Sweet Agony (15 page)

Then, as realisation dawns over his face – as his brows part in something like relief – I go on with whatever this is. I touch him in all the ways I most long to, without ever actually doing so. I trail my fingers over the broad expanse of his shoulders, and down, down that steep, heavy slope of his back. Always mindful to never make contact, but so near it’s like I can feel it anyway.

And I know he can. When I turn my hand as though to stroke the back of it over his perfect arse, his head goes back. He can’t see me doing it,
but his head goes back
. As though he can make it out through an inch of air and a taut expanse of expensive material. The tension between us is so high it pushes into him anyway, no matter how much space I put between us.

Though I can hardly call it space. I think I actually graze the material of his shirt when I make my way around his right hip – though in my defence there’s a reason for the slip. As I step around him, hand twisting about his body as though this is all some syrup-slow dance, he lifts his arm. He lifts it, like he wants to give me more access.

And, by God, I want to take him up on the offer. My hand shakes at the idea of it; I almost press the whole of my shivering body against his. At least I lean towards him, but once I have I wish I hadn’t. It only makes things more intense. The second I do it his scent rolls over me, somehow not sweet or fine but physical. It feels like heat, and it just about does me in.

As does the thing he tries a moment later.

Oh, why does he have to try the thing? Everything is unbearable as it is – I have a pulse beating between my legs and my body is so flushed with heat I can only compare it to being drunk. I’m drunk on arousal, excited past my limits, and he thinks the best thing to do in the face of that is give me the same back. He raises one hand, haltingly, while my breath tries to desert me for pastures new.

Then he just slides it down over the air around my bare skin, and I have to let out a broken sob. If I don’t, I think I’ll die. There’s too much air in my body and so much heat – I need to let a little of it out. And especially when I realise what he’s really doing. He’s not just returning some favour that I’ve just done for him. He’s almost touching me in all the places he’d love to most. He nearly dips his finger into the hollow just above my collarbone, and finds that dimple beneath the pronounced curl of my lower lip. Then once he’s done breaking me in two with tender things like that, he lets his hand drift down with deliberate slowness. He makes a shape in the air around my breast, so clear I couldn’t misinterpret it.

He wants to cup me there, hold me there, caress my tight little nipple and see what response he gets – though he hardly has to imagine. I make it for him anyway. I show him everything I am and all the desire I have, so thick with it in that moment I don’t hold back. I bring my hands up to his face as I would if this were real – so I could kiss him and kiss him with all the passion I feel.

And for just one glorious moment it seems like he will respond in kind. He’s so tall I couldn’t imagine that he’s leaning down when he isn’t, and he goes so slow that I’m able to chart every glorious second of it. I see his eyes trailing over my face, greedy and searching. Then his lips, as they part in a way you could almost pretend wasn’t there. I want to pretend it isn’t, because it’s only more painful when he pulls back.

Like a promise made but never kept.

‘I can’t,’ he says, and I am bereft. Or at least, I am in the brief pause that follows – because it
is
brief, and it
is
only a pause. I barely get a chance to hate the ghost of those words against my lips before he finishes his thought. And oh, the way he goes about it. I know immediately what he means. I hear it and my heart tries to thump through my breast bone, even though it barely seems like anything.

‘Not skin to skin, not like that,’ he says, as if maybe he would in other ways.

Though I don’t really believe he will.

Until he tells me to get on the bed, in a tone of voice I’ve never heard before. How could I have heard it, when usually he is the very epitome of cool? I never imagined in my wildest dreams that he would lose that cool so obviously, but he does. His voice goes up in the middle and down at the end, so packed with frustration or exasperation or plain old desire that he simply has to do something. He improvises, in so weird a way I should probably hate it.

Yet how can I, when it feels so damned good? The second he spreads the bed sheet over me I start shaking. Partly, I think, because of the cool contact on my overheated skin. But possibly because of other, stranger reasons – like the fact that it immediately obscures most of my senses. He swathes me in material from head to foot, and my hearing is muffled. My sense of taste and smell is blocked off by cotton-fresh fabric conditioner.

