by Megan Mulry
“My, my. What have we here?”
She flushed from her chest, right up her neck to her burning cheeks.
“Have you been lingerie shopping without me again?” His finger slipped under the delicate lace and the edge of the cup, then along the satin ribbon that trailed over her shoulders.
She nodded and hummed, unable to speak amid the crashing waves brought on by his touch.
“Lovely. Perfectly lovely. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“I had it made,” she whispered. “It was appallingly expensive.”
Eliot laughed. “Turn around. I want to see it. I want to see you in it.”
She moaned again and gave in to all the pleasure that welled up inside her when Eliot wanted to look at her like that.
“Exquisite. You are exquisite, Abigail.”
The bra came off a few seconds later. He bent his head to her breast and kissed one exposed tip, barely touching his lips against the tender, sensitive nipple. He licked a gentle circle around the hard nub, then grazed it between his teeth, in a near painful repetitive abrading.
Abigail hadn’t caught her breath since they were walking down the hall. She was holding one hand in his, and her other had a desperate grip on his thick, wavy hair. She groaned his name as she rode the intense sensations. He lowered himself to his knees to better contend with removing the provocative suede boots that Sarah had insisted she wear.
“That woman is an agent of evil,” he grumbled as his fingers fought with the tiny button closures that ran up the inside of Abigail’s calf.
“I think she has some distorted vision of patient lovers when she creates them,” Abigail spoke on her exhale.
Eliot took a deep breath to refocus his efforts. He got the boots off with persistence, then nearly tore off Abigail’s jeans and—exquisite, lovely, matching—underwear. He was kneeling back on his heels, fully clothed, in front of her perfectly naked body.
He grabbed her hips and looked up into her eyes. “I adore you, Abigail.” He leaned into her lower stomach and kissed the tender skin just above her thatch of hair. He dipped his tongue into her navel, then kissed his way gently down. His hands held her pinned against the wall in the small entryway of his suite. The lights were dim, except for a lamp somewhere in the main living room farther inside.
His hot breath teased her mercilessly. The closer he got to her throbbing center, the slower he went. Inhaling her scent, nuzzling into the skin, licking at the tender flesh of her upper thigh. He kept zeroing in and then meandering farther away. She began to whimper with desire. She felt the moisture of her own eagerness begin to slip down the inside of her thigh. “Please, Eliot,” she whispered.
He shoved her legs wider apart and thrust his tongue into her, feeling the beginning of her climax after only a few seconds. He nipped at her, licked and delved until she was crying out for him, holding his head in a rough grip as he held her, his arms wrapped around the back of her waist for support. He kept slipping his tongue across her slick flesh, causing her orgasm to go on and on, taking her far beyond anything she could fathom.
Beyond herself.
Quaking in his arms, she finally collapsed over his broad, strong shoulders, softly crying his name in low, begging, repetitive pleas.
He finally gave her one last gentle stroke of his tongue and rested his cheek against her moist, beautiful center. He inhaled, to catch his breath and to take her in, to consume her through all of his senses. His own desire was making him so hard against his pants that he wasn’t sure he could stand up easily, but Abigail’s first sweet surrender was enough incentive for him to get them both into the large waiting bed in the other room.
He carried her in a fireman’s hold over his right shoulder, her limp arms hanging down his back. He pulled back the covers at one side of the bed and set her down with a careful slowness. Her eyes fluttered open momentarily and she smiled at him as he looked down at her. She moved one hand up to her own face, having a momentary desire to shield herself from the strength of his love, then thought better of it and flung her arm wide across the nearby pillow. She closed her eyes and arched her back up toward him, stretching, offering, welcoming him to her body. When she reopened her eyes, he had taken all his clothes off except his close-fitting boxers. He was running his thumb around the elastic waist. Abigail felt that all of her senses were so heightened, she could actually hear the slight friction of the small hairs on his lower stomach as he scratched past them in that maddeningly leisurely gesture. She found it delightfully arousing and crawled, catlike, onto all fours and looked up at him. “Do you need help with those?”
