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  We kissed a long time. Soft and hard, tiny feathering touches and deep soul kisses that sent shock waves of arousal through me. We kissed like we had nothing else to do, ever again. He breathed in, I breathed out, we shared air and spit and…trust. We shared trust.

  His hands roamed my back, then down to grip my hips and press me against him. His penis throbbed between us. My clit rubbed against the base of it, and he rocked me, rubbing, and my arousal made both of us slippery.

  His fingers dug into me, but I didn’t mind. We were moving together, our bellies a cocoon for his cock. My breasts scraped his chest. He put a hand flat on my back, holding him close, his hips thrusting upward and every movement urging another burst of pleasure from my clit.

  The pleasure ebbed and flowed, the contact indirect enough to keep me pushing closer and closer against him and at the same time hard enough to reward me. He ground me onto his cock, my pussy slick and hot and wet with desire and my clit its own tiny erection. His fingers curled under my ass to add a small up and down motion that made me gasp into his mouth. We rocked together without friction, smooth, skin gliding on skin.

  His tongue thrust inside my mouth the way I wanted his cock to fill me, and I moaned. He moaned, his hands hot on my skin, moving me, using my body as a tool for his own satisfaction, and it drove me wild to think that I could get him so hot without even putting him inside me.

  He rocked me harder, and I shuddered. Just a little more. Just a little more. Just a little more, a little harder, a little faster, a little deeper.

  He thrust against my stomach, fucking against me, each movement bringing me closer and closer to the edge. Sweat molded us together. My clit burned. My lips burned. My hips burned from where he clutched them.

  He murmured my name into my mouth, then tilted his head back against the pillows. His eyes closed, his face contorted, his penis leaped and throbbed and his body shook.

  So did mine. I came, watching him take his pleasure from my body. Bright sparks of pleasure rocketed through me. My thighs jerked. Heat flooded between us as he emptied himself against my skin. I could smell him, musk and sex mingled with my own fluids, and the scent made me groan as my body shook in climax.

  He pulled me closer, his arms around me. He held me while our bodies quieted. Our breathing slowed. I tasted the skin of his neck and found it salty. My head fit perfectly on his shoulder.

  I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to look at him. I didn’t want to unglue us. It was too raw and new, this feeling of comfort. Too easily dissolved. I didn’t want to lose it. I didn’t want to chase it away.

  We had to pull apart, of course, unstick ourselves from the aftermath of our passion. It was too physically uncomfortable to do otherwise. My thighs had cramped, something I hadn’t noticed when surging toward orgasm but was quite unable to ignore now.

  Dan rubbed my back and helped me to extricate myself from his lap. I thought I’d be embarrassed, but he gave me no time to be. His belly and chest glistened with the evidence of our actions. So did mine.

  “Want to shower?” His calm reaction to the aftermath allowed me to be calm, too.

  Genuinely calm instead of merely blank; I noticed the difference but made no comment. I nodded and held out my hand for him. I helped him up, laughing at the way he hobbled upright, apparently as stiff as I felt.

  He looked down at himself, then up at me. He linked my fingers through his. He tugged me closer, oblivious to the stickiness that had made me so squeamish.

  The kiss he gave me was tender and almost hesitant, like he feared I’d pull away again. I didn’t. There could be no turning back now, I had crossed a line with him. Even I wasn’t so fucked up to pretend it hadn’t happened.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  A simple phrase, but one that made me flinch. I hid it well, or so I thought, because I knew he didn’t mean it the way it sounded. He couldn’t know what the words meant to me, how they made me feel, what they made me remember.

  I thought I hid it well, but I didn’t realize how much he saw. He put a finger beneath my chin to make me meet his eyes.

  “Elle, what?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t want to talk, didn’t want words to ruin what we had done. I liked feeling close to him. I liked feeling that I could let him close to me. It made me feel normal. I didn’t want to ruin it.

  “Shower,” I said, pushing past him and going through his bedroom to his bathroom.

