ISABEL FELT FOR THE WALL switch for the overhead light. The one whose shade had sliced her finger, which had indirectly led to the big doctor standing behind her, making her flat suddenly feel much smaller.
And much sexier.
She closed the door quietly behind them, and while Malcolm shook out of his jacket and laid it on the old squishy armchair, she went to fill the electric kettle from the tap. Just as though he’d actually come here for tea.
She clicked the kettle on.
Then she crossed her arms across her giant sweatshirt and stared at their reflection in the stainless steel of of the kettle. Behind her, Malcolm was big and dark and pensive.
It was silent apart from the sound of her own breathing. Which seemed both unduly loud and quick.
It was fair to say that her body was already properly simmering.
When he moved it was though his entire body was releasing a sigh.
His arms came slowly around her, gathering her against him. She closed her eyes and shivered with anticipation. He ducked to press his lips against the pulse in her throat and he caught hold of the hem of her giant sweatshirt, furling it up and over her head and flinging it out of the way as if was one of the stampeders at the riot.
His hands filled with her breasts and when he dragged his thumbs across her nipples she moaned shamelessly and arced to latch her arms around his neck, abetting him, inviting more of the same. He obliged, and as his tongue in her ear and his fingers at her nipples fingers sent shock after delicious shock of pleasure coursing through her, he slid one hand down down, down, right down into the waistband of her pajamas and oh God, was he ever deft when it arrived between her legs.
She had a great view of this whole wanton tableau in the polished sides of the kettle: half naked, a man’s hand down her pants.
The view disappeared when she closed her eyes to isolate herself with the feel of his hands on her body, to the smell of him, to the sound of their breathing, ragged, swift, hungry. He hooked his fingers in her pajama bottoms again and dragged them down. Her underwear efficiently went along for the ride. She wriggled to help him get them all the way off. Then she kicked them across the room.
How about that. She was nude. All within about a minute of his arrival.
“Malcolm...Jesus...” her voice was weak. “Take your damn clothes off.”
He took orders well: He ripped his shirt off off over his head and yanked open his jeans buttons.
When she turned around he groaned like he’d been clubbed, a primal sound of such hunger and yearning and triumph her head went light as a balloon and her body went molten.
He gathered her up against him, dragged his hands over her shoulder blades, then down along the curve of her waist, learning her terrain. Then he reached up and slid the scrunchy out of her hair, hurled it across the room, then laced his fingers up through her hair and tugged her head back. They met in a kiss so hot and carnal the windows probably went white steam. She locked her arms around his neck and he staggered forward and somehow she toppled backward and was on her back now, on the bed, and he was propped on his arms over her.
Oh, the beauty of him. Of the precise muscles cut into his torso, of the taper of his big shoulders to his narrow waist, of that ferny trail of hair that meandered down and vanished into his jeans, which were still clinging to his hips. She pushed at them and together they peeled them off his body in seconds. And she sighed when they folded together, limbs entwined, skin to skin, his hard cock pressed against her, rolling across the bed like they’d just leaped from a speeding train. Greedy, wondering hands stroked and searched out the places on each other they knew would elicit gasps and make each other writhe and beg and swear in wonderment.
With Malcolm as her muse and her lips, her tongue, her breath, her nails at her disposal, Isabel was inspired to heights of sensual creativity. Malcolm was no slouch, either. His lips and tongue were clever and hot on her nipples, sucking, circling them, then he moved all of this deliciousness down her torso, lighting a little trail of flame right down to where she was soaked and pulsing and seconds away from coming. He teased, with a hard stroke or two of his tongue when he got there. She may have eve thumped the bed with her fist, it was so good. She did swear and beg.
All was hoarse, staccato breathing and whimpered “please, dear God, Malcolms, yes,” and moaned “Christ, oh my God, Isabels.”
She found that he’d managed to somehow to fish a condom from the pocket of his cast aside jeans and he rolled her beneath him.
She wrapped her arms around him and he hoisted her legs up onto his shoulders and he thrust in and in seconds she did come, shattered as if by lightning, like that elm tree, her body bowed upward, head thrown back, fingers digging into his skin to keep herself from blasting into the stratosphere. He didn’t attempt anything fancy rhythmically. His white hips were a businesslike blur and she took him hard and deep, their bodies colliding, his eyes fixed on her face and...was she actually going to come again?
And then he went motionless and he cried out, his body wracked his head thrown back, dark eyes shut, he roared And then she came again, practically sobbing with the surfeit of pleasure, little white lights exploding behind her eyes.
* * *
“Volcanos,” Malcolm murmured aloud. “Have nothing on us.”
He was the first one speak as they lay quietly in each other’s arms, returning to earth and full consciousness, the sweat drying on their bodies.
It stood to reason that was the best sex she’d ever had. She was fairly comfortable assuming he felt the same way. The prevailing emotion in the room was stunned, humbled satisfaction.
She merely half-sighed, half-purred in agreement.
