September 2026 – Listen Here

We were lying in separate beds that afternoon, with only the steady whir of the hotel air conditioner and the distant murmur of a football game filling the room. I had reached that peculiar threshold where desire and sleep had become equally persuasive, and I could have surrendered quite happily to either.

But it was the weekend, and my stubborn Inner Goddess kept whispering that I had already allowed far too many opportunities to pass me by lately. She was decidedly opposed to sacrificing another upon the altar of hesitation.

Unfortunately, knowing what I wanted and persuading my tongue to actually say it were two very different matters.

I tried. More than once. Each time, the words rose valiantly toward my lips and then promptly abandoned their post.

So, armed with all the courage available to a woman safely protected by several feet of distance and a cellular device, I reached for my phone and sent a text instead.

A simple question.

Then I waited.

His phone illuminated the nightstand beside him. The Archangel reached for it, glanced at the screen, and read what I had written.

There was one look across the room.

For one suspended second, neither of us moved. I watched recognition dawn across his face and felt the mortifying little thrill of realizing that my carefully typed courage had been received – and understood. There would be no pretending now that I had meant anything other than precisely what I had asked.

Then came those absurdly shy, conspiratorial giggles from both of us, wholly incongruous from two grown adults who knew perfectly well what was about to happen.

And then he crossed the distance between us.

Within moments, I was being gathered into the Archangel’s arms.

After that, everything became remarkably easy.

The afternoon sun poured through the room and caught upon his shadowy wings until they appeared almost incandescent behind him. There were kisses and hands and mouths; then his head disappeared between my thighs while I writhed beneath his divine attentions, fingers clutching white sheets as though cotton might prove a sufficient tether to the mortal realm.

Then he rose over me.

There is an extraordinary intimacy in the sheer weight of a man above you when you trust the body carrying it. His breadth eclipsed mine, his arms braced around me, and for a woman barely five-foot-one, there was an almost absurd disparity between us. I should have felt dwarfed beneath so much masculine mass.

Instead, I felt wonderfully enclosed.

There is a difference.

His size did not make me feel diminished; it made me acutely aware of how completely his body could surround mine. Shoulders wider than I could reach across, arms planted on either side of me, the considerable weight of him held with enough care that I could surrender beneath it rather than brace against it.

Then our hips met without any of the languorous ceremony one associates with midnight. This was afternoon carnality – bright and breathless, sun-warmed and wonderfully greedy.

Bodies already tired from half a day beneath the Texas sun and nevertheless quite willing to discover what reserves remained.

Thought became unnecessary. Flesh answered flesh until the mounting cadence finally broke us together in one glorious, gasping collision.

It was brief and ferocious, and considering we had already spent half the day being slowly roasted beneath a Texas sky, probably merciful as well.

My Inner Goddess, thoroughly pleased with herself, merely smirked.

Afterward, beautifully spent and possessing no further ambitions whatsoever, I curled into the pillows and took a nap.

The second time came late that night.

By then my foolish heart had grown heavy, and I found myself standing at that familiar crossroads between practicality and possibility. I could change into my loungewear, climb into the car and make the ninety-minute drive home, or I could accept the Archangel’s offer to stay.

I chewed my lip. Accepting the offer felt perilously close to owing a life debt.

Yes, I know. Nothing quite so dramatic had actually occurred, and yet the old arithmetic immediately began tallying itself inside my head: he had given; therefore I owed. It did not particularly matter that he had offered freely or that friendship is not an invoice. I could not bear the thought of owing another human being so much as a grain of rice.

And he had already been exceedingly kind to me all day – attentive, thoughtful, protective in ways that did not announce themselves or demand applause afterward.

I was exhausted, yet one bright ember remained within my Inner Goddess, and she was becoming increasingly offended by the notion that the evening should end merely because ending it would have been sensible.

I have spent enough of my life postponing living.

Are you seriously going to be the depressed wraith who hides on her couch for the rest of her life? she demanded.

It was, admittedly, a fair question.

I did not want to look backward upon an evening filled with possibility and wonder why I had chosen the highway instead.

So, while the Archangel refreshed himself in the shower I had only just vacated, I did not change into the clothes I had brought for the drive home.

I slipped into the nightgown I had packed for the after-party instead.

It was peach, diaphanous and unabashedly feminine, with eyelash lace drifting across my bosom and upper thighs. I settled upon the bed and waited for the Archangel to emerge from his shower, feeling rather conspicuously like a woman who had made a decision without quite having the nerve to announce it aloud.

