by J. M. Frey
It made me feel like a piece of furniture, or sculpture, or meat. Nothing human. Nothing with feelings and thoughts and frustrations of my own occupying me. No, I was only a flesh-puppet put in that paddock for his entertainment.
“Let’s say we’re in a coffee house, and you want to buy me a coffee as a way to get permission from me to sit down and flirt with me. If I say no, I don’t want a cup of coffee, and you insist on getting me one anyway, and make me uncomfortable enough that I feel guilty and have to drink it, then . . . what else are you not going to accept no as an answer to? You’ve proven to me once that you don’t listen to me, so if you want a kiss and I say no, then what? If you want sex and I say no, what happens then?”
I reach up and take both her hands between mine. “That is a dilemma I never considered. How difficult it must be, to try to discern between genuine interest and pushiness. It makes it difficult for me, as well, I suppose . . . for how am I to approach a woman without terrifying her, if she has already had such a negative experience?”
“It’s extremely hard, on both sides.” She raises my hands and kisses one of my knuckles. “But I really appreciate you listening.”
I cannot help the twinkling, cheeky grin I offer up. “Well, someone told me once that I was written to be an attentive and thoughtful listener.”
Pip kisses each of my other knuckles in quick succession.
And then my hands go cold between hers. It never occurred to me to try to decipher whether Pip was as interested in me as I was in her. Everyone had pushed me toward her because that’s what happens to heroes—meet a maiden, fall in lust (or sometimes love), and do it quickly. The maiden reciprocates, because why wouldn’t she? You’re the hero. Only Pip has a mind of her own, and desires, and such fierce intelligence. Pip is her own person and will not be dictated to or told where to feel and how.
I wonder, suddenly—do I really love her?
Or is this something brought on by either the Authorial Intent of the Writer, or my own desperate loneliness mixed with the “helpful” suggestions of my friends.
No, I do love her. I really do. Wherever it is that the emotion began, I love her now, and there is nothing to be done for it. Except to decipher whether Pip feels the same for me.
Because, if she does not, I will not be one of those men who take it as a challenge. I will not be a Schrödinger.
Oh, how I hope this will not be the end of it!
“I’ve scared you,” Pip says. “I didn’t mean to.”
“N-No,” I reply, as quickly as I’m able. “I just re-realized that per-perhaps I ne-ne-need to re-reevaluate how I’ve appro-proached . . . u-us.”
“You think about an ‘us’?”
“I … I d-do.”
Pip smiles softly, sadly. “Have I given you any indication of being unwelcome?” She underscores this query with another kiss to my knuckles.
“Well, n-no.”
“Then don’t worry. Trust me, I’ll let you know when you’re not welcome. You’ll know where the line is before you can accidentally cross it.” The grin she gives me then is revealing, and salacious, and everything that is wonderfully promising.
But then the smile falters, and she yawns, and I do not think that should be as cute as I find it, her pink tongue curling like a kitten’s. I am filled with a sudden surge of warmth and light, because, after all she has said, after all the grief and agony and anger she has exorcised tonight, after all the explanations, she has still chosen to allow me to pursue my feelings for her. She has chosen me, and it feels so freeing, so wonderful, because I do not have to guess. I know now. I know.
She wants me to want her. It is freeing.
“May I kiss you again?”
“One more,” she says, and so I comply, but I am careful to stop when she pushes away to yawn again. “Sorry. I promise you’re not boring.”
“I understand. Dinner?” I ask.
“I’m not hungry anymore,” Pip says. “Still tired and drunkish though. Sleep with me,” she pleads softly.
“Sleep,” I echo, feeling a stirring in my trousers and the back of my mind that probably shows on my face.
“Just sleep,” Pip clarifies. “I need . . . someone beside me.”
Reassurance, she means. Despite her bravado, she is still shaking. The face she puts on is determined and brave, desperate to not allow her fear of what happened downstairs to taint what we have now.
“Very well,” I say. “But you’ll have to let me go long enough for me to undress.”
