Made of Glass Ch. 09

Chapter Nine: Dinner and Dessert

'She's a craving of cream and cinnamon

Spicy sweet, her taste on my tongue

Like any good dessert, no matter how much I get

She always leaves me wanting more' – K.A.

*****

"Where'd you learn to handle a knife like that?"

Ellery finished slicing the tomato and dropped it into the salad. She moved swiftly, dicing vegetables, tossing them in a large glass bowl while the steaks sizzled away on a grill pan. Tender baby carrots boiled in a pot, and a baguette heated in the oven. She reached for a cucumber, glanced briefly back at Kort, then started slicing.

"My father," she explained. She scratched her calf with the toes of one bare foot. "When I was younger especially, we'd spend a lot of time cooking and baking together, when he was home."

"Huh. Baking. I honestly didn't take him for the sort."

The knife tapped loudly against the cutting board as she chopped. "Bit of a Renaissance man, my dad. Cooking, baking, carving, painting—he taught me that, too."

"You never told me that," Kort said.

Ellery shrugged. "You never asked."

"I'm asking now..."

His voice, so quiet and uncertain, made her smile. She tossed the cucumber slices into the bowl just as the timer went off. In smooth, fluid motions she swept up the tongs, transferred the steaks from grill pan to plates. Without missing a beat she spooned carrots onto the plate as well, then grabbed the oven mitts and bent down to retrieve the baguette. Her father had taught her this way, this dance of skill, speed, and steadiness.

When she had both plates set up, she turned to the table. Kort stared at her, his mouth partially open in astonishment. Two cans of beer already sat on the table. She set the plates down, then got butter from the fridge. Almost everything she used they'd had to buy; Kort kept very little, in terms of both food and tools, in his kitchen.

"Wow."

Ellery smiled shyly. "Guess that destroys all those illusions of

being a strong feminist."

"But it's amazing," he protested. "Have you considered going on one of those cooking shows? The competition ones?"

"You haven't even tried it yet."

As she took her seat, Kort began cutting into his steak. She watched with nervous anticipation. Will he like it? she wondered. I think I might've used too much garlic salt... Ellery studied his face carefully, noting the brightening of his eyes, the slight curve at the corners of his mouth.

"Damn. If I'd known you could do this, I'd have invited you up sooner."

She raised an eyebrow. "Oh really?"

Kort smiled in that way he did when he was teasing her. "Yeah."

"And what would you have done to me?"

She peeked up from beneath her lashes, hoping she sounded coy; playing the coquette wasn't something she'd tried much. Something shifted in his features, something subtle in his eyes and the set of his mouth.

"Anything you would've let me do."

The words came out so quietly for a moment she was afraid she hadn't really heard them at all. But then Kort glanced down at his plate, his cheeks tinged just the slightest bit red. Her own face went quite red indeed. She fumbled over what to say, until Kort set his fork and knife down, reached across the table, and touched a fingertip to her cheek. All her words disintegrated, fading into a rush of breath that escaped from her lips.

"You look like a strawberry," he teased.

"Oh, shut up and eat your dinner," she groused.

"Only if you tell me about your father. About the things he taught you."

Ellery reached for the salad bowl. As she filled the smaller bowl next to her plate, she considered. What to tell? Talking about her father, about the good times together...she didn't know if she could handle it. She still couldn't wrap her mind around the fact that he'd cut her out of his will. The money didn't matter; that he had, for some reason, left her out, hurt more than she could stand.

She glanced up to find Kort studying her, his brow furrowed in concerned. Not wishing to spoil their evening, she forced a smile to her face.

"Cooking, obviously," she said. "Not just at home, either. Sometimes he'd take me with him. Nannies would have to look after me a lot of the time, because they were business trips, but he still found time for me. He took me to culinary schools in France and Italy, places where he had friends...

"I was the darling of the kitchen, most of the time. Dad taught me to behave myself, to do as I was told, so people tended to like me. I ran errands, and they taught me all sorts of tricks."

"So wait...just how many languages can you speak?" Kort asked. "I mean, I can't imagine they spoke in English just because you were there."

She smiled tentatively. "I've learned a fair bit of...French, Italian, Spanish, German. A few others. Generally I speak them with

varying degrees of fluency."

"Oh."

"Most of this was before I met you," Ellery said, noting his downtrodden look. "After he married Nancy, things were—never quite the same between us. So I didn't talk about it..."

"I've never gotten to go anywhere outside this country," Kort confessed. He watched her with eyes hungry for something more than food. "What's it like?"

He leaned forward eagerly. He's never been? she thought, surprised. But his father definitely had the money... Come to think of it, she remembered him mentioning—when they were younger—a few times when his father went on vacation. She hadn't thought, back then, to ask him why he didn't go with his father.

It might hurt to remember the days she'd spent with her father, but suddenly Ellery found herself grateful that she'd had those days at all. So she leaned across the table too, propping her elbows on it in a way that would've driven Nancy crazy, and began with her first trip to France.

*****

"I swear it's true!"

"I don't believe you," Kort said, snatching the spoon from Ellery's fingers.

