June, 1974
His mouth was going to ruin her.
Not in the way Lars ruined things generally, with his ego, his Flemish, his infuriating capacity to be right, but thoroughly, specifically, in a way Lina was not going to recover from before morning.
The sheet beneath her was rough. Not soft-rough. Hard water, too many washes, the particular texture of cheap Louisiana linen that caught at her skin every time her back moved against it. Her back was moving against it a great deal.
Outside, crickets. Relentless. A single held note that had been going since dark and would still be going at dawn, indifferent and eternal.
Inside, Lars.
His hands held her thighs apart with the easy certainty of someone who had decided something and was not open to revision. His palms were dry against her skin, which she resented faintly, given that the rest of the world was damp. The heat here was a different creature from anything she knew. Belgium got humid. This was wet. The kind that sat inside your lungs and reminded you it was there with every breath. The ceiling fan turned overhead and moved it around the room and called it cooling and lied.
Lina had stopped thinking about the heat approximately two minutes ago.
His tongue moved and her hips rolled before she could stop them, chasing, the instinct entirely bypassing her authority. Her fingers found the sheet. Knotted in it. Something to hold.
"Scheiße"
Bitten off. Half-breath. The houses on this street were close enough that she was not about to give Victoire, Louisiana anything to talk about.
His mouth traced a slow, deliberate path and she felt it move through her spine, through her thighs, through the backs of her knees. She pressed them together on instinct only to find his hands there, firm, not allowing it. He didn’t look up. He never looked up when he was making a point.
Her foot found his shoulder.
A suggestion first. Then not a suggestion. Her heel pressing into the muscle of him, pushing, her body conducting its own argument entirely separately from her. Too much and not enough arriving in the same breath, contradicting each other, making no sense whatsoever.
His hand closed around her ankle.
One hand on her thigh. One hand on her ankle. Her held still between them.
The grip wasn’t rough. Wasn’t a reprimand. Just certain. His thumb resting against her ankle bone, warm and dry and completely unmoved by the fact that her foot was pushing against his shoulder with increasing insistence.
He held her still and continued.
"Verdammt"
She pulled the sheet half off the mattress.
The heat coiled low and spread up through her stomach into her ribs, her thighs trembling against the steady press of his hands, and she was close, right at the trembling edge of it, her whole body drawn tight and tilting.
His mouth was gone.
Lina opened her eyes.
The protest came immediately, sharp and armed and already in her throat.
His mouth found hers.
Hot. Open. Immediate. Swallowing the protest whole before it could become words. She could taste herself on him, which she had never quite decided about. Strange. Not unpleasant. His, somehow. The way he delivered it made it his, with the same unhurried certainty he brought to everything, as though her hesitation about it was simply not a thing he was going to acknowledge.
His hand cupped the back of her head. Not gripping. Not pulling. Just there. Warm and solid at the base of her skull.
Her hands found his chest without her permission.
She spread her fingers against it. Felt his heart. Steady. Slightly faster than his demeanour suggested. She filed that away.
His mouth moved to her ear.
Quiet. Low. Warm against the shell of it, lips brushing her skin with every word. Praise. Unhurried. Specific.
He had worked it out. Observed, filed, worked it out with the methodical patience that she found maddening in every other context. That this, the particular register of quiet approval delivered directly into her ear, did something to her she had never admitted and did not intend to begin admitting now.
Her toes curled.
She wriggled. She was aware she was wriggling. She pressed closer with a neediness she was going to blame on the wine and the heat and the insufferable crickets.
Lars exhaled against her ear. It contained, almost certainly, a laugh.
“Say my name.”
Lina breathed out slowly. “Nein.”
His mouth didn’t move. ”Say it."
“No.”
"Lina."
Just her name. Patient and certain, the way he said everything, and then his hand moved between them. A touch so deliberately light against the throbbing ache of her that her whole body contracted and her nails pressed into his chest and the sound she made was not something she would be documenting.
"Verdammt."
Through her teeth. Her hips pressed forward and found only that same infuriating restraint.
His eyes found hers in the half-dark. Blue and patient and entirely unbothered. The ceiling fan turned. The porch light hummed. Something rustled deep in the cypress trees at the edge of the yard.
He waited.
Three seconds.
Her jaw tightened.
"Lars."
Breathy. Bitten off. Pulled from her despite everything, arriving on a short wanting exhale that she resented completely. She felt the shift in him the moment it left her mouth. The small exhale against her cheek.
“Good girl.”
She felt that somewhere deeply inconvenient.
His mouth caught hers. His hand guided. And then the slow, full, absolute push of him inside her and every thought Lina had vacated entirely.
Her body softened around him even as her fingers dug hard into his back, nails catching. His hips pressed flush and he stayed there, his forehead dropping to hers, both of them breathing. Outside, Victoire continued its humid indifferent night. Crickets. Frogs. The porch light buzzing.
Then Lars moved.
Slow. Deep. Unhurried.
Lina’s breath left her.
Her hands spread across his back, palms flat, feeling every shift and flex of the muscle beneath her. The rough sheet dragged at her shoulder blades. The damp pillow caught her hair. His mouth found the curve of her neck, lips and teeth, and the sound that came out of her was low and open and entirely her own.
He didn’t hurry. That was the thing about Lars. He never hurried when he had decided to take his time, and he had clearly decided, and she was at his mercy and furious about it and not stopping him for anything.
Her hips rose to meet his. Her legs wrapped around him. Her fingers moved from his back to his hair and pulled, not gently. His breath changed against her neck.
Good.
The pace shifted. Less patient. More intent. A deeper, sharper drive that pulled a sound from her she didn’t swallow in time. Her fingers gripped harder. The tension rebuilt fast and urgent and this time when his hand moved between them there was no teasing in it.
Her back left the mattress.
The sound she made was brief and involuntary and completely honest. The short blank moment where there is nothing, not thought, not language, not the heat or the crickets or the rough sheets, only the wave of it, cresting and breaking and spreading through her while her fingers pulled at his hair and her thighs pressed hard against him.
Lars followed. His forehead pressed to her temple. A low sound against her skin. His body drawing tight and releasing, hips pressed flush, both of them still.
Neither of them spoke.
The ceiling fan turned.
Lina became aware of her own breathing. The damp pillow. The sheet tangled somewhere at the foot of the bed. Lars’s weight still settled over her, which she was not currently finding objectionable.
Her fingers uncurled from his hair slowly.
He lifted his head. Looked at her. His hair was a disaster. She said nothing about this.
A moment passed.
"Geh zum Teufel," Lina said.
Lars reached across her for the wine glass on the nightstand and drained what was left of it without comment.
Outside, something moved at the edge of the yard. Slow. Deliberate. At the tree line, just beyond the reach of the porch light.
It stopped.
Neither of them noticed.
The ceiling fan turned.
