Chapter 19 Ravenna, Italy #2
“Hey, Salvi.” He sidesteps to where I’m sitting and positions himself between my thighs.
His hands comb through my hair. His dark-pewter eyes are intense, but I see how he’s fighting to appear aloof.
With a defeated moan, he lowers his face to the curve of my neck.
His breath is warm and alive, and when I grip his hair in both hands, I feel more than hear his small gasp.
“Don’t go,” he says.
Cautiously, I echo the words. “Don’t go?”
He shakes his head against my neck, like a child waking from a dream.
“I’m staying all night.”
“That’s not what I mean.” His words touch my skin as gently as snow.
I pull back, and the expression on his face is just this side of despair, like he fears he’s said too much. I nibble at the inside of my cheek, deliberating. “I really, really want to kiss you,” I admit.
He strokes one curled knuckle under my chin. “I know why you’d deny me, but why would you deny yourself?”
Guiding my head up, he leans to brush my lower lip with a touch of his upper.
The sensation gives me goose bumps in the best way.
I dig my fingers into his shoulders and switch the angle of my head to meet him again.
The second kiss is longer, but still tentative for us both.
The third is a passing slide, lips still closed, like we’re charting a blueprint of each other and don’t want to miss a single line.
I pull back an inch. “This is actually a great idea.”
“Brilliant,” he murmurs. His smoky gray eyes flick from one of mine to the other; then he closes the distance between us.
My mouth softens, and when his tongue touches mine, I whimper like a stupid kid who’s never been kissed before.
I weave my hands into his hair and go in deeper, testing and teasing him, searching, tasting the forbidden mouth that I’ve been dying for so long to kiss.
When we pause, I whisper, “Fuck, I’m glad you’re good at this…” and he chuckles, giving my lower lip a bite, then soothing the spot with a tender lick before closing in again.
I can’t tell if we stay like this for a minute or an hour, exploring each other in a way that’s both desultory and half starved, but finally he lifts me and heads toward the bedroom.
I’m raking his hair, lost in the skill of his mouth, our kisses ranging from restrained, taunting nibbles to deep plunges like we’re mining for our own damned souls somewhere down there.
He carries me into the hallway, where we bump the wall in the middle of a particularly intense kiss.
He pushes me against the cool stucco and when I unwind my legs from his waist to put them on the floor, he makes a small, pained noise and murmurs, “Stay… ” against my mouth, lifting me so we don’t break the momentum.
After another minute, he pulls back and studies me.
The velvet light on him is so goddamned pretty, he’s like a Dutch Golden Age painting.
I resist the urge to say one of my usual cavalier, horny things.
I study him right back. Every freckle, the curve of his nostrils, the glint of light in his left eye, the white scar on the opposite eyebrow.
I trace my forefinger over the smooth, pale interruption. “Looks like a Morse code letter A,” I whisper. “Dit, dah… ”
He kisses me, a ghost of a skim across my lips. “The beginning of a message. You’ll have to stick around to decipher the rest.”
Our mouths find each other again, and he moves us into the bedroom. What’s left of our clothes are peeled off and tossed, and we tumble onto the mattress in an urgent tangle, hands everywhere, as if we’re afraid that anything not being touched might disappear.
Rising over me on his beautifully corded arms, Alexander murmurs, “My bed will never look right again without you in it.”
There are a dozen clever replies on my tongue, but for some reason it feels like eleven too many. Right now I want one thing to say, and the right person to say it to, but… fuck, seriously? What the hell is happening to me? It’s almost intimidating to look at him, I’m feeling so much.
“That,” I tell him, pinching one of his nipples in an irreverent way, “is very corny.”
“But true.” He moves a knee to part my thighs and begins a leisurely trip down my body, his lips visiting every plane and curve.
It feels amazing, like he’s painting dabs of pleasure-static all over me. My body is taut with anticipation, and he responds so naturally to my subtlest cues—a muscle tensing, a slight intake of breath—elevating me to a state of longing I can barely stand.
“Why are you making me wait?” I groan.
“Why are you making me rush?” he serves back, amused.
When he kisses his way down the sensitive valley between my leg and mons, I nudge him with my thigh and start to sit up and scoot back. “Not to be discouraging, but you probably won’t get me off like that. Don’t, uh, be bummed if we can’t hit the mark.”
Sex-wise, there’s not much that’s as annoying as a guy who decides it’s his life’s work to make you come from oral even though he’s mediocre at it, and then seems hurt when it doesn’t happen. Usually only girls do it right, probably because they understand the landscape better.
No matter how much direction I give guys, they always go too hard—I get oversensitive fast, and it scares away the arousal and replaces it with irritation.
And what is it with the consistent problem that if, by some miracle, it starts to get good and you’re vocal about it, they think it’s a great time to switch things up?
Take a fucking clue, gentlemen, and stay on task.
With a chuckle, Alexander scoops both hands under my ass and pulls me close. “More process than goal here.” He brushes his lips across my small trail of pubic hair in a teasing way. “Every square fuckin’ inch of you is heaven, and I want to taste it all.”
He gentles his thumb over my clit, then kisses it, and…
it’s just the first light touch of his lips there, but oh my God, it’s better than what I fantasized, because it’s real.
My thighs relax, but I’m practically holding my breath, willing him to do it again.
Normally I’d be barking commands right now—I’m not shy about what I want.
But the uncertainty is part of the excitement.
