Leave the Night On Pt. 03

My mouth stays, drinking her in, soothing her pulsing flesh with gentle strokes of my tongue. She begins begging me, "Please, please, please." And yet, I find the strength to pull my face away from her ass only when she collapses on the bed, boneless and dizzy.

The mattress dips under my weight. I kneel on the bed, positioning myself right behind her. Pearl, still heaving, is deliquescent under my rough hands grabbing her waist. Everything I've been craving is within reach there in between her legs, glistening in the moonlight. I hesitate for a beat, like a thirsty man savoring the imminence of his first drink. I'm having her like this. All of her. No walls scribbled with dirty words behind us.

I wrap a fist around her damp curls and pull her back against my chest so I can get better access to her neck, her mouth. "You taste amazing, My Pearl. I could eat your pussy every day."

She turns and kisses my mouth, now tender and slick with her cum. "Fuck me," she pleads, panting.

My dick, resting on crack her ass, twitches in answer. "You want it?" I groan into her ear.

"Fuck, yes."

I nuzzle into her neck. She's sweaty, salty. Her sweet, natural scent is enhanced. "How much?"

Grinding her ass against my dick, she says, "Fucking desperately. Please." The hoarseness in her voice is evidence that she wants this as desperately as I do.

What I've learned about her is that she likes to drag it out. She likes me to be slow, gentle at first. She likes me to work her up, build it up in her until the frustration grows so unbearable, she starts begging me to be rough. Foreplay is how you get her to go crazy in bed. And now her trembling body tells me she's on the edge. Ripe and ready.

"Julian, please!"

I laugh at the annoyance mingled with lust in her tone. "Tell me what you want, baby," I purr in her ear.

"I want you inside me."

"Yeah?"

"Now."

She is pure need. For me. In this instant, I know this is different. It's different because she is in my bed. It's different because she was a casual encounter, a transient visitor in my life, a face to be lost. She's unforgettable now. This woman wanting me, my body and more, won't be out of my mind come Monday.

Before my thoughts get too consuming, I press a gentle hand to the base of Pearl's spine and bend her to my will. Steadying myself behind her I grab my dick and brush it over her entrance, coating the head in her. Then I ease inside her. With a restraint I never knew I could muster, I sink in with the barest push, feeling the tightness in her giving in to accept all of me. I hear the hiccup of breath that gets stuck in her throat as I enter her so leisurely, we both feel every inch of me being enclosed by her warmth. She makes a sound that gets lost between a grunt of pain and pleasure. I sit so deep inside her my balls get wet.

"Jesus, Pearl," I growl. She's silken heat around me.

"Yes". She utters a single word that translates the relief I feel.

Fucking finally.

Even knowing beforehand what she'd feel like, I'm still floored by the feel of Pearl. She's so small, so fucking tight I could come too soon if I'm not careful. For a skipped beat, I stay still, unmoving inside her, allowing us both to reacquaint ourselves with the intimacy. But Pearl pushes her ass against me, looking for friction, urging me to move.

So, I begin moving.

In one thrust, I surrender to what I've been craving. I start gently, my hips working in anticipation to that moment in which holding back will become impossible. I thrust slow and deep, pulling her ass against me as I push in.

"Oh, God. Julian, yes!"

We've only just began and the slow pace I drive my dick into her tightness drives her crazy. I sink in and roll my hips when her ass meets my pelvis. She claws at the sheets pulling so hard she removes it from the mattress. When I hear my name, I plunge so deep she gasps.

This isn't supposed to be fast, but when Pearl swirls then thrust her hips, I lose my sanity. My fingers on her waist dig in. Her hips begin working in a frenzy, rocking in synchrony with mine. She's chasing my movements herself, pushing against my thrusts, moaning my name imploringly. She is in thrall to me. Her responsiveness fuels me on. She's loud. Unapologetically loud. She doesn't let a single sensation pass her by without expressing it.

I snake a hand around her ribs to fill my hand with one soft breast. The other stays on her waist, merely there, while she moves her body on instinct, taking her pleasure from me. Inside, her pussy is sucking me in, swelling around me. Any second now, the unhurried ins and outs of my dick in her pussy won't be enough. For now, I move how she likes it, to the rhythm that gets her moaning, begging for something she doesn't know, building up the urgency. I increase the pace and she follows me.

