The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [60]
“Love,” I say. “We talked about love.”
Pythias takes the wine cup from me so I won’t spill it. “Lie down.”
She starts rubbing my feet. She works her thumb up from the heel to the tender arch and kneads a long time under the balls of my toes. After a while she gets up and I wonder if she’s left me; I’m too lazy, my head too full of fumes, to open my eyes and see. But then I feel her weight on the bed again beside my knees and hear the click of clay on clay, a vessel on a plate. She rubs her hands together to warm whatever it is and then she’s rubbing my feet again with something slick, some oil. Something of hers: the scent is pretty, not any oil from the kitchen. I roll onto my front so she can work her way up my legs. I’ll smell pretty too in the morning, and will need a bath to get rid of it. I widen my legs a little when she reaches my thighs. Maybe she’ll let me return the favour, though I doubt it. This is a pure gift. When I feel her little nails on my buttocks I have to turn over, but she continues just as slowly and methodically, hips, chest, shoulders, arms, hands, even palms and fingers, each anointed to its end. Some ritual she needs, maybe. I want to tell her she’s making a meal out of a cracker and we could be finished in a minute if she put her mind to it, but she can surely see that. I let her do it her way this once. She drapes her dress over my face. A flicker of this, a flicker of that through the gauzy cloth: a few bright points of candles, the misty moving shape of her above me, and something coming she doesn’t want me to see. I reach out but she puts my hands back on the bed and holds them there while she rubs her breasts up and down my chest. My face briefly smothered. A poised moment between offerings, and then she sets her weight on me, hips on mine, easing down. It’s not an easy penetration, involving much flexing and adjusting on her part, fingers spreading her dry pink self open, trying to complete the fit, and then she moves too slowly, rocking a little, not knowing what to do. I take her hips and try to move her the way I want but she sucks her breath in, a sharp hiss of disapproval, or perhaps pain. A moment of stillness and then she tries again, the frustrating, tentative rocking that chafes not nearly enough. I take the cloth off my face so I can at least look at her, and she stops again.
“This isn’t working,” she says.
“It’s fine.” The candlelight is flattering and she’s as pretty as she’ll ever be, with her hair hanging down over her shoulders and tendrils licking at her breasts. I reach for them, small, almond-tipped, and she lets me. She looks determined, just short of grim. I decide not to look at her face.
“Harder,” I tell her. “Like grinding meal.”
It comes out more sternly than I mean, but I decide it’s a game I could like. “Fuck me, for once.” Saying the words aloud instead of thinking them becomes entwined with the pleasure coming, but incredibly she stops a third time and gets off me. “What?”
“We have to finish normally, for it to take.”
Normally. She wants to lie on her back, but I don’t let her. We finish with her face down, taking it hard, her two hands pinned by my one. I come like a monster. When I get off her, she rolls onto her back and pulls