Ami and Zoi. Not a couple I have a lot of experience writing, so I hope I do them justice!
Seduction: Part #2 – Bubbles
…
…
…
…
…
6:30pm. He was already late. I should just not hold these bloody office hours. It's not as though that many students come by to discuss Petrine Russian literature with me, or something. And if they do, God help them.
Zachary shook the wet from his red-gold curls as he made his way into their bedroom. Apple-colored eyes scanned the darkened space. Not a soul.
Shrugging, he tugged his shirt over his head, careful to avoid catching his piercings. Once in their closet, Zach chose his attire with care. Tonight was going to be a fun one. "Zach, I need you and maybe Jacen to come flirt with me and make him jealous so he doesn't hide in a corner all night," Mina only half-jokingly pouted at him. He laughed. "So what the fuck do you need Jacen for? He's too pussywhipped to make anyone jealous." Zach couldn't wait to see the long-suffering Kenneth trying to make small talk with Mina's theatre buddies. Of course, he had a hunch Mina's husband would make good on his threat to simply hide in his office until it was all over, anyway.
Splash!
He froze, halfway into another shirt, straining his ears to hear the sound again. Ah – the faintest of splashes, coming from the adjacent bathroom. Again, and not bothering with his buttons, Zachary made his way toward it…
…
Ami leaned back in the clawfoot tub, the heady vapor smelling of apples and clinging to her eyelashes and white shoulders. One slender hand reached for a small, nondescript book stacked above several imposing tomes, the other grasping for a half-empty flute of champagne.
She made a small sound of complaint as her head hit the back of the tub for the seventh time – and for the seventh time, Ami wished for her husband's beautifully long, talented fingers at her nape, deftly massaging away the ever-present tension – the product of 80-hour weeks in residency. Ami could almost feel his distracting sigh cooling her damp skin, hear him whisper in exhaustive detail what else he could do with those fingers, trailing blunt nails knowingly over her gooseflesh…
"I wish you'd play an instrument," Ami said plaintively. She dropped into the seat opposite his desk, watching him efficiently mark up papers. "It's just wrong that those hands are grading honors theses, while Nikolas…is off doing musician-y things with his."
Zach didn't look up. "Do you often think about Nik's hands?"
She colored. "No! I just – I just think you'd be good at it – music…long fingers and all…and, you know, all the – the piercings, and the accent." Ami was deeply uncertain as to what might come out of her mouth next. "I mean, come on, British people – it's so unfair. Half your students are already in love with you because of it."
Now he did pause, putting his pen down. She felt his assessing gaze, heard the chair creak as he leaned back. "Ami, how much did you have to drink?"
"Not much," her tone breezy. "Just a few glasses of chardonnay – what? It was a party for you! You're a tenured professor now!" Flinging her hands expansively into the air, Ami stood and walked around the desk. She noted with irritation how her husband's lips were slightly upturned, as though he was fighting the urge to laugh and losing, badly. He was never very good at concealing any sort of feeling, particularly from his observant wife. So Zach thought she was funny. Fine. She was just going to have to be more direct.
Ami grabbed the chair's arm, turning his seat on its wheeled axis to face her. He gazed up at her challengingly, amusement plain on his face. Without further ado, Ami unceremoniously plopped herself in his lap. The chair squeaked in protest.
Startled, Zach swallowed his laughter and sat up straight, balancing the petite woman in his arms. She twisted slightly to face him, twining his neck in the crook of her elbow, the other hand playing with the closure of his dress shirt. Apparently, Ami meant business.
"Do you really have to grade someone's paper right this second?" she entreated softly.
Those impossibly blue eyes practically nailed him to his seat. Zach honestly didn't know sometimes whether his wife was trying to be seductive or not, but God help him if she didn't succeed brilliantly every single time.
The intrepid hand on his chest was already a touch bolder, having undone two mother-of-pearl buttons without his noticing. He closed his hand over her smaller one, immediately halting its movement. Zach stared into Ami's eyes, fascinated by their seeming innocence.
"Well," her voice broke his near-trance, a little petulant, "do you have to?"
"No, darling," he said. "I don't have to."
And then his hand was under her skirt, pushing already-soaked cotton panties aside, dragging two fingers tauntingly top to bottom – waiting for her impatient mewl – before sliding in to the knuckle. Zach also meant business. As she tried desperately to keep quiet for his colleagues' sakes, muffling her whimpers in his neck, Ami was glad she'd chosen the direct approach.
