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verushka70(continued from Part 1 because x-posting from DW to LJ; the entire story is too big for one LJ post)
7.
The next time everything was the same – coffee, talking, flirting, his lips pursing into a self-conscious, downward-glancing smile, her eyebrows lifting happily, just like the last time and the time before that and the time before that. Except this time there was no question: he knew something would happen between them. He just didn't know what.
This time he parked and they went up to her apartment. It went roughly the same, except instead of in the front seat of his fucking station wagon, it was on her Chesterfield.
She brought him up to her apartment, she made him tea, she sat him down on the Chesterfield. He awkwardly blew on the tea. She set the tea on the coffee table on a coaster, turned to him and pressed her closed lips to his. Within moments they were hungrily devouring each other's mouths while her hands roamed all over him – his cheeks, the back of his neck, his shoulders, his thighs, and there, there, where he'd been hard in the fucking car, squeezing him, stroking him through his pants. He felt queerly passive and didn't give a rat's ass, it was so fantastic. He held her face in his hands and kissed her like they were the only two people left on earth.
She unbuttoned his shirt, yanked the shirt tails out of his pants, and stripped it off him. He unbuckled his holster from his belt, while she unbuttoned her blouse. He made sure the safety was on the gun as she stripped her blouse off. He dropped the gun onto the rug while their mouths came together again. In his sleeveless undershirt, she feverishly kissed him. She stroked and squeezed the muscles of his arms and shoulders. Then she stripped his undershirt off over his head.
Every article of clothing removed was mere punctuation to her fierce kisses and caresses. She opened his pants and didn't bother with the fly in the underwear this time. She pushed them down. He pushed them down farther.
This time she did jack him off. He helped. Her efforts were endearingly inexperienced but enthusiastic, which somehow made it really fucking hot. He finally put his hand over hers, squeezed down a little, then harder, then harder, watching her face to see if it hurt her hand – she wasn't even looking at him, she was just staring at his cock – and, fuck, that was hot, too. She seemed fascinated with it, itself a fucking turn-on.
Finally he just squeezed her hand on his cock hard, tight, like he liked it. He used her hand under his to jack himself hard and fast. He took himself to the edge and then slowed down. He did that a couple times. Then he let go and she did it on her own.
He leaked pre-come all over the fucking place again. His balls tightened up. Eventually he pointed to his shirt on the floor. She leaned down, grabbed it and handed it to him. He spread it across his lap with his other hand. She let go of his cock and he took hold of himself. She put her hand over his and he finished himself off, hard, fast, brutal. He squeezed his eyes shut tight, felt sweat trickle down his temples. He came hard, pelvis thrusting automatically, gasping, moaning. She slid her thumb, light and slippery with his come, over the head of his cock, felt the last couple spurts of semen as they came. It made him jerk involuntarily with pleasure so intense it hurt.
Then her lips pressed against his. The barest tip of her tongue slipped tentatively between his lips. He sucked it in, grateful, groaning. He held her hand still on his cock so she'd stop sliding her little thumb over the slick head. When the empty pulses of aftershocks slowed and stopped, and Mike could feel it softening and shrinking, he removed her hand from his cock and wiped it with his shirt. He wiped his cock and then wiped his own hand.
She hadn't said a word the entire time. He hadn't either. His tea was cold, untouched.
Her blouse was off. She had some kind of pretty pinkish beige bra on and her skirt. She stood in front of him and lifted her skirt and slid her panties down.
She climbed on his lap, still in her skirt. He wanted her to grind her hot wetness against his naked thighs, but he didn't ask, and he kept his jeans on because she didn't indicate that he should take them off.
She knelt up on her knees, straddling his lap. She pulled her bra cups aside and offered her breasts to his mouth; she tugged his hands up to her breasts. Alternating breasts, he squeezed gently while sucking one nipple and gently pinching the other. Her panting turned to low moans as he did. So he sucked harder and her moaning got louder.
Her nipple slipped out of his mouth when she sat, hard, on his thigh and began to rub against it. His mouth was out of reach of her nipples, but not her lips. He caught her mouth in his and she kissed him hungrily, throwing her arms around his neck. Her nipples were hot and hard between his fingers.
She rocked on his thigh. Her skirt spread over his lap, hiding everything, making it inexplicably more erotic. Knowing her naked, velvet lips were pressed so hard on his jeans, seeking release – the ferocity of her lust – got him hard again. He knew later he would bury his face in the thigh of his jeans and inhale the faint remains of her scent. He would do the laundry anyway; the smell of detergent and fabric softener made Audrey nauseous now.
Nathalie rubbed and rocked faster on his denim-clad thigh, faster but shorter moves, pressing harder and harder, grinding on him until she came.
By the time her breathing calmed back down, he was full hard again, head bare, shiny, wet and leaking. Which of course she noticed. She put his right hand on his cock and with her little hand around it, jacked him a few times, then pulled her hand away. He jacked off, hard and fast this time, straight to orgasm, none of that to the edge and back like before. It took a while but he came again, a small amount, little dribbles. This delighted her.
It surprised the fuck out of him. What it looked like on the outside was nothing compared to what it felt like on the inside. He felt like he was coming his brains and guts out; he came hard, very hard. He actually stopped breathing involuntarily with the first spurts. He got lightheaded; behind his closed eyelids he literally saw stars. His body shook, uncontrollably, a lot longer than the first time he'd come that night. He gasped like a fish out of water while she clung to him, stroking his thigh gently. While he tried to catch his breath and felt fewer and farther apart pulses, deep and faint inside, it occurred to him: this was that whole la petite mort shit, the little death of orgasm. He could hardly believe it.
They hadn't even spoken. About anything they'd done. That made it somehow more mysterious, yet... fated. This, this, thing between them. He didn't know what it was. He just knew it was good and it was his and his alone and it kept him going, kept life livable. Mike knew he had to put a big, huge fucking DO NOT CROSS tape around this thing with Nathalie, protect it from the rest of his life, so he could keep this one thing, keep it good, something that was just for him.
The best part was that this thing required nothing more of him than to sit there and let Nathalie do whatever she wanted with him in her sexy-shy way – whatever she wanted, whatever she told him to do, whatever she intimated or indicated she wanted him to do.
He didn't have to make the moves, make the plans, look ahead. He didn't have to think and do and cope and drive and clean and shop and cook and homework and bedtime stories and how-was-school-today and Audrey on his ass for his long work hours because one of us has to be there for the kids and three weeks out of four (first chemo) and then for three fucking straight months (radiation) and then two weeks out of every three (second chemo) because Audrey couldn't. Mike hadn't signed on for all that, he really fucking hadn't, it was a raw deal he'd been given, a shitty hand he'd been dealt and forced to play.
Mike tried not to think about it. But when the guilt about Nathalie prodded too painfully, he remembered the fucking vows. He thought,
Audrey's the 'in sickness.'
I'm the 'for worse.'
If he didn't do anything, if she did everything, that was all right, right? changed to If she started everything, that was all right, right? He was amazed at how flexible he could be, how he could push the black into white and make it gray.
But then Caleb had known that about him. Had known it made him good at compartmentalizing, at undercover. Caleb. Motherfucker. Caleb. Who'd had to get fuckin' shot. Who he missed like a brother. Why it took so fucking long to get ashes and an urn back, Mike didn't fucking understand.