I want to see what he’s going to do. So far, every way he’s touched me and kissed me has felt right.
His ministrations are soft, languorous, and have effortlessly perfect pacing.
He seems to understand to keep his touch so light that sometimes I’m more feeling the heat of his breath.
When something is exactly right and I arch and push against him, he’s there with more.
Two of his fingers flirt at my pussy and I didn’t even realize I was aching to feel him inside, but I open my legs wider and tilt my hips and he slides in.
Holy fuck, I will never look at long “piano fingers” the same.
The delicious whisper-light rasp of his tongue is killing me, and I don’t know if I’ve babbled some encouraging directions or he’s just paying attention, but…
the nerves aren’t always perfectly the same in me from day to day, and tonight I’m feeling best a little high up on the left side of my clit and he fucking finds the spot, and better yet he sticks with it like a goddamned champion of both intuition and patience.
My hips are rising and falling with my gasps that are increasingly close to sobs, and before I know it, I’m wringing the sheets.
But then as climax rumbles onto the scene and stampedes over me, I just want to be closer, closer, closer, and my arms shoot over my head so I brace my palms on the headboard and push against him like I never want him anywhere else.
My shocked scream fractures into laughter and I cover my face with both hands, but not as if I’m hiding—it’s more like I want to hold this joy so it can’t leave.
After the last tremors rattle through me and I settle, he moves up beside me, laying one big hand gently on my lower belly.
I lift my head and his arm tucks beneath it.
I can feel him hard against my hip, and I both want to fuck him stupid and to sleep for about ten hours, I’m so blissfully wrung out.
I side-eye peek at him. “I’m pleasantly surprised that you’re talented at more than piano.”
He kisses my shoulder, smiling. “Thank you, love.”
My heart clenches at the word, and I remind myself that it’s just a casual Briticism and people call complete strangers “love” at the grocery store in England and it doesn’t mean anything.
Also, I have zero interest in being in-love loved.
But for some idiotic reason I want to cry, and… it’s both in a happy and sad way.
I am losing my shit big-time. Hormones, right?
A wave of paranoia that he’ll see this on my face makes me turn away.
I roll onto my side, then scoot back to stay pressed against him.
I place my hand on top of the one he has lying open on the bed.
When his fingers close around mine, they’re a bit sticky, and it turns me on because I think of where they just were.
His dick is temptingly settled between my ass cheeks.
I trail my fingernails up his forearm and adjust my hips so he’s right at the gate.
He gathers me back against his chest. “Salvi,” he whispers simply.
I clasp one of his hands—the one I just came all over—and playfully bite the tip of his forefinger.
He curls it and enters my mouth a knuckle deep and I sweep him with my tongue, tasting myself.
When I suck a little, he groans and tilts his hips to slide that fantastic dick of his into me.
As he begins his slow thrusts, I rock sinuously back against him.
Goddamn, this guy has the best sex soundtrack I’ve ever heard, and that’s something you can’t engineer—it’s either right or it isn’t.
Some guys are businesslike-silent when they fuck (not great, but at least it isn’t distracting), and most are stupid sounding.
Like, it’s a monologue of the type of dirty talk that porn taught them, and they’re rattling off a litany of You love it, dontcha, baby?
and other such horseshit that never feels rhetorical enough to ignore.
But fuuuuuuuck, Alexander is pure erotic music.
I can hear every change in what he’s feeling with his catch of breath, his small groans that are a natural surrender to pleasure, his occasional dominant growl.
He doesn’t talk much, but when he does, it’s like hearing words spoken in my own language after years of speaking something else.
I raise one leg and hook it back over his, and as I reach to touch myself, his hand is there too.
Sometimes when that happens with a guy, I’ll shove his hand away so I can do what I need, and other times I cede and just let him fumble around.
But I thread my fingers into Alexander’s and move his hand how I want, so we’re both touching me.
Maybe it’s like how he can focus on both the left and right sides of a piano keyboard at once, but he has absolutely no trouble caressing me softly, even while he’s clearly getting close to his own climax.
My ankle flexes around his leg and I move my hips in time with what he seems to need, and that fucking auditory witchcraft of the way he sounds boosts me higher as his helpless and slightly shocked groan breaks.
I can feel him jerk inside of me, and his fragmented release of breath is a little like the way I tend to laugh when I come—something I’ve always felt self-conscious about, like people might not understand that I’m just happy.
Knowing he’s happy too does something unexpected, and yeah, definitely this is a new thing for me—I’m so…
here. A flicker of impending orgasm blooms on my horizon and I let go of his leg with my ankle and tense both thighs and push his hand against me, grinding my pussy into his palm as another peak hits, harder than expected for a second round.
As we both come down, the two cadences of our breathing play off each other and I listen to us and think syncopation, and I wonder if I should confess to Alexander that when he left Bahrain, the day after he bought that stupid record, I looked up a bunch of jazz stuff because I was curious about it, and… well, curious about him.
I try to fight the sleep that’s creeping over me.
The last time we had sex I was all, Thanks, dude, and rolled off him and was out like a light, so it seems like I should try to do the polite chitchat thing.
But he pulls my hair away from my neck in this nicely tired and lazy way and kisses the curve of my shoulder, then nuzzles against me and falls asleep first, still half inside me, which for some reason makes me really blissed out.
As I follow him into unconsciousness, I can’t help thinking, Maybe we’re sort of a good match.