“Oh,” she breathed, when, at the top of one wave, something happened. Something caught, snagged inside her so that she lost the rhythm.
“That’s right,” he said soothingly, so perhaps the rhythm was meant to be lost. She wasn’t sure—
“Oh! Oh!”
Oh.
* * *
Archie was going to hell. There was no way around it.
But wasn’t the descent going to be fun?
He lay next to Clem, both of them panting and staring at the ceiling. His prick was hard as a rock, but he didn’t mind. It would calm down. Eventually. Or, Clementine would go back to her room soon and he could take care of matters then. Though he found he would rather suffer if that was the price of keeping her here.
“I had no idea,” Clem said a few moments later when she got her breath back. “Why didn’t anyone tell me about this?”
He chuckled. “You can do it yourself, too, you know.”
“What?” she shrieked.
He took her hand and guided it between her legs. “You’re probably too spent now, but you can do for yourself what I just did.” He fit his fingers atop hers and maneuvered them so the pads of hers were in roughly the correct spot. “It may take a little time to accustom yourself to the finer details of what works most expediently, but I have observed that you enjoy a moderately firm pressure.” He pressed, and she gasped. It made him want to gloat. Not in a prideful way, but he was glad to finally have done something decisively useful. Too bad he couldn’t tell the boys about it. Here was something, something practical, hewasgood at.
Clem moved her hand experimentally. “I am all astonishment. And I repeat my earlier question: Why didn’t anyonetellme about this?”
“That I do not know. I suppose, as we discussed earlier, that a young lady generally learns about these matters from her mother, perhaps in advance of her wedding night?”
“So a motherless girl is out of luck.”
“Mmm. I do get the impression that these sorts of matters may be discreetly discussed among women.” Some women of the ton gave an impression of such worldliness—worldliness bordering on world-weariness—and Archie had even heard of books being circulated among young ladies, manuals of a sort.
“Hmm.” She rolled onto her side and considered him. He considered her back. The light of all the candles made the room look cozy, domestic. Yet Clem looked as wild as ever, her hair as unkempt as he’d ever seen it. That was, he was certain, due in large part to him. He hadfinallybeen able to indulge that ever-present desire to tangle his fingers in it. He hadn’tsatisfiedthe urge, though. He wondered if he ever could. “Perhaps in Town,” she said. “Or perhaps even in the country, but for that I suppose one has to go to tea parties and such. There are no discreet discussions of that sort in the forest.”
“Yet you claimed being an observer of nature prepared you,” he teased.
“Clearly I was mistaken. I was not at all prepared for that.”
“Perhaps you gleaned the mechanics of things from your observations in the outdoors but, paradoxically, spending so much time running wild means you also missed the nuance that might have been covertly imparted by women in society.”
“I think you may be right.” She grinned.
He grinned back. He wanted to put his hand back in her hair, or perhaps rest a palm on her cheek, but that might be an overstep. He’d been charged with a task, and he had carried out that task. Clementine was so very dear to him, though, in this moment. In this moment and always.
“I have so many questions.”
“Well, let’s hear them.”
“The most important one is, when are we going to do that again?”
15
Three Square Meals
“Why no kippers, though?” Archie asked Clementine the next morning at breakfast, the first meal of their meatless day.
“Why would there be kippers here if we are not eating animals today?” Clementine asked from the table where she was seated with Olive and Simon—Effie never ate breakfast on account of his habit of sleeping in.
Archie paused at the buffet where he was filling his plate with pastries and . . . pastries. So many pastries. “A fish is not an animal.”
