by A. J. Molloy
And then there is the way he struck my attacker. I cannot ignore that. The serious punch, the sudden explosion of expert violence—as though he were producing a deadly weapon that he knew exactly how to use.
The blood on his knuckles as he drove. The dark skin, the white teeth, the predatory animal. The way the junkies cowered when they saw him.
“Hello?”
Jessica is waving a hand in front of my face. As if I have gone blind.
“Sorry.”
“Let me guess, you were thinking of lottery numbers? The price of polenta?”
“He doesn’t want to see me, Jess, so it’s all pointless.”
“Yeah?”
“He made it clear, he might . . . have feelings . . . but we can’t be together.”
“Pah.” Jessica waves away my plaintive words. She glances up at the waiter, asks for the check. “I don’t believe it, babe. He clearly does want to see you, there is just some problem. But sexual desire at this level has its own logic. When it happens, a real love attack, then nothing can stop it—trust me.” She smiles in the dusk. “He will be back.”
I so want this to be true. I am scared that it is true. I need it to be true. I want to fly home at once; retreat from danger and hurt.
Jessica pays the bill and we rise, ignoring the attentive eyes of the burly drinkers, and walk along the Naples waterfront to Santa Lucia. The moon above Capri is pale and loitering; she is a white-faced northern widow in dark southern veils. Mantillas. Suddenly everything seems very sad. The chattering Italians gathered in groups and strolling in families no longer enliven me. It is stupid. I want to cry. What is happening to me? These feelings are entirely overblown and unjustified, and yet they are very real. I am wounded, I am an idiot, I am hurt, I am self-pitying. I am staring at Marc Roscarrick.
Marcus Roscarrick.
He is standing there, in the moonlight and the lamplight, by the door to my apartment. He is leaning against his car, his silver-blue Mercedes, quite alone. He is in jeans and a serene dark shirt. He is gazing down the boulevard at the slice of starlit sea; he seems oblivious, tall, solitary, shadowy, very pensive. The dark evening light sculpts his cheekboned face. He looks younger and sadder than ever before. Yet more masculine.
“See,” says Jessica. “Told you.”
Alerted by Jessica’s voice, Marc turns, and he stares at me. My mouth is open but unspeaking. I feel like I have been captured in a spotlight on stage, and the whole darkened audience of the city is watching the drama. Everything else yields to silence.
“I’m just going to a bar . . .” Jessica says, and she smiles at me with a significant expression. Then she slips away, into the city—leaving me and him. The only two people in Campania. It’s just me and him and the constellation of Orion, which glistens over Sorrento and Capri.
I can tell by his dark, sad, broken half-smile that something has changed, something irrevocable has changed between us; the breach has been made.
He moves toward me. But I am already running toward him.
CHAPTER EIGHT
IT’S AS IF our lips meet before our bodies: it is the first kiss—maybe the first of many, maybe the only kiss, I cannot know, I do not care—and it is hot and brutal. He gathers a fistful of my blond hair and pulls back my head with a jolt of subtle pain—and yet I like it—and his mouth sinks down onto mine, warm and salty and hot and wet. His tongue is in my mouth; it is all instinctive, reflexive, and immediate. I am not thinking about anything. I am just a kiss. I am just this brilliant kiss under Orion.
Our tongues explore, the kiss thrills down me; he is kissing me harder and better than I have ever been kissed; I can feel spikes of tingling excitement rippling through me.
Then he pulls back for a moment, and I can see his long-lashed and narrowed blue eyes glittering in the lamplight—so close to mine. I can smell his bodywash and the fine topnote of cologne, and sweet summer sweat, and it is him, him, him.
“I’m sorry, X . . .” he says. “Just can’t help it. What you do to me—”
“Again.”
This time I grab him and now we are a drunken couple, holding on to each other on a divine dance floor, on a doomed and pitching cruise ship, stumbling slightly backward, almost laughing, utterly serious, kissing fiercely. His lips are hard on mine again, and this time his firm male hands slip desirously down my back.
