Come Play With Me: An Erotica Collection. Madelynne Ellis

      Dancing On The Edge

      Charlotte Stein

      He says it in the middle of talking about something mundane – like quotas or reports or that meeting we all had last Tuesday. We’re just sat here at the bar, and Johnson’s gone to the toilet, and in that tiny moment that we’re alone he puts his lips too close to my ear and murmurs the words: ‘If you come upstairs with me once we’re done here, I’ll lick your clit until you come all over my face.’

      They feel hot, up that close – and not just because of the content. I can feel his steamy breath, rubbing against the sensitive whorls of my ear. And I get a heated hint of his body, too, as he invades my space.

      I don’t know how to react. A second ago he was Michael Turner, rather quiet and sort of uninteresting colleague. Now he’s a guy who propositions girls by using a word I don’t think I’ve ever heard a man say before. Not even in bed. Not even when the guy in question is actually touching me there.

      Though, come to think of it, even that’s rare.

      But this is rarer. I feel like he’s already done the deed, before I’ve even taken him up on the offer. My clit is suddenly huge, immense. It’s eating the rest of my body in pulses and tremors, and all of them make me realise something startling.

      It doesn’t really take a lot to make me come. I could come like this, while staring straight forwards at my reflection in the mirror behind the bar. I can see him just to the left of me, toying with his glass of Scotch as though nothing was said – but then he glances up just a little and our eyes meet around bottles of absinthe and mint liquor, and I know.

      I know I could come if he just breathed on me wrong. I’m primed like an engine; he’s said the magic words and kickstarted a libido I didn’t previously have. Usually I’m bored, restless, I have to work for it, push for it. I’m always on the edge and never all the way over.

      But that’s not the case now. Why didn’t I notice those eyes of his, over morning coffee and dull chitchat? They’re like neon lights, lowering on the front of a predatory sort of car. Something slick and close to the ground, ready to run me down. And his mouth … oh, his mouth.

      It’s like someone pressed a blade to his face. They carved those cut-glass cheekbones, and then finished off with a slash just above his chin.

      Which is all just a way of saying that he’s stunningly attractive, though I’d never quite seen it before today. I guess I’d passed him by in the same manner I pass by most handsome men, sure and certain in their uninterest, only concerned with what they have to say. Maybe it’ll be something good, like today.

      Though usually I’m just hoping for anything at all. From anyone, ever. A word, a sign that I’m alive. A hand on my thigh as nonchalant as a back pat, just before he slides away.

      Of course, I know where he’s going. He’s headed to that mythical upstairs – the one I can’t help picturing as a bin for this bar. Beer crates on the stairs, boxes in the bare living room, naked bulbs dangling from the ceiling.

      But Johnson tells me otherwise. He asks me if Michael has called it a night, and then he points to the place I was offered. ‘Maybe we should head off too,’ he says, while I reframe the place above with this new information in mind.

      Now it’s not a fuck on the stairs, amidst the rubble. There’s no splinters digging into my ass, from stripped floorboards in an abandoned apartment. I think of how he seems, instead, and what the home of a man like him would be like – pristine, elegant, sharp. The way his suits are, the way his haircut is, the way he’d whispered those words in my ear.

      So slick, I think.

      I should be angry.

      Instead, I’m walking up the stairs.

      I wait until Johnson’s bid me adieu outside the bar, and go through the motions of leaving as he does so – putting my gloves on, bracing myself for the cold. And then once he’s gone I turn around and go back inside, to the red door he went through at the rear.

      No one tries to stop me. No one says anything to me at all, so maybe he does this all the time. Invites a girl through this red rabbit hole, to a flight of stairs that couldn’t be more different from the ones I’d imagined.

      Everything is white, bright white, and at the top there’s another door, left ajar.

      Beyond, his apartment is the same. Clinical, almost, as though to take back the invitation that was so easily extended. Now I’m supposed to feel like an intruder, in the land that clean built. I’m a filthy whore who’d like her pussy licked, invading his precious space.

      Though it’s not this thought that makes my face heat. It’s how he catches me when he emerges from some space-age kitchen. I’m in the process of fleeing, before any of this solidifies and turns into that thing I did one time.

      ‘Leaving so early?’ he says, and my cheeks nearly flame. I’ve been caught with my hand in the cookie jar, then compounded my error by vacating the scene of the crime. Now I have to be punished, I suspect, though his and my ideas of punishment differ greatly, it seems.

      I think of spankings, or maybe a brutal fuck bent over his couch. He thinks of the promise he made me, and kneels down to shove my dress up over my hips. No talking. No asking. I’ve never been so bare before any kind of discussion has taken place.

      And it gets worse. He looks up at me with this shark’s grin on his gorgeous face when he sees my panties: plain cotton, humiliatingly girlish. And once he’s judged them suitable, he hooks two come-hither fingers into the elastic.

      Then