Chapter 57
Ore
She’d never really thought that naked men were that attractive – not that she wasn’t attracted to them, more that the aesthetics of the male form had always been relatively underwhelming to her. Daniel’s body was a different matter. It was sculptural in its construction, each part of him harmoniously in tune with the other. His skin was so smooth and toned that her fingers sent confused, flustered messages back to her brain, as though they were expecting to feel the coolness of marble, rather than the warmth of flesh. In her right mind she might have taken time to marvel at it.
In this moment though, there was no time for that. Her body had taken the reins and her mind could only come along for the ride – an exhilarating one at that. She was crouching in front of him, facing the hard, taut, quite-a-bit-more-than-a-handful of him. She knew she was ready for it, and when their eyes met, he did too. He pulled her up and pushed her up against the wall. She hooked her leg around him and found herself staring into his eyes, transfixed by them as he slid inside her. Eye contact during sex was untrodden territory for her, but the intensity of it was exquisite.
With each thrust she felt a slow unfurling of something,deep within her. Like her body was welcoming him in, like he wasn’t merely a guest, but a cherished old friend. The edges of her began to blur. She could no longer determine where she and he ended, and the rest of the world began, their pleasure smudging the contours of things. She had an overpowering sense of herself as a mass of vibrating atoms and as the waves grew taller and taller, and she waited for the crash, she feared she might come apart entirely, that he would finish and find a mass of quivering matter dripping off his hands.
The graze of his teeth on her earlobe brought her back into herself and she focused on the smell of him to keep her there. She wanted to be present. The thrumming in the pit of her stomach had reached a fever pitch, but she didn’t want to reach the summit without him. She grabbed his hips and slowed him down, whispering in his ear, ‘Let’s get there together.’ He groaned into her neck and they found a new, delicious rhythm.
It was deliberate, what they were doing now, not frenzied like in the beginning. Ore didn’t think she’d ever experienced anything like it before. Sober, for a start, and considered … He had navigated her body like a pleasure garden, admiring the blooms, stroking the petals, burying his nose in the bouquet. She was no mere object, but a living breathing constellation of new experiences, and they were on that exploration together.
She opened her eyes to find him again, and he was already there, his lips parted slightly. Each plunge dove deep now, caressing a part of her she didn’t know was there. She realised the panting was hers and with the slightest of nods, his pace almost imperceptibly quickened. ‘I’m almost there,’ shebreathed and he brought a hand to her face, his thumb slipping into her mouth.
‘I’ll see you at the top …’ he whispered before his own breathing turned carnal. Ore wasn’t sure if he had actually spoken or if she was reading his mind, but as her mind frazzled at the edges, she surrendered to him, body and soul, and was no longer convinced of any distinction.
At some point, as she floated out from somewhere deep within her body, he shuddered and she held him tightly for fear he might collapse. Her senses returned slowly, one by one. The roughness of the panelling against her back, the smell of neoprene and sweat, the sound of the waves, the taste of herself from his mouth, and then finally, the beauty of his face, beset with a smile that made her feel like she had finally found home. She realised too late that the hotness on her cheek was a tear.
His brow furrowed. ‘Are you OK, Ore? I … I’m so sorry …’ He sounded panicked.
‘Shhhh,’ she soothed him, bringing a soft fingertip to his lips. ‘I’m just happy, Daniel, like I’ve been rummaging around my life looking for something I’ve lost, and I’ve just found it, and it’s even more special than I remembered.’
In her postcoital state, she was being careless with her feelings, she knew, but the words tumbled anyway.
‘You have such a beautiful way with words, Ore.’ He smiled softly. ‘I don’t think I could have described it better.’
She laugh-gulped back another stream of tears and Daniel just buried his head in her neck. She let them fall then, splashing into his hair, and kept holding him as tightly as she could.