"Hey!"

"Liars don't get ice cream."

Not that he could easily keep the spoon away from her. After dinner they'd curled up together in an old arm chair. Ellery's weight held him down; her legs were twined with his. The position, while cozy—rather intimately so—wasn't so good for playing Keep Away. Ellery grabbed the spoon back from him and pointed it demandingly at the pint of ice cream he held. Not that I blame her for wanting more, he thought, holding out the Haagen-Dazs Dulce de Leche she'd picked out.

"I'm dead serious. I fell in a canal," Ellery insisted as she spooned up some ice cream.

"In Venice?"

"Yep."

"Aren't those canals disgusting?"

She wrinkled her nose. "That's about the biggest understatement ever. You don't even want to know what I went through afterwards."

He reached for the spoon. His fingers brushed hers as she relinquished it to him. Kort nabbed a large spoonful and shoved it in his mouth, so he wouldn't give in to the desire to lean close and nibble her neck instead. Though he hadn't seen her drink a lot, she was obviously more than a little tipsy; he wouldn't take advantage of that. Even if it did put a rather attractive flush in her cheeks.

And he wanted her to keep talking at least a little longer. Once she started talking more about her trips than about her father, she lit up with the telling. I want to go some of these places too, he thought, handing the spoon back to her. Maybe some day, if Good Intentions ever gets successful enough... No use dwelling on pipe dreams right now.

"You're the only person I know who's taken a header into a Venetian canal," Kort remarked.

"It was hardly on purpose. And I was five. I saw a reflection of light on the water, thought it was a fish, and tried to make a grab for it."

He let out a bark of laughter before he could stop it.

"It's not funny," Ellery grumbled. "I wanted a fishie. I was five."

"A fishie, huh?" He grinned, imagining five-year-old Ellery. She must've been cute, with all those freckles. "Dare I ask what your father did?"

"Scolded me profusely, mostly. But then some months later we went to Japan and he took me to a cherry blossom festival. They have this game, kingyo-sukui—goldfish scooping, basically. You get this sort of paddle thing called poi, which is made of plastic and paper." Her hands moved, gesturing wildly as she spoke. "It breaks really easily. When I tried, mine broke like right away.

"But my dad was good at it. He caught a goldfish for me that first time. Then every year he would bring me back, to see if I could catch one myself. I never could, though. Guess I don't have the patience."

She shrugged, as if it didn't bother her. But those trips must've stopped once Nancy came along, Kort realized. Or maybe Nancy and her girls joined Ellery and her dad. Either way would've been hard for her to take. Yet at the moment she just smiled, as if the memory didn't hurt at all.

Ellery raised a spoonful of ice cream to her lips. The movement distracted Kort, drawing his gaze to her mouth. He leaned in before he could stop himself, his lips brushing hers, and the spoon. Cold and warmth lingered on his skin. He reached up, drew the spoon away from her, kissed the taste of caramel from her mouth.

She set the pint aside and kissed him back. Kort slid a hand along the base of her neck, stroking the soft, fine hairs there. Ellery shifted, untangling her legs from his so she could straddle him. She kissed him more urgently than ever before, her hands gripping his shoulders tight.

"Ells," he murmured, trying to break the kiss gently. "Sweetheart, you're a little drunk."

Ellery smiled. "Is that like being a little pregnant?" She leaned her forehead against his shoulder and spoke so quietly he had to strain to hear. "I'm not, you know. Drunk, that is. I've been acting kind of tipsy, but I was just pretending. Sometimes I still find it hard to relax, but I wanted to be close to you. So I pretended until I convinced myself. Stupid, right?"

Kort placed two fingers beneath her chin, tilted her head up, and kissed her with the same fierceness she'd kissed him with. She responded hungrily, her lips parting beneath his, her fingers winding in his hair.

He closed his eyes, let himself get lost in her. He ran his hands along her bare arms, along her back, down her sides, savoring the heat of her skin through the thin cotton of her dress. The material slid beneath his palms, bunching up around her waist. Ellery returned his touches more shyly; he could feel her fingers trembling.

He opened his eyes, watching her and trying not to laugh as she timidly unbuttoned his jeans. It wasn't funny; it was just so damn adorable. Kort ran his fingers gently over the backs of her hands. Despite all his experience, he wasn't quite prepared for the way it would feel when she wrapped her fingers around him. Despite the lightness, the tentativeness of her touch, he felt it like a bolt of lightning crashing along his nerves.

"Whoa." Shocked, Kort grabbed her hands and pulled them away.

She froze.

"This—this might be...I'm not sure we should..."

It took him a moment to realize the pounding of his heart was fear. Too much emotion, too much feeling ran through him. Unnerved, he lifted his head to look at her, to apologize, to explain. The look in her eyes frightened him even more. Every muscle in her body was coiled tight; another moment and she'd flee. So Kort pushed that strange storm of confusion as far down as it would go and drew her hands back to him. His breath came out in a harsh rush.

"Does it hurt?" she asked, squeezing lightly, curiously.

