Fifty Shades of Dorian Gray Page 12

  She covered her face with her hands, peering at him through the slits between her fingers.

  “It’s all right,” said Dorian, lowering her hands and holding them in his, where they were as if devoured, so miniature were they in comparison.

  “I do not love you any less for this. And it is quite normal, my dear. Though I agree that eight days is a rather drawn-out vigil.”

  “It is?” she asked. Oh, she’d known there was something wrong with her. Dorian was just being kind.

  “Yes,” he said. He kissed her chastely on top of her head. “But we will work with it,” he said, adding, “But it is true that you must be treated with great care during this ghastly time, and make as little exertion as possible. I have been dreaming of licking you, of savoring your sweet taste in my mouth, but to drive you to such ecstasies would be dangerous,” he said. He looked at her in all seriousness, and nodded as if to be sure she was comprehending him. She nodded back in agreement, though she did not really know what she was agreeing to. He seemed to know a great deal about how a woman’s body functioned in this time. She would submit to his wisdom, but, ah, what a shameful mess this all was.

  “This is not the end of days, my dear flower,” he said. “You must relax, but here—” He led her hand down to his crotch. His cock swelled hugely against his pants.

  “You can still feel my desire for you,” he said.

  Rosemary felt around the erect area that was apparently his desire for her. She was unsure what she was supposed to do that would not risk her own perilous arousal. She was also just unsure in general. She knew she had to keep the cock hard, but felt clumsy and shy and worried she’d make it soft. She was grateful when Dorian spoke up and took control.

  “You may unbutton the pants,” he said. His voice was not exactly stern, but neither was it brimming with love and understanding. His tone was rather clinical, like he was guiding a novice in minor surgery.

  Rosemary complied, gasping as his monumental cock emerged. She stroked it like he had shown her the first time. His eyelids fluttered, and she rubbed more vigorously with both hands. She went on doing this for what felt like a long time, her own desire creaming her diaper, and the aching want there growing to a pounding need. How she wanted to slip him inside of her and ram her against her hemlock headboard with its sweet stenciling of faeries and horses. But she was frightened, too, remembering the monster he’d become the last time he’d made love to her.

  She kept stroking him until he abruptly removed her hands.

  “Lie down,” he told her.

  Oh, dear, was he going to take her in this state? She felt powerless to stop him, she was so desperate to have him between her legs and heaving on top of her. She fell back on the bed, then sprang back up, remembering she would have to undo her swaddling and douche herself in the toilet.

  “Where are you going?” asked Dorian.

  She bit her lip.

  “I must clean myself,” she said. Curiously, she felt she ought to use the word “master.”

  “There’s no need for that,” said Dorian, patting the bed where she was to lie.

  “But—” she started, and sat back on the bed.

  “Rosemary,” he said, kissing her neck up to her ears, sucking lightly on her earlobe. The heat of his tongue traveled straight down through her. Her legs twitched.

  “I am not going to make love to you here,” he said, his fingers passing down to her skirts. He drew his fingers back up to her face, circling her mouth. “I am going to make love to you here,” he said. Rosemary’s eyes bulged. She held her mouth shut. Then she let go of it and tried to smile as if all were well. Then she held it again. Resuming control, Dorian took both her hands in his.

  “It’s quite a normal act,” he said. “When a woman is in your vile condition, one that she—that you—cannot help, for it is nature’s cruel course, then one must become creative.”

  He stood and lifted her up—she felt like a little doll in his arms—and set her against her headboard, bringing a pillow to bolster her lower back. His cock was still hard and high in the air. Rosemary regarded it with a nervous gnash of teeth. Her teeth! Wouldn’t they get in the way of all this? She remembered how he’d strangled her the first time. Would this not be another form of asphyxiation?

  If she could hardly manage his cock in her hands, how was she to fit it in her mouth? Tell him you can’t do it, she thought. It’s too much. But to think such words would have to be enough. She could not disappoint him. He loved her. There was so much at stake. If she couldn’t please him during this unclean time, then what hope was there for their future? He was right, too. Eight days a month was a long time, and no husband should have to wait in abstinence. That was how they ended up at brothels.