Then the entire matter seemed to arrange itself without discussion.

One moment I was sitting there in peach lace.

The next, he stood before me.

He bent toward my upturned mouth but stopped just shy of it, leaving that final sliver of distance to me.

The courtesy of it did not escape me.

I closed the distance and kissed him.

I had, incidentally, chosen the bed upon which I had napped rather than his. This was not romantic symbolism. It was logistics.

I had not planned to stay. I certainly had not planned to play. Consequently, I had neglected to bring my waterproof blanket, and I knew perfectly well what could happen to innocent linens beneath me during amorous endeavors. If matters progressed, I reasoned, at least I would not condemn the Archangel to spending the remainder of his night marooned in a cold, wet patch on his own mattress.

It was an excellent plan.

The Archangel promptly demolished it.

His arms came around me and, with one magnificent sweep, I was simply lifted.

There are certain things a hopeless romantic can pretend do not affect her.

Being scooped into the arms of a very large man is not one of mine.

My legs flew around his broad hips, although around was rather aspirational considering the breadth of him made locking my ankles behind his back an anatomical fantasy. He turned, carried me the three steps to his bed, lowered me onto it and resumed kissing me as though my careful consideration of mattress preservation had never existed.

I stared up at him, thoroughly bewildered and embarrassingly enchanted.

I had been trying to take care of him!

There had been forethought involved. Consideration. An entirely sensible strategy designed to preserve the poor man’s mattress from the potential consequences of inviting me into it.

The Archangel had apparently reviewed my carefully constructed plan and elected to solve the problem by simply picking me up.

My Inner Goddess, traitorous creature that she was, had no objection whatsoever.

Quite the contrary.

She was still somewhere back at the moment my feet had left the floor, luxuriating in the discovery that this enormous man could gather all five-foot-one of me into his arms and relocate me as though I weighed scarcely more than the peach lace I was wearing.

I wanted to protest.

I truly did.

And yet kisses were already wandering down my abdomen, descending lower as my legs parted for him, and my argument concerning responsible mattress stewardship rapidly lost both structure and conviction.

And once again, we found our rhythm.

There are two images from that night that remain especially vivid.

In the first, he was reclined against the headboard, legs parted before me, while I lay upon my stomach between them.

For once, there was nowhere else my attention had to go – no competing demand, no divided awareness, no responsibility waiting impatiently at the edge of my thoughts. I could simply devote myself to him, and that freedom made me curious. Playful. Studious, even.

So I explored.

I traced my tongue along the underside of his cock, learning which movements altered his breathing. I took him deeper and discovered that I could work the muscles at the back of my throat around him; having discovered this rather intriguing piece of information, I repeated it merely to observe what response it would draw.

Every shiver became information.

Every groan was carefully catalogued.

Every involuntary movement told me where I ought to return.

There was an almost scholarly satisfaction in it, except scholarship has rarely involved quite so much nakedness.

I could not help the grin that curved against him as curiosity gave way to practically devious malice. For just one night, I wanted to be the architect of his undoing – not through brute force or frantic effort, but through the mischief of my lips, the art of my tongue and the intimate contraction of my throat.

The Archangel had spent the day tending to me.

For those minutes, I intended to study him until I knew how to return the favor.

Later, I rode him until my thighs began to quiver beneath me.

His arms swept around me and, in one fluid motion, the ceiling changed places with his face.

Suddenly I was upon my back again.

That is the other image.

My right leg was clenched around his hip. My left ankle rested upon his shoulder. His broad palm lay against my breastbone – not pinning me, not hurting me, merely there – and the sheer scale of his hand against my chest caught my attention.

I opened my eyes.

And looked.

Really looked.

Perhaps I had been too occupied until then with what his body was doing to mine to properly appreciate the body itself.

The Archangel above me was magnificent.

His shoulders seemed almost indecently broad from that angle, the muscles shifting beneath bronze skin as he moved. His biceps tightened and released; corded forearms descended from them, thick veins tracing their way toward the hand spread across my chest. My gaze followed the formidable line from shoulder to wrist and then back again, fascinated by the mechanics of him.

He seemed less born than rendered – some immodest classical study of masculine anatomy that ought to have been hanging in a museum beneath a discreet brass plaque while respectable women pretended not to stare.

I had no intention of pretending.

