And so, I do.
A Song Of Us
At first, Nathan just kisses me. But this kiss is meant to distract, to incite, and god, does he do that. His tongue whips my need into a frenzy, and I realize how very, very long it’s been since I felt anything good, anything this good, and I only dare approach that thought before just flinging myself headlong into simply feeling.
His mouth on mine
His body heavy and big and hard above me. His skin under my hands—I touch his broad shoulders and thick arms, his wide back and taut butt, his hairy, strong thighs. The hard weight of his sex is there, hanging and bobbing between us, but I wait. I want to hold him, stroke him, feel him, but I wait. Not quite yet.
He braces himself on an elbow and a hip, beside me more than above me, now, and his kiss seems to slow, as if settling in for the long haul. His hand caresses my breasts, his touch deft and greedy and soft. My breasts feel heavy, taut, my nipples sensitive, and his touch draws fire in my belly. And then, the fire in my belly hardens and descends lower, to the delicacy of my folds, the apex of my thighs. His touch moves there. I’m trembling, afraid and eager at once, and I’m grateful he takes his time. He doesn’t just plunge right to touching, but explores me first, and never stops kissing me. He touches along my thigh, over the top, everywhere. And when he does touch me at last, it’s gentle and slow and light, tracing the seam. I hold on to his neck and his shoulder, angled toward him, one thigh flung aside, opening myself to his touch. I’m greedy for it even as I tremble in anticipation, more than a little fear, as a million what-ifs crash through my mind.
Doubts are silenced when he slips a fingertip through me, and then finds the nexus of my need. I moan, and then he follows the trail of my whimpers and lifted hips to discover what moves me, what draws groans from me. He learns me, becomes a student of me. I can feel him memorizing my whimpers, absorbing the knowledge of where and how his touch makes me shift under him, lift, pulse against him.
Despite my desire, my nerves dull the sharpness, and it takes a while. He is patient, pulling back when I need it, racing ahead when I’m ready. He knows my rhythms, somehow. His touch circles, and I’m on the edge. Teetering, unable to topple over.
I’m becoming frustrated. I want to.
He slides a finger into me, gathers wetness. Pauses, there, just like that. “Nadia.”
I open my eyes. “Hmm?”
“Relax.”
“I can’t. I’m so worked up, and I’m getting frustrated because I can’t just…”
He finishes my sentence for me with a kiss. “Just breathe.” I take a breath. “Now look at me.”
I meet his eyes. “This is us. You and me. Nothing else. No pressure. All the time in the world. If you’re not ready, it’s okay.”
I shake my head, and reach for him. “I want to. But I think I’m just so keyed up from anticipation, that I just…”
His eyes go heavy-lidded as I gather him in my hand, for the first time. So much of him, more than I was even expecting, and given the overall size of the man, I was expecting a lot. So hard, but the flesh sheathing his hardness is silken, almost delicate, thin, with a tracery of veins. I look where I’m touching, and watch as my hand slides down his length, and he groans.
“Go easy,” he murmurs. “Been…a while. Might not take as long as I’d like if you do that too much.”
I smile, and keep doing what I want: touching him. “Your rule, remember? No explanations, no apologies.” Both hands, then, because the size of him requires two. “We have all the time in the world. If it’s quick the first time, then we’ll have all night and all day and as long as we want.”
His fingers resume their exploration. “You’re so soft, so wet.”
“Nathan?” I swallow hard, tasting a bold question on my lips. “Could you…would you use your mouth? On me? Please?”
He smiles, a heated, pleased smirk. “I love that you asked.”
“I was kinda scared to. But I need it. If you want to, that is. If you don’t, that’s fine, I just—”
Once again, his mouth on mine silences me. “I want to.”
