It Stings So Sweet

by Stephanie Draven

  “Something like what?” I ask bitterly, the scent of liquor swirling in the backseat with the scent of sex.

  “Cause a social embarrassment for your family,” Jonathan answers. His eyes pierce through the car window, following the glow up to the top of the building where the party we left is still in full swing. “There’s no help for it now. The bastards are probably all gathered around that balcony to watch us.”

  I don’t doubt that he’s right. Paul Kendrick, Big Teddy Morgan, Robert Aster, and god knows who else are probably standing out there, cigars in hand, looking down on us. “Do you think I care about that, Jonathan? Do you think I’ve ever cared about that?”

  “You should care,” Jonathan says, and lays a surprisingly gentle hand at the back of my neck, massaging it. “You deserved a different life, Nora. One where no one would be making cracks about how you married down. If I hadn’t come along—”

  “You did come along, Jonathan, and I chose you.”

  “Don’t feed me a line, Nora. You didn’t choose me. You got knocked up and didn’t want anyone to find out about the little bastard in your belly.”

  I try to hit him. “You’re the bastard!”

  He snatches my hand to defend himself and I’m no match for his strength. “You’ve a right to be angry, Nora. I know I took advantage the first night we met. But I swear to you, it wasn’t because I was looking for a payday. I didn’t know whose daughter you were. I just took you … because I wanted you.”

  “I wanted you, too,” I say, my voice shaking with fury. “Or don’t my wants count for anything?”

  “Baloney. You didn’t want me. You were young. You were drunk. You expect me to believe that you wanted someone who treats you like this? That you wanted me to shove you in the back of a car and use you like a little quiff? Like you’re something I paid for?”

  “Yes,” I say defiantly, wiping my eyes with the backs of my hands.

  His face crumples. “If you like it so much, then why are you crying?”

  I shake my head, refusing to give him that.

  “This isn’t what you want, Nora. Tonight I made you—”

  “I wanted it. Or didn’t you feel me come on your hand? I liked it. I loved it.”

  His mouth opens, then snaps shut again. “Prove it.”

  My body quakes with renewed interest even as my emotions are dangerously close to spilling forth.

  In answer to the question in my eyes, he puts a heavy hand on my head. “On your knees.”

  Slipping from the seats to the floor, brushing pearls out from beneath me, I find myself shaking. I know what he wants but now that he presses my cheek against his pant leg, doubts batter at my resolve. Between the open flaps of his dress pants and lowered briefs, he’s only half-swollen, shining with the remnants of his orgasm and mine. I reach out for him, tentatively slipping my manicured hand around his shaft.

  “There’s my little society girl,” he says when I hesitate. “Use your mouth.”

  My insides melt at that simple command and I wet my lips, wondering if they glisten the way the head of his cock does when it expands. Leaning forward, I purse my lips into a kiss, inhaling the musk that is his scent and mine. I brush my lips along the length of him, kissing the surprisingly smooth skin. “Like this?”

  “No. Suck me.”

  My lips part to wrap around his cock, and I groan. I taste myself on him, knowing that this is the same instrument that opened and stretched me moments ago. No expertise guides me in this—only instinct—and when my tongue swirls over the pulsing vein, Jonathan swells in my mouth.

  His breathing deepens in such obvious pleasure that my anger fades. He is even more beautiful when aroused, his masculinity something at once natural and dangerous. The throbbing hardness between my lips becomes my whole world, and when my clumsy efforts at suckling are rewarded with a clench of Jonathan’s fist and a jerk of his hips, a thrill of triumph dizzies me. I like the roughness of his pubic hair on my lips as I breathe heavily through flared nostrils. The musk of his arousal encourages me to take him deeper. The spongy slick flesh slides deliciously in and out of my mouth.

  “Jesus Christ,” Jonathan whispers, his hand atop my head.

  That’s when I become aware of the way I’m humping his shin, trapping his leg between my thighs.

