Page 25 of Misadventures in Blue
And now my throat is so tight I can barely breathe.
I begin unbuttoning her uniform shirt, taking care to keep my fingers from grazing against the silky fabric of her expensive athletic shirt underneath. Once I get the top few buttons undone, I can access the hidden zipper behind the placket of dummy buttons and unfasten the shirt all the way. I pull it from her arms and then drape it over the towel bar.
Next come her boots, which I unlace and gently remove, as if I’m handling glass slippers and not steel-toed footwear. She flinches when I get to her socks—I imagine in Cat’s head, someone seeing and interacting with something as shamefully human as her socks is very embarrassing—but I don’t let her move away. I’m not afraid of her socks. And nothing about her wonderful body should make her shy. After pulling the socks free, I give her bare feet several kisses to prove it.
I nudge her off the counter and remove her belt and pants, which also go over the towel bar, and now she’s only in her undershirt and panties.
“Do you trust me?” I ask again, and she knows what I’m asking. Does she trust me not to make this sexual? Does she trust that I’m not doing this for me but for her?
She nods.
And then I strip her completely bare.
It’s the first time I’ve seen her naked, and even though I ignore my erection, my body’s response to her unclothed form is like being struck by lightning. Heat everywhere. Light behind my eyelids. My life poised on a razor’s edge.
She’s porcelain, rare and precious.
Her breasts are little teardrops, still pert and high on her chest and tipped with pale-pink nipples. A narrow waist curves in and then gently flares into her hips, and an adorable navel studs her belly along with a couple tempting freckles. Below that belly is the sweet cup of her pussy, covered by neatly—almost primly—trimmed blond curls.
But she’s also so real. There’s a few thin white streaks along her hips and on the sides of her breasts—the kind of stretch marks that come from living, not from babies—and a small curve below her navel that softens her belly out of true flatness. Slightly too-large areolas and a little mole under one breast.
She’s real. And perfect.
I pull her into me and kiss her hairline because I can’t not kiss it.
“You’re so fucking beautiful it hurts to look at you,” I say roughly.
She only rubs her face against my still-clothed chest in answer.
I step back and quickly undress, doing my best to ignore the throbbing erection currently aimed at the ceiling. I turn on the shower and coax her inside once it’s warm.
I start washing her. Methodically, scrupulously. Avoiding the stiff buds of her nipples and the plump weight of her ass and the silky curls between her legs. Instead, I focus on her arms and her legs and her feet. I spend a long time soaping up her back and shoulders and then kneading her tight muscles until she’s limp and heavy-eyed. The familiar smell of my body wash rises all around the shower stall, mixed with something fragrant and female that is uniquely her. I wish we had her soap here, her scents, but at the same time, I can’t deny the primitive pleasure in having her covered in my own. Marking her skin with my smell.
After her body, I wash her hair.
I mean for it to be comforting, soothing, and maybe it is at first. As I pull her hair free from her ponytail with solicitous care—making sure not to yank or tug—and as I begin working the shampoo into her hair, she makes low, happy noises in her throat and leans back against me. For a while, it seems like she’s practically purring under my touch, and I make sure to massage her scalp as I work. To pamper her.
But after I rinse the conditioner from her hair, I notice that her shoulders are hitching in barely perceptible jerks, rising and falling in the suppressed, shuddering way of someone trying to hide their tears.
She’s finally letting it out.
“Cat, baby,” I say, turning her so that she can bury her face in my chest again, which is what she does. I wrap my arms around her and cradle her, my broad back shielding us from the spray as she sobs against me and I stroke her hair. She cries so hard that her entire body shakes, that she can barely breathe, and I wonder if she cries like this often.
I wonder if this is the first time she’s ever let herself cry about anything.
I chafe her back and kiss her wet hair that smells like my shampoo, and I simply hold her and let her use me. Use me as a safe place for her, use my arms and my chest and my silence. My strength and my body are hers. And I’m beginning to think my heart is too.
After a good ten or fifteen minutes, her sobs begin to space apart, quiet down into muted sniffles and sucks of breath, and she tilts her head to look up at me with owlish eyes still glassed over with tears.
“Thank you,” she whispers. I can barely hear it over the running water.
I give her temple a kiss in response, using every last shred of my control not to kiss her full on the mouth and stroke her tongue with my own. In fact, we’ve both been very maturely ignoring my hard-on as it dug into her back and stomach, knowing it was a lost cause. I’m a little proud of how well-behaved I’ve been, considering the naked, slick, emotional circumstances.
“You said you weren’t going to fuck me,” Cat says, reaching up to touch my face. I cradle her face in response, feeling the fragile flex and work of her jaw as she speaks. “What if I’ve changed my mind? And I want to be fucked?”
I peer down at her, water droplets dancing off my shoulders to make a heavy mist around us, and I study her expression through the haze. Study her aqua eyes, as open and vibrant as any tropical sea. Her mouth, which is currently in a shape of worried hope. Vulnerable excitement.
“We don’t have to,” I tell her. “I know I’m hard—that’s just what happens when I’m around you—but that doesn’t mean we have to do anything.”