  “If you sit up on your knees, that may be more comfortable for you,” Dorian said, fluffing a pillow and setting it on the bed. He tapped it and she rose up and placed her knees on it. She looked at him for further instruction.

  “Oh, Rosemary, you look so beautiful right now,” he said, touching her cheek. “I hope you know it will give me great pleasure to watch you while you do this. If it gets to be too much, just signal with your hand, but please don’t stop abruptly, as that can be painful for me. And also,” he grabbed her hand and placed it on his ball sack, “keep massaging these like you did before. You can pull harder than that, remember?”

  “Yes.” Oh, how she wanted to please him. She crouched down and, taking what felt to be the deepest breath of her life, faced his cock. She had not been this close to it before. It was longer than her head and as wide as her smile. She gave a small lick, and felt like a kitten in a tree.

  “Put it into your mouth, slowly,” he said. “Don’t be afraid.”

  Rosemary nodded, and accidentally banged her head against his cock. They both let out an “Argh!”

  Once it was in her mouth, she felt it could be reckoned with.

  “Deeper,” he said. “Put it in as far as it will go.”

  Goodness, was it only halfway in? Holding his balls with one hand, she used her other hand to guide the rest— or most of the rest—of his cock in. It was hot and salty. A large vein protruded down the base of the shaft. She ran her tongue along it, and Dorian quivered in excitement.

  “Yes,” he said. “Oh, Rosemary.”

  He put his hands on her head and rocked her back and forth, his cock feeling parts of her throat that had never been touched by flesh. She kept her lips clamped around her teeth. Saliva spilled out the sides of her mouth, helping his cock to slide in and out of her mouth with more ease. At one point, she gagged—a hideous froggy sound. She went on more vigorously, pulling on his balls all the while, using the central vein as a compass for her tongue.

  Her own arousal was still calling attention to itself, bubbling beneath her petticoats, but she was resigned to getting this present job done. She kept on until she felt his cock spasm as it had when he had been about to unload his seed inside her. He stilled her head with his hands. She moved him only with her fingers.

  “Ah!” he cried, and cried again. It was on the third cry that a river gushed into her mouth, filling her cheeks. She crawled off him and spat over the edge of the bed.

  Dorian lay back, regaining his breath. He felt dumbly around for Rosemary, and finding her hand, clutched it to his heart.

  “My dear, that was very enjoyable,” he said. “You will become very good at it, in time, I think. We have eight days to practice.”

  Rosemary drew closer to him, wrapping his arm around her.

  “Did I not do everything right?” she asked, glancing at the puddle of sperm on the ground. Wasn’t that proof of success?

  “Oh, my darling,” he said, kissing her hand. “It was fine. But there were a couple moments when I felt your teeth, which you can imagine is excruciating, for the male organ is quite sensitive. Also, toward the end, you must jerk rapidly with your hand but desist using your mouth.”

  Rosemary rolled away from him and sighed. T
here was something she had to say to Dorian, but she didn’t know what. The whole process had resulted in dissatisfaction. She wanted to please him more than anything, and had believed she had, yet here he was critiquing her while her own nether parts burned with ungodly passion.

  She didn’t want to be in bed any longer, but recalling everyone’s orders, she snuggled up against Dorian and closed her eyes. He was snoring faintly.

  Well, it would only be eight days a month. And at least he hadn’t hit or strangled her. Life had much improved since that morning when she’d worried she’d be alone forever. She looked at her hand where Dorian’s mother’s ring would soon rest in promise. She thought of her own mother. The woman had not loved her father, but she had loved someone else—so much so that she had left a family behind. Rosemary hated her for that, but she also understood her. As she looked on at the sleeping Dorian Gray, still quietly snoring (an endearingly humanlike god), she wondered what she would abandon for him. She was so much luckier than her mother. To say everything didn’t mean much.

