“God Almighty,” he muttered. His head swam, a blur so exquisite, so delicious. He let out air in sharp syllables.
Hha. Hha. Hha
. As if he might catch something back.
She hung balanced, one arm from his neck, bending him to her. James hooked his arm under her hips and lifted, taking the deepest possible angle with a jerk of movement that hardened his buttocks into ridges. He thrust himself deeply, so deeply….
Coherence itself ebbed. Consciousness seemed in question for an instant, the pleasure became so intense. He withdrew, but before he could bring him
self all the way back again so as to re-experience the bliss of that deep entry, she was moving with him, cooing a nonsense chant of low syllables, touching his face with her hands, her hips sliding in a rhythm of their own.
James buried his nose in Coco’s hair, in the crook of her neck, and answered her movement, trying to find just a few more deep, rhythmic strokes, heading for the precipice. The wall became necessary for balance. He felt her shiver in his arms. Then it was almost as if she became smaller; her body folded into him as she let out a guttural whimper from her throat, then louder—“
Aah!
” He held on to her.
James couldn’t believe it. She went over the edge before he did. He laughed from the surprise of it. Which was perfect. It delayed him, sidetracked him just enough. He braced himself, one straight arm on the stove, one curved under her hips, wedging her into the corner, and mated the way he wanted to. In long, deep businesslike thrusts, no apologies, no restraint. While she called out, clinging to him, quivering.
He felt his gonads tighten to his body, rotating, pressing into the base of his penis, as rapture, hot and slippery, grabbed him. And, from there, only convulsions…explosions…blinding white heat…lava…fusion…charged vapors…melting cinders superheated under pressure…the hottest molten matter…viscous, rushing, spreading in all directions…flowing out in a rolling sheet of pleasure…an ecstatic crest that overtook him.
Shuddering, with Coco naked in his arms, James slid along one shoulder down the kitchen wall, the
floor coming up at him. Only at the last moment did he think to put his arm out again, like a brake against the side of the stove, to keep from landing full-weight on top of her.
A
s Coco recovered, she became aware of James, lying beside her on the kitchen floor, digging his fingers through her hair. His fingertips would glide in against her scalp, along the side of her head, till they rode the back of her skull. As they continued on, her hair would tug gently. Sometimes, combing up and out, before he got all the way to the ends, he would bring a handful of her hair against his face. Or his gaze would remain fixed just above her head, his planed features stark in the elongated shadows of lamplight, while she felt her hair slide from between his fingers, gravity taking its weight through his hand.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
He shook his head, then didn’t answer precisely. “This,” he said, lifting a handful, “is the most beautiful hair that has ever existed.” He stopped to touch her cheek, a caress, then let his hand drift to her breast. “And these”—he cupped and lifted one, then the other—“are the most gorgeous breasts.”
She put her arm over her chest, trying as non-chalantly as possible to cover herself. Coco was
self-conscious that her breasts were no longer the plump, pert things they used to be. Her body was changing: a small betrayal of nature. Those blessings that she had counted upon once, to draw, to charm, no longer charmed
her—
she was fuller through the hips than she liked, her skin noticeably less resilient, her breasts, well…not to put too fine a point on it, they drooped.
James pulled her arm and hand away as he had before. “The best part about your breasts is how they move,” he said. “They wobble and shudder in a way that mesmerizes me.”
Coco made a pull of her mouth, a skeptical click of her tongue. “James, they’re…well, pendulous. They sag. I’m old.”
But the young knight disputed vehemently. He shook his head. “They are perfect. They are lush. Mature. Voluptuous. I love them.” He laughed—perhaps nervously, she thought, for having spoken the word
love
. He smoothed his hand over her, the flat of his palm down her belly. “And your hips, your waist, your feet—I adore your feet—”
“My feet?”
“Oh, yes.” His fingers circled her ankle. He drew her foot up across his chest. She emitted a surprised
ah
as his tug rolled her, bringing her belly against his scratchy trousers, her pubis against his hip bone. “What wonderful feet,” he said.
She laughed. “You lie.”
