Eight Ways to Ecstasy

by Jeanette Grey

  Between sips of coffee and idle discussions about what he should do with the house, he fed her bits of the half dozen different pastries he’d brought, placing each sweet, flaky bite on her tongue. When she returned the favor, he nibbled at her fingertips. Grasped her wrist to suck a sticky bit of icing from her thumb.

  And he looked so beautiful like that. Perfectly casual and relaxed in his bed. Eyes dancing. Grip warm.

  So beautiful she wanted to capture it.

  She didn’t have her sketchbook or her charcoal. But then it struck her—she had something else. Maybe even something better.

  Letting out a shaky breath, she pulled her thumb out of his mouth and stroked it wetly across his lip. “Stay right there.”

  She barely took the time to wipe her hands off on a napkin before reaching for the camera bag she’d brought up with her the night before. The thing was clunky and ancient and solid, and she loved it. Adored the mechanical clicks it made as she opened it up. She dug through the rolls of film Rylan had brought back with him, selecting a black-and-white one she could develop at the darkroom she had access to at school.

  “What are you doing?”

  “What do you think?” It had been so long since she’d done this, but her hands remembered how to load the canister. She fiddled with the settings for a minute, then brought the viewfinder up to her eye.

  She fit him into the frame, this close-up shot of his eyes and his smile.

  “Do you know what I miss about this kind of photography?”

  “What’s that?”

  “The mystery.” Her vision flashed black as she pressed the shutter, capturing this image of him. This moment.

  “Oh?”

  “Digital’s nice. You know how the picture turned out right away.” She rose to her knees and backed away, fitting more of him into the shot. “But with film, there’s this anticipation. You have to wait.”

  The corner of his mouth twitched up, and she took the photo of him, just like that.

  “Not a fan of immediate gratification?” His voice dipped lower, going sultry and dirty, and she felt it in her breasts. In the tender, warming space between her thighs.

  “It has its place.” She kept snapping shots, framing each one with care, moving around the bed to get him from these different angles.

  Slowly, she lowered the camera from her eye.

  He was closer than she’d realized, hidden behind the lens the way she’d been. His chest rose and fell with every breath, and there was an openness to his posture. As well as a tension. Like how he’d posed for her the last time.

  He’d let her in, back then. In this way, at least, he’d let her see him fully exposed, and yet, both then and now, this aura of uneasiness radiated from him. He didn’t give this part of himself to people very often.

  But he was giving it to her.

  In some vague attempt to ease the dryness of her throat, she swallowed. Licked her lips and summoned her courage.

  And then she asked him, “Take off your shirt?”

  Rylan rarely hesitated when a gorgeous woman asked him to undress—it generally tended to go well for him. He reached one hand behind his head and grasped the back of his collar, all set to tug the fabric over and off.

  But he hesitated. Kate sat on her knees a scant couple of feet away from him on his bed, her long, bare legs going on for miles, the soft swells of her breasts pressed against the cotton of her top. It hadn’t been that long ago that he had been dying for her to ask just about anything of him. For her to be in this with him, meeting him halfway. Well, she was asking now. She’d started this.

  She’d asked him to reveal himself, to her and to the camera, and already, he felt nearly as naked as he had in that room where they’d shared so much of themselves. Back a handful of months and an entire ocean away.

  He worried the collar of his shirt between his fingers and his thumb, a restless, nervous energy making his pulse race. His dick was firming up inside his jeans, and he’d normally be all the way to hard with how close she was, how gorgeous she looked against his sheets. But the crackling of static in the air between them, her request for him to strip. It wasn’t only sexual. It was more. Better.

  More terrifying, and maybe that was why he was stalling.

  “You’re not going to put these on the internet, are you?” he asked.

  She shook her. “They’re just for us.”

