Chapter 19 — Tasting the Tide101 #2
“Someone will hear,” she breathed, and her own hand flew up to cover her mouth, and nobody heard, because she did the muffling herself.
I stayed exactly where she needed me until she had no words left at all, just the fist in my hair and the hand crushed over her own face, and then she came against my mouth, her whole body curling up off the linen, shaking, behind a curtain, in the middle of the afternoon, in a room packed with cultists.
It was, hand to God, the proudest moment of my time on Saltren.
“Swap now, loves,” Coral called over the curtain tops, bright and serene. “Offerers receive. Receivers offer. Let the tide turn.”
So we turned, and the nerves came flooding back into our little box all at once.
I lay down on the table where she had just been, the linen still warm and damp from her, and she knelt up beside me, flushed and still wet from what I’d done to her, her thighs not quite closed, and she looked down at the fact of me, hard and bare and with nowhere on earth to hide it, and I watched her hesitate before she had even started.
“You ready?” she asked, which was my own line from a minute ago, handed back to me.
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” She didn’t move. Her eyes had dropped and fixed on my cock, and she said it again, lower, more to herself than to me. “Okay. Then I’ll... I’ll start kissing you.”
She made herself do it. She kissed my chest, once, and again, and worked her way down, slow, over my stomach, the trail of hair below it, until her mouth was an inch off me, and there she stopped. Just stopped, breathing.
Because there was a difference, I understood, between losing herself behind a curtain where no one could see and being the one bent over me with her head moving where a hundred people could do the arithmetic, and the brand, even now, even as gone as she was, would not let her be seen to be that.
She had a limit, and the limit was being watched.
Coral’s head came around the edge of the curtain.
Of course it did. She had been reading the room the way she read everything, for exactly this, the hesitation, the soul gripping its own release.
“You’re clenching, lovely,” she said to my mother, gentle, stepping into our little stall and drawing the curtain shut behind her as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
“I can see it. You’re so close to giving him this and you’re holding on.
May I show you? It helps, sometimes, to watch it done without fear. ”
And before either of us could find a single word, before I could make any sound that was language, Coral knelt down between my knees in her seafoam linen, calm as a woman demonstrating a yoga pose, and took my cock into her mouth.
I would like to report a complicated reaction to this.
I did not have one. The reaction was extremely simple and I am not proud of it.
Coral was good at it, with the same total unselfconscious commitment she brought to thanking lemon water, narrating nothing now, just showing, and my mother knelt frozen at her shoulder watching a serene young cult coordinator demonstrate, on the man she had raised, the exact thing she had just been too proud to do.
My mother’s eyes came up off the spectacle and found mine, and we just looked at each other over the top of Coral’s bent head, the single most surreal eye contact of my life.
“Is that...” she mouthed, barely any sound to it at all. “Is that okay?”
That she would ask. That, in the middle of all of this, she would stop and check.
“It is extremely okay,” I breathed back. “It is the most okay I have been in days. Please do not stop her on my account.”
And then Coral, who did everything with conviction, got lost in the conviction.
I felt it happen, the moment the demonstration stopped being a demonstration, the moment the serene instructor went somewhere else behind her eyes and her hands tightened on my thighs and the whole rhythm of it turned from teaching into something she had stopped doing for anyone but herself.
It lasted maybe four seconds before she caught it.
She came up off me fast, a bit of stickiness still on her lower lip, flushed for the first time I had ever seen her, the serenity cracked clean down the middle.
“There.” Breathless, rebranding in real time, her voice not quite her own.
“You see. No fear. The body just knows. The energy in here is very high. Very high. I think the two of you should hold the rest of it. Finish tonight. When you’re alone, and you can really focus, with no distractions.
Yes. That’s better. That’s the loving thing. ”
She stood, smoothed the linen, would not look at either of us, and was gone through the curtain, fast, and the rite, for us, was over.
