by Orla Bailey
“I missed you, kitten.” His eyes travel down and he lifts the eternal knot pendant he gave me on the river. He looks back up at me.
“I never removed it, Jack.”
“I know. And I’m sorry.”
“Isn’t that usually my line?”
“You’ve nothing to be sorry for.” He really believes me, without needing any proof. “I know you, Tabby. You couldn’t wear my gift, our symbol, while you took another man.”
Our symbol? Etched on the cuff-links I gave him when I was eighteen. On the pendant he gave me before rivalry ripped us apart. Yet here we are. Still together. This symbol – our symbol – insists we are bound by karmic destiny. Is Jack mine? Am I his?
“Don’t dwell on the past, don’t dream of the future.” I recount the Buddhist sentiment to him. It seems highly appropriate to remind myself of it in this place, this time.
“Concentrate your mind on this present moment.” He whispers the words, lowering his mouth over mine.
If there’s any moment I properly love him, it’s now. He knows me and I know him. We’re unsurpassed together. I ache and throb all over. When I snake my arms around his neck, he slants his mouth over mine, taking gentle unhurried sips of me. My fingers slip into his hair, between the strands, raising it from his scalp, gathering it in fistfuls and tugging gently until he’s pulling against me to get deeper. His tongue glides and teases until I can’t help but open up to let him enter. I can’t deny Jack any part of me with his hot, naked body moving its magic over mine.
The sexy little grunts he makes as he works his busy mouth and tongue from my lips to my jaw, down my neck to my shoulder, arouse me like no other sounds. I feel their deep rumble right the way to my cervix. He makes me feel like some delicious feast spread before a starving man.
“God, I’ve missed your body,” he groans between mouthfuls. “It’s been way too long.” He sucks a nerve-tingling vacuum over the skin at my shoulder branding me with a tender bruise.
I writhe gently beneath him, loving the sweet pain he inflicts, remembering the last time his mouth was on me; at the end of our trip upriver. “Two entire whole days,” I laugh. Yet I know what he means. Can all this really only have been two days? It feels like we’ve been ripped asunder for all eternity.
“And nights,” he growls. “Far too long. I want you with me all the time.” He shifts his body over mine, holding himself above me on two muscular arms while his head dips to my breasts.
I arch up to meet him – first with finger-tingling delicacy, then with toe-curling tenacity – as he suckles at one nipple until I moan under the skin-tight suction of my flesh into the hot wet vacuum of his mouth. The electric impulses he generates send a repetitive current flickering a downward path straight to my core. The energy collects, waiting to be shorted out with his featherlike touch.
I cry out his name as I clench hard and greedy wanting his body to meld with mine.
But he pushes off me, abandoning me before the peak, and steps to the window where he draws the curtains back fully to reveal the first golden rays of the rising sun. The ghostly glowing light suffuses my heated skin as I observe his silhouette against the dawn: a gold-skinned, dark-haired god, heavy with lust, firm with desire for the flawed mortal languishing in his temple of longing. Bereft of his body.
He turns to regard me; an unwavering intensity flowing from those Arctic blue eyes to mine.
“Come back to bed, Jack.” Come back to me.
“Can you feel what it’s like to be without me, Tabitha?”
My body thrills to the echo of where his has been but it’s a pale shadow of the real thing. I know this feeling intimately. I plunge my hands between my thighs and clamp my legs together around them to ease my longing until he returns to me.
He pads over to pull my hands away, holding them against the pillow above my head in one of his own. He covers my sex with his other hand. “This is mine, Tabitha. You are mine. Only mine.”
“I’m yours, Jack. Always.”
He rewards me with two fingers slipped inside my slick heat to tease me with their subtle movements. His thumb glides once over my sex and I arch my lower back off the bed, as I pant and whimper. He withdraws his hands leaving me untouched again. I burn for reconnection but understand the game he wants to play, so I wait.
Not patiently but I wait.
