by KD Robichaux
“Baby, are you trying to tell me you’re protected and clean?” He puts me out of my bumbling misery.
“Yes,” I sigh, with a relieved smile.
“I’m clean too. But, Em, are you sure?” he asks, and I feel his hips circle against me, making my eyelids flutter. “You want me to make love to you for the first time on the dirty ground?” His eyebrows draw together, as if he’s starting to question whether we should.
God, doesn’t he see? “Dean, I was conceived in the Great Pyramid of Giza. These undiscovered places… these catacombs,” I whisper, letting my gaze take in the tunnel around us as he stares down at me, “they make my soul happy. There is nowhere I would rather be than trapped down here with you. And the only thing that could top the fact I’m on an adventure in search of the lost Ring of Atlantis, is if you were to make love to me, right here, right n—”
His lips crash down on mine, my confession his undoing, and he reaches down to help me push his clothes all the way off before pressing himself intimately against me. I become aware of the smallest details, taking them all in and memorizing them. The feel of his hairy legs against my smooth ones. The rock-hard muscles of his body cushioned by my softness. His rough and calloused hand reaching to hold my much tinier one, bringing it up to rest above my head. His pulsing erection nuzzling the entrance of my wet heat. And my favorite, the part I will fantasize about for the rest of my life: the feel of his short beard on my neck and his hot breath tickling my ear, as he whispers, “You’re mine,” before slowly, carefully, inch by achingly perfect inch, he slides inside me, filling me up until I feel like I might tear in two. But there’s not an ounce of pain. Just the feeling of being full to the brim, sharing my small body with a man as large as Dean.
I look up into his handsome face, forcing myself to keep my eyes on him when they want to shut in utter bliss. I want to erase my first experience and replace it with this one, with this wonderful man, in this dream of a place, the feelings rushing inside me so new and unfamiliar, but welcome. But I lose the battle with my lids when he starts to move, because it’s like the feel of him stroking inside me combined with the perfection of his face is just too overwhelming all at once.
He pulls almost all the way out before thrusting back in, hitting that spot inside me that makes my head spin. I’m thankful for the way he surrounds me with his entire body, caging me in and grounding me, because so much pleasure at once is making me dizzy, not knowing which feeling to focus on, instead just trying to consume it as a whole. I pull my hand out of his so I can hold onto his bulging biceps on either side of my head, and as he leans down to trail kisses down my neck, I turn my head and open my eyes to find our matching tattoo along his forearm, and at that same moment, I feel him trace mine on my collarbone with his tongue.
My hands tighten their grip on his arms and my hips lift to meet his every thrust as he picks up speed, my gasps and moans of pleasure urging him on. I never imagined sex could feel like this. And it dawns on me that it’s because I never thought about what it would be like to actually make love with a person I desired. Always too busy, always too absorbed in my schooling and chasing my dream to worry about any of this. God, who knew?
He moves one of his arms then, and I think he’s about to cup my breast, but instead, he places it right in the center of my chest, closing his eyes as his movements slow back down, thrusting shallowly as he visibly concentrates. He pulls his knees up underneath himself more, to balance without bracing on his elbows, and taking my hand, he places it in the center of his chest with his other.
I feel his heart pounding there, and I smile at the fact I can bring this gorgeous man, a man who could have anyone in the world, to his knees, and I watch him, mesmerized, and he feels my heartbeat too.
“Wow, it really is true,” he whispers, more to himself than to me.
He looks down at me and sees my questioning look, and when he finally speaks, my heart soars.
“One more interesting finding about The Golden Ratio in the human body, baby. The harmonics of the heart. According to Dan Winter’s studies, when a person is relaxed, receptive, and feeling loved, the average distance between frequency peaks, or heartbeats, recorded was 1.618. The Golden Ratio. And when two people were hooked to the machine and they sent love to each other, their waves and peaks lined up at 1.618—so they were, in essence, two hearts beating as one. Therefore, when two people are sharing the emotion of real, reciprocal love, the average space between their hearts’ electrical waves is 1.618, The Golden Ratio, which is, literally, eternal love.”