I sat on a spa table at full mast and abandoned, hungover, blown halfway to glory by a cult and then unplugged from the wall, while my mother stared at the swaying curtain Coral had vanished through with an expression I could not read at all.
We did not talk about it. We went to dinner, and to the evening circle, and back to the room with the thing Coral had started still live in the air between us, and I lay down on my side of the bed braced for the usual, the dark, the careful inch, the long nightly performance of two people falling asleep.
She left the light on.
That was the first thing that was different.
She left the little warm lamp burning, and she did not lie down.
She sat on the edge of the bed in the light, where she could see all of me and I could see all of her, and she looked at me for a long moment, and I watched her decide something behind her eyes.
“Coral said to finish it,” she said.
“Mom.” It came out as half a question.
“She did. She said it was the loving thing.”
“Coral says a lot of things. Most of them are printed on candles.”
“I know.” A breath of something that was almost a laugh. “I know exactly what Coral is. But I started something today, in front of all those people, and I lost my nerve, and a stranger had to step in and finish it for me. I’ve been thinking about that all day, and I find I cannot stand it.”
And then she stopped talking about it and moved.
She came over me in the lamplight and put her mouth to my chest, picking up exactly where she had lost her nerve that afternoon, and this time she did not stop.
She kissed down me, slow and deliberate, my chest, my stomach, the trail of hair below it, no curtain now and no hundred people and no nerve left to lose, just the warm lamp and the whole weight of her decision.
By the time her mouth reached the crease of my hip I had to say it.
“You don’t have to prove anything,” I said. “Not to her, not to the room, not to me.”
“I’m not doing it for her.” Her breath was warm against me. “Or for the rite. I want to know I can. I want to be a person who finishes what she starts.”
“That’s a very inspirational reason for a blowjob.”
She lifted her head, and there was something fierce in her face. “Don’t. Don’t call it that.”
“Okay.”
“It isn’t that.”
“Okay,” I said again, softer, because I could see how badly she needed it not to be that, needed it to be some other thing with a kinder name, and I was not going to be the one to take that from her. “It isn’t that.”
And whatever it was, whatever we were calling it or refusing to call it, I had run clean out of the patience to wait for the right word. I just needed it. Her mouth. Now.
She took me in her hand, and then her mouth.
The second her mouth closed over me a need went through me so vicious it frightened me.
The whole day had wound me to a wire. The afternoon had left me primed and ringing and denied, and now it was her, finally her, doing it on purpose with the lights on and her eyes holding mine, and I tried to be still, tried to be good, and I managed it for about ten seconds.
Then my hips came up off the bed to meet her without asking me first.
She made a sound around me and took it, her palm flattening on my stomach, not to push me down but to steady the both of us, so I did it again, helpless, thrusting up into her mouth while she kept her eyes on mine, and she let me, she wanted me to, I could see it in her face.
“I’m not going to last,” I got out. “I’m sorry.”
She didn’t come off me to answer. She hummed, low, a yes, and took me deeper, and that was the end of it.
I came in her mouth embarrassingly fast, the word breaking out of me before I could stop it, Mom, the one I was never supposed to say, and she stayed down and took all of it, her hand working me through every last pulse, and didn’t let go until I was wrung out and shaking and apologizing, actually apologizing, for how fast.
“Stop apologizing.” She came up, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “I did that. I wanted to know I could, and I did.”
“You did extremely well,” I said to the ceiling, demolished. “Gold star. Straight to Diver. The tide is so proud of you.”
“Shut up, Sean.” But she was smiling now, properly, the first proper one in what felt like a week, and she very nearly meant it.
She lay down beside me after, in the lamplight, on top of the covers, not pretending.
That was the part that took the floor out from under me.
Not the act. The after. Every other time we had done this we had done it asleep, or close enough, and rebuilt the wall by morning and agreed without agreeing that the night had happened to two other people.
This time she had turned the light on, and looked at me, and finished what she started on purpose, and now she was lying here with her head on my arm not pretending she wasn’t.