Consent

by Sahara Kelly

  It thrilled her and scared the hell out of her, but all those thoughts paled beside the feel of his fingers as he began caressing her secret places and opening her to his touch.

  “In the drawer,” she muttered, moving to give him more room.

  She heard him slide the drawer open and knew he’d found the small tube of lubricant. “Good girl,” he murmured.

  She couldn’t answer as he picked that moment to bite her neck and lick away the sting.

  His cock was swelling, although given his orgasms this evening she knew it wouldn’t be as huge as it had been earlier. For this she was grateful. It had been a while and she wanted to be able to sit down in the near future.

  She felt the cool smoothness of the lubricant as Brian worked it into her flesh, brushing his hands around and over her anus and working a sensual massage into the entire process. His touch was sure and confident and she knew in her bones that he’d done this before.

  No battering ram here, just some extraordinarily good loving.

  It seemed ages before he was satisfied with his lubrication, and even then he took more time. His fingers slipped to her clit, not that it needed any further stimulation, but he paid it homage just the same.

  She heard wrappers tearing, God how many had they used tonight anyway? She should have bought stock in the company.

  Then her rational thoughts flew out the window as Brian began a dual attack. One hand continued its teasing caresses to her clit and the other gently penetrated her anus.

  Spooned against him as she was, his intrusion was barely noticeable, and she gave her body the order to relax. It wasn’t hard. Their hours together had turned her into a mostly useless lump of human jelly. She figured that he could probably use a two-liter soda bottle and it wouldn’t bother her.

  But Brian, loving, wonderful Brian, was doing it right. Soooo right. He’d even sheathed one finger to protect her delicate inner surfaces as he opened the way for his loving.

  She felt him move his finger inside her and something shimmered through her. The muscles that would have expelled him, welcomed him instead.

  She heard him sigh and withdraw and then felt his cock pressing against her.

  She tensed slightly.

  “Easy babe. Tell me to stop any time.”

  “Brian, please, I want you so much,” she sighed, letting the truth of that statement ease her heart and her soul.

  Her body accepted the order and opened for its mate.

  The lubricant was cool, and his cock was slipping inside her, past the first muscle ring and on to the second. It was as if he’d always been there, part of her, joined to her in this and a million other ways.

  He filled her and she relished the almost forgotten feeling, her unused nerve endings singing at the stimulation they were receiving.

  He continued his gentle play with her clit, arousing her on more levels than she had thought was possible.

  “You can move if you want,” she whispered, tightening and releasing her anal muscles around his hardness.

  He groaned. “No need. Just keep that up.”

  She did. Every time her clit responded to Brian’s touch, she made sure she tightened every muscle group she could control. It was an astonishing exercise and she realized that she was, in fact, contributing to her own arousal.

  The feelings grew in intensity, and her need to move against Brian made her push a little, begging for more of his cock.

  He let her dictate how much she took and when, just maintaining his ever vigilant stimulus of her clit. It was a slow unhurried ride for both of them, but before long her movements started his climb to the peak and his fingers teased her from warmth to explosive heat.

  “Brian, I’m going to come again,” she groaned.

  “Go for it, honey. I’m here. I’m with you, I’ll always be with you…let it come.”

  And she did. Rolling waves of ecstasy thundered through her pelvis, making her clit throb and her anal muscles clamp like a vise around Brian’s cock. She milked him with her spasms and pulled him over the brink into another round of joy, reaching behind her and clutching him to her as he emptied his balls yet again into her welcoming body.

  The feeling of his skin against hers as she orgasmed was like nothing she’d ever known, and she cried out and felt the tears fall as she came back down from her peak.

  Brian gently slid from her, caressing her, loving her, and delicately wiping away the lubricant with a tissue.

  “You alright, love?” he asked, settling her into his side and pulling the covers over them as her heartbeat slowed.

  “Never better, Brian. Never, in my whole life, better than I am now.”

  Adele snuggled in to Brian’s body and slept.

  *~~*~~*

  Brian surfaced to the land of the living in slow increments, letting his mind ramble and his body awaken in a delightfully leisurely fashion. He was surprisingly stiff, in an assortment of different muscles. One of which was rooting around for its new home.

  Which wasn’t there.

  There was no warm pussy sleepily awaiting his morning greeting. No soft bare mound rubbing up and down his cock. No buttocks tucked neatly up against him.

  There was a pillow, but it wasn’t warm, sleepy, passionate, or at all interested in returning his early morning lust.

  Shit. He was alone.

  He sniffed deeply, inhaling some of the best scents in the entire known galaxy. Sex, Adele and coffee. Okay. The sex he knew about, the coffee he really could use right about now, so that left Adele.

  Deducing that she had probably made the coffee, Brian reluctantly pulled the last of his sleeping brain cells out of their stupor and went to find his woman. And that coffee. And a trip to the bathroom.

  And sure enough, there she was.

  Brian had slipped into the old robe that hung behind Adele’s bathroom door, and walked quietly into the kitchen to find her.

  She was sitting in a little patch of sunshine, wrapped in her robe, with her hair pushed into a floppy sort of knot on top of her head. Her hands cupped a steaming mug, one leg was tucked up beneath her, and the other swung free, brushing the floor with each move.