I close my eyes as his mouth teases downward, kissing my shoulder, my breastbone, licking my nipples to hard peaks, and then kissing downward, over my belly, and I involuntarily draw my stomach in as he touches his lips to my seam. A flick of his tongue, and I gasp, and my feet draw up to the backs of my thighs and my knees angle away, and his tongue delves into me, and then drags luxuriously upward, and then there’s an explosion of sensations all at once, as his tongue and lips find the nadir of my desire and makes my sex sing, and his fingers are everywhere, in me and twisting my nipples and cupping my breast and it’s all so much all at once and I’m crying out, maybe just flat-out crying, sobbing or screaming I don’t even know or care, I’m just a far-flung spark of a mind hurtling through the space of an endless climax.
He keeps me there and refuses to relent, and the waveform of climax dips to a brief trough of between, and then he does something else and I’m riding another crest and his hair is soft on my belly and his beard scratchy against my inner thighs and his tongue is clever and his fingers strong and gentle. I can’t take any more, I’ll explode if there’s more—but there is, and I fling through that as well, and each time I think I’ve reached as far as I can go, that I’ve come as hard as I can come, he finds a way to push me past that edge.
And then I just need him.
I pull at his jaw, tug at his beard, and he ascends my body, wiping his lips with his hands. A million thoughts rifle through my head, but none of them make it past my lips. I roll away from him, to my bedside drawer. Pull out a new, unopened box, hand it to him.
“I guessed at the size,” I whisper. “I thought I was being generous, but I think they may even be too small.”
“Nah. They’re perfect.” He opens the box, pulls one out.
This feels so weird, so foreign. In my previous life, we never used these. And again, that’s as close to that line of thought as I can go. Just that this, too, is uniquely ours, Nathan’s and mine.
I watch him rip open the square foil packet, and my nerves flutter in my throat.
He sets the foil aside, and is about to roll it on; I take it from him. Use my hand on him for a moment, just touching. And then I sheathe him in latex, and there’s a pause, him on his side, me on mine, facing each other, as we silently debate what’s next: whose going on top?
He pulls me to him. Rolls to his back. Yes, this. Our first time should be like this. I look down at him as I straddle him, like our first kiss when I straddled him—I never told him, but that moment, when I sat on him and kissed him, I had a vision of this, us like this, and I knew then it would like this. And that’s why I stopped, because I wasn’t there yet.
I am, now.
I reach between my thighs and find him. Grasp him, touch him to me. Hesitate. His eyes rake my body, then fix on my eyes, and we’re both shaking, trembling, panting, neither of us ready and knowing we never will be.
I sink onto him. My groan is involuntary, torn from me as he fills me and overfills me and tears fill my eyes, tears of wonder and ecstasy and even a pinch of pain at the size of him that I’m so unused to, like nothing I’ve ever felt; I shy away from that thought at first, but then I embrace it. This is Nathan, and it’s okay. It’s okay that it’s new and strange and different and that it’s overwhelming.
He brushes a thumb under my eye, a smile on his lips, encouraging, loving. His hand rests on my waist, on my hip. Then he grips both hips and helps me settle more fully on him, and he’s in me and I’m surrounding him enveloping him falling forward onto him and clinging to his neck and groaning, waiting for myself to get used to him.
He’s stone still. Waiting. Shaking all over, stomach hard with tension.
Shaking with the need to move.
I’m wild with ecstatic glory, and he fills me and presses into me and scrapes against me such that I need only to move, to feel more, to fall higher. He isn�
�t moving—he won’t, I know it. He knows he’s big, that if he moves too fast, too hard, he could hurt me, and so he cedes control to me, even as I know everything inside him is driving him to take me, to take his release. His hands caress me, all over.
Finally, I feel the need to move exploding inside me. I press my palms flat on his chest and lift up, and his eyes meet mine, and I don’t look away as I begin to move. Lift up, pause, sink down. Gasp and moan on the downstroke, the filling thrust. A groan isn’t enough, though. It’s a song inside me, and the note I need to sing is loud, wild, enthralled, lost, gloried. So I lift up and sink down and let my voice go, give in to need, to nature, to what we are becoming together in this moment. He growls counterpoint to my long-drawn hoarse ragged cry, and the cry becomes a constant wail as I move faster, needing more, more. His big hard strong hands are not so gentle now and I relish the power in them as he grips my hips with rough dominance, tugging me downward, and the more I demand of him the more he gives me, and the tug of his hands becomes forceful and my bottom slaps against his thighs and there’s only us, and his lips are against my ear as we move in orchestral unison.
