Chapter 41

“Luke?” she whispered.

“What time is it?” he whispered back, his head throbbing. Not from an alcohol-induced hangover — they hadn’t even opened a bottle last night — but an emotional one.

“Time for this,” she murmured, kissing her way down his chest until her lips met his cock. It was unusual for her to wake him before she began fellating him, and curiosity eventually pried his tear-glued eyelids open. It was light out, but only just. Power still hadn’t returned, and the apartment was a little chillier than usual. Well, I know one way to keep warm, he said to himself, leaning back and concentrating on the waves of pleasure emanating from his expanding manhood.

The exhaustion of a long day of sex, and an even longer night with less sex but more difficult emotions than either of them would have preferred, sent them back into each other’s arms for a few more hours of sleep. When they finally stirred, the power was back on. Luke stared across the room at the microwave clock blinking its never-changing noon. If only those numbers could shape reality. We could stay like this forever.

He sighed, hugging her closer. She responded, though still without words.

Four days.

Neither of them seemed to be able to talk to each other. They shared breakfast, a shower during which he devoured her sex through several orgasms, and a through-the-window survey of the exterior damage. A number of branches had fallen, and the first of the season’s autumn leaves were scattered around what had previously been a pristine lawn, but otherwise the storm’s fury seemed to have been more audiovisual than physical.

“I need to check on the house and the pool.” Her voice was flat and emotionless.

“I’ll take a look at the boat and the beach,” he offered.

“Thank you,” she responded, taking his hand and squeezing it once before letting go. It was a cool, almost distancing gesture, as if she couldn’t bring herself to reopen her badly wounded heart. “I also have to make a few calls, but I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“Lawn service?”

“Among others.”

“Ah.” He didn’t have to ask who “others” included.

“Everything okay?” he asked as she trudged up the stairs.

“One umbrella knocked over and some tree litter in the pool. The flowerbeds have looked better. You?”

“The beach is a bit of a mess; I guess the wind ended up blowing in our direction. Everything else looked fine.”

“That’s good.” She glanced at him before returning her sullen gaze to the floor. “I would’ve waited until after the weekend to clean up the mess, but given that B ... well, anyway, I had to schedule the lawn service and the pool cleaner over the next few days. Sorry.”

“I understand. It’s no different than having to put the wine away before I leave. I guess we’ll just have to be quiet and keep some emergency clothes nearby.”

For the first time in a while, he saw the faintest hint of a smile on her face. “I guess we will, unless you want me to generate some new story material.” Suddenly, she rushed into his arms, gluing herself to him as if she’d never let him go. “I’m so sorry about yesterday.”

“I fail to see how you did anything requiring an apology, and even if you did, you more than made up for it with everything else. It’s too bad that our last attempt to explore submission ended that way.”

“Maybe...”

“No. I think, given everything else we’re going through, it’s too emotionally fraught. Especially after what you told me last night.”

When she kissed him, he realized she was crying again. “You’re right, we shouldn’t. I’m just ... sad.”

“I know. Me too.”

“What can we do to stop being sad?”

“I don’t think we can. Which means there’s only one thing we can do.”

With a tear-streaked smile, she began shedding her clothes.

There was, for the rest of the day and well into the night, no stretch longer than five minutes without them at least touching each other. With the exception of dinner, there was no stretch longer than thirty minutes during which they weren’t engaged in some sort of sexual contact, every moment of it orchestrated by her. Though it wasn’t obvious to him until later, she was carefully managing the pace of his orgasms so that he never reached a point of collapse or exhaustion, all the while driving herself into an orgiastic frenzy during which he suspected she was attempting to set a personal record for cumulative climaxes. By the time sleep finally took him, they’d revisited absolutely everything they’d ever done together, often considerably more than once. And when he finally succumbed, it was with her still slowly riding his shockingly resilient erection. What happened next he never learned, though he was fully aware of the single obsessive thought that chased him into and tortured his dreams.

Three days.

