Page 40 of Service Included

“Maybe calling theDiadoumenosa victory celebration isn’t quite right.” She inhaled and paused, knowing that her breasts pushed forward and upward, into maximum visibility. “Doesn’t it seem more like surrender?”

“Teasing me with your arty ways?” His eyes narrowed.

“What if I am?”

“Then you’ll get exactly what you deserve.”

"That's the plan."

“Lie on your stomach.” Definitely a command.

She shivered while she complied. She brushed close enough to his cock to notice the light scent of soap, barely a hint of condom or sex left on him, but didn’t have time to taste him before the weight of his hands fell to her shoulder blades and pushed her flat. Then he straddled the backs of her thighs and, surprisingly, went for that spot where the fisted muscles of her neck spread their tension to her shoulders. His hands seemed to take the ball of need from inside her and spread it out to her skin, and then rub it into something warm and intoxicating. A drug. In her veins. He wasn’t seeking her erogenous zones, but rather the on/off switches embedded in her musculature. Her thoughts faded to wisps when his thumbs started low in the curve of her back and traversed up the outer edges of her spine to the base of her neck, then switched to deep circles across her upper back.

“S’good,” she muttered. His hands, the hands she’d watched all day, were stripping each part of her back and mushing her into the mattress. He took her will and drive and left her feeling like a stick of butter in the sun, with the illusion of structure until you poked a knife in it and discovered it had become a block of soft liquid under its familiar contours.

“Relax.” His hands left for a moment, and then she felt a cool point press into her skin, but it wasn’t sharp.

Not his fingers. One of the markers? She was muddled trying to figure out, distracted by the way the hard tip followed a path from the base of her neck along the length of her back, distinct from the feeling caused by his pressing thumbs. When it tweaked her skin, her pussy recognized something that could fit inside or tickle and suddenly awakened, begging.

“I said, relax.”

Like she was going to be able to relax with him dragging that point across her skin, first zigzagging, and then figure eights that spanned the back of her ribs.

A tiny noise that sounded like theplickof plastic parts separating must have been the cap coming off the marker. She felt the next press on her skin, softer this time, and knew he’d switched to the writing part of the marker. In the hollow at the base of her spine, he made choppy lines, touching her for an instant and then lifting away.

“What, may I ask, are you doing?” Even she could tell her words were half speed. Whatever he answered might matter when she was fully awake, but that wasn’t going to be in the next ten minutes.

“Giving you a tattoo. One that’s not permanent.”

“That’s not the name of those pens.” She sensed movement and guessed that he was selecting another marker from the stack next to her arm. Not worth opening her eyes to confirm.

“They’ll last as long as you need them.”

Too cryptic for her satiated brain, so she immersed herself in the sensations crossing her skin. The cool marker tips, their motions irregular but also soothing, might be writing. Other than the first few short strokes, his motions felt like looping swirls that seemed to curl back on themselves. She’d look later. When she wasn’t exhausted. Until then, his drawing could stay a mystery.

Mystery writing. Secrets.

On her back, Nico changed to shorter, denser strokes. She assumed he was shading an area of his drawing.

Written secrets. An idea teased at the edge of her consciousness, and she fought to lift her eyelids. An idea about writers. With secrets.

Three markers, red, blue and black, in a row next to her face when Nico’s fingers finally trailed up her sides, close enoughto her insanely ticklish spots that a shock loosened an idea she hadn’t even known she’d known.

A secret writer.Aunt Bea and her magazine career. That was the reason her mother had kept those boxes. Her sister had undeniably written the fake letter from the farm girl who’d owned Percherons before she went to the city. She’d married her boss soon after she’d arrived in New York. Divorced him later—she remembered her aunt saying that putting a nice suit on a turd didn’t make it into chocolate whenever she’d mentioned that marriage—so that had to be Aunt Bea’s story. The notes on the covers must be from her too.

Nico must have sensed a change in her. “What woke you?”

She knew enough about men to realize the only magazine articles they wanted to hear about while naked included phrases like “Seven Positions,” and the authors’ identities were irrelevant.

The mattress smothered her giggle. “You.”

His hands settled lower, curving around her hips to pull her butt in the air. “Let’s see if I can make it worth your while.”

This was going to be position three. Or perhaps five. No, definitely nine.

And then his mouth fastened on the curve of her butt, and she heard herself make a high-pitched sound into the night, like a bird’s desperate call. Never before had she appreciated how that part of her body had so many nerves that it could be suckled like a breast, that a man’s mouth, a man’s teeth, could worship there. She could feel the connection pulse directly to her breasts. She swayed her shoulders, rubbing her nipples against the mattress, and heard the sound of a plastic wrapper ripping.

“Does this way”—he nudged her knees farther apart, spreading her legs so that his hand could find the center of her desire. One of his fingers slipped into her while another one pressed her clit—“work for you?”

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