8.
The next time after their coffee, after their talk, after Mike came up to her living room, after tea – and everything else – on the Chesterfield, Nathalie added her mouth to her hands on his cock.
He knew it was a lie to say she led and he followed. It was clear she was not that experienced (which he – admit it – loved, like opening a new present, like walking into virgin forest, like a wild animal versus a pet). He showed her whatever she wanted to see, whatever she wanted to know, let her know what felt good, what he liked. In turn, he tried to find out what she liked, but she was not letting him into her world yet.
Maybe that was for the best. Nathalie wanted to explore him – that much was obvious. Well, parts of him. They hadn't been fully naked with each other, at the same time, together, in bed. He was fully naked, eventually. But she – she still wore some clothes and kept some secrets.
He'd had no clue English literature – fucking old English lit! – was so dirty. But even though they didn't talk about what they did, Nathalie liked to find those passages for Mike in books. She'd read them to him quietly, smiling and blushing, turning them both on. She made it so fucking sexy. She'd studied it in college. Yet she seemed strangely sexually innocent for a girl (woman) her age. He supposed it could be an act, but he found that very, very hard to believe.
She had her favorite bits of this book and that book. She knew exactly where some passages were in books; some were even marked. She didn't say so, but he slowly concluded she'd been reading this stuff over and over for quite some time. It was her literate version of porn – what she used instead of the dirty magazines men had. The thought alone made him smile and stiffen.
It was so achingly hot and sweet to watch her beautiful mouth learn every detail of his cock. He wasn't teaching her how to fellate him (her word). She was just. . . learning.
He liked her polysyllabic, literate words for what they were doing better than the short, vulgar one or two syllable words he'd grown up with. He didn't ask himself why. She was the English teacher. Fuck, she could say polysyllabic and it was a turn-on.
They were very discreet in the support group. No one would have known.
With Audrey's diagnosis, the glass cracked and splintered and spidered. Mike waited for it to fall in on him. But the big shattering was Caleb. He never saw the Caleb thing coming, though he should have known – he knew that they lived with 'might never see retirement' every day.
As much as he observed that it came to upset Nathalie, he had to talk about Audrey in the support group. He couldn't not. They were two halves of his life, one approaching and growing, the other receding, shrinking, fading to nothing.
But he talked about Caleb, too, with fondness. Irritation. Anger. Sorrow.
Because – he admitted only to himself – Caleb had called him on it. You called that girl, didn't you? You're a real asshole, you know that? With his characteristic easygoing chuckle, Caleb went easy on Mike in that way that only he could go hard on him, shoving the truth in Mike's face.
Like he needed more truth than the truth that was choking him, drowning him.
Mike had tried to go back out there, out without Caleb, out on the street. Alone. With another partner. It didn't work. It so spectacularly didn't work. I'm having a personality conflict. Copspeak for your other officers are all corrupt or idiots and they're not Caleb and fuck you for pairing me up with them.
It wasn't entirely his idea, the transfer to Durham County. It – not Durham specifically, but anywhere else – had been suggested. Fortunately for him, he'd had a good solve rate with Caleb. One he wasn't sure he could maintain on his own or with a new partner, if the partnering attempts were anything to go by.
There was so much to run away from, so much to not think about, so much to not talk about, it was easy to go to Nathalie and let her show him the things she thought about that no one seemed to know about but him. Assumed ex-boyfriends faded into the background. There were no pictures of her with other men around her apartment. Maybe there never had been. Mike liked that idea.
He existed with Nathalie in a kind of limbo. That was what Caleb wouldn't have understood. Maybe if he had lived, if he had seen what those slices and slivers of time with Nathalie did for Mike. Until Nathalie, Mike's only picture of the future had been crumbling. He had nothing to replace it except a terrifying void and the clear, light eyes of his two young daughters, who looked to him for everything he had been doing, plus a whole bunch of new stuff he never expected to do because he'd never thought in a million years he'd be doing it alone.
He took the limbo where he and Nathalie existed apart and away from everyone and carved that out for himself. He let her do whatever she wanted with him. Tried to give Nathalie as much as he could, given that she was his fucking life line to sanity, something that kept him calm when he wanted to slam his fist on the kitchen table and say
Yes, goddamn it, it's spaghetti again because I'm not a cook and I'm not your mother, I'm your father, and I'm really good at interrogation and beating people up and putting the screws to them and shooting guns and teaching you how to fight and protect your self from boys like Ray and me were, but I couldn't even protect my own goddamned partner. I'm no good at saying the right thing when other girls at school do catty bitchy things to you; I just wanna smack them, or I want you to smack them: that's how boys solve things. I'm no good at comforting you in a way you actually believe, I'm good at being angry and confrontational. I can't hug you like your mother hugs you because I'm not her. I don't help you with your clothes like her because I can't. I pretty much suck at everything except being the sexual plaything of a woman half my age and I need her is because I don't know how to deal with all of this.
He kept his head down, nose to the grindstone, the rest of the time.
If she started everything, that was all right, right? changed to I don't put it in her, so we're not really...
He tried to never complete that sentence in his head.
9.
They talked a few times on the phone – he should say, a few more times – before they saw each other next. They didn't talk about what they'd done. At all. But even through the phone – fuck, he got hard hearing her voice – it felt like they were both thinking about it, both wondering what they would do next.
The next time, all through the support meeting, through talking, through coffee, through flirting, he was stiff with desire and had to hide it most of the time. After they were not with the group, he stopped hiding it.
Mike figured out – correction: Nathalie figured out – that like she liked to see the effect she had on him. In the car when he picked her up, she was hyper-alert to him in a way that he found both extremely flattering and very arousing. She noticed right away when she got in the car that he was already hard. He wasn't trying to hide it; he wasn't trying to display it, either. But just thinking about seeing her tonight, just thinking about last time, he was hard.
Neither of them mentioned it as they chatted and drove and he sat there, hard, the whole time.
They maintained the facade of just friends at all times in public, plausible deniability for if – when – people who knew Mike (he knew a lotta cops) might run in to him and wonder who was this woman he was with, who wasn't Audrey. They had a (plausibly deniable) explanation: the support group, Audrey's cancer, Nathalie's mother's cancer and death. Mike reserved his gentlemanly manners – opening doors, taking her elbow – for those moments right before going up to her apartment. Otherwise, she was just a young woman he knew from the grief group, helping him through a really rough patch.
Good God, she was so young, so energetic in her quiet, brainy way, so idealistic. It made him remember when he'd been that way – though parts of him had never been that way – and kind of put a new spin on things. A cheerful spin. Shafts of sunlight. Leaves turning. Him whistling. Suddenly realizing he needed to be more serious when he got home because everyone would wonder why he was in such a good mood if he wasn't.
Not that it was hard to get serious when he got home.
After they left the support meeting, and they went to the coffee place, he found them a corner table in the back. He leaned back in the chair, letting her see the not entirely obvious, but obvious if you were looking, bulge in his pants. She eyed it frequently, but said nothing about it. They talked of other things, but the whole time, a secret smile played at the corners of her lips. She wouldn't hold his gaze too long.
