That was flattering. And also the cause of a matching fluttering inside Effie. He decided to be direct. “I must tell you that I have never done this before. May I hope that you have so that at least one of us knows what she’s doing?”
She lifted her head from where she had been blowing out a candle. There was a branch of them next to the bed, and she’d carefully blown out half of them, leaving the room cast in a warm glow. “You are remarkable.”
“Youare remarkable,” he countered. He meant that in the most literal sense. He wanted to remark on everything about her, make a list, a catalog of her attributes. He could hang it on his wall at home, next to her portrait.
She smiled in a way he flattered himself was fond. “I have done this before, yes. There was a, ah, gentleman before you.”
“Excellent.”
“You are the only man on earth who would think so.”
“What do you mean?”
“Most men would say I’m ruined. That I’ve given away my maidenhood. Their reactions would fall somewhere along a scale of stern disapproval to murderous outrage.”
It was difficult to know how to respond to that. On the one hand, he wanted to honor her experience. On the other, he wanted to dismiss what she’d said as nonsense. He settled for the truth. “I approve of everything that brought you here to me, that brought us to this moment.”
The next smile she graced him with was so unmistakably fond, so wide, it took his breath away for a moment.
When he recovered, he said, “Tell me what to do.Showme what to do.”
The smile turned a little bit wicked. “Come over here.”
He nearly tripped over himself to get to her. He’d been perched on the edge of the bed, but he scrambled across it so he was sitting cross-legged in front of her. She sat up, pushed back the covers and mimicked his position, and for a moment they merely stared at each other. Eventually, she reached forward and pulled his shirt out of his breeches—he had undressed to his shirtsleeves while with Simon and Archie—and up over his head. When she finished, she took up one end of the drawstring at the neckline of her shift and held it out. She wanted him to take it.
He pulled, slowly, the sound of string against string as the bow was untied, filling his head as completely as the waves on the shore had the other day.
When he had finished, she reached a hand inside her neckline and pushed the shift off one shoulder, then the other. He watched; his senses sharpened as if he were in danger. When the white linen fell to reveal small, pink-tipped breasts, he began to fear that perhaps hewasin danger, though he could not quite articulate why.
He lifted the hem of his shirt, and before he could think what to do next, before his head was fully out from under the shirt, her hands were on him, stroking down his arms from shoulder to wrist, leaving a trail of gooseflesh.
“You may touch me, too,” she whispered. So, after a beat, he lifted shaking hands tohershoulders, let them slide down toherwrists.
What followed was a slow, sensual game of sorts, whereby she touched him, and he, mirroring her, performed the same gesture. Her hands slid back up to his shoulders; his hands slid back up to her shoulders. Hers made their way then around nape of his neck; his did likewise with hers.
“I adored your long hair,” she whispered as she slid her fingers up over the back of his head—he wanted to groan from the pure pleasure of her fingernails against his scalp—“but I think I like this better.”
Wordlessly, he tangled his fingers in her hair. The flickering light of the candles glinted off it, making some strands look like shimmery onyx, others like warm mahogany.
With a sigh, she let her hands slide down the front of his face. It reminded him of the way he’d once seen a blind man greeting a brother after a long absence.
Her hands didn’t linger, though; they continued their southward journey, down his neck, over his clavicle, and down the front of his chest.
Marveling that he had ever thought of desire as an abstract concept from which he was exempt—he was certain his prick had never been this hard—he replicated the path with his hands on her body. The textures of her were so exquisitely rendered: her collarbones, sharp as her wit; her breasts, soft as her heart. He was aware that she would not characterize her heart thusly, that her vision of herself did not include the wordsoft, but he saw a truth about her that others, including she herself, did not.
The knowledge that he possessed a singular view of her made him want to laugh and cry at the same time, made the pressure in his groin, and at the base of his spine, intensify.
He had been going to let his hands continue to fall, but she stopped him, putting her own over his so that they stayed in contact with her breasts. She hissed and let her head fall back. Experimentally, he kneaded the soft flesh, and she arched her back as if seeking more of his touch.
The hiss became a moan, and never had he heard anything so pleasing, so erotic, soastonishing. He was struck with the idea that he ought to replace one of his hands with his mouth. He could see himself from above, lips working over one of the pink nubs. They would make a gorgeous, obscene painting.
He made the image come to life, his own moan breaking free just before his mouth made contact. The nipple in his mouth was harder than the nipple in his hand. Experimentally, he flicked his tongue over it, and she took a rapid inhalation and held it. He did it again. Eventually, she exhaled—it was a ragged exhalation, almost akin to a sob.
He was growing more and more agitated. He saw another image in his mind, of her lying on her back, naked, his mouth on herneck. He began to make it so, gently encouraging her to lift her hips so he could remove the shift that had bunched around her waist.
He hadn’t understood that making love was like painting, that when an image arose in his mind, he could make it concrete. They were a living canvas. Her pulse thudded under his lips, and when she sighed, he realized they hadn’t kissed on the mouth yet. So he remedied that, changed the picture, lying atop her but keeping his full weight from her, kissing her deeply. She wrapped her legs around his waist, and he gasped in shock—she was painting, too—and gasped again when he realized the maneuver had put his manhood in contact with her soft center.
She began rocking her hips up and down, and he knew somehow that he was meant to rock with her. He had expected to have to have a conversation about making sure she did not fall pregnant as a result of their lying together, but it seemed they would not need to broach that particular topic, at least not yet, for this, this rocking as his prick nestled against her soft heat without entering it, was bringing him a degree of pleasure he had not thought to imagine. It was pressure and heat together, sensations that ought to have been unpleasant, but he wanted more of them; he wanted to rush toward them, profligate and blind.
