Page 113 of Faceless

She kept him at the brink with her hand alone for longer than he would have believed he could bear, and just when he had gathered himself to beg, she took her hand away. Her weight shifted down the length of him, her breath came warm against his stomach and lower, and all at once, he knew what she meant to do.

He had heard the thing spoken of, in the low, careless way such matters were spoken of among men at the club, always as a French vice — a thing got from certain women in pleasure houses, and not anywhere a gentleman looked to meet it in his own marriage bed. Where she had come by the notion, he could not think, unless she had got it from him, and meant now only to give him back what he had given her.

His hand came up to her shoulder. He did not want her doing this out of obligation, nor going on with something she might find distasteful for his sake, and he got as far as her name. “Elizabeth—”

She did not lift her head. She pressed his hand off her shoulder and back down to the bed and held it there, and that was her answer.

And then her mouth was on him, and the wet heat of it closing over him put out whatever was left of his reason like a candle, and he gave himself up to her, because there was nothing else left in him to do. The thought that she had taken the idea from him, that she wished to give him this because he had given it to her, undid him very nearly as much as the act.

She took her time. She learned him by mouth the way she had learned him by hand, unhurried and thorough, and when she had brought him near the end of his endurance, she drew off and waited, her breath cool on the wet of him, until he had come back far enough from it that she could begin again.

She did it once. She did it twice.

By the third time, he had stopped being a man with any will of his own and become a thing she was making, held a hair short of a release she would not grant and could not be made to grant, and somewhere in there, he was asking her for it without words, because words had gone.

“Not yet,” she said against him, and he obeyed, because obedience was all that remained to him.

When she had unmade him so entirely that his soul felt ready to split from his body, she came back up over him, and took him into her, and sank down, and this time she did not hold him short. Her hair was on his face, and her breath was in his ear, and her mouth came down sometimes to his and lifted away again before he could keep it, and he had no further argument in him about anything in the world.

When she let his hands go, they did not know what to do. They went to her breasts because that was where they had been put before, and she pressed down hard against them and sank harder onto him, and his whole body strained up into her past any will of his own. She laughed once, low and pleased, and bent down and put her mouth against his ear and said something he could not afterward remember.

She rode him hard and gave him leave at last, her mouth at his ear, telling him that he could, now, he could — and he went over the edge she had kept him from for so long and spilled into her, deep, while her hips pressed down hard to take all of it, and the whole of him emptied into her until there was nothing of him left anywhere but there.

He held the cry back.

Even then — even spent into her, even destroyed past every other guard he had — he kept his jaw shut on it. It was the one sound she had been listening for since the first night they had lain together, and he did not let it past his teeth, though it took the last strength in him to keep it and though everything else he had was already hers. It was the final thing he owned. He gave her the whole of himself and kept that one thing back, even as he broke.

She made a sound above him that was almost a sob, and held him inside her, and did not let him go. She rode him through it and past it, taking the last of him beyond anything he could account for, working him with her whole body until she unravelled against him in her turn, hard and long, and emptied the pair of them.

Her breath was gone. She laughed, shaky and spent, and drew the backs of her fingers down his cheek, and then she sank down against his chest. He crossed his arms over her back and held her tightly, and they lay together with the snow still going on outside and the dark entire and his breathing not yet his own.

He could not have said what time it was. He could not have said his own name, if she had asked, and thank God she did not, because he would have said the wrong thing.

Her breath was still unsteady against his temple when she drew her fingers into his hair.

He rolled her half to her side and lay heavy against her, and had her arms around him, and the warmth of her was all through him. The room was dark and quiet, and he was as close to dissolved as he had ever been in his life.

Her fingers moved slowly from his temple to the nape of his neck.

“You have fine hair,” she whispered. “I always thought so, the first time I saw it.” She drew her fingers through it again.

A sound came out of him — low, unguarded, the sound he made when he was boneless in her arms at midnight with nothing left to defend. “Did you?”

“I did. I find I am rather taken with it.” She was quiet, her fingers still moving. “You have no idea what you look like, do you? All that careful darkness and you have no notion.”

“I have a mirror,” he said, into her throat.

“A mirror is not the same thing. A mirror shows you what you see every day.” She turned her lips to his temple. “I am telling you what I see.”

He had nothing to say to that. He was too mellow for speech, too far from the sentences he had lost at supper, too entirely reduced by the warmth and the dark and her hands in his hair. He let her have whatever she wanted of him, which was apparently his hair and the whole of the night, and he had no objection to either.

Her hands moved from his hair, slow and warm, tracing the line of his spine. He was very nearly asleep.

“Jane wrote something curious in her letter today,” she murmured sleepily.

He made a low sound, willing enough to hear whatever came next. So long as she did not ask him to move.

“There was a man she had once fancied.” Her fingers found the nape of his neck and moved there, slow and deliberate. “She thought perhaps he had cared for her, though nothing was ever said.”