We do this dance together. I'm on the edge of losing my control here. My movements abate. I sink in rolling my hips in tandem with her rolling. I recede then go in again. My thrusts create synchronized moans in her. Her sounds are desperate, tight and pleading when I withdraw, and raw and indecent when thrust in. It's as if, to her, being touched is almost unbearable as being touched.

"Harder!" She cries.

It's a command I obey. Sliding a hand up her neck, I fist her hair in my hand and pick up my pace. We groan in unison. The sound of flesh slapping against flesh muffles our noises. Pearl starts crying out, her pussy clutching me harder. It's going to hit her any second now. But I can't let this end yet. The nearness of her orgasm stymies my movements. I pull out, without warning.

"What?! No, no, no!" Pearl grabs for me in a blind frenzy. "Come back!"

"I can't let you come yet," I rasp. "This can't be over this fast."

"Julian...Please." She whinnies, still rolling her hips in the air, searching for me.

I want to see her face when she comes on my dick. I want to be right there with her when she screams my name. Taking her by the waist, I flip her so she lands on her back. My weight settles between her legs comfortably. She grasps my erect dick, positioning it at her entrance. With a single thrust I bury myself back inside her. Her mouth opens to let out a perfect sound. She's tighter, swollen, impossibly wet. I slide in so effortlessly it's like I belong inside her.

I'm in control of our rhythm. I flex my hips, driving her into the mattress. The sheer force of my hips hammering my dick into her has her body riding up the bed, the bed sheets bunching up around her. With Pearl under me this way, there's a familiarity with a strange newness. It's the same body I knew before. It'd the same feeling, the same smell, but something is different. This closeness is new. The way Pearl's looking at me is new.

She takes my hand and places it over one of her bouncing tits. I squeeze and she cries out. I pound through her uncontained little cries. My name said in between her broken breaths steals my reason. I withdraw then push in slowly, seeing a tear scape her eye and fall into her hair.

A bead of sweat tickles its way down my temple. Her eyes go to where our bodies are joined and stay there with fascination. I hold back, so that she can see me entering her in slow motion. So that she sees and feels how good this is, how easy it is, how perfect. We both want it faster, rougher. I can tell by how she follows me when I withdraw. She whimpers at the loss when I'm almost all the way out, with only the head of my dick rimming her entrance. I hesitate a second before thrusting in again.

She won't look away from where I'm fucking her. I want her to miss me inside her. I want her to beg me to go back and stay forever. I halt again, only half in. "I've been wanting this for weeks, my Pearl," I breath into her ear. "I've been dying to be inside you." I push in, hard. She gasps. "You feel this?" I say as I pull out then drive into her so slowly, we both feel every inch of skin between us. "You feel how your pussy loves my dick?"

"Hmm..." She nods, biting hard on her lip, seemingly incapable of forming coherent phrases. The tight humming in her throat and the pleasure on her face are how I know. She feels it, too. This feels the same for her too.

Entwining my fingers through hers, I hold her arms over her head and start working toward her release. Our faces are inches apart, I can see her eyes begin to fog. She tilts her head back, exhaling in synchrony with my thrusts. I don't relent, I let up for a second before flexing my hips and plunging into her again and again.

Pearl's sounds get lost between strangled unintelligible words and pleas. My mind is growing hazy. I feel her clutching me, her noises are getting more desperate. She's going to come and there's nothing in the world I'd love right now than see it. Her release begins tensing her body. Her thighs press hard against my sides. She is wounding up around me, panting, clutching. I sense her quickening. "Come on my dick, My Pearl." I rasp.

She responds arching off the bed and grabbing my ass. Her nails dig in, holding me so close it gets hard to pull out of her. I pound into her once, twice and then her thighs quiver. Her walls close around my dick and my name escapes her lips again.

"Ah! Julian!"

She pulls me in. The tightness holding me to her. Sucking me in tighter and tighter. The orgasm shakes her whole body. She writhes under me, half out of her mind. She's the most fucking beautiful thing I've ever seen. I continue fucking her through her release, holding her in place with the weight of my body over hers.

She slackens, but doesn't stop. "Come inside me, Julian," she says, with barely enough air.

She locks her ankles on the small of my back and squeezes her thighs. It gets so fucking tight I can barely move inside her. My eyes roll back inside my skull. I can't think. Her orgasm made her swollen, slick and hotter. It's heaven inside her.