“Nadia,” he whispers, growls, grunts.
“Nathan, oh god, Nathan, Nathan.”
I think deep in the darkest corner of my soul, my hesitation at allowing this moment with Nathan to come was that I’d forget, that my lips would utter a different name. But that’s impossible. I am fully present, fully alive and fully aware of where I am, when I am, and whom I’m with.
Nathan.
I feel him reaching climax, and our rhythm goes slow and gentle and delicate and purposeful, and I press up so I can look down at him, and my arms press against my breasts as if offering them to him and he takes the offering, his mouth loving on them, and then his eyes tell me he’s there and his voice goes rough and it’s him, now him in control, lifting me and bringing me down, pushing up, thrusting up as I drive down, and I watch him through it, watch his face lose whatever composure he had left as he fills me, as he detonates and I collapse forward on him, cradle his face to my breasts and let him pump wildly into me through the mad starburst of his orgasm, and there’s more and more and more, until he slows to half thrusts and then to stillness.
I just lie on him, filled with him.
It feels like this was always us, always meant to be.
From the moment I saw him sitting on the porch of his cabin, reading, I think I knew.
My head on his shoulder, his hand on my butt.
“Be right back,” he says, wiggling out from under me.
I watch him go, clean up, watch him return, and I move the covers back and get under them. Lift them up for him. Lift myself as he sidles in beside me, and I resume my place against his side, tucked into him, head on the pillow of his strong arm.
I feel him working up to something. “Don’t say it,” I whisper.
“Okay. But it’s true.”
“I know.”
“Nathan?”
“Yeah.”
“Thank you.”
A wry laugh. “For what? I should be thanking you. I think you just changed my world.”
I snort. “Who changed whose world is up for debate I think, because mine feels pretty damn well rocked.” I lift up to look at his eyes. “Thank you for waiting. Thank you for being patient. Thank you for taking the time to…to know that you love me, before making love to me.”
His arm tightens around me. “I do.”
“I thought you were gonna say it for a second.”
He chuckles. “I would. But for some reason, you told me not to.”
“Because I want to say it first.”
Another laugh. “Okay, honey.”
“Honey?”
“No?”
“No, I like it. Just…seeing how it feels. And I like it. It’s good.”
“You’re sweet as honey, so I figured it fits.”
I laugh, patting his chest. “You’re silly, you big sweet man.”
We float together in a long glowing silence. Doze, maybe.
It emerges from me unbidden, abrupt, a raw whisper into the afterglow silence.
“I love you, Nathan.”
His chest rises and falls, harsh. A ragged breath escapes him. I reach up and brush a droplet of overwhelmed emotion from his cheek.
“Sorry, I just—”
“Try that again,” I interrupt. “This time, no apologizing.”
A not-quite, almost laugh. Another heavy sigh, this one long, an attempt to control.
“Nathan.” I brush my fingers over his cheek again, and again they come away damp. “Feel it. Don’t control it. And most of all, let me see it.”
He swallows hard—I hear it. “I never—” he pauses, clears his throat. “I never thought I’d hear that again. Or feel this way again.”
My eyes begin to sting. “I know. Me either.”
“I thought maybe I was…broken. Like I’d been wrecked beyond repair.” He’s breathing hard. “And then I met you, and…and you fixed me. One day a time.” He clears his throat. “And so I guess, to hear you say that just…I dunno. It’s a lot. Kinda overwhelming. Or, a lot overwhelming. I don’t cry much, and it seems kinda silly to cry after something so amazing.” Another sigh, another clearing of his throat. “I just never thought I’d hear that again.”
I lean up on my elbow, wipe at his cheeks. Kiss them, one and the other. “Thank you for giving me this, Nathan.”
He peers at me with a half-open eye, still embarrassed of his tears in the way men have. “Giving you what?”
“You. Fully, just…you. It’s brave of you.”
