by JD Hawkins
I take the other earring and step up behind her in the mirror where she’s still holding the other against her face. The smell of her perfume, her body, more powerful than a drug. I hold it up to the other side of her face.
“Put them on,” I say. Her eyes flick toward me, then back to herself as she puts one in, then takes the other from me to put in—her fingers brushing against mine faintly, yet it turns my insides volcanic.
In this moment I’m gone. Lost. Forgetting anything but the sight of her, beautiful in the dark. The two of us going through pieces so she can choose a range feels like something from another life, something I read in a book—and the new reality, the only one I understand, that makes sense, is her standing in front of me becoming as beautiful as a person can possibly be, for no other reason than beauty itself.
“These are wonderful…perfect… I’d maybe make them a little shorter, but otherwise, I’d love something just like this…” she whispers, but the words are like a foreign language to me, incapable of penetrating my heightened senses, my mind incapable of deciphering words now, only processing how magnificent she is.
When she spins away, back to the shop, to the other pieces, it’s almost painful, wrenching me from my brief glimpse of heaven. The dance going on, but getting more intense.
In the dim light now, moving between the shadows, she looks majestic. Wide eyes, those sparkling earrings, her blonde hair like a glowing halo, a small stud on the strap of her high heels catching the light as she takes an elegant step. It’s the kind of magic you’re lucky to find in art, but transcendent when you find it in real life.
She lifts a festoon necklace set with white and yellow diamonds, holding it aloft in her equally delicate and beautiful fingers.
“Tell me about this.”
“I can tell you that you pick the most interesting, expensive pieces,” I reply with a smile. “But I expected that.”
She looks at me from across the darkness, flashing light into me.
She carries the necklace back to where I’m standing by the mirror and stands before me—no sense of being too close now. We both look at her in the mirror as she holds the necklace up against her chest, turning this way and that so it sparkles. I reach around and take the necklace from her, my eyes on hers in the mirror.
“A piece like this is designed with everything in consideration,” I say, as I hold the necklace to the side, away from her. “To draw the eye, accents around the collarbones, to swing the gaze out from the center. Weighted to rest perfectly against the neck, the body. Jewels cut and set to play the light against flesh, to make fair tones fairer and dark tones glisten. You have to see it against skin.”
I said it like a challenge. Like a command. Like a provocation. All my original intentions for what was meant to happen tonight gone, as if the dark makes the rules not count anymore. She stares back at me in the mirror, pupils wide in the dark, eyes narrowed with the focus of this moment. Gazes as direct as territorial animals. But only for a few seconds. Enough time for her to come up with the idea, before acting without hesitation.
In a single, swift, neat movement, she takes the bottom of her pink sweater and lifts it up, over her head—experience and the loose collar allowing her not to catch those earrings as she removes it. Underneath she has on nothing but a black bra, thin straps. Then, her eyes never leaving mine in the mirror, she tosses the sweater aside onto one of the counters. She stiffens her neck, raises her chin regally. A tiny gesture that in the intimacy of the moment is a command to put the necklace on her.
I’m gentle with it. Slow. Partly because it feels like the slightest misstep or mistake could spoil this strange, fragile moment. Partly because I want to savor even the touch of her hair as I brush it slightly, the feel of her skin beneath my fingers as I set the clasp, each wisp of contact between us like some small-portioned delicacy.
She finally pulls her eyes from mine and looks at herself, turning her chin to the sides, then her shoulders to give herself—and incidentally me—the best view. She brings her fingers to her neck to trace the chain and I feel like she’s torturing me now. Her warm skin so close, outlined in light and shadow, necklace shimmering like it’s part of her, brought out from within.
“You could do something like this for me?” she asks in a soft whisper.
“I could do anything for you,” I reply.
She looks at me once more, face blank, eyes hard, but she lets slip something. Her lips part, so slightly only someone who looks at her as intensely as I do would notice. A gesture so nonchalant only somebody who knows her as well as I do would be able to decipher it.
