chapter 18
Decca
“Gus, can I ask you a question?” I asked, once I’d brushed my teeth, thrown my hair into a messy ponytail on top of my head, and swapped my black dress for my black Cramps t-shirt.
“Always,” he said. But he braced himself. He was still dressed. Even down to his black Vans. He’d removed the tab from his collar and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. Leaning with his shoulder against the wall, in his undone clerical uniform, he could’ve easily been mistaken for a modern Johnny Cash, rather than a Greek priest.
“We said we’d try to find the skeleton that would work for us to build a marriage on. Have we found any bones yet?”
His lips quirked, but there wasn’t an outright smile. He rarely smiled. “We working from the top down? Ground up?”
“Spinal column first. Proximal to distal.”
“Okay, then. I held your hand tonight. You didn’t cringe. I think that earns us a few vertebrae. Maybe a rib or two.”
“Scapulae?”
He shook his head. “I have to take you on more dates for those.”
“And not the pelvis, either.”
“Not the pelvis,” he agreed.
“Are we ever going to…?”
“Decca,” he said, a plea to reroute the conversation.
“Okay, but… you do… want to?” I looked at his crotch.
He stared into the bathroom. The light I’d left on for him cast half his face in shadow. His hands were in his pockets, and with his long hair and beard, that sleepy, sexy look in his eyes and half smile playing on his lips, he looked effortlessly cool.
I so rarely let myself look at Gus. Not this deeply. I did everything I could to tamp down that hunger inside me. The hunger that was currently making my vulva rush with blood and fluid soak my panties.
“I don’t understand, Gus. You have my consent. I’m incredibly attracted to you. I want to.” I dared not step closer. My nipples were hard. The slightest movement of my shirt sent them tingling. Even my amazingly self-controlled husband couldn’t help but glance down.
I sucked in a breath, daring myself to be brave and have confidence. “Gus, do you mind if I ask—” No. That wasn’t confident. I straightened my shoulders; peaked nipples be damned. “How long has it been for you?”
The question hit him with an unseen force. He blew out a breath with his cheeks puffed out. “A long time.”
“Since you were twenty-two?”
“Well, I didn’t exactly stop cold turkey after Eleni.”
“Okay, how long? Yesterday?”
“I would never—” He made a groaning garbled noise in the back of his throat. “Before seminary.”
“So... three years?”
“Ahh, no. After college, I spent some time at Saint Nektarios monastery in New York.” He looked at the ceiling as if there was a timeline written on it. “Definitely didn’t get laid there. Then a little over a year for the Theology Masters and Byzantine music certificate. I worked a little over two years in the Metropolis of Boston—that’s like an archdiocese.” His arms crossed as he kept counting back the years of his celibacy. “I built a camp. Like a summer camp. Still didn’t get laid. Then the three years of the Master of Divinity with extra semesters of fieldwork. So, that’s... what? Eight?”
“Eight. It’s been eight years since you’ve had sex.”
He took a deep breath. “Yeah.”
“And you married me because you thought you couldn’t handle celibacy.”
He shook his head. “I married you for the companionship. The potential for sex is just a plus.” He kicked off the wall and headed into his room. Then spun on his heel and walked right back to me. “It’s different when you’re staring down the barrel at the rest of your life. I never set out to abstain from sex for eight years. I was learning, growing closer to God, seeking Theosis. Sex wasn’t really on the forefront.”
“And yet we’re married, and you’re still chaste.”
He winced. “Technically, as a married couple, our sex would be considered chaste. As long as it remained between us.”
“Hmm. Any kind of sex?”
He raised his eyebrows. Then looked at the floor, nodding. He’d just recounted almost a decade of his nonsexual history and I’d finally managed to embarrass him. He cleared his throat. “Well, I imagine there could be some debate on that, but I’ve never heard the Papathes bring it up in conferences. According to my readings and interpretation... I’d personally add the safe, sane, and consensual guideline, but yeah.“ He met my eyes. “Any kind.”
It was so hard not to take those three steps closer to him, press my body close to his and feel if he was as hard as he claimed to be around me.
My mouth was dry. I licked and bit my lower lip. His lids lowered as his eyes focused on the movement.
“So... we just had our first date. No time like the present?” I offered.
“Dec.” His mouth pressed into a line, and he considered my offer—or rather, considered the best way to turn down my offer. His voice sounded pained. “I’ve never had sex with a woman and not hurt her after. I had a pattern.”
