Page 9 of Once Upon a Dream
I pause.
It’s a good answer.
And it may even be the right one.
“But is that enough?” I ask, still feeling the warmth of his finger against my mouth. A single fingertip on my lip, and it feels like the reassuring weight of gravity, like the idea of love itself in one small touch.
“Are you asking me if it’s enough for all women everywhere or just you?”
“I don’t know,” I say. Because I believe him when he says he would never ask anything to change. I would still be Morgan Leffey, Vice President, I would still be the same person in public I’ve always been.
“Let me show you it will be enough,” he whispers, his finger sanding lightly over the curve of my lower lip. “Let me show you one more time.”
I look past his shoulder to the party beyond our veiled alcove. No one notices us, and no one would be able to truly decipher what we were doing without stopping and staring. And somewhere out there my Secret Service detail is patrolling the perimeter and keeping any would-be documentarians at bay. The detail knows where I’m at, just as surely as they know what I’m doing, but after a few years of them escorting me to Lyonesse, I’m no longer shy about where I get my kicks.
I’m feeling shyer about admitting what I’m about to admit. “I want you to show me,” I confess. And then I confess something even worse: “I’ve missed it, Lorne. So fucking much.”
“I know,” he murmurs, and then he replaces his finger with his mouth and kisses me again. Long...slow kisses while his hand moves from my sex to the opening of his tuxedo pants.
I feel the moment he frees himself, I feel the idle stroke he gives it before he reaches into his jacket pocket and withdraws a small foil packet. He sheathes himself with a practiced hand, and I break off our kiss so I can watch. There’s just something about someone rolling a condom over their cock. I can’t explain it. The experience it belies, maybe? Or maybe it’s utilitarianism of it, this stark, practical confirmation that penetration is imminent? Or maybe it’s just the sight itself: an already delicious cock shining with clear latex, its shaft now a slick topography of veins and flares, rigidity and give.
Finished, Lorne lifts my thigh to his hip, and pushes the front of my dress up to my waist. The silk underthings are tugged to the side, and then he’s pressing against me, all thickness and heat against my opening. But he doesn’t push inside, not yet.
Instead, he threads his fingers through my hair and pulls—gently enough that it doesn’t hurt, but hard enough that I have to look where he’s making me look. Down to where we’re about to be joined, framed by tulle and tuxedo, lit by sparkling lights and by the glow of the chandeliers outside our alcove. There’
s no mistaking what’s about to happen, there’s no mistaking what’s coming next, and that’s the point.
“A choice, Morgan,” he repeats softly. “Your choice.”
I don’t have any answers…but maybe I finally have different questions. And that’s a start, if nothing else.
“My choice,” I tell him. “Yes.”
Lorne says nothing, but I feel his satisfaction with my answer like a living thing, pulsing in the air around us.
And then he pierces my body with his own.
He spreads me—stretches me—an upward stroke that steals my breath and then a slow withdrawal that steals it once more. He keeps a hand in my hair and another under my thigh, his jaw going tight as he spears me again. Fully this time, burying himself in my belly like it’s been his all along. Like he’s claiming what he’s owed—four years apart be damned, divorce be damned, my stubborn refusal to submit be damned.
“God, you feel—” His eyes flutter shut for the briefest of seconds, long, sooty eyelashes resting against the edge of his mask.
Then he opens his eyes again and stares at me, all amber heat and dark lust. “You feel good, my little witch.” He drives in again—hard, hard—sending me to my toes. “Fuck. I’ve missed it. Missed this pretty cunt. Missed these green eyes flashing at me, like you can’t decide whether you want to hiss or purr. There’s nothing like fucking you,” he growls as he rams himself inside me once again. “Nothing.”
Now that he’s fit himself to me, now that he’s mapped me anew, he starts going rough. Vicious. Not the rapid pounding of a youth chasing his own pleasure, but the hungry, brutal strokes of a Dominant partner too long denied.
It takes me a minute to sort out the pain from the pleasure, the using from the choosing, and it’s a feeling I can’t describe, except to say that it’s every feeling all at once. It’s every feeling pouring out of my adrenal system and ovaries in a heady cocktail of chemicals, leaching right into my very blood. Soaking my heart.
And then it’s there.
The thing underneath it all, which is something like completion, except it’s not completion necessarily, and neither is it satiety, because I want more and more and more of it and the wanting is part of the feeling too.
It’s more like...serenity. Or ecstasy. No matter how different those two things might seem on the surface, they are twins at the root. They are both a rightness of self, a rightness of the world.
A rightness so deep that even my bones feel right. My cells, my mitochondria.
Everything is curled up in bliss and singing with happiness to be fucked like this. To be Lorne’s again. However briefly.
“You were going to give this to a stranger,” Lorne breathes, biting at my neck as he pumps into me. “You were going to go to a stranger when I was right here, when you have an ex-husband who could give you exactly what you needed.”
