by Joanna Bell
I was afraid of roller coasters when I was a schoolgirl.
"How's your arm?"
"Huh?" I replied, lost in his eyes for a moment. "Oh – yeah. Um..."
I pushed the sleeve of Cillian's sweatshirt, far too big for me, all the way up to my shoulder. At the top, up close to my armpit, a series of purplish bruises were coming into full florid glory.
"Fuck," Cillian breathed when he saw them. "I'm sorry. I didn't realize I grabbed you so hard."
"It's OK," I said quietly, poking very gently at my flesh and then wincing as I discovered that they were indeed tender. "It wasn't your fault – it was mine. Do you know I spent 4 years in college and they never once mentioned how slippery wet rocks can be?"
Cillian grinned. "You should ask for your money back."
"Maybe I will."
Just being with him was better than being anywhere else or with anyone else. I know it happened fast, but sometimes it just does. Sometimes human nature and attraction and the mysterious forces of the universe all come together at exactly the right time – or exactly the wrong time – and things that shouldn't make sense suddenly do. Cillian Devlin made me feel special just to sit beside him and talk about nothing much. I don't know why. I still can't explain it. All I know is what I felt – and what I kept feeling in spite of everything that was to come.
It wasn't like that with Julian. With Julian Acton-Hayes III it did make sense. He wanted to get married and have a family. I wanted to get married and have a family. He was from a socially prominent and well thought-of family. I was from a socially prominent and well thought-of family. His family was rich. My family was rich. It made sense, in other words. We could have defended our relationship in a court of law, using logic and common sense, in a way I could not have defended my feelings for Cillian.
"Let me see."
I held out my arm.
"Goddamnit," he muttered, inspecting my bruises. "You know, I think I might have something for that."
"I don't think there's any treatment for bruising," I murmured. He was so close to me. So sweetly close it made my heart race.
"No," he insisted, getting up. "I think I have something. Hold on."
He disappeared and came back a few minutes later with a small tube of arnica cream.
"Arnica cream?" I asked, smiling at the remedy I remembered my grandmother keeping in her medicine cabinet when I was a little girl. "Where did you get this?"
Cillian shrugged. "I dated this hippie chick last year and she got it when I dropped a bucket of feed on my foot. Never used it, obviously."
I don't know what it was about that 'obviously' that bothered me. Maybe it wasn't that word that bothered me at all? Maybe it was just the mention of the other girl? So Cillian dated other girls and one of them bought him some cream for a bruised foot – so what?
It was his dismissive tone. Whoever the hippie girl was, she cared enough to buy some arnica cream when the man she was dating hurt himself. The way Cillian talked about her didn't seem to acknowledge that. I began to wonder if maybe the cowboy took the attentions of women as his due – and in doing so managed to hit the nail right on the head before anything even happened between us.
Because Cillian Devlin very much did take the attentions of women as his due – and he would in time take mine the same way.
I liked him, though. I liked him quite a lot. It's so easy to blind yourself to the early clues when you simply don't want them to be true.
"I'll do it."
Instead of handing me the arnica cream, Cillian squeezed some out onto his own fingers and then, with a gentleness that almost made me feel faint, began to apply it to my skin. He was close again – very close, like he had been beside me at the creek. I could feel his breath on me once more, smell the scent of his shampoo and his skin and just him.
Neither of us spoke. I couldn't have done so even if I wanted to. Without realizing it, I wasn't even breathing.
"Is this OK?" He asked. "Am I hurting you?"
"No," I whispered. "N– no."
It was as if all the air had been sucked out the room. As if Cillian and I were in a vacuum, with nothing to see, nothing to focus on except each other.
I could say I don't know what got into me but it should be pretty obvious what it was. Strangers hooking up isn't exactly a new concept. It was new for me, though.
