American Queen

“Need to come,” he mutters raggedly. “I’m going to come.”

I get a quick break for air and then I’m back down, and I feel both of his hands on my head, pushing me down as far as I’ll go, to the point where my nose is buried against the clean, shortly trimmed hair at the base of his cock. Now that I know the swallowing trick, I do it repeatedly, driving him into a frenzy, and soon his forearms are clamped on my head and his body curled over mine, holding me fast as he pumps several hard, short thrusts into my throat. The silk tie rasps against my cheek, and my hands are desperate and everywhere, pulling at his pants, his belt, the expensive leather upholstery of his chair.

He finally erupts with a breathy grunt that makes my toes curl. I’ll be hearing that grunt in my dreams, in my fantasies, how helpless and yet strong it was, how very, very male. The sound of it lodges in my gut, and when the hot warmth of his climax finally hits my throat, I know I’m a lost cause. Nothing—not literature, not teaching, not traveling, or looking out over Manhattan at night—nothing compares to this. Having the powerful body of a powerful man pressed against me, owning me and taking pleasure from me. Having his most intimate, unguarded self unveiled, and only to me.

Because this night, this moment? I could be the only woman in the world, the only mouth and the only body, and that isn’t love, exactly, but it feels like it, and maybe that’s what counts in the end.

He lifts my head off his cock and says simply, “Lick me clean,” which I do. Thoroughly. So thoroughly that he starts to get hard again and pushes me off.

“Enough,” he says sternly, but when I look up, his eyes are sparkling with amusement. “You’re too good.”

Despite my raw throat, despite the wet tears on my cheeks, his words make me want to purr and stretch like a kitten. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so close to another person, so admired and, yes, despite the brutal face-fucking, respected. I’ve never been this happy and content, save for that handful of moments under Embry’s body all those years ago. I rub my face against Ash’s knee, like a cat indeed, and he indulges me, stroking my hair and praising me for how good I made him feel.

After a few minutes of this, he straightens up, tucking himself back into his pants. “Stay like that, on your knees, and put your hands behind your back.”

I do as he says, watching him stand up and walk into his bedroom again, thinking there will be more to the night. My cunt rejoices, because I am so incredibly worked up after making Ash come, but when he comes out of the bedroom, he’s not holding any kinky sexy toys or condoms. He holds only a soft-looking washcloth and a hairbrush.

He sits back down in his chair and tilts my chin up, cleaning my face slowly and gently, wiping away every last black mascara trail and cooling what I know must be flushed cheeks. Then he tells me to turn around, still kneeling, and I feel him begin to pluck the hairpins out of my ruined chignon, one by one.

“Your hair,” he says in a low voice. I hear the pins hitting the desk one at a time, clink clink clink, as if he kept them all in his fist and then dropped them onto the desk in a steady rain. “There’s no end to the things I’ve thought about doing with your hair. It was the first thing I noticed about you that night, you kneeling among all that glittering glass, your hair like sunshine. Like white gold.” I can practically hear him shake his head. “I suppose I’ll never know if it was your hair or seeing you on your knees that captivated me at first. I’ll also never know if it was you noticing my sleeplessness or watching you bleed for someone you loved that made you unforgettable to me.”

His words are rolling through my veins, a spell of fire and heat.

“But that hair. I used to think about it incessantly, what it would look like wrapped around my fist as I fucked you from behind. How it would feel wrapped around my cock, like so much loose silk. There were times when it was all I could think about, what your hair would smell like and what it would feel like against my lips…” I feel his lips against my hair now, dropping kisses onto the crown of my head.

We’ve just been so intimate, his fingers in my cunt and his cock in my mouth, but for some reason the kiss on my hair reverberates through me like a church bell. It’s gentleness and desire all at once, and after what we just did together, that kind of warm affection seems more precious for all the abuse that came before it. Tears smart at my eyes again, this time for a very different reason than physical pain.

He picks up the brush, and it starts to pull it through my hair with even, soothing strokes. I only have a few tangles, and Ash works through them with care, so that I barely feel any tugging or stinging. “But of all the things I thought about,” he continues, “it was brushing your hair that I thought about the most. Just watching it glint in the light, hearing the brush move through it. There would be nights in Carpathia where we’d be out on patrol in the mountains, freezing in the darkest hours of the night when it was too dangerous to light a fire, and to pass the time, I’d imagine brushing your hair. Sometimes you were the age you would have been at the time—seventeen or eighteen—and other times I’d imagine you older. Pregnant and at my feet, with my ring on your finger.”

The image gives me a moment’s pause. In my loneliest hours, I have imagined something very close to his little fantasy, and hearing him admit it sends another church-bell-style shiver through me.

The brush pauses in my hair. “Does that make you uncomfortable?” Ash asks. “I know that I’m basically confessing to a history of obsession. And I don’t want that combined with my position as President to make you feel coerced or threatened.”