My eyes tear up, and the all-consuming feeling of finding the one my heart belongs to overwhelms me. I take my hand from his chest, lean up to wrap it around his neck, and pull his face down to mine. I kiss him with everything I have, fleetingly wondering if there could’ve ever been a more perfect man for me, one who would pause during lovemaking to basically confess his feelings for me in a—admittedly nerdy but sweet—way only people like us would understand.
He sucks my bottom lip into his mouth and wraps his arm around my lower back, yanking me downward as he thrusts up into me, and soon, a feeling starts to build within me, one I’ve never felt before, since the only orgasms I’ve ever had were through the bundle of nerves his pelvis rubs against with his every move.
“Oh, God,” I breathe, feeling my arm grow weak where I have it draped around his neck, holding me upright. He must feel me starting to tremble with exertion, because he lays us back down, never stopping his mind-blowing momentum. “Oh, God…” I start chanting, quietly at first, until I cry out for the last time as I explode, while he thrusts one… two… three more times, and on the last one, he plants himself deep and grinds his hips as we fall over the edge. My world shatters apart blissfully, as I feel him pulsing, filling, and coating the inside of me, soothing me with its warmth.
He buries his face in my neck, his heart thundering against mine as we both catch our breath. “Wow,” he says there, making me smile.
“Yeah. Wow,” I agree, and it’s like neither of us can come up with anything else to say, our minds both completely blown.
“FINALLY!” THE WORD comes out on a sigh of relief, as we’d been walking the tunnel at a snail’s pace for thirty minutes, carefully checking every millimeter of the walls and floor for any sign of another clue, and had come up empty until now. “Dean, there’s something over here. I can’t reach it.” I point at a spot about three feet above my head, shining my cell’s light up the wall. I cringe, seeing the battery flash from green to red, letting me know I only have twenty percent left.
It’s now 3:56 a.m. We’ve been down here exploring—the tunnel, and each other—for four hours. How it’s possible to go from hating someone with every fiber of my being to feeling an emotion I’m afraid to admit sounds remarkably close to what people describe as love, I have no idea. But I’m not going to discount it in any way. After my parents’ story, not only do I believe in instalove, but I believe in a good, old-fashioned enemies-to-lovers romance with a happily ever after.
Thomas Crain and Elizabeth Davis were rival Egyptologists. They hated each other, always trying to one-up the other with their findings and records. When one of Dad’s articles was published in Smithsonian Magazine, Mom didn’t stop until hers was featured in National Geographic. When Mom set a record for how many hours straight spent hand-dusting a statue of Horus out of a site, Dad nearly sent himself into the hospital with caffeine-induced heart palpitations, blowing her record out of the water by a full twenty-four hours, only his was a statue of Imhotep.
This continued for years until they were both hired onto the same excavation crew, leading to that fateful day in the Great Pyramid, when they had to combine Dad’s keen eye, sense of direction, and leadership skills with Mom’s near genius-level ability with robotics, and precision. And together, alone one night in that dark, cold desert, almost-freezing temperature without the blazing sun shining down on them, all the stars aligned and they finally got into the qu
een’s chamber with the crawler robot. With their adrenaline rushing, their excitement building to an all-time high, they launched themselves at each other, as Mom tells me, always with a dreamy look on her face. And as long as I remind myself to not think of them as my parents when she’s reminiscing ‘the best night of her life,’ I can truly appreciate the magic of their story, the night I was made, a product of a match made in heaven.
Mom and Dad got married just a few weeks later, and eight months after that, I was born. They’ve now been together for almost a quarter of a century, so you’re damn right I believe in instalove.
The tiny hairs on the back of my neck stand up, almost like metal shavings reaching for a magnet, as Dean comes up behind me. The short distance between our bodies crackles with tension, and I try my best to concentrate on keeping the light steady on the rectangular stone tile roughly the size of a shoebox just out of arm’s reach.
“Up you go, love,” he says in my ear, and I squeal as he ducks, wraps his arms around my thighs, and lifts me into the air.