She distracted him from the headaches of his daily life. She was a smart, sweet, sexy girl. He tried not to remember that that was what he'd thought of Audrey when he'd met her: smart, sweet, and sexy.
While they were in the car he made sure his jacket was off, and his seat far back enough from the steering wheel, so that she could see when he was hard. Which was pretty much the whole time, to varying degrees. As they got close to her apartment, her little hand stole into his lap to check how hard, feeling him through his pants. She hadn't requested or imposed it, but he'd stopped jacking off in the shower. He came when she let him come – which, fortunately for him, was usually whenever he got to see her. If he didn't jack off daily in the shower, when he came for her, the quantity was greater. It was fucking childish and insane but, fuck, she liked to watch him come, and he wanted to give her as much as possible.
She kissed him as soon as they walked in the door to her apartment. Pushed the door shut and pushed him up against it. Unbuttoned his shirt there at the door and slowly tugged it out of his pants, pants she hadn't yet unbuttoned or unzipped. Mike was happy to be as buttoned or unbuttoned as she left him. Their mouths slid across each other's and when his shirt was on the floor, and he was in his sleeveless undershirt and sidearm holster, she pulled the straps of his undershirt down and to the side and sucked his nipples until his cock was burning to be squeezed and gripped.
She didn't bother with the tea this time. She took him to the bedroom, leaving his button-down shirt on the floor by her front door. In the bedroom, she pushed him gently down on the bed and then pulled his sleeveless undershirt off him. She had decided by now that she really liked to run her fingers through his chest hair, and Mike was fine with that, perfectly fine with it.
Whatever she wanted, that's what he was here for. She wanted to lay with her head on his chest and run her fingers through his chest hair while he stroked her hair, while his hard cock was tucked behind her naked knee, her doing nothing with it, and him doing nothing with it? Not a problem. Wanted to alternate drinking ice water and hot tea and (he loved this word now) fellate him until he couldn't stand it, and then slide her mouth off at the last minute and watch him come? He was fine with it. Wanted to use one of her hand lotions to massage every inch of him between his asshole and his navel and not quite let him come? Okay.
Nathalie didn't just read D. H. Lawrence and Fanny Hill and Anais Nin and The Story of O (in the original French). She read The Guide To Getting It On and The Joy Of Sex and who the fuck knew what else. And if he lost control, and he came anyway, she didn't get mad. She was kind of mock-mad, but secretly pleased.
So she lay on the bed with him that night, her head on his naked chest, her fingers making short little strokes across his ribs, his hand loosely in her hair. But eventually, she moved that hand down to his belt. She unbuckled it. Unbuttoned his pants. Unzipped the fly. Reached in to grasp what she knew was there. It had been stiffer earlier; it was about fifty, sixty percent now. All she had to do was touch him,and his cock throbbed back into full hardness.
Every time he came over, she did almost everything they did the previous time – but added something new. It was a continual surprise. It was something to think about when he was driving to and from work. It was something to focus on when he really, really hated his job or Maddie and Sadie's bickering got on his nerves and he wanted to shout at them both to shut the fuck up with their petty crap, their mother was trying to sleep and he was trying to daydream. He would review all the things Nathalie had done last time and wonder what new thing she would come up with next time.
She withdrew her hand from his pants and sat up. Mike lay quietly, waiting to see what she'd do. She slowly unbuttoned her sweater, then her blouse, and removed them. Unhooked her bra and slipped it off. Her skirt still on, she straddled his open pants, pressing her still-clothed crotch hard against his erect cock. Hands on his chest, she leaned down, letting her nipples graze his chest hair and stiffen.
She leaned down further and kissed him sweetly, then more urgently. He slipped one hand into her hair, held their mouths together, and she ground insistently against him. His other hand went automatically to her hip, holding her there, rocking her on him. Her hands pushed against his chest as her thighs gripped him strongly. She ground hard on him, almost painfully hard. She gasped, sweat darkening the hair around her face. Eyes closed tight, she rocked and writhed, bit her lip and moaned, shaking and shuddering.
He hadn't realized how close he was until the fierce grip of her thighs tightened and spasmed around his hips. Then his own orgasm welled up, surprising him. He spurted, bucking up into her, imagining being inside her, her hot, wet, tightness. It was wet inside his briefs when they both stopped moving.
She sank down on him with a gusty sigh. She slid slowly off him and he curled on his side towards her, slipping a hand between her clothed legs, feeling the heat, the moisture, the slow twitch of her aftershocks. He was stunned at the fury of both their responses, the passion and strange chastity of the encounter. He hadn't come in his pants in more than twenty years – since probably high school. He hadn't known it was possible for that to happen at his age, or wouldn't have if he'd thought about it at all until now – which he hadn't. Nathalie had a way of making him think about things he hadn't thought of in some time.
10.
This night, after she got him full-hard again, she drew his pants off him. And then his boxers. He was naked except for his socks, the holster having been lost in the living room. She was shirtless, bra off. She slid off the bed, took off her pantyhose, and left her skirt on.
She climbed back on her bed and knelt by his shoulder, her knees together. She pulled her skirt slowly up to her hips. He looked at the little trimmed patch of hair at the V where her thighs met. He looked back at her face and then back at the patch of hair and realized she had moved her knees an inch or two apart. He kept looking at the patch of hair and she kept moving her knees slowly apart. Until he was looking farther down, where it was dark because the light was overhead and everything was in shadow. Her knees were wide apart now. He looked up at her face. She had a strange, half-excited, half-fearful expression, but she knelt up, then, and let her skirt fall, hiding everything.
She ducked her head, and her hair fell into her face, and that hid everything too. Mike had gotten to know that when she did that, she wanted something very specific but felt shy about letting him know. He put a warm hand on her knee, just her knee, no higher than her knee, not even naked knee – skirt-covered knee. He looked at his hand, at her knee, and he waited for her to decide what she was going to do, what she wanted from him, what he was supposed to do.
He was surprised when she clambered over him and straddled his naked chest. Her skirt flowed down around his chest and upper arms and stomach and her vulva was pressed against his stomach just below his ribs, hot, very hot, not yet wet. He waited. She bent her head down, which hung her hair in her face, and reached down to grab his hands. His hands always seemed so big and clumsy compared to hers. When she had her hands on his cock, he thought they looked way sexier than his own. His own were – utilitarian. They worked. If she wanted him to jack off and come, he would. But he preferred her hands on his cock to hers.
She pulled her skirt up again and tucked it into it's own waistband to hold it up. Then she grabbed his hands, put them on her spread thighs, but pushed them down, a little, to her inner thighs. He was always half-guessing with her. The nice thing with Nathalie was that if he guessed wrong, she just gently corrected him. No, not the whole breast – just the nipple. She would pull her breast out of his cupped grasp and then delicately place just the nipple between his big thumb and index finger.
From where and how she put his hands, from the way she straddled his chest, Mike guessed she was maybe finally ready to let him touch her there. He stroked her thighs slowly, from the inner knee upward, his strong thumbs massaging the inner thigh. He felt her thighs tremble under his hands. He must be partly right.
He swept both thumbs farther below her little thatch of hair, into the furrows on either sides of her mound, feeling the cording of the tendons there as her thighs tensed and she pressed harder onto his upper abdomen, forcing his breath out. She was sitting on his diaphragm, but he didn't think she knew that.
