God. How can that idea still hurt so much? How can it hurt more and more and more, like a train rolling over you, like being stretched on a rack, like being crucified?
Tell her now. Tell her so she knows.
I open my mouth again, but she is already taking my hand in hers, guiding it over the firmly plump curve of her ass. “Please,” she murmurs. “I don’t want anything left undone. Not a single thing.”
My heart hammers at my chest and my objections hammer at my skull and my cock—well, my cock is just as hard as a hammer, pushing against the teeth of my zipper like a cellmate trying to break free.
“I—”
“Sean,” she begs, spinning in my arms and leaning forward on the counter. The act turns her body into a buffet of tight curves and narrow lines, showing the clear dip of her waist and the edible swell of her hips. It also displays that firm, sweet ass. And the shadowed well between her legs.
Reasons why I should tell Zenny I love her right now:
1. I love her.
2. She needs to know.
3. She likes the honest guy thing.
4. An old nun told me to.
Reasons why I should wait to tell her:
1. She’s bent over a sink.
And really, I think, as I smooth interested hands over her waist and ass, I’m going to love her even more after we do anal, so what’s the rush? It can wait.
It can wait.
Except.
Sigh. Huff. Grumble.
“Zenny, we can’t do this here,” I explain softly. My hands are still everywhere on her, fondling and caressing and loving, despite my words, because fuck it, I can’t help it. Not when she’s like this, bent over and peering back at me with a daring kind of half-smile.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s a fucking kitchen,” I say, giving her sides a quick tickle as I say it.
She giggles at my touch, but then pouts at me. “I don’t want to wait,” she says. “I want to be able to look back and say I was spontaneous, say that for once I didn’t care about what anyone else thought, I didn’t do something to be the best at it. That I did it just because I wanted to. Just for me. I could barely make myself choose this in the beginning but now…” she gives me a shy smile. “Being with you has made it easier. It feels easy to demand the things I want. Good, even.”
Ugh, I hate all this casual talk of looking back, this implication of her future life apart from me…and yet at the same time, pride burnishes a warm glow inside my chest. Pride for her. If I couldn’t have my wish of worshipping her for the rest of my days, then this would be my second wish—that she’d grow into her own needs. That she’d find a balance between pouring her love into the world and loving herself.
But, be that as it may… “That makes me glad, sweetheart. I promise it does. But I don’t want to hurt you, and anal is, well, delicate, at the best of times.”
“Can’t we at least try?” she asks, wriggling her cute bottom at me, and it’s absurd that I, Sean Fucking Bell, am trying to talk a woman out of anal, but that’s what Zenny’s done to me. She’s unbuttoned me and shaken me out all over the ground and now I’m just a mess of jumbled pieces, nothing resembling the arrogant know-it-all I was just a few weeks ago.
“I don’t have toys to warm you up—”
“Use your fingers, then. Are you Sean Bell or what?”
“—or lube come to that—”
“It’s a kitchen! I’m sure there’s oil in here somewhere.”
“Baby, I can’t use a condom and oil. It will break the latex.”
There’s a pause, and I watch Zenny’s teeth dig into her lower lip. I think for a moment—with a rueful sort of relief—that she’s finally conceded, that she’s finally accepted that it’s bananas to have kitchen-sink anal, and then she says, “Then don’t wear a condom.”
This would be a good time for me to remember how to pray.
“Zenny…” I breathe. My hands are still on her body, rubbing circles and lines along her silk-soft skin. I know I should say more, I should resist, but being bare inside her…even if it’s just once…
“You’re clean, and so am I. And it’s not risking pregnancy,” she says, and then—sensing my weakness— “Teach me how it can feel good, Sean. Please.”
Fuck. I can’t refuse the teacher game and she knows it. I curl over her body, defeated, my willpower melted away like a snowflake on a tongue.
“Okay,” I mumble into the delicate bird-wing of her shoulder blade. “But you have to let me do it the way it needs to be done.”
“As long as you hurry up,” she says, wiggling against me. Fuck.
It takes me less than a minute to source a mostly full bottle of vegetable oil—I’m very motivated—and then I’m covering Zenny’s body once again with my own. “Are you sure about this?” I say, kissing her ear. “Very, very sure?”
“Very, very,” she says impatiently. “Why is it when I want to speed up, you want to slow down—and then when I want to slow down, you want to speed up?”
I’m straightening now and unscrewing the bottle cap. “When has that last ever happened?” I ask, amused. “You’ve never wanted to slow down a minute in your life.”
“Not with sex. But with…other things. Feelings.” She stops, as if hesitant to say more.
The furrowed-out space in my chest aches with her implied meaning, aches more at the thought of telling her I love her. Would it be wrong to? If she has just said she wants to slow down with the feelings?
This is not ass-talk, I decide. Ass first. Orgasms for Zenny first. Then we talk.
“I’m just rubbing oil on you now,” I explain to the little nun in front of me, shoving my feelings to the side and focusing on her. Her pleasure. “I’m not going to press inside just yet.”
“Okay,” she says, and then hums a little as my finger brushes against the sensitive pleats, spreading oil warm and plenty over her.
“Now inside. Just like the plug, baby, you’ll push against me.” And then I gently, as gently as it can be done, work my finger inside the tight aperture. Inside, she is a furnace. A fucking furnace. A snug ring of muscle and a smooth sheath of heat behind it. My blood goes on fire, all at once, burning me up from the inside.
“Okay, this part you’ll help me with,” I say, taking one of her hands and guiding it to where my finger is burrowed inside her. “You’re going to replace my finger with yours…and then add a second one as soon as you’re comfortable. Yes?”
“Yes,” she says eagerly, already pushing at my hand to replace it. I let her, drizzling some more oil for her, and then while she fingers her own ass, I quickly toe off my shoes and tear off my jeans and shirt. She adds a third finger without me telling her to, and I abruptly lose the ability to breathe.
“Jesus,” I mutter, liberally glazing my palm with oil and wasting no time fucking my oiled-up hand as I watch her. “Jesus Christ.”
I step closer, the view impossibly intimate, impossibly carnal, and then I run my hands all over her ass and flanks. “Are you ready, sweetheart?”
“Ready,” she sighs out, withdrawing her fingers with a noise that would make God Himself sympathize with all my decisions. I move myself behind her as she braces herself on the edge of the sink, and I feel her shiver when the broad head of my dick nudges against her rim. It’s much, much bigger than anything she’s taken before, and I run a soothing hand up and down her back.