possibility intruded.

What if rebellion earned me a new discipline?

What if he simply stopped?

Worse – what if he ordered me to dress, marched me out to the car and insisted upon feeding me dinner while the ache between my thighs remained unanswered?

The horror.

I went almost preternaturally still.

I scarcely dared draw breath for fear he might interpret oxygen itself as disobedience.

Then came three measured strides across the floor behind me.

Only three, and I counted every one.

That unmistakable presence returned at my back, his primal aura reaching me before his hands did, and then his body folded over mine at last. Naked chest met my back, his wide, solid hips surrounding me, his cock settling against my seam, and after being deprived of him for so long I arched shamelessly toward every inch of contact he permitted.

His breath swept the side of my neck, feral now, while beneath it came that subterranean timbre – the voice that had spent the evening issuing decrees as though obedience were merely a matter of waiting for me to exhaust every other possibility.

“Does this feel like meh?”

The question rolled against my ear and through me.

Oh, the arrogant man.

I wanted to tell him yes purely from principle. I wanted to resurrect that single infuriating syllable and fling it at him again, to discover what fresh punishment such audacity might purchase and whether I possessed sufficient courage to survive the consequences.

My body had, unfortunately, become an unreliable accomplice and answered him by pushing backward instead, seeking what he had withheld while every sensible thought scattered beneath the intoxicating realization that after all his refusals, all his waiting, all those exquisitely calculated denials, he was finally there.

Then, with a guttural sound against my neck, he drew back, creating an ungodly distance between our bodies before giving me what I had spent the entire evening demanding, entering me with one decisive thrust that drove through every ache he had cultivated and straight into the center of me.

For one suspended heartbeat my body could do nothing but receive him. The sudden breadth of him demanded room I had spent hours begging to surrender, stretching me around the very fullness he had so mercilessly withheld until the ache of being denied transformed into the deeper, almost unbearable ache of finally having enough. My breath caught somewhere between gasp and sob as my body yielded around him, every clenched place gradually conceding until there was no tantalizing absence left to chase, no empty space for desire to inhabit – only him, buried completely inside me at last.

There.

That was what I had been pleading for.

Not merely penetration, but the profound, body-deep gratification of being filled after being kept wanting for so long; the exquisite pressure of him occupying the place that had ached for him through every denial, every punishment, every humiliating backward search of my hips. I had begged him to fill me. Begged him to stretch me. And now that he finally had, my body closed around the answer as though terrified he might reconsider and take it away.

All my rebellion faltered.

His mouth remained beside my ear, his body enclosing mine, and that sepulchral, resonant voice reached me once more.

“Come.”

One word, yet after the entire evening it felt almost ceremonial: the command I had fought not to obey, the permission he had made me plead for, the culmination he had stolen every time I believed I had outwitted him.

And now, at last, he gave it to me.

My body obeyed him as though it had belonged to that voice since the dawn of time.

After an entire evening spent plotting mutiny, bargaining for sovereignty and insisting – at least privately – that he could not command the final province of me, one word proved what an astonishing liar I had become.

Come.

And I did, with a violence that made all my earlier rebellion childishly quaint.

The release he had denied me again and again tore through every barricade at once, my cries buried helplessly in the bedding as my body convulsed around him, surrendering in great, uncontrollable waves while he remained infuriatingly still, buried to the hilt and giving me no refuge from the fullness of him. There was no frantic pursuit from him now, no assistance required; after bringing me to the brink so many times and dragging me back from it with diabolical accuracy, he merely held himself there and allowed the command to finish what he had begun.

I gushed around him, every clenched spasm wringing another broken sound from my throat until I could no longer distinguish the aftershocks of release from the accumulated ache of the evening. The punishment, the blindness, the thwarted climaxes, the rasp of denim against my chastened backside – all of it converged upon that single surrender until there was no remaining argument to make, no province left to defend, only the shattering gratification my own body had spent the evening begging him to permit.

And then he began his assault.

Those formidable hands chained my hips as restraint finally deserted him. He drove into me again and again, each collision finding flesh already bruised and exquisitely susceptible from the punishment preceding it, and instead of shrinking from the excess I became ravenous for it – more, deeper, yes, yes, yes – until my throat grew raw from sounds I no longer possessed either the inclination or capacity to suppress.