  “Jesus Christ,” Jonathan repeats, as if I’m torturing him upon a rack. “You’re a good cocksucker … so beautiful …”

  Groaning with obvious delight at this praise, I suck harder, and Jonathan convulses, hitting the back of my throat with the knob of his arousal. The unexpected choking sensation ought to intimidate me, but it’s my husband who is now shaking like a leaf. A sense of power makes me cruel, and I tease him, slowing the suction, glancing up at him, my cheeks bulging with the effort to take him. I use my lips, my teeth, my tongue and fingers.

  Our eyes meet and Jonathan’s mouth falls open in silent ecstasy. He’s going to spill his seed in my mouth, I think, and I want him to. Jonathan grips the back of my head and breathes another string of expletives. But he doesn’t come. Instead, he pulls my face up, dragging me into his lap until we are nose to nose.

  “Do you know how easy it would have been to blow into the back of your throat just now?” he asks, the roughness of his words undercut by the whisper in which he speaks them. “Do you?”

  “Yes,” I whimper, my nipples erect against the buttons of his shirt.

  “I could make you swallow it, Nora. Every last drop,” he says, jaw tight with restraint.

  I wrap my knees around his waist and ask, “So why don’t you?”

  He blinks. His nostrils flare as if he needs to think through an answer. He blinks again, then says, “Because you’re not a prostitute.”

  “Are you sure?” I ask, because the tables have somehow turned, and his need for me has made him vulnerable. I feel the hot, throbbing evidence against my own soaked pussy lips. Shamelessly, I position myself over the head of his cock … and sink down.

  A long breath escapes him and his hands go to my hips, squeezing the flesh there.

  “Are you very sure?” I ask, taking full advantage of the fact that Jonathan can’t seem to tear his eyes away from my exposed breasts. “Because you made me dance with those men and let them grope me and you made sure to check and see if it excited me, remember?”

  “Which it did,” he manages to growl through clenched teeth.

  “Yes.” I lift up a little bit, then sink all the way back down until he’s in me so deep that I imagine I can feel him in my throat. “But it excited you, too.”

  He can’t deny it. Especially not with his stiff erection buried tightly inside me. Not with the sticky semen on my belly gluing us together. But he’s not as hurried in his arousal this time. He has more self-control now. “If it excited me, it’s because I told you to do it, Nora. Because we did it together. Because you came back to me after each dance and I watched them all envy me. Not because I want to be cuckolded.”

  The slow agonizing roll of my hips is arrested by my husband’s strong hands. For balance, my hands drift up to the roof, which leaves me vulnerable to Jonathan’s mouth. He dips his head, leaning forward to capture my nipple between his teeth. And he bites.

  The pain is like an electric jolt straight to my womb, and I’m not sure whether to beg him to stop or beg him to do it again when his mouth drifts to my other breast. Wanton lust seizes me as both nipples harden to diamonds. He’s close. I know he is. His shirt is soaked with sweat and every cord of his neck is tight with the need for release. But he holds back. “Touch yourself, Nora.”

  Until this moment, I thought I was shameless. But with his face so close to mine, his eyes boring into me, I can’t fathom doing as he asks. A conflagration of embarrassment burns in my belly as I wonder if he knows all the nights my hand has danced between my thighs in secret. It’s not something anyone ever talks about. Certainly nothing that I’ve ever done in front of anyone. “I—I can’t.”

  Jonatha
n taunts me, biting and sucking at my other nipple until I can’t breathe. His tongue is wet and insistent and the blood rushes to my sensitive areolae until I’m sure that he could lead me around by my nipples like a dog on a leash. Instead, he drags me up and down on his cock, forcing me to ride him, and when I whimper with sexual need, he becomes even more demanding. “Touch yourself, Nora.”

  Arching my back, aching for the release that he’s denying me, I clench on him over and over again. “No, Jonathan, please …”

  “Why not? You want me to believe that you like this. That you want me. Me. Well, this is who I am. A depraved monster who wants to watch you rub yourself.”

  His tone is hard and unmerciful, but his fingers are gentle as they tangle with mine, drawing my hand to the thicket of dark hair where we’re joined. My sex is swollen, engorged, slick to the touch, and the moment he forces me to cup it, I whimper with complete surrender. Gasping at the way it lays me bare, I touch myself, flicking at the slippery, swollen button at my core.