  CHAPTER XI

  Dorian had asked to see her again in the days following his initial visit, but she had declined his company, insisting she was too fatigued. Her erotic craving for him was too intense to bear another unrequited act, however right a thing it was to do.

  By the eighth morning of her menstruation, all bleeding had ceased. The long bed rest had made her feel weak and atrophied. She forced herself to eat a hearty breakfast, the first full meal she’d had in a week. Parker set the day’s mail before her. On the top lay a hand-delivered note from Dorian, announcing that he was sending a hansom for her at eleven o’clock, and that he would expect her unclothed and in his bed by noon. She slurped up the remainders of her breakfast and hurried to bathe and dress.

  As she sat in the carriage, she contemplated a worrisome thought that had begun to fester and grow in the last few days. Granted, she had been half insane with feminine bloodshed and so in no place of logic or judgment, but she felt unable to shake it off. The night before, tired from sleeping all day but unable to sleep any longer, she had consulted a book Helen had given her some time ago called The Passions of Alphonse Gris. It was Helen’s favorite work of literature, an obscure, wretched novel that Rosemary hardly had the stomach to skim through, let alone bury herself in as Helen had. But she recalled the protagonist, the young Alphonse, had been fond of feasting upon women in a most lurid fashion. One after the other he scarfed them down and left them for near-dead. In one passage so vivid Rosemary had to squint to see straight after, the young Alphonse had taken a woman by way of her bottom—an unthinkable act—and strangled her while he mounted her, ripping tendrils of her hair out with his occasionally free hand. When Alphonse was done with her, she was grappling for life. That was only in the second chapter.

  Was Dorian Gray an Alphonse Gris of sorts?

  No, he was beautiful—inside and out. He’d been so elegant and innocent when she painted him. Yet since then, there was much to conflict with her original impressions of him. She recalled how when he’d made love to her, his hands had dug into her neck, like a bear’s claw. Her bottom had been bruised from the blows he’d dealt. And then there was the letter begging for forgiveness, claiming madness and vowing to never cross such boundaries again. The words had sprinted from one end of the page to the other as if they were running away from him, as if he could not hold onto them.

  She would have to talk this through with him. The carriage deposited her on the stone path to his house, and she walked it with a delighted sense of her own bravery and nodded to the golden poppies as if to assure them of their beauty and her own.

  Victor opened the door for her and bowed simply, then plodded back down the hall into one of the many expansive, dark rooms. The house got so little sunlight, Rosemary noted. She would have to do something about that if she were expected to live there. Ah, to live with Dorian Gray! It was all such a fairy tale come true!

  Before heading up the stairs she peered into the main dining hall to see if he’d hung her painting up as promised. He had not—but he had put it somewhere as it was no longer against the mantle. Where might he have placed it?

  As she entered his bedroom and saw the heavy curtains blocking the windows, and the enormous bed in the center of the room, looking so pristine and tidy in its tightly tucked brocade coverlet, she felt sickened by the memory of what had taken place there last time. Surely, there had been pleasure—unbelievable pleasure—but then there had been brutality, too. She had cried out for him to stop, but he had just gone on practically murdering her. It was difficult to swallow when she thought of how he’d held her neck. Had he wanted her dead, for even a split second? No, of course not. She’d seen his soul, and it was bereft of homicidal intentions. Why, it was as beautiful as his face! What had occurred was just as he’d said; he’d gotten carried away, and as the sexually experienced probably all knew, such violence was part of the advanced lovemaking process. Perhaps, in time, she would learn to enjoy it all.

  She undressed in the corner of the room, by the mirror but out of its view, and crept into the bed, taking up but one-fourth of it and sealing herself in like a candy in a wrapper. Victor was likely informing Dorian of her arrival. She could expect him to come in at any moment. Would he knock or just walk in? Was she already his, or still something to be asked for? She felt she needed to prepare herself for something, yet she couldn’t think of what. His instructions had been simple. All she had to do was lie there and wait, and soon he would be on top of and inside her. Yet she felt uncomfortable, her thoughts itching and distracting her.