Then his pace changed.

Only when the fiercest of my convulsions had passed did he withdraw and turn me onto my back, finally removing the coral silk and helping disentangle me from the costly trimmings still wound ignominiously around my ankles. My stilettos were less fortunate. He pulled them free and tossed them across the floor with such disregard that one struck the hardwood and skittered away, and some secret, sentimental part of me hoped the wretched things might actually break.

It was absurd – I adored those shoes – but there would have been a certain poetry in keeping forever a pair of ruined stilettos as evidence of the night one flippant meh inspired an entire campaign of retribution.

My backside, meanwhile, required no additional souvenir; I was quite certain morning would provide one. There would almost certainly be faint bruises dappling my fair skin by daylight, and the prospect of sitting primly at my desk through an ordinary workday while my afflicted derrière privately remembered how I had acquired them struck me as equal parts appalling and perversely amusing.

The Cowboy, however, was not finished.

He placed my petite heels upon his shoulders and caught my hips in his hands, his feet planted upon the floor, and for a moment the expression upon his face arrested me more completely than his grip ever could. The teasing man who had arrived at my door was nowhere to be found. In his place remained that same concentrated intensity I had felt through the blindfold, visible at last – the fixed attention of a man who had evidently taken one lighthearted, noncommittal syllable as a personal affront to his abilities.

Then he began answering it.

Every driving stroke seemed to carry its own rebuttal: Meh? Another. Meh?

Good heavens, I had impugned the Cowboy’s honor.

He changed my position with the same unceremonious authority he had exercised all evening, eventually ordering me onto all fours with my head turned toward the white-framed mirror hanging above the matching dresser currently serving as an arsenal for his instruments of punishment.

“Watch. I want you to see my face when you tell me meh.”

There was that voice again, that subterranean resonance possessing the peculiar ability to travel through my bones before my mind had finished interpreting the words.

I lifted my eyes and nearly wished I had not, because that was profoundly unfair.

The woman reflected there scarcely resembled the creature who had opened the door pretending indifference. Her sapphire hair lay in wild disarray around her shoulders, her cheeks were flushed, her lips reddened by the fury of his kisses and parted around each increasingly ragged breath, while the delicate lingerie she had so painstakingly selected had been reduced to discarded finery somewhere beyond the mirror’s frame.

Behind her rose the Cowboy upon his knees, something feral glinting through the chiseled lines of his handsome face, and at last I could see what the blindfold had forced me to imagine.

The evidence of his intent was etched there – not frenzy, not some theatrical pantomime of dominance, but concentrated possession, his attention fastened upon my reflected gaze even as he continued taking his time with my body. He wanted me watching, I realized. Not merely watching him, either.

Myself.

He wanted me to witness what he was doing to me, to see every response I might otherwise have concealed in pillows and darkness, to watch the woman in that mirror lose every argument she had so confidently brought to this encounter.

So I watched.

Gods help me, I tried.

But there are limits to a lady’s powers of observation when she is simultaneously attempting not to scream loudly enough to invite local law enforcement to investigate a disturbance at her address.

The intensity came in mounting waves until keeping my eyes upon our reflection became its own impossible task. My cries disappeared into the bedding whenever I could bury them there, my hands clutching uselessly at sheets while the woman in the mirror dissolved before my eyes from recognizable creature into pure response.

Then another crest took me.

There was no dignity left with which to meet it. I poured myself into the release until surely there could be nothing left inside me to surrender, my waters drenching us both while the reflection blurred before my unfocused eyes and whatever argument meh had once represented became laughably indefensible.

Later, he drew me over him and reversed our positions, granting me what looked, at first, suspiciously like authority.

I straddled his hips with renewed ambition, some bedraggled remnant of my earlier rebellion resurfacing as I planted my hands upon his chest and surveyed the situation with the optimism of a general who had lost nearly every battle yet remained inexplicably convinced the war might still be salvaged.

This, surely, I could control.

He even allowed me to believe it for a while.

