Chloe in the Master's Study

I had let the fire burn low on purpose, because a bright room invited questions and I had no wish to be interrupted. The study of my London townhouse held the smell of coal and leather and the faint sweetness of the whisky I had not yet poured, and beyond the shutters the winter streets were empty. I was Edmund Vale, thirty-two, unmarried, and the master of every person sleeping under this roof. Chloe Thomas came in with the tray as if the hour were still decent, twenty-four years old and employed in my house, her black dress uncreased and her mouth already doing something unwise with a smile.

She set the glass where my hand would find it and did not retreat to the door.

“The rest of them have gone up,” she said, and the lightness in it was a little hook, thrown to see whether I would take it seriously. I had seen her in this room with a scuttle of coal and with clean glasses. I had not seen her linger. Last night among the glass and the plants had not been enough for either of us.

I drank and watched her. If a footman found her here, or if I chose to be cruel in the morning, she would leave this house without a character and her name in service would be finished. That was the whole of her fortune, standing in front of my desk while the city froze.

“Do you know what it means if you stay, Chloe?” I asked, and I let the question hang until a wiser girl would have curtsied. She met my eyes and I saw her decide not to make a joke of it, her fingers still on the silver of the tray as if the metal might steady her. “I know you can dismiss me,” she said. “I know what a girl is worth without a letter.” I told her she was still standing there, and she answered that if I wanted her gone I would have to say it plainly.

I did not say it. I set the glass down and pushed my chair back far enough that the space beneath the desk was no longer a secret. “Lock the door and come here. If you stay, you stay on your knees first. I will not pretend this is something else.”

She turned the key. The sound of it was small and final in the quiet house. When she came around the desk her hands were already at her skirts, not shaking, and she looked at my face as if she wanted to be sure I meant the seriousness I had put into the room. I undid the front of my trousers and drew my cock out into the lamplight, already thick from watching her choose the lock. She went down without being told a second time, the wool of my trousers against her cheek, and the first wet heat of her mouth closed over me as if she had been thinking about this since she picked up the tray.

I kept a letter in front of me because I had said I would, and because the sight of her under the wood, hidden from the rest of the house, made my blood move in a way that felt like ownership. Chloe took me deeper on the second stroke, her tongue working along the underside, and I felt her hand come up to hold what she could not swallow. She made a small sound that was not quite a complaint. I put my palm on the back of her head without forcing her, only letting her feel the weight of it, and she answered by sucking harder, messy now, spit shining on her chin when she drew back for air.

“You will be quiet,” I told her, and my voice sounded almost ordinary, as if I were still reading the letter I could no longer see. “If anyone comes to the door you will stay where you are.” She looked up from the dark under the desk, eyes wet at the corners, and took me into her throat until I had to shut my own. The papers blurred. I could feel how wet her mouth had become, how willingly she used it, and I thought of the hours I already owned in this house, and how this was not a game she could walk away from in the morning.

She hollowed her cheeks and worked me with a patience that did not match the playfulness she wore in the kitchens. Spit ran down to the root of me and she followed it with her hand, twisting on the upstroke while her mouth stayed greedy at the head. I let her go on until my thighs were tight and I was close enough that another minute would have finished me in her throat. Then I took her hair in my fist, carefully, and drew her off my cock. A string of spit followed from her lower lip. She wiped it with the back of her wrist and waited, breathing hard, still on her knees as if the floor belonged to the work.

“Come up from there,” I said, and my voice had gone rough enough that I hardly knew it. “On the desk. I want my mouth on you before I fuck you.”

I cleared the letters with one sweep of my arm and they whispered to the carpet. Chloe stood and I lifted her by the waist onto the leather top, the lamp throwing a yellow circle over her stockings and the pale skin above them. I pushed her skirts to her hips and found she had nothing underneath but heat. The air of the room must have been cold on her; she shivered once and then opened her knees because I put my hands there and asked without speaking. I bent and put my mouth on her cunt, and the first taste of her was salt and want, already slick from kneeling under me.

She made a noise she tried to catch with her teeth. I licked her slowly at first, the flat of my tongue through the wet seam of her, and then I found the swollen place at the top and stayed there, sucking in a rhythm that made her hips lift off the desk. My hands held her thighs open. I could feel her trying to be good and failing, the little rolls of her body against my face, and I wanted her to fail. I pushed two fingers into her while I licked, and she was tight and soaked, clutching at me from the inside. Her hand found my hair. She did not pull me away.

“Edmund,” she said, and my given name in her mouth was a trespass I allowed because she was shaking. I did not stop. I fucked her with my fingers and ate her with a greed I did not bother to hide, curling against that place inside her that made her thighs jump, and when she came it was with her heels against my back and a broken sound she buried in her own wrist. I kept licking her through it until she tried to close her legs and I would not let her, not until the last of it had gone through her and she was wet on the leather and on my chin.

I stood. My cock was leaking against the silk of her stocking. I rubbed the head through the mess of her cunt and watched her face change as she understood I was not done. “I am going to fuck you now,” I said, and I made her hear every word. “Your stockings stay on.”

She nodded at me with her eyes still dazed from her own climax, and I felt the consent in it like a hand on my throat. I pulled her to the edge of the desk and pushed into her in one long stroke that seated me to the hilt, and the heat of her after my mouth made my vision narrow. Chloe’s head fell back. I held her hips and fucked her with the full length of it, not gentle, the desk creaking in a way that would have damned us both if the house had not been asleep. The silk rasped against my coat. I could see the wet of her on my cock every time I drew out, shining in the lamp, and I drove back in because she took it, because she wanted the seriousness she had asked for with her staying.

