Curio Vignettes 05 Exposure (4 page)

I speed my thrusts and let every shock of pleasure I feel escape from my mouth in grunts and sighs and groans.
Take what you want,
her hands tell me, urging my hips. And for a glorious minute, I do just that. Let the fire rage until I feel so good, so close, it frightens me that I haven’t come yet. That I can burn this hot and not lose myself. Not go insane from the sheer intensity of this pleasure.

Then all at once, the hands on my sides stop begging.

“Wait,” she says.

Panting, I pause, as easily as I might stop the Earth from spinning. “Yes?”

She pulls away, and my throbbing cock is closed in cold, dry air. I gasp and shiver, so primed it hurts. She twists around in my arms so we’re on our sides, and I understand. I slide my leg between hers, angle my cock and slip back inside her heat from behind. Her moan is soft and tight, excitement sharpening. I wrap her in my arms, chest flush to her back, mouth just behind her ear. I shove my own pleasure into the shadows and concentrate on hers. The breast in my palm is hot from the fire.

“You like me this way,” I murmur. “Behind you.”

“Yes.”

So often I wonder why, when her feelings for me sprouted from a purely visual attraction. Because it feels animalistic somehow, she told me once. Because she likes to hear me losing my mind behind her, all my poise gone.
We do enjoy demolishing our lovers,
I muse, slipping my hand down her belly, settling it on the soft curls of her mound. We want to see our shy partners turn brazen from what we can do to them. We want to bring our domineering ones to their knees, if only for a moment, if only evidenced by a helpless look in their eyes, a shudder, a whispered plea. If Caroly wants her elegant servant torn to bits by a desire he can’t control, I won’t deny her.

I slip my fingertips to her lips, glancing my own sliding flesh, stealing her slickness. Her clit is already hard, a throbbing knot of nerves begging for my touch. I could circle with exquisite precision, stroke with the lightest, most excruciating pressure. But I won’t. Instead, I let myself feel my own arousal. My cock, wrapped in her. I shut my eyes. My fingers twitch against her clit, unbidden. Whatever I feel, I let it spill from my mouth and into her ear. I bump her thighs with every thrust, and she reaches behind to grasp my flexing hip.

“Didier.”

That alone is a sharp shove, ushering me away from reason and toward the crash. I take her harder, holding my fingers still and letting the motion of the sex dictate the strokes they give. I feel wild and reckless. Bossy. I’ve been crowding her body, and now she’s nearly pinned to the bed but for the elbow propping her up. I drive my leg deeper between her thighs and move the other to join it.

“I’ve wanted this so badly,” I whisper.

“Me too.”

“I’m close.” Saying it spurs my need, edging me closer. For ages I’ve had to be told when it’s my turn to release. It’s my job to know when a woman’s taken everything she needs from me. To read the signals and seek permission. Tonight, though. Tonight I’m holding back not out of duty, but out of desperation. I don’t want this to be over. But every stroke blazes with sensation, burning hotter, hotter…

She doesn’t urge me. She knows some switch in my head wants her attention, needs to be flipped to inform me it’s okay to be selfish, but I can sense she’s denying me. I’m not a whore anymore. I’m just a man. Her equal and her lover, mortal and allowed to lose control. And how good it always feels to me, watching her come apart from our sex. She must want the same. To watch me succumb to the pleasure like most any man can.

Come,
she usually says, with her voice or her gaze, with urging hands on my hips. Not now.

I feel the shapes of words forming on my tongue—
I’m so close.
I swallow them. I sink into my body, into the excitement humming in my cock, into the fire. A groan rises from my throat, erupts from my mouth, an
Ahh
harsh with need.

She whispers, “Take what you need.”

Take.
Not an easy order. Not when I’ve spent all these years only giving. Even alone, just myself and my hand, I don’t come until the woman in my mind tells me to.

But tonight.
Come
, a voice inside me says.
Come, just as you’ve fantasized all this time. Stripped. Bare. Selfish and sinful, come like an animal in heat
.

