I knew it was both the truth and a lie. She’d follow me for a while, until she decided she didn’t want to, or she got too uncomfortable, then she’d do whatever the hell she wanted to do and somehow it would be my fault, again. I was starting to seriously sympathize with the men who were dating me.

8

I SNUGGLED DOWN against the left side of Nathaniel’s bound body, and Jade mirrored me on his right. I started by kissing those full lips of his; he kissed me back with his eyes already losing their focus as he began to give himself over to the rope, to our touch, to simply not being in control. It was one of my favorite things about bondage.

Jade leaned over, but didn’t kiss him; she offered her red lips to me. She had never kissed Nathaniel on the mouth. It was something she saved for me. We kissed and it was a mingling of identical scarlet lipstick. She’d started wearing my shade of red, because if she wore something else it ruined both our lipsticks, or made colors that looked good on neither of us. I realized that she got more kisses now that our lipsticks matched; good thing the color looked good on both of us.

Nathaniel watched us kiss, his lips touched with red just down the center. He’d coined it the go-faster stripe, and wore it proudly. There was an eagerness in his eyes that wasn’t just the submission; he liked seeing us kiss above him. I loved it when he and Micah kissed, so I totally got that he liked seeing me kiss another woman. Funny, I hadn’t thought he had that typical male fantasy of two women and him; just goes to prove that bisexual doesn’t mean not guy, just a different kind of guy.

I kissed him again, leaving our mingled reds brighter on his lips, and then moved to the warm sweetness of his neck, breathing in the vanilla scent of him, before laying a perfect red lip print against his skin. Jade mirrored me on the other side of his neck. I kissed the top of his shoulder, then the very beginning of his chest, feeling the flex of his muscles as he pulled at the rope that bound that arm. Nathaniel and I both liked to test our bonds, not to get away, but more to feel the pull and know we were trapped, held, helpless, at the same time that we knew we were not. All he had to do was say his safeword and I’d untie him. The same held true when it was my turn to be tied up. Bondage was the illusion of danger, not the real thing. I’d been tied up for real by bad guys and that wasn’t exciting at all, just scary.

I laid my mouth over the mound of his pectoral muscle just above his nipple, and Jade kissed him at almost the same time so that we were beginning to truly mirror each other across Nathaniel’s body. I put my mouth over his nipple and licked just the tip of my tongue across him, back and forth, quick strokes until his nipple became a small, firm point. I rolled my eyes upward so that I could look across his body at Jade, and found her fire-colored eyes looking at me. I used my tongue to lick and tease his nipple, keeping my eye contact all for Jade. Nathaniel began to make soft, eager noises for us.

We kissed slowly down his body an inch at a time, marked in red lipstick prints across his skin. We placed the last kiss on the top of his foot, just below the black circle of rope around his ankles.

I sat back, kneeling to look at our handiwork. There was something incredibly satisfying seeing him stretched beautiful and nude with the tracks of our lip prints decorating all that bare skin. His groin was untouched, but we’d both planted kisses all around it on his thighs and hips, until he’d whimpered. His body was more than ready to be touched, straight, hard, and eager. I’d avoided the area partially to up the teasing, but mostly because Jade was mirroring my lead better than she ever had before with Nathaniel and I wanted her to keep doing that. She’d already let me push her outside her usual comfort zone; I wanted to ease her further out, not push her off the cliff, not yet.

It wasn’t just kindness, or even caution on my part. Jason and J.J. stood by the bed doing their own light petting. I knew that she was waiting for me to say, Okay, come aboard. There were so many possibilities of cliffs tonight that I didn’t want to be pushed off either, so I wouldn’t push Jade. Treat people as you want to be treated, and hopefully that whole karma thing works out.

Touching Nathaniel had helped me gather myself—grounding and centering, my friend and teacher Marianne would have called it. Whatever you called it, I felt better, more sure of myself and everything else, including the people around me.

I crawled over Nathaniel’s legs and went to Jade. I wrapped her in my arms, drew her in close and kissed her, not just so she wouldn’t get mad at me, but because I wanted to. She was mine, and she’d been very brave and marvelously sensual with Nathaniel. I kissed her, tongue sliding inside her mouth, my eager hands sliding over the silk she was wearing. I thought, as I thought almost every time I French-kissed her, that women had smaller mouths than men. She was so tiny in my hands, delicate bones and flesh, that she triggered the instinct that you should protect that which is smaller than you are. In reality she could have overturned a small car without breaking a sweat, but in that moment I kissed my delicate girl, feeling protective and proud, and drew back from the kiss leaving her breathing hard, her pupils huge with the endorphin rush of my attentions.

We’d smeared our lipstick, but not that much. I’d learned to kiss without ending up looking like a clown from kissing the men; now it was just a slightly more delicate dance with two women, two lipsticked mouths. Jade and I were learning. Of course, tonight if we didn’t smear our lipsticks all to hell, we’d be doing it wrong.

I turned and looked at Jason and J.J. They were still holding each other, but had stopped making out to watch. I didn’t know when they’d gone fully voyeur on the show, when Jade and I were still kissing our way down Nathaniel, or when I kissed Jade. Didn’t know, didn’t care; all I cared about was that as I crawled across the bed toward them, J.J. watched me like a bird that sees the snake coming, fascinated and a little afraid, as if she thought I might eat her, which was sort of funny since I was the only other non-wereanimal in the room. But there are all kinds of ways to be devoured; taking actual flesh is just one of them.