He laughed softly into her hair. “I’m not scared of that.”
“Then why are you restraining me?”
“I’mhuggingyou.”
“But you’ve already done that.”
“Alice, sweetheart, you deserve all the hugs I can give.”
Sweetheart.Was that an idiom too? And was she a fool for glowing inside at the sound of it?
Daniel kissed her throat, her jaw, kissed words against her mouth. “You deserve to be cared for, Alice. You deserve everything.”
He would not let her argue or explain the logical fallacies in his statement. And she would not let herself weep with desperate yearning for it to be true. Instead, they kissed, hard and deep, with a languid, heavy passion. And while he kept her occupied with that, Daniel quietly spread her legs, pushed up her knees, and advanced the schedule.
Pain shot through her. Alice closed her eyes, silently counting one cycle of breath and then another, willing her countenance to remain undisturbed. According to her scientific reading, women did not enjoy sexual intercourse, but if they waited patiently until the man was finished, they’d feel a sense of achievement that would be satisfying indeed. Alice rather doubted this, considering the discomfort she was in, but she was prepared to endure.
“Sorry,” Daniel whispered, withdrawing.
She caught at him with something akin to panic. “Don’t leave.”
He smiled. “I’m not going to leave you, sweetheart.” Shifting his angle, he moved closer, deeper, again. “I just don’t want to hurt you.”
“You can hurt me,” she answered promptly. “I don’t mind.”
“I do.” And shifting his angle again, slow, patient, he watched her face until its disguise faded and she was helpless to pretend. Her breath became an unmeasurable mess of gasping and broken sound. Then he moved more firmly. Things began to feelnice delightfuloh my good God she wanted to do this and nothing else for the rest of her life.
“Alice?” he asked gently.
“Umhunmghm,” she replied—which was about as effective a rebuttal to science as it was possible to get. She glanced at him, and their eyes accidentally met.
He stilled.
She stopped breathing altogether.
The whole universe tilted on its axis, pouring starlit silence into the small, shy distance between their eyes.
And when Alice exhaled again, it felt like her soul emerged with it to embrace Daniel, drawing him close for a kiss that was only soft, brief, yet somehow more profound than any they had shared before.
He smiled, making her shiver right through. “You know when you open a new book and realize it’s going to be perfect?” he whispered.
“Yes,” Alice said.
“That’s how I feel when I look at you.”
He gave her no chance to respond as he lifted himself to a steeper angle and, discarding rule after rule, made her climax even more emphatically than before.
“Oh, valiant dust!” she cried out, overmastered.
Daniel’s movements grew almost desperate then. The bed shuddered and wailed. Alice lay rocking beneath him, feeling boneless, defenseless, peaceful at the eye of a storm. He lowered himself once more, fingers twining with her hair, mouth so near hers they breathed the shivering fragments of each other’s breath. He said something she could not quite hear but it sounded a great deal like the inarticulate love and grief that lay at her own core.
“Daniel,” she whispered.
He went suddenly taut, as if she’d stopped everything in him—as if speaking his name had broken a curse. Then he collapsed. For a sweaty, overwrought moment they clung to each other, still connected in deep and wishful ways, while the bed sagged as if it was equally exhausted. At last, Daniel rolled away.
Alice felt the sharp flash of the world against her body. Immediately, she moved to press herself against him again. He had one arm up, his hand clutching his damp hair, and he laid the other around her shoulders. She relaxed then, safe in his steadiness.
“Are you well?” she asked tentatively.
