Masked

Two years ago:

The Crown Inn had held the silence of a locked building.

Pipes ticking, a fridge compressor kicking in somewhere behind the bar, rain needling the leaded windows outside.

The public lights were off. Only the pool-table lamp remained, a low green island in the dark.

Kim Brayburn lay on her back across the baize, her wanton cries shattering the silence of the closed venue.

The red summer dress she had arrived in lay in a crumpled heap by a table leg, one strap still hooked around the high heel of an ankle strap Louboutin shoe she was no longer wearing.

What she still had on was wreckage more than clothing. A black lace bra askew, one cup still clinging, the other peeled aside to reveal her firm left breast, matching knickers dragged down one natural stocking-clad thigh and left there around her right calf in a damp tangle. The stockings themselves were hold-ups, lace tops twisted, a ladder starting at the left knee from when Jake had hooked her onto the table.

"Oh fuck... Oh fuck" Kim whimpered, her brow like her chest coated in a sheen of sweat.

Mark Pulley held her wrists. She had long stopped pulling against his grip as The Landlord of the venue stood at the head of the table forearms braced, pinning her arms above her head against the far end of the pool table.

"Harder..." she implored, "... Fuck me harder."

Kim's dark brown hair was a mess across the baize. Her hazel eyes cast across her body watching as she was used.

Jake Parkinson needed no encouragement between her parted thighs. He held the backs of them, thumbs digging in, and drove into her with the last ugly, concentrated strokes of a man who had already decided how this ended.

"She's a rampant fucking bitch" Jake offered across her prone body.

Mark simply nodded, maintaining his grip as he watched his friend savagely claim the married woman. Punishing her promiscuity.

"I'm cumming in you." Jake growled his eyes dropping to Kim's.

"No... No... No... Don't... Don't cum in me," Kim implored, her struggle in their combined grips genuine for the first time. "Don't cum in me... Jake don't cum in me."

He did not look at her face. He looked down to the place their bodies joined, at the sheen from her that coated his length as it slammed hurriedly back and forth.

"Pull out.... Pull out..." Kim begged, "Cum on me... Cum on..."

It was too late, she appreciated immediately as Jake's mouth opened on a groan that was almost a laugh.

"Sorry" he sardonically offered as he pressed forward and pulsed deep inside her unprotected body.

He stayed there letting her feel it, the pulse, the heat, the breach of the only term she had made when she had said yes in the first place.

For a second nobody moved except her, a small helpless clench she could not stop.

"You fucking asshole," she gasped when she could make words again. "I knew I couldn't fucking trust you."

Jake grinned down at her, still inside her, still holding her thighs as if she might bolt. Sweat stood on his temples.

"My seed flooding James Brayburn's wife... and she talks about trust."

Mark let go of her wrists to work his down his fly. He stepped around the corner of the table, looking down the length of her taking in the stockings, the dishevelled lace, the red dress on the floor like evidence.

"To be fair, Jake," he offered, sardonic, almost conversational, "I'd rather not be fucking the mess you've left in her."

Jake chuckled and pulled out. Kim winced at the wet sound of it, at the sudden empty ache, at the way her own body did not have the decency to close ranks.

Mark did not wait for ceremony. Snagging the redundant underwear over her foot before he lined himself against and pushed into her in one unhurried stroke that made her spine lift off the baize.

"You gonna let me cum in you too," he stated, already thrusting, already using the slick Jake had left him.

Kim stared up at the lamps above her. Her free hands had nowhere useful to go. Jake caught her wrist and pulled them back above her head.

"Do I get a say?" she finally uttered lying between them in the darkness of the empty bar.

Mark's answer was his next harsh thrust.

She did not protest. The Crown was locked, the street outside empty. Her husband at home with the children and the story that she was helping a friend lock up after a charity quiz.

She whimpered as Mark set a steady pace that used her body for a second time, Mark took it as permission enough. Jake watched. The rain kept on. When Mark finally finished it was with the same proprietary stillness Jake had used, and Kim simply lay there exhausted on the worn green cloth.

**********

Two years later:

The Crown Inn on a Tuesday night was unusually quiet.

Three locals sat at three two tables, a fruit machine chiming encouragement only to itself, the feint smell of furniture polish and strong smell of ale.

