Chapter Seven #2
Not the first time it had come to this, not even the first couple of times, but it was fresh and unaccustomed enough each time that they were still learning each other.
They got the blouse awkwardly off between them, his hands moved to cup her breasts, tongue seeking a nipple, but she scotched the move—grabbed him forcefully by the wrist, put one foot abruptly up on the chair and dragged his hand under the lifted folds of her skirt.
This was new. She pressed his hand up between her legs, he found her naked there, wet and eager and open, and they both gasped with the hot, lewd shock of it.
His cock throbbed suddenly tighter, hard as the pump-action slide on the McCulloch, aching with the new rush of blood.
Niamh moaning now, oh-like-that-oh-yes as his fingers moved in her, and she was reaching down, fumbling impatiently with his belt.
He helped with his spare hand as best he could, got his trousers opened.
His cock wagged out and she grabbed it, squeezed it viciously around the shaft with one long fingered hand.
He worked his own fingers faster, deeper.
Her moaning notched up, became a guttural, rhythmic grunting, gathering pace.
He got her breast in his mouth, sucked up the nipple, breathed in her scent.
She let go his cock as if it were suddenly burning hot, threw back her head.
Gripped his wrist tightly with both hands under her skirt, pressing, pushing, urging him on, until, abruptly, violently, shuddering, she came.
Last time had been hot and rushed and frantic, but this—this was more raw and abandoned still, fresh vertiginous depths opening up under them.
Niamh collapsed over him in the chair, head still tilted back, a loose wide grin spilled across her face like dribbled wine.
He held her up as best he could, only vaguely aware of the throbbing demand in his abandoned cock.
She looked down at him, wiped tear-trace out of her eyes with the back of her hand.
“Was it the chocolates?” he asked her, grinning.
She laughed, involuntary, unguarded. Felt his cock wagging against her breasts and clutched it again.
She let herself slide artfully down into a disarrayed heap at his feet, eyes never leaving his face.
Got elbows up on the chair edge, looked up at him through tousled, oil-black locks.
Her ’do had come loose in the festivities, and then some.
“C’mere, strange man,” she said throatily.
Then she took his aching cock in both hands, plunged her soft, warm lips down over the glans.
And when—very shortly after that—he exploded in her mouth, she gripped him hard in her pumping fist and sucked, until her cheeks pulled concave and he thrashed and arched in the chair and, eventually, begged her to stop.
—
Later, lying awake amid the tangled sheets and blankets of his cramped bed in his cramped bedroom, listening to Niamh sleep at his side, he sifted the storming intensity of the encounter for sense.
As much as anything, he supposed, it was the times.
The war, the Forest, the Huldu—all the old certainties were in their graves, the old promises defunct.
Faith and flag and patriotic song had failed, catastrophically, rammed the iceberg, were sinking fast. The old order was on its arse.
Like some dissolute aristo clan, the House of the West had spent wildly in the coin of noble causes, duty and honor, until all that remained was a debt-ridden, derelict ancestral seat; faded structural glory, stacked with mildewed old masters and chipped Greek bric-a-brac; dripping water ingress from a roof that could no longer be patched and paid for with promissory notes.
Now, the flappers and the Jack the Lads were chopping up furniture to make a bonfire in the great hall, jittery syncopated music echoed off the walls in time with the leaping shadows cast by the flames, and faced with the frenzy of it all, most just shrugged assent and joined the dance.
Life was something you snatched off the tray as it went by, and when you drank, you drank deep. Because who knew how long this party would last.
Against that backdrop, two lonely people who didn’t really know each other all that well had collided in the drafty, high-ceilinged empty spaces of their lives, known a good thing when they saw it, and so clung to the warmth it gave.
But it wasn’t just that.
Not this time around, not with what he’d just felt go shuddering between them.
Niamh mumbled in her sleep, twisted in the mess of the sheets. He gathered her in, spooned her, murmured reassurances in her ear.
Was she hot to the touch?
He put a hand on her brow. Couldn’t tell. Her skin always felt warmer than his anyway.
From her lungs, the soft, edge-of-hearing crackle and wheeze, like a radio being tuned a thousand miles away.
She’d finally seen a doctor in the summer. Had still not shared with Duncan what she’d been told. And he carefully hadn’t asked. But he saw how a haunted stillness crept in on her at times, how her bright and brash colleen humor could suddenly corrode into something with a more ragged edge.
He looked at her sleeping face and, as if she felt the weight of his gaze, she stirred. Blinked awake, stretched.
“Mhmm. Midnight already?”
“No. We’ve got a while.”
“That a hint, then?”
He forced a smile. “Go back to sleep, succubus. You’ve had all the fun you’re going to get out of me tonight.”
“Drained you dry, did I?” She licked her lips, vampish parody of Greta Schroder in Murnau’s Carmilla—they’d caught it a couple of weeks ago at the Scala. Under the sheets, she grabbed his shrunken cock. “All that sweet, sweet woodsman’s elixir?”
He forced a laugh to go with his forced smile. But for just a moment, he wondered.
Because a whole lot of shite was talked, wasn’t it, about what miraculous cures and balms could be found deep in the Forest, if you only had the nerve to go; what lurid properties those who spent time there might come out imbued with, which they might then bestow in turn.
The Americans he’d met in the trenches had a sharply apt name for the con—snake oil.
He’d known woodsmen who exploited the new superstitions unmercifully, got themselves taken care of time and again in back rooms and brothels and some of the more bohemian salons up and down the country.
One or two witches and wise women he’d heard of pulled the trick, too, though the favors they extracted were rarely known to be as blunt.
Maybe she saw some of this in his face. She poked him in the ribs. “I’m fuckin’ kiddin’ you, Duncan. We’re just passing the time here, all right? Now for Christ’s sake, wipe that look off your face and give me a fuckin’ kiss.”
She puckered up and he leaned over her to do it.
“Go back to sleep,” he said with an attempt at lightness. “You’ve got lots of time.”
But he felt how she winced with the words, and he cursed himself, too late.