The wave crashed over her before she even realized it had formed upon the horizon. A crest of such unimaginable, inconceivable euphoria dismantled everything she knew about herself.
She came apart in his hands, against his mouth, and hoped to never again be found.
This was bliss. Rapture. Heaven. And a bit of the other place, too. Because once she’d begun to tumble into the grips of ecstasy, she already understood it was fleeting. That it would inevitably end, lest she die from the intensity of it.
For surely nothing like this could last.
Inevitably his mouth softened, gentled, and returned her back to herself. A self she wasn’t certain what to do with. She was a weak, trembling, overwrought mess, and she couldn’t seem to remember her own name let alone consider what to do next.
So she sat and breathed, because such was the extent of her functional capacity.
She’d expected pleasure… but not that.
Not her unaccountable unraveling.
He left her, sliding from beneath her skirts, and used one of the many ruffles of her petticoats to wipe his mouth before he rested back on his haunches so that they might take the measure of one another.
She couldn’t see much of his body, as he was dressed in all black and the night was a moonless one. The lamps filtered through the fountain and cast the shadows of water against his skin. Like a mirage of tears. An entire ocean of them.
They bled down his stark cheekbones creating hollows beneath, and the effect somehow caused her heart to swell in her chest.
“You look… as if you are in pain,” she ventured, doing her best to lift her boneless arms to reach for him.
“I’m hard as fucking marble.” A crass, almost cruel admission, one that brought her body back to astonishing life.
“Bloody hell,” he panted, running the back of his hand over his mouth again as if to rid it of her flavor. Stopping in the middle of the motion, he curled his fingers into a fist and bit down on his knuckle. Composing himself just long enough to command, “Stop looking at me like that, woman, or I won’t be responsible for what I do next.”
Little trills of danger thrummed through her veins. Something primitive and ancient in this garden of delights. Something as old as the first stories, when a man found a woman who tempted him to sin.
The stories had always offended Prudence as she’d obediently sat in church, listening to holy men blame Eve for everything. For the knowledge of good and evil and the ability to bear fruit. For life, itself.
And for temptation.
Why would God, in all his infinite wisdom imbue them with these forces of nature so powerful, there was barely the sentience to deny them? Didn’t it make sense that a more pagan deity was responsible? Perhaps one with golden hair and electric eyes. With savagely beautiful features and an expression of half hunger, half wrath.
Eve was not tempted by the devil, but by the power of the very impulses already inside of her. She’d been in Eden, much as Pru was now, and had stared across at a man who’d looked at her just like that, infusing her with power and fire and subtle submission.
How could she have possibly denied him? How could she have denied herself?
Prudence slid from the fountain to her knees before him, little more than a puddle of pleasure and need. Her hands explored him a little, tested the mounds of muscle beneath his coat before slipping it up over his shoulders and down his corded arms.
He was hard and she was soft. He was stone and she was water.
Wet, ready.
Willing.
He watched her as she came to him, his eyes strangely wary and uncertain. His skin pulled taut over the shape of his bones.
The moment she freed his arms from his coat, he took over. He draped it on the moss before guiding her to it and following her down.
He kissed her gently, and she tasted a lingering essence of herself.
It tasted like sin. Reminded her of where he’d taken her. Someplace like paradise.
She opened her legs to welcome the lean intrusion of his hips and he took every inch of ground she ceded.
He distracted her with soft, probing kisses as he reached down between them. Lifting her skirts to her waist, fumbling with his trousers.
No romantic words punctuated his kisses and none were needed. Though his desire was rough and apparent, his mouth was gentle and endlessly restless. He dragged his lips up her jaw, breathing in great gasps, as if he could lock her scent in his chest. He pressed them to her temples, her eyebrows, her lids and the tip of her nose.
Prudence kept her eyes closed, under the guise of appreciating his attentions. All the while preparing to give him what George no longer deserved.
Her virginity.
She didn’t tell him. She couldn’t say why, exactly. Maybe because he treated her in this moment like no one else had. Like someone whose need and knowledge matched his. Someone who could take what he was about to give her with all its primal desire and no little bit of masculine anger, and provide him a little of the pleasure she’d only just experienced.
Lord knew, he’d earned it.
He returned his mouth to hers just as his fingers stole into her cleft once again, sliding against even more abundant moisture than before.
She squirmed a little, anxious and anticipatory. Wanting him to stop. Wanting him to get on with it. Not knowing what to say or do other than to cling to him.
Yes. That was it. She reared up, wrapping her arms around his trunk, and buried her face against his neck. She breathed him in, a scent like cedar and stringent soap and perhaps a bit of creosote, as if he’d been in a trainyard recently.
Her breath warmed and moistened the scant space between their skin, and she inhaled greedily as his arms locked around her.
“Please,” she whispered.
He stole her next words with a strong thrust.
Prudence bit her lip so hard she tasted blood. She’d expected pain. Or maybe pleasure. But not this unbearably magnificent medley of the two.
Her intimate muscles were not exactly as welcoming as she wished them to be at first, but after the initial thrust, they seemed to clench at him. Pulling him inside.
He’d claimed to be hard, but she realized she’d never truly had an idea of what that word meant. He was like heated steel inside of her, over her, around her. He was everywhere she wasn’t and also where she was.
He was her entire world, and yet still a stranger. He blocked out the sky and the breeze and the darkness, her lonely pain and her fears for the future. Reducing her entire frame of existence down to this.
To the place where they joined.
She suddenly wished for daylight. For a filter of illumination through which she could appreciate his nude form. She wished she’d seen exactly what it was he’d pressed inside of her. But for now, all she had was this. Darkness and experience.
And what an experience it was.
With a dark growl, he withdrew slow and deliberate. He held her to him like a coveted treasure as he curled his back to sting into her again. And then again.
Each gliding, slick thrust was easier to bear than the last, easing the way for the pleasure he began to pump from his body into hers, chasing away the lingering shadows of pain.
He made dark, needful, animal sounds. She reveled in the catches of his breath and the sheer wonder in the wordless questions he kissed into her mouth.
He took pleasure as he gave it, and she thought, that was what lovers ought to do.
For he felt like a lover, even though love had nothing to do with what they did here in the dark on the earth.