18. Ariah #3
Then he pulls out suddenly. I make a sound of protest that would embarrass me in daylight.
“What - where…”
“Quiet.” He drops to his knees on the cleared patch of kitchen tile and yanks my hips to the edge of the counter. “I need to taste you. I’ve needed it for six fucking weeks.”
He puts his mouth on me like a man who has something to prove. Wine and tomato and the smell of basil still hang in the air. He licks into me with filthy thoroughness, sucking on my clit while two fingers fuck me open again, curling against that spot that makes my thighs shake around his head.
“Pietro - we don’t have - oh fuck…”
“Quiet,” he mutters against my cunt, and then he’s doubling down, relentless, the flat of his tongue and the point of it alternating until I can’t think.
My fist stuffs itself against my mouth. My other hand fists in his hair.
The first orgasm hits small and sharp against his tongue - a stolen thing, mean and bright - and he stands up looking wrecked and smug, mouth shiny, cock still jutting hard from his open pants, a smear of me on his chin.
“Now,” he says, and drives back into me in one thrust that punches a cry out of both of us.
He fucks me through the aftershocks without mercy.
One hand braced on the cabinet behind my head, the other gripping my thigh hard enough to bruise.
Every snap of his hips shoves me back against the counter.
A plate rattles in the sink. Somewhere under the stove that button is still lost. I wrap my legs tighter and take it - take all of it - because my body has always been a traitor and tonight it’s winning the war.
“Missed this pussy,” he pants against my ear. “Missed fucking my wife. Missed the way you look when you’re about to come and you’re mad about it…”
“I’m not - mad…”
“Liar. Terrible liar.” He laughs, breathless, and bites my shoulder hard enough to mark. “You’re furious that this still works. That I can still make you this wet. That you put on the nice lace for a man you claim you’re done with.”
“I hate you,” I gasp again, and this time it comes out half a moan.
“Come again,” he orders. “Come on my cock and then tell me this doesn’t mean anything. I dare you.”
I hate that it works. I hate that his voice in that register still owns me.
He changes the angle slightly, grinding deep on every thrust, and his thumb finds my clit again with devastating accuracy.
The second orgasm builds differently from the first - lower, heavier, a wave instead of a spark - and when it hits it’s blinding and mean, my whole body locking up as I muffle the sound into his collar hard enough that I taste fabric and skin and the salt of us.
He follows a handful of thrusts later, burying himself deep and spilling inside me with a low, broken “Ariah” that sounds like a prayer he doesn’t deserve to say. I feel the heat of it. The pulse. The way he holds me through it like he’s afraid I’ll disappear the second he lets go.
We don’t make it to the bedroom. We don’t need to.
For a few suspended minutes we stay like that - him still inside me, my forehead against his, both of us breathing like we’ve run a race.
His hands are warm on my waist. My dress is hiked around my hips.
There’s come sliding down my thigh and a shattered wine glass on the floor and the taste of him still on my tongue and a button under the stove that I’ll find weeks from now and not know what to do with.
His thumb strokes my hipbone, absent and tender. I let myself have three more breaths of this. Three. That’s all I can afford before the walls have to go back up.
Afterward, I pull back.
My breath comes ragged, my heart pounding against my ribs. Pietro’s eyes are dark, his lips swollen, his hands still warm on my waist.
“This doesn’t change anything,” I say.
The words land between us like a wall reconstructing itself brick by brick.
“Ariah…”
“I mean it.” I slide off the counter, putting distance between us, yanking my dress down with hands that won’t quite stop shaking.
“This was - it doesn’t mean I’ve forgiven you.
It doesn’t mean the separation is over. It doesn’t mean anything except that apparently I still…
” I can’t finish that sentence. Can’t admit out loud that I still want him, that my body hasn’t gotten the message my mind has been sending for weeks.
“Okay,” he says quietly. “Okay. Whatever you need.”
“What I need is for you to go.”
He nods, retrieving his jacket from the chair where he left it. At the door he pauses, turning back to look at me with an expression I can’t read.
“For what it’s worth,” he says, “it meant something to me. It still means something.”
Then he’s gone, and I’m alone in my kitchen with the dishes from his surprisingly good dinner and the taste of him still on my lips, and I know - I know with absolute certainty - that I’m losing the war with myself.
I touch the lopsided bracelet still on my wrist.
This doesn’t change anything, I tell myself.
But I know even as I think it that everything has already changed.