DOMINANCE

The night after our last love-making, I speak via the floo network, as per her wishes. Anything she desires. She is in control.

"Did you enjoy last night?" I ask her.

"Yes," she breathes, and I know her hand strays to her tender and tingling body.

"Be still," I say. "Save yourself."

"Yes," she says and she will move her hand so that it rests chastely on top of the blankets. She will content herself with the feelings of well use, and the slow throb of blood thudding through her clitoris, still coming down a day later from its all-night high.

"I especially liked –"

"Shh," I say. "Just tell me about next time."

She hesitates "Six?"

I smile. She is becoming ambitious after years of being a mouse, of longing but not having.

"Six," I say out loud. "Are you sure?"

"Six," she repeats.

"You are becoming greedy," I say.

She giggles, then quiets abruptly, wondering at my mood.

"My greedy girl," I say, indulgent.

She giggles again, now confident. It has taken much coaxing for her to express her tiniest want. A long time ago someone well named Krum beat her for wanting anything they did not. The night she took a restaurant menu from me and ordered her own meal was a triumph.

We talk of small things, but always our conversation is full of holes, and the shapes that plug them. Our words slide and roll in the mouth and each of us knows the other is imagining.

It is time to end the conversation.

"Six?" I ask again.

"Six," she replies.

"Then you must wait twelve days."

"Twelve, like the Dancing Princesses."

"Like the fucking princesses," I agree.

"Fuck the princesses."

"You're my princess," I say and hang up.

Our talks always end with banter, with words that melt and thrill her.

Six. It is good that I have twelve days. I am nearly finished a new experiment and will need time to fine tune it. Twelve days until I see her naked again. Twelve days before I seek my own pleasure. And only the floo network, or maybe an owl between us. If I am in Muggle London, I may use the telephone. When Alexander Graham Bell made that first connection and said: "Watson, I need you", did he know what binding wires he had charged for lovers to lash themselves together?

Sometimes as I talk to my beloved in this archaic fashion, I slide my little finger in and out of the coils of the phone cord. I like the way I wet my finger and it penetrates easily and comes free tasting salty with accumulated time and sweat. The coils grips me, but still they are rubber, not the warm circling insides of her.

My rooms are silent. I am tempted to touch myself, ease the loneliness, but resist. Twelve days, to let the feelings and thoughts build. It is still early, so I turn to my work. I have thirty essences to add to my potion. The potion has taken a month to brew, and these last drops will see success this evening, I hope.

Symbols and numbers swim across the parchment, tight and pinched. There is no joy in them, no way to appreciate the formula itself as a sensual process. The letters are printed, hard and sharp, gathered in blocks of words, interspersed with dots and symbols that jerk, not flow. And as much as I try to hurry through this, I have to stop, stare, think about what I am doing. I make more mistakes than I should, hating this necessary function.

Some words are smudged in this book, from decades spent in the Restricted Section of the library, and my guesswork take all night, and it is early morning before I sleep. I have made the potion, and I must suppose it works, but I am too tired to be pleased. Sleep, and my regular life take hold for another day. I teach, and teach, and students file to and from my laboratory, some stupid, some with promise.

I know that with a short walk to Hogsmeade, I could Apparate to London, see my love have lunch. She sits in the city square each fine day. I have watched her many times as she opens her red mouth. It is small and it is good that her lips are full. She could easily have a narrow look to her. To take an adequate bite, she must cram and I love to see her lips stretched around bread, with perhaps a dribble of mayonnaise coming from the corner of her mouth.

To sustain the anticipation, I delay my lunch break, Apparate later than normal, and the square is nearly deserted. There is a tiny pigeon feather on one of the benches. It is fluffy at the base. It either belongs to a young chick, or is one of the delicate breast feathers of an adult bird. The curve mimics exactly the place on my love where her nipple ends and the swell of her breast truly begins. I keep the feather as a reminder of her.

It is a short walk to Diagon Alley. I rush. There are afternoon classes. There is a shop containing small crystals full of music. With every crystal I consider, I take the feather from my jacket pocket and caress it. Would this music suit her? Can I see her body move to this tune? By the end of my lunch break, I have four new crystals, and the feather is safely back in my pocket. The fluff is a little ragged and I think of her pubic hair, not coifed into a perfect triangle or other fashionable shape, but full bloomed across her crotch and thick into the crease of her thighs, with stray hairs springing out from her legs. She is natural, wild, dark like a gully. Unlike the openness of the city square, in a gully there are birds with deeper, sharper feathers, quills that prick.

The rest of my day passes in a blur until I am home, back in my rooms. I cannot stop my fingers as they flick floo powder into the fire. She is breathless as she answers.

