He cupped her ribcage and ran his thumbs underneath the fullness of each breast. Her nipples hardened in response to the attention. She stopped breathing.
“Saffron, those were some lucky babies.” Her breasts were much more than a handful, and the span of Leo’s splayed hands played teasingly over the lace encasings. He found her nipples, one at a time, stroking his thumbs over the wide aureoles.
Anna groaned, her thighs spread, her center poised over Leo’s groin. He drew her toward him. She had to breathe, or she was going to faint.
“Kiss me again,” he whispered.
She was happy to oblige. This time, when their mouths met, one tongue wrapped around the other while the ridge in his sweatpants pressed against her. A tremor passed through her body, igniting a long dormant connection between her mouth and her labia like an engine coming back to life after a long time spent idling.
Her mouth slid off his. She buried her face in his neck, tongued his skin, and bit.
“You felt something,” Leo said, surprise threaded with the pleasure in his voice.
“I did,” Anna murmured. “I really did.”
“That’s an advanced exercise. You’re getting way ahead of me.”
Anna muffled her giggle as Leo rolled her to her back, taking his weight on his elbows on either side of her arms. He kissed the corner of one eye and the other, making his way down both sides of her face to her neck and the fullness of her breasts where they rose above the lacy bra.
“Saffron, I want to taste you.”
Oh.
What he was suggesting was, technically, a kind of kissing, lips to lips. A kind of kissing she hadn’t participated in for… Anna couldn’t recall how many years. It didn’t matter. It was a long time ago.
“I don’t have any diseases.” She squeezed her thighs together and cringed inside at the way she’d blurted out her declaration. “That didn’t come out very sexy.”
The frank recounting halted his explorations. She played with his hair as his hands stilled over her breasts. “I’ve been careful, and aside from the cancer, I’m clean too.”
“May I say something?” she asked, everything at once tentative and brave.
“Of course.” He nibbled at the voluptuous curve of her belly. Yeah, she didn’t find that at all distracting.
“I’m in no way ready for sex, but kissing you and touching you feels really good. I want more, and I have no expectations of you around…around anything except clear communication and respect.”
Leo smiled at her breasts, and he smiled at her face again. Then he rose high enough on his knees to bring his hands to the waistband of her pants. “If you’ll lift your hips, my tongue can get started on some of those clear communications.”
Thank God for fancy underwear.
Off went her pants; on stayed her panties. Leo traced the delicate lace along the waistband, and the more he touched her, the more her individual skin cells lit up and linked together, creating delicate chains of sensation across her body.
“These are gorgeous.”
“They’re new.” She blushed again. She was such a novice, blathering on about her skivvies.
“You have beautiful curves.”
He continued to explore, running his hands from her chest to her waist, his thumbs meeting near her navel. Leo dipped his head to the rounded rise of her belly and nibbled, licked, and sucked at mouthfuls of her flesh. His exhale swept across the sensitive skin of her inner thighs as he nudged her underwear to one side and burrowed his nose between her labia. He separated her lips with two long licks, removed her panties, and dipped his head closer for more.
Anna arched, closing her thighs on instinct before relaxing into the sensations.
This was not long-time-married-people oral sex. This was a connoisseur of cunnilingus at work between her thighs, licking and sucking with a gusto that made her want to laugh and open her legs as wide as they would go. She flashed on Elaine calling the two of them brazen hussies, and she liked the moniker.
And when she opened her eyes wide, her arousal-addled gaze flitted across the ceiling, and a memory of one of the last parties with the MacMasters the summer before Gary died.
“Leo. Stop.”
She pressed the top of his head away from her sex and scooted her hips, providing her with a cushion of space into which she could insert her hesitation and hold it, barrier-like, between them.
At least, temporarily.
Leo lifted his head. His lips glistened, and his eyes did that sexy, half-closed thing. Anna propped herself on her elbows, watched as he swayed above her, kissed one hip bone and the other, his chin hovering over her recently trimmed pubic hair. One arm held tight to the back of her waist.
“This is too much, too fast,” she groaned, before dropping back onto the bed and covering her face with her hands.
“Do you want me to stop?”
Hesitation vibrated in the musky, scented space between her thighs. “Yes.”
Leo grazed his mouth over her skin, cradling her pelvis between confident hands, and tucked a section of the bedsheet between their bodies. “Saff, have you been sexual with anyone, at all, since…?”
She threw an arm over her face and shook her head side to side. Not the time to cry. Not the time to cry. If only she could crack a joke, find a laugh, but this was too important a moment to disregard. His questions sent shudders through her chest, alerting her to the presence of the two other unseen men in bed with her—Gary and Daniel.
Her body vacillated between memories of past intimacies with this more immediate desire to move forward with the man nestled
