In the next instant, pleasure wracked my body, a pleasure so acute and consuming it was almost painful. My voice felt ripped from my throat in an animalistic cry, and I did not care who may have heard, nor could I have stopped it had I tried.
As I surfaced, I felt him shudder against me as he reached his own pleasure, heard my name as he groaned it in my ear. Then he was still; we were both still for a long moment as I held him to me as tightly as I had as we made love, holding him inside me. Then he lifted himself off of me and rolled onto his back, wrapping his arms around me and drawing me tightly against him, as though he could not bear to let me go. I laid my head on his chest, and I could hear the rapid pounding of his heartbeat, not yet slowing down.
I do not know how much time passed before he spoke. “Oh, Simonetta,” he said. “My Venus, my goddess. What have we done?”
I drew away slightly so that I could see his face. “Do not tell me you regret this.”
“Never,” he said immediately. “And though I might burn in hell for it, it was worth it. I shall laugh in Lucifer’s face when he greets me.”
I smiled at the image, blasphemous though it was.
“No,” he went on. “That is not what I meant at all. I mean that I … I have been with women before. But never was it like this.”
My eyes, inexplicably, filled with tears. “Nor for me.”
He kissed my neck. “It is because neither of us has ever loved anyone the way we love each other,” he said. “They call it the act of love, but it has never truly been so for me until this moment.”
“Nor will it ever be for me again,” I said, “unless I am with you.”
*
We lay there for some time, our arms and legs loosely entwined, hands lazily roaming over each other’s bodies. Finally, I drew myself into a sitting position. “You know, Sandro, it is not quite fair,” I said.
He propped himself up on one arm. “What is not?”
I reached out and pushed a lock of hair out of his eyes. “Why, you have seen me wearing nothing at all,” I said. “Many times. And yet I have not had the same privilege. I have not seen you.”
An irresistibly alluring smile curled around his lips, the one that always transformed his already handsome face. The smile that I loved so much. He leaned forward and kissed me, then rose from the pallet. “Come, then,” he said. “And I shall show you all you wish to see.” He pulled me to my feet, kissing me again. “And it is only right that I make love to you in a proper bed,” he said, drawing me through the workshop and toward the staircase in the back, snatching a branch of candles off one of the tables in the workshop as we went.
I giggled. “That improper bed seemed to serve us well enough.”
He led me into his bedroom at the top of the stairs. It was a simple, small room, the size of my dressing room. A large, roughly hewn bed took up most of the space, but even here sketches and bits of parchment were scattered all about.
I did not care. Dante had never visited such a paradise as that room was to me.
He shut the door behind us, though there was no one to discover us. Somehow, just that simple act made everything seem much more intimate: we were alone together in his bedroom, a room that I had never before entered but had imagined many times. Just us.
He set the candles down on a small table beside the bed. “As you wished,” he said, smiling. He pulled his shirt off over his head and dropped it on the floor. The flickering candles created shadows in all the lines and planes of his lean chest. I stepped closer to him and ran my hands over his bare skin, feeling the hard muscles beneath.
He drew in his breath sharply as my hands touched him. “Careful now,” he murmured. “Or I shall never be able to remove the rest.”
He pushed down his breeches, and I saw that his manhood was already swollen and erect again. I could not resist; I stepped closer again and took him in my hand.
He groaned. “Simonetta, please.”
I smiled and stepped back, slowly withdrawing my hand. “Very well,” I said. “Though this time, I confess that I shall need your help.”
He chuckled, and I turned my back to him so that he could unlace my dress. I let it slide to the floor and faced him again. I drew my shift off over my head, as I had done so many times before in his presence.
Yet this time was different, still. This time his eyes took me in as carefully, as hungrily as ever, but I knew that soon his hands would trace the path his eyes had taken. I closed my eyes, feeling heat bloom between my legs.
When I opened them, he was kneeling at my feet. “My goddess, my Venus,” he whispered again. “I worship you just as surely as if you were a goddess in truth, and not mortal at all.”
“No,” I whispered. “I am as mortal as you, Sandro. And perhaps we are luckier than the gods, for we are but a simple man and woman who love each other.”
He rose to his feet and stepped close to me, and this time his hands traveled slowly all over my body, cupping my breasts, moving down my waist to my back, my buttocks. His hands traced fire in my skin as they moved. He toyed with my hair, letting it slip through his fingers like silk.
It was everything I had imagined and dreamt of so many times, and better. And I could not bear much more of it. I stepped away from him, moving toward the bed. “Do not make me wait much longer, please,” I whispered. I was as hungry for him as I had been when I had first walked in his door. More so.
I lay back on the bed and drew him down to me, but he was determined to torture me a bit more. He kissed my neck, my breasts; his mouth closed around one nipple, teasing it with his tongue as I gasped and writhed beneath him, then he switched to the other one even as he moved one hand between my legs, and he slid two fingers inside me. Sweat broke out on my skin, and I thought I could bear it no longer when he suddenly withdrew his hand. “No,” I moaned. “Oh, please.”
He eased himself atop me, and this time he slowly slid into me, keeping his eyes locked on mine as he did so. Our gazes never broke even as he moved within me, gently at first, then faster as his breath and mine began to come in short gasps.
Not once did we look away as our bodies moved together toward ecstasy, so that it seemed that he was not simply making love to me, nor I to him. We were making love to each other’s souls, could see each other deeply and clearly as we joined completely.
We reached our pleasure at the same time, and it ripped through me with even more force than before. I saw my pleasure reflected in his eyes, watched his own move through him. We cried out together, our voices mingling in one perfect moment that seemed to go on and on, and even so it was over all too quickly.
Oh, far too quickly.
Afterward, he held me as I wept silently. I did not need to explain. He understood.
*