Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [157]
It was as if they’d been catapulted at each other. Immediately, still in their coats, standing right beside the front door, they were in each other’s arms, kissing frantically, desperately. She was barely aware of Joe deftly removing her coat, which fell in an abandoned crumple on the hall floor, before he steered her into the living-room and to the couch. Still kissing her, he put gentle pressure on her shoulders and forced her down, so that she was lying on her back. Then he kissed her for what seemed like several hours. Every time she tried to sit up or speak to him he’d force her back on to the couch and start again. He devoted himself to it, to her. Kissing is an art form in itself, she thought, in a daze. Not just a precursor to the main event.
She had her eyes closed and felt as if she’d gone into a trance. Deep inside her head she was flying, over fields of colour, over landscapes of stars. Who needs drugs? she thought.
It was a long time since she’d been kissed like that. Well, it was a long time since she’d been kissed at all. How could she have lived without it?
She barely knew where she was and when she opened her eyes she was surprised by the mundanity of her living-room.
All the time he was kissing her he touched and stroked her, slowly, maddeningly. Feathery circles with his long, sensitive fingers on her skin, her face, her neck, her arms. Then he was caressing her stomach through her dress, and then slowly moved higher to her ribcage. And then higher still until he was almost at her breasts. Beneath her lacy bra her nipples made two tents. They were shrieking for his touch, but instead he stroked underneath her breast and then the softness of the side, then around to the hollow of her cleavage. In slowly decreasing circles, he began to move inwards until he was touching the mound of her right breast. Slowly, too slowly, he kept moving inwards, inching across the tight fabric. When, after what seemed like hours, he reached her nipple and gently flicked it with his forefinger, she felt as if she’d come.
He lay half on half off her and his erection dug into her hipbone. It was excruciatingly pleasurable.
When he put his hand on her leg and moved it up under her skirt and when he found that she was – as he’d hoped – wearing stockings instead of tights, his mastery nearly deserted him.
He started circling her thighs. First the front, then the outside, then dipping into the soft virgin skin of her inner thighs, before moving back to the front again.
‘No,’ he chided, as she began to buck her hips, and he forced them back on to the couch, with the palm of his hand pressed against her pubic bone. Again, sweet pleasure rippled through her.
She itched to touch him, to splay her fingers between his ribs, to stroke his stomach with her thumb, to feel the muscles in his thighs. With fumbling fingers she undid his shirt buttons, then shifted, sat up and placed her hands flat against the crispness of his chest hair. To his surprise she pushed him so that he was lying flat on the couch and she was looking down on him.
They smiled silently, dazedly, at each other.
His shirt was all undone and there was something about the way his hollowed-out belly created a gap between the waistband of his jeans that made Katherine slip her hand in. Laying the palm of her hand against the frayed-rope line of hair on his stomach, and then with a little swivel, moving her fingers slightly lower. And lower still. And then into contact with his pubic hair.
He groaned and murmured, ‘Katherine…’
Looking into her eyes he barely recognized her as the buttoned-up girl he worked with. She was a predatory woman.
Again he began to kiss her and turned her around so that once more she was the one underneath. But she couldn’t wait any longer.
‘Please,’ she begged, tugging at her dress and trying to shuffle it up around her waist. He stood up and quickly undid his belt and buttons and stepped out of his jeans, underpants and socks. His skin was moonstone translucent, so pale that the darkness