Mark Pulley was behind the bar where he belonged. Jake Parkinson had an elbow on the wooden surface and a pint he was not drinking quickly. Steven Myler the least regular of the three friends if not to the village, sat on the next stool turning a beer mat over and over.

"So..." Steven said brightly, "... What did you find up in the attic?"

Mark set a glass of Whisky he was sipping on down on the bar and wiped his hands on a cloth tucked into his belt.

"A treasure trove... Of sorts.... Militaria.... Think the previous landlord must've been a collector.... Couple of crates left up under the eaves."

"Can't be worth much if he left it all behind," Jake interjected.

"You never know." Mark offered as he bent, with a grunt he lifted a wooden crate onto the bar with a thud that made the optics chime. "I've picked these pieces out to get them valued."

The three of them sifted. Cap badges. A dented mess tin. A webbing belt gone stiff with age. A bayonet without a scabbard. And then, nestled in brown paper as if someone had once cared, a Russian full-hood gas mask. Grey-black rubber, circular eyepieces in steel rims, a green filter breath canister screwed to the snout. The rubber still had give. The lenses were clean. It looked unused.

Steven picked it up by the canister and turned it toward the light. "That's definitely gotta be worth something."

Jake took it off him, held it at arm's length, then closer, peering into the empty hood.

"I can think of uses for that," he said, and chuckled. "I'll give you two hundred for it."

Mark snorted. "That's because you're a fucking pervert."

Jake set the mask on the bar like a prize. The three of them looked at it a moment longer than the joke required. Then Mark started repacking the crate around it.

The door from the lounge side opened. Heels on boards. Kim Brayburn came up to the bar with her bag on one shoulder and that a composure set behind the glances she gave the three friends.

The three of them noticed her, it was hard not to. Shoulder-length dark brown hair. Dark hazel eyes. Petite, slender, the kind of figure that made tight jeans and a cream blazer look like a decision. She had a friend in the corner in the corner of the otherwise empty lounge bar, an attractive blonde. Mark had served them an hour ago, a bottle of white wine that had seemingly already gone.

She set her manicured fingertips on the bar and wrapped them idly.

"What'll it be?" Mark offered.

"Two house whites, please, Mark.... Large." Kim offered.

"Evening, Kim," Jake said, peeling away from Steven before Mark had even reached for the glasses. "Long time no see."

Kim's smile was polite, if cold at the edges. With the exception of Steven, they all knew what had transpired on the pool table in the corner of the room but did not acknowledge the matter.

"With good reason." Kim smirked.

It was a nod to the night, to the pool table, to the two years of crossing the street and

choosing not to speak. Jake did not take the hint. He never did. He leaned a fraction into her space and asked after James, after her son, and whether she still ran the school fair committee.

Kim answered in complete sentences and gave him nothing extra. Mark poured. Steven watched idly over the rim of his pint.

Something Jake said too low for the others as he leant his mouth to her ear and spoke on a whisper just for her made Kim's eyebrow lift. Not a laugh. An assessment.

She took the two glasses, thanked Mark by name, and went back to the other room and her friend without looking at Jake again.

Jake drifted back down the bar to his stool.

"What was that about?" Steven asked.

Jake picked up his pint. "Just reminding the delectable Mrs Brayburn of an unfulfilled promise she never kept."

He did not elaborate. The ambiguity sat there much like the crate and the mask.

Mark pulled a fresh pint for an elderly male who shuffled up to the far end of the bar and spoke without raising his voice.

"Bridges are burnt there aren't they mate..... torched a long time ago."

Jake glanced through the partition along the bar into the lounge. Kim was back in the corner, passing a glass, already performing ordinary life: the tilt of her head, the small social laugh, the marriage visible from across a room.

"Maybe," Jake said. "But we all know.... with a minimum of effort... what a rampant little whore James Brayburn's wife can be."

Mark did not answer that. He folded the newspaper back over the gas mask, set the crate on the floor behind the bar.

"I'm missing something here aren't I?" Steven offered

"Doctor Myler.... That ones a psychiatric case you'd never crack" Jake offered to his long time friend.

Tuesday night resumed: the fruit machine, the rain starting again on the windows, three men and a piece of rubber from another country's war.

Kim did not look back over. She did not need to. The Crown Inn had a long memory, and so did she.

