“Why do you ask first?” I asked, matching the quietness of his tone.
“I can’t afford not to ask,” he said. The enormity of his life settled over me. His celebrity status. It was sort of sad that his fame made him have to ask if he could kiss someone so they wouldn’t use it against him. Sue him. Drag his name through the mud.
It was as sad as my daughter having to ask before she could hug another child.
I moved a hand from his waist to his lips, an echo of the trail his thumb had run along mine back at the store. I said, “If we’re trying this…whatever this is…you don’t have to ask. If I ever change my mind, I’ll tell you.”
He didn’t smile as I thought he might. He looked deadly serious.
I stood on my toes and placed my lips against his. The sensations that hit me were exactly the same as the first and second time. Sunshine and moonbeams and bursts of light. Sweet cherry wine and happiness. Waves of it surging and receding like the shapes inside Hannah’s lava lamp. Heating. Cooling. Mixing.
He groaned against my lips, tongue demanding an entrance that I easily gave. As we searched the tender reaches of each other’s mouths, his hands journeyed from the chaste spots they’d stayed both times we’d kissed. This time, he explored more than my mouth. He began a gentle exploration of my curves. My waist, my side, my breasts which pebbled under his touch.
Touch.
Male hands searching me that only added to the blend of sweet and sour making up my emotions. I wanted this and yet hated myself for wanting it. Wanting and needing more. Never wanting it to stop.
I slid my hands under his T-shirt, touching warm skin, and it turned into a wave of goosebumps under my fingertips. It awed me that I could make this man feel that way. Desire. A man who’d easily had hundreds of people touch him. Caress him. Make love to him. I’d been with one man my whole life. I’d been sixteen the first time Darren and I had made love. A bumbled mix of nerves, rushed moves, and not much more except the love that had filled us.
This dance with Brady was so much slower, agonizingly gorgeous, flaming the yearning inside me. I pushed at him, moving us toward the couch, wanting to feel the weight of him on top of me. Needing it more than I’d needed anything in a really long time.
We collapsed there, a tangle of limbs and tongues and hands. Searching. Guiding. Finding. His T-shirt hit the floor followed by mine, and when I went to join our lips again, he held back, finger dragging along my collarbone, down the middle of my chest to settle between my breasts.
“You’re so beautiful,” he said quietly, reverently, as if he’d never seen a woman before.
I wasn’t embarrassed by my shape. It was not the skin and bones and soft waves of my twenties. I was curves and stretch marks and breasts that had nursed my daughter. None of it was anything to be ashamed of, but I also knew it wasn’t the tight muscular frame he was probably used to. Like my life being mundane, I was as well. Normal. Average. Not a size two and not a size fourteen. In the middle.
He’d have to take me as I was if he wanted me. I couldn’t change for him, and even if I could, I wouldn’t.The scars told me I had lived. The marks a secret treasure of who I was. Once I had doubted their value, their beauty, but I didn’t anymore. Now, they were just me.
Brady leaned in, taking my nipple into his mouth through the silk of my bra, and I moaned from deep inside me, a monster coming from the recesses of a cave where it had been hibernating too long, needing the sunshine of the spring that pushed away the winter.
He unhooked the bra, and I let him, forgetting everything but him and me and the feel of our bodies touching. My brain shutting down like it did when I was painting. Lost only in the waves of desire that seeped through us.
Then, his lips were back on my breasts, no layer between them. Sucking. Licking. Heating the core of me and slicing away the icy numbness that had been there for so long. Too many days and weeks and months. Years.
Brady
HERE TONIGHT
“I just wanna linger like this on your lips
And taste the salt air on your skin.”
Performed by Brett Young
Written by Ebach / Kelley / Young / Caver
She was so intoxicatingly gorgeous. Softand sensual. A burst of daisies in a field of roses. Light amongst the red. And with every move of our lips and every tingle of our touch, I was making music in my head.Crescendosfolding intodiminuendos. Like we were alegatoof notes blending together in a smooth connection while the chords came alive around us.
Never had I seen music while making love.
Notes and chords were part of my life, but they’d never been part of a sexual experience for me, and now they were. We were partially clothed, only chests bare, and yet my entire being was straining to become merged with hers. To find a tempo and a dynamic that meant us.
I was lost in the music we were making.
And it brought me suddenly back to reality, to the things that happened when I got lost in notes and rhythms, especially when I had others who were counting on me. Instead of pushing my fingers into her leggings and pulling them down her body, I slowed our pace. The tempo, alarghissimoof broad strokes. A cooling of the heat.
Tristan resisted at first, hands and tongue trying to pick up the pace. Need filling her as it filled me. I wanted to touch her, to make her come and feel her fall apart against me, but I wouldn’t jump from nothing to all in. I wouldn’t allow either of us to forget the world like she’d admitted she did as easily as me.
