CHAPTER 25
Chris
I watched as my wife’s face turned the color of ripe strawberries—a flush that started at her collarbones and climbed all the way to her hairline, staining even the tips of her ears. Her hands trembled where they gripped the bunched cotton at her ribs, and I could see her processing my command.Make it sexy.Three words had stopped her dead.
For a long moment, Valerie didn’t move. Her eyes darted to mine, then away, then back—a cornered animal calculating her options and finding none. Her lower lip disappeared between her teeth, and I saw her chest rise with a deep, shuddering breath.
Then she began.
The nightgown descended back down her body first—she let it fall to its full length again, smoothing it with her palms as if resetting. I almost told her she didn’t need to start over, but something in the set of her jaw told me to stay quiet. Valerie had started to figure it out. She was trying.
Her fingers found the top button at her throat. She unfastened it with a deliberateness that I could tell cost her a good deal—not the brisk, efficient movements of a woman undressing for bed, but something slower and much more intentional. Her fingertips lingered on each button as she worked her way down, and I watched the column of pale skin appear inch by inch: the hollow of her throat, the delicate ridge of her collarbone, the first suggestion of the valley between her small breasts.
She wasn’t good at this, but I loved her all the more for it—and my cock got all the harder. Her movements looked halting, self-conscious, her shoulders hunching forward as if her body was trying to fold in on itself even as her hands kept working. The visible struggle between her modesty and her obedience, though, aroused me much more than any practiced seduction ever could have.
The nightgown hung open to her navel now. Valerie’s breathing had gone shallow, her nostrils flaring with each exhale. She glanced at me one more time—a look so full of vulnerable, burning embarrassment that something shifted in my chest—and then she slid the fabric off her shoulders.
She tried to let it fall slowly. The cotton caught on her elbows, and she had to shake her arms slightly to free it, which ruined the effect she was going for and made her face crumple with frustration. But then the nightgown pooled at her feet and she stood before me in nothing but those full-cut white cotton panties—the ones she’d obviously put on like a fortress after her shower—and the lamplight gilded her skin with amber warmth.
Her arms twitched at her sides. I could see the muscles in her forearms tensing as she fought the urge to cover herself. She won the fight, but barely, her fingers curling into fists against her thighs.
“The panties,” I said.
A sound escaped her—not quite a whimper, not quite a word. Her thumbs hooked into the waistband. She hesitated, her eyes squeezing shut, and then she began to push them down.
She did it slowly. Whether that was because I’d told her to make it sexy or because her body was simply resisting every inch of the descent, I couldn’t tell. Maybe both. The cotton slid over the swell of her hips, revealing the smooth, pale skin of her lower belly, thrilling bareness of the outer lips, from which the adorable hood of her clit just peeked out.
She eased the panties past the tops of her thighs, bending at the waist, and I caught the gleam of wetness at the gusset as the fabric pulled away from her body—fresh wetness, new wetness, evidence that even this mortifying striptease was doing exactly what her body couldn’t help but do.
The panties reached her knees and gravity took over. They dropped to her ankles and she stepped out of them, one foot and then the other, with the careful movements of someone walking through a minefield. She straightened up and stood naked before me, her chest rising and falling rapidly, her nipples drawn tight in the cool air—or from arousal, or from the sheer overwhelming intensity of being seen this completely.
She was so beautiful it made my ribs ache.
“Good girl,” I said quietly. “Now fold them. Both. Set them on the chair.”
* * *
Valerie
Good girl.That too-familiar sob of need, shame, and love burst from my chest once again.
I folded the nightgown first—the long white cotton one, still warm from my body—pressing the fabric flat with hands that wouldn’t stop trembling. Then the panties, which I smoothed into a neat square despite the damp patch at the gusset that made my fingers flinch. I set them both on the chair beside the dresser, stacking them with the compulsive precision that I felt sure Chris had noticed was my way of maintaining control over something—anything—when everything else had been stripped away.
Then I turned to the new nightgown.
The fabric slithered through my fingers like water as I lifted it from the dresser. It weighed almost nothing. I gathered it at the hem the way I’d seen women do in movies—the kind of movies I wasn’t supposed to watch, according to my mother—and raised it over my head, letting it cascade down my body in one fluid motion.
The sensation made me gasp softly. The cotton-and-lace confection settled against my bare skin like a whisper, like a breath, like barely anything at all. It skimmed the tips of my nipples, and I felt them tighten further beneath the gossamer fabric, two obvious little points that the sheer white material didn’t conceal but rather accentuated.
The hem brushed my thighs several inches above my knees—higher than anything I’d ever worn to bed except for the peach baby doll, higher than all of my day skirts. And beneath it, nothing. Just me. Just bare skin and the cool air of our bedroom moving freely between my legs, against my bottom, across all the places that had always been sealed away behind sensible cotton.All the places that now, it seemed, belonged to my husband as much or more than they did to me.
I tugged at the hem, trying to pull it lower. It stretched a little, but when I let go it just rose again.
“Come here,” Chris said from the bed.
I walked to him on legs that felt like they were attached to someone else’s body. He sat on the edge of the mattress, his eyes moving over me with an expression that made my stomach flip—appreciation and authority braided so tightly together I couldn’t separate them. In the lamplight, I knew exactly what he could see through the fabric: the shadow of my areolae, the little cleft at the apex of my thighs, the shape of my body rendered in suggestion and silhouette.
He reached out and took my hand. His callused thumb traced a circle on my wrist, over the pulse point where my heartbeat hammered visibly.
