Chapter 6: The Sour Scent of Arousal

It wasn’t at all unpleasant, the knicks and flicks and slathering of soft velvet lips over skin that had never been coddled and petted and made to feel special, desired or even worthy. So much of what I knew about attraction was that it rose from some indefinable black hole, unquantifiable and mysterious.

That gave the draw between two beings a mystical quality, a purity of form and function.

And the only reason I waxed euphoric over arcane psychobabble was because the thing I feared most was happening.

Nothing…

Worse than…

Whatever shifted and stirred inside was parchment thin and oblivious to the stimulation systematically commanding my nerves to line up like good little soldiers and fire on command. It didn’t work … I didn’t work that way.

The odd thing was, I cared enough for my Dark Eyes, enough to claim her for my own, but not nearly so much that I was willing to allow liberties. And therein was the oxymoron.

You can’t hold back when nothing is what you seek to contain. She’d offered refuge, a place to crash, a date on a national holiday—a picnic for christ’s sake—and sustenance, prepared with a care I did not deserve, stirring guilt I’d thought I’d lost long before my head and heart recognized the true Finna.

Whoring my body in the service of my master came second nature. In some ways it created the mannequin that my targets fucked and abused according to their gifts and secret cravings. I’d gotten a rep along the way…

They died with a smile.

I died in increments, each bit painstakingly replaced by Richter until the whole became greater than the sum of its parts.

I was, in Richter’s terms … a piece of work.

In the end, it was endings I most enjoyed, not beginnings or that euphemistic journey, and that ran counterintuitive to how I approached an end game without revealing the real Finna.

Listening to her husky voice was too pleasant and too easy to ignore. It carried the hint of a rhumba, tarted up with inviting hips and a movement that promised heaven on earth. Squirming under her tender ministrations, I detached and allowed introspection to take the place of sensation.

“Finna…” She repeated my name, over and over and over, the effort hypnotic in its sensuality.

I reached deep into my inner reservoir of encouragements. “That’s nice.”  It was, very nice indeed. That’s why the lie and the truth were so hard to separate. “Yes, there…”

Dark Eyes massaged instead of caressed, a clever switch-up, rendering a modicum of pain in the pursuit of relaxation. Pain always got my attention. I licked my lips and repeated, “Niiiice,” drawing it out, then immediately regretting my lapse.

“Let me take this off.” Annie reached for the fleece tee-shirt, rolling it up, bottom toward the neckline. It inched precariously toward my breasts.

“No!” Fuck, easy Finn, easy girl. Don’t over-react. “I m-mean…” The stutter interrupted the progress her busy fingers were making on disrobing me completely. It was a mistake I could not allow.

“Chica, shh, it’s okay, baby.”

She straightened her shoulders and fondled her own spectacular globes, thick, bulbous and heavy—the kind men of every persuasion admired, the kind old women lived to rue. The aerolas were dark pinkish brown, a perfect counterpoint for tawny, golden skin. Once more it occurred she might have borne a pregnancy. It could account for the pigmentation and pronounced size. Not that I was an expert. But sometimes first impressions were dead on.

I wore clinical as an escape mechanism, suiting up when the barriers were breached. Even when I was the one breaching them.

Hissing, “Shit,” Annie squeezed and teased until I intervened, replacing her own blunt fingers with my longer, bony digits. I needed to keep her away from my secrets.

Bracing her hands on firm thighs, she invited the stimulation, but something in her canny gaze let me know she wasn’t going to be distracted for long. When she reached for the tee-shirt again, I mewled, half in jest, “Don’t or I’ll have to kill you.”

“Are they sensitive, honey?”

Sensitive? No, no they weren’t. Were they the ultimate turn-on when Richter attached the electrical leads, or weighted them to the point of exquisite agony, forcing me to adjust my stance in miniscule wavelets. Forward, ease off. Backward, clit and boobs engaged in a luscious tug-of-war that only Richter could win.

It was the price of admission to his playground, one I paid with a subscription fee to my soul and the promise of forever.

With tentative fingers, Annie reached once more to cup a breast. She oozed across my belly, leaving a trail of dampness that collided with the room’s conditioned air. I shivered. She took that as a yes, though every muscle, every millimeter of my skin contracted in panic.

