Chapter 8: The Unspoken Hunger
The walk back to Catriona’s house was made in a silence so complete it felt like a third person walking between them. The evening air was cool, sharp, a welcome contrast to the sticky heat of Jenny’s kitchen. Catriona could still feel the slickness between her own thighs, a persistent, private reminder. Every few steps, their shoulders would almost brush, then apart again, a silent, nervous dance.
Catriona’s living room was a sanctuary of worn comfort, a sharp contrast to the sterile, desperate hope of Jenny’s kitchen. Catriona went straight to the sideboard, pouring two generous fingers of bourbon into a heavy glass. She didn’t ask; she just handed it to Jenny, who took it with both hands, cradling it like something alive. Catriona poured her own, then knelt before the fireplace, stacking logs and balled-up newspaper with a focus that was almost frantic. A match scratched, flared. The fire caught, whispering, then growling into life, casting long, liquid shadows up the walls.
They sat on the deep chesterfield, a careful foot of space between them. Jenny sipped her bourbon, her eyes fixed on the flames. The firelight danced over her face, highlighting the tracks of old tears, the faint puffiness around her eyes.
“I should feel used,” Jenny said, her voice a dry leaf of a sound. “I think part of me does. But a bigger part…” She trailed off, swallowing hard. “A bigger part feels alive. For the first time in years. And that’s so much worse.”
Catriona watched her, the bourbon burning a slow path down her own throat. “I know.”
“When he turned you toward the table,” Jenny continued, her gaze still locked on the fire. “When he pushed your legs open… I watched. I couldn’t look away. It was the most brutal, beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. And I wanted…” She finally turned her head, her hazel eyes glowing in the low light. “I wanted it to be me. And I wanted it to be you doing it.”
The admission hung in the air, thick as the smoke from the fire. Catriona’s breath caught. The quiet, curious hunger she’d been nursing since this began uncoiled in her gut, warm and insistent.
“I’ve been thinking,” Catriona said, her voice lower now. “About taste.”
Jenny blinked. “Taste?”
“When he came back. The smell in the kitchen was… him. And both of us. Mixed together. I stood there, and I could smell me on him, and you on him.” She swirled the bourbon, watching the legs slide down the glass. “I wanted to know what that tasted like. On your skin. Where he’d been.”
A sharp, soft gasp escaped Jenny’s lips. Not protest. Recognition.
The space between them on the couch seemed to shrink, charged by the fire’s heat and the bourbon’s burn. Jenny slowly, deliberately, set her glass on the low oak table. The click of crystal on wood was absurdly loud. She shifted, turning her body to face Catriona, drawing one knee up onto the cushion. The movement made her robe fall open just enough to reveal the pale, vulnerable line of her thigh, the shadowed junction where the bruise lay hidden.
Catriona mirrored her, turning. The worn velvet of the chesterfield was soft under her palms. She could hear the crackle of the fire, the slow, heavy beat of her own heart.
“He marked us,” Jenny whispered. “Prove it.”
It wasn’t a question. It was a yielding.
Catriona’s hand wasn’t steady as she reached out. Her fingertips, calloused from gardening, brushed the inside of Jenny’s knee. The skin was impossibly soft. She felt Jenny tremble, a fine vibration that traveled up her own arm. Slowly, her touch drifted higher, tracing the line of her thigh, pushing the terrycloth robe aside.
The bruise was there. A bloom of mauve and twilight blue in the shape of a thumbprint, just beside the still-glistening evidence of Aidan’s final possession. Catriona’s throat tightened. She looked from the mark up to Jenny’s face. Jenny’s eyes were wide, her lips parted, her breath coming in shallow pulls.
Without breaking that gaze, Catriona bent her head.
Her first touch was her lips, a soft press against the bruised skin. Jenny jolted. A quiet, broken sound came from above. Catriona’s tongue followed, a slow, experimental stroke through the mingled salt and bitterness that lingered there. It was a complex, intimate flavor—Jenny’s own essence, the stark, biological truth of Aidan, the faint metallic ghost of her own arousal from watching. It was the taste of their shared conspiracy.
Jenny’s hand came down, her fingers tangling in Catriona’s auburn curls, not pushing, but holding, anchoring. “More,” she breathed, the word barely audible over the fire’s snap.
Catriona obeyed, her exploration becoming less tentative, more searching. Her mouth moved, tasting, claiming the territory in a way that was utterly different from Aidan’s. This was not about possession, but about knowing. About connecting the points of a triangle that had only existed in theory until now. Her own need spiked, a sharp, sweet ache between her legs. She was mapping Jenny’s body with her mouth, learning the texture of her, the sensitive hollow of her hip, the soft plane of her lower belly.
When Catriona finally lifted her head, her lips were slick, her chin damp. Jenny was looking down at her, her expression one of stunned, wrecked wonder.
“Your turn,” Catriona said, her voice raw.
She leaned back against the arm of the couch, her legs falling open slightly in invitation. Jenny hesitated for only a second. Then she slid off the cushion, onto the worn Persian rug between Catriona’s knees. Her hands, usually so careful, pushed Catriona’s robe apart. She looked, her eyes taking in the familiar landscape of her friend’s body, now made foreign and fascinating by the same shared history.
Jenny didn’t pause. She bent, her honey-blonde hair falling like a curtain, and her mouth found the heart of the slick, heated evidence Catriona carried.
Catriona’s head fell back against the velvet with a thud. A low moan was torn from her. This wasn’t the blunt, overwhelming fullness of Aidan. This was precision. This was devoted, focused attention. Jenny’s tongue was seeking, curious, tracing the paths he had taken, tasting their combined story. It was an act of communion, of confirmation. Each soft lap, each gentle suck, was Jenny saying I know, I was there too, I feel it.
Catriona’s hand found Jenny’s head, her fingers threading through the silken hair, not guiding, just holding on as the sensation built—a slow, deep coil tightening in her belly, different from the frantic crescendo Aidan pulled from her. This was a rising tide. When it broke, it washed over her silently, a wave of shuddering, liquid heat that left her breathless and blind.
Jenny rested her forehead against Catriona’s thigh, her breathing uneven. After a long moment, she crawled up, collapsing onto the couch beside Catriona, their bodies aligned, their robes gaping open. The fire painted their skin in gold and umber.
They lay there in the quiet, the only sounds their slowing breaths and the settling logs. The bourbon sat forgotten, the ice melted. The unspoken questions hadn’t gone away—what this meant, what came next, what they would tell Aidan. But for now, they were just two maps, charting the same strange, fevered country on each other’s skin, the taste of their husband a shared, secret language on their tongues.