The Man I Love

by Suanne Laqueur

  He had never wanted so much.

  He wanted all of her. Her thoughts, her words, her silences and her stillness. He wanted her skin, her smell, her taste and her noises. He loved to make her come, could never get enough of the sound she made when he was bringing her around. Or rather, it was the absence of sound. Other girls he’d been with seemed to explode when they came, but Daisy would implode, pulling everything into her—light, air, sound, even her own voice.

  He would never forget the first time it happened. Locked up in her room one night, they were making out, making in, making time stop. Erik was half-sitting, half-leaning on her desk, holding her in front of him. Kissing her mouth, kissing her bare breasts, feeling her head loll around her neck. And then, in an astonishing move, Daisy took her hands off his shoulders and unsnapped her jeans. Started pushing them down. Herself. Never had a girl loosened her own clothing for him with an open, unabashed invitation for him to come in. Come in. I want you. He held her steady even as he was exploding with stunned arousal. He felt like thanking her.

  Graceful and confident, she stepped out of her clothes and kicked them aside. Slid her arms around his neck, pulling up tight to him. “I like this. Being totally naked while you’re totally dressed.”

  He swallowed hard, running his hands up and down her back.

  “I love feeling your clothes against my skin,” she said.

  He moved more of his forearms along her spine, then down around her waist, letting her feel the material of his shirt bunching up around his elbows then smoothing out again. He slid his leg between her calf, then drew her closer so he could feel on his thigh where she was softest and warmest. His hands curved around her ass and the air in his chest thickened.

  “Your body,” he murmured. “I swear.”

  Her hips rocked back, then forward, pressing down on his leg, rubbing as she pushed deeper into his kiss.

  He started to draw her over to the bed but she resisted. “Stay here, stay like this,” she whispered.

  Kissing, he slid his palm down her soft stomach, then further down one hard, sculpted quadriceps muscle. Up the tender, smooth skin of her inner thigh until his fingertips reached that secret nest of damp heat.

  “You’re so wet,” he whispered, his heart pounding hard in his ears.

  Her breath shook by his ear. “I know.”

  He touched her. Easily. None of the awkward, hit-or-miss fumbling he’d experienced before, trying to guess where things might be. He didn’t guess with Daisy, he just knew. It was right there, that little bright pearl of flesh, right where he knew it would be, cozying up against his fingertips.

  “Feels so good,” she said against his mouth. Little hitches of air on his lips. His own trembling breaths back to her.

  “Like that?”

  “Yes. Just slide on it. Like that.” Her hand at the back of his head, the other’s nails biting into his arm. Her voice got thinner, with no breath behind it. A click in her throat as she swallowed. Her forehead down on his shoulder. “That’s gonna make me come.” The words fell apart in her mouth.

  “Come, Dais. Come for me.” His mouth caressing her breast, one hand flat on the small of her back, the other sliding into her, sliding along her. Transfixed he felt it rise up and bring her around. Her hips bucked against his hand, sending a rolling motion through her ribcage. First her shoulders, then her head flew back, taking the wave of her hair with it, and she came. No noise, just a keening rush of air through her throat. Her chin dropped down, and as it did, her teeth chattered. That sound was an arrow to the core of his maleness. It hijacked his breath, thoroughly did him in.

  I made her teeth chatter.

  He was holding her up by then, holding her carefully in his hands, running his lips along her face, holding her as her body quieted and her breathing slowed. He kissed her, craving the taste of her mouth and how it felt in his. Slowly he felt her getting her feet back, and her hands on him grew heavier and intentional.

  It was his turn.

  That first night, it took some effort for him to convert to a passive mentality, to take his hands off her and not engage. To scale the walls of vulnerability instead of taking refuge behind them. He stood still. Tried to expand instead of contract under her touch. He was utterly exposed with no way to divert the attention or diffuse it by adding his own actions. It wasn’t his home base. But he let her at him. He breathed through it as her fingers unbuttoned his shirt, opening his skin to the Christmas light. He breathed as her lips nudged his apart and her fingers trailed down his chest and stomach. He kept still and slowly he came out the other side into a new place of electric arousal, his entire body taut and coiled and wanting.

