by Baird Wells
She paused with her fingers on the lamp, faced him and afforded him a last look before she turned down the wick and blew out a sputtering flame.
First, the room was curtained by the dark, and there was just her breathing and his in a haphazard rhythm. Then lamplight from the street peeked through the window shades and pooled in rippled lines on the floorboards, giving rough shape to silhouettes around her.
She took a slow step forward, and then another, and gasped when their bodies struck together, sure she’d measured the distance between them properly. She frowned and realized he had crept up on her, and smiled when he didn’t move to touch her. She made up the difference.
Darkness was always accused of concealment, and in a fashion, it was true, but she appreciated now a whole world beyond the visual. James's coat had looked sturdy against the weather, under the lamplight, but at her fingertips its merino was soft like brushed silk. His plain white shirt, an article so standard that no gentleman would be noticed for it, distinguished itself against her palms with starched lines when she peeled his coat away. Its stiff yardage was deceptive, denying her any hint of his skin beneath, but communicating heat through the film of her nightgown.
She cradled his jaw with her fingertips and dragged to the silken folds of his tie. It unbraided a loop at a time and unraveled at a similar pace. Her thumb found the cold metal stud at the stiff band of his collar, standing out like a question. She pressed, popped it through, and the collar snapped open with immodest haste. Cologne and soap filled her next breath.
She knew to be jealous now of the pleasure James must have felt in undressing her, and savored each of the four buttons down his shirt. All the while, he wasn’t doing anything she could see, but she could feel the hitch of his breath, a sympathetic thrum of his heartbeat in the atom of space between them.
“Hannah,” he whispered when she claimed the shirt from his waistband, his trousers becoming an obstacle. He took her hand and made her touch his chest, though she had wanted to wait. “Do you feel that?” he asked, his words rests between the bass of his heart, steady beneath her palm. “You put it back together. It’s still my heart, but the pieces are stitched together, out of order. And whatever I’ve managed to make of that, you gave it to me.”
She gave up on seduction for sheer joy and slipped her arms around his neck. Her cheek rested where her palm had laid, and the pace of his reconstructed heart raced under it. Damp heat seeped from his fingers, through her nightgown, and to her hip in a way that made her think of sweat clinging between their bodies.
He wrestled out of his shirt and didn’t let her undress him anymore, not for a long moment, and for an equally long moment she didn’t try. He stroked lines through her hair, callouses tickling her back while she thumbed the short, crisp hair behind his ear. Hannah stood in his embrace, wondering at poets who wished to be one with someone, glad of being separate enough to take pleasure in the feel of how their bodies fit together.
But his trousers were inevitable, her hunger cooled but hardly slaked, and when they had filled the silence around them with what was too much for their hearts, she slipped a hand to his waistband. She hooked it and pressed and pulled it, orchestrating his hesitant and almost clumsy steps backwards until he shuddered and the mattress groaned from catching his fall.
There was an obscene pleasure in kneeling before him and doing something as subservient as unlacing his shoes, like a properly demure and fragile example of her sex. She slipped off the first shoe and chuckled, knowing that she could stand up at any moment and push him over with her pinkie finger.
He flinched and gasped when she slipped her hand up his trouser leg and stripped his sock, calf twitching against her progress. He was better prepared the second time around; his toes flexed and he resisted the torture of her fingernails.
She got up on her knees and laid her head in his lap, hands at the small of his back and curtained his thighs with her hair. He flinched again and twined stiff fingers in the curls at her nape as though discouraging himself rather than caressing her. She thought of a novel she had read in which a woman had laid her head in a man’s lap, and the following five pages had been torn out, which made her understand what had come next better than any printed words. When James leaned back and braced on his other arm, panting, she wondered if he’d read her thoughts. She told him this with her fingers at the buttons of his pants.
When she had finished twisting the last button from his trousers and the last groan from his lips, he pushed her back and wriggled up from the bed to stand. She found his hands and joined him, a silent agreement as to how they would continue. His trousers gave up under a suggestion from her thumbs and crumpled at their feet.
She yarded up her nightgown a fistful at a time, was swallowed by the folds of its deep hem, and then she was free. Her breasts went taut against the air’s chilled touch through her chemise, and she ached deep in her belly, a longing so hot that it turned her reason to ash. Promise anything, demand anything; her body pleaded with her to negotiate some release.
“Jamie,” she whispered. She had softened his name, but it carried a weight that tipped the scales. He grabbed her and snapped their bodies together. He was just as ruthless with her lips, crushing them, invading them with his tongue in parody of their bodies.
Hannah didn’t recognize the soft resonance against her mouth, not when the crisp hair of his chest scraped her nipples through silk, or when the heavy linen band of his drawers gripped her belly where her smallclothes had bunched. Only when she came up short for breath and pulled away, panting, did she identify the small cries as her own.
James clutched at her back and his other hand worked between them at his drawers, but she grabbed at it.
“Don’t!” she rasped. “Don’t hurry to be naked.” She wanted him to feel as she had, the slow and delicious agony of being stripped bare.
