The Proposition (37 page)

Whatever he called it, it was as stiff as the boom on a ship. It stood straight up, slightly mobile in an upward-angled way. As she inspected him, he took her hand, then leaped and gasped as if surprised when he placed it on him. Covering the back of her hand with his, he put pressure, sliding her palm slowly up and down him, pushing forward with his hips. He groaned from it, a single deep rasp of breath.

Then took her by the shoulders and turned her around toward the bed. "You can look more later. I'm sick with waiting, Winnie. I'm having."

Indeed, they were both past ready. The backs of her legs hit the bed, and he pushed her. She fell, a delicious plunge through the air that lifted her stomach and ended on bouncing bedsprings. He lifted her skirt and pushed her legs apart at the same time, then got his knee between, on the bed, as he put his hand on her, rubbing between her legs, through her knickers. He rubbed for a moment, hard, a few times, then said, "Let's have done with these. Lift up, loov."

He stripped her knickers off, just like that, then lay over her, bringing his naked weight on top of her. Oh, his body. Free of his trousers, his penis fell heavily, nestling naturally into the sensitive crevice of her. They both leaped, tensed at the contact, caught their breaths in unison. She tried to relax again, though relaxing wasn't exactly what she wanted. She closed her eyes, then found her mouth kissed. Mick's mouth touched hers and she opened it to him, then his tongue penetrated this intimate place. Tentatively, she let her tongue push into his. He groaned, twisted his head, and went at her mouth harder, his body curving to her in rhythm.

It was the last she knew of sanity.

She knew the sliding of his body, a desire for the contact of skin that became a sliding everywhere and particularly a rhythmic grind of hips. His hands went into her clothes, owning the inside of them and her naked flesh
…
then the inside of her. He reached between them and did what he'd already done once tonight. He touched her inside.

"Aah!" she called out.

He made a low sound, something near a growl of satisfaction.

Their communion became the way it always was with them: rough—not for what either one did, but from sensation itself. She wanted whatever he would do with an intensity she could never foresee. Then, with each contact, the feeling was so powerful, it seemed to knock her senses flat. She jumped and gasped through his stroking her, his rubbing his face against her cheek, his chest against her breasts
…
his hips
…
his finger moving in her. She loved it, yet her own ears might have doubted she loved anything. Sounds came out, not unlike those from an animal crying out, beaten, torn apart.

They touched each other with relative gentleness, yet they each reacted as if from violence: bombarded with pleasure.

Mick flinched and let out a long, dragging rasp of air, when all he did was open her with his fingers, then draw the head of his penis down her—she shivered with enough power to shake the bed—to where he could guide it with his hand. He was shaking himself and muttering epithets as he planted himself into position, then with a thrust of his hips—one, single, swift, elegant deflowering—he buried himself deeply into her and they both buckled up into each other as if reacting to being scorched.

"Gaw-aw-awd bah-less-s-s," he breathed out. "Be still oh be still," he warned.

Winnie couldn't have been anything else. Her body had contracted around his, arms, legs, torso, the very inside of her. It felt like what it was: her flesh torn. A strong pinch, then a burning. She lay there, aware of the fullness of him. An alien, thick pressure, a weight that was surprising, yet satisfying, indescribably satisfying.

He began to unfold himself, move again. The burning lessened through friction. He withdrew then thrust again with the sure force of passion, a thrust then pull, each time flinching, his breath rasping with his deep bass groan. While each stroke made her dizzier, consciousness itself in question at the peak of full penetration. He pushed his hips, as if he couldn't get himself deep enough, yet each time the heat of him went so deeply into her body that it moved something inside, something unearthly and wonderful.

Winnie let instinct take control. She returned Mick's strength. She savored his power and her own. She loved his movement and the vigor of him that translated into a hardness not just inside her body but everywhere along him, in his muscle and sinew and bone, while she clutched this rock-solidness in his flexed shoulders, dug her fingers into them.

A fever took hold as if it flowed in her veins, as if she had grabbed hold of an electric wire charged with pleasure. Volts and volts of it. It coursed through her, leaving her helplessly connected to it while it traveled up her nerves. It gripped her—him, too, for he called out as he convulsed—and drove them into each other. Till it grounded, like lightning, down her spine into the low center of her, between her legs, shocks of bliss…

In the throbbing aftermath, she felt the ghost of Mick's masculinity inside her, as if it were thunder, rolls and rolls of it in the distance, continuous. It resounded through her veins, booming, as she lay exhausted, leveled by it. As if she were singed from the bolts of their contact. Struck. Love-struck. She understood the analogy all at once in more particular detail. Yet was bewildered to understand that it came from something so simple and seen daily: the skin and muscle and heat of Mick's male body.

Winnie had had no idea…

* * *

Mick pursued sexuality the same way he pursued everything else. For the rich, full joy of it and for all he was worth. He had a penchant for whispering wicked things in Winnie's ear. Oh, the horrible-delicious things he promised to do. Attacks, atrocities, on her modesty. And he liked her up against walls and straddling him on chairs and in his arms, rolling around in bed, not to mention once rolling around in the grass of the back garden in the middle of the night. Oh, the fine old time they had.

Lovers.

They were naked for most of the next three days. Milton became so put out with them, he went to his sister's. Mrs. Reed mysteriously didn't come at all. Mick and Winnie had the house to themselves. And they put their privacy to good use.

"Look," Winnie said one afternoon. She was exasperated. "Look at these pathetic things." She glowered down at her breasts. "So small they don't round even a little. They point."

There on the bed, Mick looked as if from politeness, since she'd asked him to. His eyes, when they rested on her naked body, darkened; they became the green of a still sea reflecting black clouds overhead, the sky closed off, a black green, deep in hue. These eyes didn't miss a spot on her. If she showed naked flesh, they found it and stared.