Long after, they leaned against the bookshelves in his dingy university office, and Zach lazily ran his fingers through her silky cap of hair. "You're a little devil," he said tiredly.
"Me? I'm not the one who – who – well. You know," Ami said, with the prim air of one violated.
Zach laughed and tilted up Ami's chin to look her dead in the eye. "You said you wanted me to play an instrument." A pause.
"And you were right. I am good at it."
A rush of blood to her dimpling cheeks accompanied the errant memory, a flush that didn't abate when she read the title of the book in her hands. The Luscious Sin of You, huh?
Where is Zach, anyway? He'd told her specifically that he did not want to miss this party, as Mina had told both of them she'd had a hell of a time convincing Kenneth to allow "a bunch of dirty hipster sleazebags" into his home at all. Zach gleefully identified with the latter, despite his professorial vocation – and really, teaching Russian Literature was more like teaching Drama than anything else.
"I'm dying to watch Kenneth interact with, you know, plebeians," he'd told Ami wickedly. "Not his usual Stanford set." She would be forever mystified by Zach's need to "stir shit up just to watch it hit the fan," as he eloquently put it.
Shrugging as she always did at her husband's unorthodox uses of his brilliance, Ami settled down to read.
…
Zach exhaled very slowly, gaze fixed on his artless siren as she scanned the cover quickly. Bit her lower lip pink in fierce concentration. He almost laughed. When they'd first married, she'd employed that same deliberation when doing anything of the least importance. Oh, yes, she'd leapt from bed to hang up their discarded clothes, absolutely refusing to indulge in anything resembling an afterglow. After he had threatened to physically restrain her, Ami now deigned to cuddle. He rather thought she liked it.
And now look at this wanton little mermaid knocking back champagne in the tub and – hrm. What's she reading?
Zach stepped onto the slick tile, knowing that she wouldn't notice him through all the steam. Silently, he crouched by the bath, waiting. One dimpled white leg arched from the water, briefly covered in dripping foam, to rest on the marbled edge.
…
Ami felt for her champagne, wanting the sparkling warmth of it to counteract her sudden goosebumps. Not there.
She looked up from a particularly steamy scene in the book – the one she always shamelessly skipped the other chapters to get to – and found her husband leaning over the tub's edge, one hand slowly trailing in the bubbles, the other bringing her drink to his lips.
His lashes sparkled with minute droplets of condensing vapor, heavy over lidded irises. Zachary's gaze flickered down to her shape, ghosted in the hazy water, before returning oh-so-chastely to her eyes.
Ami smiled and rose from the bath. She leaned forward to find his lips with hers, one foam-covered hand emerging from the water to tangle in his curls. He abandoned the drink to encircle her shoulders, pulling her into him. The flute tipped into the water, and the remaining champagne bubbled up playfully against Ami's skin.
…
She barely noticed when Zach reached down to pluck the book from between them. He gently broke away, pulling back to examine the cover. Too late, Ami tried desperately to snatch it back. He swiftly stood so that it was high above her reach, mouthing the words of the title in bewilderment. She blushed furiously as her husband began to chuckle, at first softly, and then filling the room.
"The Luscious Sin of You?" Zachary bit off his words precisely, a remnant of his mellowing British accent. "What exactly is this, darling?"
"It's not what you think – "
"One of those trashy romances, like they've got at the pharmacy – " He flipped to the inside cover, already knowing what he'd see. A brawny man in breeches, fondling the swelling bosoms of a woman whose eyes were shut in strangely agonized ecstasy.
"…it is what you think," Ami concluded gloomily, reaching out a hand. "Now give it back."
Zach grinned hugely. "No way. This looks like a…ah, refreshing change of pace from the kind of literature I routinely subject myself to. It's not even in Russian! It'll be like vacation for my eyes. Let's read some of it together, shall we?" Her mouth dropped open in horror, and he fought an intense urge to just… Fuck it. Mina has plenty of guests she can make eyes at. And Kenneth…well, fuck Kenneth.
"Zach, please – "
"Where were we?" He flipped to a thoroughly dog-eared page. Zach cleared his throat theatrically, massively enjoying the way her eyes narrowed like chips of sapphire. He assumed the plummiest, BBC-hack enunciation he could manage without wanting to hurt himself, and began.
