by Coralie Moss
He brought his tongue into play, exploring her folds. Anna groaned, pressed herself into the bed and reached for the wall, Liam stroking her from behind. When undulations slid her knees farther apart, he took hold of her hips and spiraled her onto her back.
His shoulders, arms, and chest were illuminated by firelight. For one brief moment, Anna dropped the weight of her offspring’s judgement and allowed herself to embrace desire and being desired.
Liam lowered his chest to meet hers, bringing his mouth to her lips. The weight of his body sank against her front, taking them deeper into the dips of the mattress.
“Do you want me?” he whispered. Words came out of his mouth, after rippling up the front of his taut belly and rumbling through his chest. Sound moved from his throat to his tongue to her mouth.
Anna lifted her pelvis in answer to his question and wrapped her arms around his neck for emphasis. “Yes.”
“Will you wait for me?” His hand circled his cock and brought the smooth head to her inner thigh, stroking around and over her swollen labia. The musky scent of mutual arousal slid between their chests.
“Yes.” Her voice went raspy, her body urged him to enter her, and she was on the verge of letting go of any stray voices urging her to consider slowing down.
“I have a confession,” he said. “I took half a little blue pill.”
She stopped gyrating, his erection pinned against the fold of one thigh. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“I wanted you to feel what I’m capable of, and that pill’s going to help me get hard and stay hard.”
He bit at her jaw and the side of her neck, his breath hot. Anna brought her arms down around his waist and felt for his muscular ass. The way they were moving together, the head of his cock a half-inch out of reach, reminded her of high school, her first boyfriend, and the hours and hours they spent writhing against each other, clothes on. The memory provided an unexpected erotic charge.
Liam responded to her tremors and brought his mouth to where the tip of his cock had explored. His tongue lengthened, reaching for her, coaxing more and more of the hidden parts of Anna to come out and play.
“Liam, I can’t wait.” She moaned, pressing herself into the pleasure of his tongue and the pain of his fingers rolling her nipple. She pressed his hand to her breast with hers, arched her spine, and let her orgasm unleash. From zero to sixty, like Elaine said. Or from zero to one or more a day for the past week.
His breath was ragged, his arousal more pronounced than before. He kept Anna pinned to the bed until she stopped shuddering. She was surprised she’d climaxed so quickly. When her breathing calmed, he moved off the mattress until his knees were on the floor.
“Bring your head over here,” he said, gesturing to the side of the bed. Anna, still soft and pliable, hesitated. No, she wanted to stay right she was. She wanted Liam to go back to where he’d been and give her a few more moments of uninterrupted soaking in the sea of physical of bliss.
He slid one hand up her thigh and tugged. She pivoted, her head tilting off the edge of the mattress. Bending her knees and planting her feet for stability, she reached one arm back for his ass.
“Is this what you want?” she whispered, taking him in her other hand. “Do you want my mouth?”
“Yes, like that.” Liam nodded and leaned forward, supporting himself with one hand on the mattress, guiding his swollen tip toward Anna’s lips with the other. She let saliva slick the inside of her mouth, parted her lips, and licked. The angle of her head opened her throat, allowing him easier access.
As he found a rhythm, a way to enter Anna, he continued to hold himself, guiding her even as she released him in favor of exploring her awakening anatomy.
Time slowed. Their skin warmed and glistened. Anna found dormant parts of her body, parts she’d neglected far too long, waking, aching for recognition. The more self-pleasure she experienced, the harder Liam got, until he grabbed the sheet in his hand, pulled away, and stroked himself into orgasm.
He collapsed back on his heels and brought his mouth to Anna’s upside-down forehead for a kiss. “Thank you, Anna. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“My pleasure,” she purred, sliding all her fingers through his dampened hair, his ragged breath warming her cheek. She wiggled toward the wall until her head rested on the bed, keeping her gaze—and one or two fingers—connected to Liam as he crawled around her and curled into her side. His touch was tender, his hand slightly shaky, and his breathing took longer to even out. The only sound in the room, aside from the pulse thundering through Anna’s ears, was the crackling and spitting of the fire as it consumed another log.
