The flat plane of her stomach. The narrow hips. The crease of each thigh.
Nerys starts to direct. "If you move—"
"Trust it," I say against her hip.
She stops. I feel the effort in her body — the muscles that want to manage, the instinct to instruct, the fear that silence means loss of control and loss of control means the worst thing that can happen.
She lets go.
I settle between her legs. I look up. She's looking down at me — propped slightly on her elbows, auburn hair falling around her jaw, the firelight making her eyes more gray than green. She looks afraid. She looks willing. She looks like a woman standing over a three-foot putt and deciding to trust the stroke.
I hold her gaze and lower my mouth to her.
The sound she makes — low, caught in her throat, released only after the first slow stroke of my tongue has already made it impossible to hold back — fills the cottage and mingles with the rain and the fire and the stone.
I taste her. Warm, salt-clean, slick. My tongue moves through her slowly, finding the places that make her thighs tighten, the places that make her breath stutter, the place at the center that makes her say my name like it's the answer to a question she didn't know she was asking.
I keep my eyes up. I want to see it. I want to watch the composure — the magnificent, hard-won, costly composure that Nerys Quillan has built around herself like a castle wall — come apart stone by stone.
It does. The analytical expression dissolves. The measured breathing fractures into something ragged. Her head tips back. Her elbows give way and she lies flat, her hands moving to the blanket, gripping, releasing, gripping again. Her hips rise toward my mouth and I let them — I follow her movement, adjusting my angle, my pressure, my rhythm, reading her body with the attention she taught me to give a green.
Her hands find my hair. Then release. Then find the blanket. Then nothing — they fall to her sides, palms up, and she lies there with her hands open and shaking.
I reach up.
Both hands. I lace my fingers through hers — my smaller hands wrapping around her longer ones, feeling the tremor pass through them and into me. I hold her shaking hands while my mouth works between her legs, and I don't let go.
I feel the moment it changes.
Not the orgasm — that's still building, still approaching, still gathering in her hips and her thighs and the rhythm of her breathing. The thing that changes is larger. Older. A locked door opening in a part of her that predates the yips and the collapse and the marriage and the father who couldn't separate his daughter's worth from her grip.
She makes a sound that I have never heard from her. Not a moan. Not my name. A sound that comes from somewhere below language — a release of something that has been held so long its departure is physical. Like crying without the word for it.
I press my mouth harder against her. My tongue finds the place and stays there — circling, steady, unwavering, holding the rhythm the way she's taught me to hold a putting rhythm: with my fingers, not my palms, with precision rather than force.
Nerys comes.
Her hands clench mine. Her back arches. Her thighs close around my shoulders, and the sound she makes is my name broken into its syllables —Taand then a breath and thenla— and it sounds like something being set down after being carried for a very long time.
Tears.
Not sobbing. Not performed grief. Quiet tears that run from the corners of her closed eyes down her temples and into her hair. The firelight catches them, turning them gold.
I move up her body. I hold her. My arms around her shoulders, my face against her neck, my body along the length of hers. I feel the tears against my cheek.
"I haven't cried during sex since Saskia," she says. Her voice is rough. Stripped of the measured quality I've come to associate with everything she says.
"Is that bad?"
"It's terrifying."
I pull the blanket over us. The wool is rough against my bare shoulders. The fire pops. The rain has softened to a steady percussion against the stone walls, and the cottage smells like peat smoke and sex and the ancient air of a place that has witnessed a thousand storms and remained standing through every one.
"I'm not going anywhere," I say.
"You say that now."
"I say that always. Test me."
