How would anyone not have guessed? She wasn’t a master criminal, living by her wits alone. She was a fumbling, bumbling idiot who didn’t realize simple, obvious things like, “You limp, honey. You wince without even knowing you’re doing it. Do you know how many times I’ve felt as though I accidentally hurt you, and wanted to pull away? And yet you never say. That’s the worst part. You’d rather pretend it didn’t hurt than make a sound of protest. I’ve sometimes thought I could be popping stitches I didn’t even know were there, without you telling me a single thing about it.”
“There aren’t any stitches. It happened...it happened a long time ago.”
She wished she didn’t have to lie in amongst all of this truth. But then, she was giving him so much here. She was standing in front of him in just her bra and panties, shrouded by the dim light of her bedroom but still completely visible. He could still see the rope-scar around one of her legs and the place where the metal had gone through her middle. There were the burns over her right shoulder like a piece of medieval armor, weird lines around her upper arm where something white-hot had held on.
It was a lot, a lot, a lot.
She hoped it was enough.
Thank God he let it be enough.
“You don’t have to tell me,” he said, and though showing him should have been the hardest part—though telling him should have seemed easy compared to this—somehow she was still relieved. She wasn’t sure why but it was there, buried at the bottom of her. But there it was—a certain pleasure to know that she still wouldn’t have to reveal the worst thing.
They could just have this.
Oh, this, this.
“You just have to believe in me. Believe that I won’t let you down—that I won’t walk away because you think you can’t give mesomething. You give meeverything. You’ve given me peace and comfort and love. Just let me give the same back to you.”
And in that moment, she really thought she could. It wasn’t hard to let him come to her, and touch her, and take off those last items of clothing. On the contrary—there was a kind of bliss in it she’d never felt before. She closed her eyes and just drifted on a wave of his careful caresses...the way he stroked the back of his hand down over the burns on her shoulder and collarbone, so soft it barely sparked that prickly feeling, so tender it made her ache right through the middle.
But best of all...there was no curiosity in it. No lingering on her scars as though they needed prettying up and paying apologetic attention to. He touched the rest of her in the exact same way, with that same sweet deliberation and barely checked lust. His breath caught as his knuckles brushed over the smooth slope of her left breast, and there was barely any difference when he found the knotted star just left of the rich curve of her right hip.
Everything was given the same weight.
And that weight seemed to be dragging him down, down, down into the depths of his desire. By the time he got to her underwear he was flushed and feverish, clearly trying to be patient but getting pretty close to failing. He went to ease that scrap of cotton down her legs, and somehow wound up yanking a little instead. And when he realized what he was doing—that he was getting too hot and too eager—he cursed at himself and drew his hands back.
It didn’t help him, however. He still didn’t seem to know how to be careful and passionate at the same time. After a second of flummoxed indecision he finally settled on tearing his jacket off, as though his jacket was the thing causing all the problems. It wasn’t her body or the situation or the fact that he was finally touching her bare. It was the suede, the goddamn suede. “I fucking hate suede,” he said.
Though she felt pretty sure the suede had nothing to do with the way he leaned forward to press his face between her legs. That was all him, from the desperate way he reached up to cup her ass as he did it, to the sound he made once his mouth was against the light fuzz that covered her pussy. She knew that sound so well now—lost somewhere between a moan and a sigh of relief—and it thrilled her.
But not as much as the feel of where he currently was. She’d thought she was ready for it, sure that the touches they’d shared through clothing were pretty close to the real thing. How different could they possibly be? How could she have known the answer wasextremely different in every possible way?
Because it was, oh it was. She seemed to have a thousand new nerve endings on the surface of her skin, and the slightest movement from him set them all firing. He turned his head and she nearly collapsed, and not just because of the place he was brushing. There was also the near-cutting sensation of his stubble over that tender skin. The hint of his lips, all soft and near slippery.
And then it wasn’t a hint at all. His tongue slid over the seam between the lips of her pussy, seeking entrance—at first softly, gently, but then with an insistence that made her shiver. He wanted those lips to part for him...and they did. Slowly, slowly they did. They eased open the way a tightly clenched fist might, as someone soothes it.
And it felt like that too. She had the sense of being stroked into calmness, of being teased and caressed until she surrendered completely. He didn’t push or force or grab—he waited until she simply had to part her legs a little more, and maybe lean toward him a little bit. Then once she had, once she was trembling and impatient...
Thatwas when he decided to lick a little deeper.
Only a little, she thought, yet it felt like a lot. The tip of his tongue just barely grazed her clit, but the flood of sensation it produced was almost too much for her to take. Her legs really did give in then, though it didn’t matter much anymore. He had hold of her, he had hold of her. His hands were on her hips now, steadying her.
He was always steadying her. Just when she thought she was going to fall, there he was. And he kept being there, no matter what she did. She wound up sort of crouched over him, breathless and shaking, one hand twisted in his hair.
He didn’t care. He kept licking her in that good, good way—in these short, sharp shocks that made her buzz all thick and nice—and when she said his name he did it faster. He did it with more intent, as though the sound of those two syllables spurred him on. “Bernie,” she said, “Bernie,” and suddenly he was ravenous.
She could feel him kissing at her now, rather than just the little licks. His plump lips parted and slid around all sorts of things, making everything wetter and hotter and messier. Oh she was so incredibly, undeniably messy. She could feel it all slipping and sliding beneath the stroke of his tongue and the press of his mouth, could feel it spreading outward over her thighs.
It was probably all over his face; he was probably swallowing the taste.
But the strange thing was—she didn’t care. If anything, the idea only excited her more. She thought of his chin all glossy with her slipperiness and felt a surge of squirming arousal, half embarrassment and half sweetness and all perfection. She was going to come if he carried on this way. She was going to come if he carried on any way. He could have clicked his fingers, if she was being honest.
Though she was glad he decided on sliding them between her legs instead. That was a much better way of finishing things off—and itdidfinish them. The second she felt him just sort of easing his thumb over her tightly clenched pussy, stroking rather than pressing inward but with thathint... That hint of actually doing it...
She went over for that hint. She imagined him there, sliding in and out of her, stroking and finding all kinds of interesting things, and everything just disappeared over the edge of pleasure. She plummeted headfirst into a shivering, insane maze of intense bursts and sudden pulses, and even that seemed like an understatement.
It just wasn’t like anything she’d ever experienced before. She’d touched herself there, of course. She’d let her fingers slide in just a little, egged on by curiosity and something like excitement. But none of it had even remotely gotten her close to this.
