Chapter 14 #2
He looked down at me, a pink, healthy glow about his cheeks. “I know, right? It’s horrible while you’re in the water, but later you feel so… I don’t know. What’s the word?”
“Rejuvenated.”
“Yes, rejuvenated.”
But was it the water that made me feel so wonderful, or was it him? His closeness and his way of looking at me like I was the most important person in the world and he didn’t want to miss anything, not a single flutter of my eyelids, not a single parting of my lips.
Both of us knew it was time to pull apart now, change out of our wet garments, slip into the shower, and get properly warm, but neither of us moved an inch to do any of those things.
Steadily, with a murmur of desire, I reached up and seized his wrist, my fingers at his pulse. His breath hitched, and he stopped toweling my hair. I lowered my lips to his hand and kissed his palm, feeling the heady heat of it against my cheek.
“Anya,” he sighed in a low, tortured voice. “Stop.”
But with his thumb he went on tracing the shape of my mouth. I could taste the seawater on his skin. I could see the muscles of his throat tightening, pulsing.
I glanced up at him, wanting him so much I felt faint. “Do you really want me to stop, Kai?”
He shut his eyes, shuddering. Then, “Fuck it,” he groaned and kissed me, lips damp and open.
The towel fell from my shoulders. There was nothing left between us but my wet tank top and our underwear.
When he pushed me back against the counter, I could feel him everywhere, his solid chest and arms and hips melting into the softness of mine.
Weakness spread in my limbs, but warmth too.
In sheer, overwhelming need, my hands came frantic up his back, his shoulders, his neck, feeling the ice-cold droplets trickling from his hair and the muscles beneath his skin working.
Again, he moaned in my mouth, “Fuck,” while his fingers roamed low now, at my hipbones, his thumbs teasing the edges of my underwear. And in me: a deep, liquid ache. Anticipation and agony.
“Kai,” I mumbled, neck wide open for his lips to skim over. “Please.”
Pulling back an inch, he searched for my eyes, lashes lowered, his lips still parted from kissing me. I didn’t have to say it. He knew what I was pleading for.
“You want that?” he asked.
“So, so much,” I promised.
Carefully, not looking away, he dragged the palm of his hand down my navel and slipped his fingers past the elastic of my underwear.
I let out a high gasping sound, a sinking feeling stealing over me, a sort of darkening down of my thoughts. For a while he touched me like this, slow and indulgent, his mouth hovering over mine, breathing in my sounds.
“Please,” I implored him again, but he liked to make me wait, make me really want it. Hot and impatient, I ground myself against his hand, and just when the wait became too much, I felt his middle finger sink inside me, deep, wet from saltwater and me.
Shakily, I clutched his arm, hearing myself murmuring something. His name.
“Do you want me to slow down?” he asked, breathless, the vein in his forehead throbbing.
“No,” I whimpered, letting a hand between us so I could feel him too. Hard. Heavy. The taste of him, I thought of, and sensed my body clutch with need. “I want more.”
Eyes slightly rolling, he heaved, “I didn’t exactly plan for this, Anya.”
“So?”
“So, I don’t have any condoms.”
“That’s okay. I’m on the pill. It helps with my period pain.”
I squeezed him a little in my hand, and he caved into the slope of my shoulder, mumbling, “Oh.”
In his ear, very quietly, I asked, “Will you take me to bed now?”
Just as quietly, he rasped against my skin, “Is that what you want?”
“Yes, Kai. That’s what I want.”
In the bedroom, the light was soft and butter-yellow, and the sheets on the bed were very cold.
Or perhaps I was the one who was too hot, too filled with want, already searching for his lips as he laid me down.
And before I could ask, he kissed me again.
Slow, deep kiss. Sensuous stroking of his tongue and a rough sound rising from his throat.
When I wrapped my arms around his neck to pull him closer, he seized me by the shoulders and held me still. “Patience,” he said with a small, knowing smile.
I could only nod, eager, throbbing beneath him while he played with the straps of my tank top, twirling them around his fingers and tugging them down my arms until the wet fabric barely covered the top of my breasts.
Skin tingling, I felt him trace the neckline with the very tips of his fingers, teasing it down and down until the entire top was gathered around my hipbones.
Then, with a trembling exhalation, he stopped everything he was doing, stood from the bed, and got out of his underwear.
