Chapter 21 — The Merging117 #2
It could not hold, because that kind of care is its own confession.
My thumb caught the edge of her nipple on a pass that had no business being that high, and I felt it draw tight and felt her breath snag, and I did not apologize and I did not take it back.
I did it again, slower, on purpose, watching her face.
Her oiled hand slid off my hip and closed around my cock, once, slow and filthy with the oil, then remembered itself and went back to safe ground, except it went back lighter and left sooner and found its way home again.
The slips stopped being slips. A graze became a cup, a cup became a stroke, and the polite fiction that we were oiling each other for the tide dissolved, and we were just two people in a cloth box in the candlelight with our slick hands openly, unmistakably on each other.
Neither of us said anything. The room was full of soft sounds by then, the wet quiet of a dozen pairs oiling each other into one current, and that cover was the only thing letting us get away with it.
“This is the most insane thing we have ever done,” she whispered, very low, working oil down my chest.
“By a distance,” I said. “And we have a deep bench.”
“Don’t joke.”
“It’s joke or scream, Mom. I’ve chosen.”
“Then choose quieter.” But her hands had gone slow and certain on me, and her breath had dropped into the register I knew from the dark, and the word Mom hung there in the warm air between us doing what it always did, which was make the whole thing worse and better at once.
“All the way down now, loves,” Coral called, drifting between the stalls, her voice gone dreamy. “Lie together. Full length. Let the oil bring you to one skin. Don’t rush the tide. Let it rise on its own.”
So we lay down on the mat together, oiled and bare and full length, my mother on her back and me coming down over her the way the pairs around us were folding together.
And the second the whole slick length of her came against the whole slick length of me the last of the chore burned off and there was just this.
Her under me, warm and bare and breathing wrong.
Her oiled breasts flattening against my chest, slick and heavy and shifting with every breath she took.
The soft give of her stomach against mine.
Her knees coming up on either side of me, not a decision, just her body making room, and my cock hard against the inside of her thigh, the oil turning even that into something obscene, a slow wet drag of skin on skin with nothing in the world left between us.
No clothes. No clay. No dark to pretend we were asleep in. Nothing. Just oil and the rule.
“Sean.” Barely a breath. “We are right at the edge of something we can’t take back.”
“I know exactly where we are.”
“Then move your hips back.”
“You first.”
Neither of us moved back. That was the whole truth of it, said and done in the same second.
She had her hands flat on my back and she was not pushing me away, she was holding me there, and I had my face in her neck and my hips fitted to hers and I was moving, slow, the long oiled slide of me against her, against the heat of her, and she was rocking up to meet it, both of us breathing like the rite was a thing that hurt.
“We have to stop,” she whispered, and rolled her hips up into me.
“Should I stop?”
“No. God. Don’t you dare.” Then, a second later, agonized, “We have to stop.”
This was the conversation, such as it was, conducted an inch from each other’s mouths in a room full of murmuring cultists, the two of us saying we couldn’t and we mustn’t and we have to stop while neither of us stopped anything, every no a no with its hips moving, the most honest dishonest thing I have ever been part of.
The oil made it relentless. There was no catch, no friction, no point where the body got to rest, just the long slick glide of me against her over and over, finding the heat of her and dragging across it, and her getting wetter under the oil until I couldn’t tell the two apart, and her thighs falling open wider on each pass like the rule was a formality she’d stopped believing in.
“Look at me,” she breathed.
I lifted my head. The brand was gone. Deb was gone too.
There was just her, my mother, wrecked and oiled and open under me in the candlelight, looking up at me with no mask left of any kind, and that was the most naked either of us had ever been, more than the bodies, and I understood we were past the place where a person stops.
“I can’t keep not having this,” she whispered, and it wasn’t to the room and it wasn’t the rite and it wasn’t deniable, it was the truest thing she’d ever said to me. “I can’t, Sean. I have tried.”
“Then don’t.”
And I shifted, and she tilted her hips up to me at the same moment, the two of us moving as one current in the one way the rite had never intended, and the head of me notched against her, right there, right where a week and a half of dark had never let me go, the rule the only thing left in the entire world holding the line.
“Sean.” A warning and a plea welded into one word.
“I know.”
“We can’t. Not that. Anything but that.”
“I’m not.” I was shaking with not. “I won’t.”
And then the tide came up in both of us at once and took the decision somewhere neither of us was sitting, and I pushed, just slightly, just past where I had any right to, and the tip of me slipped inside her.
For one second I was in her. Actually in her, the heat of it closing around the head of me, both of us going rigid and silent with the enormity of the line we had just put a foot over, her nails biting into my back and a sound breaking out of her that she crushed against my shoulder, one second of the thing we were never, ever allowed.
Then the oil that had made the whole thing possible took it away again.
I shifted to get more of the angle and there was nothing to grip, everything slick, and I slid off her and out and against the wet of her thigh instead, and the loss of that single second of heat was so total that it finished me on the spot.
I came against her, all of it, every denied drop of the whole obscene week, on her stomach and her thighs and the oiled join of her, helpless, shaking, my face in her neck and the word breaking out of me before I could stop it, the one I was never supposed to say, low and wrecked against her skin.
“Mom.”
And she held me through it with both arms locked around my back, taking all of it on her body, her breath ragged in my ear, neither of us asleep, neither of us pretending, both of us having just discovered exactly where the bottom was by going one inch past it.
“Beautifully done, loves.” Coral’s voice, soft as a closing door, from somewhere above and behind me. “And let the tide recede.”
I had forgotten the room. That is what the rite does, it lets you forget the room, right up until it needs you to remember it.
I lifted my head and the candlelight swam and there was Coral, serene, hands folded, looking down at the two of us tangled and spent and over the line with an expression of pure professional pride, and around us the other pairs were already drawing apart at her word, breathing, unhurried, surfacing from their own merges like swimmers, and we had to do the same.
We had to peel ourselves off each other and lie back panting on our separate halves of one mat and let a young woman congratulate us, in front of everyone, for the realest and least permitted thing we had ever done.
“That,” Coral said to the room at large, glowing, “is what it looks like when two tides forget they were ever two. Do you feel how high the basin is right now? That’s them.
That’s this pair. The Keeper is going to hear about this one.
You held the crest and you did not fall.
After today, loves, there is only Diver. ”
She crouched between us, radiant, and laid a hand on each of our oiled shoulders.
And there it was. We had been brought to the precise edge of the only thing we actually wanted, we had gone a single inch over it, and at the exact second it became real the cult had reached in and called it finished and handed us a gold star for stopping, and the worst part, the part I will carry, was that we had not stopped.
We had been stopped. By an inch of oil and a girl with a serene voice and a rule we hadn’t broken so much as run straight into. Left wound and spent and one re-angle away from everything, and told we’d done beautifully, and that the prize for it was a deeper word.