Page 98 of One Year Ago in Spain
The next, long stroke caressed the side of her throat, across her collarbone, then down and around the swell of her breast. She heard Matías pause and swallow to gather himself before he reached for a different brush.
With blackberry, he painted a mirroring curve. Then with both brushes at the same time, he swept down from just under each breast, across the softness of her stomach, and out to her hips, drawing spirals like the body of a cello.
She arched up, yearning for him.
“Not yet,” he said as softly as the skimming of his paints.
He unscrewed the jar of honey, its sweetness blossoming into the air. When he touched his brush to Claire this time, it was to the inside of her ankle. And even though it wasn’t real, the honey was warm and thick as the brush trailed up, along the side of her calf. Up, past her knee. Up, across the pale skin of the part of her thigh that rarely saw the sun but that was feverish now, burning, as the sweep of honey stroked the crease where her leg met her core.
Torturously, Matías painted her other leg with honey, too, and by the time he was done, she was begging him. “Please.”
“Please what?”
“Please touch me. Everywhere. Make me yours.”
He bent over her neck again and kissed her, hungrier now, tracing the swoop of strawberry down her throat, her collarbone, the heat of his mouth on her breast. He did the same to her left side, murmuring her name, ending with his tongue hot on her nipple.
In the background, the piano music sped up, no longer languorous. Claire’s breath came quicker, too, matching the tempo.
Matías worshipped the curves of her stomach and her hips with his mouth. She arched toward him again as his lips completed the second cello swirl.
“Almost,” he whispered.
Instead of kissing her ankles, though, he wrapped his handsaround both, his thumbs in the honey. Then he began to glide up, inch by slow inch, a massage along the interior of her legs that felt alive, like the buzz of electric against her skin. Ankle. Calves. Thighs.
Slowly higher and higher…
Until his thumbs met.
“Dios mío,” Claire gasped.
He spread her open and slid himself inside.
“Oh, Claire…”
It didn’t matter that he was only a soul. She rememberedherMatías, and this version of him was not that far removed from the one she had met at the Rose Gallery, the Matías who had brought a picnic dinner to her firm, then made love to her in the shadowed law library. This soul—who was only one year removed from the present—was the same Matías who would later wake Claire up in the mornings with tender kisses and gentle entanglement in the sheets. He would also fuck her against the wall in his Greenwich Village studio. And on the paint-splattered floor. And one time, in the elevator with the emergency switch pulled.
So now, with eyes still closed, Claire blended her memories of the past with the man in the present, and she felt Matías’s hands in her hair, her body pressed hard against his, her hips meeting his movements. She could feel the stickiness of the honey and fruit on their skin even though they weren’t really there. The drumming of his heartbeat in his chest against hers.
Their muscles tensed.
Breathing synced, shallow and fast.
She bit his shoulder as the eddying storm inside them grew wilder and wilder.
And then the tempest unleashed, exploding in a beautiful fury of colors and shards of Claire and Matías, of blinding lightning and thunder so loud it rendered the world without sound. She was Claire, but she wasn’t, because nothing as mundane as a mere person could exist in this moment. Even time seemed to hitch.
Afterward, she swam for a while in the drowsy bliss of its aftermath.
But eventually, her heartbeat slowed close to normal, and Claire’s eyes fluttered open.
“Matías?”
But she was alone on the bed. In the room.
Claire bolted upright.
“Matías?”