He smiles gently at my quick acceptance. “Good girl.”
He needs to assert control over me. He needs to know I will submit my will to his in this way. I’m gifted with a gentle kiss which ensures no other part of his body touches any part of mine. It’s incredibly frustrating but alluring.
I dare pose him his own question. “Is this what it feels like to be without me?” I wonder if he experiences the same emptiness, the same hollow loss I endure when we’re not together and in harmony.
His features tighten. “I’m halfway between purgatory and hell when I’m not with you.”
“Then let’s create a heaven.”
He lowers himself over my body, his welcome weight crushing me beneath him. I cradle his hips with mine, wrapping my bent legs around the backs of his thighs to bind him to me. His hand works between us, fingers skimming the cleft of my swollen flesh, stroking and coaxing my longing until I buck, uncontrollably below him.
He rolls off to lie alongside. I turn towards him, fearful I will never get what I desire. I can no longer wait. Sometimes a woman has to take matters into her own hands.
I push him onto his back, straddling his thighs. I feel for his thick erect length and enjoy the animal groan he emits when I squeeze him between my palms. I bend, touching the tip of my tongue to the blunt head, swirling and teasing at him until he grasps my head between his hands and directs me to go deeper. He holds my curtain of hair back in order to witness the act.
I hold myself still with all the force at my disposal and meet his wary eyes with a challenge. I smile wickedly. He sighs and releases me, throwing his arms back behind his head offering me the freedom to do as I will.
“You’re killing me here.”
“I’m worshipping your body.”
“Worship faster.”
I smile as I slide my mouth over the engorged head to compress my lips around the glans, massaging it between them and feeling him swell and kick as I play. I sweep droplets of moisture, gathered at the tip, onto my eager tongue until he can’t help thrusting gently upwards into my mouth.
I cup his tight balls, applying a little pressure until he freezes.
“Fuck sake, Tabitha.”
I laugh at such irrational fears until he relaxes marginally and laughs nervously. “Little witch.”
My teeth graze the shaft gently and he hisses an intake of breath as I allow my tongue to trace along the thick veins, exploring.
“Don’t tease too long, kitten. I’m only human.”
I cast my eyes upwards at his warning, to see him rise up on his elbows watching me intently. His thrilled fascination as I suck deep and low excites me and I throb like a pulsar.
Jack’s hand reaches to grasp my nipples between thumb and forefinger, squeezing and rolling until I groan.
“Just so you know, I’m fighting off one giant compulsion to throw you beneath me and fuck you so hard you’ll scream.”
“Let’s compromise,” I suggest. “You stay where you are and we’ll fuck each other. See who screams first.”
“And the prize?” His face tells me he might have something very filthy in mind.
I get an idea. “Whoever makes the other scream first gets to plan a whole dirty weekend.”
“A dirty weekend?” His tone suggests he likes the idea of a dirty weekend very much. “Whatever they want, the other has to do it?”
“Every last little thing,” I say.
“Game on.” He spits in his hand and holds it out to me like some coarse Irish horse trader. “Deal?”
I grimace but spit delicately into my own palm anyway and we shake on it. “Deal.” Suddenly
he grabs me and I squeal.
“You screamed first.”
“I didn’t scream, I squealed.”
“Like a piglet.” He tickles me, conceding the point and I laugh hysterically kicking my feet at him to get him away.
By the time I get my breath back I’m pinned and trapped beneath his huge frame.
I’m impressed. “How did that happen?”
“You took your eye off the ball.”
I squint dubiously, waiting for a probable rude joke. “You do realise we haven’t slept all night?”
“We’ll take a morning off. But first, I have the Herculean task of making you scream.”
“Not if I make you scream first,” I warn. I grip his nipple tight and pinch hard. He doesn’t grant a flicker of response.
“Oh, kitten,” he sighs, shaking his head at my feeble attempt. He covers one of my nipples with his mouth and teases the heightened sensitivity at the tip, flicking his tongue against it. As soon as he has me squirming, he swaps his head to the other side while I smoulder.