And most importantly:

I can’t see a thing. I have no clue where he is or what he might be doing, and oh, my good God in heaven, that idea is electric to me. It jumps and sizzles in my veins, in a way that makes me breathe far too hard. Within seconds my makeshift cocoon is much too hot and much too close, and the dip of the mattress does not make that any better. I’m probably going to suffocate under here, because he has decided to straddle me.

I can tell he has. I can feel his thighs on either side of mine, so close I want to scream. I want to spread my legs to increase that contact, just press and press until it starts to hurt. I want bruises from his body, as evidence that all this happened.

Even though I know I’m never going to need anything so tangible. His every move is already burned into my brain. My hair damn near stands on end when he shifts a little like someone trying to get comfortable, and again when I sense that he’s straightening the sheet. In a second he’s probably going to touch me, and when he does it’s going to be bad.

It’s just that I don’t realise
how
bad.

I expect him to do something tiny, like giving me a brief, chaste kiss through the sheet. I’ll get the sense of something slightly hot and slightly wet and slightly soft, and that will be pretty much it. The thing is, though: I simply don’t get it. Again, I understand all of him so well
, until
it comes to sex. I subtract too much of his desire from things, so convinced that he could never really want me that I overlook the obvious signs.

Like him going for all the rudest parts first, before he even considers anything else. He doesn’t touch me or kiss me the way a monk would. He does it like the man he is, beneath seventeen layers of awfulness and repression and people fucking him up. And the man he is wants more than tiny caresses on my left elbow or my right knee. He doesn’t want to touch my cheek.

He wants to find my nipple – which is probably poking through the sheet in the most obscene manner possible – and then he wants to pinch it. He wants to pinch it and pinch it, so softly I want to sob. At the very least I squirm the second he does it, and not just because of the way he goes about it. Somehow the sensation is magnified by the sheet. It slides around between his fingers and that sensitive little point, all cool and ever so slightly rough. It rubs me a second time, and I think my whole body vibrates.

I can hardly help arching my back, despite knowing how lewd that must look. Like I’m saying,
Go on, go on do it more. Do it harder or softer or faster, until I come over something so slight
. Because the thing is – I think I really could. Him doing this feels better than most masturbation I attempt, and it only gets more intense from there. Once he’s managed to pluck and play with one nipple he seems to grow in confidence, and attends to the other at the same time. Two fingers on the right, lightly tugging until I go insane.

And then his mouth on the left.

Oh, fuck, oh, fuck, did he just put his mouth on the left? I think he might have done, but as my mind is currently taking a vacation somewhere just south of reality it’s rather hard to tell. I have to take several calming breaths and get some control of myself, in order to be sure. Then, once I have, I wish I had stayed in the dark. Not thought anything or worked out what he’s really doing.

If I had I probably wouldn’t have made a fool of myself. But I do, so I just have to deal with it. He puts his mouth on my nipple, and sucks hard enough for me to really feel it. And in response I ramble like some incoherent sex maniac. ‘Ohhhh God yeah do that to me do it to me lick my stiff little nipples,’ I tell him. And though it’s no worse than the things I said when he took a belt to me, it somehow feels it in every way. The sheet makes it so, as though it really is a shroud and I’m supposed to respect the dead.

At any rate I shouldn’t be groaning orders – an idea that he seems to agree with. He pulls away almost immediately, as though the belt incident was Nam and now he’s having flashbacks. All of this is just getting way, way too horrifying for him, and now it all has to stop. That was enough, that was everything I’m allowed to have, and I should just make do.

And I can, too. I lie there quietly, awaiting my probable doom. Not saying a word or asking for anything, every inch of me just waiting for him to rip away the sheet. In fact, I wait for it so hard and so confidently, that when he tells me to spread my legs I at first think he’s said something else. Or maybe he
did
say that, but means it like he did in the study. He just needs to correct my supine posture, and once he has we can go about our business.