I established my own cadence over him, determined to prove that I possessed at least one remaining territory he could not annex. I refused to race toward another ending. I wanted to build toward it at my own choosing, to memorize him instead – the intimate geography of his body beneath mine, every response I could coax from him, every minute alteration that told me when I had found precisely the place I sought.

When he told me he could feel another climax gathering, naturally, I argued.

He could not possibly be right again, and I categorically refused to permit the man the satisfaction of being right again.

Then the Cowboy flexed beneath me.

The effect traveled through my body with such startling immediacy that my carefully constructed argument vanished somewhere between one breath and the next. My nails sank into his chest and ribs, my thighs clamping fiercely around his hips as the first unmistakable warning betrayed me.

His expression changed.

That insufferably knowing look returned.

His hands closed over my shoulders, arresting the retreat I had not even realized I was attempting, and suddenly the position I had mistaken for freedom revealed itself as merely another variation of his punishment. He kept me astride him, denying me the distance my oversensitized body sought and forcing me to remain exactly where my own earlier demands had placed me.

I had begged him to fill me. I had begged him to let me come, and the Cowboy, it transpired, considered both requests binding.

My body tightened around him despite every protest I attempted to marshal, my thighs shaking against his hips while my nails bit deeper into his skin. The argument I had been so determined to win deteriorated into incoherence as another climax overtook me, leaving me trapped there around him with nowhere to retreat from its force.

And still he held me through it.

By then there was nothing remotely graceful about either of us. Our bodies met with obscene, wet sounds that would undoubtedly furnish the dresser and bedstead with fresh material for their morning gossip, my sapphire hair clung wildly around my face, and whatever sophisticated woman had once thought meh an amusing response had been reduced to a breathless contradiction astride the man she had so grievously underestimated.

I suspected the Cowboy considered his point made.

Unfortunately for both of us, I was not yet prepared to concede it.

He repeated that accursed maneuver until I began to suspect he had discovered a private amusement in watching me repeatedly attempt to regain authority only to lose it again. Sometimes he offered no assistance at all, resting his hands behind his head and watching me with that dark, impenetrable gaze while I sought my own abandon above him; other times his hand returned between us at the least charitable moment, dividing my attention until my carefully maintained rhythm disintegrated and my nails scored fresh red lines across his Adonis body.

Every variation carried the same unspoken question he no longer bothered speaking aloud.

Meh?

Not remotely. 

And I do not know how to explain what happened to me while I rode him, except that no two moments seemed to inhabit quite the same place inside my body.

Every climax was subtly, astonishingly different, as though some previously undiscovered part of me kept awakening beneath the one before it. One began low and deep; another scattered outward until even my fingertips seemed implicated; another caught me so abruptly that I scarcely recognized what was happening before I was already lost inside it. There was no reliable map for any of it, no sequence I could memorize and reproduce, and eventually I abandoned the attempt and surrendered the chase to whatever came next, in whatever form or speed my body demanded.

Even when he offered to change places, suggesting with almost tender reasonableness that surely my knees must be exhausted by now, I refused.

They were exhausted. Of course they were. Somewhere beneath the delirium they were probably drafting formal grievances against me, complete with supporting documentation and a demand for improved working conditions, but I could not feel them and had no desire to begin. I wanted only to pursue that sublime, shifting ecstasy and discover where the next crest might begin, what unexplored place inside me it might illuminate before splintering outward through the rest of me.

Nothing about this was meh. Heaven forgive my earlier impudence.

Yet beneath all that intoxication ran another current, so unobtrusive at first that I nearly missed it.

At some point, I stopped moving.

My chest heaved while my eyes drifted closed, not from exhaustion this time but introspection. His hips remained encased between my thighs, our bodies still joined, and I sat there with my fingertips resting lightly upon my own legs while an elusive melody drifted through me from a place very far away. 

For several breaths I could not identify what had changed.

Inhale.

Exhale.

I was hot and sticky, my muscles quivering from their exertions and every nerve alight, yet beneath all of that I continued trying to connect the dots because there was a difference this time – an absence I could feel without yet possessing a name for it.

Then I understood.

I wasn’t fighting.

The realization arrived like the first silver flicker of a star coming to life, almost too distant to trust, yet it reached more deeply into me than anything else that evening.