James would be expecting her home. The friend across the table was already talking about holidays. Kim drank her wine and felt, without wanting to, the old green baize under her shoulder blades, the weight of wrists that had held her down, the particular heat of a men who had been told to pull out and had not.

*********

The farmhouse lane was a black ribbon between hedges.

Pulling into the courtyard Kim killed the headlights and stepped out onto the gravelled surface.

Two weeks since the Crown. Two weeks of telling herself she would not come, for numerous reasons. Promises she had long made to herself, to preserve her marriage. Archie was five and already asleep when she left; Skye, James's daughter from his first marriage, had taken the offer to babysitting with a look that said she was old enough to know her stepmother had headed out looking as she did for a reason.

Kim kept the short leather jacket zipped to her throat against the wind and against the other cold, the cold expectation that knocking on the door would bring.

She smoothed the leather skirt across her thighs, its hem meeting opaque black tights that led into knee high black leather boots. She had dressed in the bedroom only half an hour earlier, she could have dressed differently, she had consciously chosen not to.

A decision made over a handful of exchanged messages against the backdrop of the recent neglect by her husband and a titillation that had nothing to do with Jake Parkinson and everything to do with the male she could not stop thinking about, the male she tried to keep her distance from but kept finding excuses to make time to be with. Andy Maxwell

Tonight was disposable, Andy had the potential to be so much more of a conscious, long term, decision. Without thinking she raised the brass door knocker and let it wrap three times as she took a breath of composure

Jake opened the door before she knocked a second time. Warmth and woodsmoke and dog spilled out behind him.

"Always a pleasure." He offered his grin wide, his eyes staring.

He stepped aside. She did not kiss his cheek. She crossed the threshold like a woman entering a negotiation.

"I'm only here to discover what you have in mind."

His eyes consumed her travelling the zip of her tight fitting jacket, the hint of lace at her throat, down her legs to the boots.

"Yet you dressed the part." Jake offered

"I always dress the part." Kim confidently responded.

"Come through to the kitchen... I've prepared a meal.... Let me take your coat." Jake offered on the edge of over enthusiasm.

She let him. The jacket when unzipped came off her shoulders and Jake saw the outfit whole for the first time: high-neck black lace that showed skin without surrendering it, keeping her breasts hidden behind the detail. The leather mini skirt sat high on her thighs accentuating the extensive line of tights into boots.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" Kim smirked.

"You remind me of someone.... an an older model."

"Flattering," Kim's offered her mouth tilted. "I feel sorry for the poor little bitch."

The kitchen was intimately illuminated. One lamp above the table, where two places were set, a stew that had been kept warm in the slow cooker. They sat. Kim crossed one leg over the other with deliberation, boot swinging, and watched him watch the swing.

He poured wine first, then served food. Conversation was kept light enquiring on one another's lives without discovering any genuine detail. Everything she said had a hook in it. Everything he said had a memory under it. She subtly reminded him of her married status, twice even if so very lightly, yet reminding a Jake of the gold band sat upon her ring finger.

When the plates were stacked she looked up at him over the remnants of the surprisingly flavoursome meal.

"There's a reason you invited me here, Jake... lets not pretend there's an ulterior motive."

His grin did not bother to hide.

"I miss your company."

"We've never been company... we always been.... And I'm with James." she reminded him a third time.

"As you were when you let Mark and I fuck you that night." Jake prompted

The baize came back into her mind without permission.

"I was drunk." She offered

"Doesn't matter to me... I still got to fuck his wife," Jake offered.

James Brayburn had been a fact in the village longer than Kim had been his wife a deep hatred had manifest since the summer of twenty five years earlier, the disappearance of friend and the obnoxious ignorance and lack of accountability that money buys those that can afford it.

Jake's dislike of James was longstanding. It had the patience of the grudge that had been born of single deeply distressing cause, that very few in the village had forgotten about

James was fifteen years Kim's senior and had that as if it were an achievement when he had returned to the village three years ago. Jake had watched him from a distance, the trappings of his wealth the arrogance of his re-emergence. Jake had wanted to spoil that smile for years.

Fucking Kim had been the first precise instrument. It had not been enough. It never would be for Jake, especially as he was oblivious of the fact.

Kim turned her wine glass in her hand and looked at him over it. "You hate him don't you."