  Us. That one simple word had him nodding to himself. The world disappeared behind black cloth for a fraction of a second as he finally gave in and pulled his shirt off. The click of the shutter fired away while he was still partway through the motion. He balled the fabric up in his hand and braced his arms behind him on the bed. Stared straight into the lens through which she watched him.

  She took another couple of pictures before the restlessness of being observed like this got to him. It felt too one-sided. Which gave him the idea…

  Sitting up straighter, he reached out toward her. She snapped a photo of him with his arm extended, then lowered the camera. Tilted her head at him.

  “Let me take a few.”

  The idea seemed to surprise her. She shook her head. “I must look—”

  “Beautiful. Come on.” He wrapped his hands around hers where they gripped the metal body of the thing. “Show me how it works.”

  Their bodies pressed together as he came to sit beside her. She walked him through how to focus, delicate fingers dancing over the controls. Once he had it, she surrendered, letting him take the camera from her hands. Reluctance was written all over her, and the first picture he took was of her with her lip between her teeth.

  She laughed despairingly and covered her face. “I wasn’t ready.”

  “But I was.” He snapped the next one with her peering out from between her fingers, and it all but stopped his heart inside his chest.

  This was precisely how he wanted her. Real and genuine and imperfect and his.

  “Stay right there.” He got up and walked around to the other side of her. With careful motions, he slipped the elastic from the end of her braid and set it aside. He combed out her hair with his fingers, the dark strands slipping like water through his hands, falling into waves exactly how he’d thought they would. When he was done, he stepped back, waiting for just a moment until her impatience got the better of her. Until she turned to look over her shoulder.

  He caught her just like that, and he wished he could check the image right then and there. Make sure it had come out the way he’d pictured it, but she’d just said it herself. Film was about waiting. It was about a finite, fleeting moment, here and gone in a flash, and you didn’t know until it was all over if you’d captured it at all. If you got to keep it.

  His chest squeezed in. Fuck, but he hoped he did.

  Sitting down beside her again, he lowered the camera from his eye and reached over to tug at the sleeve of her shirt. “It’s only fair,” he said to her pout.

  And she didn’t fight him on it. She stripped the fabric up and over her head, unveiling the creamy flesh of her abdomen. The bottoms of her breasts and then the rosy circles of her nipples, tight points peaking harder as they were exposed to the morning air.

  “Well?” Her chin tilted up, challenge shining at him from within those deep brown eyes. She didn’t cover herself, and his breath sharpened, his own flesh responding. His brave girl. His brave, beautiful girl.

  He took one last picture of her, and then he set the camera aside.

  “Well,” he repeated. Restraint was a trembling thing inside his limbs, but he was running out of it and fast.

  He’d just wanted this for so long. Not only the promise of sex that lay in the faintly crackling space between their bodies—though fuck knew he’d take that, too. But what he longed for was something deeper. The shy, intimate way she’d looked at him through a camera lens. The slowing of her breath as she fell asleep inside his arms.

  The heaviness to her eyes as she stared at him right now.

  And su
ddenly, the inches of space separating them were too much.

  Reaching out, he put a hand to the bare flesh of her thigh, and the distance between them broke.

  Restraint was never something he’d had a lot of anyway.

  His pulse thundered hot inside his veins as he rose to his knees. Within the span of a breath, he was upon her, pulling her against him. Her breasts pressed warm and full against his skin, and he groaned aloud as their mouths finally met. It was sex and it was intimacy, and it was everything.

  It was the photograph he’d taken of her naked smile, the one he didn’t know yet if he’d get to keep. But damn him if he wasn’t going to try.

  Encircling her in his arms, he kissed her deep and wet, losing himself in it. In this moment.

  In her.

  It all changed so fast.

  One moment Rylan had been gazing at Kate with this quiet sort of adoration, and the next he was kissing her within an inch of her life. Her head spun, dizzy, as the scent of him surrounded her, the weight of him. She grasped at his shoulder and his hip, just for something to hold on to. But it wasn’t enough.