I was not fighting my demons.

I was not wrestling with that old, poisonous suspicion that perhaps I did not deserve this – or affection, or desire, or the privilege of inhabiting my own skin without finding fault with it. I was not arguing with guilt or attempting to outrun grief. I was desperate, certainly; the Cowboy had seen to that rather comprehensively. But for once my desperation was not another frantic search for myself.

I was already there.

Inside my body.

And I liked her.

That was the part that nearly undid me.

For weeks – months, really – I had inhabited myself as though my own body were contested territory, forever inspecting, correcting, questioning, searching for the flaw that might explain why I felt so detached from the woman reflected back at me. Yet now, seated astride this man in the thoroughly disordered aftermath of everything we had done, there was no tribunal convening inside my head.

Instead, a peaceful serenity thrummed through me.

The realization was so foreign that I remained motionless for another moment and took inventory – not of deficiencies, but of loveliness. My hands traced the glorious dip of my hips; I admired the generous swell of my breasts and the butterfly delicacy of my skin, flushed now from exertion. My sapphire hair had been thoroughly rumpled into silken disorder around my shoulders, and when I studied my own long fingers resting against my thighs, they seemed almost as though they belonged to a woman I had only just been introduced to.

Elegant things, really.

I let their tips wander into the curls of his bare chest.

There was no accusation waiting for me inside my own head, no demon whispering that I had failed to earn this, no demand that I become prettier, thinner, cleverer, less complicated, less wounded, less anything before I was permitted to enjoy being wanted.

Gods.

I had sought this peace so desperately for weeks. Months, really.

A thought surfaced then, tentative enough that I was almost afraid to disturb it. It had only been a few days – a week at most – and surely that was preposterously soon. Perhaps the explanation was nothing more mysterious than chemistry of an altogether different variety: the cumulative influence of a Cowboy, a coral blindfold and a truly unreasonable number of orgasms.

I could hardly claim to be conducting a scientifically rigorous experiment under the circumstances.

But perhaps…

Maybe…

Just maybe the medication was beginning to work.

I did not know.

I inhaled, exhaled, and felt my shoulders descend as though they had been carrying a burden I had forgotten was there.

For once, I did not require an answer.

What mattered was that in that suspended moment I did not ache anywhere that mattered. I was simply there – sated and desirous at once, skin flushed, sapphire hair wild, body gloriously used and still capable of wanting more – and the woman inhabiting all of it did not feel absent from herself.

She felt present.

She felt like me.

So I moved again, not because I was fleeing the stillness but because, for perhaps the first time in months, I wanted to discover what else this body might have to tell me.

I sank deeper against him, savoring every minute shift between us while his fingers returned to torment me once more, this time closing around my throat, and indecision became its own voluptuous predicament. I could not determine whether I wanted to fold myself over him and offer my breasts to his mouth, sapphire hair spilling around us while I surrendered to the pull of his lips, or arch backward with my hands braced against his thighs and offer myself shamelessly to his attention.

Perhaps I wanted my fingers wrapped around the headboard; perhaps I wanted my nails marking his thighs. Perhaps I wanted his hands everywhere I could put them and his mouth everywhere I could persuade it to go.

Increasingly, the answer was all of it.

I wanted every variation my body might invent, every undiscovered response, every fresh reminder tomorrow that this body had been thoroughly employed for ungodly purposes. I pursued each changing feeling until there was no longer any sensible distinction between discovering him and rediscovering myself, until my sapphire hair became a wild curtain around my face, my thighs had long since abandoned any reasonable complaint about fatigue, and I was an exquisitely disordered mess astride him.

And somewhere inside me, my Inner Goddess – who had spent months pacing the corridors, rattling locked doors and demanding to know why I had restrained her, buried her beneath grief and obligation, and expected her to remain there without protest – finally threw back her head and laughed.

And then we lay there panting, the fans creating a soothing lullaby over our overheated, exhausted bodies while the room gradually settled around us and I contemplated whether my legs would ever again be useful for ordinary pedestrian purposes.

Eventually, the Cowboy presented me with options for the continuation of our evening. We could abandon civilization altogether, order dinner in and exchange massages, or resurrect our original plan, make ourselves publicly presentable and venture out for dinner and bowling.

