It wasn’t really a question, but she appreciated that he still bothered to obtain consent. “This is more than okay.”
“Thank God.” She wasn’t sure if she kissed him or he kissed her, only that she needed his mouth on hers, hot and open, teeth and lips and tongue, his breath at her throat, his thumbs over her nipples, his hands between her legs as she found the crease at his upper thigh and gripped him tightly in a long, smooth slide of skin that made him say her name again, “Allie.”
The tile was cold behind her, his skin hot in her hand, his fingers slipping inside her, deeper and faster than she’d been ready for, so she had to hitch a breath and clench around him, tight, tight, to keep everything okay.
Her throat hurt, her emotions running high, and he had too many fingers inside her, and she didn’t think she could do it, actually. She didn’t think she could let go of one more thing, even for Winston, even if she wanted to.
He put his forehead on hers. “Darling.”
“Yup.”
“Breathe.”
Allie pursed her lips and exhaled. It was thin and fake and ineffectual.
“Try again.”
“Mm. No.”
He began to ease his fingers out, and she grabbed his hand and held it where it was. “Nuh-uh. You’ll have to leave them there forever.”
“Is that so?”
“That’s so. Sorry. My junk has decided this is the way things are going to be from now on.”
Winston smiled and kissed her. He kissed her lips, and the corners of her mouth, and her upper lip, tickling the fuzzy downy hairs that grew there. He kissed her eyebrows and temples and her forehead and the tip of her nose and her cheekbones, her earlobes, the space behind her ears. He kissed her neck, and the slope of her right breast, and her nipple, and he was somewhere between her underboob and her navel when her body remembered how to relax and be loved.
She let him love her.
She let him take her thighs in his hands and put his mouth on her, pushing her back against the shower wall, rain falling on his shoulders and slicing across his back, until she came silently, her head thrown back, her palms pressed flat against the walls in surrender.
Allie surrendered.
It coursed through her whole body, glorious and awful, pleasure and pain, joy and grief and loss, and she didn’t want it, but she took it anyway. She liked him too much not to take it from him, this gift of his attention and his time, his body, his heart.
He wiped his mouth, kissed her thigh, rose slowly. She just watched him, his dark eyes, his face, her heart pounding, the heat making her a little unsteady.
Allie turned around and put her palms on the wall. “Like this,” she said.
He stepped closer, chest at her back, his erection pushing hard against her butt. “Forgive me for asking, but what, precisely, like this?”
“Just the ordinary thing. You know. Stick it in, take it out?”
He snorted and pressed his face into her shoulder. “Stick it in, take it out?”
“Yeah.” She thrust her hips, a weak mimicry of the sex act. “Stick it in, take it out, stick it in, take it out, stick it in, take it out, ohhhuhhh.”
At her imitation of orgasm, Winston began to shake with laughter. She closed her eyes, smiling, overwarm and tender, possibly a little bit manic in the wake of her orgasm and this terrible, wonderful intimacy.
He wrapped his arms around her and held her, and for a long time they stood like that, bathed in warm water, together. “Allie?”
“Yes?”
“I want you to know that I’m grateful. Whatever happens in the next few days—and it’s not something we need to talk about, at least not this moment—I’ll always be grateful for this. For you.”
She closed her eyes again, to keep the feelings inside, where they swooshed through all her wide-open postorgasm veins and infused her whole unprotected self with love.
Love. Love, love, love.