Chapter 5 #3
“Beautiful,” he said, nuzzling his mouth against her neck. He pulled a pin from her hair and a coil of hair fell. He held it out, the long loop of it, and then twisted the curls around his fist. The first claiming.
Then there were the kisses he scattered across her chest, shoulder and collarbone and the rise of her breast. He found the clasp at her shoulder and sprang it.
“Beautiful,” he said again, drawing the fabric away and following the exposed flesh with his mouth and hands.
She wore no stays, no shift, and as she lay deliciously bare to his nips and kisses Effie thought dreamily that she had been made for this.
Her body had been shaped to fit in his hands, to cradle his as he stretched over her on the bench.
A cushion caught her back as she arched her breasts toward his mouth, caught by an impulse she couldn’t control.
She choked back a small cry as he closed his mouth around a nipple and sucked.
“You like that,” he murmured against her skin, sounding pleased.
“Oh, J—” She caught herself. She’d made the rule on no names.
“Just…remarkable,” she panted, and it was.
The heat of his hands, the warmth of his mouth, the sensations that spread over her skin from every point of contact.
She was rising on a wave, a limpet on the tide, and every pulse brought her closer to him.
“More?” he whispered, and she clenched her fingers in his hair in response. Yes. More. Let it never stop. Let him be hers, touching her, in her arms, always.
The music switched to a Chopin rondo, the C minor, sheet music Effie had bought for herself when it was published earlier that year.
For a moment she lay in a daze trying to comprehend how there could be an Effie who purchased sheet music and practiced at the pianoforte and had perfectly normal squabbles with her sisters, and also an Effie who lay twined with a man in the dark alcove of a pleasure club, coming alive at his kiss.
How was she supposed to return to an ordinary life, knowing this?
He moved down her body, kissing her stomach, and the muscles there jumped in every direction.
She was greedy and mortified and transported all at once.
She clenched her fingers in his shoulders, not sure if she wanted to hold him or push him away.
A man’s mouth, on her body. She wanted to concentrate and take note of every tendril of pleasure, every shooting thrill, yet she also wanted to sink into this mindless haze and be nothing but a cloud of awakened flesh.
“Too much?” he murmured as she stiffened her back.
So ardent he was, so tender, so aware. She had seen all these things in their first conversation on the beach and that was why she would never really walk away from him. He might depart Brighton, but he would never leave her.
“So much,” Effie whispered, running a thumb across his brow. But this was what she had wanted. To know how it could feel. To feel this with him.
“I want you to like the rest as well.” He brushed the words against the skin of her belly while he slid his hands up her legs, pushing away the skirt of her gown. She shivered as warm air teased her bare skin.
“There’s—more?”
“A great deal of pleasure, I believe, if you trust me.”
“Like what I gave you?” she asked, pleased and dazed and oh, so bold.
“I hope so, my sweet. But you might give me direction if you wish. I have never done this before.”
Surely he’d had other women. He seemed the confident, virile sort of man that practiced women would be drawn to.
She was certainly drawn to him. She made a soft, inarticulate murmur as he raked his hands over her hips and she realized her entire bottom was bare to the air and the dark and the—dear God, his mouth.
A dozen thoughts streamed through her head and then fell off the cliff in her mind, like a waterfall.
There was only the rush of feeling and the boil in her veins and the tide rising, rising, bearing her somewhere like a starfish on the hand of the sea, delivering her to this moment, to Jay’s kiss, to the sweet heat that arced through every part of her.
He was doing something with his tongue that she couldn’t quite comprehend because every nerve in her body was hurling a starburst of light toward the place where his mouth touched her, and she thought perhaps this would last, this nearly unbearable bliss, and how could she ask him to stop when she wanted it to go on and on and on?
But then something gathered and her entire body tensed, from the arches of her feet to the crown of her head, and she was a bow stretched tight to the limit, trembling? nothing but a taut and vibrating hum.
And then the release. He licked again, a firm hot swipe of his tongue, and she crashed like waves breaking against a cliff wall, pounding, obliterating bliss.
Her entire body rippled as the sunbursts shot outward again, searing every nerve.
He kept kissing, so gently, like he was sipping of her as she pulsed against his mouth, and Effie felt boneless and drenched and clear.