"Uh...no." He swallowed hard. "No, 'hurt' is not the word I'd use." He took a deep breath to steady himself, then spoke again, with less difficulty. "At least, not for myself. Ells, what—what did he say to you? Sometimes you act like—like I'm gonna hit you or something just because you want to kiss me."

"I guess I let him have too much power over me, huh?" She stared down at her fingers as she stroked and investigated. "Things were weird then. My dad and I didn't get along and he was so mad at me for moving in with Hank like that. He didn't understand that I just wanted

to get away from Nancy."

Kort reached up and stroked her cheek. Her hands made it difficult to concentrate, but he didn't really want her to stop.

"Hank didn't even kiss me very often. But sometimes I would try to convince him to do...something. Anything more interesting. He would tell me, you know, that girls who were easy got into trouble and—and things like that."

"Jesus Christ! Why did you stay with him?"

"I was lonely. And confused. The only time my world felt right side up was when I was with you. With Hank I was just...trying to force something, anything, to be normal."

She wouldn't look at him, and the movement of her fingers had become more nervous fidgeting than exploration. He didn't know what to say. Sorry I was such an idiot and didn't notice what was going on? he wondered. That might be the truth, but I'm not sure I should actually say it... He tried a different tack instead.

Since words weren't his strong point, Kort kissed her. Just a gentle peck at the corner of her mouth, but enough to get her attention. He let each light brush of lips linger against her skin: on her cheek, along her jaw, her earlobe, her neck. Everywhere he could reach easily. He kept kissing her until she sighed and relaxed, the tension easing from her shoulders.

Her own lips brushed his ear. "What if...what if I want to—to do something? Something other than kiss you. Will you stop me?"

Kort shivered. "Look," he panted, "maybe I'm not the sanest person on the planet, but I'm not that crazy. Although...what, exactly, do you want to do?"

She smiled a little. He could see in her eyes the way she gathered up her courage. Then she slid out of his lap and knelt on the floor.

Kort could only stare. Her hair brushed him, soft and tickling. He was so hard that it almost hurt when her mouth closed on him. The heat, the wet sensation of her tongue, the shy way she gripped him—he thought it might drive him mad. He grasped the arm of the chair with one hand, tightening his fingers until his knuckles ached. It allowed him enough self-control to wrap his other hand in her hair.

She didn't know what she was doing, but it didn't seem to matter. He studied her face, the sweep of her lowered lashes, the movement of her lips. Kort bit his lip, tried not to groan, but watching her intensified the pleasurable zing that traveled along his nerves.

His breath came out in rasping bursts, quickening the longer she sucked and licked. His eyelids lowered, going slitted like he was a cat lounging in the sun. Another moment and Kort finally let them sink all the way shut. He registered, barely, Ellery's surprised yelp as he came, but he was too sunk in the feeling to realize it just then. It took every little fragment of control he still had to keep himself from gripping her too tightly.

When he finally regained his senses enough to open his eyes—and to release her hair—she was staring up at him, wide-eyed, a hand pressed to her mouth. Um...oh damn, Kort thought, sitting up straight. He felt like he was fifteen again, especially when she started to giggle. Ellery's giggles changed to outright laughter as she stood.

"What's so funny?" he demanded, feeling a little cranky.

Her eyes gleamed. "You're usually so controlled. I like being able to change that."

He raised an eyebrow at her. She gazed back at him, unrepentant. Figuring turnabout was fair play, Kort caught her around the waist and surged to his feet. She shrieked as he lifted her up. He considered tossing her over his shoulder and hauling her off to the bedroom, but the couch was closer.

He deposited her on the couch. She tried to make a break for it, laughing the whole time, but he grabbed her hips and held her down. Kort kissed her until she was too breathless to protest, then he pushed her dress up around her hips. While she panted, he pulled her panties aside and pressed his mouth against her. She went still.

"I can do that to you, too," he murmured.

Then he licked her until she squirmed desperately. She lifted her hips, pressing against his mouth. Kort savored her, so sweet and wet and warm on his tongue. He had her trembling and crying out by the time she came. Just the way I like it, he thought, giving her a last languid, satisfied stroke with his tongue. He settled with his head on her stomach, listening to her catch her breath.

In the relative silence that followed, Ellery said, "I think the ice cream has probably melted..."

Kort chuckled and nipped her belly. "That's how you respond to an orgasm?"

"Hey, ice cream, orgasm, it's perfectly legitimate for them to be on the same basic mind track."

"Good point." He nipped her again. "I'll get you some more next Saturday."

"What's next Saturday?"

A sudden wave of shyness ran through him. He shifted anxiously. "Well, um...our second date. If you want."

This is stupid, he thought. After everything else tonight, this makes me feel shy? Fingers caught in his hair, drawing his attention. He lifted his head, let Ellery pull him up until he could cover her mouth with his. Kort sank against her; she wrapped her arms and legs around him, her embrace so soft and welcoming.

"Is that a yes?" he asked.

She bit his lower lip gently. "You can't tell? Then let me try again."

He didn't mind. He could easily spend the entire night kissing her.