“Why yes. I think I do,” he said as he let his hands move away and hang at his side.
She scooted up closer to the edge of the bed and rose up on her knees. He was still far taller, but it was a perfect angle to see him in all his masculine glory. His erection was straining against the soft pale blue cotton, and Abigail let her thoughts fly away and her body took over.
She was going to devour him. Finally. No more parsing. No more gender politics. No more worry. It was simply the person she loved the most in the world and she was going to show him that love in every possible manifestation of desire. Devotion.
She bent her head, rested her hands at his hips, and nipped at the fabric over his cock. He began stroking the smooth skin of her bare back, his fingers lightly tracing her spine, as she let her curiosity and her love take shape. She reached her hands around to the hard muscles of his backside, her hands going up under the fabric at the top of his thighs. The transition from the fine rasp of hair on his legs to the supple curve of his ass set Abigail’s heart thudding again, and she must have released an involuntary hum of pleasure.
“Aaah, the humming…” Eliot whispered, as if he had just discovered a well in the midst of a days-long journey across the desert. He let his own hands mirror what she was doing to him, stretching his palms to conform to the roundness of her hips and bottom, letting his thumb venture tantalizingly close to the tender, pink flesh between the cheeks of her ass.
“That”—Abigail’s voice was strained and hoarse—“is the limit.” She ripped off his underwear as if it were the most offensive, despicable thing on earth.
Eliot worried for a second that Abigail had been uncomfortable that he was touching her in such a provocative fashion, until she made quick work of taking him fully into her mouth and letting her own hand reach around him to grip and pull and dip into his. His head flew back in the sheer pleasure of feeling, his thoughts a mixture of half-formed phrases including words like: Beauty. Love. Joy. Abigail.
He looked down as her head moved in time with the rhythm of her mouth and tongue. He ran his right hand through her gorgeous black hair, his left hand remaining on her lower back. Right before he was about to lose it, he wrenched her head back with a quick tug of her hair and she smiled up at him, licking her lips, savoring the feel of him there, her gray eyes nearly black with pleasure, blinking lovingly up at him.
“I am so happy, Eliot. I never knew I could be this happy.”
He stared at her in simple wonder. “I will make you so happy, Abigail.” He tossed her flat on her back in a light, careless motion, then straddled her hips and knelt over her, stretching her arms taut above her head. “I will do anything, everything, to see this expression on your face, every day, all day.” He reached across to the drawer in the bedside table and she took the opportunity to lick his nipple as he leaned in close and stretched to get the condom.
“Good god, Abigail. You are better than anything.” He stayed stretching over her as she continued to lick and scrape at his nipple until it was a small, hard nub in her mouth.
He hissed as he forced himself to exhale, leaning back between her thighs, on his heels, to tear the packet and put the condom on. When he finished, he looked up and saw her eyes on him. “Are you ready for me, Abigail?”
“Oh, Eliot.” A single tear slid out of one eye, and she turned her head as if to hide it fro
m him.
He grabbed her jaw with gentle force, making her look directly at him. “Tell me you want me now, Abigail.”
She shut her eyes for a moment, as if she could somehow contain or manage the riptide of emotion. When she opened her eyes, more tears slid down her temple. “I have always wanted you, Eliot,” her voice cracked, “but never more than right now. In this moment, you are… everything.”
His eyes never left hers as his hand moved from her face to make a slow trail up the length of her sinuous arm. He stretched himself along the length of her, imagining that he could feel every molecular connection, every atom of their shared experience. Everywhere they touched created new, combined matter. He was no longer Eliot; she was no longer Abigail. They were something new and glorious together.
He kissed her slowly on the lips, his tongue a tentative flicker across her lower lip. “It is now, Abigail. Okay?”
She nodded.
“Tell me.” His voice was low and hot in her ear. “I want to hear your beautiful, lilting voice as I come to you. I have never felt this close to anyone.”