Wednesday began and proceeded much like Tuesday, at least until mid-afternoon. With a mysterious smile and a refusal to offer any explanation, Kathryn disappeared for a little while, forcing Luke to distract himself with emails until he heard the guesthouse door open. To his surprise, she didn’t come upstairs but walked straight into the cellar. When she finally reappeared, she was toting a pair of baskets. “Put some clothes on, grab these, and follow me,” she playfully demanded. Moments later, they were crossing the branch-strewn lawn. His heart started to race, and his vision blurred.

He knew where they were headed.

It wasn’t a precise reconstruction of their first lakeside picnic — the many ways their poolside adventure had deviated from the original demonstrated the folly of such attempts — but rather a sort of bookend. As the season had changed from summer to fall, so had the cheeses. And this time, she was making him guess the identity of the wines.

“Do you actually remember what we drank all those weeks ago?”

“Of course: Brun ‘Terres Dorées’ Brouilly and Chidaine Montlouis-sur-Loire Clos Habert.” Without verifying his answer, she produced a foil-wrapped bottle and poured him a taste. “So now I have to put on a show for you?” he mock-complained. “What am I, a performing seal?”

“Can I make you do absolutely anything I want?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’re a performing seal,” she smirked. “Dance for me, wine boy.”

“No problem, Wendy,” he mumbled while trying to analyze the wine’s color. The dim grey light of a blustery day — eerily reminiscent of the first time they’d visited the rock — made it difficult, but by the time his glass was empty he was brimming with confidence. “It’s still Chidaine, but it’s riper and sweeter, so it has to be the Les Bournais. Young, though the exact vintage would be no more than a random guess, as by now you own the last four.”

“And the red?” she asked, handing him a second glass of pale, burnished wine with a faded outer rim.

“Well, if it’s another Brouilly, it’s definitely not the same bottling. It’s pretty old, and...” After a few minutes of brow-furrowing analysis, he held out his glass for another taste. “Assuming this came from your cellar, and not from some secret fool-the-sommelier stash, there’s only one thing it can be, and so my guess amounts to cheating: 1998 Chamonard Morgon Le Clos de Lys.”

“Cheating or not, that’s still sexy as hell.”

“Not as sexy as when you do almost as well with absolutely no formal training. But will I perhaps be rewarded for the brilliance of my sexy-as-hell insight?”

“You know, since you don’t have to exert the slightest effort to get laid anymore — if anything, you’d have to exert more effort to pry me off your dick — I really should come up with a more meaningful reward system. But yes, your correct guesses will receive compensatory sexual favors. Now, relax and enjoy while we still can.” She peered at the low-hanging, fast-moving clouds. “I don’t think the weather’s done being metaphorical with us yet.”

She backed herself into his chest, balancing the cheese platter on her thighs. Instead of letting him serve himself, she periodically offered him morsels of bread and cheese, refilling their glasses whenever the need arose. “The first time we were here, eating and drinking almost exactly like this, did you ever imagine we’d end up doing everything we’ve done? That we’d fall in love with each other?”

“It’s difficult for me to know anymore. I think you may be conflating events, though. The first time we were here I tentatively put my arm around your shoulders, and you not only didn’t resist, you leaned against me. The second time was when you made me spread my legs so you could nestle between them, like you’re doing now. You chose that moment to explain you were tactile, which I certainly think you’ve more than proven.”

With a sexy giggle, she acknowledged, “I guess I have. But the first visit is the one we’re paying tribute to, right? The one with chenin, gamay, and cheese, I mean.”

“Yep.”

“And the second was late-night Champagne.”

“That’s right. I also remember you telling me to stop worrying about my erection, which of course made me worry about it the entire time.”

“Not that you’ll be surprised to hear this,” she admitted, “but once I felt it pressing into my back, I was horny for the rest of the night. In fact, when I got home I quietly snuck into my office and took care of myself a few times before going to bed. And I might as well share another secret: I came pretty close to giving you a grossly premature handjob right then and there.”

“Why didn’t you? Wait, never mind, I know why you didn’t. Your husband was home.”

