“What?”

“I shouldn’t touch you.”

My hand finds his cheek. “I thought your weird little security blanket of a rule was that you could touch me, and I couldn’t touch you.”

“Fucking hell.” His breath comes fast, loud even over the patter of the rain. I feel his forehead against my belly. “Like I said,” he mumbles, bending my knee, pushing my leg up. “I was a goddamned saint for three years. I had it down. I knew exactly how to avoid you.”

I run my fingers through his hair. Watch him look down at me. The way the fabric adheres to every inch of my cunt. He can’t see me yet, but he can. “Did you consider not coming to the wedding?” I ask.

“You know I did.” His hands find my inner thighs, splay me open so wide, my muscles groan. He yanks my underwear to the side, none too gently. It bunches there, slick, right next to my bare slit, and…

I hadn’t shaved in months before this trip. I did before coming here, simply because I knew I’d be wearing bikinis, and I’m glad of it now. I doubt Conor would care either way, but I love feeling every pass of his tongue, every little movement as he nibbles and teases and eats.

He’s not nice about it. Other guys have done this to me, and they weren’t bad by any means. But there was a daintiness to it, delicate licks, ghostlike touches. Conor groans. Conor sucks. Conor clutches and bites and swears. Conor looks, while eating me out, like other men do while I go down on them.

“Please,” I gasp, not asking him for anything except to continue. He’s relentless and ruthless. He can’t read my mind, nor does he skip the awkward phase of figuring out what to do. He does, however, shorten it to just a handful of trials.

Quick learner, and all that. All those years in academia.

“I–yes, there.” I writhe. Squirm against the rock even as it scrapes the skin off my back. Lift my hips right off the ground to meet his mouth. The sounds he tears out of me echo through the cave, but I’m long past shame.

“Fuck,” he says, and then he repeats it when I contract around the first knuckle of his thumb with a rush of heat. It slips inside me quickly, and my cunt squeezes it in, asking for more, and—“Fuck,” he says again, low and drawn out, and I wish I could tell him, show him how good this feels, but my orgasm shoots up my spine and wraps around my vocal cords. There is not enough air in the world. My body is made of snapping tension and loose pleasure and nothing else. This is how people die and still ask for more.

“Conor,” I gasp after a while. Above me, little stalactites drip from the ceiling. “You…”

I fall silent, because he does it all over again, with my fingers pulling at his hair and my heels shoving into the muscles in his back. His nose rubs against my clit and he licks me clean only to make me convulse again, and there is no scrabbling away from this pleasure, not until he lets out a low, barely stifled growl against my inner thigh, and decides that I’m free to go.