This was the first time I had touched any part of her but her hands. I let my own hands linger on her hips. "How beautiful," I said in an altogether different tone of voice.
She cast down her eyes once more- a modest bride indeed. But there is also a time when modesty should end, and that time had come. Leaving one hand where it was, I raised the other to her chin and tilted her face up to mine. She looked nervous but determined, which, under the circumstances, was as much as I could expect.
I quickly discovered she knew nothing about kissing of the sort in which a new groom and his bride are apt to engage. She learned fast, though. My own first instructions in these mysteries were close enough in time that I remembered them and used them as a guide in teaching her.
While we kissed, we clung to each other ever more tightly. My manhood rose. As it was pressed between us, she must have noticed, but she gave no sign that she did, perhaps again from modesty, perhaps because she simply did not know what to do. I took one of her hands in mine and guided it down there. She started to pull away when she felt the bulge, but I held her hand there.
"That is-" she said, and then stopped: half a statement, half a question in two words.
"Yes, it is," I answered, my voice full of what I would rather call enthusiasm than raw lust. I took my hand away; after a tiny hesitation, she left hers where I had put it. I nodded: another lesson learned. I needed both hands to undo the catch of the marriage belt. My fingers trembled as I worked it. "A pity to take this off so soon after putting it on you, but\a160…"
Then I had to step away from her for a moment, to set the belt on the table once more. When I came back to her, I began to undo the catches that held her wedding gown closed. She stood very still under my hands. I slid the gown down off her. It puddled at her feet. The small nipples on her breasts were tight and hard, more, no doubt, from nervousness than passion. I bent my mouth to them, first one, then the other. Her breath caught. "That feels-" Again, she did not finish, but she put on hand on the back of my head to keep me at what I was doing.
Presently, I pulled her drawers off her, so that she stood naked before me. "I am a lucky man today," I said, and smiled the smile I had been practicing since before the little Sklavinian girl took me into the storeroom.
Then it was my turn to divest myself of my robes. When I was through, Eudokia stared at me. I knew how women were made, and had learned from her nudity only the particulars of her body. In my nakedness she saw for the first time the generality of maleness. My erection stood out as straight as if I were about to fence with it.
"I'll try not to hurt you," I said, taking her hand and walking with her to the bed, "though it may, the first time." I spoke as if I knew in detail, wanting to make her feel easy, although, as I have said, the only virginity I knew was my own. Losing that had not hurt- by no means!
We lay down together. I did not go into her at once, but kissed her and caressed her with my hands. When I stroked her secret place, she sighed and her legs, which she had held tightly closed till then, opened of themselves. After a while, my mouth followed my hand. A maidservant had taught me that a year or so before- sucking the fig, she called it. She and several others had seemed to like it more than a hand stroking the same place, and so, by her little gasps, did Eudokia.
Without my asking, she took me in her hand, and laughed to feel me throb against her palm. Then, on hands and knees, I got up over her and guided myself inside her. She being wet, I went in easily- until, all at once, I was halted. Eudokia's face, which had been full of surprised delight, twisted in pain. She was indeed a maiden. I had not had any serious doubts on that score, but proving it was a relief.
"We must finish what we've begun," I said, and she nodded. I thrust with all my strength, and broke through the barrier. Eudokia did not cry out, but her breath hissed through her nostrils. I have heard soldiers make that sound when they take a wound. "Is it all right?" I asked after a moment. She nodded again. Slowly, I began to move inside her.
Bu t as my own heat built, I forgot about restraint, and soon gasped out my spasm of delight. When I came back to myself, I saw her eyes were tightly closed. A tear had run down the side of her face from each of them. She hissed again when I slid out of her. I looked at myself, at her, at the stained sheet, and nodded, happy with the world. No one would have cause to doubt I had taken her maidenhead.
She too sat up and looked at the blood that had come from between her legs. "You are truly my wife," I said.
"Yes." Eudokia got off the bed and, walking as if she had been on horseback for a long time, poured some water from a pitcher into a basin, soaked a rag in it, and washed her private parts. After a moment, I did the same. A wedding night of one round only is a poor wedding night indeed, and I had in mind teaching her some things I had not shown her before our first joining. Being clean would help.
If I had the stamina now that I did then, or if I had known then what I know now, the night might have been even more memorable, but it was quite fine enough as things were. Some time along toward midnight, I stripped the sheet from the bed, put on my robe, and displayed the trophy to all the wedding guests who had not yet drunk themselves to sleep or gone off with a dancing girl. Loud, raucous cheers greeted me. "What are you going to do now?" someone shouted.
"Go back in there and put some more stains on it," I answered, and the shouts that came echoing back were even more raucous than before. To whoops of laughter, I shut the door and proceeded to do as I had said.
I woke the next morning to sunlight streaming into the bedchamber. Eudokia lay naked beside me. I thought about waking her with the same music to which we had fallen asleep: when you are but sixteen, you can contemplate such things after a night like the one we had had. But even at sixteen, that next round was far from urgent. I rolled over and yawned and stretched, feeling lazy and contented.
Eudokia's eyes came open. She let out a startled squeak at finding herself in bed with a man, but quickly remembered how and why that had happened, proof of which being that, although she started to cover herself with her hands, she stopped with the motion half begun and let me look all I pleased.
"My husband," she said. Her eyes traveled from my face downwards. Sure enough, I had begun to rise again. I do not know whether she was impressed; being ignorant of the ways of men, she had no standard for comparison. Looking back across a quarter of a century, I am certainly impressed. And so we did play that same sweet tune over again.
MYAKES
There, you see, Brother Elpidios, you read that all through with only a handful of wheezes and hardly a splutter. First times are strange, but after you've done something once, the second time is always a lot easier.
What do you mean, that wasn't the reason you had an easier time here? Oh. The other was just fornication and this was talking about real marriage, and so not a sin in the eyes of God? I see. If the difference makes you happy, Brother, far be it from me to argue with you, even though Justinian was doing the same things as before.
Not all the same things? Oh, sucking the fig. Yes, they like that, same as we like it when they play the flute for us. No, when you get right down to it, I don't think there's anything in the Holy Scriptures against it. It's not the sin of Onan, for how can a woman spill her seed out on the ground? She has no seed to spill, now does she? She's just fertile soil where a man's seed can grow. You might even say he's watering that ground, eh?