Without thinking, without taking my eyes from her in the mirror, I bring my fingers to her back and slowly unclasp her bra. As slow as I can, I slide the straps from her shoulders, brushing my fingers against her breasts as I ease it down, peel it away from her, and let it drop to the floor.
She says nothing, but her eyes watch mine as I study every contour of her body, every line and shape in her skin, the half-light revealing more than it hides. A moment so loaded it feels like we’ve stepped out of reality, out of all the silly things we cared about ten minutes ago. Our history, her jewelry line, past mistakes… The people involved in all those things aren’t here anymore. She looks like another person, and I feel like one.
“Stay here,” I tell her firmly.
I have a strong idea of what she likes now—and it makes so much sense I should have just guessed. Baroque. Fine. Complicated. Things that intimidate with their extravagance, but force you still to be drawn into them. Jewelry like a labyrinth for the eye.
I take a collar necklace from its cloth, something more modern but still feminine. An inch-wide band of bluish-white pearls set into silver shaped into lashing waves. Then I return to her.
She’s standing still, her composure utterly perfect. Half-naked and vulnerable—and yet in no way submissive. Her chin too high, her eyes too beautiful. As I stand behind her, wrapping the collar necklace around her neck, I wonder which of us is really in charge. Me, telling her to stand still so I can dress her. Or Maeve, who is allowing me to worship her.
I latch the collar and it’s a little tight, her breath stopping a moment, though she barely shows it. I realize neither of us is in charge anymore. We’re both slaves to something bigger that’s happening between us.
Her lips are parted still, and I notice her breath stutters a little. I don’t know if it’s the collar or the tension between us. She turns her eyes to study it on herself, then brings those fingers to her neck to touch it. I see in her eyes a fire alight, the fire she always has, but it’s pure and raging now.
“Yes,” she whispers. Her voice so sensual and forceful it sounds like she’s casting a spell, speaking an arcane word. A voice almost not hers, and yet unmistakably her.
I take a moment to appreciate her in the mirror, breath held, then move away to the counters. I bring back a bracelet of big marquise-shaped emeralds and small rubies in a stark pattern that resembles bramble thorns. I put it on her left wrist, handling the delicate part so I can appreciate how perfect she is even here, my thumb brushing over her pulse, feeling it like a distant drum in the dark. She brings her forearm to her chest to see it in the mirror, squeezing her breasts together a little. Her eyes narrow and the stillness on her face seems more like serenity.
Again, I pull myself away, but only to return with an enameled bangle of twisting snakes, their heads yellow and purple, for her right bicep. She doesn’t move except to shift slightly and make it easier, now that this has become a private ritual that only we understand. Again I look at her, again I go and return with a long, thin chain from which numerous diamonds hang—small but refracting like spotlights—that I clasp around her waist, to drape against her beautiful hips. Another winding-patterned necklace of liquid silver. Rings of such spectacular, sculptural shape they seemed unable to be worn—until her—that I relish carefully putting on her long fingers. A clip in the shape of a butterfly for her ha
ir, a necklace of multicolored sapphires so long it hangs to her navel.
Another bracelet, another bangle. And with each item she seems to grow, to straighten, as if rising to carry the weight of such beauty, to carry herself with even more elegance and poise, until she looks like a goddess. The goddess she always was. Timeless and profound, as eternal and unyielding as the diamonds themselves, an incarnation of something that precedes civilization itself.
Even with her queen-like stillness she shimmers in the dark, light dancing off her arms and her front, sparkling like magic, the shadows cast by her breasts, her chin, her sides, lending a mystique equally as intense as the extravagance of the jewels.
She gazes at herself in the mirror, turning slightly, each movement like some terrifyingly compelling dance. I stare at her reflection over her shoulder.
The words come without thinking, an impulsive whisper from somewhere deep inside, bypassing all thought, the only possible way I can express anything I feel, and yet still pathetically inadequate.