I was genuinely torn, because my conscious mind was firmly convinced we should leap from the bed, put on something scandalously fetching and go triumph over the Cowboy at bowling. I was already envisioning victory with a degree of confidence unsupported by any evidence whatsoever.

This was ambitious.

Honestly, I was woefully incompetent at bowling and had spent the better part of twenty years periodically confirming that fact. Nevertheless, perhaps I could apply pirate rules to the situation and distract the Cowboy from winning – or at least from winning by too humiliating a margin – through strategic deployment of my feminine wiles.

I smirked.

Surely a low neckline, the proper amount of leg and a carefully timed bend toward the ball return could accomplish what two decades of inadequate athletic ability had not.

My Inner Goddess, however, was considerably less eager to abandon my sanctuary. My bedroom was pleasantly dim, the sheets thoroughly disordered, the fans moving blessed air across my flushed skin, and the residual current of the past several hours still thrummed beneath everything. Leaving required clothing, shoes, public behavior and the possibility of encountering other human beings, none of which possessed quite the allure they might have earlier.

And if we stayed…

Well.

Perhaps we could be seduced again.

Both choices were excellent, which was rather the problem, so I turned the question back to him. I knew he had endured a long day as well, and while I would have been genuinely happy with either prospect, I wanted to know what he wanted.

We were staying in.

The question of dinner followed, but even that arrived differently. He gave me two options rather than casting the whole vast universe of edible possibilities at my feet and asking the deceptively innocuous question that has tormented women since the invention of restaurants: What do you want to eat?

I considered his suggestions, told him either sounded wonderful, and that was that.

He chose.

Dinner was promptly ordered through DoorDash, the matter concluded with almost indecent efficiency, and I felt the strangest easing move through my body.

My voice had mattered. It always had.

But that was not what made me pause.

He had requested my preference without following it with an endless succession of open-ended questions requiring me to research, organize, anticipate, choose and then remain mysteriously responsible for whether everyone enjoyed the result. He had offered me choices. I had been allowed to consider them and answer honestly. Once he knew that both were genuinely agreeable to me, he simply chose between them and handled the rest.

That smooth confidence was intoxicating in a fashion I had not anticipated.

There was nothing left for me to manage.

And that was when I understood why the exchange felt so disproportionately luxurious: my opinion mattered, but I did not have to carry the decision.

Perhaps to another woman that distinction might have been inconsequential. To me, lying there with my sapphire hair in glorious disarray and my body pleasantly exhausted, it felt almost indecently lavish to have someone consider what would please me, ascertain that I was agreeable, and then take responsibility for making it happen.

I had not been commanded into irrelevance; I had been consulted and then relieved of the burden.

The Cowboy had spent hours pouring into me in one fashion or another – attention, effort, choices, touch, consideration – and now even dinner required nothing more from me than an honest preference. That ceaseless internal machinery responsible for anticipating what came next finally ceased its grinding, and for once I was not required to orchestrate the evening.

Perhaps that was the greater seduction of the evening, the one I had not anticipated when I pulled on seamed stockings and sent a catastrophically ill-advised meh. For a few hours I was not required to be the architect of anyone’s experience, including my own. I was allowed preferences without being handed responsibility, allowed to be considered without being made responsible for the consideration, allowed to receive without immediately calculating what I owed in return.

And the curious consequence of being so thoroughly poured into was that, rather than leaving me depleted or selfishly content to receive, I discovered that I actually had something to give back.

Not from obligation, and not because reciprocity had been demanded or because some invisible ledger inside me insisted that kindness incurred a debt.

I wanted to.

There was abundance in me again.

So, at my insistence, the Cowboy stretched out on his stomach across my bed and, for the next thirty minutes, I devoted myself to him.

I worked every formidable muscle beneath my hands, coaxing one stubborn knot after another into surrender, my knuckles traveling down the long ladder of his spine before my palms swept outward across his shoulders and back again. I genuinely wanted to give this to him – to return some measure of the attention he had lavished upon me all evening – and for surprisingly respectable stretches of time I managed to conduct myself with admirable dedication.

I cannot, however, claim the endeavor remained wholly innocent.

