Halting, hands on her hips, Mike looked at her in disbelief. “You’re afraid you’ll do something to me that I won’t like?” His incredulousness sounded in his voice. “Okay, try me. Start touching, start kissing. Whatever you want to do to me, you may. I’m yours.”
Anyone else might have laughed at his words, but not Sam. Years of Richard saying, “Not there. Men don’t like to be touched there.” Or, “That’s not the way to touch a man, don’t you know anything? Most women your age know this stuff. Why don’t you?” had made her wary. Her ex-husband had made her shy and uncertain from years of trying to remember his rules.
“I…I guess I would like to touch you.” When Mike just stood there staring at her, she said, “Is that all right?”
Mike kissed her softly. “And people doubt if there’s a heaven. There is and it’s here in this room. I’m yours, baby.”
Holding her hand while she remained standing, he stretched out on the bed, but Samantha couldn’t look at him. The front of him was too…too intimate, too private, and his eyes kept watching her. Seeming to read her mind, he turned over, face down, so she could look at him in comfort.
Tentatively reaching out, she ran her hand over his shoulder. There was one dim lamp on in the room, and it made Mike’s honey-colored skin glow. With his face turned away from her she could look at him to her heart’s content, look at and touch the full, long, nude, muscular length of him.
He was the most perfectly formed man she’d ever imagined. He was movie stars, men in underwear commercials, guys
at the gym, the construction worker in the red T-shirt who’d whistled at her but she’d pretended she hadn’t heard; he was the men in three-piece suits whose brains were as sexy as their bodies; he was lazy, insolent seventeen-year-old boys whose muscles bulged out of their clothes, rodeo stars, and those smooth-cheeked, eyeglassed men who held their children tenderly. He was all of them.
Running her hands over his body while he lay still, so still he might have been asleep, she began to kiss the back of him. When her lips had kissed him from the nape of his neck to the soles of his feet, she straddled his legs and began rubbing her hair over his skin. Stretching out on top of him so she could feel her breasts on his skin, she fit her torso into the hills and valleys of his body.
Somewhere along the way she stopped thinking about him as a person, even about whether she pleased him or not, and began to think only of herself. Remembering seeing that soft bit of skin where his legs joined his buttocks, that hairless, enticing little patch that she’d once seen in the mirror when he’d walked away from her, she hadn’t realized then that she’d wanted to kiss that bit of skin. So now she did kiss it: kissed it, sucked on it, ran her tongue over it while Michael lay absolutely still.
It was some time later when Samantha lay beside him, her body vibrating, her breath short and shallow. She wanted him, wanted him inside her, but she was afraid to tell him so. Once, after she and her ex-husband were first married, she’d asked, “Could we do that again?” Instantly he had become furious, telling her that she was saying he was a bad lover. “Don’t you know anything? Men can’t right away. It’s physically impossible.”
Now, she was timid with Michael, not wanting to insult him or make him angry. “Michael,” she said softly, but it was difficult to control her voice. “I was wondering if maybe, we could, well, possibly, do that again—if you can, that is.”
With the fury of a storm at sea, Mike roused from his seeming acquiescence to jump on her, his hands on her hips, fingers digging into muscle and skin, as he slammed into her so hard she was sure he’d loosened a couple of back teeth. Samantha saw stars.
Mike halted instantly, hovering over her, looking as though he was afraid he’d killed her. “Sam, baby, are you okay? Did I hurt you?”
Samantha blinked up at him in surprise. “Golly, Michael, I think you can.”
“Imp,” he said as he stretched out on his back and pulled her on top of him.
In the manuals she’d been given, Samantha had read about different positions, but missionary was the sum total of her experience. Sitting on Mike, she looked down at him with an expression of, Now what do I do?
Lacing his fingers, Mike put his hands behind his head and gave her a look of, You figure it out.
Samantha did.
Lying still beside Mike, her skin sweaty, every muscle in her body limp, Samantha smiled dreamily. “What was that?”
There was a little smugness in Mike’s voice when he spoke. “Sam, my dear, you have just experienced what is commonly known as an orgasm. Like it?”
She chuckled. “Michael, had I known you were capable of producing such an effect, on the first day I met you I would have grabbed you by the neck, pulled you into the house, and had my way with you on the foyer floor.”
“Then we would have been in perfect accord, because that’s just what I had in mind for you.”
“Ahhh, but would you have respected me in the morning?”
“Speaking of respect, we have two alternatives now: One, we can snuggle together and go to sleep or, two, we can fill the tub with hot water, put in some of your smelly stuff, wash every nook and cranny of each other’s bodies, get out, dry each other off, come back in here and I can give you what I think will probably be your very first lesson in oral sex.”
Opening her eyes just a bit, Samantha gave a jaw-cracking yawn and said, “I’m awfully tired, Mike. Maybe we should sleep.” His face fell, making him look like a boy who’d just been told that he wouldn’t get to go to the circus after all. Yawning again, she scratched her ribs. “On the other hand, I could use a bath.”
He had her in the bathroom before she could say another word.
24
It was in the bathtub that Mike asked her why she’d waited so long before going to bed with him. He tried to make his question sound as though the answer didn’t matter to him, but she wasn’t fooled by his tone.
“Richard told me I wasn’t any good at sex and that’s why he had to go to another woman.”