He slipped his hands up over the tops of her thighs and then around to the backs of them, up to cup her buttocks. She sighed and knelt up a little and he took the opportunity to slide down a bit beneath her, so when she sat back down, she wouldn't be sitting on his diaphragm, she'd be sitting on his breast bone. He still wasn't quite sure what she had in mind here, because he couldn't really touch her there if she was sitting on his chest, but breathing was kind of important.
But she mistook his sliding down, or maybe it gave her an idea, or emboldened her to do something she'd wanted or planned to do anyway. With her hot moist lips pressed against his chest, and her knees in his armpits, it took relatively little for her to move forward, a knee at a time, over his shoulders, to straddle his mouth.
Oh.
She settled on his mouth gingerly, barely brushing his lips with the furred cleft below the thatch. The musk of her scent filled his nostrils. He closed his eyes, knowing now what to do. With his arms trapped below her bent legs, all he could do with his hands was slide them up her buttocks to her hips. He pulled gently down on her hips, pulled her fully down onto his open mouth, pushing his tongue out and pressing it into the deep furrow, against the little nub that nestled at the top where her lips began. She inhaled sharply when he pressed his tongue harder and pulled her down harder against his mouth. When he quickly swept his tongue, hard, side to side, over her clitoris, she gasped and pressed down harder herself.
He licked her hard and slow, side to side, knowing his tongue would be sore later, his lips and neck muscles, too. But he was completely and utterly intent on tasting her, licking her, sucking her, making her feel good, his nostrils flaring, breathing hard through her hair. She moaned and panted, louder and longer than she ever had. He felt her thighs shake around his face and neck. The nub of her clit swelled beneath his tongue as he sucked it, tongued it back and forth, faster now. She leaned forward, putting her hands on the headboard, and her skirt fell like a curtain over his face. It left him alone in the dark with her essence pressed into his mouth and nose, the taste and scent of her most secret parts filling his senses.
His hands slid down to knead her buttocks and press her harder into his face. He'd always disliked Audrey on top for this. But now he wanted to drown, to suffocate in Nathalie, this somehow so much more shocking and intimate than fucking her would ever have been. His lips and tongue knew nothing but the tight fur at the top, the slippery smooth texture of her rising nub, the little folded hood hiding the most sensitive part. Her swelling outer lips parted to let him slide his tongue down farther into the inner, more delicate lips. There Mike tasted the first slow flow of her sweet tang and wanted more.
He needed to use his hands with his mouth to do this right. He needed to get down there, needed her on her back, needed light, if at all possible.
He started to sit up in the darkness under her skirt, pushing her up with his mouth and chin. She rose on her knees with his face. Now that he had room, he slid his right hand up her inner thigh. He touched her lips where they were wet now. She was slick and soft, swollen and so, so hot. He slid his fingertips farther up – hot, wet flesh parted for his fingers.
But she suddenly pulled away from him, took back everything he'd just been worshiping.
She was suddenly all the way at the end of the bed, shrinking back. The sudden exposure to the light momentarily blinded Mike after being under her skirt. He still had the tip of his tongue sticking out of his mouth, it happened so fast. He looked at her, bewildered. She panted, hair hanging in her face, bangs sticking to her forehead, flushed, every bit the excited woman in the throes of passion – suddenly wild around the eyes, frightened.
“I – what?” he said softly. “I just want to ... lay you back, lick you more.”
“Don't,” she blurted out. “Don't shove your fingers in me.” She bit her lip.
He was speechless a moment. Her face went from confused to fearful to hopeful to worried.
Mike still wasn't sure what to say. I need the assist? I'm out of practice? My mouth and tongue can only do so much before they give out? I thought you'd like it?
He reached for her smooth, delicate ankle and gripped it gently. “I – I need to hold your lips apart for, er, better access. I won't put them in you, if,” he hesitated, “if you really don't want me to.”
“I don't,” she said, forlorn. “Everything else was so wonderful. Not that.”
“Okay. Okay.” He reached for her wrist. “Come here.”
Mike drew her into the circle of his arms and legs – such a tiny thing, she was. He held her and they both felt his erection but ignored it. He stroked her hair. She put her arms around him and put her cheek on his chest.
“Sh. I can do other things with my hands,” Mike murmured.
He gently slipped his hand under her skirt, between her legs where she was still deliciously wet. She gripped his reaching wrist tight, as if she'd yank his hand away if he made one false move. All he did was thumb the slippery nub of her clit slowly back and forth, adding a little pressure. She moaned.
“See?” he whispered. She nodded against his chest, breathing hard. She loosened her grip on his wrist.
With the same hand, he made his first two fingers a V around her clit, tucked tight between his index and middle finger. He tightened them together and slid them, slow and sure, back and forth through the wetness, back and forth. He tightened her clit between his fingers, sliding them back and forth faster and faster, feeling her clit tighten and swell and twitch between his fingers. She moaned again.
“Like that. Okay?” he asked softly.
“Yes,” she breathed, laying back against him. “Okay.”
“Okay. Okay.”
He laid her down on the bed, pushed her skirt up, and sidled down beside her until his head was on her shoulder. He dipped his head to take her nipple in his mouth and continued to slide the V of his fingers up and down, back and forth, in the furrows on either side of her clit, keeping the pressure snug, the movements short and fast. His other arm fell asleep under the curve of her back, but Mike didn't care. Her nipple hardened between his lips as her clit did the same between his fingers. He sucked her nippled and stroked the V fingers around and alongside her clit.
She moaned and writhed and whispered incoherently. She seemed so close and he wanted to do that for her. He felt her muscles tense wildly and then she cried out, loud, and long, squeezing and clenching her thighs, crushing his wrist between her legs. He kept doing everything he was doing until she reached down and pulled his hand away.
She was panting, gasping, eyes closed, knees up, arms around them. Mike sat up and pulled her toward him. She was limp, pliant, sweating. She let him pull her into his arms, and he crushed her against his chest. The violence of her orgasm, its honesty, was inexplicably moving, after she'd let him see her and taste her and smell her and touch her, every bit as beautiful and mysterious there as she was in all other ways. He kissed her hair, her cheeks, her temples, her closed eyes, her swollen lips. He stroked her arms, her knees, her calves, her back.
“Oh,” she sighed, muffled against his chest. “I never thought it could be as good as it was by myself.” She hesitated. “Until now.”
Audrey wasn't getting better. That part of his life was ending. He had come to expect it. Accepted it. He had Nathalie, now.
He asked her to look at the house with him the following week.
Then Audrey began to get better.
He would be an asshole now no matter what he did.
* * *
He swallowed several times, hard. He tried to compose himself as he looked at her dead body washed up on shore. He squatted and touched Nathalie's head and saw that it was bloody.
In the morgue later, she was laid out on the table, cold and pale and vulnerable. So beautiful. So dead.
A virgin. Good God, he was a detective – how had he not figured that out? He was an idiot not to have seen the signs.
Fresh loss and crushed hope opened at Mike's feet like an abyss. A universe cold as an insect was at his back.
He had something new and terrible to choke back; no one could know.
The weight of Nathalie's loss was exponentially greater than all she had been saving him from.
She touched him first. It sounded like an excuse – reason – apology – explanation – defense – but it was a simple fact. Every time, Nathalie touched him first.