  Her mouth drew long silken lines up and down his neck. Her fingernails in his chest hair. The tightening and release of his belt, the metallic whisper of the zipper on his jeans. She pushed them down, helped him out as he had for her. Then he was naked in front of her and he was hard, so hard in her warm, eager hands. A moan escaped his chest, knuckles tightening white on the desk top. “Dais.”

  “Let me,” she whispered.

  He let her. And she got him. She was good at him. As nights gathered into weeks, she made both his teeth chatter and his toes curl. She could make him come like a freight train, or come in slow motion. Climax laced with emotional intensity made him lose his mind, and in the divine insanity, he became expressively fearless. Verbally uninhibited. Things he had never imagined saying to a girl came tumbling forth unchecked.

  “I want to kiss you until I die.” Which was the truth.

  “Your mouth feels amazing.” She was going down on him, the warm wet of her tongue and throat advancing and reatreating like the tide, her head dipping and bobbing under his hand. The words floated out of him into the dark and her response was a fiercely pleased sigh from deep in her chest.

  “I love watching you come.” Another one—in his head and right out his mouth. She took his hand, slid it due south down her stomach, her hips yearning up and her knees swooning open, and she whispered, “Do it again.”

  “You taste so good.” He groaned it one trembling night when he finally got into her sweetness, a tart rush along the roof of his mouth and the back of his tongue. Her palm heavy on his crown, her fingers threaded in his hair. Her shoulder blades plowing furrows in the mattress and her calves warm and smooth on his shoulders. He practically hummed with contentment as he drank her in, feeling her unfold and shiver, closing his eyes as she came against his mouth.

  “Let me get this straight,” she said a little while later. “I’m supposed to leave this room, dance thirty hours a week, earn a BFA and get an education… All the while knowing you can do that to me?”

  “Mm-hm.” Her body limp in his arms and her taste lingering on his tongue, Erik was swaying in a hammock of perfect contentment. “Any time you want.”

  Daisy rose up on her elbow, eyebrows wrinkled. “I’m so fucked.”

  Staring up at her, he felt his face widen in a grin of wicked delight. He reached his hand into her tangled hair and pulled her face to his.

  “Me, too,” he whispered.

  Prince Henry The Navigator

  The month of December brought what Will called Nutcracker Mercenary Season. Private ballet schools around Philadelphia were getting their Nutcrackers ready, and they needed experienced dancers for the more difficult roles in the second act—always Sugarplum and Cavalier, sometimes a Dewdrop for the iconic flower waltz. They came scouting around the conservatory, looking for hired guns.

  “It’s a stupid easy gig,” Will said. “One or two rehearsals a week, a few on weekends. The choreography is never complicated and you’re only doing the second act anyway. In and out. It’s good exposure and you earn a couple hundred bucks. Win-win all around.”

  Daisy and Will landed Sugarplum and Cavalier at a school in Ardmore. The whole entourage—Erik, Lucky, David, Marie and Kees—turned out to watch the Saturday evening performance, which happened to coincide with Daisy’s eighteenth b
irthday.

  Daisy’s parents came, too. They all stood around the lobby at intermission, talking and chatting easily. This was Erik’s second time seeing them, the first back at the fall dance concert. He felt it had gone well, and tonight Francine Bianco had hugged and kissed him, which was an encouraging sign.

  Francine had once danced with the Paris Opera. She now ran the orchard, raising chickens, ducks and organic produce, but she still looked and carried herself like a dancer. Her posture was impeccable. Her black hair, elegantly threaded with silver, was drawn up in a bun, showing her long neck. Standing with turned out feet, she was talking vigorous shop with Kees and Marie, switching effortlessly between French and English.

  Erik and David stood apart with Daisy’s father.