“You’re the most perfect thing I’m ever going to see in my life.”
There’s the softening at the corner of her lips, the trace of the smile that only I ever look at her so intensely I can see. She raises her arms wide as if performing some black magic dance, embracing her final manifestation as goddess, the discovery of what she always knew. Then she raises her arms above her head, the twist in her waist, the lines of her body never anything but absolute exquisiteness.
Arms held high, she slowly reaches them back until her jeweled hands are in my hair, her forearms resting on my shoulders. Her back arches, chin so high she’s leaning back now. I step toward her, press myself against her back, allow her weight to fall into me, my hands slow to come to her waist. It’s an invitation to worship, to appreciate, to pay tribute.
“Don’t just say something like that,” she utters softly, sounding as majestic as she looks, “show me.”
Wonder and awe make me slow as I move my hand from her waist to her hip, the other up to her breast, grazing against the jewels, gently tracing her body in the dark. Her shoulder blades lean further into my chest, her head tipping back against my shoulder. My deep breath on her neck. Cheek, nose, lips, grazing as gently as a breeze, as if she’s too incredible to touch, a beauty too dangerous not to go slowly with.
She sighs, breath hard and short under the collar necklace, and I feel her breath move under my hands, under my lips at the back of her neck. Our bodies tuning in to each other, the dark and the jewelry accentuating every movement, every ripple of the experience.
I squeeze her breast a little firmer and she straightens up, backing her ass against my pants. I push my lips against her ear and she pulls away with a little hiss, teasing me even here, even this close. But I don’t let her get away. Tongue against her ear, arms squeezing her a little closer, a hand reaching for the top of her jeans.
She writhes and sways and twists in my arms. Ass pushing into me, sliding up and down, lips moving close enough to taste her breath before pulling away, her hand in my hair pulling me toward her, then pushing me away. She’s like a wave lapping up against me, pressing and pulling already, though the line gets higher each time, my hands get rougher each moment, my lust harder every second.
The jewelry clinks gently, her breaths shortened and stuttering by the collar, mine deep and suppressed, her heels on the floor as she sways and shifts her weight on and from me. A strange kind of music in the dark, like some forgotten mystical accompaniment to this strange ceremony.
I get the buttons of her jeans undone and she murmurs softly, chest vibrating under my palm, throat humming under my lips.
“Stay here,” I whisper into her ear, and pull away slowly, trailing as I take my hands from her, as carefully as I put them on her.
Once I’m in the backroom I tear off my shirt, and tear apart my desk with the hurried impatience of an investigator, looking for a condom.
I take it back into the shop, where she’s still looking at herself in the mirror, so transfixed she doesn’t show that she notices me. She’s still swaying to a rhythm only she can hear, her hand against her chest, turning herself to appreciate the jewelry—or rather, how she looks in it. A concentrated, fascinated expression on her face as if it’s the first time she’s seeing herself. As if, finally, she’s seeing herself the way I see her.
Only when I move up behind her does she notice me, eyes flickering to my reflection as I appear over her shoulder. I tear open the condom packet and lower my pants to put it on, watching her all the while. I can see that she’s started to sweat a little. Her body glistening like the jewelry, so that she seems even more a part of it, so that there’s no separation, and once again it seems like some truer image of her, rather than an effect. A few strands of hair have fallen over her face, silvery blond streaks of light flashing across her eyes.
I toss the condom packet away and there’s a loud click as she places a ringed hand on the glass, as if bracing herself. Back arched, ass toward me, eyes staring a challenge back at mine in the reflection. I lower myself behind her perfect body and pull her jeans down slowly, teasing myself now as I unveil her glorious ass and hold back from burying my face in it again. I do the same with her panties and then stand up behind her.
My cock between her thighs, she rolls her wet pussy back and forth over it as I press her into the mirror, bracelet thudding against the hard surface as her forearm goes against it. All the while watching her magnificent shape there. The sensation of her thighs over my cock feels so bracing and hot it almost stiffens me, my eyes closing as I groan at how good it feels.