I unleash my lust and give in to selfishness. I begin fucking her harder, thrusting mercilessly, driving her body up the bed, chasing the pressure on my spine. Sweat aids the glide of our bodies against each other's. Pearl claws at my back and my growl breaks through the slapping sound of my pelvis meeting hers.

I squeeze my eyes shut, feeling an increasing urgency roll over me. On my next thrust, heat flows down to pool on the base of my spine. My ass contracts under Pearl's hands and I close my eyes as my whole being is poured out of me and into her. "Fuck. Fuck!"

Heart thrilling, I collapse on top of her, still throbbing inside her. We stay this way for what feels like hours, waiting for the air to work its way inside our lungs again. Our chests are heaving, glued together by the moisture the friction heated on our skins.

It's forever before I find the strength to lift my head off Pearl's neck. I open my eyes to find her eyes are sparkling. She's marveled, smiling up at the ceiling. I wipe the gleaming sheen of perspiration off her forehead. "What's got you smiling, My Pearl?"

Her eyes are lazy to meet mine. She shakes her head, the satisfied grin on her mouth widens. "Man, I love you dick," she says.

I stare at her for a second and then I'm laughing. She joins me and, in a minute, we are both breathless again. I'm half stupid, too hot and exhausted. I try to pull out of her but she clings to me, holding me inside her. "Stay," she asks.

Already growing limp inside her, I stay. Sapped out, I drop my head on her chest. Her fingers start playing with my hair. I don't even notice when sleep comes.

***

I KNOW, BY THE DENSE DARKNESS OUTSIDE, the time must be suspended between those hours where it's neither late nor early. It's a habit so worn out it became an instinct to roll on the bed, my body wanting to take up all the space. When I try, though, she's there. Pearl's in a deep, undisturbed sleep, with her back to me. Sometime between the last word we spoke and sleep overpowering her, she ended up on the part of the bed that used to be mine back when left and right were designated as sides.

At first, the panic comes, unannounced, as an invasion; an invasion of a space that I've had to reclaim as mine and mine alone. It takes hold of my muscles like an iron grip. It makes me want to get up, get out, because I don't do this anymore. I've forgotten how to share this space.

As if sensing the quickening of my breath, Pearl stirs and rolls towards me. Her forehead touches my chest, her hair tickles my chin. I take in her scent, detect some of my own in her, and gently, from one heartbeat to the next, I calm down.

And just as fast as it came, that panic fades away.

I slide an arm around her waist and pull her against me. She nuzzles my neck in a gesture as natural as it is unconscious, lending it a familiarity only built over time.

There hasn't been a woman in my bed in five years.

There's one in my bed again.

I think it's going to rain soon.

I go under smelling the damp earth outside and the scent of lemon grass in her hair.

***

WHEN I WAKE UP AGAIN, IT'S RAINING. Rivulets of water are trickling down the glass on the windows. There's a faint blue-grey light on the horizon, beyond the lake, threatening to bring dawn in a few hours. I'm alone in bed. The imprint on the mattress that still holds the proof of Pearl's presence is cold. I check the clock on the bedside table. 4:37 AM. I trade the bedsheets for clean sweatpants and set to find her.

She's in the living room, on the armchair that was once my father's favorite piece of furniture, wrapped on the afghan that still held the scent of nicotine for days after he was gone. Even as the floorboards creak under my weight, Pearl doesn't hear me come in, distracted as she is, wistfully watching the rain.

"I thought you'd run away after having used me for your pleasure."

She turns to the sound of my voice. "I couldn't sleep. Helped myself to some tea," she says, lifting the mug in her hands.

There's a heaviness to her voice, a weight pulling the corners of her eyes down. We were just in bed together, and I'd hate to attribute meaning to this post-coital moroseness on her face. Because I don't know how to react to it, I don't. "You're welcome to all my tea," I say, and scoop her in my arms. Before she can react, I sit myself down on the chair, settling her on my lap. She curls around me like a cat. That's when I notice she's wearing the t-shirt she peeled off of me earlier. The sight of her in my clothes does something weird to my stomach. "You okay?"

"My bra is somewhere on that lawn, out in the rain," she says, evading my question.

"So are my pants."

"My bra is a La Perla."

"I don't know what that means, but I can salvage it later. Besides, you look better without it." I prove my point circling my thumb over the peak of her nipple poking through my t-shirt. She responds with a press of warm lips to my neck. The gesture is half-hearted however, when everything she does is done with all of her. "You're far away, My Pearl."

