“This is what I want you to know,” Sophia began. “I was able to love afterwards.”
She had seen him in the web after years, in the way that the web had connected everything now, so that there would never be any escape from the past again. She’d heard his voice once again, and time had rolled backwards to the room where the two of them had been lovers in the way that the first lover breaks your heart and you have to go on afterwards, somehow. Not that you will ever forget. Life is like that, really. How you will move forward after everything. After anything.
She’d heard that voice and it took her into halls of memory, and the places where we lock memory so that we can never find it again. She was on that bathroom floor in the heap where he’d left her; rolled like a fetus rolls into a little ball as if it’s preparing to birth itself. As if she could remember what he’d birthed in her that night. His voice. The baby she’d lost. It had all come rushing back, suddenly. Marcus.
The walls were green and black tile in a pattern from the 1930’s and the house had been very old—up in the Hollywood Hills. He’d let her down eventually, the way that lovers let you down when you’re young and not expecting anything bad to happen. When you have fallen so much in love that you think it will break you in half if it ever ends.
“I was able to love,” she wrote, after seeing him on the screen. “Again.”
The moon hung like a tiny lantern surrounded by night clouds drifting in a rushing wind. Nothing was clear anymore, about the sky or the stars or the planes flying about and what they might be. She stood for a long time in the cold and brittle light of almost total darkness looking up into the heavens. The pages of her journal fluttered on the desk, before she tore them out completely and crumpled them in her fist.
“Come to bed, Sophia.”
Brace called her back from her depths, his voice stronger than her darkness, stronger than the cold of the clouds and the night sky filled with uncertain stars.
“I’m waiting.”
“It’s so cold out,” she said.
“I’m warm.”
Her hands were icy as she slid them across his chest. “Brrrrr,” he laughed. “You’re freezing.”
He smiled as he pulled her toward him, in the way that husbands smile, that’s different than the way a lover smiles.
“Am I?”
“Take off your clothes and come to bed. It’s late”
“You’re always right Brace, aren’t you?”
“Do you think so?”
“You’re always very sure of everything.”
“I am what I am.”
“I suppose we all are.”
“Come to bed.”
His arms were warm as they tucked themselves around her, pulling her in against him, but her mind had shifted elsewhere on some kind of different plane. Brace rolled his back to her. “Go to sleep.”
But Sophia couldn’t sleep. Not anymore, not after hearing that voice, and seeing the photograph. She and Brace never talked about the past or the other people they had been with. What would have been the point?
In the warmth of the bed, against Brace’s back, in the heat of the blankets—her mind kept drifting backwards.
The feeling between her legs began as a little tingle. The ghost of remembrance. A trickle. Adrift in the way Marcus had gone down on her late into the night so many times, bending her thighs back until she was exposed to him fully, nowhere to hide, until the intensity of him was so difficult she’d had to close her eyes and not look at him. The lush sounds his tongue made against her skin, his mumblings whispering poetry, the way he teased her lips apart and opened her, opened her more and more and more, his hot tongue going in and out, fucking her over and over. Or sometimes the way he made just the slightest flickering, his touch just out of reach, driving her mad, driving her open. Wanton.
She gripped the iron make-believe bars of the bed they’d once slept in. Brace’s breathing had changed subtly. He could fall asleep so easily, anyplace, anytime. He needed almost nothing but a place to lie down. Already he was gone to dreamland and Sophia could tell, listening to his breath moving.
“Marcus,” she began, as if penning something she hadn’t already crumpled. “Marcus.”
She shifted on the bed rolling away from Brace as far as she could. It would never do to wake him.
“Marcus, I…”
She could feel his hair brushing the inner parts of her thighs the way it had, the stubble along his cheeks as he moved between her legs.
“I was able to love…”
He pushed her legs further apart in her imagination.
“I was able to forget you.”
“Were you?”
His hands gripped at her thighs, gripping at her bottom, pulling her closer to his mouth. A finger traced the rosebud of her posterior. Not entering, just tracing over and over and over as if to tease her backwards across time.
“I was able…”
The tracing continued as an agony. He had loved that place.
“Does he tongue you here?”
He slipped some of her silken fluids onto his finger, taking long traces down the channel, slowly moving back and forth, never touching her opening, making it weep with desire, only dipping lower as the wetness increased—his every breath so close to her she could feel the vibrations from his words playing the air along her labia. Her mind locked onto the sensation. That sensation only Marcus had been able to conjure. His finger was so light, it was almost a feather as it teased.
“Open your thighs, Sophia, so I can see how wet I’m making you.”
That had been the hardest part of Marcus. He’d liked to watch her excitement as he built it to a frenzy with the softest of licks and touches.
Brace was breathing deeply as the curtains stirred. The night clouds moved against the sky in the darkness. Sophia watched them from the bed, trying to erase Marcus from her mind as if she could. As if anyone can ever erase an old lover. It wasn’t doing any good. Her hands rose again above her head and clasped each other tightly, as he’d liked to see her hold them.
“Don’t move them,” Marcus breathed against her.
“Don’t unclasp them.”
If she could have moved, she would have sighed. The way only Marcus made her sigh.
