Free I'll Take Manhattan by Judith Krantz Page B

signs of pain or fear. Her expression didn’t change although her lips were again firmly pressed together, her jaw set.
    Zachary wet his finger again and again, each time returning cautiously to the warm tunnel, finding no resistance even when his finger was up inside as far as it could go. He couldn’t tell if she had become wet by herself or because of all the wetness he had brought to her, but he knew that the moment had come to enter her. He straddled Lily on his knees and elbows and carefully lowered himself so that just the rounded, engorged tip of his penis nuzzled at the mouth of her delicate opening. Then he pushed into her, at first less than an inch and then a half-inch more. Slowly, oh so slowly, he moved, the sweat standing out onhis forehead, always scanning her face for the moment when he would have to withdraw, when it would hurt her too much, but she was expressionless, although her breath came more quickly. She didn’t move, she lay under him unflinchingly and let him fill her. Finally, after long minutes, she had accepted his entire penis, it throbbed within her at its full length, and Zachary lowered himself so that his legs were outstretched on the mattress, while his elbows kept him from crushing her. He could feel his penis swelling, growing larger and larger, although he didn’t move a muscle. The soft, hot, tight inside of her was too much for him. Without a single thrust he came, his spasms so wrenching, so
strong
, so impossible to control after the frustration of the last hour that he poured his sperm into her with a rush, a flood, that was so quick that it was pure animal release.
    For a minute Zachary, lost in the pounding of his heartbeat, forgot Lily, but as soon as he recovered himself he rolled off her body and gathered her in his arms, covering her face with kisses of wild gratitude, a hail of kisses mingled with the tears he couldn’t keep from shedding. He hadn’t expected her to become aroused. In the days to come, gradually, and with infinite care, he would teach her to enjoy sex, but now he was astonished at her courage, infinitely moved by her refusal to allow her innate modesty to make him feel as if he were brutal, touched to the heart by her willingness to permit him to enter her without any other sign of the effort she was making than her closed eyes.
    “Did I hurt you, darling?” he asked at last.
    “No, of course not.” She opened her eyes and smiled at him. How could he know that her body had been trained to accept pain, to welcome it, to embrace it? How could he understand that the new set of feelings she had just encountered were as nothing compared to breaking in a pair of toe shoes? For many hours each day, from the age of eight, she had lived with constant pain, pain she was trained to smile through, pain that a dancer, like any other athlete, considers an inevitable part of life.
    Lily had expected something different of her wedding night, something rough and exciting and unknown, something far wilder than the sensations she had when a strongpartner lifted her farther than she had ever been lifted before. She had expected a duel of two bodies that would leave them both sore, aching, sweating and exhausted, as after a great performance. Not this long, drawn-out cuddling, not the stealthy exploration of a body she had long ago stopped thinking of as anything but an instrument, a body about which she had not the slightest self-consciousness. Oh, but how much she had wanted and needed to be
taken
, used, overcome, relentlessly plunged head over heels into a world she had never known, a world she
sometimes
heard the other students giggling about, a world that had fascinated her even as she rejected it.
    She couldn’t
do
more than she had, Lily thought, she didn’t know the right movements, the right positions to take, but surely her immobility must have indicated clearly that she would permit him anything? She could not endure feeling awkward, ill at ease with her