“I never lie. Look at this instep.” He ran his finger along the top of her foot. “High, elegant. And this arch. Except for your other foot”—he grinned—“there was never one more graceful. And here.” He traced the veins along her ankle bone.
“Little, blue threads, cerulean, like light shining from beneath a surface so delicate and white—your skin is translucent.” He kissed the tops of her toes.
Coco found herself discomposed in the way she was so often with James. “You—you are such a—” She finished, “such a charmer.”
“I never lie,” he repeated.
“Everyone lies sometimes.”
“Well, maybe once or twice, but not to you. Why should I, when the truth is so wonderful?”
“All right. Poetic license, then. The scientist is a poet.”
If she hadn’t been on the floor already, his next words would have put her there; they leveled her. “No,” he said. “The scientist is in love.”
Coco raised up slightly onto her forearm and stared at him. Normally she would have said,
Oh, no
, or teased him, tried to talk him out of his foolish turn of mind. Foolishness, yes; that’s what it was. She tried to reduce his declaration in her own mind to nothing but romantic rubbish, the delusions of youth, but her efforts were not successful. She ended up pressing her lips tightly together, then having to hide her face in his shirt, her cheek on his chest.
Love
. The word scared her; it thrilled her. It made her feel reckless—afraid of what she herself might do in order to hear him say it again.
He continued. “You are the most beautiful woman I have ever touched.”
“Stop.” More discomposure. She couldn’t let him go on like this. She playfully filliped his shirt stud and made light of what he was saying. “As if
you’ve touched so many as all that.” She attempted to roll onto her back again.
He held on to her foot. “Hundreds. I’ve had hundreds. Well”—he laughed—“four, anyway, counting my two widows in Africa. Do they count? I mean, they were, it was, such a different world there.”
“They count,” she said. Four, she repeated in her mind. Four women. Coco laughed, dizzily aware of her own past. “Four,” she said again. “Tell me. Name names.” She mimicked him from a week ago. “Details, where are the details?”
“Hmm.” He tapped her captured toes. “Details. Let’s see. There was Greta, the household scullery who made it a point to be every lad’s first.”
“That’s funny. I knew a Greta like that. And she was a scullery, too.”
“And there was Chi, my nickname for her, since I couldn’t pronounce her real name properly. And the one I called Leeta.”
“And the fourth?”
He laughed. “Ah, her name. Coco, I think.”
“Go on!” she said. “
I’m
what makes your fourth?” She groaned. “Oh, Lord. A baby. I have seduced a baby.”
“Ha.” He pulled her foot till her leg lay over him, his other arm around her, his hand patting her bare buttocks. “I’m as experienced as I need to be, Mrs. Wild,” he told her. “I’ve been busy up till now. And perhaps a little tentative—or, more likely, there was just no one worth the bother. But I have no trouble with any of the concepts here.” There was joy in his voice. “I can match you.”
“Good,” she said. Since she couldn’t pull her leg
free, Coco extended it forward, rolling up onto him, sitting astride.
His eyes widened. “Whoa,” he said, with more air than voice. It was an expression of appreciation, not restraint.
She pushed his coat back and off his shoulder. “Take this off.” He was not sure what she was doing at first, cooperating, turning one way, then the other, to let her have his coat. “You are dressed about as formally as a man can be, while I’m stark naked.” She unbuttoned his white piqué vest. “You’re right, you’re a cad. You took off my every last stitch without even knowing that my aunt is with her daughter in Girton, my maid is in London, and the rest of the staff is with the Dunnes in Bath.”
He resisted when she stripped down his trouser braces. “Oh, no—” He grabbed them up, shouldering the left, losing the right.
She wrestled both down again and laughed at him. “For all you knew, anyone might have come in.”
“No-o-o.” He denied it. “I could see there wasn’t anyone around.” He rallied to the call of battle. “Oh, no, you don’t,” he said. He attempted to button his trousers around her busy hands.
“Yes.” Gleefully, without the restriction of clothing or inhibition, Coco attacked whatever garment he left undefended.
She had his smooth white shoulder braces off and tangled, his starchy shirtfront half-unbuttoned, and his vest off one arm before he became serious about the game and rolled over onto her. He pressed her flat to the kitchen floor, nestling himself between her legs. It would have been an unqualified win, a
shoulder pin, except that his trousers and combination were open and he dropped, semi-erect, directly into the best possible niche of her.