Pip laughs and releases her hold. I rise and shed both my boots and my robe, but leave my trousers and shirt, being a gentleman. Pip gets herself into a similar state of undress, and we burrow under the covers. She maneuvers us so that my body is between her and the room’s only two exits, and I allow it because she needs it, and I say nothing about it because she also needs the illusion that she is fooling me. She wraps one curving, beautiful arm over my chest, palm splayed against my pattering heart, and together, we drop into sleep.
I want to make love to Pip, to hold her close and lavish her with my affection. But tonight, she needs a body between her and her fears, not between her legs. I am proud to be that body.
✍
I wake when slim fingers thread through the thinning hair above my ear. The light is soft and blue-orange, and when I open my eyes, it gilds the rise of Pip’s cheekbone, the shell of her ear.
“Hello,” she murmurs, her face bare inches from mine. A smile curves into a dimple on the visible side of her face; the other side is resting on the canvas pillow.
“Hello,” I croak back. Water. I would love a cup of water. I might even gleefully commit murder for a cup of water.
“Drink too much, did you?” she whispers.
“I’m not hungover,” I protest, struggling to sit up, to untangle myself from the bed and her limbs. She reaches up, straining against the awkwardness of the position, and puts a finger over my lips.
“Lay back down,” she says.
Stunned and ashamed of the possibility of my tripping tongue, I obey. She throws her nearest arm over my shoulders and wriggles until her side is pressed all the way up my chest, our ankles crossing. Her hand splays between my shoulder blades and she sighs, a contented sound.
“You smell nice,” she says.
“You too,” I reply, though I am more commenting on the memory of her scent than the present version. There was a lot of running and riding yesterday, and I can smell stale horse and old sweat.
She wrinkles her nose. “Well, maybe not this morning.”
Emboldened by her embrace, I bury my nose in her hair and inhale noisily. Pip giggles.
“Even this morning,” I murmur against her ear. I feel her squirm, and I cannot tell if it is born of ticklish glee or arousal.
She moves onto her side, so that we face one another. “Kiss me, then,” she says and wriggles forward. Our heads are both still on the pillow, and it seems silly, but I stretch my neck and do as I’m bid.
It is a light peck, and she makes a hearty sound of disappointment. I jerk back. “So-sorry.” I crawl out of the bed, standing by the side, looking down at her, ashamed that this is another thing I just can’t get right. Pip sits up, frowning.
She reaches up and twines her fingers along the back of my neck. “Oh, you will be sorry if you don’t kiss me properly, Forsyth Turn,” she says, and yanks my face back down against hers. This angle is better; we snap together, and it drives all the breath from my lungs, all the fight from my limbs. But it could be better, it could, and so I pull back, turn my head the other way, and try again, playing with angle and pressure. I have always prided myself in being a quick learner.
“Much better,” Pip breathes between kisses, and it doesn’t matter that her mouth is dry and morning-stale, because, with each kiss, she tastes more and more like me.
“I . . . I th-thought . . .” I manage to stutter, breathing my confusion into her mouth each time we part to realign ourselves, to expe
riment, to be scholarly about the push and pull, the drag of noses across cheeks, skin against skin, working to find the most comfortable tilt, the place where we simply slot together. “I thought you wouldn’t want . . . after last night . . .”
“I’m allowed to want it, you know, bao bei,” Pip teases, eyes emerald in the pre-dawn light stealing across our bed. “I’m allowed to be a sexual person. I want you. I want to own you.”
A surge of lust and affection crawls up my chest, so powerful that I fear opening my mouth lest it come out in a ridiculous torrent of words that are too strong, too meaningful. One simply does not say such things the first time. Instead, it bypasses my mouth and crawls in behind my eyes, making them warm and wet.
Fearing that I will be undone by the pleasure of her hands pulling at my waist, trying to press our skins together tighter, I bury my face against her neck and lavish attention there instead. I am suddenly, powerfully desirous of leaving a very visible love bite under her ear, a warning to others that Pip belongs to another. She gasps and wriggles, getting her legs around mine as I do my best, sucking on the skin and nibbling with my teeth, patient and too slow for Pip’s liking, if the way she is pulling at me is any indication. But I will not be rushed, and I crowd her back against the mattress, my palms on either side of her shoulders to keep from crushing her.