My professional visage slipped every now and then, particularly when leverage required me to kneel above him with one knee between his thighs and the other planted outside his hip. It was an exceptionally practical position for applying pressure to his back.

It also placed me in an exceptionally impractical position for behaving myself.

As I leaned forward and worked my knuckles along either side of his spine, the swollen petals between my thighs would occasionally come to rest against the high, sculpted arch of his backside. I made valiant attempts to treat these encounters as incidental consequences of massage mechanics, despite the rather damning fact that I was the person controlling where my body went and could, theoretically, have prevented them.

I did not.

His skin radiated warmth beneath me, the muscles of his back shifting beneath my hands while the firm curve beneath my hips provided a distraction of almost criminal proportions. I tried to limit these lapses to only a few occasions because I truly did want to give back to him rather than turn his massage into yet another campaign of seduction.

Still, the mind may possess noble intentions while the flesh maintains an altogether more libertine philosophy.

Dinner eventually rescued what remained of my virtue.

We ate in my living room amid gay conversation, the atmosphere transformed from the earlier debauchery into that peculiar intimacy that follows it – two people eating dinner and talking as though one of them had not recently turned the other’s bedroom into a tribunal over the word meh. There was an ease to it I adored: food, conversation, the occasional knowing glance, and beneath all of it the private knowledge of what had already transpired and what might yet happen once our plates were cleared away.

After dinner and cleanup, it was my turn to receive the promised massage.

I told myself I was full, thoroughly spent and more than capable of behaving like a civilized woman for the remainder of the evening.

Then I saw him sitting upon my bed.

The Cowboy had settled against my headboard, his well-oiled, toned body displayed with an indecency compounded by the fact that he regarded the arrangement as perfectly ordinary. He beckoned me closer, intending for me to climb onto the mattress, settle between his legs with my back against him and submit myself to his hands.

A perfectly respectable plan.

Unfortunately, I had changed for dinner.

The black negligee I had slipped into possessed high slits climbing either side of my hips, while its scandalously abbreviated hem scarcely covered my derrière. It had made me feel daring when I put it on; standing there beneath his gaze now, it awakened far less respectable ambitions.

So instead of clambering obediently onto the side of the bed and assuming the position he had intended for me, I walked around it.

Sedately at first.

Or at least with enough dignity to maintain plausible deniability.

By the time I reached the foot of the mattress, I stood directly opposite him and could look straight into his face. His eyes met mine, and whatever he saw there must have betrayed me because his expression altered before I had even begun.

I rose onto my tiptoes and placed first one knee, then the other, upon the mattress. Rather than turning around and backing obediently into the place between his thighs, I poured myself forward and began prowling toward him on my hands and knees, unhurried and feline, the black negligee slipping higher along my hips with every advance.

I caught my lower lip between my teeth.

I never broke eye contact.

The Cowboy immediately understood that his massage was in jeopardy.

He protested, wagging one admonishing finger at me and reminding me that this was not the plan, that I was supposed to turn around, come sit between his legs and be a good girl.

Unfortunately, he had committed a tactical error.

I was already far too gone for that particular species of obedience, and the nearer I prowled, the more intoxicating the sight of him became: reclining against my headboard, skin still gleaming faintly from the oil I had worked into it earlier, watching this nearly naked creature in black satin advance upon him as though he had any reasonable expectation that she intended to stop.

Besides, his accusation was patently unfair.

I was a good girl.

Just not the good girl he was talking about.

His cock rested against his thigh, and with my hands planted firmly upon the mattress, I bent my head and, with an innocence neither of us believed for an instant, flicked my tongue across the tip. The taste of his eagerness was already there. I looked up at him from beneath my lashes, one eyebrow arching while a thoroughly unrepentant grin betrayed how pleased I was with myself.

Then I let my mouth answer the remainder of his protest.

I drew him between my lips with such unabashed enthusiasm that his head struck the headboard behind him, the resulting thud followed by a gravelly groan that made my Inner Goddess positively preen. Whatever admonishment he had intended to deliver expired unfinished upon his lips as I took him farther, my right hand wrapped around his base while I discovered, with no small astonishment, how completely my body had abandoned its customary reluctance.