It's not like I was a prude. I didn't sleep with Julian and only Julian and no other men out of some old-fashioned ideas about female promiscuity or anything like that. I just never felt like sleeping with anyone else. I thought, before I met Cillian Devlin, that I was simply one of those people who is only comfortable having sex within the safe confines of an established, monogamous relationship.
Ha! Ha ha ha.
The universe might as well have pointed a celestial finger right at me and burst out laughing.
It felt like a fog descending. It felt like driving off campus one day in the mist and, when the mist got so thick I had to pull off the road, suddenly finding myself utterly disoriented, no longer sure which way was up and which was down.
"Cillian –" I said, not having intended to say anything, least of all his name in a tone as breathless as a besotted teenager.
He was still looking down at my arm. I watched his eyes move over my skin, luxuriating in his care, his specific gaze.
When he was finished he looked up at me. "There," he said. "I think that's enough. I think I have some band-aids if –"
"No," I shook my head, still whispering. "No I don't need a band-aid."
We reached for each other like a tide reaches for the shore. It was inevitable from the moment we met. If it hadn't happened there and then, it would have happened somewhere else, at some other time. But it would have happened.
Cillian cupped my face in his hands, sliding one around to the back of my neck with a tenderness that belied what was to come. His mouth fell on mine, his lips opening my lips, his tongue curling into my mouth.
That was the moment the rollercoaster, which had been tick-ticking up the slope since the moment I laid eyes on Cillian Devlin in the Billings airport, reached the peak and, after a tantalizing pause, began speeding down the other side. It was the first time in my life I ever truly lost myself in another person. I closed my eyes as he kissed me, giving in, wrapping my arms tightly around his neck and pulling him close.
We kissed until my lips were swollen and raw. Until my breath was coming fast and hard. Until kisses were no longer enough...
"Come here."
He pulled me onto his lap and I settled my body against his, gripping his hips with my thighs until I suddenly felt him against me and froze.
Cillian smiled cockily up at me and slipped his hands just under the bottom of the sweatshirt I was wearing, running his thumbs over my bare belly.
"What?"
I stared back at him, unable to speak with that monster pressed up against my inner thigh.
"You did that," he continued, flattening one hand against my lower back and tilting me forwards, increasing the pressure where our bodies met. "You know you did that, right?"
That's the thing – the wonderful, intoxicating thing – about male lust. It cannot be denied. There is no room for low self-esteem or doubt when you've got every sweet inch of the evidence between your legs. If someone had showed me a picture of him and told me that was the man who would want me in a way that would threaten to destroy my whole life, I would have laughed. I would have said him? That man? No, he's way too hot. Men like that don't lust after girls like me.
But he did. He did and it made my limbs feel heavy and drunk, it clouded my mind to everything but him. On him, my focus was sharp.
The first time I moved against him I gasped. I leaned my head back and gasped out loud at the jolt of pleasure it sent through my body. My hands clutched at his t-shirt – which he promptly pulled off – and then at his shoulders, my fingers kneading the thick cords of muscle as he lifted his hips up off the sofa, driving himself aga
inst me until I was almost crying out.
Things got feverish then. I yanked off the sweatshirt, revealing my breasts because my bra and panties were still in the laundry, and let him rake his eyes over every curve.
I didn't like being looked at before Cillian Devlin looked at me. I especially didn't like my breasts – too small – being looked at. He changed all that in the space of a few seconds. I didn't cringe away self-consciously or cross my arms. Instead I actually raised them up above my shoulders, showing myself off, glowing in the warmth of his desire.
"Fuck," he growled, cupping my breasts one in each hand, squeezing and stroking and running the tips of his thumbs over my nipples. "Fuck. You have beautiful tits, Astrid. Beautiful."
He leaned forward, then, and slid his tongue – wet and warm and smooth – over one nipple, encircling it a few times before sucking it into his mouth. A new pathway burned itself into my flesh, straight from that nipple right down to the place that was starting to ache for more – and more, and more – of the cowboy.