“You found it,” he said softly, running his hand along her thigh. He lifted above her and Effie wrapped her arms around his chest, pulling him close, cradling him.
“Pleasure,” she whispered, and absurdly, tears swarmed to her eyes.
Some hard case had broken in her, some dull layer of ignorance cracking open like a mermaid’s purse, and she would be soft to the world ever after.
Like a hermit crab without its shell, because he had torn her open and the same old tiny enclosures would never be able to keep her henceforth.
“Is there more than that?” Effie asked, because that was how her mind worked, always on to the next thing, even when she had just been staggered and felled by an orgasm more powerful than she had ever been able to imagine.
“There is, sweet, but you would have to give me time to recover for that. And I do not think we should risk a babe.”
“Of course,” Effie said. There must not be a babe. She must go to her cousin’s bed as if she had never known this. She must not let her husband realize she understood how her body could feel, or that she remembered, every time another man touched her, that what she really wanted was Jay.
It would not be like this with anyone else. She knew that; she known it from the first. It was why she had chosen him.
He leaned against the window and gathered her to him, and she sprawled across his chest as if she belonged there, as if he had been carved from muscle and flesh to be the match for her.
She laid her head on his shoulder and beneath her cheek she felt the steady beat of his heart, slowing to its usual rhythms. Her body felt flushed and alive and aware, and her heartbeat, too, slowed its gallop.
She had thought about the pleasure a thousand times but had never imagined this after, that she and her lover would nestle in a velvet pocket, tucked away from the world, and it would feel like this were her true life, her essential self, and everything else was a scene she played as Effie.
Her lover. For so he was. She loved him, and the knowledge was a sharp ache, as if she had taken a blow to the chest. No wonder Cupid in all the myths was an archer.
How was she to face the rest of her life after this? How was she to pretend?
The music stormed to its triumphant finish, and the audience applauded and murmured appreciation.
A hot rush drenched Effie as she realized that all this time, while this had been happening to her body, her touching Jay and him touching her, that half a dozen people sat on the other side of the curtain.
It would be no surprise to them, what they’d done; these alcoves were designed for secret rendezvous.
“Lord Ganymede.” Heddy’s voice, addressing the pianist. Her friend stood just on the other side of the curtain. “If you see Lady Erato, you might tell her I wish to speak with her.”
“Of course, Lady Hedone. I thought to perform one more piece, and then another might take the stage.”
“As you wish, Lord Ganymede. You know we adore hearing you play.”
Effie’s heart pierced again, as if someone had taken the arrow and twisted.
She knew her friend’s aims as clearly as if Heddy had spoken aloud.
She would not reprove Effie for the kisses; Heddy didn’t express disapproval for any of the activities she presided over, and she allowed a great deal on her premises.
Even those who wished their pleasure mixed with pain, though she had careful rules about such play.
The only forbidden act at Hedone was to force another to participate against their wishes.
No, what Heddy was trying to guard Effie from was this: the soft moments after the surrender, when a woman gathered herself to find pieces missing, lost to another.
Jay stirred, drawing up the fabric of her bodice and touching it to her shoulder, where the clasp hung loose. “You are wanted by another, it seems.”
“Yes.”
“I wish I did not have to let you go.”
He was to be married. He had already fixed on another. Whatever invisible hand was toying with her yanked Effie’s heart clean out of her chest. She felt the wrench of it.
“If you see me again, you must pretend you do not know me.”
“I cannot do that. You have left a mark on me, Lady Erato.”
“Then you must pretend this never happened.”
“Of course I will pretend.” His fingertips on her arm were a burn, a brand. “But I will remember,” he said softly.
“Thank you,” she whispered, fastening up her gown. Tears stung the corners of her eyes. How she wanted to hear that he would take a piece of her away with him. Just as she would carry a part of her heart that was his, only his, for always.
He rearranged his clothes, tucked in his shirt, buttoned his coats.
The cravat gave all away, but he simply bunched it into his waistcoat and reached for her.
She kissed him back, knowing this must end and unable to bear it.
His kiss was tender and consuming and a promise made without words, and Effie just managed not to cry out when he let her go.
He lifted the curtain and stepped beyond, and he was gone.
And the dream was over.