Chapter Thirty-Two
Sharon
More Than This by Roxy Music
As my door clicks closed, I feel the bubble return.
Outside the wind howls and the rain rattles against the bay window in my living room, but inside is warm and cozy. And dark. I flick on a light.
When I see Kate in my flat, still in her uniform and with her coat already flung over the arm of my sofa, I take the easiest breath I’ve managed all week.
I take more of those easy, uncomplicated breaths as Kate dumps the bags she grabbed from her flat on our way here.
I almost feel normal as I watch her take one to my washing machine and start loading it with her uniforms.
With the machine whooshing into life, she stands and stretches.
She looks so comfortable here, in my kitchen, and it brings a gentle ache back into my lungs.
Pulling at the clip in her hair, she turns to me and I step closer to her.
By the time we’ve come together, her chignon has come loose and her thick black waves tumble down her back.
“I love your hair,” I say, playing with the ends. If I can’t tell her I love her as a whole, unique being, maybe I’ll spend the next twenty-four hours saying I love each individual part of her. Maybe that will be enough for me.
“I love yours.” She runs a hand through my short spikes that are completely brown now, the peroxide tips long gone. I can’t tell if I shiver at her use of the word ‘love’ or at the way her fingers feel against my scalp but either way, I’m practically trembling.
“I need it cutting. I normally go every few weeks, but…”
“You’ve been busy,” she says with a kind smile.
“I’ve been busy,” I repeat. I stop playing with her hair and instead wrap my arms around the top of her back, pressing her against me. Again I take a long, lazy breath. Was this all I needed to breathe easily again? Her body against mine? Her heartbeat seeking out my own?
“Sharon, I…” she stops, voice cracking.
“Don’t,” I whisper. I’m not ready to struggle for air again. I’m not ready for the bubble to burst mere minutes after it’s just cocooned around us once more. “Don’t say anything. Let’s just not talk, okay? About Danny, about us, about work, about AIDS, let’s just not talk about any of it.”
Kate is silent for a long time and then I feel her body relax against mine. “Okay,” she says finally on a deep exhale.
I wait to feel satisfied, content even, but no such feeling materialises. Good, I tell myself. I don’t want to feel anything in my heart. I don’t want to think anything in my head. I just want to feel my body, feel how it comes alive and hums and sings when it’s pressed up against Kate’s.
“Kate,” I say, and it’s not her name, it’s a question. Can I lose myself in you?
“Take me to bed, Sharon,” she answers. Yes.
With her delicate hand in mine, I turn to lead us down the short corridor, but she pauses and with what I think is a blush in her cheeks – but surely not, not Florence Fucking Nightingale – she picks up the other bag she packed. Then she follows me to my bedroom.
Once inside, and with a single bedside lamp turned on, I start to shed my clothes.
It’s Kate’s clothes that I want to take off, of course, but I’m suddenly feeling very self-conscious and very uncertain about how to instigate sex with Kate.
So often, it’s been her claiming me. She’s the one who grabs and squeezes and demands.
I’m the one who yields and follows and receives.
But I don’t want this to be one-sided, with one person in control, and I sense Kate hasn’t got it in her to be that person tonight.
Like I said, I just want to lose myself in her and I want her to lose herself in me.
So I’m going to offer myself to her, and the easiest, clearest way I can think to do that is to strip and stand in front of her naked.
She watches my every move with rapt attention. When I’m down to my underwear, she starts chewing on her lips. When my bra falls off my body, I hear her breath catch in her throat. And when my hands come to slide down my knickers, she reaches out a hand.
“Wait,” she says and she steps closer. “Let me.”
My hands fall by my side and with considerable effort I square my shoulders, elongate my neck.
I had hoped she’d pounce on me and her movement, our blended bodies, would dull the embarrassment I feel standing here naked, so thoroughly exposed.
The way she stands in front of me now, rolling her eyes down every inch of my full, fat flesh, I feel like the whole room would catch fire if someone lit a match near me.
“So fucking delicious,” she says in a low, serious voice. It’s a conscious decision to not argue with her, but I make it and I stick to it and for that I feel proud. “I can’t wait to eat you.”
My knees feel suddenly weak but I hold steady, apart from the shiver than runs up my spine.
Kate’s fingers slip into the waistband of my knickers and as she removes them, she goes down on her knees in front of me. She taps my feet to tell me to step out of the underwear and I do so while keeping my gaze straight ahead.
“Look at me,” she says in an achingly soft voice. “Watch me eat you.”
I look down and immediately justify my previous choice to not look at her kneeling in front of me.
Her eyes are bigger and darker than I’ve ever seen them.
Her pink lips are parted, ready to taste me.
Her tongue is wetting her bottom lip. It’s so deeply erotic and also so very tender.
I wonder if the memory of this will be as sweet as the reality.
I fucking hope it is.
There’s another tap, this time on my right leg, and I know she wants me to lift it, to give her access.
“Rest it on the bed,” she says, and I do, my bent knee giving me something close to stability.
“I don’t—” I start and then gather my thoughts. I need to say this the right way or I could ruin everything. “I don’t want you to only give. Tonight. I want us to be equal. Giving and taking. Does that make sense?”
Her eyes stay on mine, dark and liquid and bottomless. “That makes sense. And yes, we can do that. But please let me have this?”
“Have what?”
Her gaze drops from my face to my cunt. “You,” she says firmly before clutching my backside and shoving her mouth against me.
It’s primal and it’s hungry and it’s feral and I don’t know where her tongue starts and my flesh begins.
