Chapter 10 #2
“All right, then.” A soft squeeze of Anne’s hand.
“Authenticity matters more to me than anything else. I need the person I’m kissing to truly mean it.
No hesitation. The way you kissed me earlier, at your house”—Sadie flexed her hand briefly in Anne’s, then relaxed—“that was very, very nice. Just the way I like it. You did so well.”
Anne exhaled, feeling like she’d passed a test.
“My neck,” Sadie added. “I like being kissed there.”
Oh. She’d been so focused on the idea of Sadie’s mouth that she’d nearly forgotten there were other places to kiss.
“My shoulders, too. The inside of my arms. I’m unusually sensitive there.”
“Your arms?”
“Of course. Hasn’t anyone ever kissed your arms before?”
Anne thought back as far as she could. “No.”
“Oh, Anne.” A surprising amount of emotion laced Sadie’s voice. “That’s awful. Your arms should be kissed as often as possible. They’re beautiful.”
“Not anymore.” Anne hated her triceps with the kind of loathing she usually reserved for incompetent people.
They’d betrayed her in the last five years, the skin beginning to sag below the taut line of her arm, and she’d finally been forced to acknowledge that no amount of exercise could defeat time and gravity.
“They’re not my best feature, not by a long shot, and that’s just an objective fact. ”
“Quit that nonsense right this second.” Before Anne could answer, Sadie let go of her hand and began, very carefully, to push up the left sleeve of Anne’s shirt. “Let me show you how deserving they are.”
A new shock of expectation surged through Anne. “Is this part of the sex talk?”
“I’ve always said practice outranks theory.” Sadie stroked Anne’s exposed forearm, her fingers gentle. “One word from you, though, and I’ll stop.”
Anne closed her eyes. “Don’t stop,” she managed.
“You’re very soft,” Sadie murmured. “I should’ve expected that—I did expect that—but it’s nowhere near the same as feeling it for myself.”
“La Mer moisturizer,” Anne said inanely.
“Are all women this soft?” Sadie didn’t wait for an answer. “Of course they aren’t. You’re extraordinary in every way. Why would this be the exception? Don’t try to deny it. I can’t be convinced otherwise.”
Back and forth, back and forth, Sadie brushed her fingertips over Anne’s skin, and Anne felt the touch like a silk snare, wrapping her in need. She inhaled sharply.
Sadie clearly heard it. She paused, just for a second, then resumed her caress, a little slower this time. “You don’t believe me, do you? You don’t think you’re exceptionally soft.”
Not a question but a statement. “I don’t,” Anne said, stammering a little, “don’t know.”
“Then I’ll collect more evidence,” Sadie told her, and lifted Anne’s arm at the elbow.
Anne’s eyes flew open. Paralyzed, she couldn’t do anything but wait, wait, wait as Sadie dipped her head and pressed her warm mouth softly against the inside of Anne’s forearm.
At the light weight of contact, the perfect pressure of the kiss, Anne gasped. Sadie’s lips. Sadie’s mouth. Touching her. Claiming her.
On instinct, her thighs parted, just a little. Her head lifted, tilting back. If this was what arm-kissing was like, if this was what she’d been missing—“Oh, oh, please—”
Against her skin, Sadie made a low, needy sound, the tiny noise vibrating into Anne’s arm. Hearing it—feeling it—Anne twitched. An ache, sweet and terrible, was beginning to bloom between her legs. Somehow, she managed not to push herself down against the bed and seek the pressure she needed.
“You’re already so turned on, aren’t you?” Sadie ran the tips of her fingers up Anne’s arm, short nails scraping just slightly. “I can hear you, I can hear it in your voice—I’ve barely even touched you, and you’re, you’re getting ready for me—”
“Sadie—”
“I told you what I like. How I like to be kissed. Tell me—” She paused. “Tell me how you touch yourself. Do you touch yourself? Have you?”
Anne’s breathing rasped loud even in her own ears. Oh God. Oh God. She nodded, a quick jerk of her head.
“Tell me about it,” Sadie continued, “and look at me, too. Please? I need—I need to see your face.”
“Just—keep touching me.” Anne didn’t recognize what she asked, or the thin, frayed sound of her voice. “I’ll tell you, I’ll look at you, whatever you want; just whatever you do, I need you to keep touching me.”
“I will. I promise—”
She turned to face Sadie, and Sadie turned toward Anne, matching her breath for shallow breath.
The stunned expression on her face was the same one she’d worn when sitting on the couch while she tried not to think about Anne undressing.
The same one she’d had at Burger Bliss, watching Anne give herself up to something good.
Sadie, Anne realized with dizzy amazement, was just as aroused as Anne, and trying just as hard to hold back.