  Everything seems wet right now. My belly is wet with semen and I’m damp with a sheen of sweat. Even the windows are fogged up with our rapid breaths. Touching myself with more confidence, I rock back and forth on his erection with exquisite abandon.

  “Fuck!” Jonathan says it so intensely that I think I’ve done something wrong. Then I realize that he’s straining not to explode. He’s watching my fingers in the valley between us. Those eyes of his, icy blue, have thawed into the eyes of a hungry wolf. They are eyes that cannot be denied.

  Jonathan yanks my hips, controlling my motions. Then I feel the sharp slap of something on my ass cheek, and I realize it’s the crack of his palm. “Faster,” he pants, making me pump my hips. Another spank lands on the other ass cheek driving me to an untamed rhythm. My heart is pumping, my lungs are burning. I’m blinded by arousal, humping faster, my fingers caught between us, my orgasm near enough to drive me to insanity.

  He spanks me again. Then again. “Faster!”

  I cry out, but it isn’t a protest. It is endless. I’m spanked again and again. And I can’t make my body move fast enough. I buck up and down on him, fucking him so hard that it hurts, fingering my pussy in such a blur of motion that I no longer care what he sees. It’s this edge, this edge of pain and pleasure and total abandon that I think I’ve been seeking my whole life.

  “More,” I moan, helplessly. “More, more, please, Jonathan …”

  He can’t possibly know what I want, but he does. He spanks me harder, until I’m shrieking with the blistering sting of it. Finally, mercifully, he says one simple word. “Come.”

  The avalanche of my orgasm makes everything inside me tumble down. I scream until it hurts my throat. I’ve never come so hard. Never like this. The raw spasms rock me so completely that I don’t understand what he’s doing until it’s too late.

  “No, don’t stop!” I shriek, trying to hold him with my thighs. “Don’t pull out!”

  Jonathan’s stronger than I am, though, and I’m spent. Limp. I can’t stop him from pulling his cock free, jerking it roughly in his fist. Between us, it stiffens, pulses, and spurts a thick rope of semen onto my breasts and the front of his vest.

  CHAPTER

  Four

  On the floor of the car, I curl around my heartache, idly collecting loose pearls. His voice comes through the dark, hoarse and scratchy. “I love you, Nora.”

  The words, spoken now, pierce me like an arrow. That he’s done it again, denying me a child, tells me that these words mean nothing. Perhaps he never wanted the baby that we lost, but I had wanted that baby desperately. Now there will never be another chance.

  “Nora, I love you,” he says again, reaching down for me. “Do you hear me?”

  I shrug away from his touch, tucking my knees tighter against my chest. “I heard you.”

  He catches my chin in his palm and angles my face up. “I have loved you from the first moment.”

  I stare at him for a long time. Then I ask, “Does it change anything?”

  He blanches, turning to stare into the blackness of night. “No. I don’t suppose it does.”

  “Then take me home. Just take me home.”

  “Mr. Richardson,” the doorman says by way of greeting, making way for us in our expansive foyer.

  Jonathan carries me into the house and I’m too weak to fight him. The alcohol, or the anguish, has made me cold and clammy. I feel as if I’m going to be sick. I groan when Jonathan lifts me up the first few steps, vertigo and nausea swirling inside me. He must know it, because my husband says, “Mrs. Richardson is ill. Please send up some water and Bayer tablets. Maybe some Bulgarian herb tea.”

  When we enter my room, Jonathan puts me down on the edge of the bed, then goes to one knee. He unbuckles my shoes, then rolls my stockings down, one at a time. When he eases his coat jacket off my shoulders, I realize that he intends to undress me completely, but I don’t feel as exposed as I was in the car when I showed him everything … almost everything.

  Now I’m closed off again; I’m far away, retreating into my own mind.

  “Lift your arms,” my husband says, and when I do, he gently strips what remains of my dress and chemise over my head.

  I don’t know what he’ll do to me next. I tell myself I won’t care. If he wants to take me again, I’ll lie beneath him, perfectly still. Given the way I react to him, lust for him, want him even now, this is probably just a lie that I tell myself, but I’m too tired to be honest.

