[A NOTE ON CONTENT: This is mainly a story about a loving couple, but it features themes of power, dominance and submission.]
**
I surrendered my delicate flesh to the merciless heat of a tropical sun. I turned that phrase over in my baking brain, and found it pleasingly dramatic. I mean, I was sunbathing. Lying in a bikini on an expansive lounger, gazing sleepily down the length of my glowing brown body, between my toes, out into the depths of a flawless blue sea. Blue like the opulence of pharaohs. In its depths, purple like empires. Sometimes almost green like... jade?... something Chinese... or do I mean Japan? Or both? I was dozing in the stillness, stupefied by the light, mystified by the warm wind and the fluttering of benign wildlife somewhere on the island.
The sea glittering in front of me. Dense green forest susurrating behind me. Arcing to my left and right was white beach. Not white like anything. Just white. White like the idea of white. White as you imagine it, like it never really looks. My brain buzzed and drifted.
I woke happily with Honey at my side. She'd brought me a very tall glass filled with ice and something that she had mixed herself. The glass was so wet with condensation that her clever pink fingers were drenched. She had also brought a massive bottle of sunscreen. Clever Honey-pie.
"You idiot, Maggie," she laughed, setting down the glass and opening the sunscreen. "You're going to be sore."
I gladly roused myself and sat up enough to sip from the glass. Impossible. Beautiful. I looked at my body. I'm long and lanky, but I have enough weight around my hips and enough heft to my breasts to look fine enough in a classic red bikini, if I do say so myself. My idiot skin was deeply brown now, and every hard contour had red highlights. Through the lenses of my sunglasses and the haze of my stupor I looked unreal.
I made a breathless sound as Honey's hands ladled cold cream onto my ticklishly twitching belly and began to spread it around.
"Relax, Honey-pie," I murmured, laying my hand on her arm, "we're not all as Pre-Raphaelite as you."
That's true. No-one's like Honey. Her skin is dazzlingly pale and pinkish, and every hair in that soft sumptuous pile on top of her head is the colour of Manuka honey. Is that even one colour? Honey-coloured anyway. Hence the name. Every hair on her body too, what little she leaves for me to tousle.
(I say 'hence the name', but there's more to it than that: her mother was slightly dippy and slightly eccentric and she named her Honoria. But she would literally strangle me – albeit playfully – if I called her that. Honey would strangle me, not her mother.)
"Never mind that," she replied, letting her hands glide over and around my legs. "You'll still burn. You're so careless. What was distracting you this time?"
Every pink part of her – the corner of her eyes, her mobile lips, the tip of her nose, fingertips, toes, those more intimate places only she and I share – are the colour of raw vulnerability, as though every breath of air, every degree of heat or cold, would make her burn. And yet she goes through the world as though she's as mundane as you or me.
I sipped from my glass and then held it aside to watch her slippery hands slither over my chest and shoulders in a businesslike manner.
"I was thinking about colours," I said. "I was thinking about the meaning of the word 'paradise'." I smiled. Her big blue eyes flashed at me and she showed me her little pouting smirk. She poked a creamy finger at the tip of my nose and left it well screened. I worried about her pinkness. I said: "You're going to burn before I do, Honey-pie. Let me do you."
She had come out of the villa wearing only a t-shirt and cut off shorts, and her skin (white, but not white like a beach) was already glowing alarmingly. She stood up and pulled off her shirt, leaving her little round breasts to quiver vulnerably in the blazing sunlight. She tilted her head back and squeezed sunscreen in absurd quantity over her chest, shoulders and neck. She wasn't playing around: she genuinely needed to apply it as thickly as cream on a scone.
"Are we going for a walk, Maggie? Or something? I'm bored."
"Thank you for my drink. No Honey, please, I just want to lie here. I'm so relaxed it's insane. I'm in paradise. If you lie next to me, I'll never want to move again. Come here, let me do you."
I gestured 'come here' to her, but she stepped back, reaching up to smear the cream over herself. She looked away, sulking. She's not spoiled. She's not a brat, nothing like that. But sometimes she sulks, and sometimes she gets away with it.
"I want to do something. Something that doesn't involve being completely motionless." She was coating her legs now. Her slim limbs must have been an inch thicker with the cream applied so liberally. No, they weren't. Of course they weren't. I can't bring myself to even joke about that. Her limbs remained as hypnotically lithe as ever. But creamier.