He raises his head. “Feel the need yet?”
I nod beyond speech. My breathing is laboured but he’s positively panting, his heart racing and when he momentarily kneels above me, I see his erection twitch. I sit up and take hold of him at the root, running my hand up the length of his cock to the tip in a single twisting motion and pop him free when I get to the top.
He groans. “Jesus, that feels good.”
“Again?”
He nods.
“Just give me one little scream first and I’ll do it.”
He smirks. “You think I’m a pushover, just because I have a body part that’s sitting up begging for a little attention.”
I lift my eyebrows and grin.
He grabs me by the back of the knees to haul me flat on my back down on the bed and dives his head between my legs. I clamp my knees around him so he can’t get where he’s wanting to go but it doesn’t take much gentle force to change all that.
His tongue traces a slow unhurried path towards my most sensitive centre before returning to push its tip inside me. The delicate dance sends me into a tailspin.
“I love the taste of you so much, baby.” He pauses to speak then laps and sucks, swapping between soft and titillating one moment and firm and arousing the next, until I never know what’s coming next. “A sweet little blossom whose honey is all mine.”
I feel my body tighten as an orgasm gathers pace and rock my hips against him to ease the pressure. But he pushes his fingers inside and scissors until I’m moaning out loud.
“You’re close, kitten.”
“Yes,” I gasp.
He blows so gently against me, I whimper at the loss when he moves up the bed to kneel beside me.
“Do that clever little thing with your hand again and you’ll get your reward.”
“This?” Unresistingly I encircle him at the root and slowly twist my hand all the way to the tip and off as I turn through the biggest rotation my wrist can manage.
“That’s hot,” he tells me, lust glowing in his narrowed eyes, so I oblige him again, loving the way he moans his pleasure. “I’m going to come if I let you do that to me much longer.”
He lies back, lifting me by the hips to straddle his toned body. The power and strength he has in his lean muscles to move me exactly where he wants me with no effort at all, astounds me. Yet it’s tempered with a tenderness that moves me. The lion and the lamb. The Boss and my lover, Jack.
I kneel upright to gain all the height I need as he nudges against my opening. He directs me to lower myself over him, stretching and filling me inch by perfect inch as I croon in pleasure. He lifts and lowers my body rhythmically, hands locked firmly at my hips denying me the right to speed up pace even if I wanted to. My crisis builds so slowly I know it’s going to come crashing down like an avalanche, sweeping everything in its path.
“Going to come, Jack,” I warn him.
He stills. The control he wields over his body and mine takes my breath away. I’d capitulate to the base desire to orgasm immediately every single time, if he wasn’t there to resist me.
He builds me to the brink again and stops until I subside, then repeats and repeats until a thin sheen of sweat glistens over us both as we glide against one another. I’m at the point of total exhausted collapse but he just won’t push me over that edge.
Almost beyond endurance I attempt to take matters into my own hands when he flips me onto my back and thrusts up inside me. Hard. He pins my hands above my head so I can’t do a single thing to change his masculine rhythm or the sheer force of his pleasuring.
How he prevents ejaculation, I have no idea. It’s sheer bloody-minded willpower.
“Let me fucking come.” My frustration ratchets to the max.
Laughing, he swivels his hips so deep inside me and so infinitely slowly I want to cry. I claw at the bed sheets with my fingernails so much I’m sure I hear them rip again.
“Say please.” He offers a series of slow shallow penetrations and I feel my muscles quiver each time he ceases.
“Please.” I utter the word through gritted teeth.
“Swear you’re not going to run again.”
“I’m not.”
“Swear it.”
“I swear it. I bloody well swear it.”
“Don’t say bloody. You were raised to be a lady. Even in my bed. Getting fucked.”
“I swear it. I do.” Even if he is the most irritating man on the planet.
“Okay, kitten. I believe you. Now swear you’re going to make this work with me.”
