Blood and Arrows and Other Stories Read online

  Title Page

  BLOOD AND ARROWS

  AND OTHER STORIES

  Four Sexy BDSM Short Stories

  By

  Leigh Clark

  Publisher Information

  Blood And Arrows And Other Stories

  published in 2012 by Andrews UK Limited

  www.andrewsuk.com

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The characters and situations in this book are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any real person or actual happening.

  Copyright © Leigh Clark 2012

  The right of Leigh Clark to be identified as author of this book has been asserted in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Blood and Arrows

  My phone rang. I grabbed it, “Yeah?”

  “Sophie? Did you call me and hang up?”

  Pause.

  “Oh dear, I’m really sorry to hear that,” I said.

  “Sophie? Are you all right?” It was Jane’s voice

  “Of course not. I’ll come right over and help you out.”

  “Is this about that weirdo, Demmy?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so, but never mind. He’ll understand that you really need my support right now.” I turned to Demmy who was shaving his chest with a disposable razor, in full view of anybody passing outside. He was gorgeous, black hair, deep brown eyes, compact, heavily-muscled body which he kept fit for purpose. And in the few weeks we’d been together, he’d been an exciting and considerate lover, so why was I preparing to run out on him, just as he was sitting down in the tattooist’s chair?

  “My mum, she’s hurt her ankle, fell downstairs, I’ve got to go and see she’s okay…”

  He nodded glumly.

  I turned back to the mobile, “Okay, I’m on my way, Mum.”

  “You’d better be, and you’d better be prepared to tell me all about it, and don’t call me Mum!” Jane hung up with a giggle and I fast-walked out of the tattoo parlour to the nearest taxi rank.

  Yup, tattoo parlour. The tattoo was why I was escaping.

  “I’ve wanted to do this for years,” Demmy had said. “Come with me, Soph, for moral support?”

  I nodded, relieved he wasn’t going to have my name punctured across his bicep. A heart, he’d said. Then we got to the parlour and he took the design he’d chosen out of his back pocket and unfolded it.

  It was a heart all right. A life-size copy, so realistic you thought it could throb, and full of purple and red pipes. Not only that, but in the very centre, an equally life-sized arrow—not a triangular one, like we all drew as kids back when we sketched hearts and arrows in our schoolbooks, but a streamlined, leaf-shaped bit of shiny metal, buried halfway into the heart, and with wasp-like black and yellow bands around the shaft, which appeared to have been snapped off a couple of inches from the heart.

  As an exercise in super-realistic art, the picture was impressive—as something I would have to gaze on each time Demmy unbuttoned his shirt it was frankly repulsive.

  So I shifted my hand into my bag, called Jane on speed-dial and then hung up. I knew she’d call me back, being just out of a long-term relationship herself, and still in the ‘sitting at home, looking at old photographs and hating all men’ phase. On the way to her flat I tried to come up with a concise explanation as to why Demmy’s tattoo had squicked me out. She would want all the details in return for having been passed off as my mother.

  The truth was, the closer we’d got to Valentine’s Day, the more extreme Demmy’s behaviour had become. He liked a little pain, he’d told me, that New Year’s Eve as we sat in a corner at a party, toasting each other with lukewarm Cava. It added spice to his pleasure, he said. So, when the clock struck midnight and we kissed, I twisted my hand into his curly black hair and pulled—hard. He sighed into my mouth and I felt his cock harden against my thigh as we leaned into each other. No problem, I thought.

  But it was becoming an increasing problem, and as I rang Jane’s doorbell I realised why.

  “It’s not about me,” I said, as I dumped my bag and grabbed the glass of wine she handed me. “It’s not personal. He doesn’t care who does it, as long as he gets the pain. I’m just the…”

  “Stooge?” she asked acidly.

  I winced, but she was right.

  Jane was still in her pyjamas at eight in the evening on a Saturday. It looked as if she’d coasted through the day on ice-cream and a bottle or two of Bordeaux—I could tell by the state of her lapels.

  “Yes. No. It’s like what he wants is the pain, but for his self-esteem it has to come with a reasonably attractive female package around it.”

  She raised her eyebrow. I told her about the tattoo.

  “Ugh!” Her eyes widened and then narrowed in calculation. “So it’s over then, is it?”

  I said it was, although I could already feel an ache between my legs where I wanted Demmy.

  “Then you’ll be on your own for Valentine’s Day, just like me! We can have a girls’ night in. I’ll get some films—Orlando Bloom for me, who do you want?”

  “Paul Newman,” I said without thinking, my mind was on Demmy.

  “Sophie! He’s old enough to be your grandfather!”

  “Not in a film he’s not. Anyway, if you rent Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, we get a twofer – him and Robert Redford.”

  I could see she wanted to tell me Redford was old enough to be my granddad too, but I started humming ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head’ and she nodded slowly. There isn’t a sexier piece of film than that lucky woman on the bicycle.

  So we agreed, wine, DVDs, and a Chinese take-away meal. And I spent the next seven days trying not to think about Demmy.

