After the Ball, She Stopped Pretending

There is a moment, after the music ends, when civility becomes optional.

The study door closes behind us with a sound that feels louder than it should.

Lady Iselle does not hesitate. Her hand finds my wrist — firm, urgent — pulling me just far enough into the room that the corridor light disappears. She looks different without witnesses. The poise remains, but the restraint is gone, stripped away with the last waltz.

“Don’t speak,” she says quietly.

The command is not sharp. It is controlled. Deliberate.

Candlelight catches the burgundy velvet of her gown, the same fabric that occupied far too much of my attention all evening. I watched it move through the ballroom, watched her smile when required, withdraw when necessary. I understood then that what she wore was armor. Here, in this room that smells of ink and old decisions, it has become something else entirely.

“You knew,” she continues, studying my face as if it were a document she had already read twice. “All night. You knew this would happen.”

I did. Not because she promised it, but because she stopped avoiding my gaze. Because she let it linger half a second too long. Because power, once acknowledged between two people, refuses to be ignored.

The desk is behind me. Papers lie stacked with careful precision, the remnants of order. She places one hand flat against my chest, feeling my breath quicken beneath her palm.

“I am tired,” she says, “of being admired without being wanted.”

Her words settle heavily between us.

I want to answer. I want to tell her that admiration was never the danger — that I have spent weeks cataloguing the precise shade of impatience in her voice when her husband’s guests bore her, the way she touches her collarbone when she’s calculating odds, the small betrayals of interest she thinks no one notices.

But she told me not to speak. And I find, somewhat to my surprise, that I want to obey.

She steps closer. Close enough that I smell her perfume — something warm and dark beneath the polite florals, like woodsmoke hidden under roses. Her voice lowers.

“You looked at me tonight as if I were already ruined.”

I swallow. “You weren’t.”

She smiles then, slow and knowing. “No. But I wanted to be.”

Her fingers slide from my chest to my sleeve, gripping the fabric with sudden intensity. The shift in her composure is subtle but unmistakable. This is not a lady seeking indulgence. This is someone testing the edge of her own authority.

“I don’t want you because you are safe,” she says. “I want you because you are not.”

The implication hangs between us, electric. I am beneath her in station, in reputation, in consequence. If this door opens at the wrong moment, it will not be her name whispered afterward. She has everything to protect. I have only this — only her — only the impossible fact of her hand on my chest and her eyes holding mine with an intensity that makes rank irrelevant.

“Lock the door,” she says.

I do.

The sound echoes like a decision made too late to reverse.

When I turn back, she has moved to the desk, resting her hands on its surface, her back straight, her shoulders squared. The gesture is quiet. Intentional. It rearranges the room around her.

“All evening,” she says without turning, “men asked me for dances. Favors. Smiles. None of them asked me what I wanted.”

I approach her slowly, reading permission in the angle of her spine. “What do you want?”

She turns. Her eyes are bright, focused. Alive in a way the ballroom never allowed.

“I want to be chosen,” she says. “Not admired. Not worshipped from a safe distance. Chosen. By someone who understands what it will cost.”

I stop a hand’s breadth from her. Close enough to feel the heat rising from her skin. Close enough that I could close the distance with the slightest motion.

“I choose you,” I say. “Right now. Whatever it costs.”

For the first time, her composure falters. Just slightly. Enough to reveal how much courage this confession has required from both of us.

Footsteps pass in the corridor.

We freeze. The world narrows to breath and silence — to the knowledge that this closeness, this pause, is already a transgression. My heart hammers. Hers must too. When the sound fades, she exhales slowly, almost a laugh.

“That,” she murmurs, “is why I want this. Because it matters. Because it isn’t safe.”

She reaches up and begins unfastening her hair. The movement is unhurried, almost ceremonial. Pin by pin, the careful construction of Lady Iselle dissolves, until dark waves fall past her shoulders and she looks at me with something raw in her expression.

“The woman they saw tonight doesn’t exist,” she says quietly. “This one does.”

I kiss her.

Not gently. Not with the hesitation that station would demand. I kiss her the way I’ve wanted to for three months — like a man who has stopped pretending he deserves permission. Her mouth opens beneath mine, and the small sound she makes is worth every sleepless night I’ve spent imagining this exact moment.

Her hands find my lapels. She pulls me against her, and the desk edge presses into her hips as I press into her, and suddenly the careful distance between us collapses into fabric and warmth and the taste of champagne on her tongue.

“Yes,” she breathes against my mouth. “Like that. Like you mean it.”

I do mean it. Gods help me, I have never meant anything more.

My hands find the curve of her waist, the subtle architecture of her corset beneath the velvet. She shivers at my touch — not from cold — and guides my fingers to the lacing at her back.

“I can manage them myself,” she says. “But I don’t want to.”