“Aah,” she let out. Pleasure, swift and sharp, rose up to pinch the backs of her eyes, while James ground his hips into hers, a slow, astoundingly skilled movement.
He groaned, blissfully smug. “Oh, Lord, Coco,” he muttered. “I have wanted you for the longest time—I think, all my life.”
When he kissed her, she threw her arms around his neck and drew him to her.
It had been a long time since she had let a man rest where he rested now. And a longer time still since she had felt any hunger for the way a man kissed her mouth, her neck, her shoulder. In fact—perhaps never as this. Oh, dear, she warned herself, don’t let young Galahad here, his touch, become important. But James’s hands felt so warm and good on her skin, his body so perfectly suited, its movement and breathing and rhythms immediately in tandem with her own—the hunger was there. He was important already without her having any say in the matter. But I am not in love with him, she kept telling herself. Even though he might…he just could be…it was possible he was in love with her.
A voice inside her cheered, gloated: he loves me. The thought was too wonderful, too horrible to examine any further.
She lay her palms on his cheeks and scanned his fine, angular face. Light from the gas lamp on the table cut across the top of his head; his hair, flopped forward, shadowed his brow. Coco let go of herself. She took James’s handsome face between her hands
and pulled it to her. Her lover, her friend. She kissed him deeply, open-mouthed.
They were another half hour on the kitchen floor.
Eventually they extinguished the lamp and made their way through the dim house. In the dining room Coco plucked a rose from the vase and put it in her teeth, then danced in circles in front of James, naked up the staircase. She felt happy, so happy. And he…oh, he…. He seemed like a wonderful discovery at the end of a maze she had had trouble getting through. But here she was, at the right place at last. With James’s prowling figure following her up the staircase, his hair a mess, his shirt undone, his vest and coat in his arm. He held both their clothes crumpled against his chest, while never getting far enough away that he couldn’t reach out to smooth his hand around her buttocks or run his palm over her stomach. Meanwhile, his gaze followed her every movement, any glimpse of his shadowed features always fixed in the same peaceful look: the ready look of lust fulfilled and more promised.
They went down the corridor to the guestroom all the way at the end of the hall, Coco’s room. There, James followed her in, then halted.
“Oh, my,” he said. He tossed their clothes onto a chair and went straight across the room to the far window.
Coco leaned back on the door till it latched, watching him reach and pull back a curtain. A three-quarter moon shone through the wide window, providing surprising light. It windowpaned the room in moonlight; it threw his shadow across the bed.
She watched him shed his shirt as he stared out.
He stepped out of his trousers. He stood unbuttoning the front of his combination. At first, she thought he was shy, as he had seemed downstairs, for he didn’t face her. He kept looking out the window.
Then he pointed. “Out there,” he said. “Across the rose garden, on the other side of the hedge, down the ally that runs along it, there is a cluster of apartments; the mews. See that rooftop? Do you see where I mean?”
Coco came up beside him, pulling his undergarment off his shoulders and down. “Hmm,” she said, with less interest than he might want—if James Stoker was handsome with his clothes on, with his clothes off he was wondrous: strong, smooth-skinned. She ran her hand down his back to his haunch. His body had fine hair along it here and there—at the base of his spine, more that curled sparsely and singularly down his long legs. It was blond, silver in the moonlight. Such lust. It felt new, strange. Coco wanted him to turn around so she could see the mat of chest hair she had felt beneath his shirt in the alcove of All Souls’ chapel. She felt unsettled and squirming. She wanted to touch him, to look upon him.
He remained turned from her, looking out the window. “That far rooftop is the carriage house. I was born in the flat over it. I lived there till I was nine. After that, this was my bedroom. This very room.”
The information should have surprised her, yet she said quite calmly, “You’re Jamie,” she said. “The industrious young boy who worked for Phillip, whose parents died, whom he took in.” She had
realized Phillip was his colleague and superior, even his mentor, at the university. She had not known James was the young man whom Phillip had all but adopted.