I push aside the hair at her nape and do the thing I had envisioned so many weeks before: I lower my lips to the skin there and kiss one scarred puff of flesh, carved carefully to resemble the small, tender leaf of an ivy plant.
Pip arches up off the mattress and shimmies against my legs, pressing that shadowed place at the apex of her thighs against my knees, insistent. I never thought my knobby knees could be erotic, but the way they get warm and watery and threaten to go out from under me makes me revise my judgment.
Knees: definitely erotic.
“Come on, come on,” Pip growls into my ear. “Get back down here.”
She pulls with her legs, and, this time, I am not strong enough to resist. The cradle of her thighs is glorious and hot, the ridge of her hip smooth, and her fingers are pulling at the laces at my throat, impatient.
“Lemmie,” she pants.
I return the favor as best as I’m able, propped on one elbow to give us both the space to work, our arms banging into each other’s elbows, fingers tangling, laces smacking against cheeks and necks as they are whipped from their grommets.
Pip is suddenly laughing again, and the feel of her soft belly bouncing against my own is a wonder in and of itself.
“This is ridiculous!” Pip crows. She tightens her grip on my hips, sliding one leg up so the inside of her knee leaves a trail of fire along my thigh, the heel of her foot digging into the flesh of my rear. “We’re not going to grope around in our clothes like a pair of teenagers!”
And yet, she doesn’t release me so that we may undress, just pushes at the shoulders of my shirt until the fabric falls away, down to my elbows, where it becomes pinioned by our combined efforts to get each other naked. I falter, balance lost, and fall against her.
Pip lets out a wuffing breath, her breasts crushed between our chests and two layers of rough-spun shirts. I scramble to my hands and knees, and she lets me go, laughing. I stand and make quick work of my socks, and then hers, relishing the opportunity to slide my fingers up the back of her calves. She shivers all over, the mirth falling away even as her mouth parts and that delicious pink tongue licks at her bottom lip.
She sits up, and we part only long enough to allow our shirts room to be removed over our heads, her mouth back against mine the minute the fabric has passed them. She takes my hands and presses them against her breasts, and I am stunned by how soft and warm they are. Something scratches the centers of both my palms, and I realize that it is her nipples, growing hard. I cannot resist the urge to flick them with my thumbs; Pip arches and makes a guttural noise of approval that I find so breathtakingly endearing that I do it again before withdrawing to attack my own trousers. My knees are on the outside of hers, but the moment she has wriggled out of her trousers she reverses the position, her legs outside of mine, her sex bared and wet and on offer.
My fingers go numb on my flies, and I am left trying to fumble the laces open, finding that I am too moved by the beauty of the sight before me to finish the job.
Pip grins up at me, a cheeky smile caught in the corners of her mouth, a retort on her tongue, but it fades as soon as she catches sight of my expression. I can only assume it looks a bit shocked and frightened and awed, for that is how I feel. Pip is giving me the most intimate part of her, is allowing me the privilege of being inside her, where I could hurt her. She wants to take me into her body. She wants me.
No one has ever wanted me before. No one has ever wanted me.
My hands begin to move again, but only to shake. I want to command them to stop, to play themselves along Pip’s hips, to worship the muscle that is the result of hours of dedication to her own fitness, to explore the one part of a woman that I’ve never touched before. That moist heat . . .
Instead, my hands ignore me and simply shake.
Pip sits up and takes the laces from my fingers, finishes the job of undoing the ties and spreading the sides of my trousers away from one another. Quietly, slowly, as if I am a horse she seeks to placate, she leans forward and presses one soft kiss against the small trail of brown-red hair that spreads downward from my bellybutton.