  I pushed aside the shower curtain and turned on the water. Hot. Steam began to fill the room, which was fine because it shielded the mirror so I couldn’t see my reflection, and I got in the shower before he could say anything.

  Thank you. He didn’t know what that meant to me or why. It didn’t matter what he’d been thanking me for—the sex, the kiss, for helping him up from the couch. He’d meant to be polite. Considerate. I knew that. And yet I still turned my face into the too-hot spray and closed my eyes, the words echoing in my head but spoken in another’s voice. Someone who thought saying thank you after doing something wrong could make it all better.

  He got in the shower behind me and reached around to adjust the water so it cooled enough not to sting. The shower was big enough to hold both of us but small enough to make it close quarters. When he moved, our bodies brushed. Elbow against belly, thigh against thigh, shoulder to breast.

  “Turn around.”

  I did, because he told me to, and because like so many other times, he knew what I wanted. Dan held up a blue washcloth and squirted shower gel into it, worked it to a creamy lather and turned me so I was out of the main part of the spray.

  Then he washed me.

  I know my mother did that for me in infancy and childhood, but I have no recollection of her doing it. I have suffered the touch of some and embraced it from others, but I’ve never had anyone bathe me. He started at my throat, eased the lathered cloth over my breasts, over my belly, my thighs, between my legs. He used soft, gentle motions, nothing rough, nothing hurried. He washed each arm, even each individual finger. He even knelt to wash my legs, lifting each foot to swipe it with the soap and rinsing them before he set them down so I wouldn’t slip.

  Water splashed my face and stung my eyes when he knelt at my feet. It turned his sandy hair dark and parted it in odd places. It pounded against his freckled back, turning his skin pink with heat and spray.

  “We all have scars, Elle,” Dan repeated as the water came down all around us, and then he stood aside to let it spray my body. Rinsing away the last of the soap.

  Making me clean.

  Chapter 16

  “I have something for you.”

  Dan pushed an envelope across the table toward me.“What’s this?” A gift?

  “Open it.” His gaze burned into me, set me back in my chair, fingers hesitating on the envelope’s flap.

  I pulled out two sheets of paper, stapled. Numbers. Data. Test results. I stared, reading the listings. Cholesterol. Red blood count. HDL. And then, on the second page, other results.

  I gaped, and a tiny gasp of surprise eeked out of me. “Oh.”

  Gonorrhea, chlamydia, HIV. All negative. I folded the paper and put it back in the envelope. I cleared my throat and sipped some ice water. Dan looked expectant.

  “Well,” I said finally, when it became clear he was waiting for me to speak. “You’re in very good health.”

  Now I knew how old he was, too, along with his blood type.

  “I thought it might make you feel better.”

  I blinked. “About what?”

  “Us.”

  I blinked again. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  But I did.

  Dan smiled. “Elle. I never asked you if you were on the Pill or—”

  “You want to stop using condoms.”

  He shrugged, cheeks staining a bit pink. It was interesting to watch him blush, for a change. “Well…yeah.”

  “As a matter of fact,” I told him, “I am on the Pill.”

 
He grinned. “Good.”

  I sat back in my seat, arms crossed. We’d had takeout Chinese at his place, with the promise of a movie after on his big-screen TV, but now I wondered if his real reason for inviting me over was to bring up this subject.

  I didn’t say anything, let him sweat it for a few moments before I decided upon honesty. “I have never had sex on purpose without using a condom, Dan.”

  He chuckled. “On purpose? How do you have sex by accident?”

  “It wasn’t by accident,” I said. “Just not on purpose.”

  I still held the envelope, and my thumbs rubbed the smooth paper in small, steady strokes of five at a time. Five. Pause. Five more. Another pause.

  His smile faded. He looked stricken. “Elle?”

  I shrugged and put the envelope down. “I get tested for everything you could possibly be tested for every year. I could show you my results, too. I don’t have anything, either.”

  “Elle…” He reached across the table for my hand, and I let him take it. He turned his palm up beneath mine and linked our fingers together. “If it’s important to you, I don’t mind using them.”