I let my whole body relax, sighing deeply.
It feels like she’s unravelling me from the inside out and I rock gently against her mouth – chasing the high, yes, but more than that, chasing the escape that only Kate has ever given me.
Raking my fingers through her hair, I grip her head and keep her where I want, need her.
As her licking, her sucking, her softest of little nips with her teeth get me closer and closer I want to call out her name.
But I hold myself back. I keep her name inside me, in my heart, where I suspect she will always stay.
When I do come, it’s with her hands clawing at my backside, like she can’t get enough of me, and it’s not me who moans, but her.
For as fast as it arrives, the orgasm isn’t a fleeting thing. It lingers, it pulses throughout my body, it stops my breath and possibly my heartbeat as it shakes me to my core. And Kate doesn’t let up throughout. It’s like she wants to extend the pleasure as long as she can, and still she moans.
But eventually, it does pass. The waves of pleasure melt into little tingles and sparks. My lungs start working again and my pulse thumps loudly in my ears, reminding me of my mortality.
Like I could ever forget. Like the last few months haven’t been a constant, stabbing, relentless reminder that tomorrow isn’t guaranteed for any of us.
Emotions wash over me, too many to name and feel.
I gently angle her mouth away from me, forcing her to look up. “I want you to use me, Kate. I want you to find your pleasure in me. Tell me what to do. Tell me how to please you.”
I watch her swallow. “You do, you already do.”
It’s the sweetest answer, but not the right one. I rephrase my statement. “Help me forget,” I say. “Help it all go away.”
She holds my gaze, steady and unfaltering, for what feels like minutes but can’t be. And then she nods, understanding completely.
“Lie down on the bed,” she says as she stands and starts undressing. Her uniform, belt and stockings become a puddle on the floor as I lie down on the middle of the bed.
“Open your legs,” she orders after giving me a once-over.
I do. I study her every move as she climbs up on the bed and lies down between my legs. She looks down at our bodies and when her pubic bone presses against the softness that buffers mine, I instinctively wrap my legs around her.
“Kiss me,” she demands. And it is a demand. There isn’t even a hint of question, not that my answer would be anything other than what I do, which is to give her my mouth.
Her kiss is hot and ravaging, rough and bruising, which shouldn’t be possible when she’s as small and delicate and feminine as she is. Not that I should be surprised. I know just how strong and capable and powerful this woman is. It’s why I love her.
How I wish I could tell her. How I wish she could hear those words and have them light her up the way just feeling them sparks something in me.
All these thoughts, all these wants, all these wishes slowly start to melt away as Kate’s hands move over my body.
She grabs handfuls of my breasts, pinches my nipples, rakes her fingernails down my belly before digging them into my hips.
When she starts to rock her body against mine, seeking friction, finding a perfect rhythm, the stresses and strains of the hardest week of my life start to disappear, bursting like bubbles.
“You don’t know what you do to me,” she mumbles into my cheek before resuming her attack on my mouth.
I don’t have words to reply. It’s all I can do to just sigh as she sucks on my bottom lip.
“You’ve upended my life,” she says as her hand slips between our bodies and heads south.
I groan, anticipating where it’s going.
“I was fine before you,” she continues and I hear it in her voice, the thin line between rage and regret she’s walking. “I was fine.”
“I was fine too,” I gasp out as I use my hands on her backside to press her to me. “I didn’t want this to happen.”
Kate’s short laugh is bitter and she shifts her weight so she’s elevated above me. “And yet, if we never saw each other again,” her eyes are wild as they stare into mine, “I’d be so far from fine.”
I hold my breath as her words sink in.
“So far from fine,” I repeat.
She gives me the smallest, saddest smile and then she’s gone. She’s pushed her body up and she’s rearranging her legs to interlock with mine, like we did last weekend. Again she’s facing away from me, her wet pussy covering mine and I moan when she starts to ride in earnest.
She thrusts back and forth over me with such speed, such ferocity that I have to watch her.
In a hurry, I prop my head up on the pillows so I can see it, see her.
Muscles flex all over her lean body as she rides me, her small buttocks shaking slightly.
She has a hand on each of my knees and she rocks her pelvis in short, sharp movements that have pleasure building at an uncontrollable rate behind my clit.
It builds and builds, spreading through my belly and down my thighs.
I know watching her is egging it on. I know seeing her like this, so in control of our pleasure and yet also so frantically free to move in whatever way she has to, is just as responsible as the way our pussies rub together.
“Kate,” I say, allowing myself. “Oh, God, Kate.”
Her head turns to look back at me, her bottom lip under her top teeth. She hums out a soft moan, her eyes on me, and for a second, I think there are tears in them. They are shining and misty and…
She turns back, facing away from me. Her hips move quicker and I forget about Kate’s eyes.
I forget about everything but the orgasm that is taking over my body and blissfully, mercifully, my mind.
It’s light and air and sweetness. It’s sunshine and warmth and hope.
It takes me away from reality and cocoons me in a fantasy, where life is nothing but joy and laughter and love.
It does exactly what I asked Kate to do.
When Kate throws her head back, her hair tumbling down her back, and releases a noise that is as much pain as pleasure, I reach for her instinctively. My hands grip her waist, steadying her, telling her, I’m here.
Her hips slow, her body shakes once, twice and then she stills, her heavy breathing the only sound in the room.
Exhaustion, it seems, overwhelms her, and she falls back against me. I wrap my arms around her, turn us so we’re lying side by side, our legs intertwined, and then I close my eyes, knowing when I open them again, the fantasy will be over and real life has to begin again.