“Cassie.” This time my name on his lips was a plea. He didn’t need oxygen, but he was breathing hard and fast against my neck like he’d just run a mile. Maybe it was muscle memory from the man he’d once been kicking in, now that we were here. His body lay almost entirely on top of me now, a welcome weight pressing me into the mattress. The feel of his breath on my sensitized skin made me shiver.
I wriggled beneath him, eager to feel him everywhere.
“Can I touch you?” he asked in a hoarse whisper, without lifting his head from where it rested in the crook of my neck.
I nodded, feeling like I might burst with anticipation.
His hand slid down the front of my shirt until he found my breast. I arched into his touch, and he squeezed—gently at first, and then, when he saw what his touch was doing to me, with firmer pressure. My breasts were a respectable size, but I fit easily and entirely within his large palm. My nostrils flared, my breathing coming hot and quick as sensation coursed through me.
“Frederick,” I murmured, intending only to encourage him to keep going. The sound of his name must have done something to him because he growled his response. All his formidable powers of speech seemed to have fled as his free hand came down and cupped my other breast. He thumbed roughly at my nipples through my shirt and bra until they pebbled up into hard little sensitized buds against his palms, and then he kept going, and going, and going, until I was nothing but pure sensation.
“Oh,” I said, incapable of articulate speech. The soft velvet duvet underneath me served as delicious contrast to the sharp spikes of pleasure coursing through my bloodstream, the placid and even ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway a stark accompaniment to my uneven, rapid breaths. Frederick tore off my shirt and bra impatiently, tossing them to the floor like the hindrances they’d become. His low, desperate groan when he saw my bare chest ratcheted the coil of desire in the pit of my stomach to nearly unbearable heights.
“I want to taste you,” he rasped, raising his head. His pupils were fat with desire as he continued thumbing at my pink and straining nipples. “Everywhere.”
My incoherent moan was apparently all he needed by way of consent. He shoved my skirt up to my waist and then, with excruciatingly slow and careful movements, slid my underwear down my legs. Suddenly, I was half naked and splayed out before him, exposed and vulnerable. His eyes darkened further as he regarded me, his eyes trailing so hot and eagerly along my bare flesh I could feel his gaze.
“I’ve imagined this moment more often than is strictly decent.” His voice was low and deadly urgent, his fingers tracing invisible patterns along my inner thigh. His touch was purposeful, moving closer to where I wanted him with every pass—but his movements were maddeningly slow.
And I was tired of waiting.
“Frederick,” I urged, wriggling on the bed to spur him on. “Please.”
But he seemed determined to take his time. “I’ve touched myself in my bedroom, thinking of you, just like this,” he confessed against the sensitive skin behind my right knee. “I’ve even gone to your bed in my dreams.” His hand slid higher, and higher, until he reached my aching center. He cupped me gently, reverently. I nearly arched off the bed with clawing, desperate need.
“Frederick . . .”
“Can I tell you what I do to you in my dreams?”
Finally, at last, he parted my drenched folds with one thick finger. My head fell back onto the pillow as he gently circled the place where every nerve ending in my body was centered. My jaw fell open as stars burst behind my closed eyelids, my body taut as a bowstring.
“Oh.” I was panting now, any pride or dignity I might have once had long gone. I needed him to touch me. Now. “Please.”
Frederick chuckled a little as the mattress at the foot of the bed shifted beneath his weight. I could almost hear his satisfied smirk when he said, “Perhaps I’ll just show you instead.”
He slid his large hands down my body until he reached my hips. He left them there, gripping my flesh, spreading me open as his eyes feasted on my bare flesh. I shivered at how vulnerable this position left me. The open, heated longing I saw in Frederick’s eyes was almost too much to bear.
“You,” he murmured against my inner thigh, nostrils flared as he breathed me in, “are magnificent beyond my wildest imaginings.”
I’d done this a few times before. Mostly with my college boyfriend, someone who viewed oral sex as an obligation to be dispensed with as quickly as possible before he could move on to more pleasurable activities.
But the moment Frederick buried his face between my legs it was clear there was nothing in the world he would rather be doing than this. He tasted and licked, breathing me in as he took his sweet, deliberate time. My fingertips found purchase on his shoulders, and I clung to them for dear life as he teased me, the wool of the sweater he still wore deliciously smooth against my bare legs.
My head fell back against the pillow again and I writhed on the mattress, bucking up towards his mouth in search of greater friction, needing more. But he wouldn’t be rushed. His hands gripped my hips harder as my body sought to move against him, keeping me pinned helplessly to the mattress in the exact spot he wanted me. I whined in delicious agony as he traced the shape of my clit with the achingly soft flat of his tongue, dancing around the direct contact my body was screaming for. I could feel how wet I was growing, could hear the sharp keening sounds I was making as if from a distance. But he would not be rushed by my desperation as he kissed, and lapped, and tasted.
“Frederick.” I tangled my fingers in his soft hair and tugged, moaning. I was going to pieces. I was out of my head with need. “Please.”
At my naked plea something must have broken inside him. He groaned, long and loud, the reverberations from it sending sparks of sensation rocketing down my spine—
And then, at last, his tongue was right there, licking me senseless as his lips closed around my clit. He sucked gently, then with greater pressure, and the room, the bed beneath us, fell away. The world collapsed down to a pinprick, nothing existing anymore outside of Frederick and the exquisite, cresting pleasure.
“Oh, god,” I moaned, bucking against his mouth. I was outside of myself, outside of reason. “Please—”
My orgasm came upon me like a tidal wave—devastating, and all-consuming, my toes curling with the spine-melting pleasure of it. Distantly, I could feel Frederick shifting on the bed, kissing his way up my body, whispering praise to my bare legs, my stomach, my breasts.
After what might have been a few seconds, or thirty minutes, he stretched out to his full length beside me on the bed, a crooked, self-satisfied smile on his lips.
“I want to do that to you every day for as long as you’ll let me,” he murmured against the top of my head.