Incapable (Love Triumphs Book 3) (22 page)

“Ah Georgia, you’re beautiful. I need your skin under my hands. I want to breathe it, lick it, fill my senses with you.” He nuzzled her neck, his palms sliding over her shoulders, down her back, under the elastic of her underpants and over the rump of her backside. “These have to go.”

“Yours too.” Amazing that came out at a normal volume; it sounded like trumpet in her head.

He groaned. “Oh God, yes.” His voice had fallen into thick glue, heavy in his throat, sticking on his tongue. He released her. A few seconds apart and then no more barriers.

She stood, ditched her underwear. She watched him do the same, breathing open-mouthed, loud in her own ears, eyes so bugged out it was a wonder she could blink over them.

Logic told her the two of them would fit together; one to encase and absorb; one to seek and define, but watching him pull the cover off the bed, it was impossible to believe that could hold true, impossible not to need, with a kind of unhinged sanity, being claimed by the weight and length of him.

He stood by the bed. “I want you something fierce, but you need to choose.” He extended an arm, reaching for her, his expression intense. “Where do you want to be?”

Above, below, beside, right side up, upside down. She was already all points of the compass, spinning wildly. “Everywhere.”

He beckoned and she came into his arms, the shock of skin on skin knocking a rasping grunt out of her, turning her hands to claws on his shoulders, and she knew where she wanted to be first—beneath.

Beneath him she’d feel his power, give hers over for a time. Beneath him, watching him, in the rhythm of him, her body could not for a panicked moment mistake him for Hamish and not for an eternity measured by his kisses want things any other way.

Time became the urge of his knee between hers, the stroke of his fingers on and around and inside. She lost her breath in the seconds his lips touched neck, nipple, unknown nerve ends that shot sensation from scalp to toe tip. Ages passed in the flicker of his tongue, down, down, from mouth to mouth, where he licked up into her making her buck and squirm and fight to ride this wrecking he was bringing.

He made her insensible to the bed, to the room, the flat, the street, the world. He made her see nothing and exalt in it, because she felt everything: every bone shake, every flinch of pleasure, every laboured gasp and moan wrenched from her gut in a fit of feeling that emptied her head of thought and filled it with reaction.

Her mouth on his skin. Her lips sucking his pulse points. Her hands stripping him of the coordination to ease inside her slowly, play the ebb and flow of them easily, creating instead a racetrack: speed and precision, thrust and fine concentration, a finish too far, too close, too achingly triumphant.

Over that line they were nothing but carcasses for the time it took for the world to come back into focus, for Georgia’s eyes to see again, for Damon to withdraw and crash beside her, haul her ruined body across his and hold their hearts together in the crisis of coming down.

She stirred when she heard his voice, so greased with wonder and fatigue it was a new melody for post-coital bliss. “I swear that made me see colour. Bright stripes of it, whole rainbow arcs of it.” He kissed her slow and deep, his hands heavy on her hips. “I’m never going to have enough of that. I want it to have been the same for you.”

He wanted her to talk and her brain was half starved for rational thought, ricocheting between various wavelengths of emotion, what came out of her mouth was, “That was—um—wet.” Hamish had often not been able to ejaculate.

Damon tensed. “Yeah. You’ve—”

That wasn’t her first orgasm, but it broke the sound barrier of anything she’d experienced before. “He often didn’t—um.”

“Okay, but what about you?”

She lifted her head from his shoulder to watch his face, eyes open and brows crooked down, concern but no embarrassment. She took a steadying breath. “When Hamish was still interested in sex he was good to me, but I’ve not…it wasn’t…oh God.” She buried her face in his neck. It made absolutely no difference, even after what they’d just done, that he couldn’t see how flushed with discomfort she was; she burned with it.

He gave her hair a tug, but his voice was still that sliding, slippery ease. “Tell me what you felt.”

She nibbled on his earlobe. A delaying tactic; a delightful distraction. Maybe he’d let this pass.

He quirked his neck, half pulling away from her teeth, but his arm tightened around her to hold her in place. “Georgia.”

