August 2026 – Listen Here

Steam rises as I blow across my chamomile, snug as a bug beneath clean sheets, while from the far side of the apartment comes the faint mechanical rumble of the washing machine, diligently attempting to erase the evening’s evidence. My toes curl beneath the blankets, and, despite my best efforts at respectability, so does one corner of my mouth.

I sip with absurd demureness.

My hair is still wet from the shower, cold strands trailing over warm skin and sending an agreeable shiver along my spine. Chamomile, dandelion, flowers – the fragrance drifts beneath my nose as I settle my head against the headboard, the delicate teacup balanced primly upon my knees. I look, I imagine, like a woman engaged in the most respectable conclusion to a long day.

I am not remotely respectable.

And I cannot stop smiling.

Gods, my smile has turned positively wicked as I remember…

His form shimmering from the shower.

That is where my mind goes first: water still jeweled across his skin when he looked at me with those dark, intent eyes, drinking in the sight of my body before ever laying a hand upon it. There was an arresting contradiction in him then, restraint drawn nearly translucent over appetite, civilization reduced to the thinnest veneer.

I am sitting on the bed, waiting for him to make the first move. For a moment, he merely looks at me. His gaze travels over the mulberry silk, then returns to my face, dark and unreadable except for the appetite he makes no particular effort to disguise. There is no fumbling decision in him, no question of what he intends to do next. He steps between my knees. 

His hands found the mulberry silk of my nightgown and drew it downward, exposing my breasts with an almost ceremonial attention wholly at odds with the desperation smoldering beneath it. He took his time with each wanton globe – far too much time and yet nowhere near enough – drawing each pert tip into the warmth of his mouth and lavishing it with his tongue until my back bowed toward him in shameless supplication.

His palms encompassed me. His mouth lingered. Patience became its own exquisite cruelty.

The deprivation of those long preceding days had gathered inside me like a smoldering fever, and every devoted pass of his tongue seemed calculated to make me aware of how famished I had become. My flesh had been waiting. My Inner Goddess had been positively keening for resurrection, for flight, for proof that she had not been buried beneath grief and responsibility after all.

And then his mouth was on mine.

Those kisses.

Long, consuming kisses disinclined to acknowledge such pedestrian concepts as beginnings or endings. Kisses one did not receive so much as inhabit. Kisses in which minutes became irrelevant and oxygen an administrative inconvenience eventually requiring attention.

And his tongue – 

Heavens.

When he dropped to his knees at the side of my bed and drew my hips toward him, I discovered an unsuspected talent.

Apparently the god in my bedroom is fluent in Mandarin.

I had not known this.

Or had I known and simply…forgotten in my haze?

There seemed no other explanation for the intricate characters he composed against me, tracing each imaginary symbol with the grave concentration of some ancient calligrapher. Stroke. Curve. Pause. Another infernal stroke. An entire language written where language itself had become useless, until whatever wit I ordinarily possessed abandoned me altogether.

A poet of old might have composed sonnets.

The god had other methods.

Steam wafts upward and caresses my face as I turn another page of the evening, my thumb circling the porcelain handle of my cup. There had been recklessness in the air that night – daring, unapologetic abandon – and even now, freshly soaped and tucked decorously beneath my blankets, I can summon no repentance whatsoever.

I regret none of it.

There were so many configurations that eventually the proceedings acquired the improbable athleticism of a circus act. Positions I had forgotten existed. Positions I had forgotten I could accomplish.

I grin into my teacup, privately impressed by my own agility.

On my side, tucked before him like the smaller half of a matched set, his body curved behind mine while his breath scorched my neck, my ear, my mouth whenever I tipped my head backward far enough to find those full lips again.

Then he was kneeling while I remained upon my side, one ankle slung over his broad shoulder. A shift of his hands, an alteration of angle, and suddenly he reached depths my flesh had seemingly preserved in its archives for this very occasion.

Later, on my back, his length passed over me again and again without entering.

Gliding.

Passing.

Withdrawing.

Returning.

Cruel man.

I was soaked. Ready. Begging.

With one withdrawal and the slightest tilt of my hips, I could have seized control.

I knew it.

He knew it.

I didn’t.

And he watched me know it.

That was perhaps the most infuriating part. There was a dark gleam of comprehension in his eyes as another climax overtook me, the god looking down at me with the maddening equanimity of a celestial thoroughly acquainted with the havoc he was causing and smirking inwardly.

And that knowledge became part of the provocation. I could have ended his game whenever I wished. I could have caught him between my thighs, altered the angle, taken what he was so flagrantly withholding.