She couldn’t be certain if the heat at her ears was his lips or his breath. “Hannah, you saw my soul ages ago. After that, a man is always naked.” And the drawers came down without her protest.
James drew her back to him, gently now, branding her with his planes and ridges and a hardness that pressed into the contrast of her soft belly. Something in the honest touching of their near-naked bodies communicated to her what had always been missing, what had rendered everything before his enchantment a base and hollow usage.
He banded her with his arms and swept her into them without effort, and that put her mouth in proximity to his ear, so she dared a confession. “When our mothers caution us against sex, they’re so busy worrying about touching that they forget to warn us about feelings.”
He agreed by draping her on the bed, falling beside her and then leaning over her so that their hearts were nearly aligned. They kissed with sweet soft presses and quick wet slants, and then long engagements of their mouths which would have let their souls trade places if it were possible. She contented herself playing in the hair above his neck, but James wouldn’t be satisfied with less than wild exploration. He made the shape of her breast, curved it with his fingertips and cupped its weight in the heat of his palm. That same palm skimmed her waist and gripped it to raise her close now and then, and then her hip and her buttock and…She sighed into his mouth, stopped following his path and just felt.
A clock on the mantle ticked out the progress of their lips and his hands, and a rebellious coal popped beneath ash in the grate, but nothing else trod on their breathless worship. When her lips were bruised and she gripped his shoulders, James wriggled down the bed and skimmed her chemise up high. He made an issue of her breasts, her ribs, her belly and the fronts of her thighs before he finally rested his cheek. She arched, begged for him to dare more, but he came back up the bed with the quilt and covered them. Then he raised his hips, twined them and worked them between her thighs. Hannah cradled him with her knees and waited; when words failed, she rested her hands on the pillow and slid them over her head in invitation. His fingers skipped a rough path do
wn her leg and traced the back of her knee. They were trembling, when they came to rest, and telegraphed to her the sweet gravity of what they were sharing, what he had chosen to share with her.
“James,” she invited.
“I know, Hannah,” he panted to the hollow of her shoulder. “But give me a moment. Getting is a different torment than having.”
She understood and slid further beneath him, kissed and licked the corded muscles of his neck while he decided when they should reach their destination.
His decision came as a short, sharp answer that jarred a moan from her throat and bruised her womb, and he cried her name into her neck. He was still and they gasped in time with each other, breath and bodies one. She stared up at him and felt his gaze in the dark. “I’ve never belonged to anybody,” she confessed on a sigh, too electric inside to explain that his body within hers was the missing piece of her puzzle.
It was a dangerous confession, one that prompted him to claim her slowly like a waterfall against stones, leaving its indelible mark over eons rather than minutes. He went slowly, when she praised him for it and when she pleaded with him to do otherwise; when his relentless pressure reached a height near pain before he withdrew and subsided like the tide. It was the perfect sum of all her most private longing. He pushed her a gentle blow at a time closer to the precipice, and she was frightened. She had never been to the edge, had never been in danger of tumbling over, and when it came, she clung to him and cried out in a trembling hybrid of dismay and satisfaction.
He dominated her with his larger frame and gripped her arms in a plea. He cried her name into sweat between her breasts and stiffened against tender bruises he’d left on her thighs. She shivered under the last waves of bliss transferred from his body to hers, and gentled his back and buttocks while they both gasped and shivered.
They cooled, and calmed, and Hannah felt perfectly content until he left her and rolled away, taking part of her soul with him.
She couldn’t think to dress or hurry come morning, even though Simon crept back into her thoughts directly on the heels of a fading hazy glow. She didn’t worry over Margaret’s coming home early and discovering she was gone. That was the danger of James: he made her forget to be afraid, even when she ought to be.
She lay in the room’s quiet sanctuary, between the waking world and the sleeping one. James cradled her into his body, warm rushes of his breath fanning the skin between her shoulders, his fingers resting in long lines against her belly. She nestled back, stretched her leg and slipped her foot over his, and dragged a path to his knee with her toes. She hadn’t meant to set them on fire again, but on a second heedless pass he stiffened and his broad palm flattened her stomach. Brave and curious, she reached behind and skimmed the hard ridge of his hip.
He gathered her hair, bundled it to her head and exposed her neck to the cool air of a dark room. He kissed her nape, her shoulder, midnight stubble from his chin scraping a path behind his lips. She raked fingernails from his hip to the front of his thigh, then one hesitant touch at a time lower still until she confirmed her power over him.
“Hannah,” he whispered against her ear, and she marveled again at how just her name in his voice could promise so much.
His palm pressed her shoulder until she turned to the mattress, cheek buried in the soft flannel pillow sham. His arm worked between her belly and the bed, and he drew her chemise up her thighs, over her backside where it bunched at her waist. She moaned into the crook of her arm when he turned his weight onto her and raised her hips to him, and cried again at a rigid pressure that transmuted them from two bodies into one.
Men and women were not supposed to touch like this, never supposed to meet with completely naked flesh, should comport themselves half-clothed through the most ordinary congress. There was a sinful pleasure in the way they touched now that Hannah knew had ruined her forever. James braced his arm beside hers on the pillow, weighted her deep into the sheet and urged her up its length with the slow punishment of his hips. She welcomed it, and cursed him softly.
