And then onto that goddamned freckled lip.
With a growl, I’m on her, I’m against her, I’m biting and sucking on that lip—my entire world the taste of her tears and her mouth—and she doesn’t murder me even in the slightest. The minute I kiss her, her hands weave through my hair and tighten, not trying to pull me away, but keeping me close. Her hips begin rocking mindlessly against mine and she pants into my mouth whenever we separate long enough to suck in a breath.
“Shit,” she hisses, and I know she’s furious with herself. But even in her fury, she can’t stop grinding her needy cunt against my clothed erection. It swells to full hardness to meet her. “Fuck.”
“Twenty minutes,” I demand in between bites. “Give me twenty minutes with you.”
“And just what do you think you’ll accomplish in twenty minutes?” she gasps out, hands sliding beneath my coat and sweater to tug at the buttons of the Oxford shirt I wear underneath it all. She’s always been a glutton for my body. Matched only by my terminal gluttony for hers.
“Orgasms,” I promise, moving to her neck and sucking the skin there until she groans. “One for every year we’ve been apart.”
Her hands are under my shirt now, running up and down my abdomen with greedy caresses. The caresses are awkward because our lower halves are still grinding and mashing together, but she keeps rubbing her sex against me anyway, arching her back to get a better angle against my cock.
“You,” she pants, “don’t get”—pant pant—“to just come here”—pant—“and fuck me with your giant penis.”
I move my mouth to her ear and feel how she shudders with the tiniest licks, the smallest of nips. “Who said anything about that? I’m going to lick those orgasms out of you. I’m going to kiss them right out of your little pussy. I’m going to fuck you with my mouth, and you’re going to be so soft and swollen and hungry for more after that you’re going to give me what I really want.”
I pull back so I can look into her eyes—silver and glistening even in the cloudy light coming in through the office window—and so I see how they war between wary and aroused. “And what do you really want?” she asks. Her hands are roaming down to my arse now, like she can’t help herself even when she’s supposed to be negotiating—or murdering me, according to her.
“To be your temple again.”
I think the noise she makes was meant to be a scoff, but it comes out like a choked sob. “You’ll never get that back from me.”
I know that. I know that like I know the feel of my own palm around my cock. But it’s gutting to hear her say it aloud, and I press my face back into her neck so she doesn’t see how she’s hurt me.
Her hands move back up to my chest, then my shoulders, then my hair, and I thinkthis is it, this is the moment she’s going to push me away, and I won’t get to taste her, I won’t get to pour every hour of my emptiness and misery into the kinds of intimate kisses that I would rip my soul out to give her. I breathe in the sweet, soap-smelling warmth of her neck, I tell myself to enjoy this last moment of her body against mine, her hands in my hair, and I brace myself for the rejection I’ve earned. The rejection I deserve.
It doesn’t come.
Instead, she pushes my head down—down, down, down, until I’m kneeling at her feet. “Four orgasms,” she says as she pushes me down her body. “Four and I might consider not tearing your throat out with my teeth. And you only have fifteen minutes.”
I peer up at her like she’s a goddess who’s just spared my life, and I don’t miss the tremble in her chin as she looks back down at me. Nor do I miss the flush on her neck or the hard nipples pressing against her shirt. She hates me and wants me all at the same time, and I can’t blame her, because I hate myself and want her all at the same time too. Want her so much that atonement and morality are nothing right now, they are non-concepts, they can’t exist when heaven itself is a mere few inches away from my lips.
No, I have to taste her. I have to lick her and bite her and scent her and mark her and remember. Remember this holy ritual we used to act out faithfully every chance we got—sometimes in bed, sometimes with her cuffed and spread for me, sometimes in my office at the university—this sacred act where I drank of her like communion wine. Where I breathed her in like the divine air of Delphi. She called me her angry god, and I was, I was her jealous, fierce, imperfect god, but we’d both known the truth. We both knew who actually worshipped whom.
She was my wind-whipped ridge over the temple complex, she was my precious artifact. When I held her close, I held God close, when I was with her, God was with me. Experiencing her is experiencing everything I’ve spent my life chasing after, just like the captain in the story.
Mylittle supplicant, I think wildly, pressing my mouth to the apex of her thighs and kissing her fabric-covered cunt.My little one. How I need you.
I don’t give her a chance to rethink this; I can’t. I reach for the button of her pants and unfasten them, tugging them around her hips and bottom to her knees and then I bury my face against her white cotton knickers. I inhale her, shoving my nose into her body and making her gasp with the coarse animality of it. The minute her scent kicks into my nostrils, my cock responds with a jerking leap in the leg of my trousers, wanting out to play.
“I smell you,” I murmur, angling so that I can bite gently at the cotton-covered folds. “I know you’ve been needing this. I know you’ve been thinking of me and how good it felt to fuck my hand last night.”
She shudders, her fingers tightening in my hair.
“You’ve always liked it a little wrong, Charlotte. A little bad. And you need it so often, my sweetheart. I’ve never met anyone who needs release as much as you.”
She shivers again, whimpering as I give her mound a final kiss over the cotton and then begin tugging her knickers down to reveal her gold-covered cunt. My own sweet chalice, my own reliquary. Gilded and gorgeous and protecting the real gift inside.
I kiss her as reverently as a priest kisses his stole, soft kisses along her silky curls until I get to her clit, which is plump and swollen, and sweet as any berry, a little fruit waiting to be plucked. I kiss it too, relishing her small jump as I do, and then I tease at it with the tip of my tongue, finally,finallytasting her. The unique, intimate taste that’s sweet and earthy and so goddamn addictive that I’ve been starving for it since before our ill-fated wedding day four years ago. And the moment it hits my tongue, I need more, I need so much more and I use my thumbs to spread her apart so I can lick deeper, farther, I need it to be the only thing I taste for the rest of my life.
She gives a cry and slumps back against the wall.
“Everything,” I breathe into her, barely able to stop myself from tasting her long enough to speak, “this is everything.Fuck.”
And after that, I can’t speak. Me, the teacher. Me, the writer. And all my words are gone, totally subsumed. Burned away in the face of my need to drink her down, to mark every hidden corner of her with my kiss, and have her break apart against my lips. I keep her spread with one hand and then use the other to push her pants and knickers down to her ankles, enough to free one leg, which I sling over my shoulder. God, yes,this—this right here, with her thigh warming my ear and her hips angled just right against my face—I have to live the rest of my life like this. My face buried in her and my nose bumping her clit as I fuck her with my tongue, as I stab into her and swirl and lick, and then move up to suckle at her while her pleasure slicks all over my face.
“Church, you—I wanted this—so much—” Her words are barely there, just mindless pleasure words wrung from the circumstances, but I steal them for my jealous, bleeding heart anyway, I tuck them against the wounds there like bandages.