There was an extraordinary freedom in giving to him like this. My mouth, tongue and throat worked together while I poured myself into the act with the same generosity I had discovered during his massage – not depleted by it, not performing from obligation, but giving because I possessed an almost extravagant amount to give. Every rasping sound dragged from his chest encouraged me, while every broken warning that he was nearing the limits of his restraint merely strengthened my determination to coax him beyond them.

This was a rare treat, after all, and I had no intention of squandering it.

I was becoming rather proud of myself when his hand came to my forehead and halted me. My protest was immediate, muffled and deeply aggrieved, but he was already telling me that he wanted me again, and whatever triumph I had imagined claiming vanished amid the abrupt rearrangement that followed. He extricated himself from the bed with startling efficiency, and before I had quite caught up with events he stood beside it, magnificent and aroused, catching my ankles and pulling me toward him.

A breath later I was filled with him again, my back arching from the mattress as my ankles found his shoulders and my body folded beneath him, nearly doubled upon itself while everything I had believed exhausted awakened anew. The erotic thrum of music from the speaker mingled with the faint metallic chime of his dog tags, creating the strangest accompaniment to our debauchery, and for several delirious moments those were the only sounds I could separate from my own screams.

The mattress shifted when he moved beside me, and his thick fingers buried inside my pussy replaced the fullness I had just lost, working me with such merciless expertise that the already-soaked bed – now laboring beneath its third waterproof blanket – might reasonably have thrown up its hands and surrendered.

There were, after all, limits to what household textiles should be expected to endure, and mine had served valiantly.

By then I had ceased understanding where one climax ended and another began. There was no longer a descent followed by another ascent; each crest merely disclosed a higher summit behind it, and my body, having evidently rejected all sensible limitations, continued climbing as though the ordinary laws governing human endurance had been temporarily repealed.

Yet he understood what I could no longer articulate. He knew when I wanted the fullness of him again, when my body sought his hands instead, when another command would send me careening over an edge I had not realized remained available to me. Soon he was between my thighs once more, my body bent into configurations that would have concerned a respectable orthopedist, ordering me to come while I answered with increasingly incoherent demands for more – deeper, harder, enough to make tomorrow remember tonight even if the rest of me could not.

By every reasonable measure I should have cracked beneath the intensity. There was a roaring in my ears, fire racing through my body, and still it would not stop; I kept vaulting higher, each summit becoming merely the vantage point from which another revealed itself.

My fingers joined his efforts, circling my pearl with increasing abandon as another convulsion gathered, until whatever distinction had once existed between his touch and mine disappeared beneath the frenzy.

Then he withdrew and knelt beside me, but I scarcely registered the loss because the storm inside my body had already reached its crescendo.

Protection was discarded, his hand closing around himself as he worked toward his own release, and the broken sound that escaped him did unspeakable things to what remained of my reason. My fingers were still buried inside me, my other hand still circling, my body throbbing with the remembered fullness of him even while I watched his hand travel over his iron length.

And astonishingly, I was still coming.

That was the part my mind could no longer reconcile. There was no conclusion anymore, no neat punctuation marking where one orgasm finished so another might begin. My body continued without punctuation – crest folding into crest, contraction answering contraction – and when his fingers returned to me and drove deeper while his other hand never abandoned himself, I screamed and gushed beneath him, subjecting my valiant bed to fresh indignities while the protracted release continued to course through me.

At some point I curled toward him into a crescent, drawn by an altogether different craving. His fingers continued their ministrations while the flushed crown of his cock hovered achingly near, and amid the sustained climax consuming me, another desire became incandescent.

I wanted to taste him.

I extended my tongue, and truly, I could not have made the request more plainly had I written it in calligraphy upon expensive stationery.

From his towering position beside the bed, he looked down and found me curved toward him – eyes lifted, pink tongue extended, my entire expression reduced to shameless supplication.

Please.

Whatever remained of his self-command vanished. His release spilled across my breasts and reached my waiting tongue, and the sight of him, the taste of him, the rasping roar torn from his chest at the same instant sent another tremendous convulsion through me. I folded tighter around his hand, my own fingers still moving while my body answered with an intensity unlike anything I had previously experienced.