His rough cheek rested on the damp silk between her back and shoulder, and his ardent promises whispered tendrils behind her ear. The hand at her belly grazed her ribs, curved to her breast and kneaded it until she ached.
Unlike the first time, Hannah was sure they would go on this way forever. Sharp gasps filled her lungs and fed her cries, and nothing more for long moments. What if her satisfaction had been quicksilver, and she could never catch it again? The end would never come; she twisted up a fistful of the pillow and panted her fear to him in a desperate whisper. He rewarded her agony, dragging her further down the bed and clutching her up to his stomach. He gripped her so that nothing but him was between them, until she cried out and went limp, and fell panting and trembling onto the bed.
He rested half of his weight on her then, and groaned low into the middle of her back while their breath fought a competition for an even pace. Then he collapsed over her completely, and crushed her with delicious gravity a moment before turning over beside her, into the shadows.
She couldn’t raise on trembling limbs, couldn’t open eyes heavy with satisfaction and exhaustion, with spent wantonness. Instead, she unfurled her fingers, closest to where his long breaths gusted her pillow, and brushed a tear from his cheek.
“Hannah,” he whispered, and his meaning slipped in with the darkness and wove around her.
She felt for his hand in the scant space between them and claimed it. “I love you, too.”
.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Thursday dragged on like Wednesday and Tuesday, and all the other days since Hannah had come to him. In public they darted past each other like migrating birds with no choice of their own where they landed, and paid for their division with shaved words and veiled glances. But they had gained an ability that all of his medical training, all of science would deny, and could now read each other’s thoughts.
He knew what she was thinking, when they passed between gilt frames winking down on them at the National Gallery, or when she whispered by on the grand sweep of the opera’s ivory marble staircase. James felt a bite of her nails into his back when they sat across the table at Mister Hilton’s dinner, heard her pleading whispers when her lips parted around a breath in conversation, and against a blue fire in their depths saw the same recollections mirrored in her eyes. He tugged his collar and stole glances at the other guests sometimes, the thread between him and Hannah so taut, so tangible, that it made the presence of even one other person into an audience.
Now he stared at her from the conservatory’s fourth row, an ocean of space between his chair and hers, though she sat just one seat ahead. A quartet tuned up at the front of the room between red velvet swags that had been hung to give the appearance of a stage, separating artist from admirer. A black-tailored usher circled the room, a magician fiddling with the gas lamps until they cast a spell which was neither too dark nor too light, but the intangible glow called ‘ambient’.
Brightly feathered ladies waving fans like peacock tails came in on the arms of their gentlemen, escorts of an interchangeable plainness that insured they wouldn’t steal glances that could be paid their fair companions. Lines of oval-backed chairs stood empty, though by his watch it was two minutes till the prescribed starting time of nine in the evening. He mused over the idea of being fashionably late and then wondered what was fashionable about traipsing in mid-performance and disturbing everyone’s enjoyment. Then he supposed enjoyment was purchased and shaped by those who held season tickets, and went back to caressing Hannah with his gaze. His longing was dangerous, with Margaret one Mister Hilton-sized space down from Hannah. A rush of blood thrilled him head to toe.
“When?” he whispered, leaning forward and pretending he’d dropped his program. He could smell Hannah’s soap, a heat that radiated from thick curls baring her slender white neck. Black ostrich feathers beckoned him like fingers from the crown of her little fascinator, and the scoop of he
r lace collar was a dip he traced with his eyes in frustrating substitution for his finger.
“Later.” He heard her smile and felt by the weight of that single whispered word that it rested all on one side of her beautiful mouth. She was torment, her beauty and her voice, and even her playful mocking of what she’d done to him. Parched, he’d filled himself to exhaustion in her arms, but it only whetted him until he suffered.
“When?” he demanded again, pursing his lips and blowing across her neck as he sat back up.
She flinched and rewarded him with the barest hint of her profile, throwing a smirk at him off her left shoulder. Her lips parted so that her answer slipped out on a breath. “I don’t know.”
“I need you to know,” he pleaded in a murmur, pretending to study his program, casting a wary glance at a garnet velvet-clad matron and her gentleman sidling closer along his row.
“We just saw each other.”
He heard the laughter in her throaty accusation, and thought how cruel she was to dismiss an agony she must share. He chuckled. “And I’m no better than before.”
“You’re the doctor,” she said. “Heal thyself.”
“After the performance, then.” He dared a glance at his invaders, close enough now that manners demanded they exchange nods and smiles.
Hannah half-turned in her seat and crushed all his efforts to be circumspect with a smile all in her eyes. “An encore?” she quipped, and turned back just as he was caught by the elderly pair and before he could punish her cheek.
Lights were dimmed further, to a scant glow. Tad slid in on his left, stoppering their row from the aisle, his smile a wince of apology that admitted his lateness was more accidental than fashionable. James forgave him with a smile and a nod, sparing words in favor of the quartet’s first strains.