This is her challenge, her demon. How has she lasted more than a decade without the touch – or even the desire – to touch a man only to find herself needing it now? She knows not of how gratifying – how satisfying – it could be. There are hundreds others who curl into a lover daily, wanting the closeness, and nothing happens to them, and yet she hesitates when the opportunity is standing at her side with his hot breath hovering above her flesh. Lust poisons her and burns her veins like liquid fire, but still she doesn’t move. Their eyes lock on each other, but she doesn’t succumb to their sinful desires. It would be worth it, they tell themselves, but it’s a stalemate as they idly wait for the opposite to make a move.
He wants her to reach for him and to cradle his skin in the curve of her lips. This is the mountain that she has been working to scale for months, and so he leaves it to her to complete it and to grapple her hesitations and fears. It’s honorable of him, really, to make this so easy. He is only inches away and her skin tingles with anticipation, but he mirrors her and doesn’t lean in. There isn’t even a ripple between them. Silence, stagnant. She can hear their breathing as it synchronizes; she can almost hear the drumming of his heart if it were not for her own pulse roaring in her ears.
Touch him, she tells herself. This has gone on for far too long; a touch means nothing (or has the potential to).
But she would be weak to submit and she would never be able to take it back.
And he would be so smug to know that he was the first to ever kiss her virgin skin.
The voice in her mind is screaming now to reach over and press her cheek into the curve of his shoulder or the arch of his neck. They could be powerful together; they would be a raging inferno, unstoppable.
Nayl smiles up at him with an unfamiliar compassion that has never before subdued the fire in her soul. This time, she doesn’t even try to mask it. A lopsided smile and a tilt of her head brings them almost closer. The nearness is enthralling and she begins leaning toward him, their groins frustrated with lust and need for one another. A breath is sighed across his neck and her eyes slowly blink to savor and enjoy this eternal moment. ”I want to,” she confides with a meager hint of desperation in her voice. Everything has been leading up to this and he is so close, and they both hunger for the same thing. Slowly, tantalizingly, she glides her lips just barely above his damp skin and reaches up to his jaw, then his ears. She breathes him in, noting the hints of forest and women and pond water. Never did she think she would find him so addictive, but here she is, unable to step away from him in the heat of their intimacy.
Do it, he urges eagerly, and with her mouth nearly pressed to his ear, she whispers, ”If only you were wholly mine.” She can’t share – won’t share – and she sighs as her chin drops away from his rigid face to look away toward the direction from whence she came. ”And there is no one like you, Stillwater,” she admits painfully without even looking at him as she takes a sluggish step away, peeling apart reluctantly. The chill that reaches her side from where he was reminds her of how lonely she has made herself to be.
|