There are moments when the female body becomes a rather shameless admirer of architecture.

Mine certainly did.

For several seconds, I simply watched him – the gathering and release of muscle, the contrast of his enormous hand against my much smaller frame, those silvery wings rising behind all that decidedly earthly masculinity – and thought that, if one were going to commit sins beneath an Archangel, this was at least an exceptionally handsome way to go about it.

Then another stroke sent my body bowing from the mattress, and art appreciation became quite beyond me.

I woke the next morning just before his alarm.

For several minutes I remained tucked inside my absurd nest of pillows, warm and drowsy, suspended in that lovely borderland before consciousness has fully reclaimed its dominion.

Then the alarm gave its first tiny bink.

The Archangel was instantly awake.

Of course he was.

He silenced it almost before the poor thing had properly announced itself, and I had to grin into my pillow.

For a while neither of us moved. Eventually he rose and disappeared into the en suite while I stretched beneath the covers, still cocooned among the pillows and making no meaningful contribution to the morning.

When he returned, I expected him to cross the darkened room and climb back into his own bed.

Instead, he walked around to the far side of mine.

He shifted the ridiculous collection of pillows I had accumulated behind me, climbed beneath the covers and settled against my back.

I nestled into him with a contented sigh.

That may have been one of my favorite parts of the entire weekend.

Not because it was grand. Quite the opposite.

There had been no invitation to interpret, no seduction underway, no reason for either of us to perform anything for the other. He had simply returned to the room, found me buried in my absurd little nest and chosen to crawl into it with me.

Then this great masculine body that had seemed so formidable above mine only hours earlier curved around my back as though there were nothing remarkable about being there.

I did not have to ask.

Perhaps that was what made it so lovely.

No grand seduction. No performance. Just the faint arrival of morning, sleepy conversation and the warmth of him wrapped around me while I attempted to remain acutely conscious of my dragon breath and not exhale directly into the face of an unsuspecting celestial being.

I could very easily have fallen asleep again.

Instead, eventually I turned within his embrace and draped one leg over his hip. My nails began an idle journey across his back.

Back and forth.

Then back again.

And this is how these things happen.

A caress lingers beyond innocence. Hips shift. Another body answers. The question is asked without language and answered in the same fashion – invitation, acceptance, offering, return.

His black boxers remained between us for a while, transforming every movement into an infuriating tease, until eventually they did not.

Once again his head disappeared beneath the peach negligée that had worked its way around my waist.

His enormous hands cupped my aching breasts while his mouth worked between my thighs, and I arched against him as wave after wave passed through me.

Somewhere inside the haze, an entirely irrelevant thought wandered through my mind.

When had I last had morning sex?

Six months ago?

Surely not that long.

Longer?

I dismissed the thought almost as soon as it appeared.

That belonged to another day.

I was here now.

Morning sunlight fought its way through the room, and soon our hips were meeting again while I buried my teeth in the pillow to spare our hotel neighbors an unsolicited understanding of how exceptionally well my morning was progressing.

Eventually, it was his turn to lie back.

And I had notes.

Everything I had learned the previous night came with me as I settled between his thighs. My hand wrapped around his cock while my tongue circled the tip, tasting the faint salt there, and I watched him in the pallid morning light.

That image remains with me too.

His muscular body stretched across the bed. The fan turning lazily overhead. Texas humidity already beginning to press faintly against the windows. Morning light crossing all that glistening skin and strength while I possessed the rare luxury of giving him my undivided attention.

There is a peculiar intimacy in being allowed to study another person’s responses without distraction – to learn the minute changes in breath and muscle, to discover which touch makes restraint falter and then, with thoroughly questionable innocence, return to it.

Then came the warning that he was nearing the edge.

Well.

It appeared this was going to be an excellent morning for both of us.

I smiled against him, wetting his crown with my tongue as my hand began pumping faster.

The response was immediate.

When he finally came, it spilled hot across my hand in repeated pulses, his body tightening beneath me until the last contraction had passed and there remained nothing in either of us but breathlessness and the lovely wreckage of having spent ourselves thoroughly.

Eventually I crawled upward and folded myself against his chest.

For a while we simply lay there, recovering in the near-silent morning, neither of us particularly inclined to disturb it.

Then, almost together, as though we had merely awakened rather than committed an impressive catalogue of sins before breakfast, we murmured…

“Good morning.”

Until next time, XO. Elsie