  We’d started the New Year with a bang—in my flat, as I didn’t know him well enough to go to his place. The only New Year’s resolution I’d made was that I wanted more. I was kneeling astride him on the sofa at the time, his large hands around my ribs, lifting me effortlessly so that I slid up and down his shaft. I was as limp as a rag doll—I’d already come twice and apart from Demmy’s breathing, the only sound was the slick wetness of my cunt engulfing him, giving him up, engulfing him, as I moved towards my third climax.

  Into the silence, Demmy said, “Scratch me.”

  I tried to focus my pleasure-blind eyes on him. What was he on about?

  He lowered me, took one hand from my ribs, and used it move my hand from his shoulder onto his chest. As his hand fell away, my nails dragged gently down his skin. He groaned. I got the message.

  As he began to lift and lower me again, I let my fingers trail upwards as I rose, and then clawed them down his chest and belly as I descended.

  “More,” he said.

  “More!” I yelled, as I got closer to orgasm. He plunged me up and down, I tore at his flesh, and together we came.

  More.

  Oh yes. Demmy, born Demitrious, could cope with a lot more. He was Greek, and, like many Greeks, a stoic. He could endure, would endure, and even craved endurance.

  January 3. I bit his neck as he fucked me, upright, in a doorway in Camden Town, after we’d eaten at a Greek restaurant belonging to his cousin Stavros.

 
January 5. He gave me a present. A tiny kidskin flogger—white leather with a silver gilt handle—it looked like the kind of thing Cinderella’s coachman might have used on the white mouse ponies. I used it on Demmy as he fucked me, flogging his buttocks in time to his thrusts above me. It was fun, and not only was it fun, it increased the force of his movements until I came—a win-win scenario.

  January 11. Demmy gave me another present. A bat, called a paddle, he told me. It was matte black and had airholes in it, which, he said, increased the flesh contact and made it sting more. The thing looked like it could have fallen off a Mach 4 superjet. The noise it made connecting to his flesh was like that of a cleaver chunking through meat. I didn’t like it. Demmy did. So I used it that night and decided I would manage to lose it before he visited me again. It wasn’t until I was burying it deep in the rubbish sack—who wanted the neighbours to spot it and wonder—that I realised that this gift had been given to me but it wasn’t for me. It was for Demmy. He was giving presents to himself. I was just the intermediary.

  January 23. A lovely day, we saw a film; a romantic comedy in fact, drank coffee in a new coffee shop and went home to bed. We made love and fell asleep. When I woke up Demmy wasn’t in bed. I rolled over. He was poking around in my underwear drawer.

  “Here, Sophie,” he said, handing me a pair of thick winter stockings. “Tie me to the bed with these.”

  It was faintly kinky, which I didn’t mind, and I obliged, giggling a bit as I crawled across his prone, naked body to fasten his wrists to the bed head. But then he wanted the bonds tighter and tighter. I tried, but I couldn’t tie them tight enough to please him, even though his flesh above the bonds was white through lack of blood. Then I climbed on top and rode him, using my right hand to stroke my clitoris and my left to pinch my nipples until I came. But there was something wrong—Demmy wasn’t completely involved in the game. When he’d come too, I offered to untie him, but he shook his head.

  “It’s fine, I’ll stay like this a while,” he said.

  So I actually drifted off into sleep again, with Demmy trussed up beside me. But after he’d gone I thought about it all again. The important thing for Demmy hadn’t been me, or sex, or even the idea of doing something mildly exotic—the only thing that had really mattered to him was the tightness of his bonds, the pain. And because I hadn’t been able to hurt him enough, he hadn’t enjoyed the sex as much as I had.

  For the next week or so, I’d engineered things so that there was no chance for Demmy to ask me to do anything extreme. He was loving and attentive and kind, and everything was great. Or was it? By 30 January it was almost as if those masochistic episodes had never happened, but it was taking a lot of my energy to keep it that way. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to invest so much time and effort in preventing Demmy from expressing his preferences—it was like hiding all the booze every time a former drunk came to the house.

  So when, on 7 February, he asked me to go to the tattoo parlour with him, to get the outline of a tattoo inked in, so that he could have the colour applied a week later, it was a make or break moment for us. And we broke.

  On 14 February, while the girls around me in my department were chattering about the cards they’d received (and lying, I was pretty sure) and hoping that their other half would send flowers to the office so that the world could see how much they were valued, I was considering whether to have won-ton or Singapore noodles with my Paul Newman. Hardly the world’s most romantic decision.

  Jane had advanced from pyjamas to a sweatshirt and jeans, which I took to be good news, until I realised she’d only got dressed because she had to go to the shops and rent the DVDs and buy wine. I went out for the Chinese, while she cleared the coffee table and got ready for our Valentine’s feast.

