He was so gentle, staying so still inside of me. As if he knew my sensitized nerves could not take any more sensation at that moment other than the slow, stretching slide of his hardness in my softness. Just his filling length where I craved him most. Where I held him deep inside me, my inner ripples stroking him like a squeezing hand.
There in that frozen moment, he was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. Poised above me with effortless, waiting strength as I felt him throb deep inside me. The strong cut of his muscles lovingly defined. The sweeping breadth of his shoulders. The curve of his biceps and more streamlined triceps. The gentle swell of his chest. His sloping deltoids, starkly delineated. Ready strength gathered, held in abeyance, calm for the moment like storm clouds slowly gathering on the horizon, biding their time to unleash their torrent at just the right moment. That same waiting gentleness of how he had slid into me. Thinking about it, remembering the feel of it, that gentle friction, stirred me from my post-coital languor.
I gazed up at him through half-closed eyes and felt my body tighten once more at just the sight of him. The divine illumination of his skin against the fading glow of mine. He looked like an angel with his honey-brown hair spilling in a loose, wild tangle around his face, framing those fierce eyes in softness. He reminded me not of a playful cherub, but of a warrior angel. A ferocious beauty that took my breath away.
Holding my eyes, he began a gentle, graceful dance with his body. Slow, poignant movements rocking in and out of me. Poignant because his face, his eyes, the coiled energy emanating from him in invisible waves that you could feel…all spoke of the fact that he was not normally a gentle man. But he was gentle now, for me, with me, inside of me. Slow, languid strokes made even more erotic because of the unexpected pleasure of it. Like expecting a storm to strike with fierce, pounding fury, and finding sweet, gentle rain kissing your skin instead. That restraint, that containment of all that he could have unleashed, made me moan.
I lifted my heavy arms and legs, wrapped them around my gentle lover, and drew him down to me. He kissed me, the lightest touch, as he stroked within me in that soft and easy way, his rhythm never changing, as if he were savoring the feel of it, the sweet intimacy of our joining. I savored him in turn, without demand, just appreciation, my hands gliding over his shoulders, down his back, stroking the muscles there that flexed and moved as he moved slowly, gently. My hands swept lower, reading him, feeling the tight clenching of his buttocks as he pushed into me, the easing of those muscles as he pulled back out.
The movement of his body above me was like lapping waves, ever constant. Even when I arched up into him, my skin brightening anew, asking for more, he kept to that maddeningly slow pace, that languid rhythm.
He spoke to me then, telling me how he felt, what he wanted to do to me, what he was doing to me. Coarse love words. And the rough frankness of the words he used was in such marked contrast with his movements, to the gentleness with which he made love to me. The dichotomy of it stirred my mind, my body, wound me even higher without a single alteration in rhythm.
He touched me no other way, just the turgid length of him in that maddeningly slow and intimate dance, graceful, beautiful, ever gentle. The light brush of his lips over my lips, my cheeks, across my eyes, feathering down my temples. The lightest brush of my nipples against his chest as he dipped and swayed above me, into me and out of me. The rough stroke of his words against my ears—gritty, male, shockingly explicit. Words that excited me, made me tremble, made me moan.
He stroked me slowly, sweetly, brought me once more to the edge that way, nothing more. Kept me trembling there on the brink for so long that it became like agony and ecstasy combined. Wanting and having. But not enough, not enough.
“Dante.” I said his name over and over again feverishly. My body lifted into his, but he held me in his rhythm with a restraining hand upon my hip, not allowing a faster beat. When I tried for more, he stopped and stared down at me with those fierce, glittering eyes, withholding his body until I yielded once more to that gentle, maddening stroking. He was deaf to my cries for “harder, faster, more,” delivered first as a command, then as a plea. Nothing moved him from that torturing slow and easy pace. Not his tight, straining body. Not my inner clenching, my weeping need for him. Honey poured out of me. So wet was I that you heard the slurping sounds we made as he slipped in and out of me.
I finally surrendered and lay quiescent beneath him, just accepting his easy thrusts, what he chose to give me, with silent tears rolling down my cheeks with the pleasure and frustration he had built up in me. He lapped up the spilled wetness with tender strokes of his tongue.
“Dulcaeta”—beloved—“don’t cry.”
The endearment only made more tears flow.
“Please,” I begged. Nothing else. Just that plea.
Looking down into my eyes, he gave a shuddering sigh.
“Thank you for this time. For this sweet gift,” he said. He didn’t alter the force or speed of his rhythm. But his hand slid beneath my thighs and I felt his fingers stroke my wet outer lips, probe over where he stretched me, penetrated me. He traced that sensitive, swollen tissue back to where it rucked up tight and became perineal tissue, and his touch there was even more sensitive, disturbing. My breath hitched, and my body clenched around his shaft as he grazed a fingertip around my back opening.
With eyes both tender and fierce, his voice gentle and rough, he said, “Come for me,” and pressed down, sliding that moistened fingertip into me, penetrating me as his cock withdrew and stroked back into my sheath, easy, gentle.
“Come for me,” he demanded. And I did. With crying blessed relief, I finally came. A rippling tremor that seized him, squeezed him so tightly inside me. A release that broke gently over me like the wash of calm waters against the still shore. A sweet convulsing easing that went on and on until I felt it trigger his.
Like the wash and play of our light—my shine dimming as his brightened—so did his release begin as mine ended. Extending it until it felt like one endless, gentle liberation. A letting go.
A rippling, shuddering, cleansing of the senses, washing us anew.
NINETEEN
WHEN DAYLIGHT CAME, it was with the thought of him, the lingering taste and feel of him as I lay there in my bed. He had imprinted himself on my body, in my mind. He’d been saying good-bye. And that had felt wrong…because I wanted him to stay.
Yes. A simple truth. I didn’t want him to go.
I’ll tell him, I thought. I’ll tell him tonight that I want him to stay.
It was that thought that finally soothed me to sleep. And then I dreamed.
I remembered.
A MAN WAS inside of me and I was riding him with vigorous abandon as he sweated and glowed and moaned beneath me. He was on his back, chained to a bench, his hands and ankles restrained by silver shackles. It was Shel, the warrior cut down by Barrabus’s sword in my last remembered dream, saved from death only at my intervention. He had whip marks reddening his chest, his thighs. Some had cut through the skin, drawing blood. They were marks that I had deliberately inflicted on him, I came to realize with some shock. Not in punishment, but in love play.
We were inside a dark room lit by torchlight. A dungeon, I would have thought, with all the whips, crops, floggers, and chains along the wall, on the floor. But the bolted benches and the various wooden frames were padded, the chains lined with fleece. And Shel’s moans were not those of pain but of ecstatic rapture.