Page 44 of Axe-Rated Lumberjack

“I’m going to put my mouth on your pussy,” I said, and I watched the words reach her. “I’m going to go slowly, because I want to learn what you like, and you’re going to tell me when I get it right. I want to hear everything. Especially if I get something wrong.”

“You’re using the voice.”

“This is just my voice.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s the trouble with it.”

I settled between her thighs, slid my arms beneath her legs to hold her steady, and put my tongue against her.

She tasted clean and faintly sweet, and the first slow stroke drew a sound out of her that I felt in my own chest. I kept the rhythm easy, learning her with long, flat passes and then with the tip of my tongue circling above where she was most sensitive. I paid attention to everything she gave me: the way she tightened her thighs when I found the right place, the way her fingers closed in my hair.

Peyton was also telling me what she wanted in complete sentences, which turned out to be one of my favorite things about her.

“A little higher, please. There. That’s exactly right, so don’t change anything.” A moment later she added, “Actually, lighter than that, and slower. Yes, like that.”

“That’s it, honey,” I said against her. “Let me hear you.”

I made it lighter and slower, and she let out a long breath, and her heels slid across the sheet. When I lifted my head just far enough to speak, my chin was wet and she was watching me with her lips parted.

“Would you like my fingers, too?”

“Yes, one, to start with. I’ll tell you if I want more.”

I eased a single finger into her slowly. She was so wet and so tight around it that I had to close my eyes for a second.

“Oh,” she said. “That’s quite different from how I’d pictured it.”

“Different good?”

“Extremely good. Please keep doing that, and put your mouth back where it was.”

I did both. I curled my finger forward until I found the place that made her gasp, and I went back to the slow circles with my tongue, and the sentences she’d started stopped being sentences. She said something about narration and something else that might have been my name. She tightened her thighs around my shoulders and arched up off the mattress, and the sound she made was long and low and nothing like anything I’d heard from her at the microphone. Every muscle in her body drew tight at once, held for a suspended moment, and then let go. I stayed with her through it, easing my tongue into slower, softer strokes until she pushed at my shoulder, breathless and grinning.

I pressed a kiss to the inside of her thigh and rested my cheek there while she got her breath back.

“Is it always like that?” she asked the ceiling.

“No. That was you.”

“Then I’d like it on the record that every book I’ve ever narrated has undersold it.” She pushed herself up on her elbows. Her hair was damp at the temples, and her eyes were bright. “Come here. I want to kiss you, and then I’d like to take your jeans off, and then I’d like to do several things I’ve been thinking about for two days.”

I climbed up the bed, and Peyton kissed me thoroughly, with no hesitation at all about where my mouth had just been. When she let me go, she shifted to the edge of the mattress and nodded for me to stand. I did. She undid my belt, then the button of my jeans, and worked the zipper down with great concentration, and I pushed the jeans and my shorts off together and stepped out of them.

She looked for a while. Then she spoke in the tone of a scholar reporting a finding. “In the interest of accuracy, I’d like to note that I was expecting a vine.”

“I left it in the truck.”

She laughed so hard that she had to rest her forehead against my stomach, and I felt it all the way through me.

When she’d recovered, she wrapped her hand around me, carefully, and looked up. “Show me how you like it. I’d rather learn from you than guess.”

I closed my hand over hers and showed her, firmer than she expected, slow at first, with a little twist near the top. She picked it up right away, watching my face as much as her hand, and the attention was every bit as good as the friction. I told her when she got it right, and she did it again, and I pushed into her grip before I could stop myself.

“Would you mind if I used my mouth?” she asked. “I’d like to try. If I’m doing something wrong, you should tell me, but kindly.”

“I’ll do my best to be kind. I’m not promising to be coherent.”

Peyton smiled and bent her head, and for a few seconds all I could do was watch her dark hair fall forward and feel the first careful touch of her tongue. I gathered her hair in one hand and held it out of her way, leaving the pace entirely up to her. She was tentative at first and then not, exploring with her tongue and her lips and glancing up to check my face, and she looked delighted by what she found there. Her mouth was warm and wet and growing bolder, and I lost my grip on several words I usually knew.