I seemed condemned – or perhaps blessed – to continue climbing, my body refusing every invitation to descend until at last there was nowhere higher for it to go. 

When it finally began to recede, I lay there stunned by the sheer duration of it, scarcely able to comprehend what had happened. My lungs struggled to remember their ordinary occupation, my limbs had evidently resigned from public service, the bed had survived against frankly unreasonable odds, and somewhere beneath all that astonishment one incontrovertible conclusion emerged.

I had just experienced the longest, most astonishing orgasm of my life.

Eventually even my body conceded that there must be limits.

We collapsed into the wreckage of my bed, exhausted beyond any reasonable definition of the word, surrounded by twisted sheets, discarded clothing and the accumulated evidence of several hours of spectacularly poor behavior. For a while neither of us possessed the slightest ability – or inclination – to move. The fans continued their faithful rotation overhead, washing blessed air across our spent bodies while my breathing gradually remembered a civilized rhythm and I contemplated, with grave skepticism, whether my legs would support me should the house unexpectedly catch fire.

I sincerely hoped there would be no emergency requiring evacuation, because I was staying exactly where I was. 

And yet the Cowboy, despite having every justification to declare the evening complete, had apparently not forgotten that he still owed me a massage.

I attempted to tell him this was no longer necessary. My body had been handled, folded, chastened, adored and exercised beyond any reasonable contractual expectation; surely we could consider his obligations fulfilled. He disagreed and, with that same maddening certainty he had employed throughout the evening, insisted I turn over and let him take care of me.

So I did.

There was no seduction required now, no campaign to wage and no meh left to avenge. His hands traveled over muscles that had been thoroughly taxed, working away the lingering strain in my shoulders, back and legs while I gradually melted into the mattress beneath him. It was wonderful – not because it demanded another crescendo, but because it did not. After hours of excess, there was an almost sumptuous intimacy in simply being tended to.

And we talked.

That may have been one of my favorite parts.

We talked as though we had not just committed enough debauchery to keep my scandalized dresser and bedstead gossiping until Christmas. We talked about ordinary things, ridiculous things, pieces of our lives beyond the confines of my bedroom. Conversation wandered wherever it pleased while his hands continued their ministrations, and the juxtaposition amused me enormously: my bedroom looked like the aftermath of a libertine uprising, my body bore ample testimony to the evening’s activities, and there we were discussing life with the easy cadence of two people who had merely spent an agreeable evening together.

Eventually, of course, time became an adversary neither of us could charm indefinitely, and the Cowboy had a very long drive home.

I remained comfortably ensconced in my bed while he dressed, watching the evening reverse itself garment by garment as the man who had arrived at my door gradually reassembled himself before me. Jeans. (My Inner Goddess moaned at the contrast of denim and rippling abs.) Shirt. (Huff.) Boots. The trappings of civilization returned one by one until at last his attention fell upon the cowboy hat he had so rudely discarded upon my living room floor hours earlier.

I smiled when he retrieved it.

There was something wonderfully satisfying about watching him settle it back upon his head. That hat had hit my floor near the beginning of the evening, cast aside when teasing had become intent and the civilized Cowboy had temporarily given way to the man who had taken one careless syllable as a personal challenge. Now, dressed again and preparing to leave, he placed it back where it belonged as though restoring the final piece of himself before returning to the outside world.

I watched him descend my steps and make his way toward the long drive home, privately savoring one last indecorous thought.

He could put his clothes back on. He could retrieve his hat. He could climb into his vehicle and resume looking every inch the respectable Cowboy.

But he could not leave entirely untouched.

His skin still carried the intimate evidence of me – my arousal, my surrender, the mingled traces of an evening neither shower nor respectable clothing had yet erased – and I took distinctly unladylike satisfaction in knowing that the scent of me would travel with him for that long, long drive home.

A final souvenir.

Absolutely nothing about the evening had been meh, but as I looked upon my thoroughly ravaged sanctuary, I could not suppress the smirk that curved across my lips at the recollection of just how personally the Cowboy had taken that single syllable.

Perhaps next time I should be more careful with my words.

Then again…

Why the devil would I do that??

Until next time, XO. Elsie