Interlude on a Houseboat

The carpet is synthetic and scratchy under her back. He yanks the straps of her Simone Pérèle bodysuit down over her shoulders, peeling it away from her flesh like the skin from an overripe fruit. His face is dark with concentration, his breathing for several moments the only sound in the room as he lets his eyes have their fill. He grips her hips and drives himself into her, harder and harder until he is almost there, and then he slows, and she whimpers with frustration.

"Don't stop-," she says. He stops. He smiles at her tightly clenched jaw and bared teeth.

"Why did you stop," she whines.

"I want to watch you finger yourself," he says. She screws her eyes up tight and for a lazy moment he wonders if he is going to see tears leaking from beneath those luxuriant lashes.

“No," she says. He grabs her hand and places it between her legs. She makes a pretense of pouting and sniffing, but before too long the manicured tips of her slender cellist's fingers are slowly trailing between the delicate folds of flesh, and the expression on her face is one of lip-biting absorption. He roughly spreads her legs further apart, and her fingers flicker and dance and hesitate, creep and retract, until one fingertip finally slides inside and then another, her hips swaying, her mouth now wide open. He circles her clitoris with his thumb while she bucks against the movement of her fingers.

"Come for me," he says, and she shudders and obeys, gasping his name. Tomorrow her back and shoulders will be raw where she writhed against the coarse carpet, and he will gently kiss the sore red skin, and she will look at him with limpid reproach from beneath trembling eyelashes, and complain about what a beast he is. And he will say, predictably, his belt buckle already undone: “Oh, my darling, you have no idea.”