* * *
"I never imagined this scenario," he demurred. He had never allowed a woman to touch him as Starling did now.
"Then what scenarios did you imagine?" she pursued.
"I believe we may have enacted them all."
"All? Are you certain?" she challenged, wrapping ten digits tightly around him before letting go all at once. On her knees, in the space she'd created for herself between his, she stretched forth, sinuous temptation. A glimpse of pink, and white light flashed through an immense palace, dissolving walls and doors and locks in the moist heat that sucked every vertical barrier into rubble in the wake of pleasure. There was nothing, he was nothing as she took him into the sweet warmth of her mouth, brief as lightning.
"Tell me," she demanded.
A swirl of colors hazed his vision. It seemed that sweet venom glistened on the lip she dragged across him in slow torment.
"When I was free," he breathed, and was rewarded with a soft press of lips, but nothing more. He continued: "A bandage on my face…the scent of adhesive…an image of you before me…wet…and shivering." She was fellating him in earnest now, and speech was difficult, but he knew a fair exchange was what she had in mind. He'd built better than he knew. He continued, hoarsely:
"I wanted you then. You were so real. So human. Young, strong, delicate, sensitive. Complex. Like a fine wine, a rare balance of complexity and clarity—meant only for a rarefied palate." A hint of heat in a guttural growl: "Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi." At this point, he was cradled deep within Clarice's throat, and Jack Crawford was permitted no further thought. "I wanted to come for you, to taste you, all of you," he rasped as she took him completely, her tongue laving the base of his hypersensitive organ. He reached out. "And touch you. I had settled for writing to you, but in the end, I had to see you," he expulsed this last with the barest caress of curved knuckle at her temple.
Clarice watched his face contort in anguish as a heated river blasted a path behind her breastbone.
Minutes passed with only the sound of the old clock ticking on the mantle. He gradually became aware of the sound of the flames engulfing wood in the hearth, of the daylight spreading green and gold across his vision.
"Why did you wait so long, then? Why now?" Clarice was once again sitting on the floor at his knee, still gently holding him in one hand.
He gazed upon the venerated features of the sole woman whose privilege it was to command his deference. Irreverence aside, in all things Clarice Starling.
An angel? God hath no mercy in the world according to the damned, but humor there was in abundance. Impermanence was a certainty. Could he lose her if they went any further? He felt the familiar hollowness of loss, even now. No longer was his original intent backed by the strength of his convictions. Torment!—to be starved and led to the banquet, removed of one's teeth!
As he watched her, the sun inched over the horizon and the world brightened a discernable degree.
A decision.
Granting prudence no sway in the matter, he gave her all that he could. It was as if he bled the truth. A man who knew no shame, he laid bare to her all his longing in candid revelations evoking stark, electric imagery, feeding her hunger for a glimpse into his private world.
"You 'visited' me?" Her eyes were wide with shock.
"Only to see you, sometimes for mere moments. Always at a distance. I never intruded upon your privacy, Clarice, only saw you as anyone who shared your daily route could see you. A glimpse of you lasted for years at a time."
All pleasure, pain, sorrow, and hope poured from his lips into the recent cavity of her heart, filled the emptiness left behind by a world that was never hers. That which had previously occupied the space had been cold and oddly shaped, where only the warm, apposite pliancy of requited love could now fully stem the ache. His every word salve to wounds of loneliness, he continued:
"I thought of you every day. Sometimes, I would be overcome by flights of my imagination. Once, I imagined a breath I inhaled, a scent borne sweet on the wind—here on the other side of the globe—was once your very breath, and I was not able to exhale. I had resolved to hold you in me forever," he declared, softly. "However, the body does not always adhere to that which the head rules," he mused. A pause. "I fainted."
Clarice stared, incredulous. "You fainted? Fainted?" she nearly yelled.
"Do calm yourself, Clarice. Yes, fainted."
"You fainted," she murmured, more to the floor than to him. He'd held his breath until he'd fainted, she thought. A low laugh rumbled, but never surfaced as she was overcome with unexpected joy. She could be with this man. Forever.
She faced him, unabashedly displaying her emotions as she rose to straddle him in the chair. She placed her hands on either side of his face, intending to bring him close for a kiss, but stopped when she felt the unmistakable cold of steel against her nape.
He ran the blade along her skin, before playfully waving it before her and setting it on the table beside them. Clarice—frozen astride him—watched as he removed the cover from a dish on the tray to display the knife she had earlier taken from beneath her mattress and returned to the kitchen.