  “Again,” he says.

  “What?”

  “Lift your arms again,” he says softly, and when I do, he slips a nightgown over my body.

  Moments later, he is pulling back the covers for me, tucking me into the bed, stroking my hair softly.

  A servant knocks on the door and Jonathan takes the tray, bringing it to my side. He holds the carved crystal glass to my lips. “Drink some water.”

  I can’t bear to take even a sip. “No. No. It’ll make me sick.”

  “Just enough to wash down the aspirin,” Jonathan says, perching at the edge of my bed to coax me. I let him put the tablets on my tongue, then tip the glass back for a swallow of water that makes me grip the end table in my fight to keep it down. “You’re going to hate me in the morning,” he says.

  This makes me laugh. Some half-deranged sound.

  “I already hate you,” I say, though I don’t mean it. I don’t mean it at all.

  “That makes two of us.” Warmth touches my cheek as he brushes the spot where he slapped me. “It doesn’t look as if it will leave a mark.”

  And this makes me cry.

  No mark. No memory. Nothing tangible to hold on to.

  He bends over me, the bed creaking beneath him as he presses his lips softly to my forehead. It is a kiss good night, or good-bye. I cannot tell which. So I simply close my eyes.

  CHAPTER

  Five

  At my dressing table the next morning, I use my gilded brush to tame the waves of my hair into a bob. My face is pale in the mirror, a bluish tint of exhaustion below my eyes. A warm bath in the claw-foot tub soothed the soreness in my muscles, but my head still pounds with crushing insistence. Perhaps it would have been better if I had been sick the night before. If I’d heaved up everything inside me instead of letting it fester.

  The house is quiet but for the periodic ring of the telephone from downstairs. I’ve ignored it for hours, caught in a cloud of depression. My girl, Dolly, raps at the door. She has a pot of tea and she pours some for me, stopping to arrange the vase of bluebells and violets. “Your father intends to call upon you this afternoon, ma’am.”

  There’s an edge in her voice and I don’t have to guess why. My father will have heard about last night. He’ll be smug, insufferable, perhaps he’ll demand that Jonathan stay married to me. My father is always one to bluster and issue threats. But he can’t subject Jonathan to financial ruin—at least not anymore. This time, there is nothing either of us can do to make Jonathan stay
.

  “Breakfast is almost ready downstairs,” Dolly chirps, as if to rouse my spirits. “Fresh butter, cream, and eggs from the Saturday market.”

  I’m about to say that I’m not hungry, when I realize that I’m famished. Some ravenous creature inside me has been awakened, and I need to eat. Downstairs at the table, I take my place at the far end, reaching for a pear from the fruit-bowl centerpiece. Then I stare at Jonathan’s empty seat. This is how it will be from now on, but I can’t think of that at the moment.

  “Should we wait for Mr. Richardson?” Dolly asks, hovering with a basket of biscuits.

  “He’s gone,” I make myself say, biting into the pear, which tastes like ash. “And he’s not coming back.”

  Dolly tilts her head in confusion. “He’s upstairs, ma’am.”

  The bite of pear catches in my throat. I swallow with difficulty. “He’s here? Here, in the house still?”

  “Yes, ma’am. In his bedroom.”

  Launching up from my chair, I rush to the stairway, nearly catching my heel in the expensive imported rug. I have to check myself. He’s here. Jonathan is still here. At least for a little longer. My hand turns on the smooth wooden banister and I hurry up the stairs, an effort that has me breathless by the time I reach my husband’s door.

  He’s stripped to the waist, stooping over the suitcase on his bed. Another one is open on the chair. Just looking at him, and the preposterous good looks with which he’s been blessed, the pain shoots through me and I have to steady myself on the door frame. Jonathan glances up. “What’s wrong?”

  “I can’t seem to catch my breath,” I say, because it’s so obviously true. “And my head aches terribly.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jonathan says, with a rueful sigh. “I shouldn’t have made you drink all that.”

  “I’m sorry that I let Robert Aster kiss me, but that’s not going to keep you from leaving, is it?”

  “I’m not leaving,” he says without looking at me.