Except the very last time Mike touched her.
7.
The next time everything was the same – coffee, talking, flirting, his lips pursing into a self-conscious, downward-glancing smile, her eyebrows lifting happily, just like the last time and the time before that and the time before that. Except this time there was no question: he knew something would happen between them. He just didn't know what.
This time he parked and they went up to her apartment. It went roughly the same, except instead of in the front seat of his fucking station wagon, it was on her Chesterfield.
She brought him up to her apartment, she made him tea, she sat him down on the Chesterfield. He awkwardly blew on the tea. She set the tea on the coffee table on a coaster, turned to him and pressed her closed lips to his. Within moments they were hungrily devouring each other's mouths while her hands roamed all over him – his cheeks, the back of his neck, his shoulders, his thighs, and there, there, where he'd been hard in the fucking car, squeezing him, stroking him through his pants. He felt queerly passive and didn't give a rat's ass, it was so fantastic. He held her face in his hands and kissed her like they were the only two people left on earth.
She unbuttoned his shirt, yanked the shirt tails out of his pants, and stripped it off him. He unbuckled his holster from his belt, while she unbuttoned her blouse. He made sure the safety was on the gun as she stripped her blouse off. He dropped the gun onto the rug while their mouths came together again. In his sleeveless undershirt, she feverishly kissed him. She stroked and squeezed the muscles of his arms and shoulders. Then she stripped his undershirt off over his head.
Every article of clothing removed was mere punctuation to her fierce kisses and caresses. She opened his pants and didn't bother with the fly in the underwear this time. She pushed them down. He pushed them down farther.
This time she did jack him off. He helped. Her efforts were endearingly inexperienced but enthusiastic, which somehow made it really fucking hot. He finally put his hand over hers, squeezed down a little, then harder, then harder, watching her face to see if it hurt her hand – she wasn't even looking at him, she was just staring at his cock – and, fuck, that was hot, too. She seemed fascinated with it, itself a fucking turn-on.
Finally he just squeezed her hand on his cock hard, tight, like he liked it. He used her hand under his to jack himself hard and fast. He took himself to the edge and then slowed down. He did that a couple times. Then he let go and she did it on her own.
He leaked pre-come all over the fucking place again. His balls tightened up. Eventually he pointed to his shirt on the floor. She leaned down, grabbed it and handed it to him. He spread it across his lap with his other hand. She let go of his cock and he took hold of himself. She put her hand over his and he finished himself off, hard, fast, brutal. He squeezed his eyes shut tight, felt sweat trickle down his temples. He came hard, pelvis thrusting automatically, gasping, moaning. She slid her thumb, light and slippery with his come, over the head of his cock, felt the last couple spurts of semen as they came. It made him jerk involuntarily with pleasure so intense it hurt.
Then her lips pressed against his. The barest tip of her tongue slipped tentatively between his lips. He sucked it in, grateful, groaning. He held her hand still on his cock so she'd stop sliding her little thumb over the slick head. When the empty pulses of aftershocks slowed and stopped, and Mike could feel it softening and shrinking, he removed her hand from his cock and wiped it with his shirt. He wiped his cock and then wiped his own hand.
She hadn't said a word the entire time. He hadn't either. His tea was cold, untouched.
Her blouse was off. She had some kind of pretty pinkish beige bra on and her skirt. She stood in front of him and lifted her skirt and slid her panties down.
She climbed on his lap, still in her skirt. He wanted her to grind her hot wetness against his naked thighs, but he didn't ask, and he kept his jeans on because she didn't indicate that he should take them off.
She knelt up on her knees, straddling his lap. She pulled her bra cups aside and offered her breasts to his mouth; she tugged his hands up to her breasts. Alternating breasts, he squeezed gently while sucking one nipple and gently pinching the other. Her panting turned to low moans as he did. So he sucked harder and her moaning got louder.
Her nipple slipped out of his mouth when she sat, hard, on his thigh and began to rub against it. His mouth was out of reach of her nipples, but not her lips. He caught her mouth in his and she kissed him hungrily, throwing her arms around his neck. Her nipples were hot and hard between his fingers.
She rocked on his thigh. Her skirt spread over his lap, hiding everything, making it inexplicably more erotic. Knowing her naked, velvet lips were pressed so hard on his jeans, seeking release – the ferocity of her lust – got him hard again. He knew later he would bury his face in the thigh of his jeans and inhale the faint remains of her scent. He would do the laundry anyway; the smell of detergent and fabric softener made Audrey nauseous now.
Nathalie rubbed and rocked faster on his denim-clad thigh, faster but shorter moves, pressing harder and harder, grinding on him until she came.
By the time her breathing calmed back down, he was full hard again, head bare, shiny, wet and leaking. Which of course she noticed. She put his right hand on his cock and with her little hand around it, jacked him a few times, then pulled her hand away. He jacked off, hard and fast this time, straight to orgasm, none of that to the edge and back like before. It took a while but he came again, a small amount, little dribbles. This delighted her.
It surprised the fuck out of him. What it looked like on the outside was nothing compared to what it felt like on the inside. He felt like he was coming his brains and guts out; he came hard, very hard. He actually stopped breathing involuntarily with the first spurts. He got lightheaded; behind his closed eyelids he literally saw stars. His body shook, uncontrollably, a lot longer than the first time he'd come that night. He gasped like a fish out of water while she clung to him, stroking his thigh gently. While he tried to catch his breath and felt fewer and farther apart pulses, deep and faint inside, it occurred to him: this was that whole la petite mort shit, the little death of orgasm. He could hardly believe it.
They hadn't even spoken. About anything they'd done. That made it somehow more mysterious, yet... fated. This, this, thing between them. He didn't know what it was. He just knew it was good and it was his and his alone and it kept him going, kept life livable. Mike knew he had to put a big, huge fucking DO NOT CROSS tape around this thing with Nathalie, protect it from the rest of his life, so he could keep this one thing, keep it good, something that was just for him.
The best part was that this thing required nothing more of him than to sit there and let Nathalie do whatever she wanted with him in her sexy-shy way – whatever she wanted, whatever she told him to do, whatever she intimated or indicated she wanted him to do.
He didn't have to make the moves, make the plans, look ahead. He didn't have to think and do and cope and drive and clean and shop and cook and homework and bedtime stories and how-was-school-today and Audrey on his ass for his long work hours because one of us has to be there for the kids and three weeks out of four (first chemo) and then for three fucking straight months (radiation) and then two weeks out of every three (second chemo) because Audrey couldn't. Mike hadn't signed on for all that, he really fucking hadn't, it was a raw deal he'd been given, a shitty hand he'd been dealt and forced to play.
Mike tried not to think about it. But when the guilt about Nathalie prodded too painfully, he remembered the fucking vows. He thought,
Audrey's the 'in sickness.'
I'm the 'for worse.'
If he didn't do anything, if she did everything, that was all right, right? changed to If she started everything, that was all right, right? He was amazed at how flexible he could be, how he could push the black into white and make it gray.
But then Caleb had known that about him. Had known it made him good at compartmentalizing, at undercover. Caleb. Motherfucker. Caleb. Who'd had to get fuckin' shot. Who he missed like a brother. Why it took so fucking long to get ashes and an urn back, Mike didn't fucking understand.