“I love it when you’re wet like this.”
Sophia swallowed. She couldn’t answer.
“Wider,” he whispered. “Open your thighs for me.”
“Marcus I can’t.”
“Are you afraid you’ll wake him?”
“Marcus, don’t.”
“Beg me, Sophia. I want to hear you beg me to touch you like I used to. I’ve missed it.”
Her throat was going dry, her tongue played along her lips in little circles just as his imagined tongue was doing at the apex of her thighs. Tiny little flickers that couldn’t possibly wake Brace up. He was barely touching her and yet…
“Open your mouth Sophia, as wide as your thighs.”
The night air rushed in as she parted her lips. It moved against her as she let her thighs open, splaying them inside the warmth of the bed. Marcus wanted to watch her tongue. He’d always loved that. Loved to watch her take his cock deep inside, loved her tongue’s little movements along the skin, the tiny kisses she’d left in trails, once.
“Lick your lips for me,” Marcus whispered. “Don’t stop.”
Sophia began to feel the little tremors strengthen at her cunt as her hips shifted involuntarily against the sheets. Even the cotton felt warm, but it was Brace making it so. Her sleeping husband.
“I’m going to keep you like this until dawn, Sophia. This open, and you won’t be able to come will you?”
She shook her head a little in the darkness, back and forth, as if she could say no to Marcus, even as her desire flowered.
“This open as you were for me always until L’heure bleue.”
“Marcus…”
“There is nothing you are going to be able to do. I’m not going to let you come.”
Sophia could feel the familiar panting begin to return. She hadn’t in years for a man but it was something only Marcus had known how to conjure from her—the way he forced her to hold herself back—pinioned on the edge of desire so he could watch her open further and further, until she shamed herself unable to stop him. Until she was reduced to a panting animal, almost inhuman and filled with longing. All it had taken was seeing his face again, tonight.
Her mouth opened wider in the darkness knowing he would love to see that, the pink edge of her tongue rimming herself as he loved to rim her again and again, never entering just licking until she was almost driven mad by it—by the exquisite torture of not being touched, not being penetrated. Knowing how he loved to watch her, watch the silken flood of the waters inside her pool at the surface and glisten and flow as she was glistening now, her mouth open to him as the shadow of the moon fell across it. A mouth that wanted to scream out her desire or cry into the darkness and she couldn’t. How would she ever have explained to Brace?
“I can smell you Sophia,” Marcus whispered on the wind, as if his voice was riding the night air.
Her hips moved against the sheets, imperceptibly, her cunt clenching with desire, imagining Marcus not even really touching her anymore, only licking the tiny bud of her clitoris in little flickers across the surface, watching her mouth, so wide open, telling her to imagine he was putting his cock inside her, that she was ready and wet and open, so open, and his taut fingering—just the pad along the rosebud of her ass, as he always had moved it, slicked with her natural fluid, teasing, testing her until she was begging for him to thrust into her, begging silently against his hand for release.
“You remember the night of the party, don’t you Sophia?”
The memory washed over her like an ocean in her mind. Tuttle’s party, the biggest in the Hollywood Hills that night.
“Open your mouth wider,” Marcus whispered. “Show me, as you did that night.”
“The foyer,” Sophia whispered, remembering.
She nodded as he said it, the images coming back in an onrush, suddenly. His tuxedo, the sharp lines of the bow tie, his hands, the champagne. The music playing softly in the distance. He had taken her hand and let her to the stairs, away from everyone.
She squirmed now, against the sheets. The slightest touch of him along her skin and the voice had always undone her. That Brace slept beside her could not protect her now. Not from the longing.
“Your mouth was so open that night. You wanted my cock.”
“Marcus don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t.”
“He doesn’t make love to you like I did does he?”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t say anymore, Sophia.”
“I can’t.”
“Open your thighs wider.”
She struggled against herself as she let them shift slightly again for Marcus.
“Wider.”
“Open your mouth like you did that night for me.”
“He doesn’t love you does he, Sophia?”
It was true. Brace had been different, as all lovers are different.
She couldn’t debauch herself again. Wouldn’t ever allow it, and yet so much desire had already pooled at her lips, in her mind, at her opened mouth, at his words, that the memory of that night was wrapping her again. The way he wouldn’t let her make one sound, the waltz of the party going on around them as he led her to one of the master bathrooms. The cushioned club chair where he’d made her lie over his lap, made her open her mouth and told her to not make a sound, not to do anything but just lick her lips while he touched her—the way he had always wanted her to beg for him even then, the first time he’d caressed her.
She whimpered softly, and Brace stirred against her on the bed. She’d have to be quiet, have to find a way to contain what Marcus was causing in her all over again, years later, the quickened stirring, her swollen lips, above and below, the agony of desire, dark desire, that made up everything Marcus had ever been, had always been, his memory engraved on her soul. The way he had touched her as a kind of skin memory, sensate, that sound of his voice. The way he was always murmuring things and she’d listened and followed. Blindly.