The laces come undone slowly. Each one loosened is a layer of Lady Iselle removed, until I’m holding the stays in my hands and her chemise is thin enough that I can see her breathing quicken through the fabric.

She watches me look at her. Not with shyness. With triumph.

“There,” she says. “Now you can stop imagining.”

I trace the outline of her collarbone with one finger. Down, slowly, over the swell of her breast. She inhales sharply but doesn’t pull away. When I reach the thin cotton barrier, I pause.

“Tell me what you want,” I say.

Her answer is to take my hand and press it flat against her breast. Through the fabric, I feel her nipple harden beneath my palm. Her voice drops to barely a whisper.

“I want you to stop asking permission and start taking what I’m offering.”

What follows is not gentle.

She pushes my coat from my shoulders while I gather her skirts in fistfuls of burgundy velvet. The desk becomes our altar — papers scattered, an inkwell shoved aside with a dangerous clatter. When I lift her onto its edge, her legs wrap around me with an urgency that matches my own.

“Someone will hear,” I manage, even as my hands find the warm skin of her thighs above her stockings.

“Then be quiet,” she says. “But don’t stop.”

I drop to my knees.

The gesture surprises her — I see it in the way her breath catches, the slight widening of her eyes. She expected to direct this encounter. She did not expect worship.

“What are you — “

“Quiet,” I say, turning her own command back on her. “You wanted to be chosen. Let me show you what that means.”

I push her skirts higher, exposing the pale expanse of her thighs, the delicate ribbons holding her stockings in place. She is bare beneath — a deliberate choice, I realize. She came to this ball prepared. She came to this room ready.

The first touch of my mouth against her draws a sound from her throat that she barely manages to swallow. She is slick already, aroused from the tension of the evening, from the waiting, from the danger of what we’re doing. I taste her slowly, savoring the salt and musk, the intimate evidence of her want.

“Oh…“ Her hand finds my hair, gripping hard. “Oh, Gods.”

I take my time. She told me to take what she was offering. So I do, thoroughly, deliberately, learning the rhythm that makes her hips buck against my mouth, finding the precise pressure that makes her fingers tighten in my hair until it hurts. She gasps, trembles, tries to stay silent and fails.

Above me, Lady Iselle comes undone.

Not the composed unraveling of a woman in control, but something rawer. Her thighs clench around my head. Her back arches. She bites down on her own hand to muffle the cry that escapes her, and I feel her pulse against my tongue, feel the shuddering waves of her pleasure as I drink her in.

When she finally pushes me away, her chest is heaving. Her eyes are wild.

“Stand up,” she says. Her voice is rough now, stripped of its careful control. “Stand up and let me…“

She doesn’t finish the sentence. She doesn’t need to.

I rise, and she slides off the desk.

For a moment, we simply look at each other, both of us breathing hard, both of us past the point of pretense. Then she reaches for my trousers with fingers that tremble slightly. Whether from the aftershocks of pleasure or anticipation, I cannot tell.

“You think you’ve surprised me,” she murmurs, working the buttons free. “You think you’ve taken control.”

She pulls me free, and her hand wraps around my cock with a grip that makes me groan.

“But I am still the one who decides what happens next.”

She sinks to her knees.

The sight of her there — Lady Iselle, in her rumpled velvet and scattered hair, kneeling on the floor of her husband’s study — is so transgressive that for a moment I cannot breathe. She looks up at me, and there is nothing submissive in her expression. Only hunger. Only choice.

“Watch me,” she says. “Don’t look away.”

Her mouth takes me in.

Wet heat. The soft pressure of her tongue. The deliberate slowness of a woman who knows exactly what she’s doing and refuses to be rushed. I watch, as commanded — watch her lips stretch around me, watch her cheeks hollow as she draws me deeper, watch the candlelight catch the gloss of saliva on her chin.

She doesn’t close her eyes. Neither do I.

This is not service. This is conquest. She is claiming me as surely as if she’d pressed a brand to my skin. Every stroke of her tongue writes her ownership into my flesh. Every small sound of pleasure she makes — and she makes them, soft hums of satisfaction — tells me that this act is as much for her as for me.

My hands find her hair. I grip, but I don’t guide. She sets the pace — slow at first, then faster, then slow again when she feels me getting close. Teasing. Tormenting. Reminding me who holds the power here, even on her knees.

“Iselle…“ My voice breaks. “I can’t…“

She pulls back just enough to speak, her lips still brushing the head of my cock. “Not yet. I’m not finished with you.”

She takes me deep again. Deeper. I feel the back of her throat and my vision goes white at the edges. The sound I make is animal, desperate, stripped of every pretense of civilization.

When she finally releases me, I’m shaking.

