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He figures it out before she does, that she lets go easier outside. Four walls and a roof and she gets distracted by thoughts of the act. But outside, her reservations—any flicker of guilt or shame—dissipate like so much smoke. It just feels like the wildness that god intended.
They’re in the gazebo, doors thrown wide, the only light cast by a crescent moon. The night air is warm, and Maria can hear the faint rustle as a breeze moves through the trees, an insect chorus singing atop that. That this sensory background registers at all is a miracle with how attuned her every nerve ending is to Georg’s hands, his mouth, the broad competent bulk of him so close she can feel each breath and shift in muscle.
It’s a strange kind of knowing, new and intoxicating. She never thought fingers could be hungry, but hers are every moment of the day that they spend at a decorous distance. Her mind wanders here at breakfast when she watches him raise a croissant to his mouth; as he sings with the children, hands moving over the neck of the guitar, fingers plucking surely at its strings. She hasn’t blushed so much in her whole life before now, and is grateful that Max saw fit to take his leave, because there’d be no stopping his impertinence once he noticed.
Those daytime blushes have nothing on the hot flush that runs down her body at night when he unravels her. His hands grip her waist now, a touch that could be innocent except for the up-and-down stroking of his long fingers across the rise of her hips, thumbs that tease ever closer to the underside of her breasts with each pass, making her breath stutter.
His pace is always gentlemanly to start, makes her think of whistles and tightly run ships and strict military posture. It’s Maria who grows impatient—to feel those hands without the barrier of clothing, to climb toward every wonder in the world that’s hers for the taking. She’s only fumbled open two of the buttons that run down the front of her dress before his fingers tangle hers, halting their progress.
“Ah, ah,” he says, tone chiding, imperious, though his eyes dance with mirth. “Impatient, fräulein?”
Even as he speaks his fingers make quicker work than she could of the long row of tiny buttons and oh, she knows how capable of hardness he is, but the low rumble of his voice and the first tender strokes low across her belly obliterate all memory of their rocky beginning.
One of his thumbs teases her belly button while the other leads the passage under her dress, up her thigh, where he’s about to find—
“Oh.”
He chokes on the word, brows raised. Their breathing accelerates in tandem as his thumb brushes the damp at the join of her thighs, no fabric there to drag aside.
Already deep pink from top to tail, she's sure her skin can't get any hotter until the rush of blood when his stormy eyes meet hers belies this. She thinks of fires that consume, and fires that purify. But she was raised to be practical, and neither of them thought they were just going for an evening stroll after the children were sent to bed.
She knows the feel of him now, the care his calloused hands will take, but not so well that she isn’t shocked anew each time by the things hands and mouths do beyond purposeful coupling. The rapture he drives her toward feels like the purest natural feeling she’s ever known. To deny it would be a sin, she is certain. So instead she chases it. Eager hands strive to fill him with the same mountain of sensations, to bring him as high as he takes her.
He’s got his reservations too, and outdoor exposure is one of them, but that hasn’t stopped him from exploiting her enthusiasm in a variety of locales: the gazebo; the hills on a rare solo picnic without the children; against the house directly under Frau Schmidt’s bedroom window. She’d bitten her lip near raw to keep quiet, and he’d soothed it after with light kisses while setting her clothes to right again.
She tests him now with a searching palm down the front of his suede breeches, the attire he’s traded in starch uniforms and brass buttons for since selling his commission. Already hard, he grows under her palm, and no protest is issued when she undoes the clasp and reaches in to grasp his length.
He’s slipped away more fabric to bare one breast and his mouth dips from her neck, tongue teasing around her nipple before closing it in his hot mouth. At the same moment, his fingers cease their light tracing and enter her body, a welcome intrusion.
Maria’s hand squeezes him as she drags toward his tip, echoing her tightness around his fingers, thumb searching for the wetness she knows she’ll find beading there. She wishes at once that they were free of clothes, stretched out somewhere she could take him, run headlong into the feeling of their joining with no encumbrances.
His fingers thrust twice, draw out to slide some of the slick up her folds, then re-enter her with a smooth, purposeful rhythm. She tries to match him stroke for stroke but falters when his thumb sets to work. That such a small space on the terrain of her body should fill her with the same powerful feeling as an entire mountain range under her feet plus the whole wide blue sky above is a fascination. That that expansive awe can, in his hands, be alchemized into overwhelming and inexorable need is a fascination and a terror.
She slumps back into the wall, knees buckling. When this pushes his fingers in harder, deeper, she gasps.
“My Go—“
His mouth crushes against hers as he speeds up in her hand, in her body, movements hastening in the frenzied pursuit of bliss.
He adds another finger but her body still aches for what he’s not giving her, what she never knew existed until he showed her another path to glory.
When it happens it’s his fingers, sturdy and demanding; his lips, tracing a careful pattern below the line of her jaw; the wind, life-breath of the world, causing a shiver that spears from the back of her naked neck straight down to her root. And then she’s careening past the peak, as free as she’s ever been, transcendent.
In her final contraction she feels him spill across her hand, her stomach, and it’s impossible to stay quiet, every part of her singing out in ecstasy. Their pleasure is triumphant—praise and reverence, the body bursting with deepest exultation.