CHAPTER 16 #2
“I want your mouth on my pussy. That is the sentence. You can have it twice if you want it twice.”
He knelt, and it did not read as kneeling, because he does every action at one weight. He took the rest of the dress off me. Then he put his hand open on my thigh and asked with it there, which is the part nobody would believe about him.
“Can I put my mouth on your clit?”
“Yes. Now, please.”
He was slow about it and he did not speed up when I asked him to. His tongue started flat across my clit and narrowed from there. Two fingers went into my pussy to the knuckle and stayed without moving while he kept working. The wall took my weight, because my legs had stopped agreeing to.
“You are so wet I can taste the whole night going out of you,” he said, and then he went back down.
I came against his mouth with one hand in his hair. He stayed with it until my palm went to his forehead, and he came off me before I had pushed.
“Tell me what that was,” he said, from down there, with his hand open and unmoving on my hip.
“That was the first thing all night that happened to me because I said it could.”
“Then tell me the next one and I will do that instead of guessing at it.”
“Sit on the bed,” I said, when my voice came back. “I want your cock in my mouth and I want you to let me set the pace.”
He sat, and he put his hands behind him on the covers so that he could not steer.
“Open your mouth,” he said, and then he took it back, because it was the only order he gave me all night. “If you want to. Only if you want to.”
“I want to. Keep your hands where they are.”
I got his belt open and his cock out. He was hard and warm and he made almost no sound, and the little he made came out through his teeth.
His hand came up to my jaw and stopped there without pushing.
I took him deeper. His cock got harder in my mouth, and when I had him close he gathered my hair in his fist and lifted me off.
“You are too good at that, and that is exactly why I am stopping you,” he said. “You do not get to finish me that way tonight.”
“Why not that way tonight?”
“Because a man put his hand on you tonight,” he said. “I want to be inside you when I finish. Am I allowed?”
“You are allowed. Say the whole thing first.”
“I am going to put my cock in your pussy. Tell me if you want something else instead.”
“I want that. Ask me again in ten seconds and I will answer louder.”
He opened a condom and put it on before he turned me toward the bed. The small pause made the next question feel more deliberate, not less.
He put me on the bed on my knees and asked before every part of it.
The asking had gotten slower instead of faster, and lower, and more exact, until every question had a floor under it.
He went in and stopped and let me get used to him.
His hand gathered my hair at the crown and held.
The radiator ticked twice before he moved.
He was quiet and precise and he did not let up. My face was in the covers, and my whole attention had gone down to the one place where he was. When my arms gave out he took my weight with his other hand and did not comment on it.
“Ask me again,” I said, into the covers. “You have not asked me anything for a minute and I have started to notice the gap.”
“Do you want me to keep going,” he said, “or do you want it slower, or do you want me to stop and put my mouth back on your pussy until you cannot hold your own head up?”
“Keep going. Say my name when you decide the rest of it.”
Then he pulled out and turned me over onto my back. He took my chin between his thumb and his finger.
“Look at me,” he said. “I want your face for the end of it. May I have it?”
“Take it. Take all of it.”
His eyes are slate, and the lamp at knee height put a line under them, and there was nothing else in that room to look at. He came back into me. His thumb found my clit and worked it while he moved.
“You are the only warm thing in this building,” he said, in the voice he uses for a number he is sure of.
“Say the rest of it. There is always a rest of it with you.”
“You are beautiful when you stop being polite,” he said. “That is the rest of it.”
I came the second time with my heels on the backs of his thighs and his thumb still working my clit. The plaster took the sound and carried it three doors along, into a room with nobody in it.
“That’s it,” he said, once, and he did not repeat it, and he did not need to.
Then he lost the precision for eleven seconds. He finished with his forehead against my collarbone, saying my first name into my skin, over and over, low. A man says one word like that when it is the only thing keeping him in the room.
The radiator ticked its way down toward whatever temperature it believes in. He put his hand open on my sternum and left it there. It went up and came down with me. He said nothing for a long while, and the nothing had weight in it.
“You can ask me your question,” he said. “You have been holding it since the car.”
“I know. I am picking the words so that you cannot get out of it with a fact.”
“Ask me an easy one first,” he said, and his hand did not change its weight on me while he offered it. “I will answer that one honestly, and then you will have a rate to work from, and you like a rate.”
“I do not want a rate tonight. I want the one question, and I want it to cost you something.”
I counted the questions he had asked me instead.
I have the number and I did not hand it over.
He would have kept it, and it is the only thing I came away with tonight that nobody at that table has a claim on.
His hand went down my body and rested for a moment where he had been, two fingers above my clit, not moving, waiting to be told.
Then it came back up and settled open on my sternum again, and it stayed there.
Three doors along, on my own desk, under a lamp I leave burning, there is a hardbacked book in my own left-handed writing.
Nobody has asked to see it since it came out of the Ledger Room.
That is the part that keeps me up. A building this careful about paper does not misplace paper, and it does not forget to ask, and it has not asked.
His hand shifted once and settled again. The strip of light under his door had not been broken all night. Outside the window the branches were doing nothing whatsoever, and the bell at the college was ten minutes away from being wrong again.
I turned my head so that I was talking to the side of his jaw and not to the ceiling.
“You asked me before every single thing tonight. When you were fourteen, in this building, did anybody ask you once?”