  By nine o’clock, I knew I couldn’t stick it any more. It wasn’t the films, or the cheap wine, or even the fact that we were two women alone on the most romantic day of the year. It was that Jane kept up a constant running commentary about her ex and how they’d spent each Valentine’s Day, Christmas, Easter and New Year. I told her I was getting a migraine and that I’d be better off at home in bed with an icepack on my forehead. She waved from the sofa as I left, but her eyes were glued to Orlando Bloom shooting arrows into orcs and I don’t think she really noticed my departure.

  Orlando’s arrows reminded me of Demmy. I wondered how he was getting on. A tattoo that size would take hours to finish, I assumed. Even though I’d sent him a nice email saying that I didn’t think it was working out between us, I thought it would be okay to head over to the tattoo parlour and see how things were going—the act of a mate, rather than a lover.

  I got there around ten. There was just one guy inside, wearing a white T-shirt and jeans and looking as if he was bored out of his skull.

  “I was looking for someone,” I said.

  “Yeah?” He had a nice smile, and sandy hair that looked as if it would flop in his eyes when he bent over somebody’s body to tattoo them, and his arms were covered in Celtic tattoos. “So is everybody, today.”

  I nodded, recognising this as a comment on the day. “A guy, dark-haired, having a heart tattooed on his…” I gestured towards my chest and his eyes followed my hand, lingering there when I moved my fingers away.

  “Is he your boyfriend?”

  I frowned slightly, not sure that I wanted to be interrogated about my relationship by a complete stranger. “No.”

  “Good.”

  He didn’t seem inclined to say anything else, just folded his arms and smiled at me.

  “I was expecting him to still be here.” I indicated the tattoo chair.

  “Yeah. He was expecting to still be here too. I sent him home.”

  “You sent him home?”

  He turned away, tidying up the table beside him which looked like a cross between a dentist’s instrument tray and an explosion in a paint factory. “Yeah. I didn’t like his attitude. If I’d been here when he came in the first time, we wouldn’t even have done his outline.”

  “His attitude?”

  He turned back to me. “He didn’t want a tattoo.”

  “Oh yes, he did, he talked about it for days!” I was starting to wonder why I was defending Demmy, in fact, why I was even continuing this conversation. Demmy wasn’t here, so I should just head for home.

  “Nah. He wanted the pain of having a tattoo. He’d have been just as happy if we’d left the ink off and just worked him over with the needle.”

  I nodded. “You’re right. I hadn’t seen it that way, but you’re perfectly right. He was very… interested in pain.”

  The tattooist brushed his hair out of his eyes and grinned at me again. “And I’m very interested in tattoos, so when somebody comes in here and appreciates my work, then I’m happy, but when some guy only wants to be hurt, and doesn’t care about the quality of the artwork, then I send him away.”

  I grinned. “He must have been rather upset?”

  “Nah, I gave him the number of some drongo down the road who’d work on anybody. He’ll be down there now, getting some crappy colour and, given the bloke’s no artist, a lot of pain. So everybody’s happy.”

  I didn’t want to end the conversation. I was enjoying his company!

  “So what kind of attitude to you like your… customers (was that the right word, I wondered?) to have?”

  He grinned. “We like to call them clients, not customers, and as long as they want to have something permanent and beautiful, that has meaning in their lives, permanently etched onto their skin, then we’re happy.”

  I nodded, trying to think of something else to say.

  “Take you for example.” He reached out and took my hand. I jumped slightly and then relaxed. “You have lovely olive-toned skin, dark hair, a small, pale tattoo would be something that really enhanced your body.”

  I s
tared into his light-brown eyes, mesmerised by his words. He was very sexy.

  “Go on then,” I said.

  He smiled, pressing his fingers into my palm. “Go on then?”

  “Yes, tell me what kind of tattoo you think I should have. I should warn you though, that I’m not very keen on pain.”

  He shook his head. “Don’t worry about pain. When you really, really want something, you’ll hardly feel it.”

  He pulled me over to the shiny black chair and I sat down, feeling its slick surface giving under my weight. He left me to angle a couple of lights on me and then returned, his face now hidden by shadows apart from his white teeth.

  “Take off your top,” he said.

  I laughed, but he was serious. He folded his arms. “I can’t advise you unless I can see you.”

  I lifted the hem of my T-shirt, pulling it over my head, and folded it onto the chair beside me. He stepped back again, so he was totally in silhouette and stared at me. I felt myself getting hot. Then he turned away, to lock the door and lower the window shades.

  “Now the bra,” he said.

  I unfastened it, letting my breasts fall free.

  He reached over and stroked the tops of my breasts and I felt a flood of moisture between my legs, which parted on the chair as if inviting him in. I looked up into his eyes, through the lock of hair that had fallen forward again and then extended the movement, widening my legs deliberately.

  He kissed me, very gently, his hands still exploring my chest. I felt like a map, a globe, that this man was learning with his fingers, contours and shapes, rivers, mountain ranges, seas and deserts, all taking form under his fingertips. I arched my back upwards, pushing my whole world into his hands.

  He stepped back.

  “An arrow,” he said. “A tiny arrow. You have lovely breasts. Under your left breast, where the heart is supposed to live, a pale arrow, golden even. Where nobody will see it, unless you want them to.”