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“Bella.”
Bella adjusts the cuff of his shirt, knuckles sweeping over the delicate skin of his wrist. She holds it shut with one hand while the other plucks and gathers the fabric at his shoulder until the sleeve is the appropriate length. The brush of the fabric over his skin raises the hair on his arms and he lets out a soft sigh. It only barely shakes.
“Bells.”
She fixes the position of his collar, nails raking delicately over his neck, and flattens it down. As her hands continue their path down his chest, checking buttons and smoothing wrinkles, she lingers over his nipples, the sensitive plane of his ribs, the curve of his stomach where the shirt tucks into his waistband. This time, he does shudder with the effort of restraining himself from chasing her touch.
“Bella, please… ”
“The last time I checked…” Bella muses, dipping her fingers just beneath his waistband to tug it a bit tighter. “Mannequins don’t talk. ”
She drives her point home with the jab of a pin into the soft flesh of his lower stomach, not so deep as to make him bleed— heaven forbid she ruin the shirt she’s so painstakingly fitting—but enough that he jumps at the sudden pain. Bella tuts softly.
“Stand still, dear. Or I’ll have to start again.”
The prospect of having to start this process from scratch, bare but for his shirt, Bella’s clever, wicked hands brushing over his thighs and teasing mercilessly at his cock as she measures the hem, is more than enough to inspire compliance. He’s already aching for her and they haven’t even properly started fitting his trousers. He’s not certain he’s going to survive the waistcoat and jacket.
The sight of Bella kneeling down—undoubtedly to fuss with the hem of the trousers, though God he wishes it weren’t—does unspeakable things to what remains of Arthur’s capacity for coherent thought. He balls up his hands and takes his lower lip between his teeth and tries. To. Stand. Still .
He used to find it laughable—the idea that all it took for the Victorians to work themselves into a right tizz was the sight of a bit of ankle. The way Bella is brushing her knuckles over the delicate bones while she adjusts his hemline is beginning to change his mind on the subject. Feeling her through the thick wool of his socks—it’s maddening . She’s touching him and still feels miles away.
Bella wrenches him soundly from his fantasizing about letting his knees buckle and taking her right there on the floor by running her hand up the inside of his leg. It’s a sensation not unlike a lightning bolt rushing from ankle to groin, and his cock twitches with enthusiastic interest. Bella merely sighs—a sound of dry, professional consternation—and stands back up, hands on hips.
“You’re making an absolute mess of the draping, you know. Next to impossible to get a proper sense for where everything is going to sit while you’re standing at attention like that.” Her tone is pure chastisement, but there’s a glimmer of wicked mischief in her eyes that tells him it’s all part of the little game they’re playing.
Arthur is so caught up in the effort to remain motionless that the rest of his restraint falls largely by the wayside. “And whose fault is that, hm?”
Bella raises a brow and removes a few more pins from the cushion she wears on her wrist in a way Arthur can really only think to describe as brandishing . He abruptly remembers his manners.
“I suppose we’ll have to leave the trousers for another time,” she hums, disappearing from Arthur’s sight briefly before returning with the waistcoat.
She slides it over his arms in much the same way she had done the shirt, taking time to drag the backs of her nails along every inch of each limb and down his front as she does the buttons. If anything, the layer of the fabric now separating them makes the sensation all the more titillating. Before today, Arthur couldn’t have imagined himself ever being quite so aroused by being fondled into his clothes, but now…
Bella splays her hands over his waist, checks that the fold of the lapel rests properly above the line of buttons, and runs her fingers along the bottom hem, once again brushing dizzyingly close to where he wants her without ever quite making purchase. She circles around behind him and tugs gently at the belt at the back, assessing whether it needs to be taken in any further. Arthur can feel every shift and tug of the fabric over his sensitized skin. He’s starting to sweat , he’s so hungry for her hands to be on him in earnest, and isn’t that a trick?
Another pin jabs him between the shoulderblades and he jumps again, an affronted yelp of, “ Bella! ” tumbling from his lips before he can think to hold it back.
“Hush,” she responds, primly, “And stand still . Christ, you’d never make it in Bloomingdale’s. Noisy, fidgety, mouthy…” She steps close behind him and snakes an arm around his front, reaching down to cup his cock in her hand. His knees wobble a bit and he leans back against her with a pitchy, breathless whine. “ Needy. ”
He nods, mindlessly. She’s touching him. She’s touching him and it’s never felt so good and he needs more —just a bit more and he can—
“Arthur Lester, I swear to God, if you ruin these pants before I’m finished with them I will have you dressing in shorts and high socks until I can get another order of the fabric in.” She leans in until he can feel her breath on the shell of his ear. “Is that what you want? For everyone in the damn neighborhood to know you’re no better than an eager schoolboy?”
If he’s being truly honest with himself, the idea of that does thrill him a bit—probably a bit more than it should —but that’s not the answer she’s looking to hear. She wants him to be good. And he can. He can be good for her.
He’s just not sure for how much longer.
“ Well? ”
Bella’s hand is still on his cock, thumb rubbing in maddening little circles—slow and barely-there, but enough to feel in every twitching, desperate inch—and Christ, he could cry with how badly he just wants to cum. He says nothing. They had agreed it would be Bella who set the pace for this. Arthur’s job—which he had accepted knowing full well what it would mean—is simply to endure until she decides she’s finished with him. Until she decides he gets to—
“That’s better.” Bella withdraws her hand, leaving Arthur pounding with want, and Arthur bites down on his tongue.
