‘Two can play at this game,’ he murmured into the flesh of her stomach. He took one of her nipples between his teeth and she whimpered, succumbing all too happily to her own pleasure. His hands snaked downwards and she held her breath in anticipation of his touch; instead he repaid the favour, stroking her thighs softly as she squirmed with want.
‘Is this how you fucked Opal?’ The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them. Johan looked up from beneath the mound of her breast, bemused.
‘Is that what this is about?’
‘Well, she looked pretty ravaged when you two came wandering out of her bedroom earlier.’ Ruby was annoyed with herself for letting her intrusive thoughts ruin the moment.
‘I didn’t fuck her, and that’s not even her bedroom anymore. Famously the scumbag husband sleeps in there. She told you, we were looking at some art.’
‘Oh please, the whole jilted wife thing, it’s an act. You think it’s a coincidence that the majority of the people she’s invited are young, fit men, and a lesbian? She doesn’t want any competition for her hunting season.’
Ruby couldn’t be sure, but it sounded almost like he was wounded by that suggestion. ‘You want to conquer me to one-up her in this wacky power play thing you’ve got going on with her?’
Funny, Ruby thought, how she’d so quickly turned from the conquered to the conqueror; reading that poem in the Thamesis Tavern already felt like a lifetime ago.
She pulled herself up onto her elbows and looked Johan square in the face. ‘All I want, Johan, is for you to fuck me into full-body spasms.’ He looked hesitant.
‘It’s all I’ve been able to think about all day,’ she said quietly, guiding his hand between her legs.
When he started circling her clit, it was her turn to throw her head back. He grazed his teeth against her neck, his words muffled. ‘I’ll give you everything you want.’
She could feel the tightening in her belly, and the ache becoming more acute. She knew she was close because she was finding it hard to pinpoint where each sensation was coming from. There was the wetness of his tongue and the rhythm of his fingers, but also a panting growing faster, which she couldn’t distinguish properly from her own heartbeat. She kept her eyes shut as she climbed. And then at the pinnacle before her release, he stopped.
The breath she’d been holding came gushing out in exasperation and, as her vision came back into focus, she could make out his devilish expression.
‘You’re really onto something there. That was fucking exhilarating.’ It was him kneeling over her as her body registered its own dissatisfaction. She was a bundle of live nerve endings, reabsorbing all that pent-up energy. It was a feeling akin to pain.
Without fully registering what she was doing, Ruby reached out for Johan and in one swift motion pulled herself back on top of him. Her mind was a whirr and she felt overcome withlonging. She lowered herself onto him and felt for a second the calming bliss of submerging yourself beneath the ocean to escape the sun’s burning rays. And then came the hunger, which she could see reflected back at her in his eyes. He clawed at her hips as they crashed into his.
At some point she cried out, and he brought her face close to his, clamping his palm over her mouth in a way that only made her want to moan louder. When she felt herself coalesce once more, she pinned his hands back behind his head, determined now and delighted by the intermittent flashes of fury and pleasure on his beautiful face.
He whimpered beneath her. ‘Don’t you dare come before me,’ she hissed as she brought up the tempo once again. The large mahogany headboard had begun to rattle against the wall and Ruby was thrilled by the idea of waking the whole house up.
She imagined Opal bursting in to find Ruby astride Johan’s taut, wanting frame, and bearing witness to his shuddering release. Opal would bring a hand to her mouth in a mixture of horror and perverse excitement …
It was with this thought that the building ache burst into a trembling satisfaction. Ruby collapsed onto Johan’s heaving chest and it took a moment for the beating of blood to quieten from her ears.
Johan rolled her onto her side, so that they were facing each other, their noses just a fraction from touching.
‘Sorry, I couldn’t hold on any longer.’ Johan spoke softly, and – to Ruby’s surprise – he sounded genuinely apologetic.
‘Well, it seems you really just hate being told what to do.’ She winked at him, hoping to crack through the shroud of sincerity that had descended over their naked bodies.
Johan didn’t respond; instead he held her gaze, as though searching for something in her eyes that her mouth was refusing to say.
Eventually he seemed to give up, turning onto his back to face the ceiling. Ruby did the same, wondering if there was something deeply wrong with her. This had happened before, the expectation of men that by baring her body, she was somehow also agreeing to bare her soul.
It had happened often enough that Ruby had begun to assume that forotherwomen, this distinction didn’t even exist. That one was innately tethered to the other and that by submitting to being penetrated, you were also granting unlimited access to the excavation of your mind.
For Ruby, these two things did not feel connected to one another at all. If anything, she wasmorelikely to trust those who hadnointerest at all in her sexually, with her innermost secrets. In Ruby’s opinion, to engage in that kind of trust with a man who has just derived most of his sexual satisfaction with imagining you as an object, as a toy to be played with, was foolish and dangerous.
‘What were you thinking about?’ Johan spoke to the faded wallpaper above their heads.
‘When?’ Ruby tried to keep the irritation out of her voice. This was exactly the line of questioning that she’d hoped to avoid.
‘Just then, when you … ?’
‘When I came?’ Ruby was baffled by his sudden coyness.
