Alice Close Your Eyes by Averil Dean Read Free Book Online Page B

music has changed. The singer chants an impatient bridge,
punctuated by a pop-slide in an eerie minor key as the bra straps stutter down
my arms. The chorus rises, driving and sensual, a low hum of synthesized bass
guitar buzzing underneath the melody. A breath of night-chilled air drifts over
my breasts, crinkling the tips, tightening my skin.
    A slow smile creeps across his lips when he sees the hoop in my
left nipple. He rises and strips to his boxers. And this time he doesn’t have to
speak. I shimmy out of my skirt and sit with my knees pressed together,
shivering, untethered, enduring his long visual exploration. His face is
half-hidden, divided down the center by shadow and light.
    Now look at you...look at
you....
    I let him ease my thighs apart. His gaze falls, locked between
my legs. A groan rumbles in his chest when he sees the tattoo low on my abdomen,
just above the smooth mound of my pubis: ~ Make it
hurt ~ He passes a thumb over the letters, then dips again into the
slippery heat between my legs, his fingertips circling, deepening, nudging at my
cunt. He kisses the tip of my breast and flicks the silver hoop with his
tongue.
    “What are you about, hmm?” he says, and sucks my nipple into
his mouth. The metal ring clicks against his teeth.
    But I can’t answer. I arch my back and turn my face aside. A
coil of desire constricts at the base of my belly.
    He eases me back, lays a chain of kisses around my breast, down
my ribs, into the shallow dip beside my pelvic bone and finally to the liquid
heat between my legs.
    Our floating room begins to spin. I am strangely disembodied,
as though all my senses, all my pain and pleasure and naked want, are
concentrated under the warmth of his mouth. I claw at the blankets and bunch
them in my fists. But when I sink my fingers into his hair, he catches my wrists
and pins them at my sides, muttering under his breath, his teeth grazing my
clitoris. With the anchor of his mouth to hold me in place, I wind around him
like a tetherball on a rope, in dizzying spirals that lift me to his mouth.
    “Come on, baby,” he says. “Right now...”
    His voice vibrates against me, and in the last moment it is his
breath, the lightest touch of cold and heat, that topples me. I leap under his
mouth, my wrists still pinned to the bed, my cries sailing into the night. He
follows me, groaning with pride and dark male glee. His tongue flattens over me,
dips inside me, drinks me in so thoroughly that I soar up again, simply from the
idea of being consumed this way.
    As the room spins to a halt, I realize my eyelashes are wet
with tears.
    Jack kneels between my knees and rolls on a condom. The light
skims across his body, painting long, striped shadows in the grooves of his
abdomen. He slides inside me without a word, without preamble, driving his hips
forward, pulling me to him with one hand splayed against the small of my back. A
breath snags in my throat at the size of him.
    He stops, the muscle in his jaw flexed and quivering.
    “Jesus,” he says. “So fucking tight. Be still.”
    After a moment, he begins to move, his hips rolling to the
undercurrent of music and the elemental motion of the water beneath us. I wrap
my legs around his narrow waist and pull him closer. We fall into a deep, slow
rhythm. Each gliding thrust is an incantation in a language I don’t understand.
My whole body strains, listening. And from the back of my mind, from some small
and lonesome and untouchable place, I seem to hear my own voice chanting in
time.
    I want to go home, I want to go
home.
    * * *
    It rains again that night. Jack turns off the music so
we can listen to the drops on the roof and the surface of the ocean. The sound
forms a soft cocoon around us, a background noise to the steady thrum of his
heartbeat under my ear.
    “Tell me a secret.” His voice rumbles as if from the inside of
a bass drum. “Something no one else knows.”
    “I like to keep my secrets,” I tell him.
    He slips out from