The jacket is a similarly lengthy ordeal of checking hems and length and fit, all interspersed with deliciously diverting little brushes of finger and nail and knuckle, and the occasional jab of a pin just to keep him paying attention. By the time she’s finished the final smoothing strokes—over the backs of his shoulders, down his sides, fingers tucking once more under the jacket’s lapel and fanning down his stomach, tugging at the bottom hem—he’s about ready to crumple to the floor and worship at her feet if it means she’ll let him get off.
She steps back to observe her work, one hand on her hip and the other raised to press a thumb over her lips. Arthur barely hears her murmured, “I suppose it’ll do for now,” over his singular focus on the way the pad of her finger presses into the soft plush of her lower lip.
Without thinking, he takes a half-step toward her, freezing only when her eyes rise from her assessment of the fit of his suit to meet his dead-on.
“Couldn’t be patient for another moment, could you?”
Arthur swallows thickly, torn between apologizing and minding the established rule of silence. Bella must see some inkling of genuine distress in him, because her face softens and she steps closer, reaching out to caress his face. He leans into her hand, eyes fluttering shut as she strokes his cheek with her thumb.
“Alright,” she concedes, “I’ll stop teasing before you really do ruin these—come here, let me get them off you.”
Nimble fingers undo the button of his suit jacket, sliding it gingerly off his shoulders. She keeps her hands inside the shoulders of the jacket, supporting it as she slides it down his arms and keeping her careful pinning from slipping. Her care has the added benefit that her palms skim the length of his arms as she goes.
He reaches for her, hesitant, and she laughs, bright and teasing as she loosely folds the jacket and sets it aside. “Oh, go on then.”
It’s as though a spell breaks. One moment, he’s no different than any other furniture in the room, and the next, he’s surging for her, hands at her waist, taking her lips in a desperate, hungry kiss. Another laugh bubbles out of her as her hands find his upper arms and squeeze, drawing a long-suffering moan from him in turn. She swallows it readily before pulling away just enough to speak.
“Oh, this really got you going, did it?”
“Like you wouldn’t believe. Bells, can we—”
“Yes, yes, keep your pants on.”
“ Christ, I hope not. After all that?”
She chuckles sweetly and sweeps her hands down his front to undo the buttons of his waistcoat. “No, I suppose that would be rather cruel, wouldn’t it?”
He doesn’t take his hands off her longer than he absolutely has to as she continues to unwrap him like an elaborate parcel. This time, when she goes to her knees, she takes his trousers down with her, raking her nails down his thighs, and he keens .
When she noses at the crease of his groin, his knees give another warning wobble and he manages just enough air and coherency to gasp, “W-wait. Wait, we— couch .”
“Aw,” Bella looks up through her lashes. “Do I make you weak in the knees, darling?”
“ Bells… ”
She smiles sweetly and works her way back up him in a trail of blissful, burning kisses. “Come on, then.”
As if it’s nothing. As if this has been any other fitting to her. Arthur has never been more in love with this woman.
He steps clumsily out of the pool of his trousers on the floor and just manages to take the lead over to the couch. She pushes him down by the shoulders and he collapses, gratefully, muscles he hadn’t even realized he was straining going suddenly slack.
“Well, darling.” Standing over him like this, Bella looks radiant. “You’ve been very patient. How would you like me? On my knees? In your lap? Behind you? ”
Arthur’s head spins. He’s been so focused on behaving, he hasn’t considered what he might want by way of reward. Well. Aside from—
“Could—could you— quick? Please? I-I’m sorry, Bells, I just—”
Bella goes back to her knees, leaning in to kiss his shin, his knee, running her hand up his other leg. “Hush, love. It’s alright. I’ve made you wait long enough, I know.”
Arthur’s head falls back against the couch. “Please. Please. ”
Even in the mindless depths of near-delerium she’s driven him to, Arthur is keenly aware of Bella’s mouth as it travels up his leg, taking her pleasure even as she acquiesces to his plea that she not take her time. When she does finally find her way to his cock, he’s too far gone to restrain the wanton, blissful noise the warm wetness of her mouth wrenches from him.
She takes him in by steady increments, all the while doing utterly sinful things with her tongue, and Arthur, already holding on by gossamer threads, breaks entirely under her thorough ministrations. She plays him like an instrument she has long since mastered—like she always has, even from the day he met her. Every flick of her tongue, every bob of her head, every movement of her around him draws forth a moan, a whimper, for a few there are outright sobs.
Mercifully, as promised, the symphony she conducts tonight is short, and she brings it to its crescendo with a few purposeful strokes of her hand.
She crawls up to join him in the afterglow, and when he reaches for her, giddy and loose and still halfway out of his mind, she takes his hands and presses kisses to his palms. Presses them back to his chest and holds them there with her own as she lays against him.
“Not yet, love,” she soothes, “Lay still a while. If you still want to later, you know I won’t turn you down, but you’ve done enough for now. Just be still.”
Arthur has not been able to refuse Bella Saltzman for a single moment of their acquaintance, and he knows with bone-deep certainty as he turns a bit to the side to tuck against her more comfortably where they sprawl over and around each other on the couch that this moment will not be the first.