Pam Rosenthal - The Slightest Provocation

Because with all the tricks and goads, the embellishments and elaborations, it was as though they’d made these movements yesterday, or last night, or (as once they might have) every afternoon for a month at least.

He’d begun thrusting more quickly now-forceful, demanding, joyfully exuberant-well, there really wasn’t any word you could substitute, could you, for joy ? She clasped her arms around his waist, crushed her breasts against the side of the bed, arched her back, pressed her flanks hard against his legs. Parting her knees, to plant herself more squarely upon them-savoring the moans she’d wrought from him, tremors at the root of his cock.

He wanted her throat now; she could feel coarse hairs pressed against her lips. Breathing deeply through her nose, his darkest, mossiest smells. She could smell-no, she could taste -the salt of his sweat and (ranker, saltier) the semen coursing up from him; it would overwhelm her, spill out from her lips…

No it wouldn’t. For she was taking him. Take him, drink him, breathe him, swallow him, have him, drown in him. Wash up to shore now, in his lap.

She heard his contented and very self-satisfied sigh just as she’d begun to think she’d really be a great deal more comfortable next to him on the bed, rather than collapsed all on the floor between his legs, on that not-so-nice little rug.

“Come up here.” He stretched out a hand. They arranged themselves somewhat charily, for he still had his boots on, and there wouldn’t be any servants to change the linen.

“You’ve got many too many clothes on.” Her voice came out a bit muffled, for she’d whispered it into his shirt, where his neck met his shoulder. She raised her head. “Well, it’s not very fair to me, is it?”

“Are we playing fair?” One of his hands was cupped over her quim, the tips of his fingers moving slowly over the place where the lips met, and sometimes straying down over her thighs.

“ You aren’t,” she told him. “Not at this moment. Not… oh, my word, Kit.” For there are moments when the smallest, simplest fingertip touch-from a lover who knows just where-is all that’s needed. She nestled into his side. How lovely, she thought-in some last moment when it was still possible to think. She spread her legs, stretched her back and arms, and took up all the room she could. To enjoy it completely.

“I should apologize,” he said sometime later, “for how things went in Calais. It wasn’t the right way to meet each other after so long.”

“I expect you should,” she replied. “Are you? Apologizing, I mean.”

“More like saying I should.”

“That’s like you. Are you going to tell me about what you’ve been doing since you arrived here? Oh yes, and who was the man that Peggy saw anyway? Will you tell me any of that?”

“Do you want me to?”

“Yes, I think so. Sometime. Not right now.” She raised her head. “Because right now it’s time to get you out of your clothes,” she told him. “Sit up.”

She straddled his legs. He kept his face cool and noncommittal as she unknotted his neckcloth, unbuttoned his shirt, and rose on her knees to pull it over his head.

Hesitating now, for in truth she was fearful of what she’d find. And it did come as a shock, how long and livid the scar was, the stretched and puckered flesh snaked from shoulder to collarbone and almost to his neck.

She tried to hide her dismay, to keep her voice light and her expression unconcerned. “Well, I expect we’re both a bit worse for wear.”

Too late for her to offer comfort.

He shrugged. “Worse for not knowing how to stay out of harm’s way, one’s first real time in battle.”

Nor would he offer any comfort to her.

She slid back and off the bed, standing on the floor in front of him again. Chin tilted and hands on hips. “And about them boots, Major Stansell? I’m good with boots, you know, sir.”

Coyness and posturing didn’t suit her, but it was the best she could do at the moment.

He shrugged, almost grimaced, and managed a smile instead. “Yes, I do know. You’d have made a good batman. Well, come on, then, be quick about it. There’s a good fellow.”

Even when he hadn’t cared much about clothes, he’d liked a good pair of boots. And so she’d gotten good at boots, in order to have them off him quickly.

She knelt at his feet while he braced himself against the bed. Gripping the toe of his right boot with her left hand and the heel with her right, she gave a light tug, being sure to pay close attention to the angle of her hands and his foot. The boot slid off easily, and she grinned up at him.

“Nothing simpler. The left boot now, if it please my lord major.”

But the left, in the inevitable way of an intractable world, refused to budge. She shouldn’t have been so cocky over her first success. Nor allowed herself a dizzying breath of the leather’s oily perfume, darker and more redolent as her palms grew hotter and more slippery.

For that matter, she shouldn’t have stolen that little glance up at him, his eyes so calmly fixed upon her breasts, which would continue their stupid fleshy jiggling, the harder she tugged at the damn, bloody, sodding left boot.

When had she begun muttering to herself?

“Now, now,” he chided her. “Can’t allow my batman such indecent vocabulary. Filthiest language I’ve heard since I poked my head in on the Penley sisters having their tea.”

She snorted. “Don’t make me laugh, Kit, or I’ll never get this damn thing off you.”

There was nothing for it, finally, but for her to straddle his outstretched left leg with her derriere indecorously turned toward his face. She sighed and he laughed at her. Let’s just get this over with, she thought.

She held tight to the infuriating left boot.

He’d pulled the stocking from his bootless right foot. “Less slipping about this way,” he explained, as he propped the sole of the warm and lively foot against her bum.

He wriggled his toes a bit. “Now, when I count three …”

She and the boot would both have gone flying across the room if he hadn’t caught her around the middle-hands squeezing her breasts; mouth against her neck; cock hard and impatient once more.

She might lose every remaining shred of dignity if she were to continue rubbing back against him so crudely. She dropped the boot onto the floor and he loosened his hands from around her.

“Let’s do this properly,” he said.

He made short work of pantaloons, drawers, and his other stocking. Gloriously naked at last, he took the briefest of moments to preen for her before sweeping back the quilt with an extravagant flourish that made her giggle, and putting out his hand.

She took it. “Dance for me,” he said.

Nodding silently, moving slowly, while the years swirled and dissolved around them.

He propped his head against the pillows and put a hand on each of her hips. His broad chest, coarse whorls of black hair interrupted by the vicious scar, rose and fell with his breath as he prodded her to straddle him, to open herself and grasp and envelop him. Not that much prodding was necessary-his hands, her hips, the pulse in his throat and the flesh rising and stiffening at the apex of her vulva, were all caught suspended in an aching sweetness of shared movement and slow time.

Rising, she almost lifted herself off him. He shuddered, whistled through his teeth. She lowered herself as slowly as she could, coming back to rest against him, her arse against his hips and belly.