She was well sated. They were adding to their repertoire, and she was coming to appreciate the intelligence in Liam’s touch. And she wanted to talk, maybe do the processing thing Gaia recommended, but her brain was mush and ready for sleep.
“Do you need anything?” he asked.
Anna nodded, once. “I need covers. And maybe we should think about turning around.”
Liam sat up, pulled Anna with him, and pivoted so their heads would land on the pillow as they both fell over. She reached for the quilt, rolled to her side, and fell asleep.
The next morning, rain smacked at the windows on the south side of the cottage and on the metal roof. The mattress rose a little when Liam rolled away from spooning Anna and left the bed. She monitored the slap of his bare feet across patches of wood and linoleum through sleep-heavy eyes, every sound amplified by the fog wrapping the house.
“Why are you attracted to me?” she asked when he returned to bed, sliding his icy feet under her warmer ones. Yes, it was an out-of-the-blue question, and no, she wasn’t sure why she needed to ask.
He ran a cold hand over the swells and dips of her waist, hip, and thigh and offered a drink of water from his glass before setting it on the floor.
“You’re patient. And curious. And you’re shy but also willing to be adventurous.”
Sliding one hand between her thighs, he fondled the sensitive flesh between her legs. “You smell good, you feel good, and you have that whole earth-goddess vibe going on.”
Anna chuckled in delight. “Earth goddess. No one’s ever called me that.”
Liam probed between her inner thighs, found wet, and spread the fluid around. He pressed his mouth against the side of her neck, nipped at her skin, and entered her with two fingers at once.
“You’re divine,” he whispered. He stroked, waiting for her to respond. Anna let go of wanting any more of an answer and let the leisurely rhythm of his thrusts dictate her physical response. “You mentioned feeling invisible.”
She nodded. It took concentration to manage the conversation going on between his fingers and her sex and the more thoughtful conversation his upper brain seemed determined to initiate. Closing her eyes helped.
“I’ve been feeling something similar,” he continued. “I know there’s a version of myself that’s tied to what happened to my body once I was diagnosed with cancer. Losing my hair, a testicle, and then my fiancée within a year did a number on me. I think I withdrew on purpose, and not because I felt there was some… deficiency in my life, more because the whole thing felt like I was being pointed toward a greater clarity around what really matters to me.”
“And what really matters to you?” she mumbled.
“This. Touching you.”
She smiled and kept her eyes closed while he explored until a quiet orgasm purred through her languidly willing body.
Liam kissed her shoulder and slipped from the bed again. He shuffled through a drawer, pulled on a pair of sweatpants and a long-sleeved T-shirt, and picked up his sketchbook and a pen. Under Anna’s lazy, satiated gaze, he positioned himself at the foot of the bed and started to sketch.
“What’re you doing?” she asked.
“Drawing you,” he answered, his gaze darting between the open book in his lap and the bed. “You okay with that?”
“Mm-hmm.” She rolle
d the rest of her to face him and reached for the half-filled glass. Her teeth needed brushing and a trip to the bathroom was in order, but another layer of connection was happening between the two of them and she didn’t want to break the spell.
At one point, Liam stepped away from the bed and carried over a chair, sitting and observing her from another angle. It wasn’t difficult to tell what part of her body he was drawing. His hand would swoop over the page, mimicking the shapes of her exposed shoulder, or her neck, or all the rest of the curves defined by the bedding tucked around her body.
Two sketches later, he dropped the book on the floor and pushed the chair away from the bed. “Want some coffee?”
“Love some.” Anna found the flannel shirt he’d worn the night before and pulled it on before heading to the bathroom. When she stepped out, he was pouring boiling water over the grounds, monitoring the brew as it dripped into the glass carafe resting over a low flame on the stove.
“Do you take milk or sugar?” he asked.
“Black. With a little sugar.”