The pleasure’s sharpening, deepening. Beyond friction. Beyond taboo. It cuts like a blade; my body is begging for mercy, my cock hot and hard and screaming for relief. A gleaming knife’s edge sliding along some tendon of self-control, until—

I snap.

“
Oh
.”

It rushes through me, swallows me up, pulls me under in a crush of perfect, deafening pleasure. I moan, out of control. Behind the noise and sensation is Caroly. Her soft voice chanting, “Good, good.” Her arm angled back and her hand on my hip, riding my bucking spasms. The way it shakes, I know she’s there. Orgasm still ringing through me, I make her join me with a flurry of practiced strokes.

“
Come
.”

I feel when she does—feel it more explicitly than I ever have, like two dimensions becoming three. Her breath, her smell, those most intimate contractions pulsing around the point of my own release, then easing. I’m shaking all over, still moaning even as the wave of my orgasm recedes.

“Didier.” Her voice is like cool palms cupping my face, soothing me.

My groans quiet. The world stops spinning and slowly I float back to the earth, back to the bed with the softest thump. Then…

Bliss.

No rush to withdraw and shed the condom. I can stay in her warmth as long as I like, wallowing in the beautiful, silly, mammalian mess we call sex. I wrap my arm tight around her ribs, push her hair aside with my nose so I can press my lips to the back of her neck.

I hope I never take it for granted, how close she feels at this instant. How difficult the journey was, getting to where we are now. So often I envy the careless way other people move through the world, but I don’t ever want to forget how hard I’ve worked for this. This moment is my reward. A gift to pale all of the material ones she’s given me. And for once I feel truly worthy of her offering.

Another kiss behind her ear. Another. “You’re much too good to me,” I whisper.

She clears her throat. “I doubt that. You’re the nicest man I know.”

“Am I?”

“And the most romantic, and the most sensitive.”

“Sensitive, yes. I believe that. Sentimental.”

She turns, just enough to make eye contact. “And the bravest.”

I don’t blush easily, but I feel my face warm as though I were peering into the fire. “You’re too kind.”

“No one could ever be too kind to you,” she says, and clasps my wrist at her waist.

We lay wordlessly for a long time, the silence filled by the fire’s crackling and the night noises drifting from the open window. Caroly twitches, roused from the edge of sleep. She yawns deeply and shifts against me, my cock finally slipping free between her thighs.

I peel my body from hers and toss a small log on the dwindling flames, and shut the window on my way out of the room. I find a clean washcloth and we tidy ourselves. Freeing the covers, we wriggle between the sheets.

“I don’t know if I can fall asleep without the sound of pigeons cooing,” she says, adjusting the pillow beneath her head. The moment she’s settled, I curl my body alongside hers once more.

“Crickets will have to suffice. Or you could fall asleep with the snores of an extremely satisfied man at your ear,” I suggest, and hug her tightly, settling my lips against her neck. Her skin tastes clean, only the faintest trace of sweat. I kiss her there for as long as I dare. Any more and sleep’s spell will be broken, and surely she’s too drowsy to wish to be pawed by some restless, lusty creature. I choose to behave, nestling my face against her shoulder.

“I love you,” I tell her, barely a whisper.

“I love you.” She turns in my arms, smiling broadly, sleepily. She kisses my nose, my forehead, my chin. “I can’t wait to see what life will be like when we get back to the city. Us living together.”

The idea tenses my arms around her. “I can wait.”

Another press of her lips to my chin.

“I’m excited as well. But I hadn’t imagined I’d be as relaxed here as I have been. In fact, I’m shocked.”

“I wondered how you’d…” The thought catches on a yawn. “How you’d fare. Maybe you were born in the wrong province, all along. Maybe you should have been a winemaker’s son. Maybe I was supposed to meet you during some vineyard tour on a trip to the Mediterranean.”

“You wish I were born a cheese monger,” I tease her. “Admit it.”