“Shhh,” she says, kissing up and down the trail, kissing my hip bones, the join between my stomach and thigh, the little crease at the top of my pubis. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”
“Pip,” I say, and I try to pack as much meaning into her name as I am able. Try to tell her that I am honored, that I am grateful, that I am excited and scared all at once. That I don’t want to hurt her. That I am overwhelmed by her trust. That I am terrified that, like other skills possessed of heroes, I will be unable to master this one. That I will be terrible. “Oh, Pip.”
She pushes the fabric of my trousers down, her grip gentle, the delicate skin on the underside of her wrists brushing with such lightness against my bottom that I shiver all over. She urges me to my feet with small touches, and I rise, my hands on her shoulders for balance, my feet sinking into the cheap, straw-stuffed mattress. With her head bowed to concentrate on sliding my trousers off my legs, the whole of her back is exposed to me.
It is beautiful, Writer, so tragically beautiful, that I cannot help myself. I curl forward and kiss her shoulders, first one and then the other, and then I kiss that little ivy leaf scored into her skin at the base of her neck again. So strong, my Pip. So stubborn. She is worthy of her own epics, deserves the attention of Bevel’s quill far more than my brother ever has.
I lift each foot in turn with Pip’s urging, lavishing affection on her scars with my mouth as she finally strips away my trousers.
“Look at you,” Pip says, sitting back and raising her face to mine. There is something shining in her eyes that I cannot quite place, but I think it might be pride. “Nothing useless about you. I told you, Forsyth. You’re beautiful.”
“I’m weedy and gawkish,” I reply.
“You’re handsome and kind, and this,” she says, placing a kiss on the side of my arousal, “this is just perfect.”
The sensation of her pink lips, swollen and wet, against the side of my cock nearly threatens to topple me. “Pip,” I groan, both a warning and a plea.
She kisses the tip, and then peppers a trail of them along the underside, and I begin to shake so hard that I must grip her shoulders to stay upright.
“Come here,” she says, face offered up, mouth parted, and I slowly sink back down to my knees, obliging, obeying.
“What d-do I do n-now?”
Pip wraps her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist, and then hoists herself up my thighs until her breasts are pressed against my chest, her sex leaving a trail of slick moisture across my stomach. I groan at the sensation, my cock
twitching against her bum.
“Haven’t you ever . . . ?” she asks, words smeared into the skin of my jaw as she kisses down to my shoulder and leaves her own love bites in retaliation.
“Never . . . never a-all of it,” I admit. “Ne-never a-all the way. Nev-nev-never with someone th-that wan-wanted m-me t-to—” I stop there, too overwhelmed by the heat of her in my arms to continue. “I’ve seen it-t, th-though. A-all my kno-knowledge of car-carnality comes from be-being Sha-Shadow Hand.”
“Shhh,” Pip says again, her kisses soft rather than insistent. She lets go of my neck with one arm and reaches behind her. “Lots of illicit trysts in corners, eh, bao bei? Lots of tossing off alone after? Trust me, this is better.”
I jerk in surprise and rock forward when I feel her hand close around me.
I moan, louder than I mean to, unable to resist the instinct to snap my hips forward, which creates lovely friction between the skin of my stomach and the folds of her entrance.
“Slow, slow,” Pip pants. “Jesus, hold on, fuck, hold on.”
I obey, wrapping my arms around her waist as she raises herself slightly. Something warm and wet and amazing presses against the tip of my arousal, and then Pip lets herself slide down, swallowing me, consuming me, body and heart and soul. It is wonderful and hot, and the most incredible pleasure I’ve ever experienced. I would kill a hundred Schrödingers, slay ogres and pay fortunes to stay here, right here, like this, forever.
“Pip, Pip, Pip,” I am panting against her neck, and I kiss the love bite I have left there over, and over, and over.
She squirms in my arms and pleasure shoots through me, striking my insides like summer lightning. And then, slowly, she begins to rock.
My head falls back and my throat opens, and a moan unlike any I’ve ever heard from myself escapes. And then Pip’s lips are there, under my jaw, licking at the little dip between my collar bones, her hands splayed on my chest for leverage as she rocks back and forth, lifting just that little bit more with every return thrust of her hips, sinking back down.