“You’ll like this,” she said. I met Clive Dunkirk yesterday. And spoke to him. Kind of at length. No lie.”
He whistled. “So what we just did was the second most memorable thing to happen to you this year.”
She laughed and settled in to using his chest as a pillow. His arms were looped around her.
“So what happened? How did that happen?”
She considered how to answer this. “Are you familiar with the expression “had your ass handed to you?’”
His laugh was a low rumble beneath her.
She gave him a verbal sketch of the whole excruciating encounter, beginning with Postlethwaite’s and Mrs. Mary Trevelyan.
“Wow,” he said, appropriately, after an impressed pause. “That is some story.”
“The thing is, I think he was right. About Postlethwaite’s. About what I wanted from that. I was really pretty abashed to realize it. I floated up out of my body after that and I could hear how I sounded to him and I just cringed.”
“Mmm. You took a big swing, and you shouldn’t be ashamed of that. And you really are very talented, you know, and I’m not just referring to what you just did with your tongue just now. What do you call that?”
“You were my muse. I haven’t yet named it. The Hairy Doctor, maybe.”
He laughed again. “I meant it. Postlethwaite’s would be fortunate to feature you. Your work is beautiful...original...precise, witty...” His voice was getting a little drowsy.
“Wow. I think this is my favorite lullaby ever,” she murmured. That, and the beat of your heart beneath my head. But she wasn’t going to say the last part out loud. “Thank you. That means a lot to me. And I think so, too, actually, but it’s got me thinking. Guess I’ll just play it by ear.”
They fell quiet.
“I’m still very envious that you met him,” he said finally. Dryly.
She gave a short laugh. “Mind you, I like his band better than ever. But I think I would honestly rather die than see him again,” she said quite sincerely. “It was one of the most mortifying, if useful, things to ever happen to me. That’ll teach me to go asking for things. I now understand the very definition of ‘shame.’”
“Oh, that is a pity. I was beginning to think you were shameless.”
“Very nearly,” she murmured amiably.
The last thing she heard before she fell asleep was his little sleepy laugh.
He couldn’t see Isabel—for some reason he didn’t dare look left or right—but he could feel her hand in his as they walked up the dirt road to the elm tree and he was happy. The tree seemed a long way off, always at the far horizon, and yet it never got any closer as they walked and walked. Still, he was conscious of a contentment he’d never known outside of this dream.
And the road ahead of them exploded in a fountain of dirt.
In an instant the sun was obliterated, and he’d lost his grip on Isabel and he was flying through the air, tumbling and tumbling, and—
He shot bolt upright, a hoarse scream shredding his throat, his arms flailing, fighting futilely back.
“Malcolm... Malcolm...You’re safe. You’re with me, Isabel, in my flat in Pennyroyal Green and you’re safe. You’re safe. You’re safe. You’re safe.”
She said it over and over, softly, a mantra of sorts, and he went toward those words as he fought his way through the dream debris.
She’d slipped her arms around him. He surrendered to the comfort. The bellows of his lungs swayed his entire body. He was slick with sweat.
And she just held him, as if she could will peace into him that way.
“Sorry,” he said finally. Still dazed.
“No need.”
Finally he heaved a sigh. Together they leaned back down against her pillows, shifted, settled into each others arms.
They lay together wordlessly for a time, loosely wrapped around each other. Her hand moved across his chest, his arms, gently. Soothing, at first. Then arousing. The light sneaking in at the bottom of her blinds suggested they were close to dawn.
“Do you want to tell me about it?” she ventured softly.
He did, and he didn’t. He wanted to spare her the details. And yet here, in the dark, with this woman, it somehow made sense to say things he’d never really said aloud to anyone.
“I don’t have dreams like that very often. Anymore, anyway. When I do it’s usually some...piquant blend, I suppose...of me, going about my business in Pennyroyal Green, and me in the war. In this one I was walking down the road toward Finn’s house, toward that tree, you know? Suddenly the road blew up in front of me. I can usually count on some kind of explosion. At least it’s predictable that way,” he said dryly.
He didn’t know why he hadn’t mentioned that she was in the dream.
Her arms tightened around him. “Jesus. Malcolm.”
“It’s okay, really it is.”
It wasn’t and it was.
Nearly everyone contained battles. Malcolm knew this all too well. Some of those battles would never end; they could only be contained, like the lines cut around a wildfire. Or channeled. Into things like precisely designed earrings, and home-made tattoos, into sewing up patients, into music, into leaping into audiences to attack hecklers and so forth.
Into fierce, hungry, inspired lovemaking.
They lay in silence for a time. If he’d been asked to define “peace,” he might have said, “lying in the dark next to Isabel Redmond.”
“I used to have a recurring dream where I was standing on a beach,” Isabel said, on a near whisper. She cleared her throat. “And I was trying to walk into this house, but the house kept floating farther and farther out to sea. And I just had to...watch it leave.”
He gave a short, stunned laugh.