"Hi, I just got in." Her voice is bright, brittle from her day of research at the Academy. She has not yet had a chance to soften, slip into relaxation.

"Tonight, have a hot shower, and use the hand held nozzle. Play it over yourself. Use a tickling spray and get inside the fold of your clit."

"And I can't come?" She knows the answer but likes to tease.

"No."

"Then why should I do it?"

"I want you tender when I see you next. I want you soft and hot, tender. I want you to jump when I touch you."

I hang up, and set to work. It takes me many days to fine tune my potion and attune it to the crystals. Finally all responds to the appropriate stimuli, and I find I have only two days in which to transpose selections of music to a single crystal.

In this time I have neglected my love. This is my greatest fault. It has taken me years to cease finding pleasure in the purely technical moments of life and to let them merely be the bridge to the sensual. I was a different person back then. I thrilled to achievement in the material world, got an ache in my crotch when a potion worked, when a delivery of pristine books came thumping onto my table via an owl, the day I was called Professor for the first time. Music was a pleasant enough background whilst I curled my numb fingers around a mortar and pestle. Women were shadows who featured only as other people in my life.

Until a compassionate workmate stopped my headlong drive and gave me back my soul. She blindfolded me and we made love beneath autumn trees, made me listen to the wind, to the scratch of dry leaves falling, to the sound of our bodies rubbing against each other. When I smelled our juices mixed with the damp loam beneath us, I felt a sunshine shaft pierce me and knew what I had closed off in myself to survive.

From that moment I opened my senses, finding the exquisite points on my own body and in my mind that would give me back that sudden ray of light. Then the hell that was the final war with Voldemort began and I shut myself down. I did what was needed. Now that pleasure was a possibility for me, he could not have me wholly, as he had done.

I returned to Hogwarts to new students, new teachers.

It was her hair that drew me to my love. I taught her as a child. Irritating, a little ugly. Then she returned for teaching rounds. She was a woman. Her long hair was done in a tight bun and I knew this was a woman who had much tied up inside her. Her hair was shining in the weak winter sunlight, a strand by strand mix of dark and light brown. Not quantifiable in any style the fashion experts could suggest. Uniquely herself, but fastened securely within her mind. Almost a prisoner. We have spent two years winkling the confident woman out of the shell, ready for savouring.

I floo her. She has been expecting my call, is a little fretful that I have not spoken to her earlier in the week. She is in a fragrant bath,speaking to me via her hand mirror so that she is wreathed in crystal, and my face to her is surrounded by fire. We talk of small matters before I notice the time. I have only a short while in which to complete my project.

"Use your loofah," I say abruptly. "Tonight and tomorrow night. I want you to be pink and clean for me. I want you to tingle."

"Yesss," she says, knowing the sound of that sibilant will break me into a sweat.

"What time will I be there Friday night?" I ask her.

"Seven o'clock," she dictates. "I want you to wear your faded black jeans and your black tshirt. The tight one I bought you."

"Yes," I say. I like the tone in her voice when she orders me, sharp like a wild bird's quill.

"I want you tender for me," she says. Her voice trembles. She is still unused to asking. Cowed by previous experiences, she is unsure as to how far she may go. And I am afraid to say 'all the way' to her in case she bolts. "You know which potion to use. Until you are pink like me, until you tingle like me."

"Yes."

When we finish speaking, I find my jeans and black tshirt and lay them out. I do not want to make a single mistake. I turn to my cauldron, trying to ignore the way the jeans legs are splayed out on my bed, open wide with the fly gaping. I leave the cauldron and strip. I take the cuff of the jeans leg and rub it against me. The rough fabric scratches. I stop, feeling I have betrayed a trust. If she can lay nude in her bath, hands clasped, I can resist also. But I work naked for the remainder of the night.

I select music and Transfigure it onto a single crystal. Working with the music and the potion keeps me busy until Friday night. All through Friday, I barely sit still for wanting.

Again, it is a short trip to Hogsmeade, and from there, I Apparate. At seven o'clock I ring her doorbell. She eyes the vial of potion nervously as she bids me enter. She has a bathrobe on, knowing that we do not waste time on coy preliminaries. There are clean sheets on her bed and ylang-ylang essential oil wafting from her oil burner. She sits small and quiet on the bed and watches me. She smiles when I warm potion on my hands.

I long to order her spread eagled on the bed and then I remember I am not that person, that zombie, any more. We strip and make love, fingers, tongues, saliva and juice all blending as we explore and thrill. I bring her to her first orgasm with my fingers plunged into her cunt and mouth. Both north and south of her sucking me inwards at once. I push downwards on her so she cannot buck but let the come spread through her like honey. Potion is massaged into her and she is unmindful of it.