He handed her a mug, poured milk into his, and ducked his head to exchange a coffee-flavored kiss. Anna pressed the lone pillow against the wall and settled into bed, her breasts swaying under his shirt.
“I feel like we should talk.” She cradled the mug against her chest.
Liam repositioned the chair at the end of the bed and sat.
“A lot has happened this week,” she said. “A lot I wasn’t expecting or even wishfully thinking about. You took me by surprise, Liam.”
“That doesn’t sound like a complaint.” He brought one leg at a time to rest on the bed, crossed his ankles, and smiled over the rim of his mug.
“Oh, I’m not complaining,” she reassured him, blowing on the coffee and taking a sip. “Not at all. But I’m wondering if this is a distraction for you, for what you came here to do.” She took another nervous sip, her eyes simultaneously pleading and flirtatious. “I’ve been out of the dating game for so long I’m not sure what the rules are anymore. So, please, educate me. What are we doing?”
“Well, for one thing, we might be working together. Clients of mine on the east coast have asked me to start gutting a sailboat they bought that’s moored somewhere north of here. I’ve never retrofitted a sailboat, and I was thinking I’d like your input on the project.”
“Working together. I like that idea.” Working together would create a bridge to the future, maybe a time beyond his current sabbatical. Her breath caught a little. She squeezed her mug to steady her nerves.
“But I don’t think that’s what you were asking,” he continued, a slight smirk flitting across his face. “I didn’t come to this island looking for a relationship, but it’s funny, the woman who handled renting this house made it very clear she was available. And because of that, I did have to ask myself what I wanted around companionship or even having a lover.”
More new territory. Having the relationship talk with a man whose fingers had been inside her, arousing her, less than an hour before. Breathing lessons saved her again. She inhaled through her nose, slow and steady, and kept her gaze on Liam and the way his long fingers caressed the outside of his coffee mug as he spoke. And the way his thigh muscles tensed and relaxed every time he shifted his body on the small chair.
“But as I told you,” he continued, his gaze on the hand smoothing the fabric of his sweatpants, “certain body parts haven’t worked very well. I went to the breathing workshop as an experiment, to see if I could open myself up to other ways of being sexual. Or sensual. And because of that, I met you.” He looked up briefly, setting off a pinging action in Anna’s heart. “Although, I suppose we would have met anyways, seeing as we’re neighbors, but who’s to say we’d be here, having coffee after having spent the night together, if we hadn’t met at the workshop.”
Anna nodded and confessed, “I’d probably still be wearing my cloak of invisibility.”
“Is that what you call the bathrobe you were wearing?”
She laughed. “No, that was my grandfather’s, but now that you mention it, yes, it’s big enough to hide in.”
“Do you know what you want, Anna?”
She looked beyond him to the fog gathering in the trees and along the coastline. “I like how you make me feel. I’d like more of that.” She gestured to the sketchbook and pen on the floor next to him. “Shouldn’t you be writing this down?”
“I will when your list of desires gets to more than six or seven.”
“Do you think it’s possible to be friends and to be…intimate?” Her question was directed as much to herself as to the man lounging in front of her.
“Yes,” he nodded, “it is, at least I hope it is. I think we’re doing pretty well so far.”
“Then I’m happy with this.” She opened her arms to encompass the room and the bed. And him.
“Then how about I sweeten the deal and make you breakfast?”
Anna squeezed her eyes shut as she dropped her head back to rest on the wall. “Yes!”
He picked up the sketchbook and pen, handed them to her, and took her empty mug with him. “Here, have a look. I’ve sketched out some ideas for furniture in there too. And if you think of anything else to add to your list of desires, feel free to write it down.”
She curled onto her side, slowly flipping through Liam’s sketchbook while watching him work his magic in the kitchen.
He pulled a butter dish from the refrigerator, set a frying pan to heat, and lifted the lid on the carton of fresh eggs. He cracked four into a bowl and whisked. “Do you like fresh salsa on your eggs?”
