She came out of the bathroom wearing her black vinyl dress, black mesh stockings, and black heels, and she stood in the light from the bathroom door regarding me with a mixture of shyness and challenge, letting me look at her, enjoying my reaction. I might have smiled. I certainly felt like smiling. She was dressed now and ready. She’d touched up the small amount of makeup she wore and brushed out her dark hair and now she was ready for me.
These were her sexy clothes that she wore only for me. This was my outfit, and she had put it on for our last night together.
One leather cuff was buckled around her left wrist, but she held the other in her hand to show me. A strap was broken.
"I couldn't get it on." she said apologetically.
"Come here. I'll do it."
She walked over and stood by me, her dress rustling slightly. She held her pale wrist up while I buckled the cuff around it and I could feel her warmth and her nervousness. I could smell the slight hint of her perfume. She usually didn't wear scent, the perfume was for me too. I'd told her it would help me remember her when I was gone, and that I really wanted to remember her.
She was my Star girl. I won’t tell you her name. From her earliest years she had been fascinated by the stars, by what was up there far above our heads and far, far away. There was a purity there and a mystery that called to her and that had only increased as she grew older and more capable of understanding the immense and staggering distances, the power and terrible beauty of the deep skies, where imagination faltered and reason itself seemed to lose its grip. It was a fascination she still held, and which I teased her about. But behind the teasing I came to associate her with the starry skies, her dark hair, her sense of self-possession, even now, when there was so much between us
I’d gone through my own phase of fascination with the cosmos, but I was older than she, much older, and at some point I’d finally turned away from the immensity of space as being too inhuman and frightening for me. Now I liked my cosmology with a more human face, and I took a special satisfaction in thinking about the wide belt of the zodiac, the wandering planets beaming their mysterious influences on our poor earthbound lives, the stars in their courses brought down into the realm of the mundane: Venus on her voluptuous sofa, the Sun in his brilliant glory, the mysterious moon with her baleful influence, ghosting through the night sky. I didn’t believe in the predictive power of astrology, but neither did I disbelieve. I was comfortable with things neither true nor false, right nor wrong.
She still concentrated on the reality of the stars as physical objects, as objective facts. She was comfortable with objective facts, and she was good with them. It always took some doing to convince her to enter this shadowy realm of half-understood emotion with me, where things didn’t always make sense, where dream logic was the only rule. This was where I lived now. This was where I was master. Where she saw stars, I saw the empty space between them.
It might have been the influence of the stars that first brought us together. Certainly our finding each other had something of the miraculous about it, a feeling of predestination or fate, Even so it was a doomed relationship and had been from the start; there was no place for it to go. That didn’t make it any less intense though. My desire for her was enough to bring me back to her town, under these stars, to be with her again, even though she had to snatch the time away from her ordinary life to spend these nights with me.
This was the last night. That’s why it was special. And that’s why I remember that the Sun was in the sign of the Twins, and, at this time, as I buckled the other slave cuff to her wrist, the Goat was rising on the horizon with his two horns, one of Triumph, the other of wasted effort.
She slid the cuff around her wrist, seeing that it wasn’t too tight, and waited for me to tell her what to do. I knew that the feel of the leather on her wrists excited her.
“Do you want me on the bed?” she asked.
“No. Not now. For now just stay here.”
We were standing near the dresser, and I could look over her shoulder and see the reflection of her back in the mirror. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do with her, we didn’t have a plan. We didn’t script these sessions, they developed naturally as one thing led to the next and we fed off each other’s responses and our rising desires. Perhaps we were influenced by the stars as well, or the near planets, perhaps some phantom rays from the gibbous moon decided what we’d do that night. Or perhaps it was just the sight of her dark hair, her black dress, her pale skin in the mirror.
“Turn.” I said, guiding her to face the mirror so that her back was to me. I could see her face, see my own face peering back at me, eclipsed partially by her dark fall of hair.
We both of us looked at her, both of us excited by the tightness of her clothes and the way the vinyl hugged her body.
“I don’t want you to touch me.” I said to her. “Do you understand?”
She nodded.
My hands slid slowly up over her hips, her waist, came around front and over her breasts. All the time I watched her face in the mirror, and she watched my hands touching her.
“I like to see my hands on you.” I said to her. “I like to feel you but I like to see my hands on you too. It makes me feel like you’re mine.”
She said nothing but I could feel the steady rise of her chest as she watched my hands tighten on her breasts, the vinyl crumpling under my fingers. I could feel her warmth through the dress and the softness of her flesh. I put my face in her hair, inhaled deeply, and tightened my hands on her.
She had taught me herself how she liked to be touched but it had never really been necessary. It was instinctive to me. I could feel in her body what she wanted, she rarely had to tell me. It was some magical connection between us. It had always been like that between us.
