Chapter 9
Gouté ti manzè
Soulé
I stood near the glass wall, shirt unbuttoned to my sternum, drink in hand. I find the bourbon’s aftertaste sweet; it paired well with the flavors I didn’t care to keep. The scent of sex loitered in the room, like smoke after a fire. My lips were numb. My thighs were warm. She had come hard, and I hadn’t missed the way her body trembled long after my mouth left her.
But she hadn’t been the only one affected.
Because Ana had been there, too.
She wasn’t there, not in the bed or my arms, but she soaked the room.
My skin stirred, and heat traced the back of my neck when I saw her standing in the doorway.
The woman beneath me noticed. But she was too far gone, unraveling beneath my tongue. And I had already started drifting.
Ana and I locked eyes for one breathless second, maybe less, but it landed in my gut like a second climax. It was something more profound. Spiritual. A collision of truth and timing, of who I was and who she might dare to become.
She watched.
And I wanted her to.
I needed her to understand what I could do.
Because if—when—she ever let me touch her, she needed to know I would be gentle with her.
I’d devour her the way she’d been starving to be fed.
Gouté ti manzè, bwè sous dlo k’ap koulé an mitan janm li... mwen sav bouboun li dous...1
And I’d do it, slow, reverence abounded.
With such precise patience, it would be akin to worship.
I would hunt down the parts of her no one ever dared to reach; those soft, trembling corners where doubt hid. The fragile places no one else was allowed to see.
And I would go there anyway.
I would crowd into them, relentless, as if I belonged in every secret she tried to keep, as if I was the only one who ever could. I would press until they cracked open, until they bloomed raw and desperate beneath my touch, until she forgot what it meant to hold herself back.
Yes, I would drink her uncertainty like wine, sipping slowly, swallowing it down until there was nothing left but want, nothing left but surrender.
I would make her sing acceptance loudly, ruined, unrestrained... until she shuddered under the weight of it, undone beneath the sweetness of sin, aching for more even as she tried to breathe, knowing she was mine in every place she once tried to hide.
Because she didn’t only need to be touched.
She needed to be…
Unmade.
Met.
And that goal, dark and waiting, sank into my marrow like a promise I could not undo.
I finished what I started with the woman in my bed. But my mind wasn’t there anymore.
It was still at the door.
Still with Ana.
The woman trembling behind her God.
The woman who had watched me sin...
... and hadn’t turned away.
“Taste her… drink her spring water flowing between her thighs… I know her pussy sweet…”