  “My mother kisses everybody,” Daisy had said. “But with my dad, approval is all in the handshake. First time meeting, it’s single hand.” She shook Erik’s hand, demonstrating. “But if he likes you, you graduate to a shake with the other hand on top, or better, on your upper arm. This is acceptance. If the other hand comes up like this—” She patted Erik’s face gently but heartily with her palm. “—you’re family. But here’s the carte blanche: handshake, palm pat and tug on the earlobe.” Her fingers gave Erik’s ear a single, brisk tug.

  “Then I’m in?”

  “Then you’re behind the velvet rope.”

  Erik’s ears had gone untouched tonight but he had received the single handshake with upper arm grasp. He was satisfied.

  Joseph Bianco had gained American citizenship by joining the Army and doing two tours in Vietnam as a combat engineer. Poised and observant, with a dry humor, Joe didn’t say much, yet he was fully present. His reticence wasn’t awkward or exclusionary. Rather he put out a companionable sort of silence, much like Daisy’s. Erik was instinctively drawn to it. And he couldn’t help but appreciate a man who could dismantle land mines. He suspected Joe Bianco had a plan K, minimum.

  “Is it true sappers are the only ones in the army who can wear beards?” David asked.

  “In the French Foreign Legion, yes,” Joe said. “And they’re allowed to carry an axe, too.”

  “What did you carry in Vietnam?”

  “An axe.” Joe winked at the boys. His blue eyes didn’t have Daisy’s green overtones, but the same dark rim was around the iris.

  They filed back into the theater for the second act, sitting through all the candy divertissements before the climactic grand pas de deux for the Sugarplum and Cavalier.

  It was the first tutu role Erik had ever seen Daisy dance. A role firmly entrenched in the classical vocabulary. Her technique was clean, polished, precise. She sparkled. He noticed her feet were especially controlled, defying gravity whenever she came down off her pointes.

  Will dismissed the role of the Cavalier, calling it a mindless, hands-and-arms role. “It’s a snore. I never string two steps together, I just stand where she needs me to be and make her look good.”

  But it was still Will and Daisy dancing, and they still put their own interpretation into the conventional partnering, making eye contact and smiling at each other. Real smiles. They didn’t make it romantic, they maintained a certain regal, storybook air, yet their natural human connection transformed them from an insipid dessert to a textured couple who ruled this make-believe land together.

  “This is the first time I’ve seen a Sugar-Cavi couple who actually looked like a couple,” Kees said afterward.

  “It’s pure Daisy and Will,” Marie said.

  It’s generous partnering, Erik thought.

  Joe and Francine took him and Daisy out for a late supper, where the wait staff brought Daisy a piece of cake with a candle. Back in her room, she unwrapped Erik’s present, a set of Russian nesting dolls. Matryoshka. Daisy had been collecting them since she was a child.

  They locked the door, unfolded the night and spread it out like a blanket. They tumbled onto its softness, kissing, touching and undressing.

  “Don’t move,” Erik whispered.

  “What?”

  “Don’t move. Stay still. This.”

  “This?”

  “This. This right here is like the greatest moment of my life.”

  He was standing behind her, looking over her shoulder down the full length of her body, its curves and contours and shadows. One of his arms across her collar bones, above the swell of her breasts in the silver-grey bra he loved. His other forearm, darker against the skin of her stomach, and his hand slid halfway into her underwear, just on the verge of easing them down. He held still. Took a mental picture and framed it.

  “This,” he said. He touched the heat coming off her, the heat he had created.

  She pulled her breath in. He slid his hand under her bra, fingers curving around her breast. Opening the clasp, she tilted her head to look up at him.

  “I love you,” she whispered.

  “I love you.”

  “And I’m ready if you are.”

  He turned her, held her head in his hands, their eyebrows together. “You’re supposed to get presents today, not give them,” he whispered.

  She smiled. “It is my present.” She slid her arms out of the bra straps and brought them up around his neck, her hands gliding on his bare skin. Beneath them he trembled, hard and aching with the need to be inside her. He was pure, mouth-watering want. Dying to seize it all and swallow it whole and curbing himself to let the taste linger.

