That had not been a threat. An amused remark, I guess?
“Yes.”
The quiet note in that conversation drifted along for the rest of that day, and still I felt as if a thunderstorm was in the offing. Fire and brimstone, danger and evil and corruption must be brewing past the horizon.
Yet, even if my list had been sidelined, I was certain Isak was turning into something better. I had written out that list and pinned it to a cupboard in the kitchen, and I hadn’t seen him look at it once.
Not that I’d ever been sure it was the be all and end all of being a good person.
I prayed… and I did not really ever pray… that he would become something good. On a few nights, in bed with him snoring beside me, tears silently leaked as I considered this.
I liked this, and I was beginning to think I liked him, as he was. Now.
On a Tuesday afternoon, we drove to a creek on the remote corner of another property, twenty minutes away. We’d arranged it with the owner, and no one would disturb us. The creek looped in then out again to enter an adjoining farm. Banjo was left behind. He was too bruised to run about, which he would have done if we had brought him – as well as chase the cows, sniff butterflies, and stalk our picnic food. Georgia had promised to look in on him.
The wire fence went into the water and climbed the banks where this property ended and another began, and the cattle could reach the water and drink from it. Mature ghost and paperbark gums shaded the creek, flickering leaf-dappled light on the water. Some cows grazed under the trees near us, as we set up a picnic on the bank.
“Hmmm.” The champagne was in the ice bucket, which was really a plastic container, but ice is ice. The food was on a platter—
“All done.” Isak dropped his sunglasses onto the hamper. “And you’re wearing too much. Strip for me until I say stop.”
“Are we going swimming?” I tongued the inside of my mouth. Neither of us had a bathing costume, but I was being deliberately naive.
“Not yet.” He toed straight the picnic blanket, then sat opposite me on the blanket and crossed his legs. That smile… it was becoming more and more frequent.
Strip for me. Those erotic words sent a shiver through me. As always, I tried to ignore it. He knew the effect he had on me, and sex was never far from his mind, even with the drug regulating his worst impulses.
Horndog, yes. Or avid lover. Or Casanova. Choose one.
Sex was never far from my mind, either.
For once I’d not worn the de rigueur T-shirt and jeans or shorts of country life. I shucked my black trainers – pumps were hopeless on the uneven ground – then plucked at the hem of the dress, only to be hissed at.
A finger was waved. “Slowly. Much more slowly. I want to enjoy this.”
A million times, more or less, he’d seen me naked.
“But… there is only this. And these.” I flipped the hem, then slipped a hand beneath, pushing up the side of the dress to pluck at my panties. “And the bra.” Tease, tease. I traced my finger over the contours beneath the bodice, lifting my breasts a tad, as if they had accidentally fallen in the way of my drifting hand. His gaze sharpened. “You?” I raised an eyebrow as I nudged the dress strap off one shoulder. It slipped down my arm.
“Not me. Continue.”
The unyielding command galvanized me – it was as if I was truly a stripper, a nothing to him, apart from my female form, and this was a form of humiliation. My betraying nipples scrunched in at the thought.
Another fetish I had grown? I could no longer tell what was me, my original state before Isak, and what had been created by association.
I let the other strap roll down, then let the dress slither past my breasts to my hips, and I shrugged it lower to pool on the grass, revealing my matching red bra and panties.
“Hmmm. Stop there, sit and eat.”
When I sat, propped on an arm with my legs folded off to the side, he leaned forward and readjusted my bra. He edged down the fabric on both sides to expose my breasts. Heart in mouth, I watched him suck on first one nipple then the other while his fingers explored below, rolling aside the crotch of the panties then pushing along my slit, until he found my entrance.
After a few languid insertions of two fingers, he stopped, with those fingers left in place up to the second knuckles.
Mouth falling open, I looked at where his hand was. How indecent, to see, to feel, a man’s hand violating me here, out in the open air. And on a picnic rug.
Such small obscenities impressed me.
“I can tell you like this.” He slowly removed his fingers then fed them over my lips and teeth, observing as I sucked them clean. “You are well-trained, my Red.”
My Red. Had he ever called me that before? Not this way. Eyes bright, he sat back, studying my breasts: framed but no longer concealed by the bra, as if they were a revelation.
“Better. Much better.”
The picnic went by in a haze. He poured champagne into champagne flutes and we picked at a cheese platter, smoked salmon, cherry tomatoes, and crackers with pâté. He fed me and played with the parts of me he’d made naked.
It was nothing dirtier than what he had already done, though the casual toying with clit and pussy, and being on display while he was