She had lain over his lap that night, and now he was telling her to turn over again, so that she could really remember. The agony of rolling herself so quietly in the bed that Brace wouldn’t hear, couldn’t hear as she let Marcus begin all over again. Her cunt so open, her lips so soundlessly spread apart, her clasped hands the way that Marcus had held them once, that night, how he hadn’t allowed her to move while he whispered her into wet pools of longing just like tonight. He’d had her open her thighs then too, brushing the folds of tulle over her head as he took her panties down, slid them to her ankles and demanded she open her mouth just like tonight.
“He can’t make you wet like I can, can he Sophia?”
“Marcus don’t speak about Brace.”
“He can’t, can he?”
That night Marcus had made her lie over him, and he’d said, “The only sound I want to hear is the sound of your tongue as it licks your lips. Show me how much you want my cock in your mouth.”
He’d been hard underneath her, but there was no hurry that night. There had never been any hurry once Marcus started.
“Lick your lips,” he’d said.
“Make them wet, like I’m making you wet here.”
He’d opened her thighs gently, pushing them apart from behind so slowly that each opening might have been an inch but felt like miles. She’d had to balance on the edge of his lap, the slender heels she wore flailing as he parted her, his hand tracing slowly up and down between her thighs, just as now. Barely touching her.
The tulle fanned around her like a perfumed cloud, the bareness of her bottom exposed, the cool night air of the moonlit hills sweeping over it as if the whole sky were breathing. She’d clenched herself over and over in his lap, her buttocks moving involuntarily each time he spoke, telling her to open her mouth, open it wider, imagine his cock sliding in and telling her to know how much he wanted that, wanted to see her on her knees before him, unable to stop as he slid inside her to the hilt, and that he was just warming her up, just warming that pink mouth until it quivered for him, until she wasn’t going to be able to speak ever again out loud when she was with him unless he commanded it.
“It’s good,” he’d said. “The way I make you feel, isn’t it?”
She had wanted to squeal it had been so delicious.
He hadn’t even been able to see her face, that night, so obscured it had been by the party dress. What he’d wanted, what he’d always wanted were her sounds. The wet smacking sounds, the soft lip-licking sounds, the sounds that his fingers made in her cunt or her ass if he chose to plunge them, the sounds she made as he barely touched her, barely stroking his fingers over her, until she was quivering all over. He loved to undo her, half-dressed, in public, any place. He loved that people were outside having drinks, having the party and she was upended half naked over his lap, her creamwhite thighs splayed, his fingers stroking lightly up and down the wet pink furrow that was getting wetter, fingering the tiny little rosebud of her ass, tracing by it now and again, until she was unable to hold back a moan.
She couldn’t help herself. Sophia let out a moan in the darkness, and Brace stirred again beside her. She edged away as far from him as she could, so as not to wake him, so she could open her thighs once again to Marcus, as if she were in some kind of delirium. Brace was dreaming, it seemed. Once in a while he made a gesture, or said something in his sleep—punching at ghosts.
“Move your lips like you did that night, Sophia,” Marcus whispered in the dark. “Until I can hear you.”
“Marcus I can’t, she rebelled. “Don’t.” But he was impossible, just as he had always been.
“Make them wet for me, your little pink mouths.”
On her stomach, with her thighs spread widely, unrestrained, she writhed against the sheets as quietly as she could. So quietly there wasn’t even a sound, the way that Marcus demanded. Her tongue rolled against her lips, wetting them as she remembered. Her mouth formed an open circle, a wet circle. Marcus would never let her touch herself, not then and not now. She lifted her bottom to his tongue as she always had, splayed, to the ripple of just one finger’s nimble flicking.
Brace’s dream became deeper. He was talking now and tossing in the bed, almost rolling from side to side. She strained not to wake him as Marcus chuckled, as Marcus slid the tiny tip of his little finger inside her wet cunt, letting it explore the silken folds. Brace shifted suddenly, sitting up.
“Fuck.”
“Brace are you awake?”
“A dream.”
“Are you okay?”
He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and exited their bed.
“I need some water.”
Sophia reached out to touch him in the darkness. She could always feel him recoil. After Marcus, he’d been easy. They were night and day from each other.
“Can I get you anything?” she asked.
“No. I’m just awake now.”
She could hear the water running and the sound of a glass being filled. He would be on his way to the study where he read late at night when he couldn’t sleep.
“You know I need to get an early start in the morning.”
l’heure bleue
It was always like that with Brace. Vast gulfs that they could never cross together. That they would never traverse in the polite and caring distance the two of them had created for each other. Vast empty space filled with the tiny cold pinpricks of little stars in the great void, uneasy in the warmth their bodies made together.
“All right,” she called.
“I know you’re going early, I saw your boots.”
The bed was hers again. The door closed upon her silence.
L’heure blue refers to that magic time at sunset and at dawn when the sky has one kind of light—it’s the French expression for “the blue hour.”en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_hour
© 2013 Valentine Bonnaire. All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or part without written permission from the author.
Bio: Valentine Bonnaire’s erotica has appeared at Cleansheets.com and the Erotica Readers and Writers Association. Find her in the archives, and this Spring in one of Maxim’s. More on her webpage valentinebonnaire.com xxoo! or @bonnaire in the twitterverse.