And, oh, how I luxuriated in the sunlit beauty of his body.
So perfect the moment was, I tried memorizing every little thing.
The white room, the buttery light filtering through the lace of the curtains, the flowery shadows lapping over his naked form, the sculpted lines of his hipbones drawing downward. I wanted to remember everything.
Leisurely, he returned to me, kneeling upright on the mattress, his fingers moving over the bunched top and the sides of my underwear.
I lifted my hips, helping him peel the garments off me, down my thighs and knees and calves.
His hand closed around my ankle, firm, his thumb circling the prominent bone.
Then he drew close again, looking the way he did, sleepy-eyed and languid, his hair still wet, peppering my skin with ice-cold droplets.
Cold, and yet the tips of my ears were burning, the back of my neck prickling with heat.
I brought a hand over my eyes, laughing nervously.
“Don’t hide from me,” he whispered, catching my wrist and pressing it flat against the mattress. “I want to look at you.”
“I’m sorry,” I croaked, shaking a little. “I just feel a bit…”
Nodding, eyes glittering, he said, “I know. I feel like that too.”
Pure and unbelievable was the relief that reached me at these words. To know we felt the same. Same desperate need. Same terrible tenderness. Same painful vulnerability.
Moving over me, touching me with his whole body, he murmured, “You’re so beautiful.”
I wanted to tell him that I thought he was beautiful too, but then he kissed me again, and only a muted, helpless sound was able to escape me.
At once, that liquid, pulsing feeling in my stomach was revived, and as though he sensed me wanting, he asked, “May I touch you again?”
“Please,” I sighed, shifting restlessly beneath him.
He knelt up, dragging his hand down over my jaw, my throat, my breast. My nipple raised under the tip of his thumb, my back arching into an involuntary play of anticipation. Ecstatic, I chanted his name. Kai, Kai. To be touched like this, but more than that: to be touched like this by him.
“Does it feel good?” he asked.
“Yes,” promised.
“Tell me if I do something you don’t like, okay?”
“Okay.”
He lowered himself to me, his mouth landing on my shoulder while his fingers moved between my thighs, feeling me, opening me.
Deep sensation, deeper than before. He pressed up with the rest of his palm, and I heard myself moan with pleasure and faith and surrender.
For all my unrecognizable personhood, in his hands, I knew and trusted myself completely.
“I love touching you like that,” he breathed against my neck, kissing, licking, sucking the delicate skin between his teeth.
“I… yes,” was all I hummed, oversensitive now, almost hurting, knowing that if he didn’t stop soon I’d be done. And I didn’t want to be done. I wanted to stretch this moment as thin as it could get. I wanted to fit my whole life, my whole existence, in it.
“Would you like…” I panted, delirious, feeling the tip of his erection pressing under the hollow of my navel. Wet already. “Can I touch you too?”
He gave a little tremulous laugh. “Yes. Please. If you want to.”
Slipping my hand between our bodies, I touched him with my fingers, closing them tight around him before stroking him with swift upward motions.
He shut his eyes, lips parting as though he really liked what I was doing to him.
Still, I wanted to be sure, to hear him say it. “Is it okay like this?” I asked.
It did something to me, the sound of his voice, very low and rough, saying, “Fuck, Anya. Yes. Like this.”
I wanted him so badly then that I physically ached, and even the possibility of having him inside me within seconds, of letting him take me however he wanted, didn’t seem enough to soothe this desire. Even before having him, I knew I would want him again.
“Anya,” he sighed, incoherent now, his stomach tightening against mine. “Can I… Can we…”
Heart pounding, I answered rapidly, “Yes, please. I really need it.”
A wildness braced his face at these words. He captured my jaw in his hand, roughly squeezing my cheeks as he lowered his mouth to mine. “Yeah?” he asked between fast, hungry kisses. “You need it?”
“So much, Kai,” I cried. “I need you so much it hurts.”
Again, he knelt between my thighs, his hands on my knees, wielding them open and down. His forehead was a little damp, his lips parted, his eyes onyx-black and depthless. Depth of his desire.
“Tell me how you want it,” he asked, and I nearly came just at the idea of him asking, him thinking of the things that would please me, him imagining having me in so many different ways that he didn’t know what to do first.
“Anything,” I heard myself mumble in a high, breathless voice. “You can do anything to me.”