  I looked at our linked hands. “This would mean we’d have to trust each other.”

  He squeezed my hand gently. “If you’re asking me if I’m sleeping with anyone else, the answer is no.”

  I nodded a little, then looked into his eyes. “Well. I’m not, either.”

  I’m not sure if he expected me to give a different answer, but there was no mistaking the look of relief on his face.

  “Good.”

  “You should ask me if I plan on sleeping with anyone else, Dan.” I said this matter-of-factly, my sense of safety so ingrained it would have been impossible for me not to say it.

  “Do you, Elle?”

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t, either.” Dan smiled. “Unless you want another night with Jack.”

  A bubble of laughter escaped me. “Jack can wear a condom, then. But…no, I’m not planning on that, anyway.”

  “Good.” Dan grinned again. “But I don’t think I’d want to watch you with anyone else again.”

  The implications of that gave me pause. “No?”

  “No,” Dan replied, and squeezed my hand again. “Definitely not.”

  He got up and came around the table to pull me to my feet. His arms fit around my waist so naturally I couldn’t believe I hadn’t been born to fit his hands.

  He took me to his bed for our first time this new way, and in a way it was like the first time for us. He pulled down his comforter and laid me back on soft sheets, my head cradled by his down pillows. He undressed me and then himself, easing open buttons and unnotching zips, sliding fabric over the curves and valleys of our bodies until we both lay naked with nothing between us.

  He kissed my face all over. Forehead. Each eye. The tip of my nose, my cheeks, a series of tiny kisses along my jaw and chin. He kissed my mouth almost chastely, a light, faint brush of lip on lip that withdrew so fast it was almost like it hadn’t happened.

  He drew his lips down the curve of my throat, pausing at the hollow of my collarbone to lick me. He mouthed up to my shoulder and followed a path down my arm. He kissed the inside of my elbow and my wrist over the scar, then pressed his mouth to my palm and closed my hand over it like he meant for me to save it.

  I floated on these embraces, letting myself be worshipped and adored. His mouth skated down my ribs to the small curve of my belly. He blew a breath across my navel, making me shiver with longing. He nibbled my hip. My thigh. Across to the other, adding his tongue, and my body responded to his touch by opening, tensing, heating.

  He brushed my pubic curls with his hand, and at that contact my eyes opened wide. I’d been floating with sweet erotic tension created by his mouth, but now my entire body tensed in a much less pleasant fashion. My legs, which had parted as he’d been kissing me, closed.

  “Elle.” Dan moved up my body to cover me with his.

  I was grateful for the warmth, because I had begun to shiver. He propped himself on his elbows and looked into my eyes. His penis, hard but not insistently so, nudged my belly.

  “Would you let me kiss you?” He murmured. “Just kiss you. That’s all. I promise.”

  I gave a minute shake of my head. He reached up to smooth his hand along my cheek and trace his fingers along my eyebrows. This tender gesture made me draw a shuddering breath and my lips parted. I meant to speak. I couldn’t.

  “Do you trust me, Elle?”

  I trusted him enough to agree to sex without a condom. I trusted him enough to believe him when he said I was the only one. I trusted him more than I’d trusted anyone in a long, long time.

  “Yes, Dan. I trust you.”

  He smiled. “Let me kiss you, then.”

  I do not like that I allowed my past to close me off. I do not like that I let circumstances rob me of the ability to have a normal relationship with a man, to have friends, to be happy. I do not like it, but I had felt myself powerless against it.

  I didn’t want to feel powerless anymore.

  “All right.”

  I tensed again as he kissed his way down my body. He hovered over me. His breath, warm, caressed me. I tensed more, so much that my muscles would ache the next day. I waited for him to betray my trust, to break his promise, to do more than he had said he would do.

  Dan kissed me. Soft. Warm. His mouth pressed against me, and I drew in a sharp breath that made my chest hurt. He kissed me again, but that’s all he did.

  “Do you want me to stop?”

  “No.” I shook my head. I had put a hand over my eyes. I tried to relax.