“Please, yes, my beautiful Eliot, yes—” She gasped as he thrust full into her in one fluid motion of powerful joining.
He watched as her pupils dilated, adjusting to the reality, the physical reality of his body melding with hers. At first, he held himself perfectly still, as much as his body raged against pausing for any reason. Soon his blood would demand satisfaction, but for a few moments—seconds or minutes, he didn’t know—he would freeze this moment in time: the first moment of their life wholly together.
He made an exact mental picture of how her irises glowed silver, edging the deep, telling black of her pupils; how her thick black eyelashes were perfectly still. The slow flick of her tongue at the corner of her mouth that presaged a quick intake of breath, as if she was quite literally making space in her soul to accommodate him, to welcome him into her being.
“I love you, Abigail,” he said. “It’s so perfectly obvious now, isn’t it?”
Another tear slipped down her cheek and she smiled a small grateful smile. He started to pull away, only to begin the rhythm their bodies demanded, but a flash of beautiful, desperate longing blinked across Abigail’s face.
“Please don’t move. It’s so perfect.”
“It will only get better. I promise.” He moved slightly to show her, gently pulling away then tilting his hips to touch her exactly where they both knew she needed to be touched.
She felt the initial tightness begin to fade.
“That’s it,” he said, urging her on. “Just relax into me.”
And she did.
She let him drive her body like he would drive a machine. He guided her pleasure, leading her, until she was meeting his every parry and thrust, arching her hard, narrow hips into his, throwing her head back in a state of abandon that she never could have imagined (even in any of those crazy fantasies). He had her strung so tight, she thought she would break. His lips and teeth and a slight roughness from the new growth of his beard set her breasts ablaze. Her nipples felt like they were connected to her core—every quick kiss or long pull he gave them sent her deeper, tighter, further into this realm of striking pleasure.
Every part of her took him, made him her own. She rose to meet him again and again.
When she felt she could no longer postpone the culmination of their shared joy, the final consummation of all the waiting and wanting, she lifted her hips to his, as a demand and a gift, offering herself to him, taking, giving. Then she simply tipped over the edge of the world, annihilated, lost to everything but him. Her voice, a distant, foreign shriek, became woven together with his guttural roar of triumph, an ancient, deeply familiar cry.
Not very long after, too soon, really, thought Abigail, he was pulling away from her and making shuffling noises with the condom and the tissues from the bedside table. She turned on her side and put her hands flat between her cheek and the pillow, and simply marveled at the corded strength of his back. She thought she could while away the rest of her life watching that play of muscle and skin a few inches from her face.
He must have thought she had dozed off because his eyes widened in surprise when he turned back to see her perfectly awake and staring in his direction.
“Oh, you’re still awake.”
“Quite.”
He stared at her eyes, seeing the familiar mischief returning; he looked forward to the next time he could bring her to that place of black and silver magic.
“Why are you staring so intently at my eyes?” she asked.
“Because they are delightfully revealing.”
“Tell me how.”
“In the mood to be flattered, are you?”
She warmed to his touch as his hand moved languidly along the curve of her hip, blinking slowly to encourage him. “Mm-hmmm.”
“Well, when you are all business, like when I first came over to the table at the restaurant tonight, and you didn’t know if I was going to fall at your feet or fail to acknowledge you at all, they were cool, opaque, steely gray. Your pupils were tiny pinpricks. No access.” His hand continued soothing her body as his words soothed her soul. “Then, when I took a bit of what I wanted in the hall by the toilettes, or you gave or whatever—I want to address that giving and taking business in a minute—but at that moment, the slow molten silver of your eyes started to shimmer.” His hand reached up to trace the delicate peak of her eyebrow. “Then, when you were on your knees, on the bed, taking me with your lips and tongue and—”
She buried her face in the pillow, embarrassed by his retelling. Had she been so eager?
