He touched her hair. It was soft and wild and the color of butter.

She was breathing hard and fast, sharp little pulses of air whispering into the sheet, but the pace was leveling off. There was a damp spot on the sheet by her cheek where her ruby mouth gaped half way open. Her arms extended over her head, wrists closely bound with a white cord while her knees were touching the floor at the foot of the bed. Her eyes were wet, gleaming, and trained on his face as he sat beside her.

"I just I have concerns," he told her softly, calmly, as if he were telling her something solemn and arcane.

The palm of his hand stung almost as much as her ass, and it was almost as red. He was beginning to wonder if her breaking point was unreachably far beyond his own.

"I know..." she started, but he shushed her softly.

"You have to learn to listen better." His voice was almost cloying with comfort and deference. He pushed her hair backward to expose the side of her face. She was flushed. Her fine skin had that humid quality just shy of breaking a sweat. He studied her carefully and sighed.

"You have this sparkle," he said. "It never leaves your eyes. It changes according to your mood, but it never goes away."

He let the back of his hand drift calmly over her cheek, then leaned down and placed a soft kiss against her temple. His palm briefly caressed her neck, then down along her spine to the small of her back where he massaged the little dimples above her ass with the pad of his thumb.

"It says you're alive," he went on. "It says you're not like all those zombies goose-stepping down the sidewalk. It says you're better than that."

She sighed as he pressed hard with his thumb, digging into her singing muscle.

"And it's what makes you more beautiful than other people ... other women. I want to say it's the spark of life, and that you've always had it, and that it makes me feel like the last man alive on Earth when you look at me, and that no one ever made me feel like that ever before or since ... and ... that it's the reason I keep walking into this house every day, but really there are a lot of other reasons for that."

His hand moved over the scant, black thong to firmly caress the raw, red skin of her ass. She winced slightly and almost wimpered. When his fingers slipped under the thong and moved downward to explore the swollen lips of her bald pussy, she was swimming in the syrup of her own heat. One finger slid between the petals and sank inward. Half a sound came out of her throat while her spine arched.

"That comes from being strong, too," he said as his finger began a short, lazy suggestion of fucking. He leaned close to her face and spoke low and softly. "And you're so strong. Maybe the strongest person I ever met. But it's a problem sometimes because your strength controls you. And you need to learn how to control it."

"What do you... ?"

"Shhhh, baby, shhhh. You trust me, don't you?"

She closed her eyes and nodded wordlessly. Then he told her he loved her and drew his finger out of her saturated core. He smeared her moisture on the tender skin of her ass and stood up.

Walking behind her, he undid his dark, leather belt and yanked it through the belt loops of his jeans with a prominent snapping sound. The catch in her breath was unmistakable, and her breathing went ragged again.

The curve of her spine was classic, and the swell of breast pillowing out on each side of her body triggered a spike in his pulse. He laid the belt across her ass while he took off his jeans and stood naked behind her. He knelt down in the space between her calves and pulled her thong down. He gripped her ass cheeks and pulled her open.

His tongue slid along the wet furrow of her pussy, up along the crease between her cheeks to graze the puckered bud of her ass. Something like a purr came out of her throat. Then he kissed her taut rim and stroked inside her pussy with his finger. His cock leapt with spasms of longing.

He stood and lifted the belt, grasping it by the buckle and wrapping twice around his hand, until the right length of pure strap dangled from his fist. He gripped his cock with the left and stroked his shaft. Sap began dripping from the head.

"I love you," he said again, but this time it almost sounded like he was saying it to himself. "I just want to see you fly, baby. The way I know you can. The way you know you can."

Then his right arm rose above his head and swiftly swung the belt across her spherical cheeks. The snapping sound was sharp and clear. Her buttocks almost jiggled, but the muscles in her ass and thighs were so taut from running their resilience never failed to astonish him.

An angry red swipe line in the shape of his belt began to form across her cheeks, broken in the middle by her cleft. He watched her body writhe. Heard the slow, shallow breath that told him everything he needed to know before raising his arm once more.

He swung the belt again. She gasped at the sharp sound and sting, and then a long, throaty purr escaped her throat. He wasn't sure if it sounded more like a growl, but he knew what it meant.

He swung a series of solid figure eights in the air, the strap swiping her finely sculpted ass with each cross. Blood pumped hard through his veins as he watched her hips roll, as if she were trying to buck an unseen beast riding her to the outskirts of hell.

The pale crimson of the entrancing slash between her thighs was glistening, taunting him unmercifully. Heat pulsed down the length of his cock shaft that wouldn't release its grip.

He dropped his hand, letting the tip of the belt tickle the floor, and thought of how it felt to be buried to the hilt in the sumptuous nest of luxury that was her body.

Her face was burrowed in the sheet now, while her frame heaved with short, almost violent breaths. The backs of her thighs seemed to be quivering, and her heart had to be pounding. The color of her ass made it hard to breathe. He felt small, like he was betraying her somehow, but he wanted to kneel behind her and feed himself into her more than his next breath.

Desire was a derelict planet spiraling out of its own orbit and she was the constellation it was lost in.

Ooze dripped from his pulsing cock in a heavy bead. He caught the thread in his fingers and smeared his shaft as he held the belt leather to her red skin and drew it slowly across her flesh as he stroked himself.

He wiped the precum from his fingers across her ass and stood up again. His mask of stern confidence wasn't necessary back there, studying her body bent over the foot of the bed, her taut lines nearly vibrating as her bound hands balled up fistfuls of sheet above her head.