Boundaries Tested Pt. 03

All characters in this story are adults

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He did not come early.

It was the hardest thing she had ever asked of him, and she had asked him to describe his own orgasm in a bar. He spent the day in the flat with the shutters down, doing nothing in several rooms. He showered at four and again at six, for no reason either time. He stood in front of his own mirror and looked at a twenty-one-year-old Roman boy in a clean white shirt who had been told, on a pavement on rue de Tournon, by the only girl he had ever wanted, that she did not mind, and he did not recognise him, and he put on a different shirt. At ten to eight he was in the Italian place on rue Mouffetard holding a box and not hearing the man ask if he wanted it cut. At one minute to eight he was at the green door on rue de Tournon. At eight he rang.

Sophie had needed the time, and had used it.

She had slept, finally, at four, and woken at nine with the thing already in her chest, fully formed, as if it had been there all night waiting for her to open her eyes. She had lain there and looked at it. Tonight she was going to let him put his mouth on her. Not a doorway, not a mirror, not a thing she could tell herself had happened while her back was turned. She was going to sit in front of him and open her legs and say yes, and he was going to do the thing she had described across a table with her chin up, the thing she had never had, and she was going to watch him do it.

She had bathed. She had not shaved; she had looked at herself for a long time and tidied the sides, the way she always did, and nothing else. She had changed her dress three times and ended up in the yellow one with the thin straps, the one from the afternoon she'd told him about the hair, because it felt like going back to the beginning and doing it properly. And she had put on underwear, deliberately, plain white, because yesterday at the Contrescarpe had been a dare and tonight was not. Tonight nothing was going to be an accident. She had decided that at nine in the morning, and it had frightened her all day, and she had not changed her mind.

She opened the door and he was standing there with the box and his face, and she thought: oh. There you are.

---

They did not eat the pizza.

They tried. It sat on the low table in the drawing room between them with the lid open and the lamps on and the window open onto the warm dark, and she ate half a slice and he ate the crust of hers and then they both stopped pretending.

"I didn't rent anything," she said. "There's no film."

"Okay."

"So there's nothing to watch." She looked at him. "Except."

He waited. He had learnt, in four summers, that when Sophie went quiet before a sentence the sentence was the whole evening.

"I've got rules," she said. "Because you like answering properly, and because I'll go to pieces if I don't say them first. Can I say them?"

"Say them."

She put her hands flat on her knees, in the yellow dress, and said them like a list she'd rehearsed, which she had, in the bath, twice.

"One. You don't take anything off me. I do it. All of it. You watch." Her colour was starting. "Two. Your hands go where I put them and they stay there. If I move them, they move. If I don't, they don't." A breath. "Three. The thing. The one thing. We don't. I'm still me, Checco. That doesn't change tonight. Everything else I'll decide as we go, but that one I've decided."

"I know."

"Four." She looked straight at him and her voice went lower. "Afterwards. You tell me the truth. Like always. Whatever it was. Whatever it was like. I need to know and you're the only person who's ever told me anything true."

"Yes."

"And Checco." Her chin came up. "If I say stop, it's not the ten days. It's not me going cold. It's just stop, for a minute, because I'm frightened. And then probably go on. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Okay." She let out a long breath, and some of the rehearsal went out of her face and what was under it was Sophie, twenty-one, very red, braver than anyone he had ever met. "Then come to my room."

---

She did not turn the main light on. The lamp by the bed was on, the one that had been on two nights ago, and the shutters were closed, and the long mirror on the wardrobe door gave the room back to itself, gold and dim. She stood in the middle of the rug with her back to the mirror and her face to him and said, "Stand there," and pointed to a place a foot in front of her. He stood there. She looked up at him. She was close enough that he could see the pulse going in her throat.

"You said," she said, "at the table. That a boy remembers her undressing for him. For the rest of his life. You said he'd be lying if he said anything else."

"Yes."

"So remember this."

She reached up and slid the thin straps of the yellow dress off her shoulders, one and then the other, and let the top of it fall to her waist, and she was in the white bra, and she held his eyes and did not look down at herself, and he did not look down either, not yet, because her face was the thing. Then she reached behind her and undid the dress and pushed it down over her hips and let it go, and stepped out of it, and did not bend to pick it up this time. She left it where it fell.

"Hands," she said, and took his wrists, and put his hands behind his back, one holding the other, and let go. "There."

Then she unhooked the bra, a foot from his face, and let it slide down her arms and drop, and her breasts were there, in the lamplight, close enough to feel the warmth of, the nipples already drawn tight, and he heard himself breathe out.

"Look," she said. "You're allowed. That's the whole point."

He looked. He looked at her breasts and at her belly and at her face looking at him look, and she watched his eyes move and he saw it go through her, the being looked at, saw her lips part and her breath go short, and she hooked her thumbs into the white cotton and pushed it down and stepped out of it, and stood up straight, naked, a foot away, with her hands at her sides.

