Delphine Dryden - Gossamer Wing

There were feelings and memories, and then there were fairy tales. “Women don’t have climaxes.”

Laughter was wholly inappropriate to the situation, she thought. And these were no chuckles from Dexter but a deep, genuine belly laugh.

“I assure you they do,” he said at last, wiping a tear against his shoulder.

“That’s a myth, invented by whores to make men feel like gods,” she replied, echoing the words she had overheard at a soiree, uttered among three married women who thought they were safe from eavesdroppers behind the cover of a large potted palm. She’d found it comforting to hear that, as she’d been worried she and Reginald hadn’t had time to get to all the important things and an orgasm would definitely qualify as an important thing to have missed.

Dexter shook his head, bemused. He moved his hand on her sex again, causing an almost unsettling amount of pleasure. Charlotte had expected him to stroke there a few times, then enter her and proceed as usual. She wasn’t sure what to make of this . . . playing for its own sake.

“I think I may well feel like a god when I make you come.”

He sat up, hand still in her lap, and knelt between her legs. Charlotte felt exposed, revealed in more ways than physically. She didn’t like not to know things. She didn’t like to feel a fool. But she found it difficult to resist a challenge, and even more difficult to resist the idea of being touched by this imposing man in her bed. Such an unlikely husband.

“Nonsense.” She already didn’t believe herself.

“So you feel nothing when I do this? Or . . . this?” He described a circle with his thumb on that most sensitive knot of nerves, and smiled like sin incarnate when she moaned. “Then I don’t suppose you’ll be bothered in the slightest if I kiss you there?”

Suiting the action to the word, he dipped his head and went to work. Charlotte could tell, even in her feverish agony of arousal, that he was very familiar with the whole business. He never hesitated, he knew precisely where to put his tongue and lips and fingers, where to suck and nibble and lick and plunge. And he observed, Charlotte noticed. He adjusted constantly, responding to her reactions in an escalating series of moves and countermoves. A skilled negotiation of her pleasure. She knew, before she was even at the brink of the crisis, that she had never been more wrong about anything in her life than she had been about this.

Dexter lifted his mouth away when she was trembling, staring at a precipice of sensation, ready to fling herself over but not sure how to do it. At the loss of stimulation, Charlotte made a noise that was nearly a growl. He chuckled again, but not in a mean-spirited way. If anything, he sounded delighted for her.

“Please. Please, Dexter, don’t . . . please do . . . I can’t . . .” She couldn’t find her words. They had all flown straight out of her head, and the only thing she could think of was more .

“But women don’t climax,” he reminded her.

She wanted to kill him. The smug bastard. But first she needed him to finish what he’d started. If he didn’t, she thought she might die.

“Please!”

“Well, since you’re begging.”

It took her a moment to find it again, the keen edge of that bliss. And then he moved his lips and fingers again just so, and she found it and was sliced clean through by it, lost to everything as her body showed her what it could do.

Despite what she had told him, she had always had her suspicions that there was more to the whole thing than the first gentle, then frantic though not unpleasant prodding she had experienced with Reginald. But she had never imagined anything like this.

“Please,” Charlotte whispered when she could form words again, as she watched him unbutton his trousers with frantic speed. She wasn’t even sure what she was asking for. She felt an aching emptiness, and then Dexter filled it. Filled her, body and soul. He had to push himself into her a little at a time, letting her adjust. It didn’t quite hurt, but it was unexpected. Different. Perhaps, she thought, each man really was a wholly new experience.

“So fucking tight,” he said roughly, sounding not at all displeased. “ God , Charlotte.”

His coarse words, his tension, communicated with that heat low in her belly, firing it again. Like a magical creature, hard to dispel once summoned, her arousal hovered where her body met his. She didn’t know what to do with it. This was nothing like those nights with Reginald, nothing at all. A different universe of experience. This would change everything. She felt it changing with every breath.

“Are you all right?”

He was still working deeper, languidly, and he raised himself to his elbows to look at her. Big hands framed her face, stroking her cheeks. Big shoulders blocked out her view of the dimly lit berth. Big body, splitting hers in two, so that she thought it should hurt and didn’t know how it could feel good. More insanity.

“Am I all right?” She wasn’t sure. Charlotte wasn’t even sure who she was in that moment, much less how that stranger felt. “Dexter, I can’t . . . I don’t know how.”

How to do this thing properly. Or how to speak, evidently.

He was driving the sense right out of her.

“You’re thinking too hard,” he reassured her. “Don’t think. Just let your body tell you what to do, sweet.”

Then he kissed her, which helped enormously. Soft and velvet, as gentle with his tongue as he was firm and determined between her legs. He finally hit her limit, somewhat before his own, and cursed softly against her lips.

“Move with me, Charlotte. Let me in. I’ll make it good for you, I promise.”

She believed him. She didn’t think. She moved, raising her legs to wrap over his hips, arching her back to get closer, and letting him in. They sighed together, stealing each other’s breath. The ship surged and so did they, until Charlotte’s senses were completely overwhelmed with Dexter. When she came again, writhing closer still to the source of the pleasure, he laughed that same delighted laugh.

“I don’t feel like a god,” he murmured into her ear. “I feel like I’m worshipping a goddess. Worshipping inside your body with mine.”

She might have wept at that, she wasn’t sure. It was too much. It did to her emotions what his touch had done to her body, changing the known universe in the blink of an eye.

When he followed her into bliss, finally collapsing exhausted and rolling her with him to keep them connected without crushing her, Charlotte clung to him like a barnacle. Unwilling to have it over, whatever this new thing was. But aware, somewhere in the back of her mind, that she had quite possibly made an error of such grave magnitude it could cost her everything.

THE OCEAN LINER ALBERTA , EN ROUTE FROM NEW YORK TO LE HAVRE

DEXTER HAD LIED. He had felt like a god. Seeing Charlotte shatter, tasting her surrender, had been a moment so rare Dexter could not help but be anxious lest he never manage to repeat it. Being inside her was pleasure beyond comprehension. He had felt more than godlike.

He had felt complete .

Dexter had rather thought he was already complete. To find at this juncture that he had evidently been missing something so significant was extremely unsettling.

Charlotte unsettled him. Her determination, her attempts to be solemn and businesslike when she was alone with him. She was obviously set upon the idea of mourning her late husband forever, as if she were duty bound to do so and deserved nothing else. Dexter thought Charlotte perhaps saw herself as broken. Beyond repair. Dexter didn’t think so. He wondered if she knew how much of her own clean, pure spirit shone through when she was acting out her little charade for the other passengers. Teasing and flirting and prancing about the ship as though she hadn’t a thought in her head or a care in the world. She looked as though she were rediscovering what it meant to have fun.