He closed his arms around her a little more tightly. As if she was the one floating away.
Well then. She knew that dream was more than a remnant of war.
How he wished she’d never had a dream like that.
How fiercely glad he was now that she had family. And that her family had brought her here, to this moment and this bed.
“I don’t want you to lose your home, Malcolm.”
He kissed her, gently. Then lingeringly. And when she sighed that sigh of surrender and pleasure and want it was like kindling to a brushfire. And just as need took over in earnest and he was trying to reach his jeans for another condom, she pulled gently from his arms.
Sat up. Flipped her hair behind her shoulders, and looked down at him. He had to admit, whatever she was about to get up to, the pink and cream and curvy view, the eloquent sweet lines of her, made him weak.
“I’m on a hunting expedition,” she murmured against his skin, and placed a kiss on his collar bone. And then she followed a trail with her tongue, lower, and lower, her hair, her lips, skimming his skin.
Christ, it was hot.
“A hunt..hun...” Why speak when he could just feel?
“Well, well, well. I found a ‘y’...” she murmured. “A little typewriter font ‘Y’.”
She kissed it.
Now he understood what she was after. He smiled.
“I have an explorer for an ancestor, after all,” she breathed against his skin. Her next kiss incorporated a little tongue, some breath, sweet mother it was like every cell capable of feeling pleasure was lit up.
He moaned. “What are you doing to me...”
She just smiled and moved her lips lower still.
“Hmmm...I have a ‘Y’...and now I’ve found a ‘K’...wow, Malcolm, this is the best Jumble ever.”
She dragged her tongue down further.
“I found a ‘b’...we have a ‘Y’ and a ‘K’ and a ‘B’...”
And then she froze and stared at him. “NO. WAY.”
He laughed at her drop jaw. She’d just figured it out.
“YKBT? Malcolm! ‘Your Kiss Broke Time’! And you never said a word when we were talking about it! ”
He was laughing harder now. “Do you think I’m a nerd?”
“Oh, Good God, yes,” she said with relish. “The best kind of nerd.”
She stared at him. She was positively incandescent with delight.
“I don’t think you’ve licked he ‘T’ yet,” he reminded her. “Finish what you started, woman.”
“Oh, forgive me.”
She licked the “T,” which she found right right below his navel. Right above where his cock was stirring.
And she licked that, too.
And when she dragged her lips along the length of it, circled her tongue around it, got her hands involved, he brought his knees up restlessly, his hands curling into the comforter, bracing himself for the ramping pleasure. “Isabel...come up here..”
He pushed himself upright against the headboard and she came to him, straddling him. He lifted her hair and kissed her throat, where her heart was pounding. He loved watching her eyes close in helpless pleasure that he’d caused. They managed to pace themselves this time. They met in kisses slow and deep; they rocked together, Isabel setting the pace as they surfed that ever-building tide of pleasure until it crested. And then they were colliding with urgency in a race for release, and her murmured “Yes, God yes” is the last thing he heard before the pleasure blinded, then shattered him.
He heard his own voice, a hoarse cry, from miles away. Wave after wave of untenable bliss wracked him. She clung to him and he felt her pulsing around him and he felt like they were the freaking heartbeat of the universe, a Hippie thought he would rather die than share with anyone.
And then they parted. And settled down to lay in each other’s arms again.
God. It was probably about four in the morning. He thought if he was given three wishes right now, he’d spend all of them to make sure this night lasted forever.
“So why are you so cagey about that tattoo?” she murmured.
He seemed already laid bare, in this moment. Why not give her yet another secret? “It’s...well, when I got home from the war, and dreams like that woke me up more often...I figured out that song kind of...resets me. Fills in all the jagged places. Probably for all the reasons you said. If that makes sense. It was practically a lullaby there, for a time.”
“Total sense,” she said easily.
And he smiled, because who else in the world would really get that. “It works that way, I’ve noticed. That song,” she said.
“I don’t go around telling people barmy things like that,” he said, after a silence. But Isabel heard both the wonder, the wariness, and the faintest hint of warning in that voice. He’d said it as carefully as a sentry requesting an enemy password.
She understood. She felt the same way—unnerved by her own abandon, by the easiness, by the shocking fabulousness of the sex.
At the end of “Your Kiss Broke Time”, when the singer sounded as though he was hurtling into space and wailing in terror, or was it joy?—that’s what this moment seemed like.
Fortunately they had a safety net: she’d be leaving soon enough. There didn’t have go be any consequences, or promises, or devastation, or any agony of hope or despair. In other words: none of that Olivia and Lyon nonsense.
And yet she couldn’t stop a sort of exaltation from moving through her at being one of the keepers of his secrets. At being needed by this man, in this moment.
“Do you want to listen to that song now?”
“I think...all I need right now is to just lie here and listen to you breathe. Until we both fall asleep.”
Suddenly she’d never been so grateful to possess lungs, so she could give him what he wanted.
“I can do that. I can breathe for you.”