14. Lucy #3
She came with her back arched and both hands in Lucy's hair.
Her moans filled the whole cottage. Lucy felt her orgasm—the pulsing against her tongue, the way her whole body clenched and released and clenched again—and she kept going, gentler now, letting the aftershocks roll through while Carrington breathed in ragged pulls.
When Lucy finally lifted her head, Carrington was flat on her back with one arm over her eyes.
Her chest was heaving. The last two hairpins had fallen out somewhere and her hair was spread across the boards in a dark fan, nothing like the controlled updo she wore every day.
Lucy reached up and gathered it and let it fall through her fingers.
"Come here," Carrington said, her voice wrecked.
Lucy kissed her, and Carrington whimpered.
Then her hands were on Lucy, pulling at the leggings and shoving them down.
Lucy helped, kicking them off along with everything else until she was naked except for the cardigan still bunched at her elbows, soft wool against her skin, and she didn't take it off.
She didn't want to. She wanted Carrington to undress her with her eyes the way she was doing now, looking at every part of her in the light like she was memorizing it.
"I want your mouth on me," Lucy said.
Carrington shifted and rolled Lucy onto her back.
The boards were hard and cold against her spine, and she didn't care.
Carrington kissed her throat, collarbone, breast, and stomach.
Each kiss was deliberately placed, almost careful in a way that made Lucy want to grab her and speed her up.
But she didn't. She wanted Carrington to savor her slowly and take her time.
Then her mouth was between Lucy's legs and Lucy stopped thinking about what everything meant.
Carrington's tongue was slow and thorough. She slid two fingers into Lucy’s pussy and curled upward to hit her G-spot.
Lucy's hips came off the floor and made a loud, low guttural noise. She had always been loud, never swallowing anything, and now she filled the cottage with gasps and curses. Carrington kept pumping her fingers inside her, and when Lucy’s walls fluttered around her fingers, Carrington picked up the pace.
Lucy’s orgasm wracked through her. Her back arched and her thighs clenched. She said something that might have been a word or might have been just a sound, and the orgasm rolled through her in waves that went on long enough that she lost track of where she was for a second.
When she came back into her body, Carrington was lying beside her on the floor, propped on one elbow, looking at her with an expression that was soft and amused. They lay on the floor in the gap for a while and neither of them moved to fix the couch.
At twenty past five, Carrington climbed out of the gap and found one shoe and put her shirt back on standing at the window with her back to the room, doing the buttons from the bottom in the light.
Lucy stayed on the floor with the cushion under her head and watched her do it and did not offer to help with any of it.
"I have to be seen at half past," Carrington said.
"Nobody's stopping you," Lucy said.
Carrington pinned her hair back up with three pins out of her jacket pocket and did it without a mirror in about fifteen seconds.
It was not as neat as usual, but it stayed up.
She picked her coat up off the arm of the section that hadn't split.
At the door, she stopped with her hand on the lock and turned around.
She looked at the two halves of the sectional and the cushion on the floor and Lucy lying between them.
"I'll have somebody come out and look at that," Carrington said.
"Don't you dare," Lucy said.
Carrington went up the path with her coat over her arm, and Lucy watched her from the window until she went around the corner of the house.
Grace came home at six with a root beer she had been given permission to have and a long story about a hamster.
At dinner, she ate everything on her plate.
And after, she read four pages of the fox book and tried the fox voice twice.
It was bad both times, but Lucy still smiled.
Grace was fast asleep before Lucy reached the door.
Lucy walked down the path at a quarter to nine.
Then she got down on the floor and fixed the couch herself.
The two halves hooked together underneath with four metal clips, and she lined them up and worked them shut one at a time with the handle of a butter knife, holding a flashlight in her teeth.
Three of them stayed shut, but the fourth wouldn’t hook, no matter what she did.
Eventually, she stopped fighting it and shoved the whole thing back against the wall with her shoulder and left it.
It would hold, as long as nobody sat on the left end.
At nine, she sat down at the table with her hands flat on it and said the thing she whispered aloud every night since the week she moved in.
“This is a job. She is not your child.” She stopped and didn’t say the third line.
Lucy turned off the light over the stove and stayed standing at the counter in the dark.
She had spent four years in a house with four bedrooms and a garden and everything paid for, and nobody in it had ever asked her to stay.
She had never once been as happy there as she had been in the last ten days, in a cottage that belonged to somebody else, keeping a secret that could end tomorrow.