Intrusion by Charlotte Stein Page A

between my legs to try. His fingers are on the plump curve of my cunt, and no amount of explaining or looking away will make it different.
    Not that he’s looking away, at the moment. I glance in his direction, and his eyes are all over me. They drink me in, so suddenly thirsty it turns my insides to liquid. My heart has to beat at three times the normal speed just to stop itself from sinking, and then he reaches for me, and I swear it bursts right out of my chest.
    I see the blood spray halfway up the wall. I have to carry on into this with red all down my dress—or at least, that’s how it feels. He puts a hand in my hair and pulls my mouth to his, and everything is terrifying. Everything is too violent and too sudden and too full of a kind of passion I didn’t think he was capable of.
    He nearly drags me down onto my back, kissing so hard and so fierce it hurts. I feel the glancing edge of his teeth, and want to tell him to stop.
    But I want to tell him to go on much more. My mind is saying that this is too much, while my body shouts the opposite. Or is it the other way around? Either way I moan his name into his mouth when that hand does more than press between my legs. He rubs me there—right over my aching sex, right where I’m wet and hot and swollen—and the word just leaps out of me.
    â€œNoah,” I say, “Noah.”
    And though the sound is throttled by lips and teeth and tongue, I know he hears it.
    The slow grin he gives me as he pulls away tells me as much. He looks almost feral—like he’s about to steal something from me and there’s nothing I can do about it. Why would I want to do anything about it? I suspect the thing is my breath, and that he’s about to take it by touching me in a far lewder manner.
    I suspect, yet still somehow it’s a shock. He parts my legs and I catch my tongue between my teeth. Then he pulls my panties aside, and I bite down. I taste blood. In a second, he’s going to feel how wet I am. He might already know—I can feel that my slickness has spread over my outer lips and into the sparse hair down there. I can make it out on the material he moves aside.
    All he has to do is move his fingertips over the very edges of my bare pussy and there it will be, swiftly followed by a look in his eyes. Oh, I know there’ll be a look. It’s the same one he uses when he turns inward, all heated and out of focus. Any second now, any second here it comes, God, here it comes; just a little touch and then—
    â€œBeth,” he says.
    And I snap awake, to the sound of my own frantic breathing.
    It sounds kind of like I’ve just run up a mountain. Or maybe there’s a train in my throat that I don’t know about. I can certainly hear something chuffing along at the very least—though I have no idea why that’s my primary concern. I should be thinking about the fact that I just had a sex dream right in front of him, and he fucking knows it.
    One look at his face tells me he knows it. He’s sort of leaning over me, even though I’ve no idea how or when I slid so far down on the bed. And his expression is what I want to call concerned, but can’t. It’s too close to bemusement, and bemusement says only one thing.
    It says he saw me doing something weird.
    â€œI had a dream about drowning,” I blurt out—because what else can I do? If I tell him it was something less extreme he’ll know I’m lying. But if I go with the truth he might think I meant that what we have isn’t enough.
    When it is, it fucking is. God, why isn’t it at all?
    I hate sex. I have always hated sex. Sex is boring and awful.
    â€œWell, everything is okay now,” he says, and then I understand.
    The problem isn’t about whether sex was boring and awful before.
    It’s that I suspect it wouldn’t be boring and awful with him . He touches the side of my face when he speaks, so softly and