by Megan Mulry
Devon had spent much of his adult life controlling the world around him—how he wanted to be perceived in society, how he wanted to succeed (or not) in business, how he would fit into his family, how he would pleasure a woman—yet this woman next to him (around him) was impervious. She wasn’t seeing what he wanted her to see or hearing what he wanted her to hear. She pierced his perimeter.
Years (a lifetime) of building walls and moats around himself were nothing to her. She wasn’t laughing at him exactly, but she was laughing at his delusional idea that she couldn’t see right through him to the barely contained lust and carnality. Fine. Let her see that. It wasn’t much of a revelation after all. What man would not be brought to his knees by her?
She was mouthing along the words to a French rap song that had started pulsing out of the sound system. Her lips were even more full and petulant when she wrapped them around that language. He was going to make her speak French to him later. He was going to make her do all sorts of things.
He gave up trying to decipher the menu, which might as well have been written in hieroglyphics, for all he could give it his attention. He put the stiff, laminated card back into its little stand in front of him, then leaned into Sarah’s hair and said, “You choose. Whatever you want to order. I’m too distracted.”
She smiled and gave her head a little shake of pleasure. Then turned back to his ear. “I like you distracted. I want to see you really, really distracted. Agitated, even.” She nipped at his earlobe and he told her he might have to forego dinner altogether if she kept it up, and that wasn’t a good idea because he needed fuel. He swatted her away with an affectionate, firm hand.
The über-cool Steve arrived just then with a beautiful, narrow raku pottery vase filled with hot sake. He poured the fragrant liquid into two small cups of a similar pattern and handed one to Sarah. She nodded professionally to Steve, then smiled at Devon… for Devon… and took a sip of the steaming, sweet wine and looked as though she might swoon. She turned back to Steve, all business, and told him to bring whatever was freshest from the sushi bar and to keep the sake coming. He nodded his understanding to Sarah, gave Devon a brief look that might have been envy, and then snaked his way back through the crowd.
O-Zone, Freak Power, and the Crystal Method started pounding even louder in the background through the rest of their dinner. Devon was thankful for the contrived distance the music afforded, having given up on talking in her ear or letting her nip at his, lest he throw her on the floor and take her right there on the gritty, polished concrete. He liked the idea of it, that infuriating, pristine white cashmere turtleneck ruined, her jeans pulled down in haste, maybe to her knees, preventing her legs from coming up around his waist, and just lifting her hips and entering her and having her laughing up at him with abandon as waiters and students and commodities traders and busboys and lawyers were somehow, as in a dream, all around them and oblivious.
Steve appeared again, asking if they wanted anything else, and Sarah gave Devon a provocative wide-eyed look. Deferential. He had a momentary flash of Bronte and Max at breakfast at Dunlear—had that only been a week ago?—and his ridicule of Bronte’s doe-eyed gazing. He wanted that. He wanted that from Sarah.
And she saw it all. Was she toying with him? He couldn’t bring himself to worry too much about that, with the meal finally finished and the promise of the two of them in bed looming in the very near future. Devon could even spare a smile for the solicitous restaurant manager as he handed him his credit card and told him they were ready for the bill.
They flagged down a taxi on North Broadway and Sarah gave the driver her home address. She turned to face Devon as the car pulled into traffic. “I think we can dispense with the charade that you are going to be spending any time in that hotel room, don’t you?”
His broad smile was his answer as he wrapped one arm around her shoulder and pulled her close. After all that surging, techno-hip-hop foreplay, the backseat of the taxi taking them to her place was terrifyingly silent. He wanted her in so many ways, he was afraid to begin here on a cracked and worn, blue vinyl bench seat. She was holding his hand, hard. He looked down at their joined fingers and then brought the clasped pair to his lips, kissing her fingers and his own where they twined together. Devon was reminded of that childhood game where you grip your own fingers together and twist them in a contorted, backward fashion and then lose the ability to tell right from left, index finger from pinkie. He felt the same now, unable to differentiate where he ended and she began.
“You had better not do that,” she whispered into the dark silence.
“Why?” he teased, kissing her fingers again, her eyes blinking slowly.
“Because… I can’t… I won’t be able to stop myself.”
Good, he thought. At least she wasn’t as all-knowing and in control as he had feared. If he was going to fall to pieces, best to do so in good company. He rested their joined hands in his lap and then pushed the back of her hand into his straining jeans. She groaned and he forced himself to look out the taxi window at the glittering city whipping by in cool, detached splendor.
***
The rest of the night had seemed diamond-bright, with each consecutive moment a precise jewel of exquisite discovery (when she bit him there, when he sucked at her flesh… just… there, the moments of gentleness and force, ferocity and farce, the byplay), and by the next morning, it was all flashing through her mind in shards of unreality. They had fallen into bed right away, but they hadn’t fallen asleep until the sky was just starting to turn a morose, pale gray. Devon’s firm hand held her, even in sleep, at the top of her thighs.
She started to wake up hours later, her hand still flung above her head at an unnatural angle, the weight of his palm still resting between her legs. She woke up wanting. Her sleep had been an interval, nothing more. They were right where they had left off.
