“Beth, you’re so young…”
“I know my own mind. I didn’t really, before I met you, but I do now. You hurt me, it’s true, but you also did me a lot of good. When I think now about how you worked so hard to overcome the horrors of your childhood…and here’s me, slacking away, thinking I’m entitled to a good degree without putting anything into it….I’m just ashamed of myself. I was such a brat.”
“Hmm, you were,” he smiles, tweaking my ear a little between thumb and forefinger.
“Please don’t leave me again,” I whisper.
“I won’t,” he whispers back and then our lips are together, touching softly, and even the stale whiskey-breath is not enough to keep me away from the all-consuming, all-forgiving kiss we share.
At first a languid tenderness, a whispering tickle of beard, a tentative refamiliarisation with old ground. Has it changed? Must we re-map it? It seems not; it seems that we know where we are and where to go next for we are soon darting tongues and pressing our skin harder so that the tickle turns to prickle. I can feel his teeth, I can feel his hands at my neck, a thumb pushed up into my hair, holding my head tight so that I cannot move back from him, and he has pulled me over to sit on his lap now, one arm twined around me like a steel tendril. The tongue plunges deeper, taking its time, marking every part of my mouth as its own; the tingle of my lips is becoming a burn but there is no way I would ever pull back now.
He nips at my bottom lip and slowly disengages, leaving me panting into his face, my whole body singing for more.
“Would you say it was inappropriate, Beth,” he whispers, “to be sitting here with my life in ruins, my career in jeopardy, my head tortured with hangover, thinking of nothing else but how much I want to take you to bed?”
“I can be inappropriate if you can,” I reply hazily, the only signals getting through to my brain being More! Now!
He reply is to haul himself to his feet, pulling me up along with him until suddenly I am sailing through the air with my arms clasped around his neck. ‘Love Lift Us Up Where We Belong’ runs cheesily through my head as he staggers through to the bedroom with me, lacking only the bright white uniform, though I guess I can live without that.
The door is kicked open and I am flung, giggling, on to the plush, plump duvet. He creeps up stealthily from the foot of the bed, like a predator stalking its evening meal, until his shadow falls across me and I am looking up into rapacious eyes, then squealing indignantly at the unceremonious ripping off of my shirt. Buttons ping around the room but for once Sinclair does not seem averse to having a mess on the floor; he is considerably more interested in what the parting of my garment reveals to him. Before he sinks his teeth in, I put a hand up to his face, stroking the hair, then up along the cheekbone, so that his eyes are drawn back to mine.
“I want to kiss you,” I say, even though my lips are worn out from our earlier encounter. “I want to make love to you.”
He says “Beth,” then he lowers his head to mine and we roll around rapturously, ebbing and flowing, giving and receiving, seeking a true fusion of selves. Clothes come off at regular intervals, there is touching and squeezing, mouthing and lapping and nipping. We move across each other’s bodies encountering different signs along the way, some hard, some wet, some both hard and wet, tending to them with our hands and mouths until the urgency overtakes us. Then he is inside me and I am around him, our limbs are intwined and we are one, working together, slipping and sliding, generating heat and sweat and steam between us. We take it slowly yet intensely, both of us trembling with the immensity of it, and I come first, tearfully, saying his name, and then his is a heartrending cry, as if his body is wrenched apart and we fall back together on to the damp sheets, keeping as close as we can for as long as we can.
From head to toe I am wringing wet, but the stickiness between my thighs comforts me more than I can say; part of him in me. Oh. That’s a thought.
“Sinclair,” I say, my voice coming out thickly. “We weren’t….protected.”
“Hm?” He does not seem to understand what I’m saying. “You’re protected. I’ll protect you.” He sounds as if he is half-asleep already.
“No! I mean…y’know. Contraception.”
“You aren’t taking your pills?” A note of the Sinclair sharpness creeps back in.
“I have to wait until after my period. You can’t just leave them off and take them back up again. They don’t work like that. I’ll have to get a morning after pill.”
“Right.” His fingers shred through my hair. “You know, if you don’t….I won’t mind.”
I sit up. “Sinclair!”
He pulls me back down.
“Are you serious?”
“Very. Totally.”
“I…don’t think I’m ready for that yet,” I say tentatively. “Could I get my degree first?”
“Of course. Up to you.”
I kiss him. “I love you so much.”
“Somebody has to,” he says laconically.We lie there like that for a while, thinking about how weird it is to have a future together.
“So…objectively speaking…how bad is it, then?” I say eventually.
“Come again?”