Under Cupid's Contract (Love Under Lockdown)

“This is called ‘doggy style,’” Hugo explained, stroking his cock against my pussy.

My pussy hugged his cock as he eased inside. Holding me by the hip for support. It also had the bonus of maintaining contact.

“Wow,” I gasped, as I felt his pelvis press up against me.

It hadn’t been a fluke. I could take him all the way. Another set of overwhelmed tears threatened to fall, but I held myself together.

It wasn’t difficult. Despite my nerves and the new position, it was mostly a matter of keeping still. Once I was bent low enough for Hugo to slide in, he’d taken control, tenderly fucking me toward ecstasy. As he went and my confidence grew, things started to change. Our bodies were beginning to move together as we worked toward a common end.

It was like poetry. I hadn’t even noticed him putting on another condom, but when he tips over the edge with me, I feel the familiar heat from before.

He pulled out, and I flipped over onto my back, panting hard as I gazed up at him.

“Back to work?” I asked, slowly catching my breath.

“No, you’ve got the day off too. From the project, that is,” he added with a chuckle, “We all need a break on occasion.”

By luck or coincidence, we managed to assemble a second, non-hideous, outfit for me to wear from the meager selections I’d packed, Hugo dressing me from the underwear up. Just for fun, he let me do the same with him.

“Good choice,” Hugo agreed, as I cinched up his thin black tie.

Given the choice of everything the house had to offer, it would surprise no one who really knew me that I elected to spend my day off in the study, plunging as far as I could into Hugo’s immense collection of literature.

It was difficult to tell time passing, cozy in the study. There were no clocks to speak of and no windows. nothing to distract him from his work. It was little surprise then, when a different sort of darkness fell.

Chapter Ten - Hugo

Skeletons in the yard. The usual phrase used for my home town. A place so small and intimately involved, most didn’t even try to keep secrets. It was just a lot of unneeded stress. The millennium had turned. Many of the old ideas at least gone underground, if not done away with. Things once considered shocking, or scandalous, had become a part of modern life. Like a single woman of 30 having her second child in ten years.

There were no illusions. I hadn’t been planned, very few 20-year-olds thinking that far ahead. I was also kept. Not only kept but loved. As much as a kid could be. A love I felt responsible to pass on. Particularly after Delphine.

It was a grass scented afternoon in the dead of August. Summer expending but still with more to go. The long days of lemonade on the veranda not behind us yet.

“Here they come,” grandma said, the swing creaking lightly.

She seemed interminably old then. I was nearly in my 30s myself before I realized my grandparents must have only been in their late-30s when I was born. Young mothers were a family tradition of sorts.

It didn’t look like much. Just a white blanket Mom held bundled in both arms. Whatever it was, didn’t make a sound.

“Be gentle, honey,” Mom said, handing me the blanket.

The blanket started to move, and I immediately knew what all the fuss was about. That tiny, helpless human entering my life as the person I would become was still being calibrated. I wouldn’t have wanted to meet the me I’d have been without her.

***

The blackened inferno smoldered. Wafts of smoke curling ethereal fingers up the stone chimney by the soft orange light. Time itself seeming to stand still. Vega shifted in my lap. I stroked her hair, coaxing her back to sleep. The work could wait. It wasn’t worth shattering her peace.

I spied The Plague, still on the coffee table. I hadn’t picked it up since Vega first arrived. Getting too occupied with other concerns. Through a daring feat of ingenuity, I got the pristine edition into my hands without so much as a stir from Vega.

It had become something of a tradition. Once a year, during the darkest days of winter, I would re-read Camus’s masterwork of relative absurdism. Just to remind myself of how bad things could get. A more empathetic form of Schadenfreude. Taking comparative comfort, rather than immediate joy, from the misfortune of others.

I read in the sounding silence, unconsciously stroking Vega’s hair. A feeling very much like love stirring in me. Protectiveness at the very least. I wasn’t sure she quite got the idea of the collar. Most think it is about ownership which was, admittedly, one of the possibilities.

Though it can also be about trust and connection. Trusting someone literally with your neck, one of the most sensitive and delicate parts of the body. The basis of the phrase ‘stick your neck out.’ There was an element of marking, but it worked both ways. I was hers as much as she was mine. An idea I liked ever more.