“A pattern that ended eight years ago,” I reminded him. “A pattern that you broke by learning and growing closer to God. I’m not trying to coerce you. God, I hate that it even has the same whisper of coercion, and I’m so grateful you’re so careful not to hurt me, but don’t you think you may have broken the pattern by now? You’re not a kid with an unchecked prefrontal cortex anymore. You’re a man. A good man. You wouldn’t hurt me.”
His eyes flared with obvious desire. He didn’t try to hide it. His slight smile told me that much.
Then I knew.
The way he was making me wild was intentional, calculated. He was doing it for me, so I’d know it wasn’t about his lack of wanting to, but his own emotional readiness for it.
And breaking an eight-year streak would require a lot of emotional readiness.
Eight years. Shit. I finally understood why he’d been so apprehensive.
But it made me want him all the more. My pelvic floor muscles clenched with wanting him. My vulva grew heavier. I could feel the emptiness of my vagina and imagined the way his cock would fill it. God, it would feel so perfect to finally wrap my legs around his waist and feel him fill me up.
He looked at the floor lazily, casually, as he took one step closer. Then another. And another. Closing the distance between us.
My back was against the wall and still he moved closer. The toe of his sneaker was snug against the side of my left foot. Slowly, he reached up. His fingers closing around the side of my neck one by one, skating over the stickiness of my overheated skin. Our gifted fragrances mingled. Amber with cedar. Smoke with frankincense.
My knees softened when he pressed his hand more firmly into my throat, pressing against my blood vessels. He used his grip to support me. The full weight of his arm was resting on the heel of his hand against my collarbone. His thumb at my jaw, pushing my chin up to look into his face as he just looked and looked, searching my face with a craving in his eyes.
Blood roared through my body, carrying desire in the cells of my blood, alerting my attention to all the places I wanted him to touch. My thighs, the insides of my elbows, the undersides of my breasts. As long as he kept that one possessive hand at my throat. God, I loved that.
I writhed against the wall. The cotton of my t-shirt scraped against my bare nipples and sent an electric shock straight to my clit. Gus’s lips curled into a smirk as he leaned away, watching my legs clamp tighter and my toes curl on the hardwoods. My hands clawed into his forearms.
I’d never felt like this before. My craving for him was a life-sustaining force. Like a zombie, I was controlled by this hunger. Raw and desperate, my body shivered. I heard rather than felt my hard breathing. I moaned. Could I come like this? I could come. Just from the fleeting sensation on my nipples. If it was just a little more…just a little harder. His arm draped casually down my chest, making it scrape harder as I moved. From the way he looked at me, amused and bewildered and afraid, I couldn’t stop my body from eking out some kind of pleasure from him.
How did this man have such power over me? He studied me with fascination, like I was a dead moth mounted on a spreading board. My body artificially relaxed into position. My wings pliant and open. Pinned only by his hand at my neck.
This wasn’t me. I wasn’t like this. Feral and wild. “Gus, please,” I moaned. I didn’t care who I was anymore. My desperation had driven me insane. I’d sloughed off all consciousness until I was nothing but breath and blood and bone.
And nerves. Definitely nerves.
Gus finally stopped watching. His watching would have been infuriating if I’d had any shame, but I was beyond that now. Slowly, he bent his head lower. His eyes flickered closed when I whimpered, as if the sound was torture for him.
His lips parted. They brushed over mine as his thumb dug into my jaw, lifting me higher to him.
It was a caress more than a kiss, the slow movement of his lips against mine. Information input. The warmth of my lips against his. The size and shape and how we fit together.
His eyes were still open. He watched my body freeze, all the better the opportunity for him to explore.
It wasn’t our first kiss. It wasn’t even our first good kiss. This was different, though. All the buildup. The writhing. His lips against mine made it all go still. It was intensely satisfying, just exchanging breaths with him.
Then he opened his lips, deepening the kiss. It was slow, agonizing, the way he kissed me. When his tongue slid against mine, the sharp bitterness of his beer somehow still present, he groaned.
He’d shifted his hand so slightly around the back of my skull, I hadn’t even noticed he’d moved closer to press his body against mine. His chest pushed me further into the wall with a delightful pressure, his knee between my legs, his hard cock pressing into my belly.
Feeling all of him flooded me with a profound gratitude. I let out an involuntary sob from the intensity of it.
When he noticed the slip of his hand, he brought it back to the front. He drew back slightly and inhaled sharply, looking away. That was why. It wasn’t a possessive thing, or a weird throat fetish. It allowed him to touch me in an intimate place that wasn’t strictly a sexual organ, but his arm kept his body distanced from mine.
If he leaned closer, he’d be done for, and that couldn’t happen. In Gus’s head, a moment of pleasure wouldn’t be worth how much he’d hurt me after.