CHAPTER 13 #2
I cross the room. I do not hurry. I do not slow.
I put my hand at his sternum over the white shirt and I feel the wrong temperature through the cotton — the cool of a body that runs at ninety-two point six unless it has fed — and I let my palm rest there for two beats.
He does not move. His chest does not rise.
He is not breathing because he is letting me put my hand on him without the distraction of his breath.
"Breathe," I say.
He breathes.
I slide my hands up his lapels. I push the jacket off his shoulders.
He helps me by the smallest economy of motion; the jacket goes to the chaise.
I work the silk tie out of his collar the slow way, the way he loosened it — I slide it through the collar rather than pulling — and I let it fall to the rug.
I do the shirt buttons. I undo the first two. The third one my hands are not steady.
He puts his right hand over my right hand and holds it there for one beat, the palm cool, the long fingers spread over my knuckles, the knuckle on the back of his right hand that is a half-millimeter wider than the others — old wound — against my thumb.
The shaking stops. I do the rest of the buttons.
The shirt opens. He shrugs it off; it joins the jacket.
He is in the thin cotton undershirt now, three-quarter sleeves, the left forearm covered.
Pale, finely muscled, the long line of clavicle, a small ridge of scar on the back of his right hand visible as he lifts his arm out of the sleeve of the dress shirt.
No body hair. The ribcage smooth. The undershirt is the only thing between me and his skin from the wrists up to the collarbone.
I do not understand yet why the undershirt is on.
I do not ask. I have my own piece of clothing he has not yet touched.
"Quinn."
"Vance."
His right hand finds the zip at the side of my dress.
He pulls it down the seam — slowly, the bottom-up sound of jersey opening to skin — and the dress goes loose at my shoulders.
He slides it down. He kneels for the second the dress crosses my hips.
He looks up at me from that height once.
The pale gray pupils have widened. He stands. The dress is on the rug.
I am in a plain black bra and matching panties and the black opaques.
He pulls the opaques down with both hands, knelt again at my ankle the second time, and I step out of them.
He puts the opaques on the chaise. He stands.
He puts his hand at the small of my back and the palm is the temperature of marble warmed in winter sun. He kisses me.
The kiss is not the first kiss. The first kiss was the careful kiss of someone who had not done it in too long.
This kiss is the slow kiss of someone who has decided not to be careful.
He tastes of the wine and the herb-crusted lamb and, faintly, of his own copper — the cedar from the room and the copper from his breath, the chapter's whole scent in one inhalation.
I open to him. His tongue is in my mouth slowly.
My hands are at his waistband; I undo the belt by feel.
He pulls back. His mouth comes to the freckle at the corner of my jaw. He puts his mouth on it. Not a kiss — a settling. He has wanted to put his mouth there for a long time. He puts his mouth there now.
"Bed," I say.
He picks me up. He picks me up the small way he can — under my thighs and at my back — and he carries me four steps and lays me on the white linens at the center of the four-poster.
He stands at the foot. He undoes the belt I had started; he steps out of the trousers and folds them once and lays them on the chaise.
He is in black boxer-briefs and the thin cotton undershirt.
The undershirt stays. I do not ask. He is naked enough.
He looks at me on the bed. He says, very low: "Tell me."
"Down on me first," I say. "Now."
He kneels at the foot of the bed. He puts his palms on the insides of my thighs and he opens me. He moves up the bed on his elbows. He puts his mouth on me.
The first stroke of his tongue is flat and slow from the seam at my opening up through my pussy to the hood of my clit.
He breathes out at the top of the stroke and the breath is cold against the wet.
He does it again. He does it again. He is not in a hurry.
He uses the breadth of his tongue at my clit, then the precise point of it, then the small flick at the hood; he reads what my hips do under his hands and he repeats the thing that made them lift.
He puts his right palm flat on my lower belly, just above where his mouth is, and he holds me down. He goes back to the flat slow lick. He is patient in the way a man is patient when he has waited five hundred years to taste a thing.
His mouth lifts a half inch. He speaks against my cunt; the word forms wet against me.