I am in a black summer dress and the cotton is thin. Marc is grasping my behind, hard and ardent, clenching me there as his other hand cups my neck, and we kiss, thirstily, again, and again. Then his hand slips around my waist, like a dance partner, swirling me, swinging me on his strength, then coming back and nuzzling my warm neck with his warmer lips. And murmuring . . .
“You smell of strawberries, X, wine and strawberries.”
He releases me, still holding my waist, but lacing my white fingers with his darker ones. I sense a surge of something deeper than sex, but also sex, very much sex.
“Upstairs,” he says. “Now.”
He chooses. I want to be chosen. My hands are trembling, my knees are trembling as I fumble at the door, then at last it swings open and he chases me up the stairs, half laughing, half growling, like some fine animal coming for me, hunting me down, racing up the stairs, and reaching for my giggles. But I disappear into the apartment, and for a second I am alone, but then I shriek with fear—only slightly faked—as he lunges at me desirously once again, chasing me into the kitchen. Then we are standing by the fridge and he is pulling off his shirt.
The kitchen is half dark. The only light is from the street lamps and the Mediterranean moon, slanting silvery whiteness through the window.
His shirt is off, and the moonlight traces, like a black-and-white photographer, the muscles of his chest and his stomach, the hard yet tender rib cage, the taut stomach. His chest is broader than I expected, the musculature a little more defined, even. He is taller and stronger than I am and I experience a tiny, delicate frisson of fear, mixed with abject want, wanting of him, as he flings his shirt to the floor and stalks closer.
We kiss again, and once more. I am reaching up on tiptoes to kiss his soft lips, once, then twice, delicate and fluttering, entirely sensuous. My tongue is slipping in and out of his lips. What am I doing?
“Enough, X—the bed.”
Swiftly and easily, he picks me up, like a groom lifting his bride over a threshold. Then he carries me into the bedroom and throws me onto the bed, and the bed slats creak like they are going to break. And I really don’t give a damn.
Marc Roscarrick looms over me, bare-chested—a tall, dark shadow high above.
“Stay like that,” he says. “Just like that.”
I am lying on the bed, arms flung back—but I can’t stay like this; I want him too much, so I am fiercely kicking off my sandals, and when I am barefoot he grabs my slender ankle and kisses my white instep, kissing me there with little nibbles of desire. The sensation is divine. It sends the sparks of hot excitement racing through me yet again. But then he drops my ankle, and he pauses for an unbearable moment, an intoxicating moment, and he looks at me in the half-light.
“Do you want me to wear something?”
The moment dances into stillness. Well, do I? Do I want him to wear a condom?
For God’s sake, NO. I don’t want him to wear anything, I want him naked, naked as me, and naked inside me. All my life, all my sensible, dutiful, studious Good Daughter life, I’ve asked men to wear something—the few men I have slept with. But this time I do not care, this time I actively want to be careless. I am on the pill, that will do, now hurry up.
“Just fuck me.”
Again he swoops down on me. Like a predator. Like something not quite human, yet beautifully human. He is hotly kissing my neck and breathing in my scent.
“I want you naked.”
I
stare at him. He is surging with an anger I don’t quite understand.
“I want to see all of you—”
For a second he fumbles with the buttons on the back of my dress; I lift myself up on an elbow, so as to help him, but he just laughs—or maybe he snarls—and he rips the dress away, simply rips it off my half-naked body—and flings the shredded garment across the room. I protest in vain in the dark, looking up into his eyes: “But my dress—”
“I will buy you another!” he growls. “I will buy you a hundred fucking dresses.”
And then he reaches around and unclasps my bra, and he throws that aside, too; and now he looks down at my pale breasts with a tender hunger, and then he kisses them, coldly, yet warmly, the left breast and the right breast, in turn. Carefully and expertly, his fingers toy with my nipples; he bites them playfully, nibbling at one, then the other, and they are hard, and getting harder under his touch.
The desire for him to touch me and take me, down there, is becoming irresistible. A space is opening, a wetness, a desperate expectation; my hips move toward his and he knows what I want. His mouth sows kisses down my pale stomach, kissing me to my navel; he is like a dark withdrawing tide, receding down my body, sucking on the sands.