“Mm, sounds delish.” She wondered if he knew his butt muscles tightened while he was standing there.
“And toast?” he asked, untwisting the tie on a bag of bread.
When he looked over his shoulder, she got to admire the spiraling action in his torso. More delicious muscles. More pleasure.
“No toast, thank you, just the eggs and salsa.”
Pleasure.
Liam seemed to derive pleasure from seeing to her happiness in bed and outside of the bedroom. He knew very little about her, but for a woman who’d been disengaged from her sexual side for years, she seemed to be having no problems reconnecting with her body under his inquisitive touch.
They were feeding each other, she reckoned, physically and sexually feeding each other necessary nutrients. She was discovering parts of herself, and he was gaining trust in his body’s ability to respond and perform. There was a decided lack of anxiety in their rapport.
He sprinkled a handful of cheese over the omelet before folding it in half in the pan and letting it sit, buttered two pieces of toast, and loaded their plates with the egg dish and a scoop of chopped tomatoes and other vegetables on the side.
“Here you go.” He handed her a fork rolled into a napkin, pulled over the wood chair he’d been sitting on next to her side of the bed, and set her plate on the seat. “Buon appetito.”
Liam settled at her feet in his favored cross-legged position while she lifted the plate to her nose and inhaled.
“This smells delicious,” she said.
“It makes me happy to cook for other people. Dig in.”
The wind had picked up while he was cooking, driving more rain against the windows and roof in loud bursts, as though someone was throwing half-empty buckets of water at the house.
“Is weather like this typical for the time of year?” he asked.
“We get a lot of rain in the fall, so, yes. Not always so stormy, though. It won’t be this heavy where you’re going camping. You’re still planning to leave this afternoon?”
He nodded. “That’s my plan. Unless we get torrential rains and flooding and you can’t make it home, and we’re forced to stay in my bed, in which case I’ll be delayed a day or two.”
Anna soaked in his flirtatious talk and his exaggerated, lascivious look. She deserved to be flirted with, and her self-admission made her blush. She flirted back, played at l
icking the edge of her fork. “There’s nowhere I have to be today, and if you can clothe and feed me, I guess I’ll just have to stay.”
“You didn’t happen to bring the coconut oil with you…?”
“It’s in the pocket of my coat.” She picked at the chunks of tomato that had fallen out of the omelet, pretended not to care nearly as much as she did.
“Then I think I know what we’re doing for the next couple of hours, and it involves my hands and your skin.”
Later, after another orgasm and a very short shower, Anna returned home. Liam’s car splashed through the water-filled potholes punctuating the road, the horn beeping when he passed her house. Anna breathed into a rogue wave of melancholy, listening to the sounds fade. They’d said their goodbyes and agreed to reconnect when he returned.
She shook off her sadness and picked up her phone. A dozen messages and texts waited, from Gigi, Elaine, Daniel, and two of her customers. There was nothing urgent in any of the communications, which was good. Because right now, she wanted to revel in the feelings of being the sole object of one man’s desire and being satiated by that desire.
Liam continued to refrain from full intercourse, but his imaginative use of fingers and tongue left her feeling like she didn’t need his penis to feel aroused or to orgasm or even to feel wholly female. And the best thing was, satisfying her seemed to satisfy him.
Anna hung her coat on the hook by the door. Gigi left a hand-drawn note on the kitchen counter, a small heart with the words, “See you soon.” She’d have to call her son to finalize details for the family gathering, but she could put that off until tomorrow. For the rest of this day, she wanted to continue to savor what it felt like to be with Liam.
Covered in coconut oil, by a fire, and naked.
Curled in bed, by a fire, and naked.
Wrapped in his shirt, eating breakfast he’d prepared.
There was no guilt in the pleasure she was experiencing, not in this moment. She could distinguish her feelings for whatever this was with him from her upcoming trip to see Daniel. She could be grateful to Liam, for this time where foreplay with one man prepared her for being with another man.