He pulled her face back where it had been, the two of them inches apart, simply talking. “It was the most beautiful sight. Please don’t ever turn it into anything else. You were so beautiful and you were so happy and making me so happy, and you were like a wild seductress, a sorceress, with black, knowing eyes, eyes that knew pleasure, that knew my pleasure—and yours, I think—to the very depths of our souls.” He touched a piece of her hair and rubbed it between his index finger and thumb, just as he had done on the beach in Bequia. “And then, when we came together, I felt I could see everything, the whole galaxy, multiple universes, there in your silver eyes.”
He kissed each of her eyelids in silent affirmation.
They stayed there, inches from one another, for many hours. Abigail got up to go to the bathroom, or to get a bottle of water, but they spent the rest of that night simply lying next to one another within the soft, cool perimeter of their private world. Sometimes they spoke at length about trivial things—foods they adored, their opposing views on naps, places they wanted to visit—other times, they talked about profundities—children, commitment, family. Yes. Yes. And yes.
When the morning sun began to impart a promising, evocative light, Abigail, who must have been dozing, got up to go to the bathroom and to pull a juice from the minibar. When she came back to stand at the foot of the bed, Eliot was sitting up, the sheets pulled loosely to his waist, covering his firm legs and, Abigail thought with a touch of greed, all the good parts.
“Why are you covered?” Abigail asked. “I don’t like you covered,” she added with a petulant look.
“I was just wondering, why didn’t you ever tell me you were a virgin, you know, last year when we got together?”
She kept still, standing at the end of the bed, holding the compact green glass bottle of French peach juice in both hands, as if the cool container anchored her to the spot.
“You were a virgin.” Not a question.
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Abigail, please. After everything, just be honest. Why would you hide that?”
“I wasn’t hiding anything!” She was suddenly angry. “It’s such a preposterous construct. I was in a sexually complete relationship with someone for over a decade. It’s patently ridiculous to act as if I was somehow unsullied.” She said the last word as if it were poison on her lips.
&n
bsp; “That’s not what this is about.”
“Really, Eliot? You might want to check with your centuries—millennia!—of patriarchy and get back to me on that. You think it’s not about my purity? The very word is loaded with misdirection and false meaning: virginity. Think about it!”
Eliot smiled and got out of bed as her ire escalated. He came up behind her. She couldn’t possibly stay mad at him—if she ever was to begin with—when his warm, strong body rubbed up against her back, his hands circling around her in a safe hold. She sighed and leaned back into him on reflex. He was near; ergo, she bent toward him, like a plant to the sun.
“Oh, Abigail. You’re such an idiot.”
Her eyes were placidly closed as she relaxed into his immovable strength. “Thanks for the heads-up.”
“Of course I don’t give a crap about any of that other virginity bullshit—purity, preservation, what have you—but I might have proceeded at a slightly more well-considered pace if you’d just let me know. I reamed you, for goodness’ sake. I practically nailed you to the goddamned bed.”
She smiled as she felt her stomach roll at the pleasant prospect of being impaled by Eliot. Skewered by lust. Love, she corrected. She wanted him to do everything to her: to have his way with her, to attack her, to ravish her, to slam his being into hers.
“You are so naughty,” he whispered in her ear as she tilted her neck and smiled even more broadly, eyes still closed. “You want me to take you like that, don’t you?” He bit and licked his way down her warm neck.
“I would very much rather you didn’t make me admit it.” Her prim voice was the epitome of upper-crust patrician formality. “But yes.”
Eliot burst into uncontrollable peals of laughter and tightened his embrace around her upper arms. Opening herself up to every possible permutation of their love, every possible ramification, standing there in his arms, holding the small bottle of juice, it was almost more intimate than their actual lovemaking.
Abigail’s knee-jerk anger to his questioning her virginity stemmed entirely from her misconception that he valued that idea or gave it false importance for reasons that would have appalled her. “I’m sorry, Eliot. I seem to be the one who is constantly selling you short.”