Page 11 of Glitterland
I could feel his heart beating over mine, just as quick and hard.
“Your hands,” I muttered into his mouth. “Touch me with your hands.”
He made a soft sound I couldn’t interpret and couldn’t be bothered to think about, and his fingers fumbled at my trousers. I bit at his mouth in heedless impatience and then bit him again when he got his hand partially round me. Cool skin to burning, his palm as soft as falling snow, his grip exactly as hard as I needed, it was the sort of relief that becomes its own torture. And yet it was so unbearably exquisite that I had to pull away from his mouth. I pressed my face into his neck, shuddered and moaned. And when that wasn’t enough, I dug my fingers into his biceps, hard enough that I felt the flesh yield even through his jacket.
It was a helpless free fall into pleasure. But he held me up, his other arm wound about my waist. And I let him, and I didn’t care. I could have come like this, thrusting myself into his hand, my every breath sobbing out its ugly symphony into his oblivious skin. I lifted my head, eyes opening long enough to see the way his lashes cast shadows over his cheeks, his pale, kiss-swollen lips.
“Fuck me,” I said, grabbing his wrist.
In the sudden stillness of our bodies, I realised the heat against my hip was the outline of his cock pressing against his jeans. It couldn’t have been comfortable.
“Oh…err…” he said, unsteadily. “Yeah, ahwight.”
Tearing at our clothes, we tumbled onto the mattress, sending it into a wild skid across the floor. Essex landed on me, cackling breathlessly like we were at the fairground. Irritating. But the pressure of his body against mine was bliss itself. He pushed himself to his knees and threw the jacket off his shoulders, followed by his T-shirt. I gazed up at the thick bands of shadow that streaked his torso as he moved. It was like looking at him through the bars of a prison cell and I suddenly regretted the lack of light. I reached up and stroked my hands over his shoulders, curving my palms about his shoulder blades. His skin was as smooth as the hidden interior of a shell and as supple as velvet as it flowed over the taut muscles of his back.
He made another of his soft, uncertain noises and then clambered to his feet. In tantalising silhouette, I watched him yank off his boots and wriggle out of his jeans. I peeled off my jacket and waistcoat and threw them aside.
“You always wear all that?” he asked, tugging off my trousers and, with them, thankfully, my boxers—which I’d just remembered were silk, with a garish pattern of peacock feathers. They’d been a joke gift from Niall, back when we had jokes. A poor laundry ethic, and a conviction that nobody would see them, had been the only factors that had induced me to wear them tonight.
“Yes,” I said, plucking at the buttons on my shirt. “All the time. Even in the bath.”
He was laughing again, as his hands covered mine and finished the job for me. I didn’t like being naked with strangers, which was awkward because I rather liked fucking them, but the darkness felt as cool and light as another layer of skin, keeping me safe from his eyes. I flung a leg over his hip and pulled him down on top of me. The naked heat of his body against mine was nothing short of rapturous. Sinuous had been entirely correct. He was a silken serpent of a man. Oh, God. Arching up, I rubbed myself against him with all the finesse of a rutting hog, sparks of light dancing across my vision.
“Wow.” He breathed the word in the hushed voice most reserved for art galleries or churches. “You really wannit, babes.”
“Yes,” I said, not caring and clinging to him. “Yes. I really want it. Now fuck me.”
“Lemme get summin.”
Forgetting his earlier warning, I twisted my fingers through his hair, ruining whatever was left of his quiff. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Gotta be safe, babes.”
I spread my legs under him and thrust my cock against his, making him gasp. “Don’t let me go.”
He kissed me. I don’t know what he was aiming for but, in the gloom and the confused tangle of our bodies, it landed on my nose. “I won’t,” he whispered, dragging himself out of my arms. A pathetic noise clawed out my throat. “I’m just over ’ere.”
I shivered, cold without him, newly lost.
I heard his feet scampering urgently across the room and then, from somewhere off to the right, there came the sort of sound a six-foot man might make falling over a pair of shoes. “Oh, no,” he said. “What am I like?”
And then something very strange happened.
It was like a piece of me snapped into, or out of, alignment.
I laughed.
An awful, rusty noise that made me cover my mouth in shock.
“Shuh up!” protested Essex from somewhere on the floor, but it didn’t seem as if he minded.
Except I couldn’t seem to stop. I curled into a ball on the mattress, shaking and laughing.
“I said shuh up.” He was back, his body curving round mine, his breath warm against my neck. “Or I won’t.”
“W-won’t what?”
“What you said.”