She sighs against my skin. "I wish I could be running out there," she says. "I just love the rain. I like to watch it. It's soothing."

She's lying to me. Perhaps hiding from me is a better term. As we sit together watching the downpour, a silence seeps in. My unasked questions remain unasked. We are only now beginning to know each other. There are things we don't talk about yet. Things that are best kept to ourselves until it is time to share them. Even so, Pearl's silence is reluctant and it doesn't strike me as a choice of privacy.

Who am I to judge her? I'm also dolling myself out, one spoonful at a time. Besides, I was the one who insisted we do this thing we're doing. In secret. At night. Almost committing to the same mistake we did a year ago. I can't fault her for keeping her troubling thoughts to herself, even as I feel something has shifted after the things said and done in my bed tonight.

I'm pulled out of my head by the shiver that runs over Pearl. Under the heat of her body, I hadn't noticed how the room had grown chilly. The logs on the hearth are mostly reduced to ashes, only a few stubborn coals insist on burning brightly red. "Do you want me to get you something warmer?" I ask her, running a hand up and down her arm to smooth the goose bumps.

"No," she protests, wrapping the afghan tighter around herself. "Don't you dare move. You're warm enough."

I chance a studious glance down. From this angle, her eyelashes seem even longer, curled upwards. I see the high and elegant plane of her cheekbones, the soft slope of her rounded and upturned small nose. "Has anyone ever told you; you kind of look like Whitney Houston?"

She throws her head of wild curls back and laughs. "Except I can't sing, right!"

"Except you can't sing for shit, yeah," I agree.

"My mom used to say that too."

"Does your mom also agree you're a terrible singer?"

"She says I look like Whitney," she says, rolling her eyes as I knew she would. "I think I look like her, actually. My mother, I mean. Well, except for her whiteness, of course. I see some of her traits in the mirror sometimes."

"Your mother's white?" I ask automatically, although I'm not surprised. Not exactly. Pearl looks mixed. This is simply a subject we haven't discovered in our conversations yet.

"As white as they come," she says, with nostalgia passing over her features.

Then, I realize I have an opportunity I've never had before. No one else in my family shares the worries I have with Hannah. My brother doesn't. My cousins and friends don't. There's no one else I can ask. Pearl and I share an intimacy that grants me a presumption I can't assume with anyone else I know. She's perfectly qualified to answer and understand my questions. "How was that for you? Growing up with a white mother, I mean."

She knows why I'm asking; I can tell so by the tender comprehension in her brown eyes. "Well, she is an extraordinary mom, so there's that. There were some issues, nonetheless." She sips her tea while her eyes go somewhere else. "I guess being mixed made some things a little easier, and some others a little harder. I was always so confused, lost in racial limbo. For a while there, I didn't know what I was. I didn't fit anywhere. I wasn't white. I didn't feel black enough even as I grappled with most of those issues young black girls do. I thought I was ugly, I thought I had bad hair. I compared myself to those other girls, the ones people considered beautiful. I didn't love being in my own skin."

I picture my daughter dealing with similar confusing feelings, and my heart tightens in my chest. "I'm sorry you were made to feel that way, Pearl."

"I'm sorry I let myself believe those things too. But I was lucky, you know," she says, lifting a hand to brush my cheek. "My mother never let me forget what a miracle she believed I was. The real problems were at school."

"What kind of problems?"

"I was bullied a lot. That's actually why I became a teacher. There was this boy, Rony, he threw a stone at me this one time. It hurt my head pretty bad. I still have the scar."

"You can't be serious."

"Here." She takes my hand and guides it to a spot on the back of the head and I feel a tiny protuberant line on her scalp. "Can you feel it?"

"Yeah." I'm sure I look just as revolted as I sound. "Jesus, Pearl." I don't know what I would do if such a thing happened to my kid.

"I changed schools after that. I was kind of quiet as a kid, a little like Hannah. Eventually, I grew into myself. I found my place in the world. I discovered boys. I had my first love. Built my confidence." Pearl's voice takes on a longing tone and I wonder at the images playing in her head. "Anyway, having a white mother wasn't an issue, because she was my best friend. She made sure to teach me my own value. Most importantly, though, she never neglected the fact she had a black daughter. She raised me to know the implications of my race."