  Her breath caught as she let him bear her down into the mattress. The softness of it welcomed her, the cool slide of the sheets a contrast to the heat of his skin and the slick press of his mouth.

  “Fuck.” He scraped his teeth across her lip and worked his way toward the point of her jaw. “You don’t know.”

  She tipped her head to the side in invitation. “Don’t know…”

  “How bad I’ve wanted you. Here.” His words set off a pang inside her chest at the same time that the wet kisses he laid against her throat sparked a low, warm roll of arousal, heavy in her breasts and pulsing thickly in her sex. “In my bed. First thing in the morning. Wanted to sleep beside you. Wake you up with my mouth on you.”

  Biting down, he fit a hand to the underside of her thigh and pushed it wide. She moved with him, making space for him between her legs, and he fit himself down into it. The rough fabric of his jeans rasped against her bare skin, and she arched up into the pressure, until the hard line of him pressed right where she needed it. Moaning at the spike of pleasure, she threaded her fingers through his hair, dragging his mouth back to hers to muffle the sounds he choked out of her with the grinding of his hips.

  And yet there was more to it than the heat of his body or the electricity zipping through her at every glancing brush of skin on skin. There was an intensity to him, warmer than the possessive way he’d taken her in the car behind the gallery. Fuller than the shallow way she’d laid back and allowed him to have her upon his return. It was his words and his touch, combining and echoing, and it reminded her—

  She scraped her nails down the length of his spine.

  God, it was like their first time. Right after she’d drawn him, when she’d still been shaking from the realization of how deeply and how fast she’d fallen. Every kiss and every touch had been bright with possibility, yet shadowed by the looming specter of the fact that they had always been doomed, and there was just that sharpness to them now. That knife’s edge they skated upon.

  How many times had she gone back to that moment in her mind? Even in the depths of her fury, she’d held fast to that one golden afternoon. Imperfectly remembered, all flashes of need and the rush of finally giving in. Surrendering and receiving everything from him in return.

  She wanted to remember it better this time.

  “Wait.” The word came out breathless, her chest heaving beneath the hot touch of his hands, throat thick and lips stung.

  Freezing, he groaned aloud. He lifted up to stare at her, and the concern on his brow alone made her heart swell. Unable to explain, she fumbled blindly at her side until her hand connected with the cool metal of the camera. She curled her fingers around the strap, tugging it closer.

  His gaze followed her movement, and his breath caught. When he looked at her again, it was with his eyes going molten and dark, Adam’s apple bobbing hard.

  “Kate. Fuck.” He hung his head for a long moment before seeming to get himself back under control. “Always knew you had a little bit of a voyeur in you. Remember that first night you let me make you come?”

  Deep in her sex, she pulsed. “As if I could forget.”

  “You told me about your roommates fucking in the bunk across the room from you. Your cheeks went all pretty and pink.”

  The same kind of warmth bloomed over her face right now. Shot down her spine and into the space between her legs.

  His voice deepened, liquid sex rolling through his every breath as he skated his fingertips up her thighs. “You like to watch, pretty girl?”

  “I like to watch you.”

  His thumbs brushed the edges of her panties, and her whole abdomen flexed. For half a breath, she squeezed her eyes shut tight. She could just give in to this. Let him touch her and make her come.

  Forcing her eyes open, she fought for focus.

  Somehow, she got her hand around the body of the camera, bringing it up toward her eye. But before she lost the view of him to that of the lens, she worked her jaw. Summoned her courage. How many times had he told her to ask for what she wanted? Proved to her that it was her right, in bed and in every other part of her life? She darted out her tongue to wet her lips, then skated her gaze down his body.

  Her voice scarcely shook at all as she said, “Take off the rest of your clothes.”

  The space between them seemed to vibrate as his chest rose and fell. He sat up straighter, rising onto his knees between her spread thighs, muscles tensing.

  And then he brought his hand to his throat.

