CHAPTER 8 #2
He puts his hand flat against my sternum, just above the medallion.
He leaves the silver where it has come to rest, his palm settling around it, the angel held between us.
I feel his palm and I feel the silver against my skin and the cool of the silver and the warm of his hand and the slow swell of the centrifuge under my back. He breathes once through his nose.
"I have been waiting four years to see something I lacked the name of. Tonight I see it. Look at what you are."
He kneels.
A sound has left my throat by the time I hear it.
He puts his mouth at my clit with no preamble and no apology, and the heat of him is sudden and exact.
His tongue is patient, slow as a metronome set to adagio.
His hands hold my hips against the steel; the steel under me is cold along the long flat of my spine, the lamp above me is warm at my eyelids, the centrifuge hums, and I am counting the four-second cycles without meaning to, one and two and three and four, and his tongue moves and my count stops.
I am wet. I have been wet since the corridor.
He licks me slowly, end to end, and his tongue stops at my clit and presses, and the press is the firm of a tongue at the firm of a clit and the press is a thing I have never been given like this — as a sentence rather than a verb, complete in itself.
I make a sound. He stays silent. His hands flatten on my thighs.
"Please."
He held the pace exactly where it had been, the same metronome pressure, and added two fingers, slid in slow, slid in to a depth I felt in my belly, curled them once.
He stayed silent. The centrifuge hummed.
I came around his fingers with my wrists pulling against the silk above my head and the silk held and his fingers kept their rhythm and his tongue kept theirs, and the coming was a long four-count I let pass without counting.
He held me there. His mouth slowed. His fingers stilled inside me. He looked up the length of my body.
"Stay with my voice. There. Tell me you are with me."
"Yes."
"Color."
"Green."
"Still here."
"Still here."
He gave me a breath. He gave me four. He pulled his fingers out of me, slowly.
The wet of me was on his hand and he left it there, glossing the skin between his knuckles.
The strap warmed and warmed against my wrists.
He stood up between my thighs, still fully dressed, white coat over black roll-neck over black trousers.
He undid his belt with his left hand, eyes on my face. He opened the front of his trousers.
I felt his cock before I saw it. He bent over me, the long line of the coat against the inside of my thigh, and he put the head of his cock at the slick of me and held there.
"I am going to take you slowly, Elena. I am going to keep your wrists where they are. I am going to look at your face the whole time. Give me yes."
"Yes."
"With me. There."
He slid in. The slide was long and exact.
The slide filled me to a depth I felt in my throat.
The centrifuge hummed. The lamp warmed my face.
He held inside me for a breath. He pulled out long and slid in long again.
He held the pace as he had set it. The silk at my wrists warmed against my pulse, and I felt my pulse in my wrists where the silk held and in my clit where his mouth had been and at the base of my throat, and the pulses ran at slightly different rhythms and I tried to count them, lost the count, and let it go.
He said, low:
"Look at the whole of you. Look at it. I have been waiting to see it."
I came around him with the strap tight at my wrists and his hand flat against my sternum and his eyes on my face and his cock deep in me, and the word please was leaving me before I caught the shape of it in my mouth.
The word kept leaving me. He held inside me the long beat after I came, watching my face, his expression held exactly where it had been, his rhythm held exactly where it had been, the slow steady press of him continuing until I was lying still under him and breathing four-counts on the centrifuge's swell.
"Still with me."
"Yes."
"Once more."
I said yes. He moved again. He had said he would be the most deliberate of them and he was.
He took me through it. He took me to the third coming and held me there at the very edge and kept me there and kept me there and kept me there, and then he came in me with my wrists tied above my head and his hand on my sternum, and he came on a long quiet four-count I let pass without counting, and that I felt in my belly long after.
He stayed in me for a long while.
His hand was still at my sternum. The medallion was warm where the silver had warmed against me and warm where his palm had warmed it from above.
He breathed once through his nose. He bent and put his mouth at the inside of my left wrist, where the silk met the pulse.
He kissed the wrist. He kissed the other.
He pulled the tail of the silk and the knot opened.
He took the strap off my wrists and laid it across my belly.
He took my left wrist in his hand and turned it to the lamp. There was a faint pink line where the silk had held; a press the skin would lose by morning. He held the wrist to his mouth and kissed the line. He did the same with the right.
"There. There you are."
"Hippocratic," I said. I said it because I wanted him to hear me hold the word in my mouth without using it. I wanted him to hear what it sounded like when I said it as a word I could choose.
He held still, eyes steady, the word landing on him as a chart number lands.
"I hear it. The room is here if you need it to end."
"The room can stay. I am telling you the word still works."
He smiled, very small. The first time he had smiled in front of me.
"Elena. Good."
He carried me. He decided for both of us.
He lifted me off the table as he would lift a patient — under the shoulders, under the knees — and carried me across the white epoxy floor toward the door of his office at my right.
His trousers were still open at the belt, his coat hanging loose over the unfastened shirt.
He carried me as I was, in the strap that was loose across my belly and the medallion at my sternum and the wet of him on my thighs.
The bath had been drawn before the scene began.
A deep porcelain tub against the back wall, full to within four inches of the rim, the water still steaming, the surface dark gold under a single shaded sconce.
He lowered me into the water with the same exact care a senior resident takes with a patient too sedated to know what is happening, except I was not sedated and I knew exactly what was happening.
The water was just under what my skin would tolerate. The hot worked into the inside of my wrists where the silk had been. He stepped out of his trousers and his shirt and his roll-neck in the same unhurried order he had ordered me out of mine, folded each as he removed it, and got in behind me.
I sat between his knees. His chest was at my back. His left hand came around me and lay flat against my sternum where it had lain on the table, and the medallion warmed against his palm.
"Head, please. Down. There."
I let my head down against his thigh. His thigh was warm and slick from the water; his right hand cradled my nape.
He took a small white sponge from a dish at the tub's rim, soaked it, squeezed the water across my collarbones; it ran down my chest and across the medallion and over the soft of my belly.
He worked the sponge across my shoulders.
Down my arm. Across my left wrist and over the pink line where the silk had held.
He brought the sponge to his lips and breathed against the wrist. Then he washed the right. He used a soft bar of unscented Castile that smelled only of itself.
He spoke, sometimes, while he worked. Very low.