Page 67 of Under Her Protection

"Take it off," Vivienne said.

"Yes."

She slid off Vivienne and knelt beside her and unbuckled the harness. She set it on the chair with the jacket. She came back onto the bed to lie down, and Vivienne put a hand in the centre of her chest and stopped her, and smiled, small, and pushed her.

"On your back."

"Vivienne."

"On your back."

She went on her back.

Vivienne moved.

The motion on the linen was not the motion of the woman who had asked for the rough. Vivienne moved with her hair down and her knees under her, and she came down Leo's body on her mouth, slow, past Leo's collarbone, past the old pale scar Leo had not been asked about, past the line of her sternum, past her ribs, and Leo lay on her back in Vivienne Strauss's own bed and let her come down her body with her mouth.

Vivienne paused at her hip. She kissed the sharp line of it. She put her mouth, unhurried, into the hollow at the top of Leo's thigh, and Leo's hand, at Vivienne's shoulder, went still. This was not performance. This was a woman who had not put her mouth on another woman's thigh since she was twenty-seven, remembering, out loud on Leo's skin, that she had liked it.

Vivienne settled between her thighs.

She put her hand flat on Leo's stomach and looked up the length of her body at her face, and Leo, on her back, did not look away, and Vivienne smiled, small, and lowered her mouth.

The sound Leo made as Vivienne’s tongue met her pussy was not one she had made in a long time. It came out of her throat before she had decided to make it, and she did not call it back, because the woman whose mouth was the reason for it had earned it.

Vivienne was slow. She was slower than Leo had been a breath ago. She was slow on purpose. She had been working people out for twenty-five years, and she was working Leo out now with her mouth as she had worked out the Bellini acquisition, which was to say with attention, because the attention was the thing. She tasted. She learned. She added her hand. She added two fingers, sliding in, shallow at first, then deeper, and she was watching Leo's face as she did it, assessing, deciding how much Leo wanted.

Leo's hand found Vivienne's hair.

She did not fist it. She laid her palm flat on the top of Vivienne's head, fingers spread, the way a person laid a hand on a thing she did not, under any circumstance, want to frighten, and Vivienne, who had closed her eyes, opened them once and looked up the length of Leo's body at her, grey blue eyes dazzling, and let the look be what it was.

Leo did not break.

She did not break right away. Vivienne worked her for some minutes that Leo did not count, with her mouth licking and sucking and her fingers thrusting slow and deep in and out of Leo until Leo came loudly, crying out as she did so. Vivienne stayed there. Vivienne stayed with her mouth on her through the whole of it, fingers slow, palm flat on Leo's stomach pressing her into the linen, until Leo's hand on the top of Vivienne's head softened, and then Vivienne eased her mouth away, and crawled up the bed, and lay down on her side beside Leo, and put her head on Leo's shoulder, and her hand on Leo's sternum.

For thirty seconds neither of them said anything.

Leo's hand found Vivienne's messy dark hair and rested there.

Vivienne's hand on Leo's sternum flexed once and stayed.

Leo's heart under that hand was not slowing as fast as her breath. Vivienne would be cataloguing that. Leo did not, tonight, mind the cataloguing. She lay in the small lamp light with the grandmother's photograph watching them from the bureau and the grey linen bunched at the foot of the bed, and she let Vivienne catalogue.

"Leo."

"Mm."

"The shirt you came in wearing has three wrong buttons."

"I noticed."

"Yes."

"Monday."

"Yes."

"I will buy you another shirt."