He’d written a new musical arrangement for her understanding of sex. He’d drummed a score on her body and a put a riff in her heart that changed her definition of sound. His lovemaking was an earworm to beat all other songs that could hook you. She was incapable of withstanding a craving for more and more of the tune they made together. She traced her nose over the circular edge of his ear, breathed him in.

She told him what she felt.

“Sonic boom.”

17: Technicolour

Damon could smell bergamot and vanilla. The candles Georgia lit while she was avoiding the whole we’re about to have sex thing, right before she disappeared into the bathroom and he’d thought about getting dressed, leaving her in peace and taking his frustration home. Damn glad he hadn’t.

It had to be late morning, judging by his hunger, but there was no light in the room. He’d get up and go for his watch but he might wake her and he could think of better ways of doing that than incidentally. She owed him eggs, or any kind of caress she cared to call eggs, bacon, toast. He’d accept them all, stuff his face with them and no matter how much she served up, it wouldn’t be enough to satisfy his hunger for her.

He looked up into the black of her bedroom ceiling. This was big, this thing they had together, feature-length animation film big. It had summer blockbuster written all over it: dramatic, memorable, sequel worthy. He could see the TV spin-off, book tie-in, scantily clad action figurines in compromising poses.

He could see nothing.

It wasn’t the middle of the night, and it wasn’t likely her rented flat had blackout curtains. He eased upright and she didn’t stir. Swung his legs over the edge of the bed and stood. His watch was on the tallboy. He found it, 10am and it was dead dark in here. Last night he’d been able to make out the bedroom doorway and the dresser because of light in the hall and the bathroom, plus her candles. There was no light now, maybe the flat was sun starved. He felt his way to the doorway, moved into the hall, squeezing his eyes shut and opening them again. He hadn’t gotten as far as her kitchen last night. It wasn’t a good idea to go crashing around in there now unless he wanted to wake her.

He reached for the doorway to the bathroom, danced his fingers up the wall to find the light switch. A click and nothing. There was light there last night, but it could be a blown bulb. He used the toilet, washed his face. Found that half-size plastic toothbrush with its tiny tube of paste and cleaned his teeth.

He knew the landing got sunlight because he’d felt it on his face waiting for her the day they’d bought the dress. So even if it was overcast, dismal, he should still be able to see the change in the light. This is what you got for waking up in someone else’s bed, in someone else’s home. You also got the elbow he whacked into the wall, the toe he stubbed on the leg of a hall table. At least that identified her door keys. He found them in a bowl on the table and used them to open the front door.

He only wanted the light to give him a sense of the day, the time, the place. He cracked the seal on the door expecting to feel the sun, hoping to blink against the glare.

Nothing.

He opened the door wider, and wider again until it was all the way open, folded against the wall, and he was standing on the stone step. He saw nothing. He rubbed a hand over his face. He couldn’t hear rain or wind, there were birds chirping. No people sounds. He listened carefully to check that, he heard a bus on the street, but no evidence of Georgia’s neighbours who’d rightly be shocked to meet a naked man on their landing.

He took a step out onto the tiles where he knew the sun would be. He felt its warmth immediately, but it didn’t make him squint and what he saw was nothing.

It made him stagger, his heel caught on the step, both hands went out to grip the doorjamb. Nothing. He saw nothing. He turned to look down the hallway, blackness, then back to the world outside and yeah, there was a difference, but it was shades of charcoal and midnight. He wasn’t seeing light.

He stepped back inside the flat and closed the door, leaned against it.
Fuck, fuck, fuck
. Could this be lack of sleep, stress, dehydration?

Of course, it could still be a blown bulb, very stormy day. Birds still chirped in bad weather. It could still be that he’d got the angles of the sun wrong and Georgia’s flat was naturally dark. This wasn’t a place he was familiar with, so it could be a lot of things. There was no need to panic. He took a breath, let it out slowly. The next in-breath filled his lungs and brought horror with it.

There was no need to lie to himself. This was it. This was Lina’s moment. The one he’d used vain hope and insane bravado to avoid, deny, but not as he’d planned, evade.

Jesus
. He’d lost his light and shade; he’d lost his sense of shape and movement. His residual sight, his jigsaw memory cheat, it was gone. He bent forward, hands to his knees; he was breathing too fast, hyperventilating.