8.
The next time after their coffee, after their talk, after Mike came up to her living room, after tea – and everything else – on the Chesterfield, Nathalie added her mouth to her hands on his cock.
He knew it was a lie to say she led and he followed. It was clear she was not that experienced (which he – admit it – loved, like opening a new present, like walking into virgin forest, like a wild animal versus a pet). He showed her whatever she wanted to see, whatever she wanted to know, let her know what felt good, what he liked. In turn, he tried to find out what she liked, but she was not letting him into her world yet.
Maybe that was for the best. Nathalie wanted to explore him – that much was obvious. Well, parts of him. They hadn't been fully naked with each other, at the same time, together, in bed. He was fully naked, eventually. But she – she still wore some clothes and kept some secrets.
He'd had no clue English literature – fucking old English lit! – was so dirty. But even though they didn't talk about what they did, Nathalie liked to find those passages for Mike in books. She'd read them to him quietly, smiling and blushing, turning them both on. She made it so fucking sexy. She'd studied it in college. Yet she seemed strangely sexually innocent for a girl (woman) her age. He supposed it could be an act, but he found that very, very hard to believe.
She had her favorite bits of this book and that book. She knew exactly where some passages were in books; some were even marked. She didn't say so, but he slowly concluded she'd been reading this stuff over and over for quite some time. It was her literate version of porn – what she used instead of the dirty magazines men had. The thought alone made him smile and stiffen.
It was so achingly hot and sweet to watch her beautiful mouth learn every detail of his cock. He wasn't teaching her how to fellate him (her word). She was just. . . learning.
He liked her polysyllabic, literate words for what they were doing better than the short, vulgar one or two syllable words he'd grown up with. He didn't ask himself why. She was the English teacher. Fuck, she could say polysyllabic and it was a turn-on.
They were very discreet in the support group. No one would have known.
With Audrey's diagnosis, the glass cracked and splintered and spidered. Mike waited for it to fall in on him. But the big shattering was Caleb. He never saw the Caleb thing coming, though he should have known – he knew that they lived with 'might never see retirement' every day.
As much as he observed that it came to upset Nathalie, he had to talk about Audrey in the support group. He couldn't not. They were two halves of his life, one approaching and growing, the other receding, shrinking, fading to nothing.
But he talked about Caleb, too, with fondness. Irritation. Anger. Sorrow.
Because – he admitted only to himself – Caleb had called him on it. You called that girl, didn't you? You're a real asshole, you know that? With his characteristic easygoing chuckle, Caleb went easy on Mike in that way that only he could go hard on him, shoving the truth in Mike's face.
Like he needed more truth than the truth that was choking him, drowning him.
Mike had tried to go back out there, out without Caleb, out on the street. Alone. With another partner. It didn't work. It so spectacularly didn't work. I'm having a personality conflict. Copspeak for your other officers are all corrupt or idiots and they're not Caleb and fuck you for pairing me up with them.
It wasn't entirely his idea, the transfer to Durham County. It – not Durham specifically, but anywhere else – had been suggested. Fortunately for him, he'd had a good solve rate with Caleb. One he wasn't sure he could maintain on his own or with a new partner, if the partnering attempts were anything to go by.
There was so much to run away from, so much to not think about, so much to not talk about, it was easy to go to Nathalie and let her show him the things she thought about that no one seemed to know about but him. Assumed ex-boyfriends faded into the background. There were no pictures of her with other men around her apartment. Maybe there never had been. Mike liked that idea.
He existed with Nathalie in a kind of limbo. That was what Caleb wouldn't have understood. Maybe if he had lived, if he had seen what those slices and slivers of time with Nathalie did for Mike. Until Nathalie, Mike's only picture of the future had been crumbling. He had nothing to replace it except a terrifying void and the clear, light eyes of his two young daughters, who looked to him for everything he had been doing, plus a whole bunch of new stuff he never expected to do because he'd never thought in a million years he'd be doing it alone.
He took the limbo where he and Nathalie existed apart and away from everyone and carved that out for himself. He let her do whatever she wanted with him. Tried to give Nathalie as much as he could, given that she was his fucking life line to sanity, something that kept him calm when he wanted to slam his fist on the kitchen table and say
Yes, goddamn it, it's spaghetti again because I'm not a cook and I'm not your mother, I'm your father, and I'm really good at interrogation and beating people up and putting the screws to them and shooting guns and teaching you how to fight and protect your self from boys like Ray and me were, but I couldn't even protect my own goddamned partner. I'm no good at saying the right thing when other girls at school do catty bitchy things to you; I just wanna smack them, or I want you to smack them: that's how boys solve things. I'm no good at comforting you in a way you actually believe, I'm good at being angry and confrontational. I can't hug you like your mother hugs you because I'm not her. I don't help you with your clothes like her because I can't. I pretty much suck at everything except being the sexual plaything of a woman half my age and I need her is because I don't know how to deal with all of this.
He kept his head down, nose to the grindstone, the rest of the time.
If she started everything, that was all right, right? changed to I don't put it in her, so we're not really...
He tried to never complete that sentence in his head.
9.
They talked a few times on the phone – he should say, a few more times – before they saw each other next. They didn't talk about what they'd done. At all. But even through the phone – fuck, he got hard hearing her voice – it felt like they were both thinking about it, both wondering what they would do next.
The next time, all through the support meeting, through talking, through coffee, through flirting, he was stiff with desire and had to hide it most of the time. After they were not with the group, he stopped hiding it.
Mike figured out – correction: Nathalie figured out – that like she liked to see the effect she had on him. In the car when he picked her up, she was hyper-alert to him in a way that he found both extremely flattering and very arousing. She noticed right away when she got in the car that he was already hard. He wasn't trying to hide it; he wasn't trying to display it, either. But just thinking about seeing her tonight, just thinking about last time, he was hard.
Neither of them mentioned it as they chatted and drove and he sat there, hard, the whole time.
They maintained the facade of just friends at all times in public, plausible deniability for if – when – people who knew Mike (he knew a lotta cops) might run in to him and wonder who was this woman he was with, who wasn't Audrey. They had a (plausibly deniable) explanation: the support group, Audrey's cancer, Nathalie's mother's cancer and death. Mike reserved his gentlemanly manners – opening doors, taking her elbow – for those moments right before going up to her apartment. Otherwise, she was just a young woman he knew from the grief group, helping him through a really rough patch.
Good God, she was so young, so energetic in her quiet, brainy way, so idealistic. It made him remember when he'd been that way – though parts of him had never been that way – and kind of put a new spin on things. A cheerful spin. Shafts of sunlight. Leaves turning. Him whistling. Suddenly realizing he needed to be more serious when he got home because everyone would wonder why he was in such a good mood if he wasn't.
Not that it was hard to get serious when he got home.
After they left the support meeting, and they went to the coffee place, he found them a corner table in the back. He leaned back in the chair, letting her see the not entirely obvious, but obvious if you were looking, bulge in his pants. She eyed it frequently, but said nothing about it. They talked of other things, but the whole time, a secret smile played at the corners of her lips. She wouldn't hold his gaze too long.
She distracted him from the headaches of his daily life. She was a smart, sweet, sexy girl. He tried not to remember that that was what he'd thought of Audrey when he'd met her: smart, sweet, and sexy.
