She is flushed all the way down. Her thighs are damp. The slick of her is visible on the inside of one thigh and the curve of her hip is still pink where her own hand has been.
The desire that moves through me is uncomplicated. I bend, and put my mouth against the inside of her knee, and work my way slowly upward.
She gasps.
I know she is sensitive. I do not crowd her. I take my time with the soft inside of her thigh, slow and reverent, kissing and breathing and moving upward by inches, and her fingers find my hair and tighten when I am still further away than she wants me to be.
When I finally put my mouth on her she makes a sound that goes through me the way nothing else does.
Ivy is warm and slippery and limp, and I take my time. I am not trying to make her come. I am trying to tell her something that I have not been able to put into words all afternoon.
She lies back into the pillow with her hand in my hair and her eyes closed and her breath uneven, and she lets me. Still limp, she doesn’t chase or push. She lets me give her what I want to give her, which is the closest thing to an apology I have got.
When I lift my head, eventually, her eyes are wet.
I kiss the inside of her knee one more time and move up the bed.
I push into her slowly.
Her perfect pussy is so wet she lets me in without resistance, and so swollen that the slow drag of her around me is its own sensation, every inch of her registering as a separate small fact along the length of my cock. I am all the way in before I have meant to be. Her hips lift slightly to take me, and a low groan moves out of me before I have decided to make it.
I hold there. Buried.
She makes a small sigh and her arms come around my shoulders and pull me down against her, and her face turns into the side of my neck, and her ankles cross at the small of my back. She pulls me deeper. There is no further to go and she pulls me deeper anyway.
I don’t move yet. I let my body adjust. There is a particular settling that always happens with her, a moment when something in me that has been keyed up for hours simply lays itself down, and I let it happen now. Her heartbeat against my ribs. Her breath. The slick warm grip of her around me. The damp of my shirt under my palm where I have pushed it up over her hips.
I hate being away from her. I begin to move.
Slowly. Deeper than usual, because she has me pinned in place with her ankles and because deeper is what both our bodies want. The first stroke draws a sound out of her, soft and surprised, the sound of a woman who had thought she was finished and is discovering otherwise.
I bend and find her mouth and kiss her as I move. Her tongue meets mine. I keep the pace slow. The friction builds deliciously slowly. Each stroke registers in a slightly different part of me: at the base of my spine, in the back of my thighs, in my chest. I feel the heat building gradually, the slow gather of pressure, the way my body is opening to this without rushing it.
Her ankles tighten when I draw back. They release a fraction when I push forward. They are pulling me in with each stroke, deeper than I would otherwise go, and the depth is exactly what she wants, and exactly what I want, and the agreement between her body and mine on this point is total.
Her hand strokes the back of my neck. Her other hand finds the dip of my lower back and presses me further into her. Her face has not left the side of my neck.
I move a fraction faster. Not a lot. Just enough that her breath catches in a different rhythm.
She is making small soft sounds at the side of my throat. “Alistair,” she murmurs.
“Here.”
I bury my face in her hair. She smells of bergamot and of warm skin and a faint sharper edge.
I slow myself down. I want to stay here. I want to keep her under me with my cock as deep inside her as the geometry of twobodies will allow, because in this bed, in this moment, I am the man I want to be, the one who came home, the one whose hand is at the back of his wife's neck, the one whose son is asleep in the next room.
I press my forehead to hers and move slowly and feel her breath go ragged.
I want to be deeper. I am as deep as I can be, buried completely, her ankles locked, her body pulling me, and I still want to be deeper. The wanting is not rational. It is the body's response to having been worried all evening, the need to merge, the impossible hunger to occupy the same space as the person you’re obsessed with.
The build, when it finally comes, is not a chase. It is a tide. It rises in me from somewhere deep and quiet, gathering through my pelvis and up my spine, and I keep my pace slow and deliberate and let it come on its own time.
Ivy senses it. Her hand tightens at the back of my neck. Her ankles lock harder.
“Stay with me,” I say into her hair. I groan into the curve of her shoulder, and she holds me through every pulse of it, her face pressed to mine, her hand stroking the nape of my neck, her body warm and full of me.
When I finally do move it is gently, and she makes a small sound of protest.
