Patricia thought it was kind of funny that he shaved his junk and she didn’t shave hers, but she knew better than to laugh at this moment.
If either of them had turned their heads and looked at the racks of electronic detritus along the other wall, they might have noticed the Caddies were acting weird. That is, in a way that nobody had ever seen a Caddy behave before. The Caddies lit an LED on the peak of their guitar-pick-shaped cases as a pinhole camera activated. Even the two that were theoretically wiped and reformatted with Artichoke BSD. The Caddy in Patricia’s purse also came to life and flooded its screen with data. This wasn’t the way a Caddy flashes its screen to remind you of an appointment, or the little bubble that appears in the corner of the screen to let you know one of your friends is having drinks nearby. This wasn’t a user-interface thing at all. The Caddies were just interested in this one event. Caddies had been physically present for a billion human sex acts by now, but this was the first time they’d ever bothered to watch.
Patricia’s phone shut itself off, even though its battery was full. So did Laurence’s phone. Across town, Laurence’s housemate Isobel missed her bus by seconds and then the next bus broke down, so she wouldn’t be getting home any time soon. Laurence had left his instant messenger client active on his laptop, but the program crashed. Not even Superstorm Allegra making landfall in Delaware, erasing half the Eastern Seaboard with its twelve hundred miles of Category 3 fury, could disturb these two right now.
Patricia hadn’t seen Laurence naked since they were both thirteen or fourteen, and she had been trying not to look too much back then. This time, she made a point of taking in every detail. Meticulous. Greedy.
Laurence’s body was a lot more solid than Patricia had realized, because he was so tall that you expected him to be a beanpole. Sitting on the bed, all of him collected in one place, he turned out to have a pleasing swell to his biceps and his pecs and some impressive thigh action. He still looked like he could do track and field but mostly field. She’d always found his thick, inquisitive hands kind of thrilling, but they were sexier in the context of the rest of his skin: The sandy hair ran from his knuckles all the way up his arms, and slowly got darker and thicker as it traveled down his chest to the heart-shaped zone of smoothness. Patricia had never seen anything so beautiful. She wanted to be all over him forever.
That seemed like a good impulse, so she acted on it, pouncing. He made a little surprised grunt and then a much happier little gasp. Her breasts nuzzled his chest and her face was right up in front of his, and she was straddling his stomach, her feet on either side of him and her ass just nudging his cock. He started laughing, and so did she, and she leaned over and kissed him and chewed on his lip too gently to break the skin.
She was tingling all over, even her scalp and her elbows, and she felt a kind of madness taking her over that was better than any spell or concoction ever.
She almost put him inside her without a condom—she wouldn’t get pregnant, unless she chose to. And she was sure neither of them had an STD. But doing it bareback this first time felt like too much, like they would be making some kind of declaration that they were fluid bonded, practically married, instead of just trying this shit out. Which is what they were doing. So she groped for a foil package.
“I keep expecting you to do like a spell or something.” Laurence thrust into her with an even tempo, occasionally syncopating and twisting, in ways that startled her with pleasure.
“Do you want me to do a spell?” She smiled up at him, her hazel eyes going sideways for a moment as she tried to think what spell she could even get away with, and then rolling upwards as he thrust harder and faster for a second.
“I don’t know.” Laurence leaned forward and kissed her between her own ankles. “Nothing fancy, or, you know, tricky.” She winced a little at the mention of tricks, but he was still smiling, it was all good. “You don’t have to, I was just kind of half-expecting it in a way.”
“Okay,” Patricia said. “But remember, you asked for it.”
“I didn’t,” Laurence said. “I merely speculated about—ooh.” And then he lost all train of thought because his already-quite-sensitive left nipple had developed a few million new nerve endings, and she was blowing on it. He damn near passed out from the sensation, and his brain shut down, and then he was pouring out of himself into the condom inside the woman he loved.
He hadn’t quite let himself think that before, but now he realized it was true. He found himself saying it aloud, sort of by accident, before his brain’s normal functioning could quite be restored: “I love you.”
“Oh.” Patricia was staring down at him, from where he’d fallen into a puddle on the bed. “Wow.”
She was obviously processing this. Like, a non sequitur.