She gave him back the look.
“Jane.” He set his hands lightly at her waist and drew her against him. She inhaled slowly at the feel of his bare chest brushing her nipples. “We are ready for bed. Come and lie down.”
For a moment the coldness of the sheet against her back took her breath. She had changed the colors of the room but not the materials. Satin, she had guessed, was an erotic accompaniment to what would happen in this bed.
She watched him finish undressing. He did not turn his back and she did not look away. She was to become as familiar with the look and feel of his body as she was with her own. Why begin with shyness or coyness?
She knew pretty well what happened. She had lived all her life in the country, after all. But even so she was shocked. There surely could not be room.
He was smiling that half-inward smile of his when he climbed onto the bed beside her and propped himself on one elbow to look down at her.
“You will become accustomed to both the sight and feel of it, Jane,” he said. “I have never had a virgin. I suppose there will be pain and blood this first time, but I promise you pleasure too. And I will not put this terror inside you until your body is ready for it. It is my task to see that it is made ready. Do you know anything of foreplay?”
She shook her head. “I have never even heard the word.”
“It means what it says.” His eyes still laughed gently at her. “We will play, Jane, for as long as we need before I mount your body and ride us both to satiety. I daresay you do not know much if anything about the ride either, do you? The pain will be over before it begins. You will enjoy it, believe me.”
She did not doubt it. There was already an ache of something that was not quite pain along her inner thighs and up into her belly. Her breasts had tightened to a strange, tingling soreness.
“You are doing it already, are you not?” she said. “Playing? With words?”
“We could sit at opposite ends of a room and arouse each other to fever pitch with only words,” he said, grinning suddenly. “And maybe we will do it one of these days. But not today. Today is for touch, Jane. For exploring each other with hands and mouths. For stripping away the otherness that holds us from merging into the oneness we crave. Wedocrave it, do we not? Both of us?”
“Yes.” She lifted a hand and cupped one of his cheeks. “Yes, Jocelyn. I want to be a part of your name, a part of the person who bears that name, a part of the soul inside that person. I want to be one with you.”
“You, me, we, us.” He lowered his head and spoke against her mouth. “Let us invent a new pronoun, Jane. The unity of I and the plurality of we melded into a new numberless word for Jane and Jocelyn.”
She opened her mouth beneath his, suddenly ravenous and shaken by the words they had spoken—and those they had not. This was not the way she had expected it to be. This was not man and mistress. This was lover and beloved.
It had not been a part of the bargain. Either for her or—surely—for him.
But it was what was happening.
She realized too late, as his tongue plundered her mouth and his hands gave her an intimation of the magic and sensual delights ahead, what this was all about. She understood, far too late, why she had taken this option rather than any of the other more proper and rational ones. She understood why she had accepted his proposition without either outrage or horror.
This was love. Oh, perhaps notloveexactly. But this was being in love. This was wanting to give and give to the beloved until everything that was oneself had been gifted away. And wanting to receive and receive until the emptiness had been filled again with a mingling of what was herself and him.
He was right. There was no word. No pronoun. There never was a word for the deepest realities.
“Jane.”
His hands, his skilled fingers, his mouth were everywhere. He knew unerringly where and how to touch her, where to brush with feather-light fingertips, where to tickle, where to pulse his fingers, where to massage, where to pinch and scratch. He knew where to kiss, where to lick, to suck, to nip with his teeth.
She had no idea how long it went on. And she had no idea how she knew where to touch him, how to caress him, when to change the nature of each caress. But she did know, as if she had always known, as if there were a deep well of femininity on which to draw for the beloved without the necessity of any lesson.
Perhaps it was that hers was not just any woman’s body and his not just any man’s. Some instinct told her that this was usually done in darkness and with eyes tightly shut, that usually all the pleasure was hugged tightly to oneself, the pleasure-giver shut out. Even in her inexperience she sensed that lovers did not always love with eyes open and focused on each other’s whenever it was feasible to do so.
“Jane.”
He spoke her name over and over, as she did his. She was his beloved, as he was hers.
The ache, the yearning, the need became more persistent and more localized. She needed himthere.
Here.
Now.
His hand, between her thighs, worked light, deft magic in her most secret place and built a frenzy of desire.