Now I can feel him pulling down my panties along my thighs; my bare foot tingles with the touch of the cotton and then it is gone and his sweet, sweet mouth is on my sex, my desire, my cunt, my vulva.
My wetness is mixed with his wet lips, his hands are on my bare hips, and he is kissing and nibbling, his tongue darts, and then, yes. He expertly finds my clitoris with his hard-soft tongue, and he licks me sweet and quick, like a flickering flame, a gentle feathering. And my heartbeat pounds, my entire body tingles, the delicious prickling of this pleasure makes me shiver from head to toe, as he licks and gently bites my clit. And then everything dazzles like a flash of rose lightning, and the words come spilling forth. “Oh God, Marc, oh God.”
“Carissima.”
He lifts his handsome face.
“Marc, please don’t stop.”
Who is saying this? Is it me? Someone else? It is me, oh it is me. Once again he tongues at my clitoris, greedy and fierce, and yet tender. And then he turns and licks the soft, trembling skin of my inner thigh, nuzzling at my thigh as I moan just a little, turning left and right in the dark, breathing my excitement. Helpless, shivering, and adored.
Because he is licking me there again. Right between my thighs, where my pleasure meets his desire. I murmur his name into the darkness as I stream my fingers through his soft and curling hair, his dark, sweet, tousled hair; then I greedily press his face closer to my sex, to my climax, my nearing climax—am I actually going to climax?
OhGodyes, OhGodfuckingyes. Now it happens: as he licks and blows and nuzzles on my pulsing clitoris, I finally yield, I tumble, I fall. Blissfully, I trip into the place where I cannot return.
The trembling has become shaking has become hapless juddering, a kind of spasm, delicious and remorseless, and I have to put my knuckles in my mouth to stop screaming with glee—as the explosion of deep and raw and unstoppable pleasure bursts upon me, like scarlet fireworks inside me, deep between my thighs, yet rushing upward.
OhmyGod, oh my almighty God, oh sweet, sweet, sweet, Jesus God. Still the ripples of silver cascade up and down, along my thighs, in my veins. And then come the aftershocks, the helpless quivering, the delicious tremors of my skin. The thudding heartbeat of release.
“That was . . . it was . . .” I can barely speak the words. I look down at him, his dark and beautiful face, his stubbled jaw between my still trembling thighs. “The first . . . the f-f-f-f- . . . the . . . oh Jesus, oh . . . f-f-fuck—”
He is smiling, or something, I cannot tell, but I hear him softly talking, as his face moves to kiss my belly, as his hands push my thighs still farther apart.
“Sei un cervo—un cervo bianco.”
He is undoing his jeans.
“Alexandra.”
I am helpless and pooled on the bed, half laughing with delight, all wetness and wanting and wildness; I will let him do anything to me now. Anything he likes. He can ravage me and ravish me, and ravel me up. But I also want him inside me.
And he knows this.
“Alex.”
“Yes?”
“Are you sure? Are you certain, cara mia?”
“I am certain, Marc. I am yours, all of me.”
And I am certain, oh so certain. I am hungry for him.
In the half-light I can see him pulling off his shoes and tearing away his socks until he is a barefoot warrior standing tall, something fine and Greek, something noble and heroic; then he pulls down his jeans and yes—oh my Lord, yes—now I can see his erection, thick and hard and ready. And before I even know it, he is slipping deep inside my wetness, driving inside me—big and powerful. Almost brutal.
The sensation is inexplicable. We fit, we fit together all too well; like he was meant to be inside me, meant to be on top of me all my life, meant to be fucking me. And now my thighs yield to his thighs, my strength succumbs to his greater strength, like this is a kind of fighting, or the most sublime dancing. But this isn’t dancing: this is fucking; he is fucking me. Powerful and gentle. And I want to kiss him as we fuck. So I reach my white arms up to bring him down, to kiss his face, so handsome and serious in the moonlight, and he descends, and we kiss, and now our tongues are softly combating, like his maleness inside me.
