Keeper of the Light

She drew away from him and took his hand, leading him up the stairs, down the hallway, and by the time they’d reached the dark refuge of her room, she had lost control. She sat down on the edge of her bed and turned to unzip his jeans, drawing her hands inside and bringing his erect penis to her lips.

Alec caught his breath. “Christ, Olivia.” His fingers combed through her hair, down the nape of her neck and up again, while she worked feverishly at his body. She barely heard him when he asked her to stop. The request was gentle, almost polite, and he repeated it as he pulled away from her.

She was shaking, uncertain if she had done something wildly inappropriate in his eyes, or if he was about to leave her again. He would tell her they were both too vulnerable. Walk out her door. She looked up at him. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

He sat down next to her on the bed, his arm around her shoulders. “Nothing’s wrong,” he said. “You just surprised me. I wasn’t expecting…that, exactly, and it’s been a very long time for me. If you were to keep on doing what you were doing, it would all be over in seconds, and I’m not that anxious to get this over with.” He stroked his fingers over the skin beneath her eyes. “Why are you crying?”

She touched her fingertips to her eyes and felt the wetness. “I don’t know,” she whispered.

He leaned over to kiss her, softly—too softly; she could not tolerate moving this slowly—and she deepened the kiss with her tongue as she turned to straddle his thigh.

Alec ran his hands under her nightgown, up her thighs. He leaned back to look up at her. “Are you always like this?” he asked. “Or is it just that you’ve gone without for too long?”

“I’m always like this,” she said, tugging his rugby shirt out of his jeans.

He laughed, shifting her off his thigh and back to the bed. He stood up, and she watched him as he undressed. Her curtains let in the pool of moonlight reflected off the sound, and she could see the distinct lines on his body, separating dark from light, the public Alec from the private. His stomach was tight and ridged with muscle, and she imagined his erect penis was still glistening from her attempt to please him.

She rose to her knees on the bed and took off her robe, but when she reached for the hem of her nightgown, he caught her hands.

“Leave it on,” he said, closing his arms around her.

He didn’t want to see her body. She imagined how her rounded belly would look to him in the white light of the moon.

Alec bent down to take the hem of the nightgown in his own hands. He lifted it up, his palms running slowly over her thighs and hips. The cotton caught softly on her nipples as he raised the nightgown over her breasts, then over her head, until she stood as she had weeks earlier, naked and ready in his arms. He began kissing her again, and now there was a hunger, a heat in his mouth that she welcomed, that she shared. He stroked her body as they kissed, his hands skimming over her shoulders, her breasts, her hips. He slipped his hand between her legs, and despite the fact that he had seemed driven only seconds earlier, his fingers were tender as first they probed, then began stroking her, so softly that she groaned and pressed against his hand for more.

“Sit down,” he said, and she lowered herself to the bed. He laid her back on the blanket and then knelt by the side of the bed, drawing her legs over his shoulders and letting his mouth finish the work of his hands. She understood immediately what he had meant about it being over too quickly. It had been so long since she’d been touched this way, this intimately. Her orgasm was sudden, and almost unbearably intense, bringing with it a fresh rash of tears she didn’t understand.

He lifted her more fully onto the bed and was quickly inside her, pinning her beneath him in a way that gave her one brief, irrational moment of panic, that made her wonder if he was still angry. No. The thrusting of his body was careful and controlled, and it felt good. Very good. He moved in a way that was new to her, with a depth and pressure that took her straight back to a climax and renewed her weeping as she wrapped her legs around him to spur him on to his own release.

The stillness of the room was nearly overwhelming after the frenzied activity of the last few minutes. She tried to keep the sound of her tears out of her breathing. She did not want him to know. He had touched her everywhere. He had explored her body in intimate ways, yet he had carefully avoided her stomach, carefully avoided the evidence of her husband.

She turned her head to kiss his jaw. He was so still, so quiet.

He lifted himself from her before she was ready to lose him, briefly touching his lips to her forehead as he slipped out of her and rolled onto his back. His semen seeped from her body to the blanket, and the cool air of the house hit the dampness of her skin and made her shiver.

“Alec?” she said softly.

He found her hand in the darkness and held it on his stomach. “I didn’t leave a note for Lacey,” he said. “I should probably get going.”

He sounded empty. She closed her eyes. “What was this all about?” she asked quietly, forcing the words past the tightness in her throat. “Why did you come here tonight? Was it vengeance? Were you using me because you thought I used you?”

He raised himself up on his elbow to look at her. The reflected moonlight filled his eyes, made them look like translucent glass, blue marbles. “Did you feel used?” he asked. “Is that how it felt to you?”

She shook her head. “But you seem very distant. You seem…let down, as though it was Annie you wanted and Olivia you got, and I just don’t measure up in bed any more than I did in her studio.”

“Olivia,” he said, his voice a quiet reprimand. He smoothed her hair back from her face.

She drew the edge of the blanket over her breasts. “When Paul and I made love back in April, he told me he had to imagine I was Annie before he could…feel anything. I thought maybe that’s what you were doing, and then…”

Alec interrupted her. “Oh, Olivia,” he said, smiling. He shifted a little on the bed so there was more blanket for her, and he tucked it beneath her shoulders. “Do you ever have it wrong. Want to hear how wrong you have it?”

She nodded.