Page 15 of Devil

He worked my underwear off my hips and then my legs, and they were stuffed into his pocket to rest alongside his watch. His fingertips traced over parts of me that I’d never thought about. The place where my thighs joined my groin, the delicate skin between my vulva and my anus, the swirls of short hair on the delta between my legs. When he finally pressed his fingers to my clitoris, I was shaking all over. And the moan I made when he started gently circling the swollen bud was unholy.

“No one else has done this before, have they?” he asked.

I couldn’t shake my head, not with his hand against it, so I whispered my answer. “No one.”

“I’m the first.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes.”

“How many other people have you kissed?” There was an edge to his words, as if the mere idea of me having kissed anyone else enraged him.

“This is—this is it. My first kiss.”

A groan. “Jesus.”

His hand lifted from my head, but the reprieve was brief because then he found my neck instead. He didn’t choke me; he didn’t compress my windpipe or impede blood flow. But the way he cupped my throat in his palm, the way his splayed thumb and fingers stretched around the sides of my neck…he didn’t need to. My life—and the blood and air that sustained it—was cradled in one large hand.

“You’re mine,” he said with his mouth next to my ear. “Say it. You’re all mine. I get to have you.”

“Bell…” His fingers were moving between my thighs all this while, and the pleasure was building like a storm. I was scared of it. I couldn’t get enough of it.

“It’s okay. You’ll say it soon. Because it’s true and you’re a good girl, and good girls tell the truth. You’re so wet, Birdie. I would slide right into you, you know that? If you weren’t a virgin, it wouldn’t take anything at all. But since you are, I’ll have to shove. It might hurt. You might cry.”

At that moment, the distance between thinking Bell had come in here about a grade and him talking about shoving into me was nowhere in my thoughts. All I could think, all I could see, was what he’d just described. My hands scrabbled at the chalkboard. My hips tried in vain to move. I had to?—

Something was?—

I couldn’t stop?—

“Fuck, sweetheart. Yes.” Bell’s voice was triumphant as I let out a shuddering moan that keened up into a cry, and for the first time in my conscious life, the pleasure that came to me in dreams crashed into my waking body. It was turbulent, tumbling, gasping. A wave, and I was already drowned before it began.

The wave built again and crashed and built again, the rolls and crests surging from where Bell was touching me, rushing out to my fingertips and the pads of my toes—tidal, eternal, all over. And as much as I could think anything in that moment, I thought,I want this forever. I wanted the euphoria coaxed by his fingers, the warm collar of his hand against my throat, the growled encouragement in my ear as I quivered in a cage made of chalkboard and Bell.

But when the tides receded, I didn’t feel washed clean. I felt wrecked. Like a flood had come for real, and it had left only ruined things behind, debris everywhere, mud like a plague.And now all Heaven had gone to wrack, with ruin overspread.And at that moment, I knew a terrible thing, and it was that I would let ruin spread over me over and over again…just so long ashewas the ruin. I would be mud-smeared and choked with branches and window glass, and I would linger in shivering ecstasy still.

He didn’t let me fall. He kept me upright even as he pulled his hand free and sucked his own fingers clean. He liked whatever he tasted, I thought, because he gave a satisfied grunt and shoved his hips into me in a hard, grinding motion as he kept his fingers in his mouth.

My lashes were dipping, and the floor refused to level itself in my vision; after so long without being touched, this amount of oxytocin was incapacitating. I think that’s why I didn’t notice my skirt being pulled up until it was gathered in a single large fist by my hip.

The sound of a zipper.

“Bell?” I was dizzy and the zipper was possibly the most erotic sound I’d ever heard in my life, and also he couldn’t—we couldn’t—this was the part they drilled into you, that they made you remember. You couldn’t dothis. A man couldn’t be inside a woman unless they were married.

That one rule was so clear and immutable that it warped the moral gravity around it; in fact, its very immutability made everything else seem fluid and available. If vaginal penetration was the one inviolable line, then it followed that anything apart from that was…violable. Free.

Fingering, oral, anal.

The things you did with other girls at slumber parties, the things men did on work trips with wedding rings left on hotel bathroom counters.

I was too timid to think like that—all rules applied to me as far as I knew—and I knew what had just happened was wrong. But intercourse wasn’t merely an ideological boundary; it was a visceral one. It was scored into our bones with knives made of fear, tattooed on the inside of our skin. This specific thing was what the Church cared about stopping you from doing; this specific thing was what you could never ever do.

“Bell, you can’t.” I could feel him behind me, the movement of his hand, a soft inhale that made me think he’d just wrapped his fingers around the rigid flesh exposed by that open zipper. A shift closer.

And then?—

The blunt, hot press of him. The sweep of him from front to back. At the time, I thought he was tracing me, learning the contours of me with this new instrument of his, but now, knowing more, I know he was painting me. Making sure that I was slick enough on the outside to ease his entrance.

He came to be notched at my opening.