“I love you inside me.”
“I love fucking you.”
We kiss again and I gently bite his lips and then he bites my neck a little harder, and I soar upward inside as he thrusts, and thrusts again, and once more.
“No, wait, I have to fuck you from behind.”
Deftly, he lifts me up—like a ballet dancer, a naked ballerina in his commanding hands—and then he flips me over in a single, skillful movement. I don’t know how he does it—how did he do that?—but now I am sprawled facedown on the bed, my cheek pressed into the pillow, and I sense my thighs being hungrily pushed apart, firmly opened to his desire, as he plunges into me again, harder, expert, thrusting, and his weight is on top of me, his chest on my back, and I love it.
I love the sense of his hard body on top, weighing me down, as he thrusts and presses, again, and once again. Oh God. Ohmygod. Moaning and sighing, I twist my face from the pillow to look up at him. He is serious and somber, he is smiling but angry.
“My beautiful girl.”
“Fuck me harder.”
Breathing deep, he takes me entirely; he thrusts again, deep and slow, and I look up at him once more, as he possesses me; and then his right hand slips under my pelvis and I realize he is reaching for my clitoris as he fucks me from behind.
Oh God no, oh God yes. Helpless and quivering, I turn my face to the pillow and gasp as his fingers find my clitoris, as he presses sweetly with his fingers, pressing and stroking, even as he fucks me. And now the pleasure mounts to a second crescendo, a second cadenza, a brand-new climax, the sensation of his fingers and his driving cock all at once, it is way too much.
Oh yes.
Yesyesyes.
This orgasm is sharper and harder; it is quite different, quite animalistic, and abandoned, and from nowhere I am actually screaming into the pillow, muffling my words, biting the cotton, choking on my own pleasure.
“I never, I never . . .”
And I clutch at the sheets, and I feel my toes curl, and I am yielding. I am taken. And even as this orgasm surges, and shudders, and then subsides into pulsing apparitions, I can feel him approach his own climax.
“Come inside me, Marc, please come inside me.”
I did not have to ask; he does not need to be told. Marc presses my face into the pillow; his fingers are fierce on my neck, almost choking. And then his body quivers and shudders, me
lting into mine. Marc is losing himself, he is shaking like a knife stabbed into hard wood, and then I get the aftershock of my own orgasm as he shudders and gasps, and speaks in dark Italian.
And now at last I hear him sigh, with anguish and release, and then he falls down onto me, and then he slumps to the side of me, the intensity quite gone, his taut muscles slacked. And I am left here whimpering into the pillow. I am actually weeping. I am actually crying, that I have had to wait all my life for it to be this good.
CHAPTER NINE
IT IS STILL dark when I wake. Marc is asleep in my bed and his dark, masculine beauty appears careless, even more unself-conscious. His sweet and kissable mouth is very slightly open, the white teeth shine in the moonlight, the almost-black hair is curled and mussed. But it is his hands that capture me; male but soft, lying still in the semidark. Somehow perfect and innocent. But how innocent can he be? After last night?
My mouth is parched.
I grab a gown and slip to the kitchen and drink a cold glass of mineral water. I have no idea what is happening to me; probably, surely, Jessica is right, and I am falling in love with him.
For a few minutes I stand alone in the shadowy kitchen, staring through the window at the moon, which stares at its reflection in the Tyrrhenian Sea.
Then I slip back into bed, next to his breathing and silent warmth.
WHEN I WAKE again it is bright morning, and the Campanian sun already burns through the slats of my rickety shutters, making barcodes of light on the bare walls. He is gone? My soul panics. My heart stutters. No. Not like that, not like this, no—not a one-night stand—not after that. Please.
Be still, X, be still.
He has left a crisp white note on the pillow. An elegant piece of notepaper, carefully folded in two, with X written on the front in fountain pen. Where did he get the notepaper? And the pen? How does he do this stuff? Hungrily, I grab the note and read. You looked so happy to be asleep. I have gone to get breakfast. We will have sfogliata at seven. R. x