Chapter 15 #3
“Yes, you would,” I claimed. “You’re a rake and liar! You would have your way with all of us ladies of the court, too. Lady Agatha. Lady Aster. Miss Swift. You would have—”
“I would not!” he said.
“Why?” I begged. “Why not all of us? We’re just low-hanging, ripe apples for the picking. Are we not? You like apples. Why wouldn’t you—”
“Because I’ve only ever wanted you!” he cried. We both came to a halt. “I-” Mr. Evergreen’s jaw locked. His nose flared. “I meant to say, I would only ever want for you,” he said.
Mr. Evergreen’s admission rattled my calm and tragically. I thought of a hundred possibilities before emitting a simple, “…I want you for you, too, Mr. Evergreen. Very much.”
His face twisted, somewhere between hurt and predator.
“Is that right?” he asked.
“You dare accuse your Queen of dishonesty? In a church? I knew you were an idiot but-”
“I do nothing of the sort,” he said, voice low.
He stepped closer, backing me into the altar. There was a clatter of trinkets from off of it.
“Oh!” I panicked, moving to collect them, but he only grinned. He watched me as I dropped one of the Saints. “Sorry!”
Cyrus took him from my hands and set him carefully to the side. I cleared my throat.
“Please,” he whispered. “Please say it again.”
I watched his lips. “I want for you, Mr. Evergreen.”
“Cyrus,” he replied.
“I-I want for you… Cyrus.”
“How do you want for me, my Queen? In particular?”
“I… I want you to… to touch me.”
His weight loaded to one side, braced against the edge of our shrine.
“You want me to touch you?” he asked.
His thumb appeared along my cheekbone, cutting its angle. He snuck the rest of his hand into my scattered hair, smoothing it as he went.
“I touch you every chance I get,” he said. “You want more?”
“Y-Yes,” I said.
Cyrus tamed the other side, but he didn’t say anything.
Nervously, “I…” I felt drunk on his air and shut my eyes to focus.
I heard him exhale quietly, then felt his lips as he pressed a kiss to the corner of mine. When I opened, he was still very close, waiting.
“What do you want from me?” he asked.
“I, I want… I want you to show me things,” I said.
“Show you things?” He kissed me once more on the other corner.
“Yes,” I said. “Show me how it feels to be touched.”
“Certainly we’re not discussing bedposts?” he asked.
“I... What if I am?” I asked.
He craned his neck.
“I thought to do it,” I said. “To explore the sensation… The other night. I was alone, but I… I don’t know how or where to start. I… I’ve never touched myself,” I said.
He watched every humiliating syllable.
I groaned. “I, I don’t understand why it-I just. You’re experienced, sir, and I’m… I’m so frustrated!” I said. “I don’t know what it is you do to me! Even when I’m not with you, it’s well into the night. And night after night. I’m-”
“Frustrated is a good word for it,” he gave. “I’m quite familiar with the state.”
“I don’t mean to say… I’m not ready for… sex,” I said.
“Sex?” he asked. “Yes. That is a far leap from where we are.”
“It is?” I asked.
“Yes. And you are very fortunate, Swan.”
“I… am?” I asked.
“Aye. There are many things between kissing…” He pressed his mouth to the crook of my neck. “And sex,” he finished. He was far too pleased.
“There are?” I asked.
“Yes. Plenty of things, my Swan.”
“Then that’s what I want,” I said. “I want you to show them to me. All of them.”
“I could, but... What you’re asking?” He rested his forehead to mine. “We can’t undo it once it’s done, and it will change this; it will change us forever.”
“I feel safe with you,” I said.
“…You should wait,” he told me.
“For what?”
“For your wedding night,” he said. “For your husband.”
I shifted on my feet. He was between my legs, and though we hadn’t actually crossed the line, I could feel the anticipation to do so pulsing off of us like the calm before a quake.
I wanted him.
“Would you have killed those men had they tried to hurt me?” I asked. “The ones in the alley?”
