Chapter 98: Jingle Bell Rock
The quiet was dense, filled only with the slowing cadence of their breath and the settling of the hearth. Rupert felt untethered, his body a strange, heavy, and profoundly satisfied thing. Libby’s hand in his was a dry, warm anchor.
“You’re a quiet one, aren’t you?” she murmured, giving his fingers a squeeze.
“I think… I’m just processing,” he said, the words feeling inadequate. How did one process this? The calendar on the wall, Margot’s knowingly wrapped gift, the cage, and now this generous, hungry woman. It was a spreadsheet with too many variables.
Libby propped herself on an elbow, her silver hair falling in a cascade over one shoulder. The firelight danced across the soft lines of her face and the fuller curves of her body. She looked contemplative. “It’s a lot, I know. Being her Christmas present to all of us.” She traced a finger down his sternum. “But you’re a very good present, Rupert. Better than I dared hope for.”
A flush of something warm—pride, absurdly—spread through his chest. He turned his head to look at her. “You said you’d been counting the days.”
“I have. Woke up every morning this month, looked at my own ridiculous photo on the kitchen calendar, and wondered.” She smiled, a little sadly. “Walter’s been gone eight years. You forget the weight of a man. The sound. The… heft.” Her eyes glistened. “I missed this. The silly, sweaty, glorious mess of it.”
She leaned over and kissed him, a slow, deep, exploring kiss that tasted of shared salt and lingering desire. When she pulled back, the sadness was gone, replaced by a rekindled spark. “I’m not done with my present yet.”
Before he could respond, she swung a leg over his hips, straddling him with a practiced ease that belied her age. His body, spent moments ago, gave a traitorous, interested twitch beneath her. She felt it and grinned, aligning herself so he brushed against her damp curls.
“I told you,” she said, her voice dropping to a husky register as she rocked gently, “I’ve been a very good girl all year. My stocking needs a proper stuffing.”
She reached behind herself, took him in hand, and guided him to her entrance. She was still gloriously slick from their first joining and his earlier attentions. With a sigh of profound relief, she sank down onto him, taking him inside inch by deliberate inch, her head falling back.
“Oh, yes,” she breathed. “That’s the ticket.”
Rupert’s hands found her hips, their shape solid and real in his grasp. Then his gaze was drawn upward, past her, to the ornate mirror fixed to the canopy above the bed. The reflection was obscene, beautiful, and utterly captivating. He saw the swell of Libby’s back, the powerful rise and fall of her breasts as she began to move, the silver shock of her hair flowing like mercury down her spine. He saw his own hands, pale against her skin, gripping tight. And between them, the coupling view of their joining, her body rising and falling, taking him deep with a wet, soft sound that filled the silent room.
Libby caught him looking. “See something you like?” she panted, her rhythm increasing. “Watch. Watch what you do to me.”
He was helpless not to. The mirrored spectacle fueled him, a feedback loop of visual and physical sensation. She rode him with a focused, relentless energy, her body slapping against his thighs. The fur throw beneath them grew damp. Her moans were constant now, a low, urgent chant. “That’s it… give it to me… fill me up… stuff this old stocking full…”
Her words, so crude and so festive at once, shattered his last vestige of restraint. He met her thrusts from below, driving up into her with a force that shook the bedframe. The tinsel draped on the headboard trembled. Her cries escalated, sharp and ragged. He watched in the mirror as her face contorted in ecstasy, as her body clenched around the reflected image of his shaft vanishing into her again and again.
Her climax was a violent, shuddering earthquake. She screamed, her back arching dramatically, her inner muscles gripping him in a rapid, milking pulse. It tipped him over the edge. With a guttural groan he didn't recognize as his own, he erupted inside her, a second, seemingly deeper surrender that left him bucking beneath her, emptying everything.
She collapsed forward onto his chest, a sweaty, heaving weight. They lay like that for minutes, joined, as the fire burned lower.
Slowly, carefully, she dismounted. He felt the immediate, cool loss of her. She padded, naked and magnificently unselfconscious, to the dresser and retrieved the small silver key and the hated plastic cage. He watched her come back, the evidence of their coupling glistening on her inner thighs.
“Rules are rules, sweetheart,” she said softly, not unkindly. She knelt and, with far more assurance than when she’d removed it, fitted the cage back over his softening flesh, clicking the lock shut with a final, defining snick. The familiar constriction returned, a bizarre comfort after the overwhelming freedom.
Then she gestured to the mess between her legs. “And part of my deal with Margot,” she said, her tone turning practical, almost housewifely, “is that cleanup is your department. No wasting a drop. You made the mess, you tidy it up.”
She lay back on the fur, opening her legs. He hesitated for only a second. The humiliation was there, a faint, hot pulse in his cheeks. But it was inseparable now from the profound intimacy of the last hour. This was the language of this strange year. He moved between her thighs.
The taste was musky, salty, profoundly intimate—a mixture of her and him. She sighed, her hand coming to rest on the back of his head, not forcing, but guiding. “Good,” she whispered, her body twitching lightly under his ministrations. “Very thorough.”
When he was done, she pulled him up alongside her, kissing him softly on the mouth, sharing their own flavor. “You’re a dear man, Rupert,” she said, a genuine affection in her eyes. “Now, I think we could both use a mince pie and a very large brandy. And you can tell me all about what that wicked wife of yours has you doing for January.”