He might have looked at me like I was sacred, but the things he did to me were profane. His beard brushed against my inner thighs as he licked a long line up the centre of me, making me sob. He nudged my clit with the tip of his nose, making me inhale sharply, and then, when he pulled it into his mouth, sucking gently, then sucking harder, he made me scream, and scream, andscream.
He grinned again, looking up at me. ‘I’m going to use my fingers,’ he said, pressing a chaste kiss to my hip bone, ‘if that’s okay.’
‘Please, please, please,’ was all I was capable of saying, the thought of it turning my brain inside out. ‘Please.’
His grin widened. ‘When you blush,’ he said, smoothing a hand over my lower belly, ‘it starts right – here.’
He kissed just below my navel. ‘Look at it go,’ he said, kissing his way up my body. ‘Even I can see it. Has this been happening, all this time, under all those pretty dresses of yours?’
I yanked his hair and pulled his face to mine, before he could fasten his lips around my nipple again and completely turn my brainto liquid. I could taste myself on him as he kissed me, and it filled me with a sense of possessiveness so strong it almost overwhelmed me.
This was my husband.
Mine.
And he wasn’t going to leave.
‘Well, when you blush, Fisher, it all goes straight to your face,’ I said, and grabbed his cock.
Jonah went completely still.
I stroked him through his pants. He made that half-strangled, half-satisfied sound again. It was my turn to grin.
‘I’m assuming your little experiment failed,’ he choked out at last, ‘because I definitely don’t have enough blood anywhere else in my body to blush.’
I undid the button on his pants and slid my hand inside them, wrapping my fingers around the length of him. ‘I didn’t manage the full scarlet special,’ I said, kissing the apple of one cheek, then the other, ‘but I got you to turn a tiny bit pink.’
I stroked him again, and he collapsed onto me with a groan. ‘If you keep doing that,’ he said, voice muffled in my breasts, ‘this is going to be over quickly and disappointingly.’
I stroked him once more and then let go, scratching my nails up the line of hair on his belly. He panted into my skin for a few seconds, like an athlete at the end of a marathon, before he nuzzled the hollow at the base of my throat and kissed me again, lovingly, lingeringly.
‘This is like co-writing with you, Shaw,’ he said. ‘I lay out a perfectly good plan of attack and then you insist on including a bunch of tangents.’
I was about to protest, but then his fingers dipped between my legs and I forgot every word in the English language exceptyesandfuckandpleaseandJonah.
He played me like a violin, coaxing the first orgasm out of mewith two fingers, thumb against my clit as the entire world turned white; the second assisted by his mouth, laughing against me as I quaked uncontrollably. ‘It’s not funny,’ I panted, as he chuckled, forehead pillowed on one of my thighs. ‘It’s not fair, that you can completely steal my powers of rational thought like this.’
‘Shaw, you’ve been stealing my powers of rational thought for fifteen years, every time I look at you,’ he said fondly. ‘Strictly speaking, I think it’s your turn.’
‘That’s cute, Fisher, but I don’t think you understand the extent of the problem.’ I tugged lightly at his hair, which I hadn’t managed to uncurl my fingers from yet. ‘You should have tried seducing me before we both applied for this job. If you’d fucked my brains out then, you wouldn’t have had to go to all this trouble.’
‘Hey.’ His tone was sharp. ‘No. None of that.’
He crawled back up my body, bracing his elbows on either side of my head. He’d lost his pants at some stage, and his skin was hot against mine, everywhere our bodies were pressed together. ‘There is nowhere in the world that I would rather be than here with you.’
He slid his nose against mine, then kissed me, just once, tenderly. ‘If some angel descended from heaven and told me I could live my life over again, go back, make different choices – I would do everything exactly the same,’ he said, ‘if it meant I could end up here.’
Then he looked thoughtful. ‘Well, maybe notexactlythe same. There are a few revisions I’d make. And—’
‘Jonah,’ I said, ‘shut up.’
I shoved at his shoulders, pushing him onto his back. I pulled open the drawer of my bedside table, sending up a quick prayer of thanks to whatever higher being had been looking out for me during the move when I’d contemplated throwing out the half-empty box of condoms I had left over from my last partner but had ultimately decided against it.
I glanced at the expiry date as I tore the packet open. They were still good for a few months. Thank fucking God.
Jonah tried to swallow his groan as I rolled the condom onto him, but he couldn’t. It lit something up, deep inside me, and suddenly, of all things, I was thinking about the first time I read ‘On Fairy-Stories’, and how it had struck that chord in me that had never stopped reverberating.
Outside this room, we still had problems. Problems that would not be solved easily. The hollow place Chess had left in my heart could not be filled by anyone else. Jonah would always be his father’s son. The university would probably always be a cruel, cut-throat, neoliberal institution that would do its best to bleed us dry.