"I wasn't proposing to be motionless," I said. "But I'm not running around with you. Not today. I'm so sleepy, and this is bliss." I put on a comically winsome voice. "Please be part of my bliss."
She did the smirk again, and stomped towards me with mock anger. She knelt close and faced away from me.
"Do my back," she commanded. I took the bottle and unloaded a vast quantity of cream onto the tiny canvas of her shoulders. Her skin was gloriously hot. I began to paint her, dreamily.
"I just want to explore," she said. "We've got this place to ourselves. I mean this whole fucking landmass, coast to coast, every inch."
She meant the island.
"Not every inch," I said sternly, "remember there's dangerous areas down the other end we're not allowed into. This isn't a theme park, it's an actual wilderness."
"Urgh, don't fuss. This isn't 'Lost' or something. It's fenced off. It's safe. But it's a really and truly desert island all of our very own! Why aren't you excited? Why aren't we climbing trees, digging for treasure, chasing each other..?"
"Are you nine?" I laughed.
"...Chasing each other, splashing, tumbling through the water of the Blue Lagoon?"
"There isn't a lagoon." I shamelessly ran my hands down her side and over her hips, adoring her.
"You don't know that til you explore! Also I don't know what a lagoon is. Isn't that one?"
I looked where she was pointing.
"That's an ocean, Honey. Honey, I will do those things with you, I want to. But I just want to be still for now. You know I need that."
I eased my hands into her shorts, one down the back to squeeze a juicy buttock, the other down the front to find the gossamer soft flesh below the honey hair. My fingers were wonderfully slippery as a confusion of impossibly delicate petals were shuffled between them. I tried in vain to do anything more purposeful, but there was too much lubrication and I had to be content with knowing I was doing enough.
For a few moments all I could hear was the sound of her sighing breath. She didn't look around at me. When she spoke her voice was heavy.
"That's not fair."
"I'm only exploring," I whispered. "I think I've found a lagoon."
She shook her lovely head. She shrugged. She didn't pull away, but she picked up her t-shirt and pulled it on. It immediately clung disgracefully to her moist skin. She still didn't look at me. Then she stood swiftly, dislodging my hands. Without looking back she strode in the direction of the villa, hidden somewhere in the greenery.
"Go back to sleep, Maggie," she sighed.
She knew I needed to rest. She knew that and respected it. But sometimes she sulks, because sometimes she just has to have her own way. Sometimes she gets away with it. Sometimes she doesn't.
I watched her until she was out of sight, trying not to be anxious. I drained the glass and lay back. My skin was hot but no longer defenceless. I went to sleep.
**
This island, then. I can't tell you where it is. I mean I'm not allowed to, legally. That's part of the package. You get that perfect island, you get perfect solitude and perfect surroundings, and you pay so much you can almost physically feel it. I paid it ecstatically. But yes, the package: you don't tell a soul where it is. It's on no maps, no property registers that are easily searched, and the business model has no room for word of mouth or casual footfall. You get invited.
They research you ('they' are a company whose name I can't tell you), and tick you off against a checklist. Enough money? Enough class? Enough discretion? Enough stress? Once you've been invited and signed some preliminary confidentiality papers, you get the testimonials. From some serious people. I suppose I must be serious people too. But, oh man, the people I could name. I can't name them.
You and your guests are deposited on the island and you settle into the villa complex nestled in the trees near the north coast. They'll assign servants if you want them, but I didn't. I had my Honey and my solitude and that was all I wanted. A satellite guided drone (blind and deaf, guaranteed) dropped off fresh supplies every day. And that's the island.
And I'm not going to pretend I'm some high-flying, go-getting, self made woman. I inherited my money. I invested it modestly. Put most of it into charitable foundations. I never bother anyone. Oh, there's the promotions and the lobbying and all those things that make me feel worthwhile, but I don't pursue people. People trouble my mind. I pursue peace and quiet. Honey is my peace, and the island was my quiet.
And as for Honey...
"If you play Frisbee with me," a voice purred, "I will lick you from sundown to dawn."
As for Honey...
The sun was still taking its best shot at me as I stirred, confused, and now it was a relentless weight, pinning me to the lounger. But now it was flashing on and off oddly, and for a moment I thought I had heatstroke.
