care. I did what he asked, tracing the top and bottom edges of the delicate fluted bone.
“Touch your lips. Go real slow with your thumb. How does that feel?”
“Good. All of it…feels so good.” My lips were chapped, and somehow even that skin was attached to the ache between my legs because I was dying. Restless and achy and hurting.
“Lick the tips of your fingers. Feel your tongue.”
It was surreal, these parts of my body that seemed so pedestrian, so bland and normal every other moment of my life, but right now…they were electric. The air I breathed, the skin on my body—my entire self—was electric.
“Do it, baby.”
“Do what?”
“Slip your fingers between your legs.”
“I don’t…” I closed my eyes and moaned. There was too much happening inside of me—too many things. Desire and embarrassment. A terrible, sharp sense of my own ridiculousness.
“You don’t what?”
“I don’t…I just…I’ve never—” How could I explain my life to this man? The extreme temperatures I’d endured that left nothing…nothing for me. There was not a moment of my day spent on anything but appeasing first my mother and then my husband.
“You’ve never…?” he asked.
Once, I thought, but the memory was a bad one. Sour and awful. Terrible and unfinished; I couldn’t even count it.
“Never.”
“Oh, fuck, baby, I don’t even care if this is some kind of game you’re playing. I’m in. Whatever it is, I’m so fucking in.”
“It’s not a game.”
“Okay,” he said, and I could tell he still didn’t believe me. And God, wasn’t that easier? Wasn’t it easier if he thought I was worldly and experienced enough to think of this dirty little phone sex game to play with a stranger?
“Are you?” I asked.
“What?”
“Touching yourself?”
His low chuckle sizzled from my ear over my body. “No, this one is about you.”
About me. Oh God, why did that even turn me on?
Nothing good had been about me. Ever.
“Tell me what to do,” I whispered.
His breathing was hard and I heard the shift and squeal of a chair, like he was turning, or leaning back.
“God, you’re good, baby.”
I didn’t give a shit what he thought as long as this feeling was filling my body. “Please,” I whispered.
Again, that groan. “Slide your fingers down between your legs.”
My fingers slipped under the plain pink cotton of my underwear and I whimpered when the pressure of my hand made the ache worse. Sharper somehow.
“I like that sound you made,” he said.
“What next?”
“Cup yourself in your hand, your fingers low…you feel yourself there?”
“Yes. I’m…I’m wet. Hot.”
Dylan swore.
“Good, baby. Now take those fingers down between your lips, just keep following your wetness until your finger slips…”
I gasped. “Inside.”
“Yes.”
“Oh God.” I closed my eyes, sliding my finger out slowly and then back in. I lifted my knees up, arched my hips so I could get more of my finger inside, but somehow, as good as that felt, there was something entirely unsatisfying about it. “It’s not—”
“Use two fingers.”
I did and immediately the pressure inside was fuller…better. My fingers slipped and slid, buried between my legs. I felt the muscles of my channel against the skin of my hand in a way I never had before.
“You know where your clit is?” he asked.
“Yes.” Entirely in theory.
“Slip your thumb up to the top of your pussy—”
Oh God, that word. That filthy word…“Say that again.”
“Thumb?”
Impossibly, a wild gust of laughter blew through me. My fingers inside my body and I was laughing. He laughed too, and it was a whole new layer of connection.
But then somehow in the same breath, we both sobered.
“Pussy, baby. Slide your thumb to the top of your pussy.”
I did what he asked, so hard and so fast that when my thumb brushed my clit, I cried out.
“There you go,” he breathed, sounding somehow satisfied. “Work it with your thumb.”
“It…it hurts, a little.”
“Good hurt or bad hurt?”
“There’s no good hurt,” I told him, my voice harsher than I’d intended. Good hurt. What an oxymoron. My thumb lifted from the kernel between my legs that was so sensitive right now I could barely stand to touch it.
His silence went on for a long time, long enough that I pulled my fingers from my body. The breeze over my body was not cool—it was cold.
I crossed an arm over my chest as if he could see me.
“Dylan?”
“You’re not playing, are you? This isn’t some hot virgin kink game with you?”
“Sure it is,” I said, trying to sound coy or something, not like my lungs were being crushed by failure and embarrassment. “You don’t