Chapter Twenty-Four

 

 

 

“Lex wonders if you would meet him in his studio now?” It was Dillon who delivered his boss’s request, a request the PA made in person rather than calling or sending an email. That somehow made the whole prospect seem more formal, more like a date and, though that was the last thing she needed for it to seem like, Kelly couldn’t help the dance of butterflies in her stomach, even as she cursed herself for getting so excited about something that should have been just her job. But then she no longer truly believed that any more than Lex or anyone else at Mountain View did.

The studio was drenched in midday sun when she stepped inside. The sight of Lex, naked to the waist in a pair of gray sweat pants that hung low around his waist, nearly took her breath away. He worked on a piece of granite only slightly shorter than he was. She stood watching, with him lost in his work, completely unaware of her presence. It was almost as though he were literally releasing a woman from the stone with the intimation of long flowing locks, the shape of a breast and a hip, the curve of one buttock and the hint of an arm raised overhead. Watching him in his own creative process made her heart beat faster, made her stomach bottom. Whatever happened when Lex Valentine worked was way more than the man, way more than the art. Somehow the channeling of all his pain, all his isolation, all his fears and doubts into the beauty of his work kept him safe, kept him from flying apart into the brokenness that was all of humanity in one way or another. But that brokenness had been his close companion. It had shaped his life for a very long time. A writing teacher had once told her that the most powerful writing came from the places the writer most feared to go, the places of pain, the places of suffering. As she watched Lex create, she was pretty sure the same applied.

Then he caught sight of her in his peripheral vision, and the concentration was transformed into warmth as he turned to greet her with a smile, and she felt everything inside her soften and tremble, feeling ridiculously pleased that the sight of her could make him happy.

“You came,” he said, as though he’d thought she might not.

“I told you I would.” For a second, they stood looking at each other smiling, until she remembered that this was work. She was here to tutor Lex.

He came back to himself at the same moment, as though he’d just woken from a dream—but this time it was a good dream. He gave a little shake of his shoulders and took a deep breath. “I wondered if you would walk with me in the sculpture garden?” He added quickly, “You said that it would be a good tool for our sessions.”

“I did, yes. Of course, I will.”

He reached for one of the ever-present hoodies and slipped it on. She followed him through the door and let him lead the way through the thicket and into the sculpture garden. Once they were there, she looked around then led him to the sculptures of the women without partners. “I’m assuming that you created these so that you could interact with them as you would a woman.” She’d not meant it to sound callous, but feared that it might have when he flinched.

“Pretty pathetic, I know, but it was the best I could do under the circumstances.” Then he offered an embarrassed little laugh and shuffled from foot to foot. “Inflatables just aren’t substantial enough.”

“I shouldn’t think so,” she said, “and I don’t think it’s pathetic at all. I think it’s a powerful effort toward healing. Creativity is the path through the minefield of our own fears and neuroses. It’s not a cure. I don’t mean to imply that it is, but it makes the journey a little more bearable and, at the end of the day, you have something to show for it.”

“You sound like you’re speaking from experience,” he said.

“Of course, I am. My neurotic fearful self is exactly the reason I write.” She nodded to the sculptures of couples. “In those, I would imagine, you were placing yourself in the role of the males.”

His blush was visible and his nod just barely. She stepped as close as she dared forcing him to look up at her. “The men, they’re all the same, bodily, but the women are all different.”

“I…” He cleared his throat. “I… They’re—the men, that is—they’re self-portraits.” The blush was back with vengeance.

“You’re…fit,” she said, feeling the tug low in her belly. “Really fit.”

This time he laughed. “I can interact with one body and one body only. That being the case, I’d like it to be in good shape. I’d like for it to feel good to my touch. Besides,” he added, with another unnecessary clearing of the throat, “the working out has always been one of the best ways to cope with my situation, you know, to let off a little steam, get rid of some…stress. I find that after I’ve had an incident, and I’ve recovered enough to be functional, I have a lot of anger and frustration to work out. Sometimes that manifests…you know…sexually. Working out is an alternative to… Well, it’s an effort to prevent repetitive stress syndrome.” They both chuckled at that, and he added, “It helps.”

For a little while, they stood in silence surrounded by the female nudes. She could tell he was struggling to put what was on his mind into words. She gave him time to think about it, to try to formulate what it was he wanted from their session. He’d interacted with her through the sculpture so well yesterday, but today, he seemed at a loss.

“Lex,” she said at last. “Tell me what you want.”

“I want to make love to you,” he blurted out.

