I watched Henry’s smirk turning into a fully lit up smile. I would have given anything to have seen the very image that was playing out behind them right now. I wondered if he was thinking about the two of us in the bath, or maybe in the pool. That was now what I was certainly thinking about. Heat rushed between my legs as I squeezed them tight together.
“The thought of you in that bath without me… good God, why did I walk away?” he sighed, shaking his head. I wondered how much of his blood was rushing to his pants right now thinking about that. “I hope you don’t mind me saying all of that. We can stop this conversation, we can calm down, spend the rest of the day by the pool….”
“No,” I said instantly, my voice accidentally forcing a giggle out of both of us. Henry dropped his fork, his hand reachingacross the table towards mine. As he rested his right on top of my left, I kicked my legs out underneath the table, slowly caressing his.
“I think we’ve gone too far to turn back now. I want this, Henry, I do. And what I really want to know more about is the glimpse of what I got to experience upstairs. That’s what this lunch was meant to be about after all, wasn’t it? I want to know more about the things that you find… nice.” I said quoting his own words.
“There’s a lot of things that I find nice, and I wanted to apologize….” He sat up straight pulling his hands away from mine, his smile dropped, and his professional voice took over.
“Oh no, no, no, no!” I interrupted. “You want to hope that you’re not apologizing for before. I don’t want you to apologize for any of that… not at all… I just want to know more about it.”
“You’re not turned off? Or scared? It’s not something that we have to do, and please don’t feel like it’s something that you even need to entertain. It’s just seeing that blood, and you, it just took over me. It wasn’t something that was meant to happen, or that you were even meant to see. It just… did. It consumed me, it took over me and…” He looked away from me, shoving another piece of meat into his mouth as his cheeks turned pink. This was another side of Henry I was yet to see… pure shame written over his face. This was not where I was expecting this conversation to go.
This time my hands launched across the table to his, leaning myself closer towards him. Forcing his eyes to meet mine again. “I told you not to apologize,” I said, afraid that another sorry would come out of his mouth. “I’m not scared, and I’m far from turned off, quite the opposite in fact.”
I didn’t know too much about Henry’s dating past. He said that it had been over ten years since he had something that was even semi-serious, which made me wonder when was the last time he expressed himself in the way that he did with me.
“I’m just curious, I want to know more about it, I want to know how it makes you feel, and I want to know more about what you like to do when it comes to… blood. I’d also love to know more about what you would specifically like to do with me.”
He gulped down his food, followed by a sigh as I watched his shoulders relax. “You’re really something special, you know that, Molly? I’ve never been able to open up and let someone in as quickly as I have you,” he said.
“Ditto,” I said. “And you are safe with me, I’m not here to judge. Not at all, I just want to understand. I just want to know more about you, as I’m sure you do me.”
“Without needing to go into detail, because if there’s anyone in the world that would understand, it’s you… But I remember the first time in primary school when I first got that real whiff of blood. The first real whiff after the murder. I was eleven when a girl in school cut her finger right next to me, in cooking class. The smell just completely overtook my body. I guess ina way, it gave me comfort, like the last memory of home. Looking up and the stars and the smell of blood, was the very last memory that I had of my parents.”
Henry had told me about the gruesome murder of his parents on our first date. I don’t think it was something that he was planning on telling me about over his lavish dinner. When he innocently asked me about my parents, I told him that they weren’t around. Henry was curious, asking a few more questions, trying to figure out if they just weren’t in my life anymore, or if they weren’t on the earth anymore. It was the latter, so told him the full story. I told him about the car crash that my sister and I survived but my parents didn’t. I don’t know why I had opened up so much to him about the whole situation, but I think it was for the very reason that he was talking about right now. There was just an instant ease between us, an openness. The vortex that I felt lost in when my eyes met Henry’s felt like one of the safest places in the world.
So I told him everything, I told him the graphic scenes and feelings that were forever stuck inside my mind, but no longer held emotional weight of being stuck in the back of that car at the age of six, knowing that my parents were dead, unsure if my sister was alive while emergency services tried to cut me out of the car, so naturally… Henry told me everything about his family. About the fact that his mom and dad were both shot in cold blood by a complete stranger, out the front of their New York home one night. As a five-year-old boy, Henry watched both of his parents take their last breath, and as emergency services came and went, he just sat frozen on the walkway, staring up at the stars in the night sky. We’d both been tortured in our lives by the same kind of trauma. I guess that was the very reason why we understood each other, and why there was no judgement between us.
“I can’t believe that I’m saying this out loud, I’ve never told anyone this before. But the first time it was just the memory of that smell, mixed with my changing hormones and the fact that I had a massive crush on the girl that cut her finger. Let’s just say after that class, I had to excuse myself to the bathroom to relieve myself. And that was my initiation even into self-pleasure.”
We had both witnessed the deaths of the ones that we loved the most. We both knew the distinct smell of a whole lot of blood mixed in with a spine-tingling freeze of shock. It was a smell that had stayed with me for a long time as a child. It was a smell that even haunted me every time that I smelled it, but a whole lot of therapy, hypnosis and everything else that my Auntie Susie had pushed my sister and me towards had made the feeling more nostalgic than traumatizing now. I knew where he was coming from and understood more than most people. But when he lost his parents in the awful way that he did, he didn’t have an Auntie Susie like I did, or any family for that matter. From a young age, Henry was thrown around different family friends’ homes, Lotte’s being one of them as well as some homeless shelters.
I squeezed his hands tighter. “If I’m the only one that you’ve been able to speak with about this, then… how have you been able to express your needs?”
“You know my practically non-existent dating history so it’s not something that I have been able to express. I really wasn’t expecting to be able to even bring it up with you so soon. To be honest, it’s something that I like, something that I find nice, it’s my kink and it’s my turn on. It’s something that I have mostly squashed, but every now and again, desires and needs take over. There has been some private places that I have been able to go to safely express those desires and needs.”
“Right,” I said nodding along. Henry intrigued me so much, a man so sexy, so intelligent, women wanted to be with him, and men wanted to be him. Yet he had kept so much of himself hidden. “I’d really like to be someone you could do this with…” I said. I still didn’t know all the ins and outs of what it involved.
“I’d like that, I’d really like that. We would take it slow. We could explore this very kink together.”
“Tonight?” I said, holding his gaze. I didn’t mean to be so forward but the heat between my legs began to rise up my spine. After everything that he had just shared with me, how vulnerable he had been, all of it just made me want him even more.
“I think we can make that happen,” he said, leaning across the table, his voice a whisper as he closed the gap between us.
“But I want to know more about this kink of yours, is it the feeling of being free, and out in the open that really getsyou off? Is it the animalistic side of it all or is it the thought of getting caught that really turns you on,” he said.
I smiled, shrugged. “A little bit of both.”
“Well then, would you like to try something with me now?”
Chapter Ten
My jaw dropped open and my heart began to pound. I kept myself locked in his gaze, his words repeating in my mind.
“What specifically would you like to try?” I said, trying to come off as strong and bold, but the thought of his skin pressed tightly against mine, made my voice shaky.
“What I’m thinking is, I want to make sure that you have the best holiday ever here, which means giving you everything that you want and deserve. Like satisfying those needs inside you.” He winked, as he slowly leaned back from the table letting go of my hands.