“I’ll swear anything you want me to swear. Everything. Please let me come.”
“Swear you want me.”
“Right this minute, Jack.”
He laughs. “Just one more swear.”
“What? Quick.” My voice has raised by several octaves. In two seconds flat he’s not going to be able to do anything to stop me from coming no matter what he does. My whole being is focused on achieving nirvana.
“Swear you’re going to… scream.” He pierces me hard. Deep.
I scream just as orgasm slams through my body like a thunderbolt. A surge of pure force zaps me, sucking greedily as Jack stills, holding himself deep inside me. The sensation electrifies its way to every extremity I possess from my gripping toes to my flickering eyelids. My thighs shake with its vigour until I’m literally hanging onto Jack by my fingertips as I spin off into the ether and spiral slowly back into my spent body once more.
Jack rears above me, stationary, tightening, all muscles tensed, then with a mighty jerk he detonates like a bomb, gushing jets of hot fluid straight and true. He curses soundly.
Each dirty word tightens my sex and my body squeezes him tighter. I feel like all that heat and pressure inside me has fused Jack’s body to mine enough to never be able to part us.
I lie like a spent rag, limbs no longer under my control. Jack’s entire weight collapses upon me, the only thing fixing me to this world. I want to hold him but don’t have strength enough to raise my hands from the bed. We lie in silent astonishment as the crazy beating of our hearts against each other’s bodies slows and steadies and my need for great gasps of oxygen diminishes. Neither one of us moves or speaks for ages.
Then a shudder of disbelief erupts from his chest. “I’ve never –”
“– Me neither.”
No need to express what the other is feeling. Make-up sex is the most amazing thing in existence. I try to shake my head but Jack’s cheek is resting snug against it. He turns his face into my neck and breathes me in then lifts slightly to drop a soft languid kiss onto the corner of my mouth before subsiding on top of me again.
I can’t move a single muscle; utterly expended. My limbs sprawl to the four corners of the huge bed and I briefly wonder what anyone hanging off my ceiling would make of the strange picture below them; like a human spider. I laugh.
“Not at my performance surely?” His voice mocks my impud
ence.
“Arachnids.”
“On the ceiling? I might just need to inform Lenuta.”
“I might just tell her myself,” I laugh more.
“Crazy girl.” He lifts his head and stares at me with real affection. All trace of his former despondency is gone. He hasn’t looked at me like that in a long while. I’ve missed this. I’ve missed him. He caresses the hair from my sweaty face and kisses me.
“Besotted and crazy,” I agree.
“Besotted? I was that good, huh?” He raises an eyebrow waiting for confirmation.
I nod and he smiles in a gratified manner. He shifts his weight from directly on top to one side to make me more comfortable but I turn with him to keep him inside me. I’m not ready for us to be apart.
“Do you remember all the things you swore to?”
“Hmm mmm.” Half asleep, the only thing keeping me conscious is the fact I don’t want to let Jack fade into just another torrid dream. I’ve woken in this bed too often to those.
“Think so?” He slips out of me and drags me across the bed, my back tight against his front. Where does he get his energy from? “We’d better check to see what you do remember.”
He nudges me until I speak. “Not going to run.” I wasn’t.
“Glad to see you were paying attention to that particular item. What else?”
He nudges me awake again. I’m so relaxed I’m surprised my heart can even be bothered to beat. “Make you work for me,” I mumble.
“Not exactly, kitten,” he laughs. “Although… Try harder.”
“Make this thing we have, work.”
“Excellent. You’re a quick study. The brightest CEO student I’ve had so far, I’d say.”
“Funny.” Somehow I find enough drive to elbow him sharply in the stomach for making fun of me, before my muscles weaken again. He makes a noise like air being knocked out of him and there’s more muffled laughter. “If this is your teaching method, I’d better be your only student.”
“Sexiest too,” he murmurs beside my ear. I smile sleepily and he thrusts against me bringing me to awareness of my current task.