“Yes.”
“...Then I don’t want to wait,” I said.
“Sva—”
“Touch me,” I said. “I trust you. No one else. Not like this.”
He sighed, breath escaping the tight shape of his mouth. His boot snuck between my heels and kicked my legs apart. “As my Queen commands it.”
I caught the edge of the altar. His hand grazed my thigh, then slid around my back, the dress moved with its intrusion.
“What if someone discovers us?” I worried.
“In this weather?” he asked.
He traveled my neck, dotting a string of sweet, careful kisses to it. I could’ve melted into the sensation, into his mouth as it caressed my skin.
“Oo, oof. God, Mr. Evergreen. Are you sure we-?”
“The door is barred, sweet Princess,” he said. “We’re perfectly alone; we’re perfectly safe.”
I shuttered. My body tensed, then relaxed, then tensed again as he began to gather my skirt together between us.
“I’m scared,” I whispered.
Evergreen paused, meeting my eyes. “Do you want me to stop?”
When I shook my head, the linen cascaded down around his wrist; his hand lost beneath. Still, he stopped before tracing the outer parts of my leg, studying my response.
“May I touch you?” he asked.
I nodded.
Cyrus inched toward the inner, sensitive, and previously undiscovered territory.
“Is this okay?” he asked.
“Y-Yes,” I said, faintly.
“Shall I show you why the bedpost works?” he asked. His hand passed over the front of my undergarments, and when I gasped, he snickered, doing it again.
“Y-yes,” I begged, joining his amusement with an impish giggle I’d never heard from myself. “I want it, sir. I want to know.”
“It’s the pressure,” he said. “Here.” His finger stopped, directly at the uppermost center of my sex, and though the idea of having him touch me there was excitement of its own, I didn’t actually feel anything ground-breaking in the act. That is, until he pressed.
Mr. Evergreen’s palm followed the tips of his fingers and hard. It rubbed across me, ebbing, then pulling back again in long, intentional strokes. One pass after the other, I was at his mercy.
My breathing changed. It took on a new rhythm and I could feel his eyes fixate on every part of me.
Cyrus moved faster; he moved deeper, rougher. He moved forward, bracing his other arm to the table, and pinning me between the wood and himself and I leaned back, no longer in charge of how I would react.
Behind us, the stained glass portrait—God himself emerging from clouds in red, yellow, green and every color I’d ever imagined, and I swear a few I hadn’t—rained above my eyes and chest, in direct competition with every glimmer of candlelight.
It was pressure that I felt, rising from where the two of us intersected, and as he parted his mouth to pull his soft lips across the tops of my heaving breasts, I so very quietly said his name, “Cyrus,” in a near-staccatoed gasp.
Then sharp, after sharp, after sharp breath of desperation, I cried, “Cyrus! I-I feel-!”
He swallowed my noise with a kiss, passionate, like it was the first and only kiss we could ever have, and I—
I saw light.
A crash of lightning, to be specific, simultaneous to the powerful, almost metallic outrage in every end of my person, even the roof of my mouth, but especially where he had anchored, burst through everything.
The pleasure consumed me like a wave, broke over me, and through me, and it left me shaking on his shore.
I fell forward into his arms. Panting, reeling, unable to speak.
Mr. Evergreen’s eyes were on me, focused, witnessing the metamorphosis he’d not only promised but inflicted. Rainbows continued across the altar and the floor around our intertwined bodies, as the clouds outside must have moved to release the sun entirely.
Somewhere birds chirped again.
My fingers crept on his chest, barely able with how furiously I shook, and I thought that he might say something, anything, but words were replaced with lips, soft and slow against each other.
We remained locked in our strange embrace until the tingling ceased completely, much, much later.
Something had changed. He was right. Something awakened in me, in him and in the world that, up until that moment, had been eternally lifeless. Suddenly, there were wild hues scattered around and my heart had left my chest for, I think, Heaven, for I had never felt closer to God or His light.