Mesmerized by the slip of flesh on flesh, my reactions were too slow to thwart her. The tee rose and jammed against my chin, thrusting my arms in a cruel parody of crucifixion, fingers grappling with bedding as I bowed and skated the edge of sanity.

“Sweet Jesus.” A breath—inhaling, sucking it down, holding it. Expelling on a long, draw-out hiss of dismay. Disbelief.

“Who the fuck did this to you?”

Clever, Annie, not what or how. Who. The winner of the disgust lottery gets it in one.

Turning my head away, I mumbled, “Leave it,” and tried to wriggle from underneath her very solid weight. I might have half a foot on her but she massed close to my own weight, much of it muscle.

Mortified, I said the only thing that came to mind, “It’s none of your fucking business.”

She transferred her leverage to my wrists, pinning me in place. It was such a familiar, soothing sensation, I closed my eyes and imaged other hands, other weight, other lips and tongue making languid sweeps across my chin, my mouth, my eyelids.

Gentle, torturously beautiful, my Dark Eyes nested my narrow ribcage between fleshy thighs, firm thighs, powerful thighs, thighs so satiny smooth and sensual I near died for the wanting. She pinioned my sad excuses for breasts, rocking her clit in the shallow valley created by her clever manipulations.

It was warm and wet and so very, very good. Arousing to the point of awareness. Her thighs scissored until the channel mimicked my own, and her clit and the valley and the slick pendulum grinding, back and forth, back and forth, awoke long neglected sensation I felt clear through my belly to my groin.

She verbalized in precious little grunts as I slid underneath her body, bringing that nest of curls close enough to tease with my lips, urging her forward until lips and clit and moist folds aligned.

Releasing my wrists, she pressed her hands against the wall, leaving mine free to grasp her hips and hold her steady while I explored the taste, the scents, the strange contours so familiar, yet so foreign.

My Dark Eyes could never know the excruciating pleasures I could inflict, like papercuts to her psyche…

…snaking his tongue, fangs anchored in turgid flesh, the drip drip drip of fluid, a glorious cocktail of pinked secretions he’d share in long sweeps of his tongue…

Annie arched and quivered, her back bowed unnaturally, hands braced on my knees as I bit down, hard, and sucked…

…siphoning, snaking, rapid flicks, fingers… one… two… three… fisting, pummeling…

The elixir sloughed from tongue to gums to throat to belly to uterus to contractions that began somewhere, someplace, tight and rigid and ugly with the pain of waiting and wanting and then nothing, but nothing, in hell or heaven mattered but satisfying, letting go…

Oh god oh god oh god…

Fuck, fuck, fuck it’s so fucking good…

Sweat spilled and pooled … in the notch where bone and tendons joined, in the valley of my despair—her juices, my shame and badge of honor lubricating like a skewed parting gift. On her upper lip, above the pout, now slackened and pursed, sucking air.

We were both rode hard, put away wet. I was physically fitter, but not for this. Definitely not for this.

Unable to curl into a ball, my brain instead went fetal as we each came to our own conclusion as to what had just happened. The woman-as-goddess straddled me, cunt to groin. Dark eyes stared with compassion and anger and dismay.

I allowed her tentative touch on the scar.

“Finna, sweatheart. What…”

“It’s nothing, Annie.”

She tipped the hard nub on the right. The violation sent shock waves into my core.

“Was it an accident?”

“No.”

“Fucking hell, you mean somebody did this to you deliberately?”

I shrugged.

“Why?”

There was no reason to deny her. That anger and outrage and raw intensity of emotion washed over me like mini-orgasms, pleasant but short-lived. If she explored the scar, the ridges and puckers and outward reminders of the negative space crawling like an insidious virus across a fractal surface, it would cost me only a piece of my dignity. Not much of a loss when it would fulfill her mothering instincts.

For some reason, that seemed a fair trade-off.

She feathered the phantom nipple. It made me inordinately proud the amputation did not resonate with the muscle memory of arousal. It took far more than touch to do that now.

Persistent, she demanded again, “Tell me why.”

I let defiance and spite and inordinate pride coat my voice with a bravura she would not buy.

“It was a … souvenir.”