Page 33 of Leather and Lace

There was no reason to hide her baby from Alex, no reason to hide the way her body was changing, rounding and softening in the particular way that came with childbearing. The baby was a gift of life Mary desperately wanted and yet...she continued to dress with the same care and rigidity she displayed under her mother’s direction.

“I don’t rightly know,” she confessed. Mary gave a quick shake of her head and put a hand over her belly with a frown as she turned over Alex’s question. Could she breathe? Was it affecting the baby?

“The baby,” she said, suddenly rushing to undo the stays of the corset. “What have I been doing? I kept doing it up so tight and there was no need. I don’t--why did I keep doing it?” Her words were coming quicker now, voice high and tinny at the realization that she had caused harm to her child out of habit.

When her fingers fumbled Alex shushed her gently. “Let me,” she murmured, stepping closer to Minnie, bringing their bodies flush. The feel of Alex’s chest and the press of her breasts against her back made Mary still and she simply nodded as the other woman began to undo the tight corset laces.

“Oh, Minnie.My Minnie,” Alex sighed and tutted as the laces came loose to reveal inch after inch of Mary’s abused skin. There were angry red marks on her skin from the boning and corset laces, those tender bruised places were met with Alex’s gentle touch. Mary sighed in relief as she was finally allowed the room to breathe freely. When the corset fell away she nearly dissolved into relieved laughter.

“I never want to wear that again,” Mary declared, her voice wavered from the sudden rush of air to her lungs, but she was sure of herself. All her life she had wished for freedom and it had been a hard-won thing. Somehow still she had tried to fit herself into a life no longer fit for herself. She would never do that again, and she would not raise her child to do the same.

They would be free to be whomever they wished. To love whomever they wished.

“You never will,” Alex agreed. She lowered her head and dropped a kiss onto Mary’s shoulders, hands gently caressing the welts left behind by her corset. Her skin tender, Mary winced, but she sighed as the initial sting of Alex’s touch dissolved into pleasure. Though her flesh was over sensitized it desperately craved her wife’s touch and it was a joy to receive it so freely. Alex laced their fingers together, palm over the back of Mary’s hand the heat of it---the very closeness made Mary’s insides go molten. There was something erotic in the mundaneness of it. They were holding hands, it should not be affecting her as it was, but as it were, they were closer than they had ever been in that simple touch.

She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against Alex’s chest, chin tipped up to the ceiling. Alex’s lips grazed her ear, cheek, and then finally her jaw as the other woman kissed her way to the column of Mary’s throat. It was there that her breath caught when Alex’s mouth brushed her neck. Mary leaned back, her weight supported by Alex as she kissed Mary, lips and tongue peppering the expanse of her flesh, hands cupping her breasts. Mary gasped, the sound transforming into a moan when Alex’s fingers teased her nipples. She palmed Mary’s flesh, cradling her breast. The touch ignited a fire at Mary’s core, and she opened her eyes to see Alex looking down at her as if she were the most wondrous thing she had ever seen.

As if she were the only woman in the world. She lifted a hand to Alex’s face and cupped her cheek. The two women stared at one another for a breath before Mary managed to find her voice.

“Take me to bed.”

Alex’s eyes darkened, awe transforming to lust in an instant and the blonde didn’t answer. Not with words anyhow. She merely set herself into motion and swept her wife up into her arms and covered Mary’ mouth with her own. The kiss was everything Mary had ever dreamed of, passion and need, made into action. She reached out, hands seeking to get a grip on the rain-soaked material and when it stuck to her wife’s skin she nearly growled in frustration. The damnable cotton needed to be done away with and in quick order.

“I’ll do it,” Alex chuckled, seeing her wife’s narrowed eyes.

Mary nodded her hands falling uselessly at her sides. “It must come off.”

And off it came as they tumbled onto the bed. Alex rose to her knees, she was lying between Mary’s parted legs, thighs pressed thighs as she undid and removed her shirt. She had scarcely tossed it to the side when Mary’s hands were once more upon her.

“You’re beautiful,” Mary told her, looking upon her in earnest. Everywhere she looked, she touched. “So beautiful.” Alex leaned forward, a hand going to the back of Mary’s head, hands tangling in her hair and holding her up, so the couple were able to kiss while Mary explored the planes and dips of Alex’s body. It was a lovely thing to behold, all hard muscle beneath soft skin creating an irresistible territory to explore. Their kiss was slow now, slower than it had been in the sitting room, and slower still than in their hurried rush to enter the bedroom. In her stolen illicit moments with women Mary had always been forced to hurry for fear they would be seen, and their reputations left in ruin. Fumbling hands and teeth on teeth, bruising kisses and whispers to be silent in the empty drawing rooms and powdering rooms of society’s upper echelon. She had never been afforded the privilege of exploring a lover as she did now in the comfort and safety of her own home. Their coupling was languid, kisses measured and lingering. Oh, there was softness in this type of passion—it felt real and sustainable. Easy as all things slow did.

Mary found she liked slow.

They parted then and brown met green in a look that could only be seeking. “I aim to give you and our baby a good life.” vowed Alex.

“You already have.” Mary laughed then and kissed her wife once more. “You’ve given it everything.”

“Then I have yet more to give.” Alex shifted back and settled between her thighs, and Mary’s hips lifted in eagerness that put a chiding smile on Alex’s lips.

She bowed her head forward as if in supplication and began to tease and kiss the flesh beneath her. Mary groaned hands going to the quilts beneath them when Alex’s tongue began to circle that delicate bundle of nerves. First gently and then gradually with increasing pressure, her fingers joined in her love play and by the time her wife took her bud into her mouth Mary was fit to faint.

“Please,” she begged, lifting her head to look down at Alex. “Please, Alex.”

Her wife looked up at her then, blonde hair gleaming as brightly as a halo to her. She could have asked Mary for anything then. She would have agreed to it all if only to summit the wave of ecstasy on which she had been driven higher and higher stil. Oh, what the sight of her wife between her thighs did to her. It ignited her, and her blood went hotter even still when Alex turned her attention back to her, eyes meeting hers even as she continued to suck and lick her. Alex reached up, fingers splaying across the rounded curve of Mary’s belly. The gesture was possessive and tender all at once, and Mary only lasted but a few more seconds under her wife’s attention. Her back bowed off the bed and she peaked with a shout of release.

“Alex!” Her name was torn from Mary’s lips in a ragged sob that left her shaking, hands pressed to her face and breath coming painfully short. Alex slipped from her remaining clothes and joined her.

She reached for her pulling her close and Mary helped when Alex rolled her atop of her. “What are you—“

“Ride me.”

Shaking and half drowned as she was by pleasure, Mary was quick to surface from her stupor. If her beautiful wife asked her to ride her then she was not so foolish as to turn the pleasure of it away. She put shaking hands on Alex’s shoulder and with a tentative roll of her hips began a slow and undulating ascent back up the mountain of pleasure she knew awaited. And this time it was even more lovely than the first, because this time it was a journey Alex took with her. Together they moved, bodies fitting as if shorn from the same cloth, and together the wives arrived with cries of love, fulfillment and most importantly—joy.

They lay together panting in the afterglow of their lovemaking, naked and sated, unashamed in their intimacy and for the first time in her life Mary knew that she had been made for such a moment as this, for a woman such as this and that nothing would ever take this new found serenity from her.

At long last Minnie Sophia Pierce had come home and home was the shape of the woman beside her.