Instead, I remained beneath him.

I let him continue that maddening passage until my body mutinied against whatever composure remained to me and release broke through in bright, uncontrollable waves, the glittering evidence scattering across my breasts and flecking my cheeks.

For an instant, my smile falters against the rim of the cup.

I had not possessed my customary stamina that evening. Nor quite the abundance my flesh ordinarily prides herself upon producing.

But no.

The criticism barely lifts its head before I refuse it audience. My body had done magnificently. She merely requires better tending: more water, more nourishment, more sleep.

Not punishment.

Not tonight.

Then all fours, elbows and knees sunk deep into the plush bed, my muscles already quivering from everything that had come before. 

Then my hips hanging over the edge of the mattress while he stood flat-footed upon the maple floor, broad frame planted with that peculiar, unshowy solidity of his, and apparently decided moderation was a virtue best left to other men.  The god was merciless, and every sound he wrested from me seemed only to encourage his campaign against my remaining dignity.

At some point, the distinction between falling and floating became blurred, almost abstract, as did the difference between shattering and reforming. Perhaps I was doing all of it at once. Climax had begun to bleed into climax until I remember only the strange suspension of thought, the surrender of chronology, and the startling discovery that a woman who spends so much of her life thinking can, under sufficiently persuasive circumstances, be reduced to flesh and fire and incoherence. 

Eventually we collapsed across the bed, summer perspiration gleaming over our bodies, chests rising and falling as though we had survived an expedition rather than an evening. I wanted to curl against him. I wanted his arms around me, my head nestled over his heartbeat, my limbs entwined with his in that drowsy mammalian contentment that follows magnificent exertion.

Unfortunately, I also wanted not to perish from thermal exposure.

So I lay there panting, waiting with absurd concentration for the oscillating fan to make its stately pilgrimage back toward me.

There.

Air swept across my skin.

I sighed.

Blessed civilization.

All those positions.

Truly, a circus.

I never knew what arrangement he would devise next, and perhaps that uncertainty was part of what made the union so intoxicating. I didn’t have to direct. Didn’t have to orchestrate. Didn’t have to remain three moves ahead, anticipating what came next and arranging the experience for both of us.

He chose without commanding.

I followed without disappearing.

And that distinction mattered to my weary soul.

Each transition seemed to unlock another chamber inside me, answering a buried longing through filling, fracturing, opening, until responsibility itself slipped from my shoulders. For those hours, I was accountable for nothing beyond inhabiting my own body.

I nestle farther into the pillows, one ear attuned to the washing machine as it churns faithfully on. It is late. I should sleep. I truly ought to sleep. Yet some ridiculous part of me fears that closing my eyes will give morning permission to steal the details.

His hands will fade. The bruised ache between my thighs will ease and take with it the evidence of his rampage. The muscles protesting the evening’s acrobatics will recover and behave as though they were never summoned into such extraordinary service. My skin will forget his mouth. My sheets will emerge from the dryer scandalously innocent.

And perhaps then it will cease to feel real.

So I sip my tea and summon another memory.

I am on my back again, hips spilling over the side of the bed, my legs wrapped around him. He unhooks them one at a time and settles my ankles over his shoulders.

Except my right foot.

That one he catches.

My foot looks absurdly small imprisoned between those calloused hands. His thumbs sweep over the high arch with such unexpected tenderness that, for perhaps two seconds, I entertain the charming delusion that tenderness is his principal objective.

It transpires that it is not. Not exactly.

His other hand wanders downward, teasing and stroking with unconscionable patience until my eyes close and warmth gathers through me, winding tighter and tighter, my body hovering at that unbearable threshold where another instant feels both necessary and intolerable.

And then – distractingly, bewilderingly, amplifying everything his hand is already doing – my toes are inside his mouth.

Full lips close around them one by one. His tongue flicks against each digit while his fingers continue their merciless occupation between my thighs.

Gods.

My entire frame convulses.

Release tears through me, the other foot planted against his chest as though I might push him away, although we both know perfectly well I am doing no such thing.

He refuses to relinquish me.

Torment and adoration.

Adoration and torment.

The two become so thoroughly entangled I can no longer tell where one ends and the other begins.

Caught up in the recollection, I catch my bottom lip between my teeth. A low, involuntary moan escapes before I can prevent it, and I glance toward the empty apartment as though anyone might have witnessed this appalling breach of decorum.

The light had been behind him.

I remember that with absurd clarity.

It limned the muscles of his arms and chest, caught the breadth of his hips, traveled down those sturdy oaken legs planted against my maple floor. There was such solidity to him in that moment – wood and shadow and burnished skin against the glow behind him.