After not even holding hands with a guy for six years, I’m still not used to Dean’s freely given touch, much less him picking me up every chance he gets. I’m a little self-conscious, as my ass rests on his chest, but then I giggle and squirm as he nibbles and kisses my lower back, where my shirt has ridden up. “Oh, my God. Stop! You’re going to make me pee! It’s been hours!” I warn.
“Hmmm… a Golden Shower while we’re in search of a ring created by the Golden Ratio. How fitting,” he growls against my skin. I can’t tell if he’s kidding or not, until he finally stops his torture, and asks, “So what is it?”
I pull myself back to the task at hand and run my finger along the edge of the tile, feeling that it’s not exactly flush with the rest of the wall. “There are no words on it like the placards before. It doesn’t make any sense for this to be here,” I tell him, squinting to see if I’m missing something.
“From here, before I lifted you up, it looked like there was a lip. See if it wiggles at all,” he instructs, and I place my fingers on the top of the tile, and my thumb at the bottom, and alternate pressing each side, trying to tell if it’ll budge. I’m being careful, not wanting to damage anything—I think I’ve done enough of that for one night—but then Dean suddenly licks right above the waistband of my jeans, directly in the center, where I’m guessing he’s got a bird’s eye view of butt cleavage, and it sends me reeling forward. My hand presses hard against the tile, forcing the bottom to pop out. But it doesn’t fall to the ground. Instead, it lays flat, showing it had been covering a cubbyhole of sorts.
“Dean!” I gasp excitedly.
“I’m sorry. I couldn’t help it. It’s just… your ass is right here… in my face… and your coin slot—”
“No, you crazy man. There’s something in here!” I cut him off, gently sliding the tile out of the hole. “Can you take this?” I place it in his hand, his arms still wrapped around my thighs. “Move just a little bit closer. I can’t make out what it is.” He takes a step forward, and when I shine my cell directly into the cubby, there, in the center of its bottom, is a skeleton key about six inches long. “Oh, my God,” I breathe, slowly reaching in and picking it up between my thumb and pointer finger before turning it this way and that in the light. “Dean, you’ve gotta see this.”
He slides me down the front of his body, and I don’t know what’s more thrilling, the feel of his erection against the softness of my ass as my feet make their way to the ground, or the antique key I just discovered weighing heavy in my palm.
He groans, and when I turn to face him, I see him reach down and adjust himself. “You do that a lot,” I observe, raising an eyebrow at him.
“Only around you, baby,” he clarifies, a sexy smirk lifting one side of his lips, making my insides turn to goo. “Let’s take a look.”
I stare at the front of his pants, waiting for him to drop trou, but when he starts to chuckle and I lift my eyes to his, it dawns on me he’s talking about the key, not his cock. “Oh.” I giggle, handing it to him.
“Hmmm… cast iron. Definitely fits our timeline. So it would seem no one put this down here recently.” He lifts the tile up to the light. “With the earth settling, and a century passing by, it must’ve made the cover fade, mismatching it and making it come unflush with the stone around it,” he notes, turning it over in his hand.
“But the key. It’s still in pristine condition. Like it was just made yesterday. Look. Not a scratch on the part that would fit into its lock,” I point out.
“We’re deep enough underground that it wouldn’t be affected by humidity and weather changes. Plus, it was inside the wall, keeping it nice and cool, and at a constant temperature. It wouldn’t have rusted, expanded, or shrunk, even after all this time,” he explains, and I nod in understanding.
I’m finding that learning things from a book, like in college, is a whole lot different than seeing things for yourself. Even having my degrees in archaeology and history, learning about different ores and fabrics, and their different heydays throughout the centuries, applying the things I studied for multiple-choice tests to really use ‘in the field’ is tricky. Seeing the key first, how perfect and clean it is, my immediate thought had been that someone recently hid it down here. It makes me realize how much I could learn from this brilliant man before me, who has nearly a decade of hands-on experience with all this stuff.
“Well, again, we have the answer, but not the question. A key, but where’s the lock?” he inquires, but he says it with a mischievous glint in his eye, telling me he’s excited to continue on our adventure.
