Bead

My lips part themselves as I stand, and a fingertip-sized opaquish bead rolls onto my inner thigh. Its progress is slow but it tickles, painting a shining track across skin already damp with sweat.

Still entangled in the sheets, Miles reaches out to take my hand. I halt, and the thigh-bead continues on.

Miles looks up at me with adoring eyes, rich and brown and deep. I don't think he's opened them since he batted them closed while he was urgently inside me, the high arc of his pubic bone flush with my own, his hip-peaks jutting antler-hard into the flesh of my thighs. His eyelashes stayed knitted as his forehead tilted onto mine, his high and exuberant moans merging with Return to Forever playing through the speakers.

'Flora,' he says.

The warmth is spidering now across my parted inner thighs. Filaments track web-like across the pale expanse of my skin. After the fact of fucking, Miles paints my legs with himself. To follow the course of a single bead, to feel it trickling down until it crosses the hump of my knee, is soon no longer enough. I want to be covered, glazed, oiled, enamelled. I look down at the way Miles unfurls himself across the white of the sheet; if he is a renaissance nude, I will be an abstract expressionist canvas, splattered until the lines of my body are only fluid. Spit, pussy and cum. Piss, blood and milk.

'Flora.'

My fingers knit with his.

'Yes.'

It's the middle of the afternoon and we're on the ground floor. Outside the streets clamour with market chatter, calls to prayer and far-off sirens. In here, though, there is no god or capital. No emergency but for the insistent pour of him down my leg, threatening to reach my calf, to pool into my ankle and finally to spread across the naked boards of the floor.

'Do you realise that I love you?'

Realise, he says, not 'know'. I couldn't know, but I had guessed.

'How could I know?'

I felt I had heard it in the way he lost his inhibitions over time, in the full and head-voiced gasps he allowed as his orgasms poured forth from him like they were nothing but liquid. The helpless and tangled wrinkles of his face as his muscles relaxed and clenched. The way he fucks me as though he hopes my cunt will take him whole, the way his tongue laps up my every secretion, lubricates and probes my every orifice.

I am aware still of the starchy, molten-pearl tapestry spreading across my legs. I want to rub my thighs together, to smear them sticky with all of him, all of us.

Who's to say, after all, that you cannot build a love this way? That you can't stake it out in the nuances and the furrows of your fucking, pouring your need for each other into the shallow dips your bodies create when they are wrapped together, in postures and patterns which confound the geometry of three-dimensional space?

'How could you not?'

He has a point. It's as though he was privy to my thoughts. Often Miles seems to have a sixth sense for anticipating my whims, my needs. His hands and tongue telegraph what my body wants, they move to me with such urgency and precision it's as though I'm moving them myself.

I try to pull away from him and he gives my hand another tug. The bathroom beckons, but instead I stand before him, holding his gaze with a steady warmth. The cool of the air around us begins only now to get to me. The follicles raise along my arms, and between my shoulder blades. My nipples firm, a modest breeze rolls around my feet, upward along the insides of my legs.

The flow comes to a stop. I run two fingers up my thigh, beginning close to the inside of my knee. I draw them through the rivulets, meet the soft and yielding slit of my cunt and drag slowly along it, feeling a warming rush of trembles that threatens to leave me unsteady on my feet.

Miles watches me intently. My fingers end up in my mouth, and I spread what's left of both of us across my tongue, crush it rich and salty and hot against my hard palate and let it run down my throat.

'I love you too,' I say, and let him watch my ass as I walk from the room.