45. Lily #2
By the time he actually put his mouth on me I was wet enough to be embarrassing and long past caring about it. The first slow stroke of his tongue went all the way through me and came out somewhere behind my eyes.
I'm going to be honest about that part, since I've been honest about everything else in this account.
It was better than any of the other times and the reason is not technique.
He has always been extremely good at it and he knows it and I've told him so in writing.
It was better for one reason only. There was nothing else in that room.
No countdown was running. No goodbye sat in the corner with its coat on.
There was only a man on his knees on a floorboard in his own house, with his hands under me, taking his time, with no reason on this earth to stop.
He learned me again from the beginning, the way you read a page you already know by heart.
Broad and flat at first, and then narrow and exact, and when he found the thing that makes my hands close he stayed on it and would not be shifted.
He got one forearm across my hips, since I do not stay where I am put.
Then he brought two fingers into me and curled them up and forward and held them there while his mouth kept working, and the two of those together took the top of my head off.
He worked me until I was making far more noise than the county needed to hear. Then he backed off and did something maddening with his fingers instead, and then went back and did it all over again. I got two fistfuls of his hair and gave him some instructions.
"There. Don't move. Do not get clever."
"I am never clever."
"You are always clever. That's the entire problem with you."
He held me on that edge for something close to a full minute, at exactly the pressure I had asked for and not one degree past it. I hung there shaking, with my heels driven into the mattress and my own hand jammed over my mouth out of two years of motel reflex.
He reached up and took the hand away.
"Nobody is listening," he said, against me. "There is not another house for nine miles in any direction."
So I let it out.
When I went over it was loud and it lasted, and it came in waves instead of all at once and kept on coming.
He stayed exactly where he was and rode every one of them out with me, and he only slowed when I got a fist in his hair and told him it was enough.
I heard myself say his name in a way that would have embarrassed me in front of anybody on earth except him and possibly Marge.
Then I got a hand in his collar and hauled him up onto the bed.
"Your turn."
"There is no such thing."
"There is absolutely such a thing. Lie down."
He lay down. That's one of the things I've learned about him. He will not be looked after by anybody alive, and he will lie down for me, and I have no intention of examining why. I'm too pleased about it.
I worked my way down his body slowly and made him wait for every inch of it.
I took the seam under his ribs first, and then the shoulder.
Then the new graze on his forearm that nobody had cleaned properly, which I told him about with my mouth against it.
Then the hard plane of his stomach. He said something in his first language and did not offer a translation, and I did not require one.
Then I got my hand around him, since I enjoy what that does to a man's breathing, and after that I used my mouth, and there was no further conversation out of him for some time.
I'll say only this about it. The man is very quiet until he is not quiet at all, and I know precisely where that line sits, and I enjoy standing on it with both feet.
He got one hand into my hair and never once pulled, and every time I looked up the length of him he was watching me with an expression I would go to war over.
"Lily, come up here."
"I'm busy."
"I am asking," he said, and that word has a completely different weight coming out of him now, and we both knew it, and he did it on purpose.
So I went up.
I got a knee onto the bed on either side of him and kissed him first, because I had not stopped kissing him all night and I was not going to start a new policy at that point.
He was still wet from my mouth. I reached down and took hold of him and held him upright against myself, and then I did not put him in.
I rubbed the head of him along myself instead, slowly, up and back, so that he passed through all of it and over the spot he had already spent twenty minutes on. Both of us made a noise about that.
"You are going to have to stop doing that."
"I know."
"You are doing it on purpose."
"I have waited six weeks to do it on purpose."
I did it twice more, until he was slick from me and I could feel my own pulse going against him. Then I set him where he belonged and stopped there, notched and not moving, with only the first of him inside me.
His hands were on my hips and they were not pushing. That man has never once pushed.
"Say it," I said.
"I want you to stay."
"You already asked me that today."
"I am going to ask it every day," he said. "You will get very tired of it."
Then I let my weight down onto him.
The first of it was the give. It always is. There is a moment where a body decides to open, and you can feel the exact instant of the decision. I felt it happen, and the sound I made told him I had. Then he was in, the first two inches of him, and everything after that was arriving.
I went down slowly and I watched what it did to his face for the whole distance.
He isn't small and I'm not big, and at that angle I feel every fraction of it come in, and it took a long time even though I was wet enough that nothing about it caught.
There is a stretch to that which is not pain and is not comfort and is the best thing available to a person.
About two thirds of the way down I had to stop and sit still and breathe and let my body catch up with the plan.
He stayed absolutely where he was. He did not move one inch to help himself.
"All the way," he said, and it came out of him in pieces.
So I took the rest of it, and I took it slowly, and I felt myself open around the last of him and close again behind it. Then I set both palms on his chest and sat the whole way down, until there was nothing left of him anywhere outside me.
The noise that came out of him then was not a word in either of his languages.
"All right?"
"Better than that. Don't you dare move yet."
He didn't move. He spread one hand out over my sternum and left it there. It isn't a sexual thing and it is somehow the most sexual thing he does. I stayed where I was with him buried in me and let all of it settle.
Then I moved.
I set the pace and he let me keep it, and I kept it slow on purpose, all the way up and all the way back down, so that every stroke was the whole distance.
It was nothing at all like the night in the motel.
That night had been a goodbye and this was a homecoming, and my body knew the difference long before my head caught up.
His hands went to my thighs and then up my back and then into my hair. Mine ended up spread on his chest with my fingers over the old scar there. I could feel his heart going under my palm, and after a while I could feel it going in two places at once.
That black window behind the bed had turned into a mirror with the lamp on our side of it.
I looked up at one point and found the two of us in it, and after that I couldn't look anywhere else.
He caught me doing it. He got a hand around the back of my thigh and moved us both about an inch so that I had a better view of it, which is the filthiest thing that man has ever done without saying a single word.
"You're watching."
"I am."
"Then sit up," he said, "and let me see all of you doing it."
So I sat up.
He got both hands on me after that, one at my hip and one moving, and I gave up setting any kind of pace at all. Somewhere in the middle of it I noticed I was crying, and none of it had anything to do with sadness.
"Hey."
"I'm fine. I'm extremely fine. Do not stop."
"I have no intention of stopping."
Then his thumb found the place and worked it while I moved.
It built in me the way it does when nobody in the room is rushing, in long slow pulls that came closer and closer together until they ran into one another.
I got louder and stopped caring who heard it.
Then he said my name once, low, and that was the thing that finished me.
I came apart on him hard enough to lose my balance and it went on and on.
He got an arm around my back and held me up through every second of it and kept moving underneath me the whole way.
When the worst of it had gone through me he rolled the two of us over without coming out.
He finished it face to face, with my leg hooked over his hip and his forehead against mine, and neither of us stopped watching the other.
He went slowly even then. He could have taken it and I wanted him to and he refused.
He held himself over me on one forearm with his other hand under my head, and went in deep and slow and all the way.
I got both heels into the backs of his thighs and pulled him in harder than he was ever going to go on his own, and that is what did it.