While they were in the car he made sure his jacket was off, and his seat far back enough from the steering wheel, so that she could see when he was hard. Which was pretty much the whole time, to varying degrees. As they got close to her apartment, her little hand stole into his lap to check how hard, feeling him through his pants. She hadn't requested or imposed it, but he'd stopped jacking off in the shower. He came when she let him come – which, fortunately for him, was usually whenever he got to see her. If he didn't jack off daily in the shower, when he came for her, the quantity was greater. It was fucking childish and insane but, fuck, she liked to watch him come, and he wanted to give her as much as possible.
She kissed him as soon as they walked in the door to her apartment. Pushed the door shut and pushed him up against it. Unbuttoned his shirt there at the door and slowly tugged it out of his pants, pants she hadn't yet unbuttoned or unzipped. Mike was happy to be as buttoned or unbuttoned as she left him. Their mouths slid across each other's and when his shirt was on the floor, and he was in his sleeveless undershirt and sidearm holster, she pulled the straps of his undershirt down and to the side and sucked his nipples until his cock was burning to be squeezed and gripped.
She didn't bother with the tea this time. She took him to the bedroom, leaving his button-down shirt on the floor by her front door. In the bedroom, she pushed him gently down on the bed and then pulled his sleeveless undershirt off him. She had decided by now that she really liked to run her fingers through his chest hair, and Mike was fine with that, perfectly fine with it.
Whatever she wanted, that's what he was here for. She wanted to lay with her head on his chest and run her fingers through his chest hair while he stroked her hair, while his hard cock was tucked behind her naked knee, her doing nothing with it, and him doing nothing with it? Not a problem. Wanted to alternate drinking ice water and hot tea and (he loved this word now) fellate him until he couldn't stand it, and then slide her mouth off at the last minute and watch him come? He was fine with it. Wanted to use one of her hand lotions to massage every inch of him between his asshole and his navel and not quite let him come? Okay.
Nathalie didn't just read D. H. Lawrence and Fanny Hill and Anais Nin and The Story of O (in the original French). She read The Guide To Getting It On and The Joy Of Sex and who the fuck knew what else. And if he lost control, and he came anyway, she didn't get mad. She was kind of mock-mad, but secretly pleased.
So she lay on the bed with him that night, her head on his naked chest, her fingers making short little strokes across his ribs, his hand loosely in her hair. But eventually, she moved that hand down to his belt. She unbuckled it. Unbuttoned his pants. Unzipped the fly. Reached in to grasp what she knew was there. It had been stiffer earlier; it was about fifty, sixty percent now. All she had to do was touch him,and his cock throbbed back into full hardness.
Every time he came over, she did almost everything they did the previous time – but added something new. It was a continual surprise. It was something to think about when he was driving to and from work. It was something to focus on when he really, really hated his job or Maddie and Sadie's bickering got on his nerves and he wanted to shout at them both to shut the fuck up with their petty crap, their mother was trying to sleep and he was trying to daydream. He would review all the things Nathalie had done last time and wonder what new thing she would come up with next time.
She withdrew her hand from his pants and sat up. Mike lay quietly, waiting to see what she'd do. She slowly unbuttoned her sweater, then her blouse, and removed them. Unhooked her bra and slipped it off. Her skirt still on, she straddled his open pants, pressing her still-clothed crotch hard against his erect cock. Hands on his chest, she leaned down, letting her nipples graze his chest hair and stiffen.
She leaned down further and kissed him sweetly, then more urgently. He slipped one hand into her hair, held their mouths together, and she ground insistently against him. His other hand went automatically to her hip, holding her there, rocking her on him. Her hands pushed against his chest as her thighs gripped him strongly. She ground hard on him, almost painfully hard. She gasped, sweat darkening the hair around her face. Eyes closed tight, she rocked and writhed, bit her lip and moaned, shaking and shuddering.
He hadn't realized how close he was until the fierce grip of her thighs tightened and spasmed around his hips. Then his own orgasm welled up, surprising him. He spurted, bucking up into her, imagining being inside her, her hot, wet, tightness. It was wet inside his briefs when they both stopped moving.
She sank down on him with a gusty sigh. She slid slowly off him and he curled on his side towards her, slipping a hand between her clothed legs, feeling the heat, the moisture, the slow twitch of her aftershocks. He was stunned at the fury of both their responses, the passion and strange chastity of the encounter. He hadn't come in his pants in more than twenty years – since probably high school. He hadn't known it was possible for that to happen at his age, or wouldn't have if he'd thought about it at all until now – which he hadn't. Nathalie had a way of making him think about things he hadn't thought of in some time.
10.
This night, after she got him full-hard again, she drew his pants off him. And then his boxers. He was naked except for his socks, the holster having been lost in the living room. She was shirtless, bra off. She slid off the bed, took off her pantyhose, and left her skirt on.
She climbed back on her bed and knelt by his shoulder, her knees together. She pulled her skirt slowly up to her hips. He looked at the little trimmed patch of hair at the V where her thighs met. He looked back at her face and then back at the patch of hair and realized she had moved her knees an inch or two apart. He kept looking at the patch of hair and she kept moving her knees slowly apart. Until he was looking farther down, where it was dark because the light was overhead and everything was in shadow. Her knees were wide apart now. He looked up at her face. She had a strange, half-excited, half-fearful expression, but she knelt up, then, and let her skirt fall, hiding everything.
She ducked her head, and her hair fell into her face, and that hid everything too. Mike had gotten to know that when she did that, she wanted something very specific but felt shy about letting him know. He put a warm hand on her knee, just her knee, no higher than her knee, not even naked knee – skirt-covered knee. He looked at his hand, at her knee, and he waited for her to decide what she was going to do, what she wanted from him, what he was supposed to do.
He was surprised when she clambered over him and straddled his naked chest. Her skirt flowed down around his chest and upper arms and stomach and her vulva was pressed against his stomach just below his ribs, hot, very hot, not yet wet. He waited. She bent her head down, which hung her hair in her face, and reached down to grab his hands. His hands always seemed so big and clumsy compared to hers. When she had her hands on his cock, he thought they looked way sexier than his own. His own were – utilitarian. They worked. If she wanted him to jack off and come, he would. But he preferred her hands on his cock to hers.
She pulled her skirt up again and tucked it into it's own waistband to hold it up. Then she grabbed his hands, put them on her spread thighs, but pushed them down, a little, to her inner thighs. He was always half-guessing with her. The nice thing with Nathalie was that if he guessed wrong, she just gently corrected him. No, not the whole breast – just the nipple. She would pull her breast out of his cupped grasp and then delicately place just the nipple between his big thumb and index finger.
From where and how she put his hands, from the way she straddled his chest, Mike guessed she was maybe finally ready to let him touch her there. He stroked her thighs slowly, from the inner knee upward, his strong thumbs massaging the inner thigh. He felt her thighs tremble under his hands. He must be partly right.
He swept both thumbs farther below her little thatch of hair, into the furrows on either sides of her mound, feeling the cording of the tendons there as her thighs tensed and she pressed harder onto his upper abdomen, forcing his breath out. She was sitting on his diaphragm, but he didn't think she knew that.