With his hands on the backs of my thighs, he aligned our bodies, and I felt him pressing down, opening me, sinking in a little. “Like this?”
I said nothing, just rolled up my hips and took more of him in, gasping, my body giving to his and to this feeling of parting inwardly.
He cursed between his teeth, shutting his eyes for a moment. Then, brushing a hand up my shaking thigh, he gazed down at me once more. “You alright?”
“Mm.”
Breathing hard, doing his best not to move just yet, he reached for the side of my throat and traced with his thumb soothing circles over my erratic pulse. “Are you sure? I’m not hurting you, am I?”
“No,” I croaked, sniffling. “I’m just very full.”
Stricken, he leaned over me and took my face between his hands. “Anya, you’re crying.”
“I know,” I whispered, touching my fingertips to the wet corners of my eyes. “I just… I feel so safe right now. Is that weird?”
“You are safe,” was his simple, wholehearted reply. “You are completely safe with me. I promise.”
Soothed, I gave another faint nod, and he moved inside me, slow at first, then deep, deeper.
Within seconds I began to tremble—tremble from the tight, raveling sensation in my stomach, from the brute strength of his body collapsing into mine, from the mere idea of what we were doing.
Of me lying there, writhing, and him giving it to me like that, fast and hard, wanting, needing, thinking of nothing.
What else could matter? To try to connect this moment, the wild and tender abandon of it, with any other ordinary part of my life seemed impossible.
And yes, the act itself, ancient and natural as breathing, was perhaps in its core ordinary, but the feeling he gave me wasn’t.
Because he was right. Because sometimes you did get a feeling with people that they are meant for you and you are meant for them.
The daunting and all-enveloping mystery of life clarified under the microscope of human connection.
“You feel so good,” I heard him mumble, as if to himself.
And yes, so good it was. The sheer force of him, striking such ineffable pleasure from me that I could feel the stream of my own wetness trickling down my inner thighs.
“Kai,” I cried out, feeling the shift of him inside me. Painful, almost, and transcendent.
“I know,” he panted, his hands at my hipbones, holding me up, pulling me to him. Hard. Harder. “I know.”
A flash of white rocketed behind my closed eyelids, and in my body something unfurled, a jolting, liquid sensation. “I think I… I think I’m…”
With his mouth on mine, he breathed, “Don’t close your eyes. Look at me when you come.”
It was such a simple thing. To know that this was what he wanted, to make me come and to watch me like this, undone and unthinking, all because of him.
So I did as he asked while he plunged deeper and deeper inside me, and I rolled further and further away from myself, my mouth falling open, making no sound, saying nothing, only feeling, unburdened from a single conscious thought.
I felt him too, then, deep inside me, hardening right before releasing, the pure, hot wetness of our bodies coming together.
“Fuck,” he sighed, dropping his forehead on mine. “Anya. I could die like this.”
A kind of spell lifted off me, leaving me all weak and calm and satisfied. Dreamily, feeling touched in every sense of the word, I smiled at him. “What a lovely way to kill a man,” I said, and for a moment, a tender, human moment, we just lay there in each other’s arms, laughing.
◆◆◆
An hour later, bathed, exhausted, and wearing only a clean pair of underwear, Kai rested with his back against the headboard on his side of the bed, where he had organized his existence atop the wooden nightstand the night before—his wristwatch and cigarettes and reading glasses—while I, also bathed and wonderfully sore, lay diagonally with my head on his lap, observing the room.
The cold autumn sunlight chasing out the shadows, the fragrance of the candles we’d burned last night, the rumble of the heater in the kitchen bleeding through the wall.
I was seized by this warm, melancholy sense of returning to an old feeling, or perhaps the realization that this feeling was something I would want to return to in the future.
Nostalgia. The ultimate privilege. Because yearning for your own memories was proof you’ve had a life worth remembering.
Kai went on stroking my hair, his fingers moving lazily through it, and after several minutes of companionable silence, he asked if I were feeling okay.
“I’m really happy,” I told him. Because why not be happy, even in the midst of all this uncertainty? Why not just accept the gifts life had given us? This house, this place, the way we validated each other on this earth.
He smiled down at me, gratified, proud even. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” I promised. “From now on and for the remainder of my days, whenever I think of a happy life, I’ll always picture this: a house by the ocean filled with laughter and music and books. And you. Just you, in the center of everything.”