The sheer hunger in his words left her weak-kneed, but he gave her no chance to reply. “I want to make love to you, Kelly, and I don’t care if it’s therapy or not, I want to find a way that we can be together.”

In spite of everything, all the arguments she’d had with herself, in spite of all the reasons she shouldn’t want the same thing, she did. She desperately did. She made one last valiant effort at being professional. “Lex, I… We shouldn’t… My job is—”

“I don’t care what your job is. I stopped caring about that a long time ago.”

“You don’t mean that. You can’t.”

“Don’t tell me what I mean,” he snapped. “I know exactly what I mean, and you can’t tell me that your job is what you’re thinking about either when we’re together. Besides, how can you know what will heal me when no one else does? None of the most expensive doctors and shrinks in the world did. I understand if you feel uncomfortable with my wanting to make love to you, but that doesn’t make my desire wrong, and it doesn’t make me want you any less. And it doesn’t mean that my healing can’t come from just being with you.”

The space around them was silent except for the accelerated rush of their breathing. Then he moved to one of the sculptures and stood in front of it, making the motion of pushing the hair away from the face, of cupping the cheek, of moving in with a feather brush of his lips against the stone mouth, and it was insane, but Kelly felt it. They both did. In a state that she could only describe as under his power, she moved to stand behind the sculpture he caressed, so close that her body pressed against it, so close that one slip of his hand and it would be her that he caressed. It was risky, it was more than risky, it was terrifying and yet in the adrenaline rush of knowing that his hand might slip and touch her, knowing that they were separated by nothing but a slab of marble, she felt arousal prickle along her body, and, in spite of her best efforts to hold still, she found herself rocking and undulating against the stone.

He kissed along the exposed nape of the sculpture and across its collarbone, and Kelly uttered a little cry. She threw back her head and moved her fingers along the rise of gooseflesh on her neck and shoulder. With eyes locked on her, he kissed the throat, one hand falling to cup a breast, then he straightened, struggling to breathe, holding her in a ravenous gaze, as though he waited for her to catch up before he trailed kisses along the statue’s breastbone. He licked and caressed and fondled his way down over the swell of her breast and around an erect nipple before he pulled it into his mouth with a purse of his lips and a tight hollowing of his cheeks, all the while keeping his gaze locked on Kelly.

Any other time she might have been embarrassed by the little kitten whimpers and the deep-chested moans she couldn’t hold back, but she was lost in Lex’s touch, totally lost in what he could do without so much as laying a hand on her.

“It’s not fair,” she gasped. “I can’t respond to you like this. I can’t make love to you back.” Pulling away from the female sculpture, she glanced around the garden until she found what she was looking for. It was the sculpture combination she’d fallen against the first time she’d found him here—the man leaning over his woman, who lay spread before him waiting to be mounted. There was enough room between the two nudes for her to wriggle and squirm until she all but sat on the woman’s lap, but the woman was irrelevant, the woman was a vague representation of all femininity, all of what Lex had wanted but couldn’t have. The man, however, represented Lex, always Lex, created in stone by Lex, and it was Lex she wanted. She moved to one side to keep clear of the stone phallus until she was ready for it. She positioned herself so that her body curved upward around one well-muscled thigh, her dress riding up over her hips until she knew Lex could see her panties and no doubt the shape of her through them. Her desire to hide her body from him disappeared with her lust. She wrapped her legs around the male’s thigh and her arms around his neck to pull herself up the length of his body, trailing kisses from the spot just above his hip bone up along the scars that would have snaked over his ribs—those Lex had chosen not to represent in the sculptures. His wide-eyed stare and his open-mouthed gasp told her, however, that he knew. He understood fully what she had just done, and he shivered as he lay a hand against the bulge that tented his sweat pants.

In efforts to climb onto the marble bed, the male’s thigh was raised in such a way that Kelly could ride it, shift and undulate against it, never forgetting as she did so that the sculpture was a self-portrait of the man she wanted so desperately to touch. She pulled herself up until she could kiss him on the mouth, then she began a slow descent of sloppy wet tongue kisses down over his jaw and throat, onto his hard pectoral muscles and the stiffened little points of his nipples. Lex gave a soft grunt of a curse as she did so and came to stand behind the sculpture’s female counterpart, thumbing her heavy nipples, cupping her breasts and caressing down the length of her body until he slipped one hand between her thighs and stroked her much as he had the half pear.