“Well, there was that, yes. Back then I still held to my rule about not having sex with you while Bill was around, even though I was already having a lot of sex with you in my imagination. But even if I’d been of a mind to break the rule that very night, it wouldn’t have happened because I wasn’t drunk enough to stop it from going farther.”

“You’re going to have to walk me through that leap, because I’m pretty sure I don’t follow.”

“The night after the charity ball — the night I made my big but manifestly unwise move into your pajamas — I was altered enough to make you come and then drunkenly weave home without worrying about my own satisfaction. If I’d touched you ... intimately, I mean ... the night we were here, I would’ve demanded that you return the favor. But I was not ready for that. Not ready enough, anyway. And for the record, I’d like to point out that you’ve once again evaded my question.”

“I have, probably because given everything that’s happened since, it’s hard for me to remember what was real and what was all in my head. Did I know we’d fall in love? I was already in love with you, of course. As for how you felt about me, or whether or not our relationship was ever going to turn physical, that was my period of peak confusion. In retrospect, it’s obvious that you were sending out a blizzard of mixed signals, and it would’ve been impossible for me to interpret them coherently or correctly. At the time, at least for me, it was more about the nexus of my desire, my caution, and my guilt. You were driving me insane, and I simply had no idea what to do about it, or what you wanted me to do about it.”

“I know I was, and I’m sorry. For what it’s worth, I was just as crazed. The difference was that I had an externally imposed structure that, at least for a little while, stayed my hand. Literally, that is,” she laughed, “until the night it didn’t.”

“So let me turn the question around. What did you think was going to happen?”

“I was still trying to deny the plain and obvious truth. Still fooling myself into thinking that I had things under control, even though everything I was feeling, saying, and doing indicated otherwise. That first week and a half — and I still can’t believe that’s how little time it took for all this to start — blurs together for me as well, but by the time we careened over the cliff I’d done pretty much everything except rip my clothes off and beg you to fuck me. All the sexual innuendo on the boat and elsewhere, constantly finding reasons to touch you, even though I knew exactly what it was doing to you — and to me, too — sneaking off for a romantic night of Champagne and moonlight while my husband was sleeping off his jet lag, interrogating you about your sex life, lounging around the pool in a bikini so small I might as well have been naked, encouraging you to go beat off because I couldn’t stop staring at your cock and I was growing increasingly desperate for it ... like I said, I was acting like a complete whore, with the sole exception of the one thing a whore’s ostensibly there to do. So the answer to your question, my love, is that I absolutely ‘knew’ we were going to have sex — the realization that we were in love took a little longer — but I would’ve denied it if you or anyone else had asked, and I would’ve have fooled myself into believing that I meant it. Like I said,” she added, punctuating her coda with a lusty swallow of the Montlouis and taking up her glass of Morgon, “I was in denial.”

“Do you ever wonder if we waited too long? In retrospect, it all seems so inevitable.”

“Not really. I know why you’re asking, especially now, but earlier would’ve been too soon. As it was, I almost screwed everything up by acting rashly. That night was like a perfect storm of motivation and opportunity: I was angry at my husband, I was dolled up and worked up, I’d been flirting relentlessly with you even though I wouldn’t have called it that, I was drunk, and you weren’t just available, you were obviously desperate for something to happen. You remember my story about losing control after the sculpture class, right? Well, that night was the moment I lost control with you. And then, the very next day, it happened again, with only your own restraint standing between what we did and complete capitulation. Since I returned from my panicked mini-vacation, it’s never stopped happening. Which is part of why I’ve been so willing and eager to cede control to you, because it’s clear that when we’re together, I’m no longer capable of it. I can control our sexual choreography, but I can’t control us.”

He tensed at the reminder of the previous night’s difficulties. She obviously felt it, as she twisted around to refill both his glasses and feed him a few more pieces of cheese. “Anyway, I don’t regret not getting together earlier. Those weren’t days and nights we could’ve managed without prematurely imploding. I’ve sometimes regretted the times when the intensity of our relationship stole hours, or even whole days, from us, but after last night I don’t anymore. Nor should you.”

