Four: The Liar, The Punisher & The Thief

Surely they had not known that this would happen?

Circumstance is a strange thing. Inside circumstance lie all the possibilities in the world, and it takes the smallest thing to turn possibility into actuality.

Old as it was, the room knew this. It was a creature of subtlety, such subtlety that many would consider it inanimate.

Built as it was, the room was forced to act in indirect and delicate ways. Those who paused between its walls never noticed its influence on them.

Alone as it was, the room sought to touch whomever it could, emerging from its grey hibernation with an eagerness to connect, to breathe again, to show its colours trapped for so long under dust and abandonment.

The window flexed, shifting against the contracting chill of the approaching evening and the expanding, slightly damp warmth inside. Damp from clothing beaded with rain that slowly rose in vapour at the fire's enticement. Damp from fevered exhalations sweet with lust. Damp from skin flushed with friction and slick with desire.

A pale, white condensation formed at the edges of the glass, making the room tremble in distracted irritation at the encroaching hindrance of its view of the two figures inside. There were other ways to observe, but the room liked best to use the window where perception was clearer and deeper. The room was nothing if not a voyeur.

Soft. Gentle. Silken. Smooth. The room could see the way his mouth worked on her feet, the lightest touch of his tongue sliding over her skin with a studied care that always guided him back to where his teeth had pierced her. He kept her blood flowing by suckling on her instep, drinking red in a steady rhythm.

Slumped as she was in the chair, did she know what was going through his mind? The room wasn't sure. People seemed to evince an incredible lack of empathy with each other which the room never understood. In its opinion, people proved incredibly dense at reading each other. Perhaps it was deliberate, but the room couldn't see what the advantage of that could possibly be.

There was something between them, like a silvern thread that smelled like the full moon late in the year. What passed between them through this thread? The room didn't know.

His mouth pulled away from her skin, his hair brushing along her ankles gently. He sat her uninjured foot down on the seat of the chair and cradled the swollen one.

"It seems my actions have done little to improve this," he noted dryly, running the tips of his long fingers over the puffy joint. He pressed his thumbs into her flesh. "Does this hurt?"

She shrugged slightly, her eyes wandering over the front of his body, his torso framed by his loosened clothing. "It's not that bad."

He looked up at her, his hands becoming still. "Considering how much you cussed and limped, you gave every impression that the injury was significant."

The room shivered at the edge in his voice.

"Are we to have another discussion on the unwise tendency you have to obscure your physical condition from me?"

She looked straight into those black eyes without a shred of anxiety. "I don't recall any discussion on that subject."

His eyes widened in warning at her statement.

"I do recall you shouting at me about it," she continued with a half-smile. "If memory serves, it was quite a spectacular tantrum."

No, she didn't know what was going through his mind, otherwise she wouldn't be pushing him in such a fashion while sunk so calmly in the chair.

His face didn't change expression. "I see." He plucked one of her socks off the floor and slid it onto the foot in his hand, his thumbs hooking into the fabric to guide the striped covering over the curvy swell of her calf, his palms running over the lines of her leg, up past her knee to half-way up her thigh.

She frowned. "What are you doing?"

"It needs to be bound to minimise the swelling," he told her distantly, resting her leg on the arm of the chair.

Her frown deepened as he found her other sock and slipped it on and up past her right knee. "Why...?"

"Symmetry," he replied, interrupting her question and wedged her foot into the right-angle between the seat cushion and the arm and picked the other foot up once more. His hand delved into the pocket of his coat and drew out his wand, the tip of it running down from her toes to her heel. The fabric tightened, constricting in concentric waves, embracing her ankle snugly.

She didn't see the flick of his wrist that he hid behind her foot, but she did feel what it did. Her eyes narrowed to slits and her hands bunched into white-knuckled fists.

"You sneaky bastard!"

He gave her a wide smile that would make a shark hesitate. "I know how many teeth you have hidden, tigress. I'm not about to let you sharpen them on me."

She pulled against the interwoven bonds of her clothing with the covering of the armchair, the fabrics knitted tightly together where they touched each other, her arms bound to those of the chair, her back glued to its front: trapped.