“Now,” she says, rising with a grace that seems impossible given what she just did. She turns and braces her hands on the desk, looking back over her shoulder with eyes that burn. “Now you can have me.”

I enter her in one long stroke.

She arches back against me, a low moan escaping her lips. I feel the tight heat of her, the welcoming slickness, the way her body opens to receive me as if we were made to fit together. My hands grip her hips hard enough to bruise.

“Yes,” she breathes. “Yes.”

We find our rhythm quickly, urgently, conscious of the danger that presses against the door. Each thrust drives her against the desk; each small cry she tries to swallow makes me want to make her louder. I want the whole house to know. I want her husband to know. I want to ruin her the way she asked me to.

But she told me to be quiet. So I bend over her, press my mouth to her ear, and whisper instead.

“Is this what you wanted? To be taken like this? To be fucked on your husband’s desk while his guests drink his wine?”

She shudders beneath me. “Don’t stop talking.”

“You came to the ball tonight knowing this would happen. You wore nothing beneath your skirts. You’ve been wet for me all evening, smiling at men who bored you, thinking about this moment.”

“Yes.” The word is a moan.

“Tell me you’re mine.”

“I’m… “ She gasps as I thrust harder. “I’m yours. Tonight. Right now. I’m yours.”

The desk creaks. Papers slide to the floor. Somewhere in the distance, a carriage door slams. The world continues, indifferent to the transgression happening in this locked study, and that indifference makes it feel more real. We are stealing this moment from a universe that wouldn’t permit it if it knew.

“Look at me,” she says suddenly, turning her head.

I do. Her hair is wild now, her chemise pulled down to expose her breasts, her lips swollen from what she did to me. She looks like the ruin she wanted. She looks like power claiming its own terms.

“Remember this,” she says, and her voice breaks slightly on the last word. “Remember me like this. Not the other version.”

“There is no other version,” I tell her. “There is only you.”

Something shifts in her expression. Something vulnerable beneath the boldness. And then she’s reaching back, pulling me closer, deeper, her whole body trembling as she approaches the edge.

“Don’t stop,” she whispers. “Please. Don’t…“

She breaks.

I feel it happen, the clench and release, the shudder that runs through her entire body, the way her head falls back and her mouth opens in a silent cry. Her pleasure pulls me over the edge with her, and I bury myself deep as I come, spending inside her with a groan I barely manage to muffle against her shoulder.

Afterward, we don’t speak immediately.

She turns in my arms, rests her forehead against my chest. I keep my arms around her, feeling her heartbeat slowly return to normal. The candle has burned low; we’ve been here longer than either of us intended. The study smells of wax and ink and sex, the evidence of what we’ve done hanging in the air like incense.

When she finally lifts her head, her expression has changed. The wildness is still there, banked now, but beneath it lies something I didn’t expect: tenderness.

“You’re going to have to go first,” she says quietly. “Separately. Through the garden, if you can manage it.”

I nod. Of course. The careful choreography of deception. I know my role.

But before I can step back, she catches my face in both hands and kisses me. Gently this time. Almost sweetly. Her lips taste of champagne and salt and something else — something that might be the beginning of something neither of us can name.

“Tomorrow,” she says. “The folly by the lake. Three o’clock. I’ll be walking the grounds.”

I search her face. “Walking.”

“Alone.” Her smile returns, edged with promise. “Very alone.”

I fix my clothing while she begins the long process of reassembling Lady Iselle — the corset, the pins, the careful armor. But her hair remains loose, and I know she’ll blame the dancing. I know she’s already composing the excuse.

At the door, I pause. “The papers,” I say. “On the floor.”

She glances at the scattered documents and laughs — a real laugh, unguarded and warm. “Leave them. Let him wonder what important matter required such… vigorous attention.”

I slip into the corridor. The house is quiet. The ball has ended. Behind me, the study door closes with a sound that feels different now — not louder, but heavier. Weighted with consequence.

I don’t look back.

But something has been set in motion.

And some desires, once acknowledged, are impossible to file away.

Fantasy Vixens creates erotic fantasy where desire becomes narrative language. Where women claim power and pleasure on their own terms. Where transgression comes with a cost, and a reward. Next in the Series The Folly by the Lake

She said she would be walking alone. She lied.

The folly stands at the edge of the estate where the manicured gardens surrender to wildness — a crumbling stone pavilion from a more romantic age, half-swallowed by ivy and convenient shadows.

I arrive early. She arrives earlier.

But she is not alone.

Her husband’s sister sits beside her on the stone bench, close enough that their shoulders touch. Lady Maren — younger, sharper, with a reputation for noticing things better left unobserved. When Iselle sees me approach, something flickers in her expression. Not fear. Not warning.

Permission.

And I begin to understand that last night was not the end of something.

It was an audition.

Coming soon.