His voice is honest and bare when he answers, “Not a day goes by when I don’t think about what I could have had, Charlotte. You think I didn’t want your zeal? Your mouth on my throat and feet? You think I still don’t want it?”
I should push back. I should say I don’t care what he wanted or what he wants. But fuck if being wanted by him isn’t as intoxicating as it ever was, and the admission of his desire has hot knots of excitement tying themselves in my stomach.
He nudges closer, one shiny dress shoe pressing between my feet, and his mouth now inches from mine. “Simply one kiss,” he murmurs, his stare hot on my mouth. “Surely I owe you that? At the very least?”
“You owe me everything,” I whisper.
His eyes darken. “I know,” he says.
Needing to see something other than him so I can just think, I turn so that I’m facing the wall, which is stupid, because what’s my plan here? To stare at the wall until he goes away? To hope that if I can’t see his sculpted mouth or haunted eyes I might regain my will to murder him? Or at the very least go back downstairs to Twyla and my champagne duties?
The other reason this is a stupid plan presents itself immediately; a large hand plants itself on the wall by my head, and I feel the ghost of a warm finger trace the curve of my shoulder.
As if Church needs my mouth or even my full attention to work his god-magic on me. Fully clothed and staring at a blank wall, I’m still trembling on the edge of senselessness and all from a single brush of his finger.
“I first found you here,” he says, his finger following the seam of my shirt to its collar. “In this very room. My greatest treasure, and like all great treasures, I nearly missed seeing you, buried as you were in the crush of the ordinary and the mundane.” The pad of his finger—warm and rough—whispers across my nape, and a shiver skips all the way down my spine. “I nearly walked away, and if I had, some other lover would have found you and your mind, not me.”
His fingers move around the edges of my hairline, and then suddenly my ponytail holder is tugged free and my hair is loose and sifting down around my shoulders. He runs his fingers through it, he massages at my scalp and rubs away the tenderness from where it’s been pulling all night.
My eyes flutter closed at the pleasure, but I still manage to say, “You ended up missing me anyway. At the church, remember?”
He ignores this, still rubbing and stroking along my scalp until my toes are curling. Or they would curl if my damn shoes weren’t so tight. “The night after we met, I swore to myself that I wouldn’t come back. You were too young, and I’d been a churl to you. And on top of it all, I wanted to tie you to the bed and make you talk about religious iconography while I buried myself in your cunt—and never, ever have I wanted something as powerfully as I wanted that. As I wanted you.”
His fingers follow the curve of my jaw until they get to my chin and then my head is tilted back to rest against his shoulder. With one hand still against the wall and his other now toying idly with the top button of my shirt, I’m enveloped in his embrace. His chest is warm against my back, even through his tuxedo, and against my skirted bottom—
I shiver again, unable to resist the urge to press against him. Just a little. Just to confirm that his erection is as thick and hard as it ever was, a beautiful, massive thing that proved Church’s divinity, because no mortal could have a cock like that. It wouldn’t be fair to the other men of the world.
His breath catches as I press against him, but he doesn’t move otherwise, he doesn’t hoist me over his shoulder to find the nearest spot to fuck me in, he doesn’t shove me to my knees to fix the problem I made—all things he would have done four years ago.
He does none of this, and that’s when I know I’m in real trouble. He’s going to exploit that horrible, all-consuming thing that’s always been between us. That thing when a supplicant finally finds the temple in which to prostrate herself, when a wolf finally finds a bunny that will hop after him and seek shelter between his paws. He’s making me feel it all over again.
His fingers drop to my hip, now to my thigh, now to my knee.
“You have a date here tonight,” I say, pointlessly.
“And?”
Typical Church answer. Asshole.
“I—I was going to murder you,” I say as his fingers hook under the hem of my skirt and trace maddening circles up my bare thigh. It’s a place where I haven’t been touched in years, and my body is having all kinds of wet, shivery feelings about him touching it now.
I should stop this. Yes, I should definitely stop this.
I’m going to stop it so hard.
In, like, a minute.
“You can still murder me,” Church says soothingly, his fingers now stroking along the line of my panties. My head is lolling against his shoulder and my hips are pushing against his touch, trying to get his fingers to more interesting places. “I’ll let you murder me all you want. But let me make you feel better first, hmm? Just rub it all better.”
He emphasizes his point by sliding a single finger under the cotton and running it over the curl-covered swell he finds there.
I gasp, and in the space of that gasp, he’s rucked my skirt up to my waist and slid his whole hand down the front of my panties. He cups me hard, like he used to do every chance he got before, and my body remembers. My body remembers what my mind tries so hard to forget—that this is a man I used to trust so completely, with every cell in my body, and there was a time he rewarded that trust with a breathless worship of his own. A fierce adoration and pride.
Pride.
It was always pride with us. Pride that irritated him into aggressing a poor tour guide, pride that made me fire back. Pride that kept both of us from backing down from danger when I walked into his classroom a week after the tour and realized the mysterious man I’d been fucking for the last six nights was my new professor.
“I shouldn’t teach you.”
“I promise to behave.”
