Page 68 of Honey Cut
The heavy pulses of his erection subside, and we breathe together. He’s still deep in my body.
“I thought you said you were going to make me suffer for it,” I tease, and he turns his head and nips the muscle connecting my neck to my shoulder.
“Bold of you to dare me,” he breathes, moving his head down to my breast and biting the curve of it through the silk. He rolls off me and then taps my thigh. “Spread for me.”
I spread, a familiar nervousness knitting in my stomach. “I didn’t mean you had to?—”
He smacks my wet cunt so hard I see stars, and just as I try to close my legs and roll away, he starts rubbing my stinging clit. It feels so good and a little bit awful, andoh God.
“I can’t come again,” I plead. “Please, sir. I can’t.”
“Hmm,” Mark says. “I don’t care.” He’s now lying on his side, watching me with undisguised fascination as he masturbates me toward my third climax of the morning. “I want to play with my toy.”
And I have to say goodbye to the version of Isolde that wanted to be a nun, that wanted to annul this marriage and walk away, because I don’t think I can ever walk away from this. I don’t think I could ever leave behind the man with hair like a halo and a body made for sex. I don’t think I could walk away from playful Mark, tender Mark…even cold and cruel Mark, who still reminds me of the implacable desert god I chose as my own.
Even St. Michael can’t protect me from the snares of the devil when I’m the one laying myself in his traps.
twenty-five
ISOLDE
He washesmy hair in the shower, washes my body and my feet. I look down at him as he kneels to do it, my foot resting on his naked thigh, water sluicing over his back and shoulders. It ripples over the still-red scar on his shoulder and drips off the ends of his hair. It’s his bath product he uses on me, and the large stone-lined shower smells like him. Like minerals and rain and earth.
Like petrichor.
This is something we do in the Church, wash each other’s feet, and it’s disorienting to see Mark doing it here, with more care and attention than I’ve ever seen on Maundy Thursday. He makes it seem like the most natural act in the world, and when he’s finished, he bends his head to kiss the top of each foot, right in the middle.
This cannot be the same Mark who striped my thighs with a riding crop, who left me after taking my virginity—and yet it is, it undeniably is, because when he lifts his eyes to mine, I see the same glittering gaze I saw the night I learned I was supposed to marry him. It’s the same danger, the same utter command, the same unfathomable secrets.
It’s allhim.
It’s just somehow all him.
After we finish in the shower, Mark wraps a towel around his waist and then tucks one around me, his fingers lingering over my breasts as he does.
“Let’s take the day off,” he says suddenly, impishly.
It’s the middle of the week, and as much as my job is for show, I still have to pretend it matters in order for the pretense to stand. “To do what?” I ask, a little doubtfully, even though inside I’m feeling a little… Ah, this is stupid. I’m feelingblushythat my husband wants to spend time with me.
Mark traces the branches of my collarbone with a pleased finger as he answers. “To fuck,” he says, like it’s self-evident. “To play chess. To go to the grotto together and sweat. To have a meal that isn’t polluted with people we secretly can’t stand.”
All of that sounds amazing. And leaving my pretend job for a day almost feels like leaving my real job for a day. I can, of course, justify it by reminding myself that seducing Mark is my task—as much as anything I’ve done with a knife or by crawling through a window—but I don’t want to think about it right now. I just want to be with him.
Bad.
This is bad, Isolde.
“Okay,” I murmur. “Let’s take the day off.”
A huge grin, just like the one he gave me over the chessboard on our wedding night. It’s infectious and warm and so, so perilous to my well-being.
“I knew I’d persuade you,” he says, kissing me once on the lips, hard, and then pulling me into our bedroom.
He dresses simply—barely—in linen drawstring pants and nothing else, and I follow his lead, pulling on a lacy bralette and soft drawstring pants of my own. We send whatever emails we need to send, and then he makes me a breakfast of thick toast with soft butter, cut fruit, and coffee—espresso for me, cappuccino for him.
We eat at the table, the autumn sun clouding over as we do, and he pulls me into his lap when we’ve finished, kissing my neck, my collarbone, my breasts. He tugs down the lace of bralette and sucks on my nipples.
“I want to fuck you again,” I pant.