"I've disliked him since long before you let me into you," Jake said. "Some things will never be forgotten... things he'll never tell anyone... probably not even you."

"I know enough" Kim offered with ambiguity,

"I doubt it" Jake offered coldly

"Well I do know that if you truly wanted to punish James..." Kim said, almost idly, ".... You wouldn't stop at his wife... You'd fuck his daughter."

Jake's mouth twitched. A wry smile of amusement crossing his features.

"There's no dynamic there. No possibility. She doesn't look at me. She looks through me. I'm her father's age... not a man she'd come too easily."

"She's a spoiled little princess," Kim said. "She thinks the house is still hers... She treats me like a guest who's overstayed her welcome.... I would be more than willing to assist in her demise."

"You'd feed her to me."

"I'd introduce the possibility," Kim said.

Jake drank. The dislike of James warmed in it, a warmth brighter than the claret wine.

"And what do you get?" he offered.

Kim's smile was the one she wore in the Crown when she was being civil. "Skye's his pride and joy... over and above his own son... our son... she needs taking down a peg or two... brutally... Do we have a deal?"

"We can come to an arrangement... I'm sure." Jake offered his mind whirling in contemplation.

"Is that not what tonight is?" Kim offered her eyes narrowing over the rim of her wine glass.

"Well in that case." He reached for a bottle on the dresser. "I'll fix a suitable drink."

Kim stood first. Straightening her skirt once more she left him in the kitchen, she had visited the farmhouse before socially and knew her way around.

The living room was illuminated by a cracking fire that reflected back from two leather sofas. The black Labrador, whose name she could not recall was fast asleep on the rug as if nothing in the house.

Kim settled onto the large brown sofa, sitting with her knees together and then, after a moment, not as she crossed one tone thigh over the other. On the low wooden table before her sat a black gift box, fastened with a blood-red ribbon in a bow.

Jake entered the room with two glasses. He sat closer than a friend, yet she did not pull away. She took a sip of the murky brown drink he handed her, and her face did the work her mouth had not yet agreed to.

"What's this?"

"Whisky sour."

"You went heavy on both the whisky and the sour." She offered playful with a hint of accusation, "I'll need a taxi home."

"Or you can stay the night."

"That's not part of the arrangement," Kim confirmed.

She drank, a long swallow that put colour on her cheekbones. Jake's hand went to the box. Her eyes followed, intrigued despite the lecture she had given herself in the car.

"This a gift for me?"

"Maybe.... Or perhaps more for me."

He passed it to her. She set the near-empty glass down so her fingers could get at the ribbon. The bow slithered off. A flush climbed her throat before the lid was even up.

She lifted it.

The rubber looked blacker in firelight. Circular lenses. Green canister. The hood collapsed on itself like a waiting mouth.

"What... what the fuck is that?"

"It's what I want you to wear for me." Jake stated.

"You expect me to... to fucking wear that?"

Kim reached into the box, intrigued as much as she was horrified. The gas mask came out of the box between the fingers of her slender hands, its weigh heavy against her wrists. She held it before her staring at the face of the mask as if it might bite.

She chuckled incredulously, "It's fucking disgusting... I'm not... There's no way I'm..."

As her words trailed off Jake watched her intently. Sophie, the labrador stretched her legs as she woke momentarily, not even lifting her head as the fire popped and crackled.

Kim turned the mask, finding its, the zip seal across the back of the neck, studying the way the eyepieces reflected her own face. Two weeks ago, she had glimpsed it in the bar. Now it was in her hands in a secluded farmhouse, at night, with a man who had already come in her once against terms. She should have stood. She should have asked for the taxi she had joked about. Instead, she set the mask on her knees and picked up the glass again, needing the sour more than the whisky.

"What exactly do you want?"

"I want you to put it on... I want the filter between your mouth and the room... I want his wife as my faceless little plaything... And I want her to surrender to me " Jake stated his voice dropped to the tone he had once used stood before a pool table.

Kim laughed once, short. "Surrender?"

"Like you did before."

She looked back to the mask. The lenses threw back two small fires. Kim's fingers found the edge of the rubber once more.

Her pulse was stupid and obvious in her throat.

She lifted the hood.

"If this smells." She offered as feeble a protest as she could.

"It doesn't... I cleaned it" Jake countered. "I'm not a complete animal."