  God but the man was lethal. Fire raced through her, her mouth going dry as he dragged his fingertips over his collarbones. His smooth skin gleamed in the morning light, golden and perfect. He traced the edges of his pectorals, flicked a thumb against his own nipple, and let out a huff of air, and wasn’t that just an idea for later? To touch him there and see if it made him pant the way it made her.

  Then his hand drifted lower. The points of her breasts went tight, her sex slick and hot.

  Exhaling hard, she brought the viewfinder to her eye, and it put him both closer and farther away. Made it easier to breathe at the same time that his teasing coiled the tension inside her to the point where she felt like she might break.

  She snapped the shutter with his hand flat against the dips and ridges of his abdominals. Again as he swept over to touch the crest of his naked hip above the waistband of his jeans.

  And then he tucked into the denim. Made as if to stroke the hot flesh underneath, and she couldn’t stop the whine of need that escaped from her throat.

  “You want me to touch myself?” Gravel roughened his tone. “I’m so hard for you, Kate.”

  No. Yes. She wanted that, and for him to be on top of her already, pushing her open and pressing inside. Wanted his mouth and his hands and his cock, and how was she possibly supposed to decide?

  Well, there was one place to start. “Show me.”

  In slow, dragging movements, he withdrew his hand. He circled the button on his jeans for an infinite moment, swirling a single fingertip around the metal, and it took her too long to recognize the motion. She jerked her knee up, brushing her foot along his calf as her center throbbed. It was the way he liked to slip his finger along her clit, the way he got her warm and ready and wet for him.

  And then he was popping the button free, pulling the teeth of his zipper down one by one. Heat bloomed in a fresh rush when he spread his fingers, palming the long line of himself through the fabric, and he made a low groan as the heel of his hand rubbed over the tip.

  “Show me,” she said again.

  And it was a heady ache when he did. He hooked his thumbs under his waistband at his hips, pushing the denim down maddening inch by inch, taking his boxers with it. Revealing coarse, dark hair and endless skin, and she clicked the shutter. Advanced the frame.

  Then the base of him came into view. With a shudder, he reached
in and pulled himself out. His cock was thick and flushed, glistening at the head as he curled his palm around himself and took a slow stroke forward, forcing a noise of pure need from his lungs.

  “See how hard you make me? How much I love it when you tell me what you want?”

  She fumbled with the camera in her haste to set it aside, but he was there, taking it from her. Bracing himself with one arm, he collapsed back over her, capturing her mouth, and how had she gone without this for so long? Survived for even a second without kissing him? It was cool water to the inferno between her thighs, and a conflagration to her flame, stoking her higher even as he eased the need within her, helped her keep it banked and contained.

  Beside their heads, the shutter clicked, registering only dully in the back of her mind as she scraped her teeth over his tongue, met his lips again and again. She wanted to touch all the places he’d had his hands, wanted the hot length of him against her skin. Moaning, she skated her palms across his chest toward the center of his hips. When she brushed the wet tip of him, it punched the breath from him, but then he was there, pushing her hand aside.

  Sliding down her body with the hot glide of his mouth.

  He took a picture with his tongue on her breast and another sucking a kiss beside her navel. She choked on his name when he dipped lower, running his nose along her slit through her underwear. Scrambling, she rushed to get the fabric off, to get him closer to her bare, slick flesh, but again, he caught her hand. Pulled it to his mouth and sucked her fingers between his lips. Then he was pushing her own hot hand into her panties, glancing up at her with eyes gone black with lust.

  “Show me.” It was almost a growl, the way he said the words.

  And who was she? She barely recognized the scared, repressed, naïve girl he’d had to coax into touching herself in front of him at all as she slipped her fingers through her wetness, probing just inside before gliding back up to circle around her clit. The shutter fired off again, and Jesus, she’d have to develop these in the middle of the night, would have to barricade herself inside the darkroom, because no one was ever seeing this.