"And you need to be very still for what I'm going to do to you."

The cool wood glided up the inside of her thigh, making both her and the room shudder at its touch on her warm skin, quiver at the steel hidden in his voice under dark red velvet and tighten at the midnight control in his eyes.

The wand reached where her thigh joined her body, the material gathered in a ripple of creases due to the position of her legs: open, bent, allowing him to trail this extension of his hand across in a sinuous line.

"I don't like being lied to," he told her, head tilted to one side, enjoying the frustration locked in her expression. "Yet you persist in it." His wand traced a rune of physical pleasure onto her. "I think it's time I broke that habit in you."

"With that?" she asked derisively, rolling her eyes at what he held lightly in his hand. "Good luck, Professor!"

The tip of the wand travelled up her torso to rest under her chin.

"I'm perfectly capable of getting what I want without it," was the assured response. He pushed her head back slightly by pressing the wand harder under her chin, exposing her throat to him.

Despite his confident statement, the room was glad she was bound to the chair. The dangerous glint in her eye foreshadowed an outburst of aggressiveness that would have most backing away rather swiftly.

"Punishment can be enforced in a number of ways. I prefer to be creative."

"I'm not your student," she growled at him through gritted teeth.

"You are if I'm about to teach you something." Another slight pressure under her chin tipped her head to the left.

They were flirting with each other! The room thought this odd considering what had already occurred, but it was unmistakable. Their words said one thing while their bodies spoke differently, helping them manoeuvre around each other in a twisted, almost convoluted pathway of verbal foreplay.

Keeping her head still, he leant forward, bracing himself with his free hand by placing it right between her thighs, so close to her body that his forearm pressed firmly against her. Air hissed through her teeth and the muscles in her legs flexed.

"Didn't anyone ever tell you that lying was bad?" he whispered in her ear, his lips brushing against her earlobe. The wand left the underside of her chin to drop back into where it had come from. His fingers slid along her jaw-line, around and back behind her head where they clasped thick locks of her hair resolutely.

"You lie all the time," she pointed out huskily, the angle of her head making it difficult for her to speak. "That makes you a hypocrite."

He laughed softly against her neck, shifting his body closer. "Such a shame you can't do anything about it."

She opened her mouth but no words came out, only a groan as he latched onto her with his mouth, his hand relinquishing her hair, palm pressing flat against her as it trailed down and over one breast ever so slowly. His fingers moulded around the softness, long thumb brushing back and forth to coax the peak into a firmness that he trapped gently against the side of his palm.

"Ah... er..."

"Is there a problem?" His words were muffled from his reluctance to stop tenderising her neck with teeth and tongue.

"If there was, would you care?" she gasped, eyes screwed shut.

"Not in the slightest," he breathed against her and sunk his teeth in just short of breaking her skin. Her body arched up to push into his hand and against the solidness of his forearm as much as she could, the bonded material pulling her back from a more complete and satisfying contact.

His hand released her and slithered down to the hem of her cotton top, drawing it up and over her chest. The revelation was alluring enough to separate him from her neck and make him bury his face between the two generous swells, tongue dipping down to taste the saltiness of her skin. His hand quested under the left sleeve of her coat to draw out the slender blade she had hidden there. Firelight flickered down the sharp edge as he slid it carefully under the thick fabric that secured her chest. He only had to pull the hand-length knife towards him gently to slice the material cleanly.

The weapon clattered dully to the threadbare carpet as he pulled the covering aside to bare her chest fully to his mouth and hands. His tongue left moist, glistening trails that he smoothed away with his fingers, spreading the evidence of his appetite for her flesh until her breasts were slick with it, making it harder for him to clasp her.

Fingertips teased lightly where his tongue didn't, the contact between her and him liquid and hot. The insistent pull of his mouth, the graze of his teeth and the wash of his tongue sensitised her in increasing waves, the rich, dark pink flesh stroked and caught firmly, making her shudder and pull more desperately at her restraints.

