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I went back into the library, limp and exhausted. In a few minutes the telephone began ringing again. I did not do anything. I let it ring. I went and sat down at Maxim’s feet. It went on ringing. I did not move. Presently it stopped, as though cut suddenly in exasperation. The clock on the mantelpiece struck ten o’clock. Maxim put his arms round me and lifted me against him. We began to kiss one another, feverishly, desperately, like guilty lovers who have not kissed before.
- Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca
•••
Before Maxim, my bony elbows had always bothered me. The sharp, boyish extrusions proclaimed me too young to be touched. These were the weapons I brandished, haphazardly, to carve my way through crowds with the slip of a shoulder, easily rotating around the hot, pulsing bodies. But now he was caressing them, and his fingers sent cold shivers through the veins in the crook of my elbow.
As I lay limp against his legs, my hand had rested in Maxim’s lap while he softly petted my hair. It had been easy for him to take my hand, gently stretch my thin arm, and press his damp lips to my pulsing skin. Even easier, then, with a twist of the wrist, to wrap my fingers around his jaw—I felt a pressure on the back of my neck that slowly melted into a soft caress sloping down my shoulders. Maxim had roughened skin, but such a delicate touch, and I remained still and fascinated as his fingers explored the angles of my body.
It was a genesis of sorts, to watch myself through his eyes and feel myself through his fingers. I wanted his hands to bruise me with the wine of old lovers; I knew he had touched other women like this. His lips had worshipped other bodies, bodies of ghosts, of feather-light jewels and small arched feet and supple curves. Rebecca had broad shoulders; she could tame wild horses and domesticate the most demonic of monsters, of men. But she was not here, and only the roaring of the fire accompanied the crescendo of our undoing.
Maxim tucked his hands under my arms and lifted me into his lap, and as he did so, my hair fell to my shoulders, unpinned. He crushed me against him and I almost felt his pulse quicken under his thin, linen shirt. Under my lips, his throat sighed, alive in a way I had never felt him before—I felt something else waken inside of me, too. This instinct was foreign, and therefore dangerous, and for a moment, I wondered if this was how she had felt with him. A woman defeating the colossus, this force of a man, and bending him to my will against a smaller, weaker body.
I was alive in a way I had never felt before. We kissed each other desperately, almost in the ecstasy of the first taste, like new lovers. I had once been that innocent. Now, I wondered if I would never taste him again, and so I devoured him with my lips and rolled my tongue across the delicious ridges, savoring every taste and every sound I could elicit from his mouth.
Outwardly, I could almost feel the cage of him melting. Maxim’s arms easily wrapped around me, splayed across my shoulders, rising the back of my neck to tangle in my hair. He clutched my hair and pulled back, hard, kissing my ear, my jaw, my hairline, but the pain only excited me. Perhaps it was then I finally understood the meaning of the phrase, “the heat of the moment.” As his hands roamed hungrily across my body, I came to realize that Maxim’s slow, methodical strokes were a binding, of sorts. He moved slowly, slipping under my dress, running from the insides of my legs up to the steep undercurve of my neck, unbuttoning the back of my dress. The revelation of cold across my spine was sharp, but short-lived, as Maxim quickly annihilated the unpleasant sensation with a fervent drag of his broad, devouring hands.
I was just a child in his grasp, doll-like, delicate. Maxim knew what to do with his body; he moved me like a poppet and I, the silent spectator, observed my own reactions with distant morbid curiosity that overlaid the roiling hunger, a feral instinct, burning within me. He palmed my ribs, and for a moment I felt thin and delicate, but as my bones resisted the force of his obliterating touch with bloom of tomorrow’s rosy bruises I was reminded of my own resilience.
His thumbs swept down in a slow arc from my breastbone and flaring outwards, holding me. Maxim’s touch was fierce and hot, but he was not completely unrestrained yet, and I—I wanted more. Sinful images flashed through my mind, and my only inhibition was the speed at which they moved; I could not catch them in their fleeting, evanescent spark. In my awkward ineptitude, I lacked the courage to act on my desires. But Maxim—Maxim…