Page 8 of Dark Honey Mountain Man

Neither of us moves.

Anaya sets her bowl in the sink and comes back and stands in front of my chair with her knees against mine, the lamp behind her.

"I've been trying all day to decide if you'd hate it if I did this," she says.

"Do it and find out."

She puts her hands on my face. She reads it right, the way she's been reading me right all day, and waits.

Then I get my hands on her hips and pull her down onto my lap, one knee either side of me on the chair, and I kiss her.

Slow. I've learned what it costs to hurry a thing that comes once. She tastes like pepper and underneath that like herself, and she makes a sound against my mouth that I want again, so I take it again, harder, my hand up into her hair. She shifts on my lap until she's got herself where she wants it and grinds down through two layers of denim, and I let her do it twice before I stand up with her.

She wraps her legs around my waist and laughs into my throat, and I carry her the twelve feet it takes, because the whole cabin is one room and a bed in the corner and I built it that way on purpose too.

I put her down on the quilt and pull my shirt off, and she comes up on her elbows and looks at me with her hair a wreck and her mouth already swollen.

"Shirt off," I say. "Bra too. Slow — I've been looking at you all day through a veil."

She does it with her eyes on my face the whole time, because she likes what she's finding there and she wants me to know she knows. Warm brown skin, gold in the lamplight. A scar under her left ribs I'll ask about later. Her nipples go tight in the cold coming off the window and I put my mouth on one and she says my name on an intake of breath.

"Again," I say against her.

"Heath—"

"That's it."

I get her jeans off, down and off her ankles onto the floor. Her underwear goes after them. Then I put my hands on her knees and push them open and look at her for as long as I want, which is longer than most people would think was polite.

"You're very quiet," she says. Wry, and not steady.

"Wider."

She does it.

"Good girl." I take hold of her thighs and hold them where I put them. "Now hold still. I'm going to eat you until you can't hold still, and then I'm going to hold you still myself, and then you're going to come on my tongue before I put anything else in you. That's the order."

She looks down the length of her own body at me, and whatever she was going to say about how many words that was, she loses it.

I put my mouth on the inside of her thigh. Then higher. Then on her pussy.

She's soaking and she tastes clean and salt and I take my time. Tongue flat and slow, the whole length of her, then narrow at the top where she lifts for it. When I find the rhythm that gets her hips off the bed I stay in it. That's the whole trick — people change what they're doing the second it starts working, and I've never understood that.

She gets a fist in my hair and pulls hard enough to sting, and I let her, and I put two fingers in her while she does.

"Oh! Oh, that's—"

I curl them and find the place that makes her stomach go tight and I stay on it and keep my mouth exactly where it is. Her thighs start closing on my ears. I get an arm across her hips and hold her down flat on the quilt and don't let her move at all until she’s a mess. Then she goes rigid and comes on my tongue with her heels dug in and her hand fisted in my hair.

I work her through it. I don't let up until she's pushing at my forehead with the heel of her hand.

"Okay. Okay — come here, come here."

Then I get over her and push in.

She takes all of my cock on one long exhale, and I stop there with my forearms braced either side of her head because if I move right away this is over.

"Fuck," she says.