In Her Service. Various

      Oppositeland

      Charlotte Stein

      I purposefully pick out the most mundane and unneeded items I can think of, as I stroll around the supermarket with a basket over my arm. Of course, no one pays me the slightest bit of attention because they’re all picking out their own mundane and probably unneeded items. Things like the mop they saw on some infomercial or a jar of capers that’s on offer they don’t want. They’ll never use them – the capers, I mean – though really what can I say about that?

      I’ll never use them either.

      Me and Artie, we don’t eat capers. We don’t eat macaroons either, but they’re in my basket too. They’re just the most perfect thing to buy to keep my mind on that drifting, unthinking edge, that I’m completely bored state of nothingness I don’t usually feel when Artie and I walk around the supermarket together. When we do it together, we plan meals and giggle over funny-shaped aubergines, and maybe at some point I’ll slip a hand up the back of his jersey because he’s just so gorgeous I can’t resist him.

      Though I suppose you could say I’m resisting him now. This is the ultimate in resisting, really – like a test, I suppose – but it doesn’t feel like it, somehow. It feels like something else, instead, though I don’t let myself think about it too hard. Just that little glancing edge of it, I tell myself, then let my mind wander back to mundane considerations like capers and macaroons and super-mops. I pay for my items and stroll back home, forcing my gaze and my attention over shop-window signs and people I see on the streets, and once there I deliberately put each item away in various newly made spaces.

      Though I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t aware of Artie’s presence.

      I am, but it’s a peripheral kind of thing. I bustle through the bedroom, collecting things I want to wear after my shower, and I can feel him just burning on the edges of my vision. I’m aware of him twitching and stirring towards the sound and smell of me, and after a moment he allows himself a little faint sigh. I can’t tell if it’s a discomfited sound or something else, but I don’t stop to find out.

      I have my shower instead, taking time to remove any scrap of hair on my body and smoothing everything nicely as I go. Once I’m out, I dry myself and rub lotion on my various parts and then after a moment, I slide into the little silky slip thing Artie bought me for my thirtieth birthday.

      Of course, it’s this action that almost gets me. I think about him running it all over me, bunched in his too-tense fist, telling me how he wanted to buy me something that would make me feel as sexy as he always thinks I am. Something that would feel glorious against my skin and make me near buzz for sex.

      And it always does. My nipples stiffen as it flows over them, so cool and buttery soft. All I have to do to know how aroused I am is look down, and see them sticking through the material, dusky-pink and spiky-hard. I’m turned on because of shopping. I’m turned on because Artie’s in the bedroom and he’s still waiting, waiting, waiting.

      When I walk back in there he turns his head blindly, searching me out from beneath the confines of the scarf around his eyes. His breathing is slightly unsteady, but I can’t tell if that’s because of the promise of things to come, or because he’s starting to really feel the effects of the state he’s in.

      The muscles in his thighs are trembling – I can see them from here. And every now and then he cycles his shoulders backwards and forwards, as though the strain of having his hands tied behind his back then bound to the headboard is getting a bit too much. It’s putting pressure on his joints. The leather around his wrists is starting to rub against the tender skin there.

      Though I’m not too worried, I have to say, because he’s still impossibly hard. Even after all this time – all the shopping and the shower and me getting myself ready – his cock is still sticking right out and almost up, all swollen and slippery at the tip. As I watch, a thin stream of pre-come slides down the length of his stiff shaft and I feel my cunt clench in sympathy.

      I don’t let him know it, however. I don’t say or do anything to him at all. I just walk into the room and stand close enough to let him scent out the lotion on my body, the tang of my shampoo. Of course he doesn’t say anything – he just leans forward, slightly, as though he can get at me through sheer force of will. That leather leash straining against the bulk of his big body, the smooth solid rounds of his shoulders standing out starkly through the gloss of his skin as he works against them.

      But it’s his mouth I like the best. He has a beautiful mouth at the most typical of times – soft and full in his otherwise perfectly masculine face – but now, here, it’s even sweeter. His lips are parted and moist, as though he’s been constantly licking them just to feel how good and dirty and slick his tongue feels, working over the only point of his body he can reach. And whenever he makes a little sound – a little strained sigh or a pulled-in groan – he ends it with his teeth pressed into that soft flesh.

      I’m so wet by this point I can hardly stand it. Even the shower hasn’t taken the evidence of my arousal away – the arousal I built up without really thinking about it directly, as I walked around the supermarket and made my way back home – and now it’s starting to trickle down my thigh.

      But I stiffen my own resolve and keep my voice light and disinterested.

      ‘Did you have a good time while I was gone?’ I ask, and his glorious lips move soundlessly around words he can’t say. They make me think of other things he could move them around, thicker things, more solid things, and then my clit jerks and more slickness spills down my slippery thighs.

      I