When I open my eyes, I see her staring at me in the mirror, her back like a landscape before me, begging me to explore. I put my hand on her neck, jewels under my palm, sweaty skin under my fingers. I wind it around to her throat and pull her backwards, up toward me where she twists her chin for a few moments and we kiss. She tastes even more beautiful than she looks. Her wet tongue like honey, her hard lips like some exotic delicacy. It’s a kiss that turns me ravenous, that sets me on fire, triggering every impulse for pleasure in my body, and loosening any ability to control myself.
As if sensing it, she pulls away before I get too manic, but I’m crazy enough for her now to do anything.
My one hand still on her neck, I grab a fistful of her ass with the other, so firm that the jeweled chain there scars my palm as I pull her back onto me, guiding her pussy until I can press my cock into its tightness.
In the mirror, I see her open her reddened lips wide in a stuttering gasp. I see her hard eyes soften into an expression of abandon. The sight of her only turns me on further, but I still hold it, pushing gently. The angle, my cock, her tightness, all compelling me not to rush, not to lose myself in how good it fucking feels to lick the sweat from her shoulder, smack her ass, take her breast in my hand. Even just watching her in the mirror, this feels special.
It’s her who pushes further, one hand still on the mirror, the other going between her legs to touch herself as she pushes herself further onto me. I almost howl at how good it feels, how wet she is, how mesmerized I am by her face in the mirror. The unleashed eroticism in her eyes, the perfect images she creates. This being of light and dark, of gems and skin, flesh and diamond. This incredible woman becoming a goddess before me.
She sways and grinds over me as I fuck her now. Jewelry bouncing and scratching and swaying on skin. Its quiet jangling overwhelmed by our moans and heavy breaths. Our lust going from tentative, to thunderous, to achingly close. Maeve’s moans get louder, faster, as she loses herself more, but I never take my eyes away from her reflection. Fucking and pressing harder and faster as if wanting to press her up against that echo, as if wanting us to merge.
I reach for her neck again, grasping for something as if desperate to climb deeper inside of her, fingers going to that collar. She moans even louder, her breath stuttering in her throat even more, until I realize she’s coming already, her pussy gushing over me, squeezi
ng me one last time, but it’s the look on her face that thrusts me over the edge. Lips pouted perfectly as she utters that glorious sound, eyes closing in helpless pleasure, chin quivering, head tilted so one earring is cast against her perfect cheek.
Even as I come I can’t stop looking at her, can’t break away from the spell the mirror’s casting. My hands sculpt her sides one more time, one final inhalation of her perfume and sweat, one final shake of the heat between us. Even after the moment’s gone, something lingers, as if coming only revealed something else underneath, a desire deeper than lust.
She fades a little, smiling and murmuring as she stands up and falls back against me again, her weight balancing between her heels and my chest. I put my arms around her and push the side of my face against hers.
Gazing at her hazy reflection in the steamed-up mirror, she smiles a little as she traces a finger across a red scratch on her breast. Several other red blemishes where the jewelry scraped and rubbed her warm, pliant skin.
“Your jewelry marked me,” she says, with a dreamy humor.
I trace my own finger gently over the scratch and consider telling her that she’s marked me too—although unlike a scratch, it shows no sign of healing.
But not right now. Everything is still too perfect to risk.
18
Maeve
I only half wake up. Not opening my eyes. Turning my face into the pillow so that no light seeps through. Trying to relax so that I might slip into the dream again. Grasping at it as it tries to slip away into the depths of my unconscious again.
It’s only when I fail—courtesy of a lifetime of getting up early to spend time over my outfit—that I roll onto my back and realize it wasn’t a dream at all. The slight sting of the scratch in my breast is real. The sweetness of profound fatigue in my limbs is real. Toby really did dress me in millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds and fuck me against a mirror.