"Debatable."

She studied the mask for a long period of time. Jake let go a breath he was not aware he held as she gathered her hair in one hand, the way she would do for a dress zip, and brought the mask to her face. The rubber met her cheeks, her chin, the bridge of her nose. For a second she only held it there, she did not move it, breathing the room and the filter at once.

Jake did not touch her, he did not offer to assist. Watching her silently contemplate was provocation enough.

Kim pulled the straps. The mask slipped over her head, her world narrowed to two glass circles and the sound of her own breath made mechanical and close.

The sitting room, the dog, the fire became a diorama. Jake's face, when she turned toward him, was sharp and pleased, waiting.

"Now... now what?" she offered meekly her voice distorted.

Jake leaned in until she could see only him in the lenses.

"This..." he said, "... Is the part where you admit you what came here to discover."

Kim sat on his sofa in lace and leather her face lost behind the sterility of the mask, her breath passing heavily through a canister, she did not take the mask off.

Jake waited a patient moment waiting for her to adjust to accept the confines of the mask. When he moved he lent closer turning her head away from him as he secured the shirt zip across the nape of her slender neck before adjusting the straps to fir the mask tighter

When he stood he did not take her hand. He took the back of her neck, guiding to her unsteady feet allowing her a moment to adjust in the heel of her boots before he steered her as if the mask had made her a thing that needed guiding.

Kim walked uncertain steps at first her heels heavy on the polished wooden floor boards her breath roaring in her own ears passing through the filter on steady deep rasps.

Sophie lifted her head watching them as they departed.

The hall was narrow. Floorboards complained. Her boots continued to echo around the quite of the farmhouse a sound that the filter turned into something closer and stranger. Jake kept her a half-step ahead so he could watch her move the anonymous oval of the hood catching the stairwell light in the two blank circles beyond which sat her eyes.

"Up."

She took the stairs cautiously. The mask made the climb a labour of sound, inhale and exhales passed through the canister. When they reached the landing he could feel the heavy beat of her pulse in the side of her neck. Jake's palm stayed at her neck, not cruel, dictating the route she took.

The master bedroom was dark until he flicked a lamp on.

Rested against the far wall the Four-poster bed sat. Its frame intricately carved a wide bed, dressed in heavy black covers. Beyond it a window looked down on the courtyard and the black shape of her own car. Jake closed the door behind them with his heel.

"Stop."

Kim stood at the foot of the bed, boot clad feet planted on a wide stance.

Jake walked a slow circle. When he stopped behind her the zip of the leather skirt was a single downward fact he had judged on arrival. Pulling at the gold zipper the skirt loosened, it slid and hit the floor around the heels of the boots. She stepped out of it without request. What remained was the lace top, the opaque tights, the boots, the mask.

Jake made a sound of approval.

His hands arrived without request. Gently mapping. Palms down her sides, the dip of her waist, the flare of her hips, the taut nylon over her arse. He came around and set both hands on her ribs, thumbs finding the undersides of her firm breasts through lace and stayed there until she had to breathe into the pressure.

Then he settled fully over her breasts. Fingers spread. He found her nipples already hard and treated that as an invitation he had issued himself. Pinch. A pull that made her spine try to follow. Another pinch, sharper, and Kim's breath hit the inside of the mask and the filter in a fog that briefly whitened the lenses.

"Sensitive," he observed. "Like you were that night.... When you begged me to pull out."

She could have stepped back. She stepped into his hands instead, a fraction. He rolled her nipples between finger and thumb until the lace might as well not have been there, until the sting and the heat braided, until her hips made a small traitor's movement she would have denied with her uncovered mouth.

Jake backed her to the bed and laid her down across it. On her back her legs hanging over the edge of the firm mattress. He stood between her knees, hooked his fingers in the tights at the crotch, and tore.

The nylon gave with a cheap, intimate sound. Cool air. His fingers followed the rip, found her already wet, her cunt perfectly smooth.

He crouched, Slipping two fingers, then a third when she lifted into it, the pressure of his thrust past the lips of her labia slow enough to be reassurance. He worked her with deliberation, measured, alternating between slow and excessive pace, watching the mask for the only feedback her face could still give the flare of her breath on the lenses, the tilt of the hood. Gasps of pleasure softly passing the filter as he built his stimulus.