  He knocked, but he did not wait for her to answer, and when he saw her in bed, there was no question in his eyes. He was dressed simply in a shirt and pants, with no tie, no belt, and no shoes. He looked as if he’d been lounging about all morning. This was backstage Dorian Gray. This is what she would come to know and love until death took her away from everything. God willing that death was not at his hands.

  She murmured hello, her voice squeaky. Why was she so nervous? He sat beside her on the bed, his gray eyes steely on hers. As he took her hands in his, she felt chills of anticipation down her neck and a tingling heat between her thighs. He went to uncover her, and was on the brink of kissing her, when she started to talk. She talked in a high and fretful voice. The words from her mind were unmoored by her mouth.

  “I will try and do something, Dorian, if it would please you. I—I don’t think I’m cut out for the type of things you indulge in,” she said.

  Dorian did not back his face away, his mouth still hovering inches away from hers, but he squinted as if he was not comprehending her. She went on.

  “It’s not that I disapprove—not at all do I disapprove!” she said, lifting her right hand and pressing it to her heart. “But for me, it is frightening, and I wish you would tell me some other things I could do to please you. If you are truly the kind of person who needs to inflict pain in order to . . .” Rosemary cringed at the direction the sentence was going. Then she cringed at herself for cringing. Would she ever be rid of this priggish provincialism? She thought of the insidious Alphonse from the yellow book Helen had sent her. Who were these people? And Dorian’s friendship with Helen . . . what had come of that? What had they been involved in together? Why was there no way to stop thinking? She should at least be able to stop talking, seeing Dorian’s confused expression, but, no, she kept going.

  “Well, perhaps I may never satisfy you,” she said, her cheeks hot with shame. “Yet, deep down—the Dorian I painted—I don’t feel he, umm, you are such a man.”

  “Shh,” he said, leaning in to kiss her softly. Her lips were hungry for his and as his tongue probed for hers, her mind’s chatter stilled and there was a mental silence like a cooling breeze. She crossed her legs as another fire started up between them.

  But once his mouth was away from hers again, she felt it necessary to solve the matter at hand. But, oh, how to talk about these things? Who knew that se
x was so complicated? And did she even know what she was talking about? She didn’t think so. Other than the passage in that horrible book, she really had no clue. In one or another of the sordid monologues she made Rosemary sit through, Helen had laughed about all the boys who were too timid to spank her bottom. She’d shrugged off her husband, disparaging him for possessing only the nerve to ram his cock down the mouths of whores, but not his wife’s. She said quite horrific things about Lord Wotton’s penis, indeed—that it was small (she had held up her pinky finger) and curved like screw. Whenever Helen talked about sex, Rosemary did all she could to drown her out. Usually she was stooped at her easel, painting some innocuous landscape. Now she wished she’d taken notes.

  Dorian pressed his finger to her mouth again.

  “Rosemary, I’ve expressed my utmost love for you,” he said. “I do not wish to hurt you. I am controlling those urges.”

  “Yes, I know!” cried Rosemary, as she leaped up and into his arms. She caressed his cheeks and lips, marveling at his stoic beauty. How unbelievable that he was hers! But could she give him what he wanted? Would he settle for a life of traditional lovemaking? And Helen—though she had to believe that Dorian was no longer under her spell, she knew that Helen would always be lurking in the shadows, scowling at their happiness. She would be looking for weakness in their bond, anything to separate them. But to obsess over Helen would only trouble Rosemary further, she thought. She needed to focus on her relationship with Dorian and nothing else. Yet there was something changed in Dorian that still she could not identify. Just then, she had an idea.

  “My darling!” she cried. “If I could just understand you the way I understood you while I painted you. I feel certain that if I painted you again—as my lover and not just my friend—I could understand you once more, only deeper. Before, I was too shy to look at you in that light.”