In the mirror behind her he could see her back, the long line of it, the curve of her arse. In front of him he could see all the rest. The dark hair between her thighs, thick and soft and tidy at the edges, so close he could see each curl of it in the lamplight. He could smell her. That was the thing the doorway had not given him. A foot away, with the lamp on, he could smell her, warm and faintly sharp and unmistakably her, and his hands behind his back locked on each other.

"Closer," she said. It was barely a word. "You said closer."

She sat down on the edge of the bed. The white cover. She sat with her knees together and her hands on them and looked at him standing there and said, "Kneel down."

He knelt. The parquet was hard under his knees and he did not feel it. His face was level with her knees, and her knees were together, and he could see the hair between her thighs where they met, and above it her belly moving with her breath, and above that her face, looking down at him with an expression he had never seen on anyone.

"Hands," she said again, and took his wrists from behind his back, and put his hands on the bed either side of her, flat on the white cover, not touching her. "There. They stay there."

"Okay."

"Look first. I want you to look first. Like the mirror. Before anything."

And she put her hands on her own knees, and opened them.

Slowly. The way she did everything that mattered. Her knees went apart, and her thighs, and the thick dark hair parted at the centre and there she was, a foot from his face, in the lamplight, pink and already wet, the lips of her swollen and shining, and she opened her legs all the way and sat back a little on her hands and let him look at her from closer than anyone had ever been.

He did not breathe. He looked. He could see everything: the hair going on down and under her, the dark little bud at the top where the lips met, the glisten of her, a drop of it actually gathering at the opening while he watched, and the smell of her now so close it was in his mouth already, and his hands on the white cover had gone white at the knuckles.

"Checco," she said, above him, in a voice that shook. "Is it. Is this."

"It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen," he said, into the space between her thighs, and felt his own breath go over her, and saw her shiver with it. "I told you. I wasn't being kind. Sophie, I can see you getting wetter while I look at you."

"I know." A laugh, shaky, mortified, delighted. "I can feel it. God. You're just looking."

"You said look first."

"I did." Her hand came down and touched herself, two fingers, parting herself further, showing him, the way she had in the shower but from a foot away now, the inside of her pink and slick in the lamplight, and her voice went down to almost nothing. "Now."

And her other hand went into his hair, and pulled.

He went where she pulled. He put his mouth on her.

The hair was the first thing. Soft and thick and warm against his lips and his nose and his cheeks, exactly what he had wanted for three years and had never said, and then under it, inside it, her, and the taste of her went through him like a light going on in every room at once. Warm. Salt and something faintly sweet and completely her, nothing like anything, the one taste in the world, and he made a sound into her that he did not plan and felt her hips jump at it.

He went slow. He had told her, at the table, more than once: slow. He kissed her first, open-mouthed, the whole length of her, through the hair, up and down, learning the shape of her with his lips before anything else, and above him he heard her breathing change and felt her hand tighten in his hair. Then his tongue. Flat and soft, from the bottom to the top, one long slow stroke, and she said "oh" in a voice he would carry for the rest of his life, and her thighs came in against his ears and then opened again, wider, on purpose.

"Is this," she said, and couldn't finish.

He didn't answer. He found the small hard place at the top of her with the tip of his tongue, the thing she had never had anyone find, and circled it once, lightly, and she made a sound like she'd been hurt and her whole body curled over him and her other hand came down into his hair too.

"That. Checco. That. Don't."

He did it again.

She stopped talking. He felt it happen, the moment the well-brought-up girl went somewhere and left the rest of her on the bed with his mouth on her. She lay back. She lay back on the white cover with her legs spread round his head and her hands in his hair and her heels on the edge of the bed and gave herself up to it, and he took his time. He licked her. He licked her slow and then slower, the whole of her, parting her with his tongue, pushing it inside her, deep, where she had told him she dreamt of it, and tasting her there, and she cried out at that, loud, in her parents' flat, and did not care. He drank her. There was no other word for it. She was wet enough that it was on his chin and his cheeks and in the hair on his face and he wanted more of it, he wanted to drown. He put his tongue back on the hard little bud and stayed there, soft and steady and patient, the way he'd told her at the Contrescarpe a boy should be if he wanted to be remembered, and felt her start to shake.

"Checco. Checco. I'm going to. I've never. Not like. Checco."

Her hands pulled his face into her so hard he could not have breathed if he'd wanted to. Her thighs locked on his head. And she came against his mouth, a long shuddering wave that went through the whole of her and into him, her hips lifting off the bed and grinding on his tongue, a sound coming out of her that filled the room, and he kept going, soft, steady, through it, until she pushed his head away with both hands and lay there gasping with her arm over her face.

He knelt there with his hands still flat on the cover where she had put them, and his face wet with her, and waited.

After a while she lifted her arm and looked down at him.

"You didn't move your hands."

"You said."

She started to laugh and it turned into something else and she put her arm back over her face for a moment. Then she sat up, slowly, and looked at him kneeling between her legs with her all over his face, and reached down and touched his cheek, and wiped her thumb through the wet on it, and looked at it.

"Tell me," she said. "The truth. Rule four."