They looked directly at her breasts now. Then Mick smiled. "Here, you complain you aren't petite, Win, when you have two somethings that are petite and don't even appreciate them."

"Petite breasts! Who wants petite breasts!"

"I do." His hands took them, one in each, curving his fingers around them as he rubbed his thumbs over the nipples, back and forth slowly. Back—"They are the sweetest little things I ever laid eyes on"—then slowly forth again—"or mouth on." He bent his head.

He opened his lips over her breast, widening his mouth enough to take the whole of it. Inside, he tongued the nipple and the area around it, while her entire breast sat enveloped in the warm, slick softness of his mouth. Then he slid his lips back up the little mound out to tip, riding the breast as he closed his mouth, sucking as he went, then nipped the tip with his teeth. She shivered. Both nipples puckered tightly.

"M-m-m," he said. He did the same trick to the other one, leaving both her breasts wet and cool to the air when he was finished, their nipples little hard pebbles of sexual awareness. "M-m-m," he said again. "Warm little dumplings, sweet as cream." And so it went. A man of many talents.

He could make his erect penis nod yes and no, on its own. He could move it left and right. Neither trick impressed her so much, though, as the fond relationship he had with his body that made him willing to entertain her with it.

"Imagine," she said. She took him into the grip of her fist, making Mick huff as he tried to maintain composure. "And only a moment ago you were half this size. How do you do it? How does it work?"

"H-h-ha-a-ah," he said at first. Then, "H-h-h-you do it." He grabbed her hand and pressed it to him, as if the pressure would relieve some of the delicacy of feeling. "You know how you're always worrying that you've done something you didn't mean to do?" he asked, then made a wicked laugh deep in his chest. "Well, this time, you have." He repeated, "You do it."

"I don't do anything." She teased him. She wanted him to say more.

He leaned his face into her neck and touched his tongue lightly to the spot where her jaw and ear and neck all met, then whispered, "You do. You make me hard." He bit the lobe of her ear. "Hard and long and thick as a post. You've been doing that to me for six weeks."

She laughed and lay back, happy. "I am strong," she said. It amazed and pleased her to think so. "Potent."

She was glad when he understood what she meant. "You are indeed. Heady stuff, Win. You are two-hundred proof, loovey." He whispered, "Do it some more."

* * *

They played like children. Adult children playing games all through the house. The time went by so quickly.

Winnie had to watch herself. By Saturday morning, she was daydreaming dangerously: of picking up and moving somewhere, of passing Mick off forever as
…
oh, a country gentleman. He could hunt rabbits with ferrets as some rural squires did. He and she could find a little cottage, live off whatever lessons she could give to the local girls. He'd mill about, just like a true gentleman; no gainful employ.

They were in the half-kitchen behind the dining room, when Winnie mentioned her fantasy to him, just to see what he'd say.

He didn't react as she'd have liked. "Ah," he said. "Like all the other fancy ladies. You want to buy a man to play with?" He guffawed over it, thought it hilarious, then added, "I never could understand that about gents, why they'd
want
not to do anything, no skill, no trade, no service to God or England."

Winnie wanted to discuss it seriously, though. She wagged a sausage at him. They were cooking themselves breakfast.

"I don't understand what the joke is," she said. "Don't laugh. I'm serious."

He grew grave. Without a speck of his humor, he asked, "What? I'm supposed to do nothing? Have nothing of my own? And you teach who"—he corrected—"whom? Country girls? Country girls don't care how they talk. I know country girls. Milkmaids. Farmers' wives. Daughters of shopkeepers. No. You need a city and society mamas. I need my business or something like it, nothing you would approve of, but it meets my bills—and will afford me a wife one day when I decide to have one. You think it's beneath you."

He was gaining steam. It was apparently something he'd thought a lot about. "I'm telling you," he said, "useful work well done is something to be proud of. Thing is, you're a bit of a snob, loov. Not horrible. But the saddest part is you're a snob about you—you're too individual to conform to bland standards. You make yourself crazy trying to, then you don't even like yourself. You won't even let yourself go to the ball and have fun. You should. You should go the duke's house, dance holes into your slippers, and foke the bloody bastards who don't like it. Foke them all."

What a speech.

Winnie tried to absorb it. It made her heart race.

To lessen its impact, she tried to dismantle it. She told him, "I don't know what that word means, though I'd wager you're saying it wrong."

"Which word?" He frowned.

"Foke."

"Ay!" he said quickly, turning on her with the fork he was using to cook sausage in the pan. He waved the implement. "That's not nice, Win. Don't say it."

"You say it all the time."

"Do I?"

She laughed, a belly laugh at finding him in this rare ignorance of himself. "Oh, yes. And I think, when you say
effing,
it's short for
foking.
What
does
it mean?"

He grinned sideways, then wiggled his eyebrows. Raising one in humor, he said, "I could show you." He pulled her into him and pressed his hips once. "This." He moved them again, and she liked it. She always liked it; it was such a wonder, his touch. "It means—" He looked for a phrase, a good example. "It means, Have it. Take life by the balls, Win. Take her, have her, mean old thing that she is. Foke her silly. Lap her up. Love her, why not?"

She giggled. "Women don't have balls."

He laughed, nuzzling her. He said into her hair, "Life does. Life has it all. And I love it, Win." Softer, she thought she heard, "I love you," but she couldn't have.

He wouldn't have said that.
In love,
yes. But not
I love you.
Mick was honest. He wasn't a man to court a woman with lies.

Then he said quite clearly, "So how would it be, after breakfast, before those stupid Lamonts arrive"—they'd sent a note that said they were bringing evening clothes, the invitation, and themselves at noon—"I take you upstairs one last time before we go and foke you silly? What do you think about that?"