40. Elena
40
ELENA
I lie on Atlas’s bed, which is twice the size of a normal bed and covered in furry blankets that look like bear pelts. This is necessary because his room is as cold as a cave. In most ways that matter, it is a cave, with a glass wall on one side.
I was reading his character sketches in the bath, and now I want to talk to him about them, but he is finding this highly embarrassing. Also, his tongue is busy between my legs.
“They were beautiful. I’m telling you, Atlas, you should at least send one to a magazine or?—”
He lifts his head. “I will gag you.”
I laugh and push his head back down where it’s been for the better part of an hour. “Fine, stay down there. I’ll only say sexy th—oh, bozhe chortove, tse nespravedlyvo… ”
After that, I can’t talk at all. I can only cry, and beg, and whimper.
He pulls me on top of him, rolling me onto his chest, which is warm and broad, and raises and lowers me several inches with each of his breaths. Lying with my cheek over his heart sends a thud like a tide through my body. I have never been more relaxed.
He massages my back, all down my spine, creating raindrops with his fingertips. He slowly and systematically unknits every painful knot, every place I’m tense and strained. When he reaches my lower back, I groan, on the very edge of pleasure and deep, painful release.
“This is the first part of you I fell in love with…” Atlas’s fingers patter up and down along the base of my spine.
I look down at him, my hair falling down all around his face, then bend my head to kiss him softly on the mouth. “I loved your hands first. But now…it might be your tongue.”
He kisses me so deeply I taste what I tasted the night he told me he loved me—that pure, essential, longing part of him. I drift, euphoric, until he pulls back a little and says, “No, I lied. It was when I looked into your eyes.”
He looks at me now in this glass box in the cliff, full of light reflected off the ocean. I see the bits of green that glimmer brightest in his eyes when he’s happy. When he’s looking at me just like this.
I say, “I saw you, and you saw me. And we both knew it. We knew what happened. We knew what we felt.”
I drop my lips down onto his. Atlas grips my waist and pulls my hips down, pressing me against him. Letting me feel his cock harden with every touch of our tongues.
I press against him, letting the head of his cock slide into position, letting it push against my entrance.
I’m dreading and longing for that feeling again, that tight and almost tearing friction, the very edge of what could possibly feel good. That’s how it starts. But then the wetness grows, the sliding and the heat of Atlas’s hands on my waist and his body beneath me, his cock inside me like a throbbing brand, and what’s warm and pleasurable builds and builds, and pain becomes nothing more than accelerant to everything that’s good.
Everything about him arouses me: his strength, his size, the texture of his skin, the scent that rises from his body as he fucks me.
But nothing matches how he touches me. There’s skill, consideration, sensitivity…when he finally rolls on top of me, he positions his weight on his own arm, his body lying almost alongside mine, my knee hooked over his hip. He fits his cock inside me, our bodies slotting tightly together.
He scoops his elbow under my knee, lifting my leg a little higher, pulling me closer. The pressure is intense, but he’s careful, smooth. Slowly, he begins to slide me back and forth, almost in a rocking motion. Back and forth, back and forth…
There are many kinds of climaxes, I’m learning. Some in waves, some in pulses.
Atlas’s weight presses down on me, but for once, the sensation doesn’t make me panic. It only spikes my adrenaline and the intense pleasure radiating outward from every point our bodies touch.
It’s the weight of Atlas that is his strength, his solidity.
Atlas is my fortress; he is my castle. I’m safe right here with him.
I wrap my legs around his waist and my arms around his neck, lifting my mouth to kiss him. He drives into me deeper, arms like pillars on either side of my face, dark eyes gazing down at me.
That feeling builds, builds, builds, with every pound of the hammer. This is the other thing I’m learning: the longer it builds, the bigger the blast. As Atlas drives inside me, I’m almost frightened of what must be coming.
But I hold on to his neck and look into his eyes. And when he finally groans and gives one last heave and drives in all the way, crushing me in his arms and kissing me, the shudders of his body flow into mine, and the twitches and pulses inside me set off a chain reaction.
The explosion erupts inside me, surging down my veins like molten lava. We come together, wrapped up tightly in each other’s arms atop the pile of furs, the air seeming to shimmer like the heat from a furnace.
But when we sit up, flushed and sweating, snow falls outside the window. White flakes drift down from the sky, melting into the slate-gray ocean. And the frost on the glass blooms like roses.
Late into the night, I whisper my secrets to Atlas, and he whispers his to me. We tell each other our dreams, our desires, our fears, and our fantasies.
Atlas tells me what happened to Lorne after he dove through the hole in the door, how he ran out into the woods in the storm, Dane chasing after him.
Construction slowed when the workers wouldn’t work in the rain. But as it turned out, they were right…Lorne got barely a hundred feet from his castle before he was swept down the mountain in a river of mud.
Dane narrowly escaped the same fate.
Atlas says, “Dane came staggering back to the house, covered in mud, white as chalk underneath, saying, ‘He’s dead; there’s no way he survived that.’” Something confirmed the next day when Lorne’s broken body was found at the base of the mountain.
I tell Atlas everything that happened with Boyka, the whole awful truth.
“My love,” he murmurs, “that’s not even a mistake; that was an accident.”
And maybe he’s right. Because the next morning, a genuine miracle occurs.
Mina calls me. That’s not the miracle—the miracle is what she says.
“Sprout…I’ve got horrible news.”
Mina has been my best friend all my life, not just a cousin. Which is why I don’t leap to conclusions when she says she has “horrible news”—that could mean a rise in movie theater prices or the breakup of her favorite celebrity couple. Mina is a little dramatic.
This morning, however, she sounds unusually subdued. And Mina is never subdued. Something really bad must have happened.
“What is it?” I ask hesitantly.
Mina can hardly get it out. “Well…you see…ah…” She lets it out in a rush. “I’m sorry, Sprout, but they demoed your bookstore!”
I’m silent for a moment as this slowly sinks in.
“You mean…they took down the whole thing?”
“Yes!” Mina sobs. “They boarded up the whole block, destroyed it all! They’re putting in condos instead.”
“It’s…gone? The whole bookstore? Everything inside of it?”
“Everything. Oh, Elena, don’t cry, I’m sorry… Are you so sad for all your beautiful books?”
“Yes,” I sob out, half laughing as well. “I’m crying for the books.”
Really, I’m crying with relief because, deserve it or not, I’m finally free.
Free to settle down to a new life.