I pushed my fingers into Cillian's long hair and clutched his head to my breast as he drove me almost wild with his mouth alone. He looked up a few moments later, assessing the effect he was having on me and grinning.
"You like that, huh?"
That would have been such a turn-off with anyone else. Frat-boy move. Frat-boy line. Not with Cillian. With him, I knew it wasn't posturing or bravado. I knew his cockiness was earned. He knew it too, because he knew exactly what he was doing to me.
"We're gonna have to get you out of those sweatpants, you know."
Hanging over that afternoon was the hike earlier in the day. I was infused with the emotional residue of being hauled out of the freezing creek, of Cillian's solicitousness and care. It was like having a spell cast over me. I have never in my life wanted to give in to someone like I did that day. When he said that thing about getting me out of those sweatpants I simply slid backwards off his lap and stood there in front of him.
I could see it then – what I had been feeling. I could see the bulge in his jeans – and he saw me seeing it. He looked up at me, caught my eye, and then looked down, running one hand over himself before starting to unbuckle his belt.
I hooked my thumbs over the waist of the sweatpants, intending to slip them off. Cillian reached out and grabbed one of my wrists.
"No," he said. "Wait."
So I waited – because he told me to wait and I wasn't interested in doing a single thing he didn't want me to do. And as I waited, he finished unbuckling his belt, and then popped the top button on his jeans and pushed the zipper down.
Another thing I didn't get before Cillian: that a cock could be beautiful. That it could make the salivary glands at the back corners of my mouth literally water. Cillian's did that. And it was beautiful. Thick and rigid, the head perfectly formed, slick with pre-cum, ready.
"Oh God," I whimpered as he wrapped his hand around the shaft.
"Take them off."
The sweatpants. Oh yeah. I slid them down over my hips and let them fall the rest of the way down before kicking them off. I was completely naked.
Cillian sat up, grasping my hips and kissing my belly, nestling his face into me. He looked up at me just before he pushed one hand between my legs, and then a single finger between my lips.
"Oh my God," he breathed when he felt what he was doing to me. "Jesus, Astrid. You're so wet."
I was. So wet I could feel my thighs were slick with it, feel the chill of the air against damp skin.
Suddenly, Cillian grabbed my wrist and pulled me towards him. I half-fell, half-crawled into his lap and then, as my legs opened and he held the thick, smooth tip of his cock against my opening, he told me to look at him. The second I did he drove himself into me. All the way in, wrapping one arm around my waist and pulling me down. A quick, sharp gasp escaped my throat. God he was big.
"Fuck," he moaned through gritted teeth as I moved my hips slowly at first, trying to get used to the feeling of being (sweetly, perfectly) impaled.
It didn't hurt. It just wasn't a sensation I ever felt before, being filled like that. There was a little something every time Cillian thrust into me, a tingle that edged close to being pain but wasn't. That's how big he was. I could feel my flesh literally stretching to take him.
"Do you like that?" He asked, catching a little fleeting smile on my lips when he broke off from kissing me. "Do you?"
"Uh-huh," I breathed, leaning my head back as the feeling of him inside me started to take me out of myself. "Yeah..."
It didn't usually happen for me with Julian. If it did, it was because I helped it along with my own fingers. A lot of the time I was self-conscious about that, about the effort it took. And then with Cillian it started to happen almost right away, without needing any intervention from me. That sweet, nagging feeling was there from the moment he slid into me, like an itch you can't quite scratch.
"Mmm," I sighed, leaning forward, bracing myself against his chest so I could move my hips a little faster. He felt good inside me – so good I was almost worried about what was coming. But it wasn't just the physical sensation – not at first, anyway. It was Cillian himself. It was the way he lay back on the sofa and looked at me with an expression like everything – like my body – was his due. Maybe I shouldn't have liked that so much but when it comes to a man like that, to being with a man like that, 'should' rarely comes into it.
