My fingers worked her with the same patient rhythm I had used on her shoulders — circles, pressure, retreat, return. I parted the swollen labia and stroked the inner surfaces, spreading oil and her own wetness together until the distinction vanished.
Her pearl had emerged from its hood, tight and prominent, and I circled it with a single oiled fingertip while two fingers of my other hand pressed slowly into the tight, fluttering heat of her entrance.
"Hhhnmmph—!"
Her palm crushed the cry against her teeth. Her eyes were wide, glassy, staring at the canopy above as if salvation might be written in the dusty fabric. Her free hand clutched her belly from the side, not shielding — anchoring. "My lord, I — something is — I feel—"
"The opening," I said, and curled my fingers inside her, finding the swollen place along her front wall that made her entire body jolt. "This is what must soften. This is the door the child will pass through. Breathe through it. Do not fight."
'Door — door — he is inside me, his fingers are inside me, and it is not a door it is a fire, and I am going to — I cannot let him see me — Garrick — no, do not think of Garrick, think of the pressure, the oil, the way he presses upward and my vision goes white at the edges—'
I massaged her from the inside with long, deliberate strokes, my thumb maintaining its circle on her pearl, my other hand splayed across the lower curve of her belly to feel every tremor that passed through her. The oil and her arousal had turned everything slick past the point of friction; my fingers moved in her like a tide. Her thighs clamped around my wrist, then fell open, then clamped again. Her breasts heaved with each ragged breath, the dark nipples pointing at the ceiling, a thin bead of clear fluid gathering at the tip of the left one — the body's early offering.
"You are doing well," I told her. "My mother said the sounds are part of it. The body sings when it learns to open."
"I am not — hahhh — singing, I am — nnngh — dying—"
"Not dying." I pressed deeper, curled harder, quickened the thumb. "Living. Let it come."
Her climax arrived the way a storm arrives on the coast — a sudden darkening, a held breath, and then the break.
Elira's back lifted off the bed in a deep, trembling arch, her belly rising like a pale moon, her mouth opening behind her palm in a silent scream that became a choked, animal wail as her sex clenched around my fingers in violent rhythmic waves. And then the release — a hard, sudden jet of clear fluid that erupted past my hand with enough force to arc through the afternoon light and spatter across the floorboards a full two meters from the bed. The spray caught the gold window-light and threw a brief, shattered rainbow against the far wall before gravity claimed it. Her whole body convulsed — once, twice, a third time — each spasm forcing another pulse of fluid around my fingers, soaking the coverlet, her thighs, my wrist, the air itself with the hot clean scent of a woman undone.
Her eyes rolled back. Her hand fell from her mouth. She lay gasping, trembling, naked and oil-bright and utterly wrecked, her legs still open, her sex twitching with the aftershocks, a thin line of drool connecting her lower lip to the pillow.
I withdrew my fingers slowly. Lifted them to my mouth. Tasted her — salt and sweetness and the faint mineral nothing of the oil — while she watched through half-lidded, unfocused eyes.
"I hope," I said, and my voice was warm, polite, the voice of a host checking on a guest's comfort, "that Aunt enjoyed the session."
Elira's mouth worked. Sound took a moment to arrive. When it did, it was barely a whisper, rough and wrecked and honest past the point of dignity.
"I did. I did. I…" Her throat bobbed. "My lord. What was that?"
"The body remembering how to open." I stood, wiping my hand on a cloth from the side table with unhurried care. My eyes traveled the length of her — the heaving breasts, the glistening belly, the soaked and swollen sex, the puddle on the floorboards catching light like a small lake. "The first session is always the most startling. The ones that follow go deeper."
I walked to the door. Paused with my hand on the iron handle. Looked back over my shoulder at the pregnant woman sprawled across my father's bed like an offering left on an altar.
"I will be in my chambers tonight. After the evening bell. If Lady Elira wishes another session… I will have the oil warm."
She did not answer with words. A sound escaped her — something between a whimper and a yes — and her hand, still shaking, drifted down the side of her belly toward the wet heat between her legs.
I stepped into the corridor and closed the door until only a finger's width of space remained. Through that narrow aperture I watched her: the oil-slick body trembling in the gold light, the fingers finding her own swollen pearl, the lips parting around a whisper so raw it barely qualified as language.
"I want more. I want more of that massage. I want more than just the massage—"
I licked my lips. Closed the door fully. Stood alone in the dusty corridor of my dying house while the system chimed softly at the edge of vision, new points tallying themselves in neat crimson figures, and the taste of another man's wife lingered on my tongue like a promise.
'Garrick,' I thought, and the smile that found my face belonged to no one who had ever been kind. 'I am going to take everything you planted in my soil. Starting with her.'