Kim's hands fisted in the covers. The filter soon turning every gasp into a mechanical rasp of a noise. When his thumb found her clit and stayed, circling without mercy, she made a sound that could have been his name had it not been lost into a whimpered mewl.

He withdrew his fingers, looked at them, her wetness coating his digits as he brought them to his mouth and tasted her.

His mouth found her hungrily. Jake feasted on her as if he had all night and intended to spend it proving a point. No rush. No performance for an audience. Tongue flat, then pointed, then slow drags that made her thighs try to involuntarily close and found his shoulders there preventing her.

He held the ruined nylon aside with his thumbs and licked into her. The heels of Kim's boots braced on the edge of the mattress as she lifted and bent her knees to anchor herself. Her back arched. Her arms trembling as she braced and clenched the sheets beneath her tightly.

Jake kept going his tongue a constant source of pressure upon her cunt.

Her breath hitching, her body tensing. Her thighs trembling either side of his head, he did not relent.

The mask made the climax he drew from her climax sound surreal. Her breath slamming the canister, a cry flattened into something wet and rhythmic, her hips jerking against his mouth while he kept her there, lapping his tongue through her trembling over sensitised reaction and beyond it, cruel in the kindness of not stopping at the first peak.

She came down shaking. The lenses had misted. Her lace top had ridden. Jake wiped his mouth on the inside of her thigh and did not give her a minute that belonged to her.

He opened his trousers. No condom. The decision already made the way it had been made on the baize. He hooked her the underside of her knees as he raised and entered her in one thick, claiming stroke that punched a distorted moan out of the filter.

"James wife... turned into my whore again" Jake groaned.

She lay beneath him accepting the first handful of minutes as on slow deep thrusts he stretched her body around him, only pulling out to reposition her up towards the centre of the bed.

As he fell across her, he re-entered They seized each other.

"Take it," Jake sneered "Take it."

It was not gentle. Kim's legs locked around him. Jake's weight drove her into the bed. He thrust and she met him. She raked his back and he pinned a wrist. The mask made her a stranger on his sheets; that anonymity did something visible to his face. He pulled out only to flip her, only to drag her to the edge, only to fold her thigh knee up, pinning her thigh as he took her deeper until the headboard answered every gasp that passed the mask.

Kim refused to surrender. Every time he thought he had her arranged she twisted, hooked a boot behind his thigh, rolled them, she ended up astride him for a dozen rampant strokes before he dumped her onto her side and took her there, one hand in the rubber straps as if the mask were a handle. Breath play without a lecture, the hood already limited her. Jakes pace stole what the filter left. She gasped and the gasp went nowhere useful. She clawed and he growled into her neck.

"I'm going to fucking ruin you" Jake snarled.

The fight of it pulled them off the bed.

Dragging her up from the floor he fucked her against the window, lancing deep into her before she had her feet. Cold glass on her shoulder blades, courtyard below, her car a dark toy.

Jake lifted her, her tights now in shreds, boots still on, as he held her fucked her while standing until her heels found the sill behind her and the back of her masked head smacked against the window. Anyone crossing the yard would have seen a hooded figure and a man and not needed the rest.

Kim's right hand in his hair gripping tight her left hand splayed across the glass and then dug into his shoulder as he mercilessly thrust up into her. She would not yield the rhythm; he would not yield the angle. It was ugly and athletic and exactly what he had physically intended.

When her legs finally shook he carried her and the physicality of the fuck that constituted an argument back to the bed, dumping her face-first across the soft surface. His hand hauled her hips. Her chest pressed to the covers as he pinned her nape just below the straps of the rubber, He drove into her from behind with the kind of intensity that made the mattress shift.

Kim's hands opened and closed, snatching for a grip as she sought to brace against the onslaught her body absorbed. The mask smashed into the duvet. Her gasps turning to pleasured screams. Each thrust shoved a broken, filtered howl out of her, pleasure and protest occupying the same frantic breaths.

.

"Take it," he said, not asking.

She took it. Her body, traitorous and perfect, opened for the finish he had stolen last time and was now being handed to her. Jake's hips slammed flush against her ass and stayed.

He came in her with a groan that needed no filter, pulsing deep, holding her up so she could not collapse away from it. Kim felt every spasm of it, the heat, the claim, the spill of him deep inside of her.