As if in answer, his stomach makes a terrible noise, and I look up at him with my eyebrow lifted. “Ummm… please tell me that was a hunger growl, and not one of digestion. Because I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but there aren’t any facilities to use down here,” I tell him.
“Definitely hunger, love. I haven’t eaten anything since lunchtime,” he replies with a chuckle.
“Okay, good. Because I’ve had to pee for the last two hours, and my bladder is about to pop. I can only imagine if one of us had to go… boom-boom,” I say, shaking my head.
“Boom-boom?” he repeats, throwing his head back and letting out a laugh that makes me grin.
I open my sparkly backpack and hand it to him. “Shut up. Did you forget I brought snacks? Thank the tequila. Actually, don’t thank tequila, since it’s because of it I have to pee. Help yourself,” I offer.
As he grabs a bag of chips out, he points down the tunnel the way we came. “If you really have to go, just pop a squat.”
I look at him, horrified. “Pee… in here? Like… just on the ground?”
“Well, yeah, babe. You made an entire room collapse. What’s a little urine?” His voice holds amusement that warms me as much as his words embarrass me. “I’ll give you privacy, if that’s what you’re worried about. Just go back a ways, and I’ll stay here and raid your pantry purse.” He chuckles.
He’s so nonchalant about it that the idea starts to grow on me. My bladder has been growing sore from being full ever since we… made love? Yes, made love. That’s exactly what we did. It wasn’t just sex we had. Definitely not ‘fucking.’ What we shared was special, soul-deep, a connection between much more than just our physical bodies. I feel a level of trust with him that I’ve never had with anyone before, even more than what I have with Erin, my soul sister. So if he’s telling me relieving myself is okay, then I’m going to listen.
As I turn to head back up the tunnel, he grabs my hand and pulls me back to him. I look up into those beautiful eyes of his in question. “Don’t make this weird, love. Okay?” he prompts.
I swallow, already feeling my hackles rise. “Okay.”
“In that giant, loud purse of yours, do you have any napkins, a pack of tissues maybe?” He drops the backpack and pushes my hair behind my ear then rests his hand on the back of my neck.
“Um… y-yeah. I think so. I
-uh… do you need some for your hands? I-um… I usually just suck the Dorito cheese off my fingers,” I ramble.
“No, Em. When you go, you’re going to need them. To clean up.” He leans down and presses his lips to mine before pulling back slightly to whisper, “I came inside you, love. It would probably feel uncomfortable if you didn’t have something to clean up with. If you didn’t have anything in your purse, I was going to offer you my shirt.”
“You… you would give me your shirt to clean up with, just so I wouldn’t have to be uncomfortable after I…?” My words trail off as I look up into Dean’s sincere face. The man I thought I hated mere hours ago, is now offering me the shirt off his back to take care of the mess we made together when we made love. Something I hadn’t thought about in the least. Something he could’ve just blown off, seeing how he wouldn’t be the uncomfortable one. I mean, I’ve never felt what it’s like to have a man’s cum come out of me, having never had any in me before, but I can’t imagine it being too pleasant having to walk around with soaking wet panties.
“I’d do anything for you, love,” he mumbles against my lips before kissing me deeply, sending tingles down my spine as he caresses my neck with his strong, calloused hand. He pulls back then, smiles down at me, where I’m completely speechless, and then turns me, sending me on my way up the tunnel with a swat to my ass.
I shuffle away from him in a stupor. The man is a complete conundrum. The absolute opposite of what I always envisioned him as. He’s not the selfish, good-for-nothing asshole with a stupid face that I’d called him in the bar when I was venting to Erin. He’s pretty much as far from that as he could possibly be. Selfish? Hell no. He literally offered me the shirt off his back. Good-for-nothing? Fuck that! He saved my life. Not to mention he gave me the best orgasms I’ve ever had in my life. Yep, he’s definitely good for something. Stupid face? Dear Lord, no. Nononononono. His face would make angels weep at its beauty. And there’s nothing stupid about the man. How wrong I have been about him. And how easily he forgave me for it. ‘I’d do anything for you, love.’ Thinking about it, there’s probably very little I wouldn’t do for Dean Savageman either. At least, not that I can think of right now.