“That was beautiful,” she whispers. “You’re beautiful.”
I can’t answer. I can barely even hear. All I want is to stare at her for hours and days. All I want is to be transfixed by her perfection until I die, just as the legends about me have claimed.
She unlocks my cuffs and makes me straighten up, pausing when I cry out to give me a soothing shh shh shh.
The shh shh shh continues as she walks me to the lounge at the end of the room. It’s long enough for a man to lie flat on, although the pressure and the fabric on my welted skin make fresh tears well in my eyes.
It’s strangely not humiliating to cry thusly in front of the only woman I’ve ever wanted to impress; or perhaps it is humiliating, but it’s also not bothersome. A welcome kind of humiliation, a kind of punishing vulnerability that feels better than anything else I’ve ever felt in my life. And it’s especially not bothersome because my tears make this beauty hum and sing again. They make her kiss them off my face and give me more lovely shushes and cooed reassurances and all kinds of praise and petting words that turn the incandescent pain into something cherished and golden.
“Oh Merlin, look what hurting you did to me,” she murmurs, and she lifts up her dress to reveal her bare cunt to me. It’s swollen and slick, and the little bud of her stiff clitoris is peeping through her lips, insisting on being attended to. A wave of lust hits me so hard in the stomach I nearly curl in on myself.
I’ll die if I don’t touch her silk, taste her heat, fuck her tightness. I’ll die, I just will.
“Remember the first time we met?” she asks as she swings a long leg over the lounge. It’s narrow enough that she can straddle it standing with a wide enough stance, but there’s also enough room on either side of my hips for her to plant her knees, if she so wishes.
God, if she so wishes. How is that tiny little phrase so hypnotic to me?
I hope she so wishes. I pray she so wishes.
“I remember,” I say.
“Do you remember what I said?”
The memory rises in me like a visceral thing, like a breath, like a sound. And I’m there. Then.
There and then.
I’d just been hired the year before to consult for the DNC by its de facto prince, Leo Galloway, and I was at Vivienne Moore’s expansive lake house working on strategy for her inaugural gubernatorial bid. We’d been leaning over her desk looking at demographics maps when a door somewhere in the house slammed and loud singing echoed off the walls. And then some irate shouting for Vivienne to come the fuck on, really???
“My little sister,” Vivienne apologized. “My mother died a couple years ago, and I’ve been her guardian ever since. She actually turned eighteen last month, but she still has to finish out her senior year of high school. So naturally we’ve been butting heads a little, and I may have taken away the phone in her room while she was at school today.”
Stomping footsteps came our way, and the office door was pushed open by a young woman who I’d never seen before.
And yet.
And yet I knew her immediately.
Same oval face with ocean-blue eyes, same long dark lashes resting on high cheekbones. Same tall, lithe body with a fall of dark hair down to her waist. Same irrepressible smile—even though she was also currently furious.
She opened her mouth, probably to lay into Vivienne about her phone, but then she saw me. The spots of color high in her cheeks got even redder, and she swallowed. “Enchanted to meet you, I’m sure.” She said it in the wavering, fake-confident voice of someone who’s used to being charismatic but had temporarily forgotten how.
I nodded at her, my chest tight, my pulse racing. The last time I saw her face, I’d been in a rain-shrouded cave on Bardsey, counting down the minutes to my death. And now here she was in a plaid skirt that barely came to the middle of her long thighs and brightly painted fingernails and a million necklaces with crystals and crescent moons hanging from her neck. Without her, desire had been only an abstract concept, a weakness that I could exploit in other people, but the moment I saw her, smelled the faint scent of lavender on the air, twenty-seven years of absent need bloomed inside my body all at once, a dangerous bloom indeed.
“Enchanted,” I said back, my hands shaking, and I was the only one who knew how apt that word really was.
Over the next month, I saw Nimue more and more. I wish I could say that I avoided her—if not for the sake of propriety, then at least for the sake of my pride. But I could no more avoid her than I could avoid myself. I offered to help Vivienne more thoroughly, with longer hours, and when she invited me to family dinners and family boat trips, I never said no.
And so it happened one late March evening that Vivienne had to leave to attend some sporting match of Embry’s. I was right behind her, gathering up my things in her office after she left, preparing to drive back to my hotel f
or another long night alone, when Nimue stepped through the office threshold and blocked my escape.
“Leaving so soon?” she asked, bold as you please, as if I were the eighteen-year-old schoolgirl and she were the older man.
She was still in her maddeningly short plaid skirt—did they not have any kind of discipline at all at this school of hers?—and far from being boxy or unfashionable, her uniform polo shirt only served to highlight her small upthrust tits and taut stomach. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and all I wanted to do was shove her up against the wall and bite her breasts through her shirt. I’d spent the last month imagining doing exactly that, held in throbbing thrall to this desire I had no experience hiding or controlling. At least twice a day—more at night—I found myself seeking the same desperate, furtive releases I’d always scorned. In my hotel bed, in my hotel shower, in my car pulled to the side of the road just out of view of the lake house. Rough, fast wanks that left me breathless and hot with shame.
Too often, they happened inside the lake house itself.
Earlier that day, after Nimue had stormed into the house in her usual tornado of singing, shouting, and laughter, it had only taken one glimpse of those long thighs to send me over the edge. I’d quickly excused myself from the group of strategists and aides in the office and found an empty bathroom. I’d barely gotten the door closed before I had my back against it and my hand in my pants. It took too long, too goddamn long, to fumble my erection free, and I groaned when I did. It was always this way—always this frantic, madcap sin against civilized behavior, always so powerful that by the time I got myself alone, I no longer cared who could hear or see me. Who would know.