“You’re too good to be true already. Don’t overstimulate me by adding cheese to the equation.” Another mighty yawn.

I stroke her hair and kiss her temples in turn, and nudge her to roll back over. She softens in my arms, but my worries are never so quick to let me go.

“What are you thinking of?” she whispers.

“Are my thoughts that noisy?”

“Your breathing’s all tight.”

I kiss her ear. “Sorry. I’m melancholy.”

“After all that?” she teases, stroking my hand where it lays against her belly.

“About all the time I wasted, inside. Three years.”

She doesn’t reply right away, but after a minute or more, she says, “I wasted over a decade, not really dating or even letting myself like anyone too much. Being a stubborn, fussy coward. But you know what?”

“What?”

“I didn’t waste it. Because I couldn’t have met you if I’d done it differently. And I can’t imagine anyone I could possibly want to be with more than you. So it wasn’t wasted, it was just the way it had to happen for me to get right here. Right now.” She lays her arm along mine, hugging us both.

“That’s true.” I wouldn’t have met her if I’d stayed as functional as I was in my twenties. She wouldn’t have met me. Might we have passed on some street, me going through the lonely motions of a man pretending to be at ease in his city? To hear her tell it, she’d have cast me the briefest glance then feigned utter disinterest, her old way with handsome men. Two anxious strangers passing on the sidewalk in some alternate Paris. That, compared to having her in my arms now…

“You’re right,” I say, and kiss her again. “This is just the way it had to happen. And I’d sacrifice another three years for one more night like this.”

“How lucky that you don’t need to.”

Lucky
. Never before a word I’ve had paired with my disorder. Perhaps I’m being too rough on myself. Those years I spent in self-exile may have been pathetic, but they taught me great empathy for the women who came to my bed. I learned languages, read many books, bonded with lovers as I hadn’t known a person could—briefly, yet completely. I immersed myself body and soul in recipes and wines and songs and sex, relishing their nuances as I never would have, had my life been more complex. More external.

For all its faults, it was a rich time. It made me patient, introspective, humble. It made me worthy of lying beside Caroly now. Not a waste at all. And yes, perhaps even lucky.

“You’re a very smart woman.”

“Isn’t it supposed to be you teaching
me
deep stuff about myself?”

“We’re not the same people we were in March. I’m not a prostitute or a shut-in.”

“And I’m definitely
not
a virgin.”

I laugh then drag my lips down her neck until she shivers. “And thank goodness for that.”

Three more days we have here, days of blissful nothingness, the only stresses being drives to town for food and wine, and the thought of those journeys rouses just the faintest wriggling of worry in my belly. I want to feel everything new this place can offer. A real bath for the first time in years. Enough nights in a strange bed for it to become familiar. Days away from my routines, my cabinet and my hobbies, my kitchen, my security. Time enough that perhaps even my sanctuary of the past half decade will look new upon our return, novelty to be discovered in all the spaces and items I take for granted. That I’ve taken for the entirety of my universe, for so long.

I wonder what my mother would say, if she were alive to hear me announce my travel plans.

“Why in heaven’s name would you want to go to
Provence
?” she might demand. She had agoraphobia as well—not as severe as mine, but it kept her happily confined to the only city she knew. “If it can’t be found in Paris, it’s not worth looking for.”

I might tell her, “The sky is bigger, and the air smells cleaner. It’s quiet and there are more stars than you can count.”

She wouldn’t be moved. But perhaps if I told her, “I fell in love. That’s why I’m going.” That, she might respect.

She’d have done anything to keep my father, of that I have no doubt. Unfortunately for her, his wife was equally attached. The mother of his three legitimate children. But to turn one’s life inside out for love… Yes, I think my mother would approve. Surely choosing to have me turned hers upside-down, shook it like a
boule d’eau
until the miniature snowflakes became a blizzard, her careful landscape never to look the same once the waves settled. Settled as a woman settles for a son, when it was his father she’d truly wanted, wanted until the day she died.