Page 22 of What Happens in Hedone

She did. She did. And she never would be. Effie caught back the sob that threatened to choke her.

“Go to your lady tomorrow,” Effie said, pressing a palm to his chest. “But have me tonight.”

His answer was to lean his head back against the wall and give himself over to her. She felt like an explorer mapping a new continent, determined to find and claim the prize. But a new despair drove her, too. This time was stolen from the run of their ordinary lives, a secret in the dark that neither would speak of. A treat stolen from the banquet that, in guilt, they could never confess they had devoured, even if the appetite was too powerful to be denied.

His hands sketching designs on her shoulders, threading through her hair, made her feel bold and wanton. Perhaps he ached like this, too. For her, and not that other.

Effie parted the button of his fly and found the opening in his small clothes, and then the prize was before her. Nothing like the small inchworm that had curled between the legs of their drawing models. This was a spear. Effie rolled him in her hand, analyzing the texture, the velvet skin over the hard length like nothing she’d ever known. Jay hissed, and elation filled her.

Heddy, who had more knowledge of such things than anyone else of Effie’s acquaintance, had told her what men liked above all else. They begged it of their mistresses and women they bought in the streets. It reduced them to jelly, made them a woman’s slave.

She didn’t want Jay her slave. But she wanted him shuddering with passion and longing. For her. She wanted him overcome by the pleasure she gave him.

She leaned toward the velvet length of him and licked.

He clenched his hands into fists, catching the back of her gown. She slid her lips around the tip of him and his back arched. His cock moved of its own accord, eager, swelling in her mouth.

Oh, yes, this pleased him. This was the way she could claim him. Be special. Would his little wife give him the forbidden kiss?

She didn’t know what she was doing, but it didn’t seem to matter. Jay sucked air through his teeth as she curled her tongue along the length of him, sliding him in and out of her mouth. His entire body was rigid, like a bow strung taut. She feasted on him and his ragged murmurs fanned her sense of power, along with the aching hollow between her legs. Moisture dripped there. She didn’t care. She stroked with her fingers what wouldn’t fit in her mouth—he was so big—and the tender pouch beneath. His hips bucked off the bench, as if he teetered at the edge of restraint. She loved that she drove him to such wildness.

“Erato.” He tugged at her hair with his fists. His voice was a hoarse rasp. “I’m going to spend in your mouth if you don’t stop.”

She wanted him to. Heddy had told her how it went. Jay was raw and wild and hers, wholly, and if she took all of him then it was as good as leaving a brand. Some part of him would belong to her, no matter what happened next.

She leaned into him and sucked harder. His chest heaved. He reached between them and closed his hand around hers, pinching her fingers around the base of his cock, and then his hips bucked again as he filled her mouth and surrendered. He tasted briny and sweet, like an oyster, and her body pulsed with want as she cradled her mouth around the throb of him and knew he was hers, hers, hers.

She smacked her lips and smiled, raising her head. She thought his eyes fluttered open.

“You,” he said hoarsely.

She almost crowed with triumph. Me.

She wished she had let him use her name, so he might say it in that rasp of wonder. Of satiated delight.

He surged toward her like a beast emerging from its lair, like a sleeping giant waking from the earth. His hands swept down her back to her bottom, lifting her. “My turn.”

“Your—what?”

“I get to kiss you now.” He laid her back on the bench in one fluid glide, hovering over her, his thigh pressing against hers, a thrilling shadow of solid flesh. His lips hovered over her throat. “Do I get to kiss you now?”

“I sup-pose you may,” she stuttered.

It had been thrilling to touch him, to be the one directing the scene. But now he had taken charge of her character and Effie was no longer herself. She was some new creature emerging from Effie’s shell, a selkie rising from the sea and shedding her seal skin to reveal a woman beneath, a woman remade with the pulse of passion and the heat of Jay’s kiss.

“Beautiful,” he said, nuzzling his mouth against her neck. He pulled a pin from her hair and a coil of hair fell. He held it out, the long loop of it, and then twisted the curls around his fist. The first claiming.

Then there were the kisses he scattered across her chest, shoulder and collarbone and the rise of her breast. He found the clasp at her shoulder and sprang it. “Beautiful,” he said again, drawing the fabric away and following the exposed flesh with his mouth and hands. She wore no stays, no shift, and as she lay deliciously bare to his nips and kisses Effie thought dreamily that she had been made for this. Her body had been shaped to fit in his hands, to cradle his as he stretched over her on the bench. A cushion caught her back as she arched her breasts toward his mouth, caught by an impulse she couldn’t control. She choked back a small cry as he closed his mouth around a nipple and sucked.

“You like that,” he murmured against her skin, sounding pleased.

“Oh, J—” She caught herself. She’d made the rule on no names. “Just…remarkable,” she panted, and it was. The heat of his hands, the warmth of his mouth, the sensations that spread over her skin from every point of contact. She was rising on a wave, a limpet on the tide, and every pulse brought her closer to him.

“More?” he whispered, and she clenched her fingers in his hair in response. Yes. More. Let it never stop. Let him be hers, touching her, in her arms, always.

The music switched to a Chopin rondo, the C minor, sheet music Effie had bought for herself when it was published earlier that year. For a moment she lay in a daze trying to comprehend how there could be an Effie who purchased sheet music and practiced at the pianoforte and had perfectly normal squabbles with her sisters, and also an Effie who lay twined with a man in the dark alcove of a pleasure club, coming alive at his kiss.

How was she supposed to return to an ordinary life, knowing this?