The Man I Love (The Fish Tales, #1)(25)
“Come, Dais. Come for me.” His mouth caressing her breast, one hand flat on the small of her back, the other sliding into her, sliding along her. Transfixed he felt it rise up and bring her around. Her hips bucked against his hand, sending a rolling motion through her ribcage. First her shoulders, then her head flew back, taking the wave of her hair with it, and she came. No noise, just a keening rush of air through her throat. Her chin dropped down, and as it did, her teeth chattered. That sound was an arrow to the core of his maleness. It hijacked his breath, thoroughly did him in.
I made her teeth chatter.
He was holding her up by then, holding her carefully in his hands, running his lips along her face, holding her as her body quieted and her breathing slowed. He kissed her, craving the taste of her mouth and how it felt in his. Slowly he felt her getting her feet back, and her hands on him grew heavier and intentional.
It was his turn.
That first night, it took some effort for him to convert to a passive mentality, to take his hands off her and not engage. To scale the walls of vulnerability instead of taking refuge behind them. He stood still. Tried to expand instead of contract under her touch. He was utterly exposed with no way to divert the attention or diffuse it by adding his own actions. It wasn’t his home base. But he let her at him. He breathed through it as her fingers unbuttoned his shirt, opening his skin to the Christmas light. He breathed as her lips nudged his apart and her fingers trailed down his chest and stomach. He kept still and slowly he came out the other side into a new place of electric arousal, his entire body taut and coiled and wanting.
Her mouth drew long silken lines up and down his neck. Her fingernails in his chest hair. The tightening and release of his belt, the metallic whisper of the zipper on his jeans. She pushed them down, helped him out as he had for her. Then he was naked in front of her and he was hard, so hard in her warm, eager hands. A moan escaped his chest, knuckles tightening white on the desk top. “Dais.”
“Let me,” she whispered.
He let her. And she got him. She was good at him. As nights gathered into weeks, she made both his teeth chatter and his toes curl. She could make him come like a freight train, or come in slow motion. Climax laced with emotional intensity made him lose his mind, and in the divine insanity, he became expressively fearless. Verbally uninhibited. Things he had never imagined saying to a girl came tumbling forth unchecked.
“I want to kiss you until I die.” Which was the truth.
“Your mouth feels amazing.” She was going down on him, the warm wet of her tongue and throat advancing and reatreating like the tide, her head dipping and bobbing under his hand. The words floated out of him into the dark and her response was a fiercely pleased sigh from deep in her chest.
“I love watching you come.” Another one—in his head and right out his mouth. She took his hand, slid it due south down her stomach, her hips yearning up and her knees swooning open, and she whispered, “Do it again.”
“You taste so good.” He groaned it one trembling night when he finally got into her sweetness, a tart rush along the roof of his mouth and the back of his tongue. Her palm heavy on his crown, her fingers threaded in his hair. Her shoulder blades plowing furrows in the mattress and her calves warm and smooth on his shoulders. He practically hummed with contentment as he drank her in, feeling her unfold and shiver, closing his eyes as she came against his mouth.
“Let me get this straight,” she said a little while later. “I’m supposed to leave this room, dance thirty hours a week, earn a BFA and get an education… All the while knowing you can do that to me?”
“Mm-hm.” Her body limp in his arms and her taste lingering on his tongue, Erik was swaying in a hammock of perfect contentment. “Any time you want.”
Daisy rose up on her elbow, eyebrows wrinkled. “I’m so f*cked.”
Staring up at her, he felt his face widen in a grin of wicked delight. He reached his hand into her tangled hair and pulled her face to his.
“Me, too,” he whispered.
Prince Henry The Navigator
The month of December brought what Will called Nutcracker Mercenary Season. Private ballet schools around Philadelphia were getting their Nutcrackers ready, and they needed experienced dancers for the more difficult roles in the second act—always Sugarplum and Cavalier, sometimes a Dewdrop for the iconic flower waltz. They came scouting around the conservatory, looking for hired guns.
“It’s a stupid easy gig,” Will said. “One or two rehearsals a week, a few on weekends. The choreography is never complicated and you’re only doing the second act anyway. In and out. It’s good exposure and you earn a couple hundred bucks. Win-win all around.”
Daisy and Will landed Sugarplum and Cavalier at a school in Ardmore. The whole entourage—Erik, Lucky, David, Marie and Kees—turned out to watch the Saturday evening performance, which happened to coincide with Daisy’s eighteenth birthday.
Daisy’s parents came, too. They all stood around the lobby at intermission, talking and chatting easily. This was Erik’s second time seeing them, the first back at the fall dance concert. He felt it had gone well, and tonight Francine Bianco had hugged and kissed him, which was an encouraging sign.
Francine had once danced with the Paris Opera. She now ran the orchard, raising chickens, ducks and organic produce, but she still looked and carried herself like a dancer. Her posture was impeccable. Her black hair, elegantly threaded with silver, was drawn up in a bun, showing her long neck. Standing with turned out feet, she was talking vigorous shop with Kees and Marie, switching effortlessly between French and English.