Read Online Jeremiah Quick by SM Johnson - Free Book Online Page B

length of her back.
    She shuddered, because his hands, cool and
sweet though they were, caused a trail of pain.
    "Your skin is beautiful. So clear. Like a
canvas."
    Pretty's eyes fluttered closed because it
sounded more like a threat than a compliment.
    He lifted her head by the hair again, and
she tried to raise her eyes, to focus on his face, and she thought
he was staring back at her, but her own eyes skittered away, too
vulnerable just now to study him.
    She felt the sting of tears behind her
eyelids, the horrid lump in her throat she hadn't felt for
years.
    She was ashamed not to be managing her
punishment more gracefully.
    Which was insane, wasn’t it? She wanted to
apologize, to explain, but she had no voice, not unless she wanted
to suffer more and more and more.
    He was petting her hair again, lifting it
and letting it slide through his fingers, over and over, talking to
her in a low voice. "Poor baby. It hurts. I know it hurts, but it
has to. I can't teach you anything about pain if it doesn’t
hurt."
    She could tell him about pain. If she were
allowed to speak. If a count to ten was an impossible dream, what
did that make forty-two hours of laboring to give birth?
    She was intensely sorry she'd gotten into
his car. This was her own fault.
    She might have cried for real then, but he
was pulling her hair, and she had to raise her head, though she
still didn't manage to look at him, instead lowering her eyes
toward the floor. It seemed safer, somehow.
    A startling touch to her lips made her jerk
her head to the side. He made a tst-tst sound that reminded her of
the fucking dog whisperer, and she would have said so, except it
would take more than that for her to forget the ban on her voice.
And then he was pressing something between her lips.
    She almost rejected it – until the sweetness
lighted on her tongue, and the immediate slow melt of chocolate
almost made her moan out loud.
    He went back to playing with her hair. She
closed her eyes and willed her muscles to relax. There was no point
in being tense if he was giving her a break.
    After a minute or so, his hand followed her
hair to its end and trailed down her back, and there came the soft,
weird pain again, the one that came from his gentleness.
    "Don't move," he whispered.
    The shock of the strike took her breath
away, or she would have screamed.
    She was scrambling onto the table top, in a
panic, not even on purpose, when his sure, strong hands caught her
about the waist, and eased her back into position. His voice broke
through her sudden panic."Six."
    Fuuuuck! She screamed it, inside her head;
teeth…hands… everything clenched. It would be better to be tied
down, better if she couldn't move at all, couldn't escape, and
surely his comforting her in the middle of it all made it that much
worse, made her almost forget, for a second, that he was the one
giving her pain in the first place. Fucker. If she had voice, she'd
tell him that, too. In fact, the moment he let her speak, she would
call him the worst vile string of obscenities she could think of.
So there.
    "Shhh," he said, standing at the side of the
table now, one hand tangled into her hair as the other struck her,
although maybe not quite as hard, and she reared up, glaring at
him, so fucking done with this.
    "Seven," he said. "You're almost there. You
can handle this."
    She'd thought she was beyond tears, but no.
They seeped from her eyes, and then he was licking her face, her
eyes.
    "Ahh, precious tears, from precious
Sunshine."
    The words were sweet, the tone biting.
    Pretty was shuddering, still half-crying,
when he dropped two fast blows across her back, lined up in the
original diagonal, and one last, crosswise again, and then he was
pulling her up, turning her so her small breasts pressed against
the front of his shirt, her legs hardly able to support her weight.
He caught her with an arm around the curve of her lower back,
hurting the ends of the strike marks enough that she pushed