He was such a heavy sleeper… might she just wriggle around under that perfect hand? Have a little something for herself, just to tide her over, then drift back into another interval of satiated rest. Was it masturbatory? Necrophilic? She didn’t need to ponder the depth of her depravations for more than a few seconds because, despite his ability to sleep through a demolition, apparently the slightest indication of her desire was enough to rouse him.
He gripped her tighter and she breathed with a strained relief. How was he able to do that? Before this, before him, in her ignorance, she had assumed one sexual completion (alone or with someone else) was fairly interchangeable with the next. The buildup, the peak, the after effect. Et cetera. Et cetera.
What an idiot.
It was like thinking Froot Loops were interchangeable with foie gras. Just food.
But the thing that Devon was doing with his index finger right then, for example, taunting her, leading her on, was maddening and brutal and cruel. Delectable.
“You are such a tease… you think you can just lead me on—” she ground out through clenched teeth, then gasped when his finger became more demanding.
“I am feeling a bit bossy, now that you mention it. Would you let me… I mean, may I have my way with you for a while, just be a little controlling on a Saturday morning, as it were?”
His wicked grin suggested far more than a little anything. She wanted so much, but she was also a little afraid of her ignorance.
“How bossy is bossy?” she asked, out of breath, not even trying to hide how much she wanted to find out.
“Really, downright bossy. Like, you don’t do anything without my permission, no gasping, no arching”—which drew attention to the fact that she was doing both right then, so she froze. “Okay, maybe a little gasping,” he said with a grin, then he did something taunting with his fingers and she clutched at his flexed upper arms and gasped in anticipation.
He stilled.
“Especially no climax unless I say so… when I say so… when I give it to you…”
“I couldn’t help that…” she pleaded. “I want to be good�
� I’ll be good…” She wanted to laugh at the game, but it was so all-encompassing, there didn’t seem to be any room left to distance herself even momentarily enough to acknowledge her nonsense. She was already far past laughter. She wanted to feel the extent of how far he could take her, how attenuated, how protracted, before he broke her or released her.
Raised her.
“You had better not be imagining anything naughty.” His voice gave him away. He was totally on fire, hardly the controlling master he hoped to be.
She opened her eyes slowly, then dragged her tongue across her upper lip. “May I speak?”
He had mistakenly believed that a little dominant play might give him a sense of authority, a modicum of control over this… situation.
Stupid.
Even pinned beneath him and asking his permission to utter a word, she had him in her thrall. That little bit of tongue.
“Don’t do that with your tongue.” His voice was a tad harsh. Her eyes flashed with a hint of fear and then… God protect him… power. She knew.
She knew everything.
***
Sarah’s heart stopped when he barked that command. Then raced with fever. She knew nothing. She didn’t even know her own body. But Devon knew. He knew exactly what to do.
She spent the next hour in a heretofore unknown world of carnal enchantment. He brought her to peak after peak of near-satisfaction only to pull away at the last possible moment. She took great satisfaction in both his grimace of restraint and her ability to endure the knife edge of pleasure upon which he kept her balanced.
When her release finally tore through her, she must have screamed or roared, because the residual silence crackled and sizzled through the room. The popping fireplace noises were magnified against her sensitive ears, interwoven with the sound and feel of Devon’s thick, satisfied, hot breath in the crook of her neck.
At the last possible moment, he had released his hold on her wrists and her fingertips were gloriously free: feeling his hair and skittering across his back and marveling at the new growth of beard along his jaw (that he had used earlier to such devastating effect against her inner thigh). The very tips of her fingers were both starved and gluttonously full.
“You are a tyrant,” he ground out, as his breath still worked to find a more natural pace.
She laughed so hard at that. She threw her arms around his back and nipped at his ear. “You know,” she began whispering in a happy rush, “only you could perceive an inexperienced woman who just spent the last… what? hour?”—she lifted her head to look at the gold French clock on the mantle over the fireplace, then let it drop with a thud back onto the pillow—“pinned beneath you—forfeiting speech, obeying you, subjecting herself to you—as tyrannical. Still beneath you, come to think of it.”
“Oh Lord.” He looked down the length of her body with something like contrition, then slid his weight off her. Her eyes were already drifting closed and she grinned and hummed like a little child about to nap when she felt the sheet and then the down comforter come floating down upon her skin, then tucking lightly around her. He must have gone to the bathroom for a few minutes, because her last memory before the delicious sleep finally overtook her was the abstract weight and warmth of his body as he removed the pillow in her embrace and replaced it with himself.
Chapter 9
When Sarah woke up hours later, Devon was returning from the kitchen with some cold green apples, a package of cheddar cheese, and a pitcher of ice water, two wineglasses held with casual confidence in one hand. He had showered and put on his jeans, but his bare feet and bare torso looked glorious. And then he caught her out in her appraising perusal and she pulled the sheet up over her head in guilty embarrassment, then pulled the linen back down just to stare.
“Hungry, love?”
She nodded.
She hadn’t thought much about love.