"Which part."

"All of it. The hair. Did it."

"No." He said it with his mouth still an inch from her. "It didn't get in the way. It was the way. I had my face in it, Sophie, I could feel it on my lips the whole time, and every time I breathed in I could smell you through it, and I've never wanted anything so much in my life as I wanted to stay exactly there. If you ever shave it I'll never forgive you."

She made a sound that was half a laugh and half the other thing.

"And the rest. What do I." She couldn't say it. She made herself. "What do I taste like? You said you wanted to know. So you know. Tell me."

He told her. Properly, slowly, with his hands on the cover and his eyes on hers, in the voice from the table, every word of it true, and she sat naked on the edge of her bed and listened with her lips parted and her colour going down her chest, and halfway through it her hand went down between her own legs without her seeming to notice, and by the end of it she was wet again.

"Okay," she said, when he'd finished, in a voice with nothing left in it. "Okay. God. Okay."

Then she looked at the front of his jeans, where he had been hard for twenty minutes against the edge of her bed, and the café look came back into her face, the practical one.

"My turn," she said. "I asked you how. At the table. With the hand. You explained it. I've been. I've thought about it." She swallowed. "I want to do it. To you. And I want you to tell me if I'm doing it right, because I'll be useless, and I'd rather be useless with you than with anyone."

"You won't be useless."

"Stand up."

He stood. His knees had gone and he stood anyway. She stayed sitting on the edge of the bed, naked, and undid his belt herself, which was not in the rules, and he did not point that out. She undid the button and the zip with hands that were not steady and pushed his jeans down and then the rest, and he was there in front of her, hard and aching and absurdly exposed in her lamplit bedroom with her grandmother's crucifix in the hall, and she looked at it from a foot away, the way he had looked at her, for a long moment, with her face doing something complicated.

"Oh," she said. Not the Oh from the text. A different one.

Then she reached out and took him in her hand.

Her hand was warm and too gentle and he nearly went then, from that alone, from the sight of Sophie's well-brought-up fingers closing round him and her face looking up at him for approval.

"Like this?"

"Tighter. Don't be afraid of it."

Tighter. "Like this?"

"God. Yes. Like that. Now. Slow. All the way up and all the way down."

She did it. Slow, all the way, the way he'd told her, her eyes going from his face to her hand and back, and he put his hands on her shoulders, which was not where she had put them, and she looked at them there and let them stay.

"Your thumb," he said, through his teeth. "At the top. When you come up. Just over the."

She found it. He said something that was not a word. She did it again, and watched his face do what it did, and he saw her understand that she had the power to do that, and saw what it did to her.

"Tell me when," she said. "I want to see. I want to count."

"Soon. Sophie. Soon."

"Then look at me."

He looked at her. She was sitting naked on the edge of her bed with her legs open and the hair between them wet and her hand moving on him, slow and tight and exactly right, her face lifted to his, lips parted, eyes enormous, and she said, "You're going to come for me, Checco, I asked you how and you told me and now I'm doing it, look at me, I want to watch you," and that was the end of him.

He came with her watching. She did not look away. She watched his face go and his body lock and felt it in her hand, and it went over her fingers and her wrist and onto her thigh, warm, and she kept going, slow, the way he'd said, through all of it, until he put his hand over hers and stopped her.

For a moment neither of them moved.

Then she looked down at her hand, and at her thigh, and at the wet shining there in the lamplight, and said, with enormous seriousness, "Eleven."

He laughed so hard he had to sit down on the bed next to her.

---

They lay on the white cover with the lamp on and the shutters closed, side by side, not under anything, him with his shirt still on and nothing else and her with nothing at all, and the warm dark came in through the slats and the city made its small sounds somewhere beyond it. Her head was on his shoulder. His hand was in her hair, which was not where she had put it, and she had not moved it.

"We didn't," she said, after a long time.

"No."

"Good." She turned her face into his neck. "I'm still me."

"You were always you. You were you with your heels on the edge of the bed."

She hit him, not hard, on the chest, and left her hand there.

"Maman's back Sunday," she said. "That's two more nights."

"Yes."

"And I've got questions."

"You've always got questions."

"These are new ones." She lifted her head and looked at him in the lamplight, and her face was the one from the table, the practical one, the one that had asked him everything, except that it was naked now and had his mouth's work still on it. "Checco. Serious question."

"They're all serious questions."

"That's what you always say." She put her head back down. "Tomorrow. The Contrescarpe. Two o'clock. Bring your iron memory. I want you to tell me everything I did tonight. In order. Properly. With Marcel listening." She was smiling against his neck; he could feel it. "And then we'll see what the people at the next table do."

He lay there with the smell of her still on his face and her hair under his hand and her breath on his neck, in the flat on rue de Tournon where he had eaten a hundred Sunday lunches, and understood that she was going to make him say it, all of it, in daylight, at the table by the window, and that he was going to, and that the ten days had been the last time in his life he would ever believe he was not the type of boy this happened to.

"Okay," he said.

She was already asleep.