  “You’re sure?” He felt compelled to ask one last time.

  She kissed him. Her fingers curled around his earlobe and pulled slowly. “You’re in,” she said.

  * * *

  Her skin was amazing: burnished gold under twinkling light garlands. She was sitting on her bed, her long legs stretched out in the tangle they had made of the covers. They had kissed and touched and caressed and licked and explored each other until the sheets were a twisted and rumpled mess beneath their sweating, trembling bodies. Now Erik was kneeling between her calves and together, with shaking fingers, they were tearing open the condom packet and rolling it on him.

  The air in the little room was close and warm, redolent with anticipation, sweat, sex, the faint smell of latex overlaid with Daisy’s perfume. She lay back and pulled him along with her. He gathered the covers up around them, tucking them into a cocoon. Her hand was tender at the back of his neck, her knees inching up his hips.

  “Come inside me,” she whispered.

  Cradled in her thighs, pressing the tip of his cock to that hot, pink cave, he had to take a split-second to absorb what this meant. He was her first. She had chosen him. He would belong to her after tonight. Belong to her history.

  It was almost more than his young male ego could process. And in an instant of reflection, he grasped man’s need to walk where none had walked before. He understood Columbus and Neil Armstrong and Hillary and Peary. And he pushed into her, hungry to take the step for his own mankind.

  Daisy sucked in her breath and her back arched so suddenly Erik froze. He was sure he had hurt her. He backed off, no longer Prince Henry the Navigator but just an amateur lover, a nineteen-year-old emotional virgin.

  “I’ll stop,” he said.

  “No, no, go on.”

  “I’m hurting you.”

  “No.” Her damp hands held his head. “You’re not hurting me,” she whispered against his mouth. “It’s just really tight.”

  It was. All of her body was an incredible squeezing pressure around him. He was in some primitive place, the first, the only, the one, sliding his cock into the gripping heat, the sensual effort to get inch by delicious inch inside her nearly undoing him.

  “Is it all right?” he whispered, barely holding it together.

  “Yes,” she said, her voice filled with laughing wonder. “It’s good. God it’s… It’s good.”

  Then he was on his elbows, stretched full out on top of her, his sword sheathed to the hilt. She wound her legs around him and they held still, kissing, whispering, feeling their bod
ies joined.

  “I love you so much,” he whispered.

  “God, I love you,” she murmured beneath him, her hands sliding over his skin. “You feel so good in me.” She ran her shaking mouth up his neck. “I knew you would.”

  “You’re so tight.” He was trying to move in her, trying to make it into something more.

  “It feels so good,” she said. She was beautiful and exhilarated under him. Too beautiful. And he was too young, too excited, too inexperienced with making love and being in love. He tried to hang on to his desire, rearing and pawing like an untamed colt at the stable doors. But she kept whispering in his ear, responding to every move he made inside her and it was too much. The colt busted free and ran for the pastures, dragging Erik behind. He turned inside out and poured into her.

  She hung onto him with arms and legs, crooning, stuck to his body like a starfish on a rock, riding out the tremors. Interminable minutes passed. The colt slowed to a walk. Erik’s heartbeat grew softer in his ears. The mist of sweat on his body felt cooler. Finally he lifted up his head to look at her.

  She smiled at him, but tears were dripping from the corners of her eyes, running diagonally along her cheeks. Erik’s thumbs smudged them away.

  “Don’t cry,” he whispered through a throat of iron.

  “I’m just happy.”

  The minutes passed in kissing, and he felt the muscles in Daisy’s body quiver and relax. First one leg, then the other dropped off his hips. Then her head fell back on the pillow. Finally her arms released, which he took as a signal, and rolled off her.

  “Oh,” she said, looking down between them. He looked, and the condom was smeared scarlet. It wasn’t a lot. But it was definitely blood.

  “Is it your period?”