I touch my forehead to his. Kiss him. Just to taste him, the salt on his lips. But then something births in the kiss and becomes more.
I find him ready.
“Already?” I ask, surprised and pleased. It hasn’t been very long.
He laughs, nods.
We fall into the new rhythms of us that feel old and perfect as well as new and wild. Sheathed, he rolls over me. This time it’s him, his arms pillars beside my face, his body blocking out all the world, and I lift and lock my legs around him and accept him into me and this time it’s long and slow, even as we find our mutual explosion together, in unison, he loves me slowly and deliberately and drives each thrust with his eyes devouring mine.
In the moment right after we’ve come together, still stroking gently into me, arms braced, panting, sweating, he dips his lips to mine. “I love you, Nadia.”
His moment, not just a return of mine.
And the next time we lose ourselves in each other, later that night, instead of crying out or calling on god, we chant each other’s name, a song of us.
Into the dawn we slumber and we delight in each other.
* * *
I wake up, and he’s not in bed beside me. But I smell coffee, and I smile.
He comes back, naked, with two steaming mugs of coffee. “Six thirty,” he says. “Figured it’d be nice to have it together in bed.”
“How do you know it’s six thirty?” I ask. “There are no clocks.”
A shrug. “We’ve had coffee together at six thirty just about every day since we met. I just know, now.”
“Oh.”
We drink our coffee together, in what is now our cabin.
And I wonder, do we ever have to leave? Or can we just…stay here? Can this be life?
I look at Nathan, and I know the answer.
The Art To Living
“Mr. Crenshaw, please—it’s for your own good. You won’t even feel a thing, I promise. Just sit still.”
“How in th’damn-hell is you gonna know what’s best for me, little girl? I ain’t had a shot or a pill or a stitch in m’whole damn life, and I ain’t about-ta start now.”
“I know that you stepped on a rusty nail, barefoot, never saw anyone for it, and that you’ve never, by your own admission, had a tetanus shot.”
“So? I’m fine.”
I sigh. “You have a feve
r of a hundred and one—”
“I worked through worse fevers than this afore.”
“You are having trouble swallowing, I can tell, and I’d render a guess that, even if you’d never admit to it, you’re experiencing jaw pain. You have elevated blood pressure and heart rate. Soon, you’ll be experiencing seizures, or at least, involuntary spasming or jerking.” I speak over his protestations of so what. “This is what we in the medical profession call lockjaw, Mr. Crenshaw, and it is, if left untreated, lethal.”
That quiets him.
“And by lethal, I do not mean quickly or painlessly. I mean, you will experience spasms that could fracture your spine and leave you paralyzed. You could experience lasting brain damage. Your jaw, as the name suggests, will lock up and render you unable to eat, which means you’ll survive on a feeding tube, for as long as you do survive, which won’t be long. With a tetanus shot and antibiotics—meaning allowing me to treat you—we can mitigate quite a lot of this. There is no cure for tetanus, but we can manage the symptoms.”
Mr. Crenshaw, clad in dirty denim overalls, bare chested under them, with a filthy, ragged red International Harvester hat on his graying, thinning hair, barefoot, burly and overweight and recalcitrant and tougher than shoe leather and roofing nails, lets out a gusty sigh. “Fine. I’d rather die than have a feedin’ tube shoved down my throat, let alone be paralyzed and have to have my ornery old wife wipe my ass. But if it wasn’t life or death, I wouldn’t be here.”
“You wouldn’t be here at all if you’d gotten a tetanus shot. This is entirely preventable.” I say this as I swab his arm, prepare the shot.
He snorts. “Don’t you start in on the vaccination rant, lady. I done heard it all.”
I snort back at him. “Well, next time you come in with an entirely preventable illness, I’ll remind you of that.”
“Took me an hour to get here,” he says, grumbling. “And this is the closest place to my land where there’s anything like doctors. And you ain’t even a doctor.”
“I’m a physician’s assistant, which as far as your needs are concerned, they are the same thing.” I stick the needle in while he’s formulating his response, slowly plunging the medicine into him. “If someone were to come to you, would you get vaccinated?”
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