Chapter 9: Keep Reading

"Next line," Lucio said, with his mouth against the inside of my knee.

I was sitting on the edge of his bed in my slip, with my glasses on.

The paperback was propped on my thigh, and I read the line.

It was the Friday after Thanksgiving.

He had eaten two helpings of my father's golabki at noon and kissed me in the pantry afterward.

I had been wet since one o'clock.

"A button for a sentence," he had said when he got me upstairs. "That's the rate."

"Then you'll be here a long time."

"I'm patient."

I had been wearing a cardigan with little pearl buttons.

He had worked down it one sentence at a time.

Then he had unzipped my skirt and taken it off me an inch at a time.

I had read about a house on a cliff and a woman walking through its rooms.

Now he knelt on the rug between my feet and drew the slip up over my hips.

"Don't stop," he said.

"I'm reading."

"You're reading fine."

He put his mouth on the inside of my thigh and I lost the line.

"Where were you?"

"Housekeeper," I said. "The, her hands were cold, and."

"Good. Keep going."

I found it again.

He kissed his way up, slow and unhurried, and his hand slid between my legs and parted me with two fingers.

I felt myself go slick under his touch.

"Look at that," he said, very low. "Read it to me. All of it."

I read, and my voice thinned.

He circled my clit with one thumb, not quite where I needed it.

Then he put his mouth over me, and the book began to shake in my hands.

"Lucio."

"That's not on the page."

I laughed, and it broke in the middle.

His tongue was patient and wet and exact.

He drew back whenever I got close, and he said "Keep reading" against my skin until the words were falling out of me in pieces.

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