She loved this or that. (This: the bent control of the two, sure fingers into the rims of those wineglasses. Or that: the perfect skill with which he was now slicing the bitter skin away from the apple; his deft touch.) Or when he tagged the very word to the end of a sentence, like a little peck, it gave her heart a pleasant skip. But she hadn’t thought about being in love. Wasn’t that what a girl was supposed to do? To think about it? To pine?
She thought not. Not with Devon at least. He wouldn’t want that from her… he was all loose and free and careless. His whole life was one big ride. Not that he (or she) could stop her feelings if they were fully realized, but like a seedling, inhospitable surroundings could prevent any deep emotions from taking root.
From everything she had read and heard and eavesdropped about love with a capital L, it was a gory mess. She thought of her classmates in high school, the young women at the International School in Paris. What better place than Paris to explore your youthful passions, right?
Wrong.
They all seemed miserable. Well, perhaps not all, but most. Sarah might have been aloof or alone most of the time she was finishing up high school in Paris, but at least she wasn’t suffering any of those emotional bouts of misery. Bronte was practically unable to function after she and Max split up the first time. Sarah conceded that had turned out well enough.
Nor did it seem to get any better once people got older. Sarah’s father still missed her mother twelve years on. Jane loved Nelson more than he would ever love her. It just seemed like those deeper emotions were a dragging weight on what was an otherwise delightful enterprise.
As for the physical side of it all, Sarah had always felt young for her age. She had been young. During those years of working like a machine at Louboutin, she had always been an outsider. Too young to be hanging out with her more experienced colleagues. Too old to be hanging out in bars all night with her high school friends who were now in university. Too inexperienced to be having affairs. She didn’t feel like she was the right age for anything.
But now?
Devon made her feel like she was exactly the right age to be getting on with all of this getting on. He started to come toward the bed with the small round tray of food he had just prepared.
“Let’s go in the other room,” Sarah said, sitting up and letting her legs dangle off the side of the mattress. “I’ve been in this bed too long.”
“Never say that,” he scolded.
She smiled, slid off the bed, stood in front of him (so naked!), and kissed him on the cheek. She felt the warmth of his gaze on her back as he followed her into her closet, where she grabbed an ivory silk bathrobe that was hanging on a hook, then continued through the dressing area to the bathroom. “Go on into the little front room.” Sarah pointed toward the open door on the other side of the shower stall. “My grandmother insists on calling it my boudoir, but it’s really just a little den. Let’s eat in there. There’s a fireplace too, if you want.” She gave him another chaste kiss on the cheek, then closed the door behind him.
A few minutes later, teeth brushed, hair brushed (as much as that was possible with all that toing and froing against the pillows), face washed, Sarah found herself standing in the doorway, leaning against the jamb, arms crossed over her chest, marveling at the phenomenal Devon Heyworth.
He had made himself completely at home in her world. He was sprawled out on the daybed, having left a nest of pillows to one side for when she got there. The television was on, and he had the remote control in one hand and a half-eaten slice of apple in the other. He had put the tray of food on the tiny round table near the bay window and set it within arm’s reach, in front of where he sat.
He was flipping through channels, pausing for five seconds here (basketball) or three seconds there (Nigella Lawson) or five seconds there again (the history of catapults). Obviously, he had mastered the electronics system, a feat that had taken Sarah weeks and still gave her the occasional headache. She hardly ever even used the surround sound system since it required a whole other level of technological confidence that she did not possess; he had h
andily figured it out in the time it took her to brush her teeth.
Devon had paused most recently on a French channel that Sarah had added to her cable package last year, thrilled to have the language wafting through her house, if only the rapid voice of a car salesman or the news on the latest taxi strikes in Paris. Best of all, on Saturdays, it showed classic French films and today was The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
“Do you want to watch this?” he asked.
She had started watching it, standing there in the doorway, not realizing that he had been watching her. She crawled up onto the daybed, fitting right into the little snug area he had made for her. He was already getting drawn into the story and absently fed her the remaining half a slice of apple that had been poised, forgotten, between his long fingers. Even though he was watching the television, it was as though he knew the location of her mouth regardless of wherever he happened to be looking at the time. The apple tasted like a symphony had exploded on her tongue, and she must have groaned with the tart, sweet, crisp pleasure of it because Devon (eyes still on the movie) said, “Particularly good apple, eh?”
“Mm-hmm.” She rested her head on his shoulder and he snaked his arms around her back.
They spent the rest of the afternoon just like that, with the fire sputtering and hissing, the French lovers singing and crying, and the two of them resting loosely around one another.
As the credits rolled after Catherine Deneuve’s desperate triumph, Sarah figured it was as good a time as any to break the bad news of her dinner plans. “So…”
“Is this the bad news?”
“Very funny. No. Well, yes. I have plans tonight that I couldn’t break.”
“Oh, I figured you would.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Really.”
“Oh. Well. I do. Unfortunately.”
“Yes, it is unfortunate.” He gave her a firm squeeze around her shoulder.
“So. How much longer will you be in town? What’s the project you’re working on?”
“Nothing much. Widgets.”