I took her face in my hands, making her look at me. Her hair was curled and on the loose. Medusa. Every so often the scent of her shampoo would drift in the air, the sweet smell of melon.
She put her hands on my wrists. “What is it?”
I wasn’t ready to talk about the dream. Or the other worries on my mind. I went to kiss her, but she turned away. “I have to brush my—”
I kissed her anyway, putting a halt to any further argument on the matter. My tongue searched her mouth before I licked around her lips, up her jaw, to her earlobe. I sucked on the tender skin, and the pressure on my wrists increased.
“Oh, that’s—oh God, that’s different.”
When I moved lower to her neck, and then her collarbone, she started to squirm. Her fingers slid up, taking my hands in her own. We shifted, her underneath me.
“I love when you make those breathy noises,” I said, sliding down her body, my hands still in hers, until the connection stretched and my fingertips trailed down her skin. Goosebumps spread at my touch, highlighted by the light.
Scarlett had always been sensitive to my touch, but earlier in the shower all I had done was bite and suck at her lip. She was experiencing a similar reaction, begging me to slow down, though I took my time, my fingers no more than a brush.
If I put my hands above her, I imagined I could feel the heat of every pulse, pounding away like locked hearts in separate cages. Her chest rose and fell in pants, and I could’ve sworn I saw her heart beating through her translucent skin, feel the franticbabump, babump, babump.
The night Nemours had given her the drug came back to me then, sharp and cutting. She wasn't out of her mind though. Not in the same way. She remembered me.
“I don't want to…” Her body arched, her fists tightened around the sheets, and her thighs came together. “Not now. Earlier, in the shower, I felt empty after…alone when it happened so fast.”
I nodded. The light from the moon seemed to fall across her even brighter, a silver wash across flesh. I wrapped my hands around her thin ankles, and her legs parted, cool air rushing between. She trembled and moaned from the slight maneuver. I rubbed my dick along her leg to see what she would do.
“You feel so g-g-good.”
“I just—”
“I know,” she said, “but when you touch me—the humming. It feels so hot in my veins.”
My hands slid up her lean legs and sculpted thighs, over the curves of hip bones, trailing the deep slope of belly, along each rib, the soft, fleshy mounds of her breasts, up the length of her thin arms, and found their home in hers.
She was warm and slick and tight as a fucking clutch. The rush of my blood made me lightheaded. I closed my eyes. Maybe I made a sound. Maybe I didn’t.
She pulsed her hips up, and a sound ripped through my chest. It sounded like the heart being torn away from a body.
“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me that it's different...with me. When we make love.”
I opened my eyes to meet hers. Rarely did she cry during sex, though sometimes she said it felt so good that she wanted to cry, but she was now— a slow drip, not a rush.
Like a small rock being released by a little hand, the fragile ice of a winter’s night cracked, allowing moonlight to filter through, along with secrets shared between a man and his wife.
“Look at me, baby.”
She did, ever so slowly, her black lashes wet and glossy.
I held tighter with the hand that I had marked with an S, the hand that she had marked with a B. I brought her other hand to my chest, over my heart. I stopped moving inside of her, forcing her to focus on me. She wriggled, urging me on.
“Tell me, Scarlett.”
She became as still as waiting grace. Her tears came faster. “Love. Ifeelyour love.”
I began to move again, in time to her needs. My forehead rested against hers, my mouth close, breathing her in, my arms trembling with restraint.
“I need to hear it,” she pleaded.
“I can’t—” I struggled with words, struggled to keep my head on straight. I was drowning in her love. Yet the breath was there, in my lungs, because she was my oxygen. “It’s different.” I hissed through my teeth. “So different.”
She became panicked. Her touch was urgent, trying to draw me further in, and my lips came to hers as I whispered how I should’ve never said that to her, treated her that way, and she told me how sorry she was, kissing my forehead, hands seeming to be in ten places at once.