  Somehow, covering my face made it better. This was different. This was Dan. It was all right if it felt good. It was supposed to feel good. It was all right if he kissed me there, if he used his mouth to bring me pleasure, because this was Dan. And it was all right.

  I felt his mouth on me again. Another kiss. I kept my curls trimmed short, so his lips had no trouble finding my flesh. He kissed my clitoris. My fingers gripped my temple.

  I cried out when he used his tongue for the first time. My hips jerked. I put my other hand over my face.

  I wanted him to stop. I wanted him to keep going. He inched open my thighs with his hand and licked me again. I swallowed my cry that time.

  His fingers traced my body’s contours as he kissed and licked my clitoris. It felt good. More than good. It felt like lightning strikes of pleasure striking me. He was gentle but skilled, his mouth echoing more closely the movements I used with my own hand than anything he’d ever done with his. He used his tongue like water, trickling, flowing over my skin. Nothing harsh or jagged, nothing out of sync to jar me from the desire building.

  I heard him moan and almost lost myself then.

  If you have ever done something that terrified you because you knew it was going to be better, in the long run, you will understand how I felt then.

  “Do you…want me to stop?” He sounded like he was having as much trouble speaking as I had answering.

  “No,” I breathed. I took a hand from my face and reached for his head. His hair tickled my knuckles as I twined my fingers in it. “No, Dan, please don’t stop.”

  He took me to the edge of orgasm and held me there. It felt different, this summit, getting there this way. Less like I was going to fall and more like I was going to fly.

  I didn’t come so much as I released. Unraveled. I had always thought of orgasm as being like a coiled spring, wound tighter and tighter and exploding, but this time, with Dan’s kisses to lead me, I eased into climax like leaves whispering in a tree or ripples on a pond. I felt every spasm, separate and distinct when my clit fluttered. My heart pounded in my ears. I didn’t explode, I melted. Liquefied. Became a puddle of pleasure.

  And after a moment, when I realized I was breathing again, Dan slid up my body and held me tight against him, looking down into my face. Admiration gleamed in his eyes.

&nb
sp; “I want to make love to you,” he whispered.

  “Yes, Dan,” I replied. “Please.”

  We both groaned when he slid inside me, bare for the first time. I hadn’t thought it would feel much different, had believed it would be more conducive to his pleasure than affecting mine, but the brain is an underestimated sexual organ. Knowing he was moving inside me without a condom made as much of an affect as simply feeling him.

  He paused, his face buried in my neck. “Oh, God.”

  I smoothed my hands down his back, feeling the groove of his spine, the twin dimples at the base of his back. He pushed deeper into me, then pulled out, almost experimentally. Then in again.

  He pushed himself up on his hands and looked down at me as he thrust faster, and I moved with him. Eager. My body welcomed him with slick heat. He thrust harder and I lifted my hips to let him get deeper inside me.

  He cried out, hoarse, motion becoming ragged. The muscles in his arms and chest stood out. His face tensed, eyes closed, cords in his neck standing out.

  “Dan,” I urged, as he’d done for me more than once. “I want you to come.”

  His eyes opened. He gave a low cry. His body jerked, and he throbbed inside me. I imagined his heat filling me. He collapsed on top of me, heavy, but I welcomed the weight. His face on my neck was hot. He kissed my shoulder.

  We stayed silent for a moment as our breathing slowed and the air dried our sweat and left us cool in the wake of our passion’s heat. He rolled off me, bent to pull up the sheet and tucked it around us, then pulled me against him, my back to his front. I felt his penis, soft and wet and sticky against my buttocks, but was at the moment too tired to get up.

  He kissed me between my shoulder blades. I tucked a hand beneath my cheek. His hand drifted up and down my hip, moving the sheet in a motion like waves rolling on the sea.

  “He was older than me,” I said. “Told me he loved me. Said I was the most beautiful girl he’d ever known, that he’d never love anyone else, ever again. That he’d die if he couldn’t have me.”

  Dan’s hand paused in its journey up and down my body for the barest blink of a moment before continuing. “Did you love him?”