The room could understand her frustration, tethered as she was, helpless under him, fighting against her body's reaction to what he was doing, holding out against that inevitable submission he was determinedly drawing out from her. It could also understand his frustration, persistent as he was, poised over her slumped form, his efforts increasing in strength and rate to force her to beg for more. Both so stubborn, each unwilling to relinquish control, neither wanting to show how the other stirred the murky depths of arousal in them into a turbulent vortex.

So the room decided that neither of them should have the control, that both should submit. Its walls flexed and sheared as it reached inside them both to steal away their resolve and resistance, commandeering their self-control for itself, leaving them stripped of restraint. The effect was instantaneous.

Her back arched sharply as he sucked with an almost vicious intensity, his fingers digging into her skin greedily.

"Oh, my God!" she gasped out, her hands gripping the arms of the chair frantically.

"He won't help you," he growled at her, his voice reverberating along her ribs and into her spine.

The knife up her right sleeve found its way into his hand to slice away the rest of her underwear before being thrown more forcibly aside than its twin, skittering across the floor to collide with the doorframe.

His hands clutched her hips and lifted her body upwards to pause an inch below his open mouth, allowing him to inhale the citric sweetness, to see the paleness of her skin barely hidden under the light dusting of hair, to feel the intense heat rising from her to caress against his face...

... before he plunged his tongue along her in one liquid swipe from tailbone to pubis.

... before grinding his nose into the centre-point of her building ecstasy as he drank the fresh slipperiness from her.

...before his tongue twisted and writhed inside her and out as he revelled at the sound of her incoherent pleading, fighting to keep her still.

... before he scooped up that mix of his hunger and her desire with three fingers, dipping into that cache of membranous delight to slide a fraction of it over him, one arm wrapped around and under her behind to hold her up as he stroked himself eagerly with the intimate scent of her.

Their bodies swayed and pushed in the darkness of the room, the wetness of skin and lust shining in the firelight, breathing heavy and laced with fervid encouragement.

His mouth dragged her towards the edge mercilessly, held her right at the tipping point deliberately, his tongue rippling against her as he brought himself to fullness a third time.

Her whole body clenched, her teeth gritted together as she strained against her bindings, the muscles in her legs bunching in her effort to wrap them around his neck to crush him tighter against her, into her. She called out to her deity once more, desperate for release. It would take just one more press of his tongue, just one more gluttonous suck of his mouth, just one more brush of his hair along the inside of her thighs, just one more deep, throaty word of encouragement to fragment her.

That was when he dropped her, mouth no longer against her, leaning back and away from her shocked expression.

His tongue slipped out to lick the taste of her off his lower lip, curling up and around to the corner of his mouth, chest rising and falling rapidly behind the torn remnants of his shirt.

"Punishment, not reward," he breathed at her. "Did you forget?"

She bared her teeth and swore at him as her orgasm slipped away from her in the cruel torture he had meant to put her through all along, holding her by the scruff of the neck to force her to look right in the face of ecstasy and then push her into the dirt of unfulfilment.

The room laughed, ceiling and floor bowing in toward each other, pressing the air closer. It laughed not for what he'd done, but at what he deliberately pushed her towards with such finely-tuned skill, smiling lazily at her as she railed at him. It would take the smallest thing to turn possibility into actuality, and he knew exactly what that thing was.

His hand lifted to the crossed scars on his chest, fingertips gliding over his skin, down his torso, over his lean abdomen, through the dark, curled hair and along the underside of that heavy, defiantly-shameless arousal at her frustration. Even under the sway of almost priapic engorgement, he was ruthless enough to mock her further, slender fingers wrapping around himself, flesh encased in flesh that stroked back and forth with an insulting graduality to force her toward that one last possibility he'd left her in his deft handling of both her and circumstance.

But the room wondered if he realised that she had known full well what he was doing, the manipulated outfoxing the manipulator, biding her time through such sweet agony in order to show him that he was not the only one capable of getting what he wanted.

Or perhaps he had known of her cognizance, rubbing his mastery over her right in her face to infuriate her into what he so desperately wanted.

The room saw now how each had plied the other, twisted circumstance, recognised possibility and chosen the actuality they wanted, hoping for acceptance, wishing for indulgence, begging for consummation.

The room had been the only one in the dark.

They had both known all along what would happen.