In her normal life she never got to play like this, never dressed up for anyone, never got to show this side of herself. In her normal life of study and accomplishment she gave no hint that there was this other aspect of her personality. It was something only I knew about and it made it that much more delicious to know.
She was good at what she did, but the stars were just a hobby for her. It was not what she studied in school. There was no living to be made from astronomy, no jobs to be had, and so she pursued another subject in another discipline, one just as difficult but one much more rooted in the earth, as she was. It made terrible demands on her and precluded her ever doing anything like this. For this we both had to carve out hollows in our lives
I released her breasts, and with one finger I traced a long slow line from her throat, down the bare skin of her chest, down to the first snap that held the dress closed, and then farther down, between her breasts, over her stomach, her hips, over the mound of her sex. It was a slow, languorous caress, and one that made her aware of her vulnerability and her submission. For the next few hours, as the stars rode in their invariable courses through the night sky, she would be mine. I would own her.
Her lips opened but she made no sound. Her eyes were on her image in the mirror, watching nervously as my hands slid up the row of snaps that ran down the front of the dress. I took hold of the lapels.
I pulled the first snap open. The tops of her breasts were now visible, the rounded swell exaggerated by the tight embrace of the vinyl.
I pulled again and the next two snaps parted. She did her best to remain still as I exposed her body, watching what I was doing to her as I undid her dress, as if she were not even the one who was being undressed. The girl in the mirror might well be a stranger for all the emotion she showed, but I knew better. It excited her to see herself touched and undressed like this.
I held the dress closed, the fabric between my fingers, and then pulled it slowly open, the snaps popping one by one, laying her bare from her chest to her waist..
She watched with seeming dispassion, but I could see the subtle signs of arousal, the way her nostrils flared, the quickness to her breathing, The feeling of power I had over her made my cock harden against the soft pressure of her ass.
This wasn’t the way we usually made love. More often it was fast and hungry, a sustained explosion of desire; my aggression and her surrender. But always it had this intensity, whether fast or slow. This torturous slowness was something she especially liked, slowly exposed to herself, watching herself be aroused, watching as I shamed her with her own pleasure.
I had stopped trying to understand it long ago. I didn’t care about understanding anything anymore. I only cared about experiencing, about losing myself in that experience. She was the one who still believed in reasons and explanations, in making plans, in being sensible and reasonable. But she was the one who had come to me when she wanted to explore these shadows, and put herself in my hands. I knew the way, and she was willing to follow me and see what I could show her..
Her plunge into the irrational excited her as well, but she would never stay there long. She had things to do in the world of careers and sense and success and this was only a diversion to her, or so she thought. I suspected otherwise, that she had a dark side herself that she’d glimpsed but never looked at. She had me to do that. That’s what I was for.
The dress was open, and my hands found her breasts, filled themselves with her flesh, squeezing her, feeling her softness. She moaned softly in pleasure and let her head fall back against me. She stared down at my hands on her naked breasts, looking from one to the other. I felt her start to reach instinctively behind her for my cock.
“Don’t touch me.” I said again, squeezing her breasts for emphasis. “Remember what I said. I don’t want you to touch me.”
I wanted her to have to stand here in the light from the bathroom and be caressed by my hands emerging from the shadows. I didn’t want her to reciprocate. I wanted her to feel like an object, as if her body was something being used by someone she couldn’t see. It was as if what she wanted didn’t matter.
I worked the sleeves down her arms and off, letting the top of the dress hang from her waist, then I slid my hands down her smooth arms and brought her wrists, secure in their leather cuffs, behind her.
“Stay here.” I said. I went to my bag and found a sturdy, chrome, double-ended clip. I went back to her and fastened her wrists together, the clip locking shut with a satisfying snap.
Immediately she tugged at her bonds, making sure her wrists were securely locked together. She demanded that what we do always be real, that ropes be tight and shackles strong, and I always obliged her. This wasn’t play to me.
I pulled her back against me so that she was forced again to look into the mirror, naked from the waist up, her arms pinned behind her. I stood there as she watched my hands roaming over her bare skin.
“Look at yourself.” I said. “Look at your body. You know what you’re made for?”
She was excited but she wouldn’t show it. She was looking at her reflection with a kind of detached arrogance, as if contemptuous of her body. She didn’t answer.
I took her breasts in my hands and stroked them, then reached down over her waist, took the dress and pulled it completely open, popping the rest of the snaps. I held it around her for a moment so that her pale skin was framed against the black of the dress, then let it drop, leaving her naked except for her stockings and shoes.
She had shaved for me as a special favor, and the slit of her pussy was visible where it emerged from between her legs, tentative and mysterious.