She then withdraws, her conditioning compelling her to be content, be good, be silent. I pull her towards me.

"You are allowed to ask for more," I whisper. "What you deserve is far more than I can ever give you. For the pleasure you give me."

She gives me a quick hug the way a child would thank a parent. I return the hug. We are friends as well as lovers. She moves to touch me. I shake my head.

"Not yet."

I know many other ways to give her love. She leans with her back up against me, using me as an easy chair. I play with her breasts, agonisingly slow. I start with the underside curve and work my way inwards until she is wild to push her nipples into my willing hands. They are taut like unripened raspberries, and I merely have to scrape my nails across them to hear her indrawn breath. I hold them between thumb and middle finger and tap with my forefinger. She gasps, pressing back into me. I save the tugs for when she is about to come, letting her growing hardness signal me. As she surges in waves I use long, milking strokes, pulling her forward until her peak comes and I stretch her hard enough that she jerks forward from me. I feel cool where her flesh has left mine. I know her nipples will ache for days, but when she comes, she cannot feel the pain, only the thrill.

We wait a while before beginning again. I must work for these orgasms, and I am glad to work, happy to feel my fingers cramp, and jaw ache. She comes against my mouth, pushing herself into me so hard that I worry for my teeth. It would be a joy to tell the dentist exactly how my teeth were pushed out of alignment, and amusing to have her father be that dentist.

I see uncertainty in her eyes. Her fourth come was unexpected last time and she is not sure she can do it again. It is a long time arriving. She is afraid both that she will not come, and that she will and it will unlock yet more of her. The bed has become a place of achievement, a place to strain, so we leave it for the shower. After playing water over her, getting her sensitized, it is the back of the shower nozzle that brings her across her barrier and she is so tender that at the last moment she lifts herself away from the merciless chrome and comes on her own, letting me watch her buck on the water vapour.

She does not think she can go further and I let her believe this while we eat a late dinner. I am surprised that it is all ready past midnight. With the last icecube from her drink melting in her mouth, she licks me and I shiver to the sensation of heat and cold. She buries her face in my crotch and I spread my legs wide, surrendering to the flick of her tongue. When I am beginning to push against her, we stop and she leads me back to the bedroom.

As I pass the threshold, I smile to show that she has done no wrong by becoming the leader. She kisses me hard, her tongue thrusting into my mouth. I like the feel of her squirming inside me.

"Have you any more ice cubes?" I say against her mouth.

I tell her what to do. She probes me a while longer, passing the ice cube between us. When she breaks the kiss, the delicious feel of hot blood surging to fill my lips almost has me come. I gesture to my potion, to the full vial. I have only smoothed a small amount on her as yet. Not enough to have any effect. She is hesitant. I explain what will happen. She is curious at least, but not eager.

"Just try," I urge. She is compliant.

She lies on the bed and with much loving, I slide the potion over her, running it over hr breasts, into her navel, her cunt. I massage every droplet into her, even putting some on my tongue and laving the inside of her mouth. I produce the crystal. It is a comfortable size as I gently push it home within her. She shudders at the hardness at first, but adjusts and nods to me. It is not too big. My wand is on the floor near my discarded clothing. I insert it delicately and touch the crystal.

"Sing," I say, and it pours forth music. I get a small amount of pleasure from it working perfectly. I have selected quiet classical music overlaid by the sound of sea birds to begin. With each sharp cry of a bird, the potion sings her nerve endings, pulsing, vibrating. My beloved smiles. The sensation is good, but not yet arousing.

I have chosen the music carefully, moving up in tempo slowly but inexorably, with occasional discordant sounds that sends the potion coursing through her. My beloved, who loves music, begins to ache for a driving rock beat. I do not hasten things. I let the crystal play on and enjoy the sight of her body.

I have firm hold of my beloved's nipples as the music crashes into Muggle music, recent, loud, hard. She writhes as the potion does its work, heating and dizzying her as I pull both nipples into one hand and flick her clitoris with one feather touch.

She comes, keeps coming, straining and rolling her hips while wild sea gull cries come from her mouth. The music is unrelenting, pushing her through her fifth come and her sixth. She is halfway to her seventh when the music ends.

"Finish it," she gasps, her mouth pressed against mine.

I curl my fingers within her, withdraw the crystal, and fling myself on top. We grind against each other, pushing flesh into flesh and I feel her spasm. Then I come, wave upon wave, like the ease of a bird in flight. This is what I have saved for twelve days and it is worth it.

In the aftermath, we lie panting, unable to tell where one ends and the other begins. Our bodies are spent. The music is silent. Tomorrow night I will owl her, ask her what she wants for next time. She may say eight. She may say one. She may ask for dinner and champagne. I will give her whatever she asks for. She is in control.

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