He was relaxed at first, watching me, smiling at me, running his hands over every curve and dip of my body. Soon, though, I felt the tension rising in his body. He reached out and grasped my hip, letting his fingers sink into the soft flesh. I sensed the power in him the same way I sensed it beside the creek, when he pulled me out of the water with such force he left bruises.
"You look good baby," he said, pulling me down and curling his tongue into my mouth. "You look so fucking good. I love the way your pussy feels..."
No one ever talked to me like that before Cillian. Any other circumstance and I may have been scandalized – or just self-conscious. But not when he was inside me. Not when I could see, in the way his chest was rising and falling and in the glazed look his eyes were taking on, just how good it really was for him. That's an intoxicating thing, seeing a man that lost in you. Especially a man like that, so nakedly unashamed of his own pleasure.
Things built between us like flames licking through a pile of dry wood.
"Ohhh..." I sighed, as the feeling of him buried all the way inside me started to get more and more fraught. "Cillian –"
It was happening for him, too. He was pushing his hips up off the sofa faster and faster, his breathe was starting to get ragged.
I almost couldn't believe it was actually going to happen. Like I said, it was unexpected. But the pleasure was intensifying inside me, starting to take my breath away.
"Cillian!" I cried, as I started to feel the crisis approaching and my whole body tensed up. "Cillian... please... please!"
"Goddamnit," he growled into my ear, burying his fingers in my hair and holding tight. "You sound so good. I love the way you say my name, baby. I want you to come. I want to feel you coming."
My head lolled back, my eyes closed, and I rode myself into total bliss on Cillian Devlin's cock. When I was very close, when my lips were already parting to take in the breath that would carry me away, his body suddenly went rigid and he thrust himself into me one more time, hard and deep. That was it. I clenched my hands into fists against his chest as we came together, gasping and shuddering as he held me down against him.
It wasn't work that time. That time, all the pleasure in the world came to me easily, lightly. It wasn't work for him, either. What he did to me seemed effortless. And afterwards, as I lay cuddled up against his chest catching my breath, I think it was that part that scared me the most. The fact that he did that to me – left me breathless and spent and shaken – without even trying.
***
I think I was already halfway to falling fo
r Cillian Devlin by the time he pulled me out of a creek in the western Montana foothills. But it was going back to his place and allowing him to do the things he did to me that truly sealed my fate.
It took a few minutes to come back to myself afterwards, for my heartbeat to return to normal and my eyes to re-focus on what was right in front of me.
Not what was right in front of me. Who. Cillian. I was still on his lap, blinking and speechless at the swiftness with which the frenzy passed.
If someone asked me now to characterize those first few days with him, the days that became the fulcrum upon which my whole life pivoted, I would say: I never met anyone like him before. That's the truth, but it doesn't capture the fullness of just how shockingly new the cowboy made almost everything for me. Before him, I only ever heard other women talking about sex the way he made me feel about it. I only ever read about it. I never experienced it. In fact I was beginning to think it didn't exist and all the 'oh my God' talk was just one big female conspiracy to convince ourselves that sex was a bigger deal than it was.
And then: Cillian Devlin. I actually remember looking around his condo, and then back at him, half-expecting the actual world to look different. It wasn't, of course. The world doesn't change. We change. And you know what? It scared the hell out of me. I could feel the change happening. I could hear the gears and levers of my previous life and all my assumptions grinding and creaking inside me. I didn't understand what it meant yet. I don't think I even understood why it was happening. All I knew is that my very first instinct was to wrap my arms around his neck and never, ever let go.
So obviously I ran away.
I stood up and backed away, stumbling a little in my haste. Cillian must have thought I just needed to use the bathroom or get dressed
"Astrid?" He said, when he realized I was gathering my things. "What are you doing?"
Most people run towards the things they need. Throw themselves at their feet. Hold onto them. Not me. I flee. Not from the things I need, but from the needing itself.
