Kushiel's Scion - Jacqueline Carey [84]
Is it possible to fall upward? It seemed it to me. Lying on my back, I fell upward into Emmeline; into her mouth, into her. Every part of me she had touched and made sacred blazed with a desire that was Naamah's gift, clean and pure, untouched by any shadow. I offered it back as tribute, and she accepted it with gladness.
Toward the end, everything gathered. Emmeline let out a gasp, lifting her head. I held her hips hard as she rode me, seeing for the first time the way a woman's face changes with pleasure, going soft and abandoned. It was impossibly beautiful.
With a sense of awe, I felt her inner walls ripple and flutter. Ah, Elua! It was too much to bear. I wanted the moment to last, I wanted to gaze at her face and fix it in my memory, but everything gathered. I was falling, falling so fast. Her face, the lamplight; everything blurred. I gave up and closed my eyes, letting myself fall.
"This, too," I heard her whisper. "This, too, is sacred."
Groaning aloud, I spent myself like a shooting star.
It seemed to go on forever. All the vast desire in my body was concentrated in my aching loins; my throbbing phallus and testes. A year's worth of awful, complicated longing was released in a surge of seed, and Emmeline rode the crest of my desire as a ship rides a tall wave.
But at last, it ebbed. I returned to myself enough to hear the harsh sound of my own breathing, its frantic pace slowing. I felt the tickle of her hair against my face and opened my eyes to see her face, her grey eyes shining with tears.
"You have given me a gift," she said. "Thank you."
"No." I touched her eyelashes. "You have." I paused. "Am I still crying?"
Emmeline smiled. "A little bit." She brushed away a tear with the ball of her thumb. "I don't mind."
She moved off of me, then. There was a fleeting sense of loss as my limp phallus slipped from her warm recesses. I turned my head on the pillow to gaze at Emmeline as she reclined beside me, propped on one arm. I felt strangely at peace, languid and good.
"My beautiful boy," she whispered, sliding one thigh over mine and tracing my lower lip with one fingertip. "It must have been bad."
"It was," I said simply. "How did you know?"
Her smile deepened. "It's my calling."
The night did not end there. After having lanced the poisonous wound of my desire, Emmeline showed me such things as I wished to learn; things I had read about in the Trois Milles Joies. I learned. As the Dowayne had said, Emmeline was near my age, but old enough to impart a wisdom of her own. I learned how to kiss properly, with all the niceties and subtleties. I held her breasts in my hands, marveling at the wonderful heft of them, and felt her nipples harden beneath my touch. I learned how to adore them with lips and tongue, teasing and suckling, until I exerted the pressure that pleased her most.
And I learned her innermost parts.
Emmeline showed me without shame, leaning against the pillows and opening her thighs. She spread her outer lips with her fingers, and then the inner, revealing Naamah's Pearl.
"There," she said, sighing as I made reverence to it. "Oh, yes!"
She taught me myself, too. It was true, there was no part that was not sacred. I caught my breath when she performed the languisement, one hand grasping my shaft, the other easing back my foreskin to expose the sensitive glans. I cried aloud as her mouth descended on me, one hand sliding beneath me to cup the sack of my testes.
"It is all sacred, Imriel," she murmured before proceeding.
It was. All of it was. And these things I had known in my head and heart, I learned in my flesh that night. When I fell asleep at last, my head pillowed on Emmeline's breast, it was the sleep of true exhaustion. Emotionally and physically, I was replete.
I slept soundly and without dreams, waking at dawn. Balm House was quiet. I stooped over the bed, watching Emmeline's eyelids crease as the sun's first rays slanted through