"Quinn. " Low. A verdict.
He goes back to my clit. He works at me with the point of his tongue.
He slides one long finger inside me — only one, slow — and I am wet enough that the finger goes easily; he curls it forward at the second knuckle and finds the place along the front wall I have not let anyone find in two years and have never let anyone find on the first night.
He finds it on the first night. He holds the tip of his finger there. His mouth moves on my clit.
"Quinn. " Lower. A prayer.
I have my left hand fisted in the sheet.
My right hand is at the back of his head, not pushing, the dark wet-ink hair under my fingers.
He keeps the finger inside me; he uses his mouth; the precise pressure he is using is the precise pressure I would have asked for if I had known what to ask for.
He keeps going. The slow build is the climb I do not feel as climb until I am at the top of it. I am close.
He lifts his mouth one final time. He drags it the half inch up so the next word lands against my clit on the upstroke.
"Quinn."
I come hard. The third use of my name is the trigger; my thighs jerk; I clamp once around his head and release; the orgasm is long.
He keeps the finger inside me through it and gentles the pressure of his tongue down through the after-twitches, the way a man banks a fire so it does not lose its heat.
I am still coming when he eases his mouth off and rests his forehead at my hipbone for one beat.
His breath at my hipbone is warm now. The blood I have just put in his head is the warmth.
"Up," I say. My voice is a sandpaper version of itself.
He comes up. He kisses me at the freckle. He kisses me at the mouth and I taste myself on his tongue and I do not flinch. I push his shoulder. He goes onto his back, the linens white under him, the firelight on the long line of his sternum.
I move down his body. I take the boxer-briefs off him.
He lifts his hips so I can; he is cooperative the way a man is cooperative when he wants the next thing to be exactly the thing the woman is about to do.
I look at him. His cock is long, clean, not unmanageably thick, the head darker than the rest of him, the vein on the underside taut against the skin.
I touch the base with the flat of my hand. He inhales once.
I put my mouth on him.
I work slowly. I take the head first, the salt-clean taste of him, and the smell rises into my breath — cedar and copper again, the chapter's whole air.
I take more of him. I use my tongue under the head where the vein runs; I find the spot.
He gives me a small sound — not a groan, not yet, the sound a man makes when he has been holding still and lets the holding slip for a half beat — and his right hand comes to the back of my neck.
He does not push. He rests his palm there, the weight only.
I work him. Two minutes. I do not race. I take him deeper a second time, then less, then deeper, then less, the rhythm of someone who is reading him.
He makes the one allowed sound the second time I take him deep; a small groan, the syllable of it bitten off into a held breath.
His other hand fists once in the sheet beside my hip.
"Quinn. " His voice is gone to gravel. "Quinn — I will not finish in your mouth tonight. I want to be inside you when I come. Up."
I let him slip from my mouth slowly. I slide up his body.
He puts both hands at my hips and turns us in the kind of one-handed competence that says he has done this once or twice; I am on my back.
He kneels between my thighs. He looks down at me.
He pushes a strand of my chestnut hair off my forehead with his right thumb and tucks it behind my ear.
The gesture is small and the gesture is a man's.
"Tell me," he says.
"Yes."
He notches the head of his cock at my opening. He pauses. He looks at me. He pushes in.
The stretch is comfortable. I am wet enough that he goes in smoothly; I am wet enough that he can sink the long line of him into me on the first slow stroke; he is, I find as he goes, almost too much, the kind of fullness that takes a breath to adjust to and then gives the breath back.
He pauses at the bottom. He breathes once.
He pulls back. He pushes in. The second stroke is careful — the careful of a man who is afraid he will hurt the woman he has waited a hundred years for.
I say it after the second long stroke.
"Stop being careful."
His pupils blow. The pale gray vanishes for a half second behind the black; the room temperature drops the measurable degree I know now is his control slipping; the wood in the fireplace pops once like a small concession.
He does not say are you sure. He has stopped asking that.
He drops his weight onto his forearms beside my shoulders. He fucks me.