He slipped his hands up over the tops of her thighs and then around to the backs of them, up to cup her buttocks. She sighed and knelt up a little and he took the opportunity to slide down a bit beneath her, so when she sat back down, she wouldn't be sitting on his diaphragm, she'd be sitting on his breast bone. He still wasn't quite sure what she had in mind here, because he couldn't really touch her there if she was sitting on his chest, but breathing was kind of important.
But she mistook his sliding down, or maybe it gave her an idea, or emboldened her to do something she'd wanted or planned to do anyway. With her hot moist lips pressed against his chest, and her knees in his armpits, it took relatively little for her to move forward, a knee at a time, over his shoulders, to straddle his mouth.
Oh.
She settled on his mouth gingerly, barely brushing his lips with the furred cleft below the thatch. The musk of her scent filled his nostrils. He closed his eyes, knowing now what to do. With his arms trapped below her bent legs, all he could do with his hands was slide them up her buttocks to her hips. He pulled gently down on her hips, pulled her fully down onto his open mouth, pushing his tongue out and pressing it into the deep furrow, against the little nub that nestled at the top where her lips began. She inhaled sharply when he pressed his tongue harder and pulled her down harder against his mouth. When he quickly swept his tongue, hard, side to side, over her clitoris, she gasped and pressed down harder herself.
He licked her hard and slow, side to side, knowing his tongue would be sore later, his lips and neck muscles, too. But he was completely and utterly intent on tasting her, licking her, sucking her, making her feel good, his nostrils flaring, breathing hard through her hair. She moaned and panted, louder and longer than she ever had. He felt her thighs shake around his face and neck. The nub of her clit swelled beneath his tongue as he sucked it, tongued it back and forth, faster now. She leaned forward, putting her hands on the headboard, and her skirt fell like a curtain over his face. It left him alone in the dark with her essence pressed into his mouth and nose, the taste and scent of her most secret parts filling his senses.
His hands slid down to knead her buttocks and press her harder into his face. He'd always disliked Audrey on top for this. But now he wanted to drown, to suffocate in Nathalie, this somehow so much more shocking and intimate than fucking her would ever have been. His lips and tongue knew nothing but the tight fur at the top, the slippery smooth texture of her rising nub, the little folded hood hiding the most sensitive part. Her swelling outer lips parted to let him slide his tongue down farther into the inner, more delicate lips. There Mike tasted the first slow flow of her sweet tang and wanted more.
He needed to use his hands with his mouth to do this right. He needed to get down there, needed her on her back, needed light, if at all possible.
He started to sit up in the darkness under her skirt, pushing her up with his mouth and chin. She rose on her knees with his face. Now that he had room, he slid his right hand up her inner thigh. He touched her lips where they were wet now. She was slick and soft, swollen and so, so hot. He slid his fingertips farther up – hot, wet flesh parted for his fingers.
But she suddenly pulled away from him, took back everything he'd just been worshiping.
She was suddenly all the way at the end of the bed, shrinking back. The sudden exposure to the light momentarily blinded Mike after being under her skirt. He still had the tip of his tongue sticking out of his mouth, it happened so fast. He looked at her, bewildered. She panted, hair hanging in her face, bangs sticking to her forehead, flushed, every bit the excited woman in the throes of passion – suddenly wild around the eyes, frightened.
“I – what?” he said softly. “I just want to ... lay you back, lick you more.”
“Don't,” she blurted out. “Don't shove your fingers in me.” She bit her lip.
He was speechless a moment. Her face went from confused to fearful to hopeful to worried.
Mike still wasn't sure what to say. I need the assist? I'm out of practice? My mouth and tongue can only do so much before they give out? I thought you'd like it?
He reached for her smooth, delicate ankle and gripped it gently. “I – I need to hold your lips apart for, er, better access. I won't put them in you, if,” he hesitated, “if you really don't want me to.”
“I don't,” she said, forlorn. “Everything else was so wonderful. Not that.”
“Okay. Okay.” He reached for her wrist. “Come here.”
Mike drew her into the circle of his arms and legs – such a tiny thing, she was. He held her and they both felt his erection but ignored it. He stroked her hair. She put her arms around him and put her cheek on his chest.
“Sh. I can do other things with my hands,” Mike murmured.
He gently slipped his hand under her skirt, between her legs where she was still deliciously wet. She gripped his reaching wrist tight, as if she'd yank his hand away if he made one false move. All he did was thumb the slippery nub of her clit slowly back and forth, adding a little pressure. She moaned.
“See?” he whispered. She nodded against his chest, breathing hard. She loosened her grip on his wrist.
With the same hand, he made his first two fingers a V around her clit, tucked tight between his index and middle finger. He tightened them together and slid them, slow and sure, back and forth through the wetness, back and forth. He tightened her clit between his fingers, sliding them back and forth faster and faster, feeling her clit tighten and swell and twitch between his fingers. She moaned again.
“Like that. Okay?” he asked softly.
“Yes,” she breathed, laying back against him. “Okay.”
“Okay. Okay.”
He laid her down on the bed, pushed her skirt up, and sidled down beside her until his head was on her shoulder. He dipped his head to take her nipple in his mouth and continued to slide the V of his fingers up and down, back and forth, in the furrows on either side of her clit, keeping the pressure snug, the movements short and fast. His other arm fell asleep under the curve of her back, but Mike didn't care. Her nipple hardened between his lips as her clit did the same between his fingers. He sucked her nippled and stroked the V fingers around and alongside her clit.
She moaned and writhed and whispered incoherently. She seemed so close and he wanted to do that for her. He felt her muscles tense wildly and then she cried out, loud, and long, squeezing and clenching her thighs, crushing his wrist between her legs. He kept doing everything he was doing until she reached down and pulled his hand away.
She was panting, gasping, eyes closed, knees up, arms around them. Mike sat up and pulled her toward him. She was limp, pliant, sweating. She let him pull her into his arms, and he crushed her against his chest. The violence of her orgasm, its honesty, was inexplicably moving, after she'd let him see her and taste her and smell her and touch her, every bit as beautiful and mysterious there as she was in all other ways. He kissed her hair, her cheeks, her temples, her closed eyes, her swollen lips. He stroked her arms, her knees, her calves, her back.
“Oh,” she sighed, muffled against his chest. “I never thought it could be as good as it was by myself.” She hesitated. “Until now.”
Audrey wasn't getting better. That part of his life was ending. He had come to expect it. Accepted it. He had Nathalie, now.
He asked her to look at the house with him the following week.
Then Audrey began to get better.
He would be an asshole now no matter what he did.
* * *
He swallowed several times, hard. He tried to compose himself as he looked at her dead body washed up on shore. He squatted and touched Nathalie's head and saw that it was bloody.
In the morgue later, she was laid out on the table, cold and pale and vulnerable. So beautiful. So dead.
A virgin. Good God, he was a detective – how had he not figured that out? He was an idiot not to have seen the signs.
Fresh loss and crushed hope opened at Mike's feet like an abyss. A universe cold as an insect was at his back.
He had something new and terrible to choke back; no one could know.
The weight of Nathalie's loss was exponentially greater than all she had been saving him from.
She touched him first. It sounded like an excuse – reason – apology – explanation – defense – but it was a simple fact. Every time, Nathalie touched him first.
Except the very last time Mike touched her.