With This Ring, I Thee Bed. Alison Tyler

running.

      “So I’m not enough for you,” he says, and his lip curls a little. His hand drops to my breast and tweaks hard. I open my mouth but no sound comes out.

      “You want more.” His other hand, my other breast. I’m almost doubling over, and my nipples are burning beautifully as he pulls and pinches. When he lets go, I almost fall forward. In the sun-filled kitchen I’m gasping for breath—half-naked, disheveled and as ridiculous as the yellow garter.

      Charlie knows how to tease, and today I’m wondering if he’s playing out some kind of revenge. If he’s going to teach me a lesson—how it feels to be left hanging.

      “Please,” I say, even though I think I shouldn’t.

      “You know what, Seb?”

      He’s leaning back and looking at me thoughtfully, as if I were a painting he’s deciding whether or not he likes.

      “I can understand you being chicken. I can even live with the thought of you fucking other people.” His eyes flash. I look at him and the blush storms through my cheeks. He nods. “Yes, I am aware that you like sex, Seb.”

      He leans in close and whispers in my ear. “Dirty girl, aren’t you? You think I didn’t know that? You think I can’t tell how hungry you are every time you walk down the street, shaking that tight little ass of yours? You think I don’t notice how you stick your tits out when you’re talking to a nice-looking guy? How you give all my friends the once-over, like you’re just considering the possibility?”

      I flinch. I really didn’t think he’d noticed.

      Charlie pulls back and sighs. He reaches, almost idly, to my trousers and flicks at the buttons. As if he doesn’t care if they come loose or not. When he slides his hand into the front of my panties, he touches the tip of his tongue to his lip as if he’s doing something tricky.

      “What breaks my heart, Seb, is that you think I’m so stupid.”

      “I don’t!” If I weren’t tied up, I’d reach out for him. He curls his fingers inside my panties, cups my pussy in his hand and gives a little squeeze. It’s like he’s in control of my heartbeat now, as though each stinging pinch of my clit sends the blood running through my veins.

      “You think I don’t know you.”

      “That’s not true,” I say, although my voice is strained and cracking. “It’s not?”

      I look up at him through the strands of hair that have fallen over my face. He meets my gaze, hard and direct.

      “Seb, I know you. I know how you’re torn.”

      While he talks, he keeps working at me, his fingers stroking my most intimate places, proving the truth of what he says.

      “You think that getting married is a death sentence. That we’d be stuck fast together and we’d never be able to leave.”

      I bite my lip. I can’t really deny this, not without lying. He strums at me, turning the dial up toward orgasm. He can make me come with a flick of his wrist. I rock on his hand, lean on his arm so that he’s virtually propping me up. I think of his cock, how long it is and how full it makes me.

      “Charlie,” I say, losing the thread of our conversation. I know I have to concentrate, have to hold back. But when he tweaks at my aching nipple, I nearly give in.

      “Nothing is forever,” he says, his voice so soft it breaks my heart. He tugs on my nipples, left and right, dosing me with little shocks of pain.

      “You like this.” It’s not a question, but I respond anyway.

      “Yes. God, yes.”

      “And if you didn’t want it? If you stopped liking it?”

      I won’t ever, I say in my mind. Please don’t stop. He’s alternating pinches of my clit and my nipples now, digging his fingers into me, burying them inside me.

      “Seb. Answer me.”

      I shake my head.

      I whisper our pact, our long-ago agreement. What we discussed back when we were laying down the ground rules. When we were still falling in love.

      “I say the word. And it’s over.”

      “Yes. You say the word. It’s that simple.”

      He holds on tight to my clit, rubbing it between his forefinger and thumb until it burns. “Or,” he says, “of course, I can also say the word.” His voice is low and creaky. Suddenly, I’m terrified.

      I want to kiss him. I want to stop him from saying anything more. I moan and reach out for him, want his body slammed against mine, want him to rub against me, crush me, bore into me. Prove that he’s here, with me and not lost.

      “Charlie,” I say, and there’s panic sliding in my voice. “Please.”

      He cradles my head in the crook of his shoulder while he reaches to undo his jeans. At the same time he loosens the garter and throws it on the ground. Hands free, I grab for him.

      We’re swaying now, falling against the kitchen table and bumping into the chairs. I push my clothes roughly down around my ankles, still leaning into Charlie, nuzzling at him. He smells of the soap he uses, maybe a little of last night’s whisky. I wonder what he did last night. Whether he slept. Whether he cried.

      He turns me roughly and bends me over the kitchen table. Now I can’t see his face and I’m even more scared—is this his goodbye fuck? Is he going to say the word, cut me loose, banish me from his life?

      His hands are on my hips, holding me steady and firm, and I butt back against him, wanting him to be inside me, yes, but also wanting to be inside him somehow. I spread my legs, feel the head of his cock slip between my thighs.

      “Come into me, baby,” I say, tilting my ass up as though begging. His thighs are warm on the back of my legs. He pushes into me and I could weep again. My legs are shaking, about to start bucking and jerking against him, almost out of my control.

      “Shhh,” he says, stroking from the base of my spine to between my shoulder blades, dragging his hand over my body to soothe me. And it does—I rock slowly, taking a little more of him at a time until he’s nestled deep in me and can’t go any farther.

      “More,” I murmur, wiggling my hips from side to side. Charlie keeps caressing me, slow and steady. I hear him laugh.

      “S’funny?” I ask, although I can’t stop swaying against him, working myself up and down on his shaft.

      “I’ll give you as much as you want,” he says lightly, while he withdraws in a rush and plunges back into me, making me gasp. “Whenever you want, however you want.”

      He punctuates his words with thrusts that get harder, more emphatic and blunter each time. His cock is thickening in me, corkscrewing deeper and deeper.

      “And if you want me to stop …” He pulls out so that just the tip of him is in me, an unbearable loss. “You just say the word.”

      “Charlie,” I say. He’s hovering on the brink, I know it. The orgasm gathers in my fingertips, in my toes, rushes back and forth over me, crisscrosses from my nipples to my pussy and back to my mouth, my eyes, my heart. Just as I come, holding tight to the edge of the kitchen table, I get it. I get what he means. We’ll be married if we want it, for as long as we want it, just how we want it.

      Charlie slides forward, sinks into me, and gives me what I need. I rise up to meet him and we surge together, rocking, responding, fucking like we always do.

      “This is how they fuck in heaven,” Charlie said back in the first flush of our relationship, after six weeks of springtime courting and delirious sleepless nights. It was one of those embarrassing thoughts that spill out after especially good sex, and the way he said it—like a teenage boy awestruck and mad horny, made me blush. I remember we both laughed