Page 20 of Light My Fire

“More,” I say, and she gives it, a third finger, deep, her thumb finding my clit and circling rough and exact, and I ride her hand as I rode her thigh, no elegance left, my forehead dropped to her shoulder, her bicep flexing under my grip with every stroke. She turns her head and puts her mouth at my temple and starts talking, low, wrecked, telling me she's got me, telling me to take what I need, that she's right here, that I feel incredible, and the praise undoes me faster than the fingers do. Eleven years of architecture and what brings it down is a firefighter's voice saying right there, just like that, you're perfect, into my hair at eight in the morning.

I come on her hand with the harbor light all over us, hard, in long pulsing clenches she works me through with her fingers buried deep and her arm locked around my back, and the sound I make is her name with the bones taken out of it, and the apartment that never hears anything hears all of it.

For a few breaths, I just hang there on her lap, my face in her neck, woodsmoke and the slam of her pulse under my mouth, her fingers still inside me, both of us shaking. She starts to ease them free and I clamp my hand on her wrist to keep them there, and she stills, and I feel her smile against my ear.

“Okay,” she murmurs. “Okay.”

Nobody holds me. That's been a fact of my adult life, load-bearing, and I sit on a firefighter's lap in my ruined kitchen being held, and the fact quietly fails inspection, and I let it.

Then I lift my head, and whatever she sees in my face changes her breathing, because what's in my face is that I'm nowhere near done.

“Up,” I say, sliding off her lap, my thighs still unsteady and my voice not. “On the counter.”

“Zara.”

“You came to my home with your suspicion.” I'm already working her belt, and her stomach jumps under my knuckles, and she isn't stopping me, her hands braced back on the stone, watching me with her chest heaving. “You'll leave with a confession. Just not the one you wanted. Up.”

She gets up onto the marble, and I pull her boots off one at a time, let them drop, then peel her out of her trousers, and then she's sitting on my counter in nothing but plain cotton underwear and her tattoos, all that strength gone obedient under my hands, and I stand between her knees and look at her until the flush climbs high on her cheekbones, the tell I've been collecting since the gala.

“Now who's staring?” she says, down at me, with her ears going red, and it isn't a complaint.

“I paid for the view,” I tell her, and put my mouth on her sternum, over the heartbeat, and start down.

I kiss my way down her body, the breastbone, the soft underside of a breast, the ladder of her ribs, the scar on her hip she hasn't told me about yet, and her abdomen flinches and tightens under my lips, and by the time I'm at the waistband of her underwear, her hands are fisted at the counter's edge and her breath has gone ragged. I hook my teeth in the waistband of the cotton and drag it down her thighs, slow, letting her feel the scrape, and she lifts her hips for me and swears at the ceiling, and the underwear ends up wherever the glass ended up, somewhere in the wreckage of my orderly life.

Her knees try to close an inch, reflex, the last shy instinct in her, and I set my palms on the inside of each thigh and open her, and hold her open, and look, because she's flushed and glistening and trembling and mine for now, and then I lean in and taste her, one long flat stroke, broad and slow, and the groan that comes out of her vibrates the counter.

I take my time with her, as slow as I took the kiss. I give her long heavy passes with the flat of my tongue until her hips start chasing, then go lighter, narrower, finding the rhythm that makes her thighs shake against my palms, learning her like a floor plan. When she's rocking into my mouth and her hand has found my hair and her swearing has gone reverent, names of saints, my name among them, I close my lips around her clit and suck, tight pulsing circles, and her whole body jolts like contact with a live main.

“Zara, God, please.”

I take my mouth off her, and she sobs at the loss, actually sobs.

“Beg,” I say against her, low, my voice gone to gravel. “Beg me to ruin you.”

“Please.” There's no hesitation in it, none, just this enormously capable woman shaking apart on my counter with her hand wound tight in my hair. “Please, please ruin me, I want it. I've wanted it since the warehouse, please, Zara.”

The since the warehouse goes through me like current, and I give her my mouth and my fingers at once, two pushed deep into all that tight wet heat and curled forward while I suck her in those slow tight circles, and she goes off loud, her heels drumming the cabinet doors, her thighs clamping my head. I work her through it and past it and start again before the aftershocks finish, because ruin was the agreed term.

I push more fingers inside her and her pussy is hot and wet for my fingers.

“Fuck,” she gasps as my four fingers start to really fuck her. Her eyes widen,

“Beg me to fuck you with my fist,” I say and her eyes widen and her pupils are blown and I know I have her now, right where I want her.

I tuck my thumb and begin to press the widest part of my hand at her opening. Her body resists me.

Not for long I think to myself.

“Beg for it.” I repeat.

I’m looking in her eyes and when her voice comes it’s as submissive as a kitten and I love it. “Please…” she whimpers, her eyes wide… “Fuck me with your fist.”

Her words are such a turn on.

I smile as I keep working my hand. I spit on it and roll my hand around in her wetness and my spit to ease the entry.

“Do you want your pussy wide open and wrecked for me, sweetheart?”