And he did not want Georgia to find him like this: naked, in a panic sweat, coming apart. He had to buck up, get it together. It wasn’t like this was unexpected. He wasn’t sick or hurt or in need of medical attention. He was just blind. Blinder than he had been a day ago. Blind in a way there was no recovery, miracle cure or coming back from, in a way that made him less able and threatened, his romantic blockbuster from becoming the enduring classic he wanted it to be.

Georgia loved and lost with Hamish. She’d been damaged by that relationship. She’d made a plan to start a new kind of life. And then the two of them had stumbled together, and against Georgia’s better judgement she’d accepted Damon entirely for who he was and how he managed the world.

But last night he’d been more capable, more able.

He straightened up. He had a headache: hunger, thirst. Fear. It was tight in his clenched fists and fisted in his gut. This frightened him more than it should. Other than Lina, no one else would even know it’d happened. His life was organised around his blindness, nothing changed. Once he’d lost his backlit twenty-four point, he’d had so little remaining functional sight left to lose anyway, but there was power and control in light and dark, and security in being able to see movement. He couldn’t help but find permanent blackness a crippling threat.

His threat, not Georgia’s penance.

He’d deal with it alone now that it was here; get training to use the long cane and finish that research on how to travel with a dog, put himself on a waiting list for one, work out how he could retain the independence, the life he’d prospered with.

He heard Georgia say his name, once, then louder, before he was ready to face her. He closed the door softly, made the short journey down the hall to her bedroom doorway. Her feet hit the floor and she rumbled around, he’d lay money on finding something to wear.

Her hands a shock on his chest, he couldn’t stop the flinch. “Where’d you go?” A brush of cotton, bet paid off. “Looking like that?”

He pushed his hair off his forehead. “Bathroom, used your spare toothbrush.”

“Oh.” Her arms wrapping around him. “If I use mine I could kiss you.”

He stroked her tangled hair. “I’m not the least bit fussy. You can kiss me without the requirement for a toothbrush.” Inside her kiss the darkness wouldn’t matter. He’d had coloured visions last night in her arms.

“But my teeth have fur on them.”

He tipped his head up, face towards the ceiling. “No one told me you were a were-sound engineer.”

She bit his throat and he laughed, snatching her closer. If he could still his racing thoughts, he’d be okay. He had money, resources, professional assistance. He was thousands of times better off than most blind folk without his earning capacity. He had faith in his ability to work through this new phase of darkness. He had Georgia. She was his leading lady and he wasn’t scaring her off because today he could see less than yesterday.

He captured her jaw, but she squirmed to get away and he let her. She went for the bathroom. She didn’t try the light and he didn’t catch his sigh before it was out, but she was busy splashing water about and didn’t remark on it, instead she laughingly closed the door on him, shouting through it, “I’m not weeing in front of you.”

There was the flush, the tap again, the plink of a handtowel rail against a tile, the door opening and she threw herself at him, backing him into the bedroom.

He let her push him till his calves hit the bed and then he took over, dropping back on it, dragging her down with him, taking her minty mouth and her warm skin and dissolving his truckload of dread in the luscious weight of her body and her soft sighs and murmurs.

What he could touch and taste, what he could smell, sense and hear, held no trepidation. And Georgia filled his senses to overflow.

Her t-shirt was gone and there was only the slide of skin, the stimulant of kisses. She shifted till she was braced on top of him, sitting astride his thighs.

“On top.” It came out of her in a hiss, though there were no S sounds to make it so, only the sibilance of her desire, slippery and sensate.

He forgot the vacant, aching black in the blinding flash of the moment she eased him inside; in the hot, hard gasps she made as he filled her, and the wet heat of what she was made of and gifted him. He rolled her hips, helped her move, tilted his own, gave her an anchor. She folded forward for kisses and connection and he only let her upright again when he knew she was set to ride, primed to let go. He lent her his hands to brace against, gave her his voice to guide her and he lost his heart entirely.

“You’re so beautiful, so, so God. So right. Georgia. Let me hear you.”