Chapter 60
PAUL WAS IN SUCH A good mood on the ride back to town that he slid his hand up my thigh and inside my underwear.
The driver was saying something to me in Italian from the front seat, but I didn’t know what, so I just kept smiling and nodding while Paul raked his finger back and forth.
Had I been older or more mature, I might have swatted his hand away, indicating that this was not the time or the place, but I was neither of those things, so I let him keep doing precisely what he pleased.
When the driver finally arrived in front of our hotel, it was all I could do to mumble a “Grazie” and climb out of the car.
Paul paid the fare and hurried me inside the hotel and up to our room, where we were out of our clothes in less than fifteen seconds.
He was ready to go and so intent on putting it somewhere that I barely had time to get over to my side of the bed, where I kept my diaphragm in the drawer of my bedside table.
“Just a sec!” I nearly sang as I hurried to the bathroom to insert it.
Back in the bedroom, I tried to pick up where we’d left off. But what I really wanted was to return to the backseat of the cab, where Paul had been forced to think a little smaller. “I liked what you were doing back there in the taxi.”
He pulled me onto the bed and climbed on top of me, kissing my throat and collarbone and breasts. “Oh yeah?” he said as he tugged at a nipple with his teeth.
“Mmm-hmm,” I said, encouragingly. “It felt like I was going to explode.” I wasn’t lying.
Those little jolty movements he’d managed in the car hadn’t been dissimilar to the pulse of the damned shower nozzle, and now I understood that a lot of slow and steady attention could add up to something big.
“Do you want to try it again? That thing you were doing, with your finger.”
“Oh, baby,” he said, his breath hot in my ear. “We are way past that.”
I wasn’t confident enough to argue with him.
So when he entered me a few seconds later, all I could do was let out a low moan and raise my hips to meet his.
He began to move inside me, slowly at first and then faster, and I arched my back and begged for more of him, which he gave me in short, measured thrusts.
The elusive feeling I’d been after—whatever it was I’d felt in the backseat of the cab—was gone, and it wasn’t coming back, and that knowledge left me feeling frustrated and maybe even a little sad.
Paul’s orgasm came with little warning. “You are so sexy,” he mumbled into my hair when it was over and he had gone limp.
I nodded, not because I agreed with him, necessarily, but because I was delirious with want.
Two months ago, I wouldn’t have called it that.
I’d have ascribed the dull ache in my belly to some other emotion like love or joy or even satisfaction.
That’s how screwed up I was about the whole thing.
And it made me wonder, if I couldn’t recognize and name my own desire, what right did I have to expect Paul to?