“Look at me,” I said, and I kept moving while I waited for her eyes. She gave them to me. Her mouth was open and the lamplight caught the wet on her lower lip, and I felt her legs lock around me as if she were afraid I might remember myself and stop. I did not stop. I fucked her until the slap of it filled the study, until she was coming again with a shocked little cry, her cunt seizing around me so hard I had to grit my teeth not to follow her. I wanted more of her than a single finish on a desk. I pulled out while I still could, breathing like a man who had been running, cock wet and standing, and I sat down in the chair I had left and crooked a finger at her.

“Come here and sit on it,” I told her. “You will do the work now.”

Chloe slid off the desk on unsteady legs and came to me. I took her waist and guided her over my lap, her skirts bunched between us, and she reached down and held me so she could sink onto my cock herself. The decision was hers. She took me slowly, inch by inch, until she was seated in my lap and her forehead rested against mine, and I could feel every flutter of her around me. For a moment we only breathed. Then she began to move, rising and falling with a rhythm she chose, and I put my hands on her arse and let her use me.

“That is it,” I murmured against her mouth. “Take what you came in here for.” She rode me with her hands on my shoulders, and whatever lightness she wore in the passages of the house was gone, replaced by something concentrated and hungry. I kissed her because her mouth was there, whisky and her own taste, and she kissed me back as if the contract between master and girl had become a different paper. I could feel how close I was again. I reached between us and rubbed her where we joined, and she bit my lip when she tightened. I did not let myself come. I held her still when she would have gone faster, and I waited until her breathing slowed, and then I opened the drawer of the desk with one hand and found the little stoppered bottle I kept there among the pens.

“I am not finished with you,” I said, and I let her see the bottle before I touched her with it. “I am going to put this oil on you and I am going to fuck your arse. You will tell me if it is too much. You will not pretend bravery you do not feel.” She looked at the glass and then at my face, and I watched her understand that I was still offering her the door. She did not take it. “Do it,” she said, her voice low and certain. “I want to know what you are when you stop being careful.”

I lifted her off my cock and turned her. She braced her hands on the desk, still in her stockings, her dress around her waist, and I poured oil into my palm and worked it between the cheeks of her arse with a patience I did not entirely feel. Chloe made a sound when my thumb pressed in, slow, the oil making her easy, and I waited until she pushed back against me before I gave her more. I oiled my cock until it shone. When I set the head against her I went in by degrees, the tight ring of her yielding because I asked it to and because she breathed out and let me.

I had to stop with only the head inside her, my hands shaking on her hips, the heat of her gripping me so fiercely I nearly forgot the house. “Breathe,” I told her. “You can take it.” She breathed. I gave her another inch, and another, until I was buried in her arse and her forehead was on the leather and she was making a continuous low noise that was not pain. I stayed still until her body accepted the size of me. Then I began to fuck her, slow at first, long strokes that let her feel every bit of it, the oil wet between us, my belly against her. When she reached back and held my wrist I took it as leave to go harder. I did. I fucked her arse with a rhythm that made the lamp shiver, and the filth of it, the locked study, the girl in my service bent over my own desk, all of it gathered in my spine.

“Chloe.” Her name came out of me like a warning. “I am going to come in you.” She said yes, wrecked and certain, and she said it again as if she needed me to hear that the wanting had stayed with her through the oil and the stretch. I drove in hard and held, and I came in her arse in thick pulses I could not have stopped if the house had caught fire. I kept myself deep until it was finished, one hand spread on the small of her back, feeling her tremble under my palm. When I withdrew, slow, oil and seed followed, and I was careful with her in the way I had not been in the taking. I sat and drew her into my lap before her knees could decide otherwise, and I held her while our breathing found a human pace again.

The fire was almost out. I cleaned her with my handkerchief as best a man could, and I did not speak until she had stopped shaking. Her dress was a ruin of creases. I smoothed it because I could, and because the power I had over her place in this house felt uglier now that I had been inside her.

“What do you want that is not this house?” I asked her.

Chloe was quiet long enough that I thought she might not answer at all. When she did, the sentences came shorter, as if the subject of herself required a different mouth. “Do not tell me I am lucky,” she said. “I am not a story you can make neat.” I told her I was not making a story. I could put money in her hand. I could give her a better room. I could take her out of service and still keep her, and she would not wait on anyone except the fact of me.

She stood up from my lap and began to put herself in order, stockings straightened, hair pinned again with fingers that knew the work. I saw her refuse the shape of the nicer cage even as she had taken everything else I had offered her body. “I will not name a next step that is only a prettier door in the same wall,” she said.

I asked her what she would miss if she left. She did not answer that. She would not. I watched her choose silence the way she had chosen the lock, and I understood that the seriousness she had wanted was not the same as being kept. I could have told her that her place depended on warmth in the morning. I did not. I let her go without that threat, and I knew as I did it that the lack of a threat bound her more tightly than a warning would have done, because she would walk back to her own floor knowing I had been kind, and kindness from a man who already owned her hours was its own contract.

She paused at the door with the key in her hand and wished me good night as if the tray and the whisky were still the whole of it. I answered her in the same quiet, and she went out, and the study was only a room again, papers on the carpet, whisky untouched in the second glass, the smell of sex and coal. I had offered to keep her and she had not answered. Tomorrow would come with the same law that already held her, whether she found the words or not, and if she wanted to be taken again she would have to ask for it herself.