But I swear to God, I had no idea our business is going to be him with his face between my thighs. If I had, I probably would have prepared myself more. I would have put myself into some bracing position, as though he was a plane and in real danger of dive-bombing into the side of a mountain. It certainly feels like he might be, and not just because he’s put his goddam head between my legs.

There’s also all the stuff he does when he gets there.

Good God in heaven, the
stuff
. I can’t even call it by its real name. I just have to give it vague labels, like ‘thing’ and ‘this’ and ‘that’. He uses his thing to this my that, my mind garbles, and oh, God, when he does, when I get that first hint of contact, obviously too slick to be anything but his mouth…I think I call him ‘baby’. It mortifies me beyond belief and I automatically want to take it back.

But I’m also glad I don’t get to. He deserves a ‘baby’ for this. He deserves it just for pushing himself to these lengths – lengths that definitely affect him in uncomfortable ways – and then again for how he goes about it. Dear God, the way he goes about it. I think somewhere inside I really thought he would have no idea, when it came to putting his extensive knowledge into practice. Even knowing that he made up that stuff he supposedly read aloud to me doesn’t quite make it real.

Until he spreads my puffy, plump lips with two insistent fingers, to get at everything between. He practically makes my clit stand out, like a sign saying
please God do not touch directly.
Though I suppose he’s not going to touch directly. He’s doing it through a layer of ever so slightly damp material, and, by God, he knows it. He knows what to do with my body, he understands the medium he’s working in, and he just applies both to devastating effect.

I cry, really I do, when I feel his tongue work over me there. When he just presses the tip to that over-sensitised bud, then rubs and rubs until I absolutely cannot take it. Real tears leak out of my eyes as raw sensation rips through me, too intense for me to keep still for a second round. I think I mean to get away or at least close my legs – which feels like a stupid mistake until I try.

And then I get his response.

Oh, my God, his response. ‘No,’ he says, only the ‘no’ has twenty-seven syllables and sounds like a song. Plus it finishes on something so brilliant I can scarcely believe it. He gets a great handful of me, and I still struggle to fathom it. I find myself actually asking him if he just grabbed my arse, and to my great delight he tells me yes. He tells me more than that.

‘I did, and if you keep refusing to be still I might have to squeeze,’ he says, and, man alive, I understand him. It isn’t just the idea of him doing that that’s almost killing me. It’s the idea of him doing it
in a place that he recently branded
. Those marks still burn, and if I am a bad girl he will make them burn brighter. He will make them sting so much I might cry.

While coming so hard that I want to die.

I’m not far off that now. And I get so much further when he returns to the task at hand. He shows me almost no mercy, both in the things he does and in the things he
doesn’t
do. He pauses when I want him to make circles, and makes circles when I want him to stop, and when he really starts going for me I don’t feel any better about it. Mostly because I realise in a great wrenching glut of excitement:

That sudden sense of him pressing against me, mouth working more urgently against my aching cunt…that is not me needing it. That is
him wanting to do it
. That is him grasping at something, so greedy he can’t even come up for air. I hear him gasping and understand it all for sure, the knowledge like a lightning bolt directly into my veins. It lays me to waste just thinking of him desperately kissing and licking and lapping at me, everything so lewd and close it’s unbearable. The contact is too intense, my orgasm like a waiting fist just south of my stomach. In a second I’m going to go so hard.

I think he
likes
the idea of me going hard.

And I don’t let him down. As soon as I fully see how much he wants this, my body tries to burst its banks. I scream into my teeth, grateful for the barrier because it stops me making a blurting fool of myself, but hating it just the same because, Lord, I need to let something out. There’s too much sensation inside me. It bursts from my aching clit, too thick to stand. I think I actually soak through the sheets – and a second later I know for sure. I know, because, holy hell, he
tells me so.

‘I had no idea a woman would taste so divine,’ he blurts out, so full of strange wonder that I could never doubt his sincerity for a second. He really means it, he really means that he enjoyed something he should probably hate more than anything in the world, and the second I know he does I cannot hold it back.