“Let’s not hurry. Touch me first. However you want. Then I’ll touch you.”

She halted before me, feet a little apart and eyes closed, inviting me. I leaned forward in my chair and ran my hands over her warm, soft flesh. I touched as I pleased, hefting the weight of her soft breasts, discovering the warmth between her thighs. She gave a sudden shiver as I did so. I tried to pull her to me, but she jumped back and then said suddenly, “My turn.

Lean back. Shut your eyes.”

I did as she bade me, lost in delight at her playfulness. I felt her tug at my belt, and then the bliss of buttons giving way to her nimble fingers. For one instant, I was free, and then, to my shock, I felt her clamp her mouth on me. I opened my eyes, jolted to my core at such wild and strange behavior. I knew it was not what I wanted. I tried to pull free of her, but she held me fast, and in another moment, I suddenly knew it was what I wanted beyond all else. I gave a groan of protest and delight and then surrendered to her. It was happening far more quickly than I intended, and with an intensity that left me mindless. I had read of such an act, in one of Caleb’s more depraved journals, but I’d certainly never expected to take part in such perversity. I felt unmanned that she had taken such control of me, and yet completely dominant as she knelt before me with my fingers tangled in her hair. Her small hands pressed against the overflow of my belly, holding it back. I clasped her head between my hands and feared my own strength, for her skull felt fragile as a child’s.

Sensations I’d never even imagined coursed through me. In the moment before her skillful tongue freed me from all thought, I knew that I wanted, more than anything, to grant her such bliss as she worked upon me.

And even in the midst of sexual release, I felt the telltale tingling of the magic moving in my blood. Her mouth came suddenly free of me and she gave a wild cry, a sound as elemental as a doe calling for a mate. She fell bonelessly to the floor in front of my feet, her wet mouth ajar and moaning. “Are you all right?” I asked her in alarm. I clutched my clothing around me and knelt next to her. Her eyes were rolled back in her head.

She took a shuddering breath, coughed it out, and then gasped in another one.

“I’ll get help,” I told her, and tried to rise. She grasped at me with vague hands.

“No. No, please. I’m all right. I think.” She tried to sit up, and then collapsed back to the floor. “That’s never happened to me before,” she said in faint wonder. “That was…oh. I don’t know what that was…” Her voice trailed off into incoherence.