Chapter 74: The Taste of Her Ass
The hot water sluiced over them, turning the dried remnants on Channah’s face into milky rivulets that raced down her neck and breasts. Ryan watched it disappear down the drain, along with the last tangible proof of his old life.
She soaped a washcloth, the lavender scent rising in the steam. “Turn around,” she said, her voice soft but firm.
He obeyed, facing the white subway tile. She began washing his back, the cloth moving in slow, deliberate circles over the intricate tattoos, over the knots of tension in his shoulders. The silence was different now. Not the shocked quiet of the grenade’s crater, but the heavy, listening silence of a new foundation being laid.
“I’ll need to go back,” he said, his voice echoing off the tiles. “To pack. To sign things.”
“I know.”
“It’ll take a week. Maybe two.”
Her hands paused. Then she pressed her forehead between his shoulder blades, the hot water pounding on them both. “Then you’ll go. And you’ll come back.”
She said it not as a question, not as a hope, but as a simple fact. A new rule for this new world.
He turned then, water sheeting from his hair. He took the washcloth from her and began to wash her face with a tenderness that felt devastating. He cleaned her eyelids, her cheeks, the corner of her mouth. He was erasing the evidence, but the memory was in the muscle beneath his fingers, in the way her breath hitched when his thumb brushed her lip.
When he was done, they just stood there, under the relentless spray, foreheads touching. The heat was peeling back layers, not of dirt, but of caution. The animal need from the bedroom had been spent. What remained underneath was raw, nerve-exposed.
Her hands slid down his chest, over his stomach. She took his soft cock in her hand, not to arouse, but to hold. A quiet claim.
“We’re really doing this,” she whispered.
“We really did it,” he corrected, a faint, bewildered smile touching his mouth.
She looked down at him in her hand, then up at his face. A different fire, slower and deeper, kindled in her green eyes. “I want you in my mouth again. But not like before. Not like you’re something I’m pulling out of a wreck. I want to taste you clean. I want to feel you get hard just because it’s me.”
She sank to her knees in the tub, the water cascading over her shoulders and red hair. The position was awkward, intimate, vulnerable. She nudged his legs apart and took him into her mouth, not with the frantic greed of before, but with a slow, savoring intensity. Her tongue explored every ridge, every vein, as he softened and then began, inexorably, to swell again under her devoted attention. She cupped his balls, heavy in the warm water, rolling them gently. Her other hand reached behind him, fingers tracing the cleft of his ass.
He braced his hands against the wet tile, head bowed, watching her. Each lick, each suck was a silent promise, a reaffirmation. She was building him back up from the root, with her mouth alone.
After a long time, she pulled off, his cock now fully erect, bobbing against his stomach. She looked up, water dripping from her nose. “Now I want you to do me. Here. I want to feel your tongue in my ass while I suck you. I want us tied together. I want us to be a fucking closed circuit.”
They rearranged themselves in the cramped space, a clumsy, wet ballet. She lay back in the tub, her head pillowed on the sloping end, her body submerged. He knelt over her, facing her feet, lowering his mouth to her cunt as she lifted her hips from the water. She gasped as his tongue found her, broad and flat, licking through her folds before zeroing in on her clit. At the same time, she reached up and guided his cock back into her waiting mouth.
The 69 in the shower was a logistical, soaking-wet mess. Water got in noses. Elbows bumped porcelain. It was imperfect, and human, and overwhelmingly intimate.
Ryan buried his face in her, his tongue probing deeper, then circling back to flick rapidly at her swollen bud. She tasted of clean skin and her own subtle musk. He devoured her, and she, in turn, took him deep into her throat, gagging slightly before finding a rhythm, her head moving in counterpoint to the thrust of his tongue.
The sounds were obscene—wet sucking, choked moans amplified by the shower’s acoustics, the slap of water on flesh. Ryan’s world narrowed to the taste of her, the feel of her throat massaging his cock. He pushed two fingers into her cunt, curling them, and she cried out around him, her body bucking.
“Fuck, Ryan… right there… don’t stop…”
Her words were garbled, vibrating through him. He added a third finger, stretching her, his mouth still working her clit with ruthless precision. He could feel her tightening, her thighs clamping around his head. Her sucking became erratic, desperate.
She came with a shattered scream, her back arching out of the water, her cunt pulsing around his fingers. The force of it made her lose her rhythm on his cock, but she held him there, deep, as the waves rocked her.
When the last tremor subsided, she pushed him off her mouth, panting. “Now,” she demanded, her voice wrecked. “My ass. Now. I’m empty and I need you to fill me up.”
They clambered up, water sheeting off them. He turned her around, bent her over the edge of the tub. Her hands gripped the rim, knuckles white. He spat into his palm, slicked himself, and positioned the head at her hole, which was still loose and tender from before. He pushed in slowly, the heat and tightness making him see stars.
“Oh god,” she whimpered, pushing back against him. “All of it. Give me all of it.”
He seated himself to the hilt, buried in the incredible, clutching heat of her ass. He held still for a moment, both of them trembling. Then he began to move.
This was different from the frantic fucking on the bed. This was deep, measured, claiming strokes. Each withdrawal was almost complete, each thrust a full, perfect re-assertion. He watched himself disappear into her, the pale skin of her ass meeting his thighs with a solid, wet sound. He reached around and found her clit, swollen and sensitive, and rubbed tight, quick circles.
“You feel that?” he grunted, his voice raw. “That’s me. I’m here.”
“Yes,” she sobbed, her forehead resting on the cool porcelain. “Yes, I feel it. Don’t stop.”
His pace increased, the slaps coming faster. The shower spray was hitting his back, streaming down their connected bodies. He was close, the pressure coiling at the base of his spine.
“I’m gonna come,” he warned.
“Do it,” she begged. “Come in my ass. Fill me up. Let me feel it for days.”
His control snapped. He drove into her one last, brutal time, his hips stuttering as he emptied himself deep inside her. A long, guttural groan was torn from his chest. He stayed there, pulsing, welded to her, as the hot water beat down on them.
Slowly, he softened and slipped out. She turned, her face flushed, and wrapped her arms around his neck, kissing him deeply. There was no taste of ass or cum, just clean water and shared breath.
They shut off the shower and stood there, dripping and shivering in the sudden quiet, toweling each other off with a rough, domestic tenderness.
Back in the bedroom, the blue-grey twilight had deepened. She pulled on a worn NYU t-shirt and nothing else. He found his boxers.
“I’m starving,” she said, as if remarking on the weather. “I’ll order Chinese. You still like mu shu pork?”
He looked at her, at the woman who had just taken him apart and put him back together in the span of an afternoon. The woman who was now asking about pork.
“Yeah,” he said, a real smile finally breaking through. “I still do.”
She picked up her phone, but paused. “We’ll get a box for your books,” she said, her eyes on his. “We’ll sublet your apartment. We’ll figure out the lease.” She stated each step not as a problem, but as the next line in a recipe they would follow together.
He nodded, the last of the free-fall sensation solidifying into something that felt, impossibly, like ground.
As she dialed, he looked around the room. The silk comforter was a tangled heap on the floor. The wine glass stood empty. The ghosts in the journals on the nightstack felt quieter now, less like accusations and more like old stories.
His books were two thousand miles away. His job was a phantom limb. But here, in the warm, lavender-scented dark of her Brooklyn brownstone, with the promise of mu shu pork on the way, Ryan felt, for the first time in twenty years, the peculiar and profound peace of having arrived.