“Liar. Luckily for you, I don’t trust anyone else with your education.”
So we’d done it—we’d played the promising student/flinty professor game during his lectures, and then the moment we were alone, footsteps of my classmates still echoing down the hall, I’d be yanked onto his lap and bitten and licked. In between bites, he told me everything I got wrong in my last assignment. At his flat, we’d punctuate arguments about Mircea Eliade’s approach to comparative religion with hard squeezes and strokes and orgasms, and I’d tell him he was wrong about human symbolic thinking in the Lower Paleolithic while he wrapped me in rope and then fucked me however he saw fit. He graded my papers while balancing his laptop on my back as I lay limp and well-used in his bed. And whenever I said something insightful in class, whenever I won an argument, whenever I hit on something clever in my papers, I was rewarded just as ferociously as when I was corrected.
No, not rewarded. Reverenced.
Revered and venerated and cherished.
You’re going to be cleverer than me soon, he’d murmur against my skin. You’ll outshine everyone. The other professors, me, the whole world.
It was possibly the highest praise Church could give, since he arrogantly—but also correctly—assumed he was the smartest person in every room he strode into, and so his praise and petting over my intellectual successes never felt patronizing or supercilious. Superior, yes—asking James Church Cason to be anything else would be like asking a lion to be a mouse—but superior in a way that made me into a lion too.
For all that I later resented feeling like an idiot animal of prey, until he’d left me at the altar, he made me feel brilliant and immortal. Yes, he fucked me like an altar sacrifice, refused to accept any work or thought or argument from me that wasn’t the absolute best—but there was no disharmony in that, not for us. He could be reduced to cinders by my potential and then still fuck me like I was his temple prostitute, and we moved from one dynamic to the other like hopping between trenches at a dig. And like a dig, i
t would look like chaos to the uninitiated—simultaneously dirty and yet regulated, both inchoate and bizarrely intricate—but to us it was home.
Until our wedding day.
Remembering that now, my cheeks heat and my eyes fly open. “Fuck you,” I say, right as his middle finger grazes over my clit, and then my curse turns into a low whimper.
“A fine plan,” he murmurs in my ear. “Because you were always mine to fuck, sweet Charlotte, from the moment I laid eyes on you.”
His finger is perfect, it’s the kiss of heaven, it’s big and blunt and firm, and it’s right where I need it, right where it feels so good. Good enough to push my murdery urges to the edge of my mind, just for a moment, just for right now.
“I’m not yours,” I manage. And I mostly mean it, but I can still feel his smirk curving against the shell of my ear, because he knows mostly mean it is a world away from absolutely and definitely mean it, and he won’t let me forget it.
For some reason.
“Why?” I ask on a gasp—he’s just slid his fingers down to toy with my vagina, to probe possessively at where he used to own me—and then I inhale again as he pushes his finger inside and sends sparks skittering everywhere across my skin.
Four years. It’s been four years without being touched by this man, and it’s like taking a full breath of air after a deep, dark dive. Oxygen and life flood me, my body sends yes please yes please chemicals swimming through my blood, and the bright, heady wash of it all makes me dizzy. I slump back against him even more as he slides out enough to tease my clit again. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because I need to,” he grates out. “Because you belong to me.”
His finger penetrates me again, then a second finger. They slide and curl and stroke, and my body sings at being filled by him, filled by his will and his arrogance and his hunger. The hunger that even now has him growling low in my ear as his indelible erection makes its needs known against the soft curve of my bottom.
I try valiantly for a dig, for something that would give me some control, but not enough to control to leave. I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to stop. I want to ride his hand and then murder him for being the most selfish man on the planet. “Doesn’t your date belong to you?”
“No,” he says shortly, not elaborating and his fingers not pausing in their rhythm.
“But—”
“But she’s not here with me between her legs, now is she?”
“God, you’re such a dick,” I groan, chasing his touch with my hips so that I’m riding his hand in truth. I reach over my shoulder and behind me to fist my hand in his tuxedo jacket, the other I brace against his hard thigh for balance as I rock against his touch.
“And you’re the wettest thing I’ve ever felt,” he says. “Helpless girl, fucking my hand. Do you miss it? Me?”
“No.”
“Sweet Charlotte, you can lie with your words all you want, and I’ll still know the truth.” His hand molds to the shape of me—his palm grinding against my clit as his fingers press and curl inside—and he buries his face in my neck. Inhales. “Who’s touched this since you left me?”
“None of your fucking business,” I breathe.
Oh, he doesn’t like this, not at all. I can feel his body tense against mine; his hand in my skirt is merciless, determined, it will wring an orgasm from me at all costs now, simply to erase any memory that’s not of him. I should hate that, I should stop it. Shove him away and tell him he doesn’t get to make me come, and he doesn’t get to care about the people who do get to make me come.
Or better yet, I could knee him in his giant dick and then go back to my job, the one I have to keep for at least two more years.
