Page 66 of Duke
My fingers tangled with hers, and I bellowed in pure relief and utter euphoria as I let myself go. I fucked her with everything I possessed, then, my hips slamming up to meet hers as she bounced down onto me. Her face was beside mine, then, and her mouth slid across my cheek and I turned to meet her mouth, our lips and teeth clashing in a frantic, gasping kiss.
I came within three thrusts. Our kiss became a mutual, shared groan, teeth clicking together, breath mingling and moans echoing as I fucked through my orgasm, feeling her pussy squeeze around me with impossible, unbelievable force.
I poured myself into her, into the condom, one hand tangled with hers, my other roaming her body, cupping her tits and gripping a rough handful of her hip, then knocking her hand away to take over flicking her clit, my orgasm still powering through me in wave after wrenching wave.
After a long minute or two of spasming, gasping ecstasy, Temple finally went limp on top of me, my cock still throbbing inside her, our synched breathing coming in ragged gasps.
There was a world of thought and emotion barreling though me, then. “Temple, I—” I started, intending to put some of it into words.
She shifted up my body so I slipped out of her, and then rolled to lie on top of me once more, her breasts flattened against my chest, her hair cascading over one shoulder.
Searching my eyes, she cupped my face in both hands, her brows drawn down in a frown of deep, emotive, intensity. Her mouth opened, which is why I stopped, thinking she had something to say. Instead, she claimed my mouth with hers, and this was the first kiss we’d shared outside the fury of sex.
For the first time in my life, I finally understood what real, true, soul-deep passion was; I found it in that kiss.
As earth shaking, soul-shattering as the sex had been, that kiss was more. I wanted the kiss to last forever. I buried my hand in her hair at the back of her head and kept her locked into the kiss, pulled her closer, deepening the kiss until it was all consuming, until it felt like something inside me was melting and seeping into her and merging with her. It became something more than just a kiss, then.
The whole “becoming one flesh” thing from the Bible? Yeah, I finally got it. Hey, when you do things I’ve done, seen the things I’ve seen, you look for absolution anywhere you can find it. I’ve spent my fair share of between-ops downtime in the chapel, talking to the chaplain and leafing through an old Bible, wondering if it really had useful answers in it. I can’t say I really found what I was looking for, but then, I’m not sure it exists.
Shit, I’m getting off-topic. My point is, when Temple kissed me, there in Harris and Layla’s extra bedroom, I finally understood what it meant to become one flesh. I always assumed it was a reference to fucking, right? Dick goes in the pussy, and bam, you’re “united”, and you two have technically merged, sort of. Kind of dramatic, but whatever, it was a less explicit way of talking about sex.
But no, that’s not it at all. Not even close.
Sex, fucking, banging—it’s just body parts and a few minutes of feeling great with someone sexy. Of all the women I’ve ever banged—and that number is higher than I care to think about—I’ve never felt like she and I were…one, like we’d become something more than just the sum of our two bodies and souls. Shit, I rarely ever even thought about souls. Sex was just sex. I loved women, I loved their bodies, their curves, the softness of their flesh and the way they look beneath me or above me, I love watching them squirm and hearing them scream when I eat them out, and I love feeling them come apart in my hands.
But souls? Becoming one? Passion? Nah, man, I’m good.
And then Temple Kennedy kissed me, and I just got it. Fancy-shit writers would probably say I’d had an epiphany, and they wouldn’t be wrong. That’s what it was.
Becoming one flesh? It’s when something inside you opens up and reaches out and becomes part of the other person. It’s when sex and kissing and touching and holding each other just aren’t enough, like you want to somehow just…fuck, I don’t know how to put it. It’s…it’s when no matter how deep you are inside her, no matter how hard you kiss her, it’s not enough. It’s when you feel her heart, her metaphysical heart, the very essence of who she is, becoming inextricably interwoven into who you are, just from the kissing, the fucking, the touching, the holding and moving together and breathing each other’s breath.
That’s what it is, and that’s what I discovered when Temple kissed me.
The moment was broken by the sound of an explosion—
BOOM!
The explosion was a thin, distant crumping of explosives.
And then I heard Anselm firing—BOOM!—the report a deep, shaking, shuddering, echoing roll of fifty-caliber thunder. I knew the sound of that Barrett as well as I knew my own reflection in the mirror; once you’ve heard that big fucking rifle, you never forget it.
“Fuck.” I broke the kiss, whispering the epithet. “Sounds like we’ve got company.”
BOOM! BOOM!…BOOM!
I rolled to set Temple aside, scrambling out of bed as fast as I could. I’d discarded the condom and was dressed in thirty seconds flat, stomping into my boots and tying the laces in a blur of movement.
The walkie crackled from my hip pocket where I’d stuffed it in my hurry to get naked. “Sie sind hier,” Anselm said, reverting to German—they’re here.
“How many?” I asked, shrugging into the double shoulder holster harness and buckling it in place.
“Zu viele.” His Barrett cracked twice more—too many, that meant. That was six shots, which meant six kills—Anselm never missed, ever.
“How fucking many, goddammit?”
“I don’t know!” Anselm actually shouted back at me, which stunned me motionless. “A fucking shit load of them,mein Freund. Twenty? Thirty?”
I was out the bedroom door with the Mossberg, and then stopped abruptly. Temple was dressed by then—wearing the clothes borrowed from Layla—and was hustling after me. I shoved the shotgun into her hands.