Page 87 of Faceless

She did it again — the same slow draw of her hand, surer now, as though the first pass had taught her something she had set out to prove. The second stroke was worse than the first, or better; he had lost the distinction.

She had been learning his length, firm in her grip, and he had borne that. This was different. This was the skin itself, loose enough to move, and when she drew it up over the head and let it slide back down, the sensation arrived nowhere he had words for and everywhere at once.

His hips came up off the bed. He had not told them to.

She paused — and then, of course, she did it again, slower, and the second time was unbearable in a way the first had only promised. The skin gliding, the head bared and then sheathed and bared again, each pass lighting something that ran up the whole length of his spine.

“Like that?” Barely a breath. She already knew. She did it again before he could answer, and whatever he had meant to say left him as a groan instead.

He was past speech. Past dignity. There was only her hand and that slow, devastating slide, and his body arching up after it like a plucked string, and the begging that started somewhere low in his throat without his leave — please, and her name, and please again — while she took him apart one stroke at a time and made, he was dimly aware, a soft sound of wonder every time he broke.

He could not bear another moment of it. He took her wrist, drew her hand away from him, and bore her back into the bedclothes, and she let him — sank under him and drew her knees aside, and the welcome of that nearly finished what her hands had started.

He brought his mouth down to her throat, the hollow where her pulse ran quick beneath his lips, then lower, to where the chemise had slipped from one shoulder, and set his lips to the warm skin he had kept his hands from for the better part of an hour. She was warmer there than anywhere. The taste of her was nearly the end of him. He drew his mouth along the slope of her, slow even now, learning the give of her and the small catches of her breath that told him where to linger. She made a low, broken sound he had not heard from her before. One of her hands came to the back of his head and held him there. The other took his shoulder and would not let go.

He settled lower, between her thighs, where she had opened to him, and the heat of her against him undid the last of his discipline. He meant to be careful. He was not, and she did not permit him to be — she told him so in the pull of her hands and the rise of her body, the way she moved against him with the knowledge she had built across these weeks in the dark, intending to be ravished on her own terms.

“George.” She said it as though it were a matter of plain fact rather than discovery, and he answered her with everything he had, and then he was sinking into her, and she was rising to take him, her hands gripping him as though to make sure of him, and then she was all there was.

She shuddered — at first, he feared he had hurt her, but her voice rose on a gasp, and her head was thrown back, and the gasps were rhythmic now. She had her arms around him entirely; her hands were in his hair, at his shoulder blades, at the small of his back.

He moved. She answered. Slowly at first — because he meant to take his time in a way he had not done before — and then less slowly, because slowness could only hold so long against desire, and then not at all slowly, and her hand at the small of his back was urging him on with a force that had no patience in it. He met it. He met all of it.

He had been holding on by an act of will from the moment he had melted into her, and the will was a thin thing today. It gave way. He tried to slow himself, and she would not let him; her hand pulled him towards her, her body answered him, and he was past help. He buried his face in her shoulder, and the cry that came out of him was lower and more torn and closer to his own voice than he had ever let her hear. He had her name in his mouth when it took him, and only by a miracle did he keep from shouting it aloud.

When the shuddering passed, he did not move. She had her hand at the back of his head and was holding him as if she did not intend to let him go for some while, and he was not going to ask her to. His breath came back to him by degrees. He kissed her temple. He kissed her ear. He kissed the corner of her mouth.

Then the last of him withdrew, and he moved down.

“You cannot go yet —” she began to protest.

“Shhh,” he said, against her collarbone. “I am not done with you.”

His hand moved down the length of her, past her stomach, lower, until his fingers found her — slick still from him, swollen, ripe — and he stroked her there, slow and deliberate, with no intention of stopping.

She made a pitched, keening sound he had not heard before.

He took his time. He had to — she was past the point where casual attention would do her any good. His mouth teased her — at her throat, at her shoulder, at the small hollow above her bone where her chemise had gone, then lower at the warm skin of her breast, testing for the first time the rigid peak he found there — and his hand where his body had been, only now without his own urgency to drown out hers.

Her body shook and rocked in a need she could not articulate. She drew in a breath she could not seem to let out. Her hand had taken his hair and was twisting it between her fingers, not gently. Her other hand was at her own mouth, as if she were trying to keep something in.

He took the hand at her mouth and put it back down on the bed.

“Let me hear it,” he whispered.

She broke open.

It was not the broken catch of the first time, when she had moaned quietly against his shoulder with a demure sort of pleasure. It was almost a cry, half a sob, and fully startled, and it carried the desperate shape of his name in it without quite arriving at the word. Her body arched up off the bed under his hand and his mouth, and he held her through it, and she did not stop until the dark itself had run through her several times and she was lying open and undone with her hand still in his hair and her other hand tugging frantically at his to stop tormenting her.

When she came back to her own breathing, she did not let him move away. She drew him up against her with a hand at his shoulder and held him, her face wet at the temple where he had kissed her before, her chest rising and falling against his.

“I did not know,” she said, after some time, “that one could do that.”

“Now you do.”

She did not laugh, but the air around her changed, which was nearly the same thing.

He lay on his back, and she lay against his side with her palm on his chest. Her heartbeat slowed under his ribs. The shuddering eased into ordinary breath. The house was quiet. Through the walls came the faint sound of the sea.