But fuck, he’s good at this. Even angry and jealous—or maybe it’s because of the anger and jealousy—his touch is sex itself. Primitive. Greedy. Unapologetic. His palm is pure rolling pressure on my clit, his fingers are long and skilled inside me, and liquid fire is pooling in my lower belly, burning at the apex of my thighs and down my quads. He’s going to make me come, and there’s no doubt in my mind that he thinks he’s winning some crucial point here, that he’s conquering, when really I still hate him and his perfect, godlike penis, and I’m one the who’s winning. I’ll take my orgasm, tell him to fuck off back to hell, and then walk out of here having been pleasured and with the upper hand.
Ha.
“Are you thinking about it?” I provoke. “Me fucking other people?”
“Yes,” he says sharply. “And I’m thinking about how I’m going to fuck you in very short order, my little supplicant, and the minute I do, you’ll forget about anyone else. You’ll forget about anyone but me.”
Memories flash—his body toiling over mine, his firm buttocks flexing and thrusting as I clutched and scratched for him to go harder and faster; his big, rough hands covering my naked tits as he bounced me on his lap like a doll. His cruel mouth between my legs, insatiable and as merciless as the rest of him, licking and sucking me as his muscled arm bunched and moved just out of view so he could masturbate while he ate me.
There was nothing like Church in the grip of an orgasm. It was like watching potency itself, and it was so erotic to see his jaw flex and his eyes hood and his stomach and thighs jerk with the force of his spend that I’d usually come again just from witnessing it.
Oh God.
I definitely miss sex with him, and I’m definitely going to come right now, and I definitely wish he was going to come too.
No. No pleasure for him. You take yours and get the fuck out.
Oh, I’m going to take mine. Any minute now, any second, so long as he keeps giving me that hand to use . . .
Church, predator that he is, scents his impending victory. “That’s right,” he says. “I’m going to fuck you again, Charlotte. And again and again and again, until you’re too worn out to run away from me again.”
“Dream—” moan “—on—”
“I already dream of you,” he whispers. The hand that’s fucking me pushes my ass tighter against his hips, and the bar of his erect cock rocks against my bottom. “Every night. I dream of the way your wet cunt tastes. Of the way it looks. Do you remember the day I came back for you? Do you remember how I ate you that night?”
“Yes,” I breathe. “Yes.”
“I was lost then. The moment my lips brushed against you, it was over; I was lost and you were mine. But you were mine before that, weren’t you? You were mine the moment I saw you. Right here, right in this very room, I saw you. Clever and original and so kissable with that bold mouth. You laughed at me, do you remember that? Maybe that’s when I knew.”
I’m so close, close enough that my knees are all the way buckled and my head is thrashing on his shoulder. “Knew what?” I manage.
“That you could survive me.”
That you could survive me.
But did I survive him? Could I call the last four years surviving when everything that made me that electric, ambitious girl four years ago was subsumed in the crush of loneliness and poverty? Were we the perfect example of why gods and mortals don’t mix?
“Church . . .” It’s half curse, half plea. I’m going to come harder than I have in four years, and I hate him, and I’ve missed him so much that I’m going to fly apart with it.
“Charlotte.” He breathes me in as his touch works me over the edge and coaxes me right into sheer, filthy bliss.
Release sears me—sparkling, squeezing, hot—it starts right behind my clit and rolls everywhere: my belly, my breasts, down my thighs to my curling toes. Church makes a ragged noise into my neck as he feels my pussy clutch at him, and I know he’s thinking of how it would feel around his cock. How wet and tight. How good.
The thought of his cock in me, of him spending inside of me, drives my climax higher and harder, until I’m supported completely by the hand still working my cunt and his other arm, which comes away from the wall to band across my ribs and keep me upright as I shake and shudder my way thr
ough the feeling.
It feels nothing like coming alone in my narrow bed and nothing like the few drunken orgasms I’d received from a Dutch bartender three years ago before she moved back to Maastricht and I gave up on post-Church dating altogether.
No, this is the dictionary definition of good, this is the kind of good one uses to describe sixteen-year-old scotch or a virgin dig site with bones and sherds only inches below the surface. This is the kind of good that can change your life, that can lash you to a beautiful god and lead you down the path to ruin . . .
The kind of good that not only blinds you, but binds you.
Except I’m not bound.
Church made sure of that.
What he and I had is dead, and he killed it, and it’s nothing but a relic. It could be in its very own glass case in this gallery, that’s how broken and inert it is.
He slides his hand free of my sex and raises it to his mouth to lick it clean, nuzzling me between tastes, as if to praise me—and God, I like it, I like it too much, it’s dangerous how much his raw animalism stirs me.
I wriggle free of his hold and stumble away, my body still trembling and my cunt wet and pulsing and already aching for him again, the stupid thing.
“Charlotte,” he warns in a low voice.
I spin around, staggering back enough to put real distance between us. He stands there looking impeccable and barely rumpled at all, as if he went for a stroll through the exhibits and didn’t just finger-fuck a server to hell and back. Only his dark, hungry gaze and the fingers he’s still licking clean speak to the licentious things he’s just done.
“Thanks for the orgasm,” I say in a shaky voice. “Now fuck off.”
Naughty Brits: An Anthology Page 50