She grabbed Sadie’s hands.
Yet another secret she’d never told anyone: Until after the divorce, Anne hadn’t really touched herself.
Oh, she’d tried a few times as a teenager and gotten bored.
The term self-pleasure had seemed like an oxymoron.
But those instances had followed a rulebook: Anne pushing herself to think about the football team’s quarterback or Chris Hodges or any of the other faceless faces that flitted across her shut eyes.
She’d tried again once she was on her own, not expecting much, and had shocked herself by how much better it felt when she didn’t force her mind to conjure a man.
“I’m slow,” Anne said softly. “That’s what I like. I take my time.”
A fast, loud exhale from Sadie. “Slow,” she repeated as though she wanted to memorize the details. “Time.”
“I try to clear my mind, not to think too much. Sometimes”—it felt so vulnerable to share this with someone else, even Sadie—“I picture shapes.”
“Shapes?”
“Curves. Silhouettes, I suppose. It relaxes me. Lets me concentrate on how—how my hand feels. But once—” She wouldn’t close her eyes; she’d be brave. “One time, I wondered how you did it. Just for a second.”
“Oh my God,” Sadie whispered. “Did you—”
“Yes. Quickly.”
No answer from Sadie, just rasping breaths.
“Almost everything I know I like in bed, I’ve learned by teaching myself.
Alone. How to make it build gradually. How much pressure I need to get just close enough—and then stop for a minute, because I don’t want to let it end yet.
Stopping, though—that’s the hard part. Because when I’m at that point, I need so badly to—” Without planning it, Anne squeezed Sadie’s hands, hard.
“It doesn’t always work, though. I’m not always able to stop.
I couldn’t that time I thought about you. ”
“Oh, I wish—I wish I could’ve seen that,” Sadie stammered, “although I suppose I was there, in a way, from what you’re saying; I mean, if you consider thoughts as a kind of presence, which I—Anne?”
“What?”
“If I don’t kiss you, I think I might faint.”
“We can—we can do that.” Anne faltered, feeling a bit like she might faint herself.
“Don’t pass out, please, I can—” She brought her hands up to Sadie’s shoulders, then slid them over the curve of her neck, searching past the thick, soft tangles of her hair for the back of her head.
“What about our sex talk? We never finished discussing what we—”
“Let me set the pace, if that’s all right,” Sadie said in a rush. “We can figure it out as we go. We do as much or as little as we both want, and please don’t worry about making noise; the sounds you make drive me out of my mind.” She paused. “What do you need?”
“Just—” Anne pressed the pads of her fingers into the hidden place where Sadie’s hairline met her neck, always covered by her wigs. Not tonight. Sadie was bare for her. “Just want me. That’s all I care about. That’s it. Want me.”
“More than you could ever know,” Sadie told her.
They kissed for the second time that day. Soft, at first, a slow, amazed discovery that became more insistent and more urgent as the seconds went by. It was easy, so easy, to go on instinct, to let her tongue slip inside Sadie’s mouth and stroke what it found, to pull Sadie closer, to press harder.
Home, Anne thought senselessly, surging forward. Home.
When they finally pulled apart, the distance between them was in name only, their foreheads still pressed together.
Anne’s lips tingled. Before today, any kissing longer than a quick peck had always seemed so strange.
She’d had the odd sense she was an anthropologist studying another culture.
Why was putting your mouth on another mouth a normal—even desired—practice?
Why did people seem to love the swirl of someone else’s tongue, the clack of teeth, the intrusion?
She knew now.
“Oh,” Sadie whispered.
Anne threaded her fingers through Sadie’s soft hair because she could. Anne could touch Sadie. Take her time. Anne could kiss Sadie’s lips, and her cheeks—first the left one, then the right one—and then her forehead, lingering there for as long as she wanted, simply because she wanted.
Next was the cute little bump of Sadie’s nose, which deserved attention, given how nicely it sat on her face.
When Anne softly kissed the tip, Sadie made a little surprised noise.
“No one’s ever kissed my nose before,” she offered, sounding amazed.
Another kiss, clumsy at first because Anne couldn’t stop smiling, delight blending with her desire. Happy. Oh, she felt so happy. This—this—was what she could have, this beautiful trembling thing, this starvation finally getting fed.
Withdrawing just enough to speak, Sadie asked, “Could I touch you? Please?”
She placed her hands on the sides of Anne’s waist.
Anne, speechless, nodded.
Slowly, carefully, Sadie explored her new territory, palms sliding gently over Anne’s stomach, then her rib cage, slipping to her back, up and down her spine. Each place came to life under Sadie’s hands, blooming with new warmth that stayed, then spread, becoming a rush of heat.