“Oh God, Lex, you’re killing me,” Kelly gasped as he thumbed the hard nib of the sculpture’s clitoris, which he had taken care to expose. With the other hand, he tugged urgently at the elastic of his waistband, with a squirm and a grind, shoving them down to expose his erection.

“Don’t,” she gasped, as he turned his attention to stroking himself. “That’s for me. I want to look at it.”

His face reddened briefly, then he threw back his shoulders and stood defiantly, fists clenched at his sides, a little moan escaping his throat as she slid her hand down onto his stone counterpart. As she began to stroke the length of it, his moan became a strangled curse.

“Do you want to see me too, Lex, shall I show you what I look like, what I feel like when I touch myself?”

He only managed another moan.

“Then ask for it. Tell me what you want. Tell me what you want from me, Lex.”

“I want to see you,” he blurted. “I want you to take off your panties so I can look.”

She let go of the stone cock and, with some awkward maneuvering, was just about out of her panties when he added, “And your breasts. I want to see your breasts too.”

“Greedy bastard,” she said with a little chuckle as she tugged the dress up over her head, unhooked the designer bra and let it fall, all the while he took her in with devouring eyes and nodded his approval, which made her far more pleased than she figured it should have.

“Show me how you touch yourself,” he said.

“We’re making love not masturbating, remember?” Then she shocked even herself by taking the sculpture’s erection into her mouth, deep into her mouth.

“Jesus Christ in Heaven,” came the barely breathed response, and when she raised her gaze to him again, he stood pressing his thumb hard to the underside of his cock to keep from coming.

She pulled away, leaving a trail of saliva. “I want you inside me,” she gasped, struggling to catch her breath.

“Oh, God.” He sounded like he would suffocate. “Not there. Not like that. Come with me.”

She half-scrambled, half-fell off the sculpture, struggling to keep up, as he motioned her to a bed-like plinth on which Lex’s counterpart lay on his back, erection pointing skyward. A woman straddled his face, clearly preparing to return the favor in a classic sixty-nine, but not quite there yet. Lex’s eyes shown with expectation, and Kelly’s heart leaped with the audacity, the shear cheekiness of what she was about to do as she crawled onto the plinth, first taking Lex’s cock into her mouth to get him ready for her—she had stopped thinking about the sculptures as anything other than surrogates for Lex. In truth, preparation wasn’t really necessary, she knew how wet she was, she knew how much her body wanted Lex, at least as much as his clearly wanted hers. He now mounted the bed himself and straddled the male, leaning back against the breasts of the woman, who was quite well endowed. Kelly wondered if she was someone who had modeled for him or only someone who had come from his imagination. It didn’t matter. At the moment, she had his full attention, and as she positioned herself, squatting over Lex’s stone erection, he fisted and stroked his flesh-and-blood counterpart and shifted against the torso of the sculpture, sounding as though he were hyperventilating, and she sure as hell didn’t sound much better.

“Are you sure?” he managed through barely parted lips. “Kelly, are you sure?”

She answered by holding his gaze, shifting her hips slightly backward and easing herself down onto the stone phallus. And suddenly it was as though Lex were inside her. She lost all shyness and all shame as her body took control then completely lost it again, as she thrust and shoved and rode the stone representation of Lex, who sat scant inches away stroking and tugging as though there was no tomorrow.

Grunts and groans dissolved into breathless tight silence as they both approached climax, joints popped, muscles strained and pulses hammered.

“I have to come,” Lex gasped at last.

He started to dismount, but she shook her head and cupped her breasts. “Come here, Lex, come on my body, then I’ll be able to feel you, to feel your passion.”

Totally focused on the cupping and kneading of her offered breasts, with only a few more strokes, he convulsed and the pearlescent wet of his release exploded hot against her cool skin. She gave a little yelp of surprise at the feel of it, the velvety slickness of it on her body, one last thrust onto the stone cock, and she was consumed by her own convulsions, rubbing and stroking his semen against her flesh, holding his gaze as he held hers. “There, you see, Lex?” she said, licking the last of his release from her fingers. “Now you’ve touched me and I’ve touched you, and it was amazing.” And it was. It was like no sex she’d ever had. In truth, she had never experienced anything so intimate. But what he did next raised the experience to a whole new level. “I want to taste you too,” he said, motioning her to dismount. Then he leaned over, forcing her to shove back onto the male’s thighs as he took the stone phallus into his mouth, licking and sucking the taste of her from it while she could do nothing but tremble with aftershocks. At last he pulled away, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. “You don’t taste anything like a pear,” he said with a smile his face was just barely big enough to contain.