“It’s hard not to,” he groused.

“I know, but listen carefully and tell me if I’m not right. Wall-to-wall sex isn’t a relationship. It’s not love, either. We’ve come as close as two people can to that exact kind of sexual excess, but though there’s been hurt, pain, and anger along the way, if we hadn’t experienced those things — the bad alongside the good — none of this would matter. It wouldn’t be real. You tell me over and over that you love me, with words and gestures and sometimes even silence, but the reason I know it’s true is that you can hurt me and I still love you just as much as I did before. Sometimes even more.”

To Luke, it seemed that the myriad and impenetrable grays of his horizon were inexorably darkening. If there’s been a theme running through the entirety of our relationship, that’s it right there. That love means I can hurt her. That I am hurting her by the very act of loving her. Wendy tried and failed to make me hear the words, and it took me a truly unfortunate amount of time to understand what they mean. But even after everything that’s happened, I still don’t know what to do with that knowledge. Am I supposed to keep on hurting her, or am I supposed to find a way to stop? I know I can’t stop loving her, and I guess that means I’ll never stop hurting her in all the ways she’s explained that I am, but I don’t see how I can keep on doing both unless we’re together. How can I go on hurting her if the entirety of our future is measured in days? Isn’t that the way to make it stop, just like she’s been saying all along?

Kathryn sat up again, scanning the sky. After a while, she stood and held out her hand. Though she spoke no words, he knew what she was asking. What she was initiating. Shaking off his grim hopelessness, he rewrapped the cheese and secured it on the bench while she did the same with the rest of the wine.

She drew close and kissed him, her eyes speaking silently to his of the intensity of her love, then started removing layers of his clothing. With fumbling fingers, he did the same to her until they were both naked. It was cool and breezy enough that he felt the approach of goosebumps — especially when she lowered him to the table-shaped portion of the rock formation, and the cold, unyielding hardness of the stone seeped into his bones — but then she began warming him in her own inimitable way, and all thoughts of any temperatures other than their own were forgotten.

Her lips traveled all over his body, paying lavish homage to realms she rarely visited and places her mouth hardly seemed to leave anymore. But their final destination was never in doubt, and by the time they reached it, he was painfully erect. At first, her oral attentions were a tease — a kiss, a lick, a lusty inhalation of his masculinity — but her hunger escalated until both hands were working his staff alongside her sucking mouth, never taking him to the root, but instead trying to pleasure the entirety of his shaft and his balls at once. It was a treatment he couldn’t resist for long, and when he finally poured his cream into her mouth and she greedily swallowed it down, it was more than just needed relief from the enormous pressure — not all of it sexual — that had been building in his heart and his loins. It was a tribute to, and a reward for, her love. Even more than her infinite skill.

The wind picked up, churning the lake’s surface into whitecaps and causing branches to wave back and forth. Leaves weakened by the previous night’s tempest gave up their hold on life and swirled away to join their fallen brethren.

Cradling his head between her hands, she slid up his body until her sex was positioned directly above his mouth. He made love to her dripping entrance, drinking her sensuous essence and feasting on her overheated sex, probing and caressing until she exploded, doing it again and again while she writhed and wailed and came, covering his face with her arousal.

The wind shifted, racing across the turbulent lake to steal its cooling humidity, buffeting a pair of lovers lost in an erotic universe that contracted towards singularity with every passing moment.

Rising up on her knees and shuffling backward, she bent down to offer a benedictive kiss, reached between her legs, and directed his cock into her depths, grinding and rolling her hips and crying out her pleasure. Her nipples drew roadmaps of desire across his chest. Her pace increased until she was pounding herself onto his impaling rod. Throwing her head back, hair whipping wildly about in the wind and the fury of their lust, she bellowed her climax, retracing the paths her nipples had forged with fingernails that scraped and abraded his flesh; claws dragging him to the edge of a cliff that released the animal and the pain within.

