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“My father passed when he was eighty-nine. My mother a year after...almost as if she didn’t want to stay without him.”
My thoughts turned inward, mulling over my own life and mortality.
I understood my mother.
I understood her more than she’d ever know.
Swallowing away the quick pinch of heartache, I smiled at the reporters and threw myself into the last few months of joy before facing the coming despair. “After those first few weeks of drowning beneath years’ worth of denial and copious amounts of desperation, we managed to restrain ourselves...just a little. We’d fall into each other’s arms when I came home from school and again before we went to bed. If it was raining, I’d pretend Aslan was helping me with my math homework in my room—my parents were fully aware of how gifted he was when it came to numbers. If the stars were shining, I’d slip into the pool and practice my breathing. Aslan was a permanent feature on one of the boulders as he sat with a stopwatch, timing me, coaching me, and my parents saw nothing unusual that he now slipped into the pool with me instead. With the underwater lights turned off, they couldn’t see where he touched me underwater. They didn’t know how hard it was to keep from crying out as he pushed aside my bikini and—”
I cut myself off with a chuckle. “You can fill in those blanks yourself. This is an autobiography, not an erotic memoir.”
Margot giggled. “Don’t stop on my account. I’m loving every second.”
Dylan rolled his eyes. “I think I should’ve left you two ladies to it. I have a feeling the content on this recorder would’ve been a lot raunchier if I wasn’t here to rein you in.”
Margot nudged his shoulder with hers. “I can always come back for the bonus chapters once Neri has given you the skeleton story. Can’t I, Nerida?” Her eyes glowed with eagerness, so much so that I couldn’t spoil her fun.
“Of course. If you want to know where Aslan’s very skilled fingers went, I’m not shy in telling you. We’re all sexual creatures, after all.”
“Oh, goodie.” She smoothed down her dress. “It’s a date.”
Sadness did its best to seep over this gift of remembering, and I clung to the past a little harder. “So...there we were, two very turned on, two very eager young lovers, doing our best to stay sane even though each encounter and every release left us more and more frustrated.
“No matter how much I begged or how much I teased, Aslan refused to sleep with me until I finished school. He wanted time to figure out how best to tell my parents. He was annoyingly loyal to them. I think he believed that finishing school would mean I’d left behind my childhood, and it wouldn’t seem so twisted that the boy who’d been living in our garden was doing his best not to defile their very innocent, very virgin daughter.
“Which was silly, of course, because my mother knew I’d slept with Joel. I’d told her. She was the one who regularly checked on me to make sure I took my pill and drilled me on the importance of condoms. In a way, I was more worldly than Aslan. He was twenty-one going on forty, but his body was stuck as an oversensitive sixteen-year-old.”
“Ah, I wanted to ask about that.” Margot’s cheeks pinked. “Did he...um, you know. Was he always sensitive? Even as he got older?”
I winced a little, trying to cover my reaction. His sensitivity had made me love him all the more, yet I wished he hadn’t been cursed with such awareness. It only made what he went through that much worse.
“He remained who he was.” I left it at that. I didn’t tell her why a single stroke to his skin from me was the best thing in the world to him, but a single touch from another was the worst nightmare he’d ever endured.
That part would come later.
For now, enough darkness crept on the horizon without jumping straight into the horrors ahead.
Just for a moment, one tiny precious moment, I let memories sweep me away, indulging in secrets I couldn’t share with the reporters. The way Aslan dropped to his knees one night when my parents were down the road at the neighbours. He’d laid me on the couch, then used his tongue to make me come. Joel had never done that, and I was as inexperienced as him as he whispered against my centre how to pleasure me. His eyes had burned me from between my legs as I’d run my hands through his bronze-frosted hair, whispering the words ‘harder, slower, deeper’ until those words slipped into moans, and my cries of ecstasy were silenced by his arousal-wet fingers over my mouth.
That was the first time he gave me more than his hand or his clothing-clad body against the door. It drove us into another realm of insanity, and I grinned as I recalled the first time I repaid the favour.
