I nodded. I wasn’t sure I was good but I wanted to find out.
He started at my neck. Pressed his lips right below my ear where the pulse was hammering and kissed me there so softly that my eyes closed on their own. His mouth trailed down the side of my throat, slow, tasting, taking his time in a way that no man had ever taken with me. Ahmad took what he wanted. Thad performed. Quest was doing something else entirely—he was learning me. Mapping out my body with his mouth like he had all night and nowhere else to be.
His hands found the hem of my dress and pushed it up slowly, past my thighs, past my hips. The air hit my skin and I shivered but not from cold. He hooked his fingers into my underwear and pulled them down my legs in one smooth motion and dropped them on the floor like they were irrelevant.
Then he lowered himself between my thighs and looked up at me from down there with those dark eyes, and I swear to God my soul left my body for a second because no one had ever looked at me like that from that position. With hunger and reverence at the same time. Like he was about to do something sacred and filthy in the same breath.
“Relax your legs,” he said, his voice low and vibrating against my inner thigh. “Stop clenching. Let me in.”
I tried. My thighs were shaking and I couldn’t tell if it was nerves or anticipation or both. He kissed the inside of my left thigh, then my right, alternating, moving closer to the center each time but never arriving. Teasing me. Making me wait. Making me want it so badly that by the time he finally got there I wouldn’t be thinking about control or fear or anything except his mouth.
And then he got there.
The first contact of his tongue against my pussy made my back arch off the sofa and my hand fly to his head. He didn’t rush it. He licked me slow, one long stroke from bottom to top, tasting me like he was savoring something he’d been craving. Then he did it again. And again. Each stroke a little firmer, a little more deliberate, finding the rhythm my body was responding to and locking into it.
“Your pussy taste so good,” he murmured against me, and I felt the vibration of his voice against my clit and my hips bucked involuntarily. He pressed his hand flat against my lower belly to hold me still. “Be still. I’m not done.”
He sucked my clit into his mouth and my vision went white. The sound that came out of me was something between a moan and a gasp and a prayer and I grabbed at his head, nails in his scalp hard enough that it should’ve hurt but he just groaned against me like the pain turned him on.
“That’s it,” he said between strokes, his lips slick and his breath hot against my pussy. “Stop fighting it. Let go for me.”
“I can’t?—”
“Yes you can. You’re already there. I can feel it.” He slid his tongue inside me and my whole body jerked. He fucked me with his tongue slow and deep, and then pulled out and went back to my clit, circling it, flicking it, applying pressure exactly where I needed it like he’d been studying me for years instead of minutes.
“Quest—” I couldn’t finish the sentence. His name was the only word left in my vocabulary.
“Say it again.”
“Quest.”
“Again.”
“Quest, please?—”
“Please what? Tell me what you want.”
“Don’t stop. Please don’t stop.”
He didn’t stop. He went harder, faster, his tongue relentless against my clit while his hands gripped my thighs and held them open and I was shaking now, my whole body trembling, the orgasm building from somewhere deep in my pelvis like a wave gathering strength before it crashed.
“I’m about to?—”
“I know. Come for me, Mehar. Let go.”
I came so hard that my back arched completely off the sofa and my hand found the armrest and gripped it like my knuckles were about to bust through my skin. The orgasm ripped through me in waves, the first one sharp and electric, the second one deeper and slower and rolling, and the third one a tremor that left my legs shaking and my eyes wet and my chest heaving and every wall I’d ever built in complete ruins on the floor of my living room.
He kissed the inside of my thigh. Then the other one. Then he pulled my dress back down and came up and lay beside me on the sofa, pulling me against his chest.
I was crying. I didn’t mean to be crying and I didn’t want to be crying but the tears were falling and I couldn’t stop them. It wasn’t sadness. It was release. It was years of men taking from my body without giving anything back. It was Ahmad and his violence and Thad and his lies and my father and his control and the cage and the dungeon and every night I’d spent convincing myself that the only way to be intimate was to be in charge.
And this man had just laid me down and made me come undone without taking a single thing for himself.
“You good?” he asked, his arm around me, his lips against my forehead.
“No,” I said honestly. “But I think that’s okay.”
“It is.”