They stayed locked until his breath slowed. He did not pull out with any haste

When he did, she felt the leave-taking as a second small humiliation, slick on her thighs, the torn nylon useless.

Kim's voice came from inside the hood, thin and used.

"Can... can I take this off now?"

Jake's hand was still on the straps. His other hand was already reaching toward the drawer of the bedside table, toward something that clinked softly, metal on wood.

"No," he growled. "Not until I've restrained you."

The lenses showed her only duvet and a sliver of lamp. Her wrists, empty for the moment, waited on the covers as if they already knew the shape of what was coming.

Kim Brayburn, masked and filled, did not reach for the straps herself.

She waited to be tied.

***********

The steel cuffs were not costume.

Three pairs, held apart on short chains, they ratcheted open.

Jake took her right wrist first, then the left, and ran both together to the headboard. Clipping them to a bolted carabiner she could not have noticed when her back had been upon the bed. The click-click of the cuffs over her slender wrists was small and final.

Kim tested the restraint at once. The chain gave her half an inch. No more.

He moved to the foot of the four-poster. Her left boot clad ankle seized and cuffed to the eyelet set in the pillar of the bed. Her left ankle drawn to spread her legs wide, the cuff wrapped her boot and fastened to an eyelet on the second pillar, the cuffs biting into the leather of her boots. When he stepped back she was spread across the mattress in a hard inverted Y. Lace and torn nylon clung to her sweat soaked body her wrists stacked above her head, legs open to the room. She raised her masked head from the pillows. The filter made her breath rasp.

Jake looked down at her as he knelt upon the bed between her parted legs.

He took the lace top in both hands and ripped it from the neck down the front of her body. The sound was worse than the tights. Kim gasped as breasts spilled out through the torn material, the exposed flesh rising and falling on heavy breaths.

Kim tensed. The chains sang. He watched her pull and get nowhere and something in his face settled.

He straddled her waist. Not her hips, seating himself higher, pinning her with his weight so her tits were a shelf he had made. He pressed them together with both hands, thumbs cruel on the nipples as he pushed his cock into the valley he created.

The first stroke smeared her own wetness and his across her sternum. The second found a rhythm. He held her and fucked her tits with short, greedy thrusts, the head butting the mask's canister.

Kim's muffled protests came out as heat on the lenses. She jerked her shoulders; the headboard answered her wrists and did not give. He pressed her breasts tighter and used them until the skin was slick and reddened and he was breathing like a man who could have finished there. He chose not to.

He shifted back between her bound legs and entered her in one harsh line.

No warning. No hand to ease it. She was held open and he took full advantage of her compromised position. The cuffs at her ankles kept her from closing or wrapping him; the cuffs at her wrists kept her from pushing up. He fucked her like the window and the bed had only been a draft. Deep. Unkind. The mattress slammed the frame, the bed creaking under the attention he afforded her.

"Jake... Jake" Kim begged into the mask.

The snatched words came apart in the filter, and he answered by reaching up to the breath plate on the canister and turning it.

The airflow narrowed.

Her next inhale was work. The hood became a smaller room. Panic and pleasure braided; her cunt clenched around him in a spasm that made him swear.

He kept the plate tight and kept thrusting viciously. Using her body as deep thrust after deep thrust lanced into her bound body.

When he came it was with his hand around her throat beneath the valve, he emptied into her a second time in hard pulses while she dragged at air that would not arrive fast enough.

He opened the plate.

Air hit her like icy water. The lenses cleared a fraction. Her exposed breasts heaved against the ruined lace top. Jake stayed inside her until the last twitch passed, then pulled out and looked at the mess he had left. His spend leaking from her along with her wetness, the torn nylon framing the flushed skin of her gaping cunt.

His fingers replaced his cock.

Slowly. Methodically. He worked her back open offering her no respite.

Two fingers, then three, curling, rubbing the swollen place he had already found with both his tongue and his dick, his other hand splayed on her lower belly to feel the lock of her stomach muscles when he started.

Kim strained against every cuff at once. The spread held her open for it. His fingers worked her rapidly, his thumb teasing with rough drags over her clitoris. She came with her body locked out, a seized, helpless arch, a howl flattened by mask into something animal and wet. The chains pulled taught then settled.

