The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [65]
There are a hundred, no, a thousand ways that other people have looked at Bigelow over the years, and none of them describe the woman’s gaze. He knows all the things that it is not. What it is, is harder to say. She has this trick of just looking.
Bigelow walks close enough to touch her but leaves his hands at his sides, and she leaves hers in her lap. After what seems a long time, she takes his right hand, the one with the scars. She turns it over, tracing the purple mark of the seal’s bite, the pink shadows on his palm from blisters, kite burns. She looks up at his face, raises her eyebrows in question. He shrugs, makes a fist and unfolds his fingers, showing her how they still work.
She takes the hand back and holds it in her own, turns it over to see how the bite has gone through, scarring both sides. Then she lifts it to her mouth. Not a kiss, but the feel of her breath, warm in his hand, makes him hard. His fingers shake.
She allows him to touch her face, to cup his hand under her chin and tilt it up, to brush her cheeks with his scrubbed knuckles, smooth her eyebrows with a finger. She has no expression as he does this, but for a moment her lips part just enough that he can see a white gleam of teeth behind them. Then she closes her mouth.
He undoes the button at her throat, then the top button of his own shirt, then back to hers, one and one and one, until she gets sick of the game. At least, he thinks he sees a faint tremor of impatience at the tit-for-tat silliness of such symmetry, and she pushes his hand away and begins to undo the buttons herself. Down to her waist and then on past her lap—twenty-two buttons to keep it closed, and with each one she releases he feels himself growing that much harder, an erection that seems to claim all the blood in his body. His feet tingle; his ears ring; his head feels as light as if he’s been holding his breath.
Which, he realizes, he has been. The last button slips from its hole, and he lets the air go in a rush. No drawers or petticoats, no bust bodice, no garters. Just the two pointed breasts, one nudging right, the other left, and the navel, her navel. The impossible spiral of it, like the motion of a finger turning at a temple.
Does she look satisfied as he falls to his knees? Triumphant at so complete a capture? He’ll ask himself the question later. Besides, he isn’t looking at her face, he’s pressing his own into the warmth of her groin. Salty, and just a little rank, the unmistakable bitter tang of that smell, he’s about to get his tongue just exactly where he wants it, barely enough time to begin to feel dismayed by her sudden wantonness—who has taught her this! She, missionary she, who never let him do this before!—when she twists out from under his mouth, pulls his head up by the ears.
To be sure of her constancy, if not her virtue, he tries again, and she shoves his head with both hands, hard enough to send him reeling back onto his buttocks, legs splayed, tailbone jangling with pain, so intense it kills his erection, but back it comes, revived by the relief that she is as she was, she’s not putting up with anything but the straight and narrow.
Strange to be grateful for a woman who won’t tolerate even the one little frill, but there he is, inside her, nose to nose, arms straight and hands off, and she with her eyes shut and fingers busy. It’s insulting, so why isn’t he insulted? She cries out, taking the one orgasm she allows herself, pleasure over with sooner than a foil-wrapped toffee—he hopes at least it’s sweeter or deeper or what? Something. Inside her, he feels so hard, and not just his cock but hard from head to toe, blood pounding all through him, feeling better than good, better than sublime— alive, so alive!—and forget all his tricks for slowing down, he just lets himself come, biting his lip to keep from howling like an animal.
He rolls out of her way to give her room to get off the bed, to sit in her tub and scrub the smell of him off of her.