  She looked—pensive.

  Fabulous, incredibly sexy and amazingly fuckable, but pensive.

  Brian paused and watched her as she stared into her coffee with all the intensity of a fortune teller waiting for her crystal ball to reveal the secrets of the universe.

  He wasn’t quite sure if this was how she should be looking, given that last night they’d screwed themselves into a sexual dimension that he never even knew existed.

  They’d touched, rubbed, loved and fucked just about every part of each other they could lay their hands on, and a few they couldn’t. Brian’s balls still tingled at the thought of her toes, delicately playing with them as he sucked her clit into mindless ecstasy.

  Yep. It had been one hell of a night. He wanted more of it. Like a whole lifetime more.

  But the woman sitting at the kitchen table didn’t look like someone ready to drop her robe, spread her thighs and welcome his cock deep inside her.

  Brian frowned. “You okay, love?”

  She jumped. Real, honest, slop-her-coffee kind of jump. She’d been so deep into her thoughts that she clearly didn’t have a clue he’d been watching her.

  “Hey. Good morning. Want some coffee?” She slid from her seat and crossed to the counter, reaching for a mug.

  Brian followed, slipping his hands around her waist and giving her a hug. “I missed you. I kind of hoped I’d wake and find you next to me. So did he...” he nudged her hip with his hard on.

  She didn’t quite meet his eyes. “Sorry. I’ve always been a bit of an early riser. Here...” she held out the mug, forcing him to let go of her and take it.

  Brian immediately pulled back, sensing her withdrawal and not wanting to make her any more uncomfortable than he felt she was already.

  He pulled out a chair and sat down with a sigh. It was time for
that awful experience that he, personally, loathed. It was time to “talk”.

  *~~*~~*

  Adele couldn’t look at him.

  If she did, her eyeballs would probably roll back into her head, glare at her brain and demand to know what the fuck it thought it was doing.

  She was awfully afraid that a rumpled and sleepy Brian McMillan was even more delectably edible than the regular version, and that wouldn’t do at all.

  Not when she was about to explain to him exactly why they couldn’t do this anymore.

  She’d sat with her coffee for a long time, going over and over the situation between them. Trying to come to terms with the enormous wealth of emotions he’d aroused within her, and battling the desire to curl up into his life and settle there forever.

  To rest her head on his chest and lay her burdens down along with it. To surrender to someone else the worries and difficulties that came with life as a successful business owner. To share her hopes and fears, to hold on to at night and wake up next to in the morning.

  She’d gone through one pot of coffee and had started another before she’d finally accepted that it couldn’t work between them. No matter how great their level of entanglement, nothing overrode the fact that she was eight years older than he was.

  Adele prided herself on her practicality. She’d had no choice, following her disastrous marriage. What was supposed to have been a “Happily Ever After” had turned into a “Movie of the Week” when her husband, a cool, polished, moderately successful playwright, had left her. For another man.

  The marriage had been ruthlessly exposed for the sham it was, and her small-town background hadn’t prepared her for the criticism that she would have to endure.

  Many felt that she should have done more, been more, to hold the marriage together. Especially his parents. And that had hurt. She was left feeling emotionally battered, physically inadequate, and with a stubborn streak of determination germinating in her soul. Having no immediate family of her own, she was able to close down that portion of her life completely.

  She had packed her clothes and her cameras and nothing else. Few friends even knew where she’d gone. She took her maiden name and put it on her first photographs, and thrust herself into the advertising scene with all the panache and style she could muster.

  She’d never looked back. Until now.

  Until the man watching her from across the table had silently asked that she step over an invisible line and take a huge chance.

  Well, the answer, as always, was no. She couldn’t. She’d fail. It had happened before. She’d let him down, become an embarrassment and turn into an old woman while he was still in his prime and his contemporaries would be dating nubile twenty-two year olds.

  It wasn’t fair, but it was real. Real life. And it sucked.

  And somehow, she had to make him understand.

  Chapter 8

  “Nice coffee,” said Brian, waving his mug at her.

  “Thanks. I like it. Vanilla-mocha blend.”

  Brian tried again. “Domestic or imported?”

  “What?”

  Brian sighed. “Adele, sweetheart. I may be sleepy, but I’m not stupid. Something is buzzing in that bonnet of yours. Time to let the bee out, babe.”

  Adele swallowed and raised her eyes, looking at him fully for the first time that morning.

  Brian wanted to howl at the pain he saw there. How could loving someone make them hurt like this? What had he done? He reached for her, without even realizing it until she pulled back, away from his touch.

  Now he was beginning to feel the pain.

  “Brian,” she began, licking her lips as if they were dryer than the desert. “I’ve been doing a hell of a lot of thinking this morning.”

  “No shit,” muttered Brian into his coffee. It didn’t take an Einstein to figure that out. “And it would probably be safe to assume that your thoughts weren’t revolving around the current political situation, global warming or the Dow Jones averages,” he added dryly.

  She snorted a laugh. “Nope.”

  “So…you gonna share or make me guess?” Brian raised an eyebrow.

