She sighed and turned away from the window. They needed groceries and other supplies. She’d feed Guy the hamburger that still remained and try to check on his paw. Then she’d drive into Effingham and do a little shopping while Thomas was out fishing with Sherm.
It seemed like as good a plan as any, under these precarious circumstances.
And then later, when Thomas came home . . . she’d seduce him. Sophie felt a little guilty about being so premeditative. But the fact of the matter was, Thomas’s strong desire for her was being fueled by his grief and trauma. Sophie had understood that from the beginning. The knowledge hurt, but Sophie didn’t hold it against Thomas.
How could she?
After last night, she also knew one other crucial bit of information. He wasn’t just using their sexual attraction to keep the memories at bay. Part of Thomas wanted to remember what had happened that first night when they’d made love, even if another part of him grasped for the darkness of forgetfulness. And whether she liked it or not, the electrical attraction he felt toward her had somehow become twined with his localized amnesia.
Previously, she’d conceptualized his hypersexuality as a means of escape from his trauma. Now, she’d grown to suspect that he was grasping for something as well when he made love to her so ravenously. He tried desperately to recall, even as another voice in him demanded he forget.
She needed to reach him. And if she could do that by drawing him closer to her using the only language his anguished body and mind would allow at the moment—volatile sex—then Sophie could accept that challenge.
It was a dangerous dance she was engaging in with Thomas. They moved right on the precipice of disaster. The realization that she was falling in love made her gambit even riskier.
She could only hope the situation didn’t explode in her face at the smallest misstep.
An hour and a half later she went into her bathroom and closed and locked the door. She set the sack she’d just brought in from the car and the bottle of lubricant they’d used last night on the counter and glanced at herself in the mirror. The faint hint of a blush still lingered on her cheeks. Thank goodness Thomas hadn’t arrived back at the cottage yet, or he might have noticed it.
It hadn’t been anywhere near as mortifying and anxiety-provoking as she’d thought it would be to enter the adult sex store that wasn’t far off the interstate near Effingham. She’d imagined sex-starved truckers, indecent proposals, and possibly illegal prostitution rings awaited inside the small shop. Instead, she’d found an empty parking lot and a bored middle-aged woman manning the cash register.
Thankfully, reality had paled compared to her fantasies.
The sex-shop sales clerk had asked Sophie if she needed any help finding anything, but her weary tone and the way she barely pulled her eyes away from the television perched behind the counter made it easy for Sophie to say no. She’d proceeded to walk up and down the aisles, her curiosity slowly starting to overshadow her worries about being harassed by sex-crazed truck drivers.
She withdrew the item she’d bought at the store and opened the box. Inside was a butt plug. Sophie had hesitated about which size to buy. It would be easier to insert one of the smaller ones, but wouldn’t that make things more difficult in
the end? She’d finally purchased a medium-sized one, thinking it would be better to get over any discomfort alone instead of having it interfere when she made love to Thomas.
She withdrew the black silicone plug and ran her fingertip over the fat head that would keep it in place once it was inserted. It looked like it might hurt considerably, so it surprised her that a flash of heat went through her pussy. She’d been too determined about her mission to seduce Thomas—to draw him closer, to break down some of his defenses—not to mention too embarrassed by her foray inside the adult store, to be aroused before.
But now, here in the privacy of her bathroom, excitement intertwined with her anxiety.
She wasn’t sure precisely how to proceed in her little experiment, but the physician in her told her that the most important thing would be to relax. She stripped out of her floral print skirt, T-shirt, bra, sandals, and underwear and turned on the shower. After her flesh had grown warm from the jets of water, she picked up the soap and lathered her hands, the motions calling to mind vividly the image of Thomas swirling the soap in his large, masculine hands last night.
Without ever intending to do so, Sophie began to trace the trail on her flesh that Thomas had made in this same bathroom hours ago. She closed her eyes while her hands slicked over her belly and hips, then cradled the weight of her breasts. She thought of Thomas’s gruff yet gentle command, Offer them to me, Sophie.
Her fingers rubbed and pinched at her nipples as she stood in the shower and imagined doing just that: offering her flesh to Thomas, making his eyes go dark with need . . . giving herself freely for his consumption. Her pelvis arched up against the pressure of the jetting water, eager for the stimulation on her cunt.
A moment later she turned her hips out of the water spray. Her hand moved in her soap-lathered pussy, stroking her burning clit. She used her other hand to penetrate her rectum, using the soap to ease her passage. Her fingers circled more frantically on her clit as her excitement mounted. She moaned; her eyes opened dazedly at the sound. She’d been so engrossed in her memories and fantasies, she hadn’t even been aware of making a choice to masturbate.
She rinsed quickly and opened the shower curtain. The steam in the small room had grown so thick she didn’t even catch a chill when she stepped out of the tub. She dried off and stood before the sink, naked.
She carefully washed the butt plug and coated it liberally with lubricant.
Her face looked wary in the mirror when she bent slightly over the sink and parted her bottom cheeks. She winced when she experimentally tried to slip the thick head into her rectum.
It wasn’t going to work, she thought in rising frustration. Thomas had been right to doubt the possibility of the maneuver.
But she had taken his cock head into her ass last night; surely she could manage this.
She pressed her ass determinedly against the silicone plug. Pain shot through her body. She removed the plug from between her ass cheeks, but she didn’t give up.
She applied the lubricant to herself and finger-fucked her ass for several seconds. Slowly, heat began to spread in her sex until she found it necessary to slip a finger between her labia and stimulate herself.
She had been a virgin to anal play until last night, and had been surprised by how much it had aroused her. Thomas may have thought she was being kind by asking him to put his cock in her, but she hadn’t been. As she’d lain there restrained to the bed with her ass in the air, all she’d been able to think about was Thomas’s beautiful cock, of him filling her in such a private place . . . of him taking so much pleasure in what she offered him freely.
It’d pained her, a little, when he’d refused her.