" 'You are in needs of some thrashing!' 'If you lay one hand of my bottom…' Leyla could not help but feel a bit excited at the thought of Lord Blackton seeing under her skirts, but she was frightened as well, by the darkness of his chiseled features…"
His eyes mock-widened at the next salacious paragraph. "Oh, I don't think this is fit for our ears. At least now I know what you read when you're tired of Mayo Clinic Cardiology and Moliere."
Zach let drop the novel, much like he would a dead rodent, and Ami immediately snatched it midair and hugged it to her chest defensively. He nodded to the rest of the book pile. "Isn't that my copy of Tartuffe?" The clock tolled seven-o'-clock behind him.
…
Zachary's glittering gaze met Ami's own. Oh, his wife was angry now. The tip of her pink tongue moistened her lips, and he knew he was in for it. Actually, he was rather indecently looking forward to some good, old-fashioned Ami-spluttering, just so he could effectively silence it.
Ami for the life of her couldn't think of a clever word to say. She was never good with embarrassment, not even with her husband, and she really had to wonder where the hell all her brains went just when she needed them most. God, he looked so good, mist from the bath cleaving his shirt to his sinewy abdomen. The silvered hoops lining the whole of his ear glistened dimly, and Ami thought about the matching one in his tongue and immediately squeezed her thighs together. She choked down a slightly buzzed giggle; with his shirt open like that, Zach didn't look so far from a romance novel cover himself, possibly something for the hot-for-teacher set. God forbid she tell her narcissistic husband that he should give up professorship for a soft-focus, mostly shirtless modeling career…although…she eyed the sizeable bulge in his pants with a tiny smirk that nobody – not even her closest friends – but Zach, knew Ami could make. That equipment is definitely novel-worthy.
Ami dragged her gaze back up to his eyes, fascinated as always by their uncommon color, shaded as they were by curling wisps of copper. She was tempted to blame the champagne. Despite her irritation, she wanted to drag him underwater and blow bubbles against his mouth, wanted to wrap her lips around him, press her tongue against the tip just a touch harder than he liked, hear him gasp out her name as he…
Idea.
Zach observed a confusing series of expressions flit over his wife's heart-shaped face, and was briefly alarmed as Ami not-so-covertly leered at him. He must have been mistaken, though, because a moment later she smiled up at him, relaxed. "No, I bought my own copy. Your Tartuffe is falling apart. Would you mind changing out that wet shirt? We have to leave soon, I think."
This was not what Zach had hoped for. He shrugged, a little disappointed that Ami hadn't bodily flung herself at him in humiliated outrage…or something…but there was always later tonight.
Ami waved a negligent hand, clearly indicating that he leave. Zachary turned to make his way toward the door.
Her leg shot out and hooked around his, yanking him back. As expected, Zach stumbled, the backs of his calves hitting the edge of the tub, and he fell in. A veritable tide of water erupted from the bath, but its inhabitants couldn't have possibly cared less. He rained long, investigative kisses upon her mouth, which she returned with equal ardor, tasting the bite of champagne on each others' tongues. The buttons of his shirt scraped against her breasts, his fingertips unerringly circling the place that drove her mad, and she threw her head back, belatedly hoping that her skull didn't hit the back of the tub like it always did. She felt Zach's other hand suddenly behind her head, cushioning it, and her own need astonished her with its urgency, making her gasp wetly against his collarbone.
The feel of his fully clothed body pressed against her complete nudity was, she had to admit, incredibly erotic, but Ami had a strong preference for bare skin. She shoved his sopping wet shirt off his shoulders, impatient, but Zach grabbed her hands and pushed them high above her head. He wedged his knee carefully between her thighs, mostly immobilizing her. She twisted a little bit, more confused than alarmed, but ceased her squirming as he drawled:
"What's your hurry, darling? You know we're not going anywhere tonight."
Ami stared up at him. "Ah…we're not?"
"Not," Zach enunciated, his accent deepening a touch, evidence of his arousal. As if Ami needed evidence beyond the hardness pressed against her stomach.
He leaned close, so that their lashes nearly touched. "I was thinking we should take some inspiration from good old Leyla and Lord Blackthorn…I mean, just that scene could really…take me the whole night...to perfect." The last was breathed against her foam-tipped earlobe, which he nipped at decisively. She jerked her wrists from his grasp and encircled him with both hands, smiling at his groan in her hair.
"Oh, no, I really think," Ami murmured with her last string of coherent thought, "that we can…ah…improve on their source material."
…
…
…
…
…