The wind howled back at her, at first mimicking and mocking, then desperate to surpass she whose pleasure pierced and turned back nature’s roar. Their writhing bodies were baptized by the spray from a surging wave as it crashed into the shoreline.

Gripping her buttocks, he reared upward and reversed their positions, just barely managing to cushion her head with his palm as he slammed her into the unforgiving rock. Her eyes spoke of nothing except raw sexual hunger, her lips wrestled with his, her legs widened and wrapped around his lower back to urge him to thrust harder, to thrust deeper, to take and possess and fuck her until she belonged to no one but him.

Raindrops battered his back. Wind-whipped leaves briefly abraded his flesh before swirling back towards the sky. Trees flung their razored fingers at him, stinging and lashing his skin. Nature fell harder and faster, scolding and punishing and then, when it made no difference at all to their furious coupling, showering them in resentful celebration. Kathryn screamed in continuous climax as the skies flailed in a futile and failed attempt to drown her passion. Luke dragged her to the end of the rock and stood, bending her legs back and hammering her cunt, giving in to a raw, atavistic, primal need to conquer beyond recourse.

The heavens drenched them with tears, wailing with desire and loss, howling in pain and ecstasy. Weeping without respite for a love beyond the cruelty of time. For a union that would last forever, yet might never again be.

“I think this would be a good time to overdose on vitamins,” she said through chattering teeth as they huddled in a fortress of blankets, cradling steaming cups of tea. Though their naked bodies were pressed tightly together, neither was yet warm enough to provide radiant comfort for the other.

“I agree. And I’m starting to think the tea should’ve come after a hot shower.”

“Better yet, a hot bath.”

“Well, what are we waiting for? Though you might want to bring the tea.”

“Not the bourbon?”

“No, because once I’m warmed up I intend to make further use of you, and bourbon’s only going to get in the way.”

“Understood,” he acknowledged with an eager grin as he followed her into the bathroom.

Once again — though it was, in part, a decision made easier by how much they’d consumed before the storm arrived — they skipped wine with dinner. Having expended their fiercest energies in the heart of the tempest, they made slow, romantic love straight through the night and well into the morning.

Two days.

It was his final thought as he submitted to the seduction of Morpheus only hours earlier, and it was his first thought as Kathryn finished swallowing his load and his post-orgasmic heart rate slowed to a more normal pace. She’d woken him up and voraciously attacked his rod, but once she’d taken him right to the precipice, she held him there, teasing and edging him for nearly an hour until his balls ached. Her reward — multiple mouthfuls of ejaculate — seemed to temporarily sate her ravenous hunger, and she patted his chest and told him to rest while she showered.

Two days, he repeated, misery compressing his chest. Through the windows glowed a healing sun rising up through a bright blue sky. He hated both for being full of an optimism he was no longer capable of feeling. What was it that Sevinay said? Leave something unfinished, for tomorrow will arrive whether or not I remain to see it? It would be wise advice, were what I’m leaving unfinished anything other than our love.

They fought it as long as they could, but by the time lunch was over and they were entering their fourth or fifth hour of seemingly tireless rutting, their overwhelming sadness finally crushed the last of their resistance in its pitiless grip. For the rest of the afternoon they made love, rested, fucked, and rested again in a haze of tears, desperately reaffirming their love in word and deed, but finding less and less hope within their declarations. For the first time all week, she lost control over his climaxes. Eventually, he collapsed, exhausted and spent, pleading for some time to recover.

Dinner came and dinner went, they pushed themselves beyond all previous limits until there was no more darkness left to the night, and they slept on a pillow soaked with their despair.

One day.

Wide awake despite the early hour and so little sleep, Luke stared at Kathryn. Her eyes were as haunted as his. Her hand was wrapped around his manhood in preparation for their usual morning ritual, but he was neither erect nor aroused, and she was making no attempt to change either of those conditions. Instead, she stared back at him, bereft of words and devoid of life.

