She bit her bottom lip, and his gaze dropped there. The moment stretched and morphed and the stuffy air in the bar turned even thicker. The faint smell of his fresh sweat wafted off his skin. They breathed each other in for what felt like a millennium. She could see his brain working behind his green eyes. They almost glowed at her. She was sure that they were having the same thoughts. They both wanted to take this further than thoughts and furtive masturbation sessions, but they couldn’t. And how much she wanted him felt like physical pain. He reached out one finger and smoothed the crinkle in her brow. His touch was electric.
“I should leave.” Sasha had let this go way too far.
He shook his head and didn’t lose her gaze. “Stay.”
“I want to.” She couldn’t breathe, but she wanted to drown in him.
“Show me.”
At first she didn’t understand his words. Her brain was too scrambled up in what was happening right at the moment and the things she wanted to happen that maybe, probably, never could. But his words sank in eventually, and somehow her brain got the message to her hand that it should move up to cup her own breast. She gasped when her thumb grazed her nipple through her bra and the flippy sundress she’d put on just for the man in front of her.
He looked down and just watched. He made no effort to touch her, and she didn’t think he would. This was just fair play. He’d thought about her while touching himself, and she hadn’t allowed herself that. So she got him watching her touch herself, and that would punish him for what he’d done.
It was penance.
“More.” It was a grunt, not a word. She didn’t question what his words meant, even in her own mind. She slipped her hand under the hem of her skirt and touched her pussy through her panties. She was wet, and she moaned at the contact.
Patrick reached around her shoulders then, and she stilled. He wasn’t supposed to do this. This wasn’t supposed to make things worse. But he didn’t touch her, just the back of her stool to push it back. “Lean back and spread.”
She did it without thinking. Slipping her fingers inside her panties, she touched herself the way she did when she was alone. She touched herself like she did when she wasn’t pretending to like the way the man whose ego she was responsible for not sinking touched her.
For his part, Patrick was fascinated and transfixed on the way her fingers moved under her skirt. Almost like he was cataloguing and learning for the future the way she wanted to be touched. She was beyond reminding herself that there was no future.
Between the two of them, alone in a mostly dark bar, there was no time. This was happening before he was a priest and after they were both dead in graves, the bodies that they inhabited at the moment being subsumed by the earth itself.
Energy filled her body, and all her muscles went taut. The only sounds were his heavy breaths, him chuffing with his apparent effort not to touch her, and the sounds her body made—moans and her wet fingers rubbing.
“Let me see.”
She growled at him in frustration, and he chuckle-grunted, so she did what he asked. She flipped up her skirt and moved her panties aside to show him. For a moment, he dropped his forehead to the bar and made an anguished sound that filled Sasha with power and brought her back to where she’d been before he’d interrupted her flow.
He lifted his head when she started moving again, and he wasn’t looking at where she was touching herself. Their gazes met and held, and she kept going until she thought her orgasm would break her into pieces.
It had never felt like this before. This was like nothing else she’d ever felt. It was bigger, and it would devastate her when she was done. That was the only thing that held it off for long moments before it hit her like a tidal wave. She couldn’t help but close her eyes. Her body bent and her forehead hit the bar.
When she stopped moving, that was when he touched her. Just his palm on the back of her sweaty neck. She could feel that he was trying to tell her it was okay, but it wasn’t.
It was fairly clear in her mind that it would never be okay again. She would never be able to get the awed look on his face out of her mind. She’d never felt sexier, more powerful, less tethered to the expectations of her family. All her life, she’d been a handmaiden to those expectations. But now, she wasn’t sure that she could do that anymore.
His grip tightened, and so she didn’t move for long moments. The cool mahogany against her skin a reminder that she wasn’t in some celestial cocoon out of space and time, that she’d just jilled off in front of a frocked priest in a bar that wasn’t even locked.
And she didn’t feel guilty at all.
However, she could feel the remorse coming off Patrick in waves. She was sure that he regretted it. How could he not? In his mind, he’d already sinned. In hers, she’d twisted this so that this would somehow even the score.
But the way he’d looked at her—he’d loved this just as much as she had. This would stain his psyche as much as it would hers.
This was a problem.
That was the thought that made her lift her head. This time, he didn’t meet her gaze. He looked down at her wrinkled skirt and sighed.
“Are you okay?” That he asked that, even when it was clear that he was not, made her heart ache for him. And somehow that was worse than the fact that she still wanted him to fuck her. What they’d just done had done nothing to dim her lust. No, she wanted him inside her even more. The way he’d pulled on all the right strings and pushed all the right buttons without even touching her told her that anything else they did would maybe create a tear in the universe.
The idea made her feel more than a little destructive. And the only thing that kept her from pushing things farther, from asking him to touch her more and condemn himself, was the sweat on his upper lip.
The fact that he was trying so hard not to want her, that there was something about this life he had that made him stop, made her stop.
She straightened out her clothes and nodded, finally answering his question. “I’m okay. Are you?”
He nodded but didn’t speak.
“I’m going to go.” She wanted him to stop her.
But he didn’t. “That’s probably—” He didn’t finish his thought. Whatever he was going to say would definitely hurt her and it might hurt him. But she wasn’t going to stick around to ask, because every time they talked, the talking led to them both doing something that they knew they shouldn’t.
The problem was that doing it made her feel less like a bad person—instead she felt free.
But her freedom came at a price—and it was the fact that he thought that some higher power was actually keeping tabs on what people did with their genitals and meting out punishment based on how much fun they were having.