  “I love you.”

  Her words tumbled out, clear but ragged. Brian’s breath congealed in his lungs. “I…”

  She raised a hand to forestall any interruptions. “Which is why we can’t be together any more.”

  Brian’s thought processes got inextricably tangled up. His mental gears screeched from second into reverse without hitting neutral. The clutch that regulated his brain patterns blew out and left nothing but a whirling void of blankness behind his optic nerves.

  She didn’t want to see him anymore because she loved him. Whoa. Does not compute. Error reading data. Blue screen of death appearing on eyeballs. Aaaargh. File not found.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  Where the words came from he had no idea. But they did, in fact, capture his immediate sentiments.

  Now that she’d got it out, Adele seemed a little more at ease. Well, swell.

  “I love you. I’ll say it again, and I want you to know that I’ve never said that to anyone since…since…well, for at least a dozen years. We connected with a kiss a long time ago in some strange way, and recently you’ve become…more than just a friend. You’ve become important to my life and my well-being. To my happiness and my professional career. And after these last few days, I’ve realized that you can give me, sexually, what I’ve never ever found with anyone else.”

  She looked up at him again, her heart in her eyes.

  “You give me passion. You give me love. You desire me and make me feel beautiful. You give me something so perfect there is no name for it.”

  Brian swallowed over the lump that had lodged itself in his throat as he listened to Adele and watched her eyes gleam with unshed tears. “Okay. I’m with you so far. So where does the ‘we can’t see each other anymore’ bit come in?”

  Her eyes dropped and she pushed her mug around on the table. “Hear me out, Brian. Let me get this off my chest.”

  She glanced up and he nodded, knowing that she had to clear the air here before he could begin changing her mind.

  “I’m a practical woman, or at least I like to think I am. I am forty-one years old. I have a fulfilling and quite successful career, and one very bad marriage behind me. A marriage whose ending forced me to take a good hard and realistic look at what I am and where I am going. It took any illusions I had and stomped on them. It killed them quite dead.”

  Brian winced. This was a little more blunt than he’d been anticipating.

  “We are…compatible.” The hand waved again. Brian tried to hold his tongue, wanting to shout at her that that was the biggest bunch of crap he’d heard this month. They were so much more than just “compatible”.

  “Well, all right. We’re more than just compatible.” Her lips twisted wryly.

  Huh. Brian’s mind flashed back to sweating bodies and the huge numbers of empty condom packets. I should damn well think so.

  “But our compatibility now, doesn’t negate what will happen later. It doesn’t negate the fact that in nine years I will be fifty years old. I will be looking menopause in the face. I will be losing elasticity in my skin and in my body, along with calcium from my bones. My fat cells will overwhelm my thin cells and dominate them. My hormones will be going nuts and my hair will be turning gray. These are facts that women must face. We try to face them with intelligence, humor, liquor, chemicals, medication and surgery.”

  Adele allowed a small grin to cross her face, in acknowledgement of her small attempt at humor.

  Brian bit his lip, once again torn by the urge to let her finish, while he desperately wanted to negate each and every one of her arguments.

  “You, on the other hand will be in your early forties. An age where a man becomes more interesting, mature, more relaxed about his life, his body, and his personality. You have, as I have learned recently, an extraordinarily successful
financial career, as well as a position as an in-demand photographer’s model. Your body will change as well, but nowhere near as extensively as a woman’s does. The lines and wrinkles that will appear on your face will give you character, charm and a measure of wisdom.”

  She pursed her lips in a little pout of distaste. “You will be hailed as extraordinarily attractive with that little dash of gray at your temples. Look at all the male movie stars of that age. Gorgeous. Desirable. Sexy. Capable of attracting just about any woman alive.”

  She took a ragged breath. “What I’m trying to say, Brian, is that because I love you I am facing this insurmountable issue now. Before we go too far down a path that can only lead to pain. Before I start to really let it all hang out and you find yourself stuck with someone whose breasts are flapping in the breeze like someone off the cover of a National Geographic magazine.”

  He drew a deep breath, but she wouldn’t let him speak. She clearly needed to finish. Damn it.

  “I love you too much to let you tie your life to a woman who can only embarrass you in a few years’ time. I love you too much to let you become entangled with someone who won’t have as much energy for sex and who won’t be able to keep up with you. Who is going to have skin that isn’t so fine to touch, or eyes that see so clearly anymore. Who is going to need glasses and calcium supplements. Who is going to deprive you of the chance to be with the right person.”

  She turned away at this point, not letting him see her expression.

  “The right person for you, Brian, needs to be someone who can share in your life fully. Who looks ‘right’ when you’re out together. Who will grace your life and your career, and…” she swallowed noisily, “…and can give you a family. I can’t do that either. Not now. It’s too late.”

  She turned back, eyes sheening with tears. “Now do you understand? Do you understand that it’s because I love you that I have to let you go?”

  *~~*~~*

  Brian’s mind turned her speech over and over, analyzing, dissecting, dismissing, and ignoring. It was his turn to rise and pace the kitchen floor, rinse out his mug, pour another cup of coffee.