He let her shake. Then he tightened the breath plate again.

The world shrank while she was still twitching. His fingers, slick, pressed back in. Four. The stretch burned in a different register. He tucked his thumb and the fifth digit followed, a blunt insistence at her entrance, trying to make a fist fit into what she had already given him.

Kim hollered. The mask turned mercy into noise.

She shook her hooded head hard enough to thump the pillow.

"No... Jake.... No... Stop... You can't"

Five fingers in her to the last knuckles. She yanked and protested so hard the eyelets in the headboard strained against screws that held them to the wooden frame.

He backed off.

The hand withdrew. The refusal stood. He sat back on his heels, breathing hard, looking at the woman he had cuffed to his own bed and not quite broken open the way he wanted.

"I'm only going to let you refuse me once." Jake growled

He unlocked her ankles.

He rolled her facedown, her arms twisting with her wrists still chained to the headboard, he face turning side on to her right covered cheek so that the tighten breath canister lay across the duvet. He did not loosen the canister.

Pulling her limp legs together he re-cuffed the ankles to one another, a short hobble that made her legs a single offering.

Tearing open the black nylons further, he lined himself up against the tight pucker of her ass hole.

Kim felt the head, his hand smearing the combined mess between her legs as the only courtesy. He pressed. She gasped. Along gasp torn from deep within her body that filled mask and had nowhere to go beyond the hood.

He worked himself in against the tight ring of her anus, patient now that he had named the limit.

He breached her, the head popped through the ring of muscle stretching her and she cried out into mask once more.

He gave her the inch, then another, then the rest in a slow claim that made her fists open in the cuffs. When he was seated he fucked her ass with a rhythm that was almost tender compared to the earlier intensity a slow deep fuck that forced him deep into her bowels.

Kim took it because the chains and his body weight ensured she had no option.

A half an hour of deep slow painful penetration followed.

The lamp stayed on. The courtyard outside the window stayed dark. He finished in her a third time, buried deep in her, a groan passing his lips against the back of the mask.

He left her there stretched across the surface of the bed, exhausted and used.

**********

At the bottom of the stairs, she looked like a woman who had been in a fight with her own clothes.

The jacket went back on zipped over the torn lace her skirt sat over the ruined tights.

Her face, when he had finally peeled the hood off, was flushed raw, strap marks scored her cheeks and jaw. Her long dark hair was soaked with sweat and stuck to her temples and back of her head in ugly, honest thick strands.

Kim smirked at him in the hall light, mouth swollen, eyes bright.

"As brutal as ever." She offered

"I could've been more brutal... if you'd let me."

The disappointment sat in it. She heard it. She chose not to stoke it.

"Even I have my limits."

She opened the door and stepped into the night. Gravel beneath her unsteady feet. Wind from the night whipping around her aching body. The car she had parked sat a little too far away.

They exchanged no pleasantries as Jake closed the door on her taillights as she pulled away towards the gate and the narrow lane that lay beyond the courtyards walls.

He took his mobile from his pocket. The contact was stored as Button, he typed quickly.

"I've a new toy to play with... when can you next visit the farm."

He sent it. His mind was already on the next young woman to wear the mask, a young girl far smaller in his imagination, less practised at refusal, a face that had not yet learned the Crown Inn's after-hours rules.

He made to slip the phone back into his pocket when it vibrated. He looked to the screen expecting a reply to his massage, surprised to see a message from Kim Brayburn

"You take Skye with more brutality than that. You don't give her the option to say No."

The message brought a sardonic grin to his face.

In the sitting room the gift box still sat on the coffee table. He collected the glasses.

Sophie, the black Lab, lifted her head again. At the bottom of Kim's glass, the last of the whisky sour clung to a faint grit of granules that had not quite dissolved.

Jake looked to the dog.

"Perhaps I should have used two of those tablets."

Sophie rose and came to stand at his side, obediently or in request of food, she was uninterested in the ethics of the farmhouse night. Jake carried the glasses to the sink. Above him the four-poster kept the smell of rubber and sex.

Down the lane, Kim Brayburn drove with the window cracked, thighs slick, wrists aching, already composing the face she would wear when Skye asked if she had had a nice evening.

Jake wiped down the sweat soaked mask, leaving it to dry before it went back in the box.

The bow on the box would not be replaced.