This can’t be it, he berated himself. We have so little time, yet here we are succumbing to the inertia of grief. But no one has stood still more often or more stubbornly than I have, and if it’s the only recompense I can make, this is the time to make it. If this is our last day together, this emptiness can’t be where we spend it. If today is all we have left, then I refuse to waste it. Not like this. Flinging her to her back, he buried his face between her thighs. She came within fifteen seconds of his tongue meeting her clit. And again, less than a minute later. He realized that all her tragic vulnerability came with an unexpected side effect: the entirety of her flesh was a raw, exposed nerve. I wonder if the same is true for me? Knowing her, I’ll find out sooner or later.

Scores of deafening climaxes later, Kathryn forcefully shoved his head away from her sex and clamped her legs together, silently begging for respite. I’ve never done that to her before, he mused, wondering if it was only the emotion of the moment, a new plateau in their connection, or a majestic horizon that would, in a matter of hours, no longer exist. She was murmuring incoherently, waving her hands at the empty air. He watched her flail and grasp at ephemera as a few tears escaped her tightly closed eyes.

They were the last tears he’d see her shed.

“You should pack.”

“I don’t...”

“No. Pack now. If not now, when?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then you’ll end up spending the final hours of our beautiful journey doing something neither of us wants you to do. Is that how you want to leave? In a panicked rush to stuff your last few belongings into a suitcase? Do it now. Do it before it becomes impossible. Do it so we can spend every beautiful moment together, without interruption, until there are no more moments to spend.”

“You keep calling it the end.”

“Everything has an end, my love. But there’s always a tomorrow, and one way or another we’ll see it together.”

“I don’t understand how you can call anything about this beautiful.”

“Because, my love,” she said, caressing his cheek, “everything about us is beautiful. And whether or not we cry or feel pain doesn’t change that. Not in the least.”

There was a preternatural calmness to Kathryn’s demeanor, as if she was taking on the full weight of their emotional burdens, burying it in a deep, quiet place so she could shepherd their waning hours with love and infinite care. He was deeply grateful, for every atom of his being was at war with itself, but the more he struggled and lashed out, the more generous and protective she became. He remembered Irina praising her skill as a caregiver, and wondered if this was yet another side of her that he’d never seen. I’ve only ever known her as the brilliant, vivacious, romantic, wicked, and sexually indomitable woman I love. Is this the maternal instinct so unfairly torn from her all those years ago? She’s comforting me because I’m no longer capable of controlling myself or my emotions, and she doesn’t want to experience these moments through an impenetrable veil of tears. She’s given me everything but the future, yet she’s somehow still strong enough to give me this.

He tried to steel himself, but there were piles of rubble around his heart that he knew would take more strength than he possessed to clear. I have to get hold of myself. The cost of her effort must be unimaginable, yet all I’m doing is taking. I have to summon the courage to do better ... if not for me, then for her. But where, other than her, can I possibly find that sort of courage?

“I...” Good start.

“Shhhh.” She kissed him for a very long time. Not to escalate, but to assure and affirm. “Finish packing. I’ll help.”

“You knew?”

“Of course I did.”

“You can’t possibly...”

“You’re right, I don’t. But I will. It’s something a woman does for the man she loves.”

Despite the relentless and thunderous orgasms to which they’d treated each other over the past few hours, he was restless and on edge, unable to remain still in their postcoital embrace, yet unwilling to leave her side. Once again she took the initiative to heal his open wounds, rolling away and pulling him from the bed.

“Put on some clothes — or don’t; it doesn’t matter unless the lawn folks are here, which it doesn’t sound like they are — and go for a walk. The air in here is thick, and not just with all the fluids we’ve released into it this week. Go and clear your head, or you’ll be no good to me later. I’ll be waiting when you get back.” The easy smile on her face, the lighthearted teasing — as if nothing at all about this day was different from any other — were incomprehensible to him. Yet he perceived no guile. Only openness, compassion, and love.

Unable to answer, unable to contradict, unable to do anything but cling to what was no longer there and fleeing farther away with every moment, he dug through his suitcase, threw on some unused workout clothes, and departed the apartment.