And there I was.

My tiny foot held in his hands.

My toes between his lips.

For one suspended instant, I wanted time to cease. I wanted every grain of sand to hover in the throat of the hourglass and simply refuse to fall.

I nearly reached for my phone on the headboard.

Not because I wanted a photograph of sex, or of the unholy things he was provoking.

I wanted that image.

Him.

The light.

Those shoulders.

My pale foot disappearing between his lips.

He looked angelic.

But in the old sense of the word.

Not sweet. Certainly not harmless.

The sort of angel that might descend from heaven bearing a flaming sword and require its first words to be not afraid because terror and beauty had become indistinguishable.

My breath stuttered.

My pulse temporarily forgot its occupation.

I take another sip of chamomile and silently instruct my Inner Goddess to compose herself. We truly do require sleep.

She regards the suggestion with contempt and declines.

Naturally.

We used so few words that evening, and I was grateful for it. Sometimes words are merely furniture one has to walk around.

The god was decisive without being controlling. I wasn’t being managed. I wasn’t being broken or conquered or made smaller for the convenience of another person.

There was only the next touch.

The next shift.

The next breath.

And the increasingly pressing consideration of whether my battered inner gate intended to file a formal grievance in the morning.

Even the pauses were wonderfully ordinary.

We collapsed upon the rumpled, soaking, thoroughly disgraced bedding and caught our breath, staring at the ceiling fan as two naked people sprawled across a disordered bed in companionable exhaustion, awaiting the restoration of basic cardiovascular function.

At some point I turned my head and found him looking at me. Not with the earlier calculation. Not plotting whatever fresh indignity he intended for my beleaguered virtue. Just looking. His expression held that peculiar masculine satisfaction of a man surveying an evening exceedingly well spent. 

There was no performance in those interludes. No expectation. No pressure to make our revels signify more than they were, nor to turn them into a promise of what came afterward. 

I could simply exist there.

That may have been one of the loveliest parts.

My body still sparking and thrumming, every nerve awake and pleasantly bewildered, I could lie beside him without wondering what I ought to provide next. There was no invisible ledger demanding attention. No orchestration required of me. No necessity to anticipate.

Eventually I would feel him stir beside me. No announcement, no question posed merely for ceremony; only that first shift of his weight and the return of a calloused hand to my skin,  fingertips resuming their idle explorations.

A brush along my skin.

A wandering hand.

The first warning that apparently our intermission had concluded.

And there we went again, falling back into one another with that peculiar bodily fluency which makes conversation seem woefully inefficient.

I am on my hands and knees for the last time.

By then my Inner Gate is already pinning up her formal notice of protest, but I have ceased caring about tomorrow’s grievances. My teeth catch in the bedding, muffling my screams; my throat is raw, and whatever dignity survived the earlier proceedings has long since evaporated.

And then the whole delirious affair reaches its inevitable crescendo.

The god finally comes undone. The same man who had seemed carved from oak all evening – planted, assured, maddeningly masterful – loses that formidable stillness all at once. Pulling back from me, the evidence of his surrender splashes across my back as his breath fractures behind me, his great frame shuddering with the force of his own release. For several suspended seconds, neither of us seems capable of remembering how ordinary bodies are meant to function. Then his balance falters.

And though I can scarcely persuade my own limbs to cooperate, I reach back, clutching his thigh, trying to steady him.

My Inner Goddess preens with pride.

My chamomile is gone now. I place the empty teacup carefully upon the headboard and burrow farther beneath the sheets, adjusting my pillows until the nest around me is just right. The washing machine continues its distant rumble, domestic and industrious. I will put the bedding in the dryer in the morning. After all, dawn is not that far away.

My hair is still damp, but cool against my pillow, and I shut my eyes.

Morning will come. The soreness will leave my muscles. The tenderness between my thighs will disappear. My body will quietly repair every trace of the god’s barrage because bodies are terribly practical creatures that way. By seven in the morning I shall don the illusion that I have always been an upstanding citizen and that such debauchery as occurred here last night is quite foreign to my nature and certainly could not have involved me. 

But tonight, the scent of sweet peas greets my nostrils whenever I move. My scandalously battered skin lies tucked beneath pristine white sheets, fragrant with soap, having drunk flowers from a delicate porcelain cup, while somewhere inside me my Inner Goddess sprawls in magnificent disarray, looking positively debauched.

The contrast is indecent.

I adore it.

And damn the hour, I still cannot stop smiling.

Until next time, XO. Elsie