Light and Wine (10 page)

A lush little plea permeates my consciousness, echoing not only in my eardrums, but everywhere Lacie holds me. I hear her under my skin, deeper than veins, and the feeling like spreading and growing and becoming intensifies beyond what I can comprehend. Discipline and direction, patience and endurance that make me not only a man of God, but a man of love—her man—fall completely away. Limitation and restraint fade, and I move with the boundless, unconquerable might that is infinite love.

“Implica me,” I hear myself whisper for her to
hold on
between breaths. “Implica me, minutissimi, carissima puella mea …”

Hold onto me, littlest and most precious.

Frantic arms and legs tighten around my neck and hips so formidably that it feels like gravity has left us, and there is only my weight under God’s thumb keeping His glow beneath me.

“Oro, Father, oro …” she whimpers, light but unmeekly needful into my neck.

I pray, Father, I pray …

Her voice trembles, bearing out the sounds of grateful need. “Solacium Dei, please, please, please—”

God’s comfort
, she asks for and calls me in Latin I’ve never taught her, lighting me up with warmth that floods from under my lungs, into every rib and the spaces between them, and down, into my hips. Her obedient plea for His solace through my frame makes my heart pound with fierce abandon, each pulse racing to answer her.

The paired spark in the deepest part of love draws diligent rhythm from my momentum and a heavy groan from my chest. I slide my hands to hips that were made for me to hold, pushing through my own need to come to help Lacie.

She shakes like the earth for the sound of His voice.

“Come,” I whisper, leaning down and covering her with myself, kissing the shell of her ear with breaths that match her own—too deep to hold. “Come here, carissima. Right here. Come right here, baby.”

Every bit as out of control as I’ve found myself, she grips and pushes at my weighted shoulders.

“Come, love. Come here.”

And my adored, my proof of God, my wife, trembles and tilts and dips through coming apart, and as I move love through every swell, I feel like His banner over her.

Like driftwood, I ride the current, unable to stop or slow through tensing waves and rushing heartbeats that push His kingdom all through her.

Like light, she pours over me, warm and luminous and touching everything, everywhere.

Lit and blissfully lost, I brush my nose along hers, beckoning her lids open. With her forehead under mine and her lashes barely lifted, she gives me her eyes.

I’ve never seen them so dark, and I can’t remember them ever shining so brightly.

I watch them as I move, tireless in the pace we’ve uncovered. Her lids lilt and lift the tiniest bit with every stroke I give, and her pupils are full with all they can accommodate, but I see them straining to open more.

I can’t help the feeling of pride that surges through me any more than I can help bearing down in effort to share that surge with her.

With her heart rushing toward mine and her eyes beautifully bare, love that’s always been mine comes again, effortless, copious, and desperate.

“Mmm—Marc. Marcus,” she hiccups, her worn thin little voice like a poem in my ears.

I want to always make her this kind of breathless.

I never want to stop helping her arch into this perfect welcome into His promise.

“Lacie,” I whisper, assuring and endearing, revering and glorifying her entire being with all of mine. “My Lacie.”

With longing to restrain love into easy strokes that speak of patience, I shift and rest my forehead against her sternum. My hips are helpless though, lost in consecrated cadence and striving with the need to wear gentleness. The most treasured heart ever created beats under my parted lips, and I dig as deeply as I can to harness lifelong hunger.

But I can’t.

I wish as I move that I could ease my grip and my rhythm, and at the same time, I don’t want to ever be any further from her than this.

Barely able to breathe, I swallow as I push deeper into light.

She gives as she takes, and I’ve never loved her more than this moment.

And I will never, ever love her less.

My lips find hers, and we kiss as we cling like ivy and flow like the tide. We breathe together, and I brush my lips from her red right cheek to her blushed pink neck. I kiss the chin she split when she fell off her bike when she was ten, and I kiss the corner of her jaw so close to her ear because I know it’s her favorite place to be kissed.

I kiss over and under and all around rosary beads I laid on her.

I kiss the curves and tips of her breasts, and the sacred place between them where her heart pulses so deeply, I can’t help closing my eyes in prayer.

Thank you
, I tell Him while my soul’s whole body hums around me.

Thank you so much.

“Ah, ah …”

Precious, pleading sounds surround me, bringing me into salvation with
my eyes closed but my spirit wholly open. With my head on her chest, wrapped up in her pulse, all I can do is move.

Little light of my world slips stripped, salient notes for every undone push I give, and it’s so sensual, so pleasing to me on every level it’s almost unbearable. My feet falter like I’ve missed a step, like I’m going to fall, and when I grip her hips tighter, struggling to hold on, Lacie coos shamelessly.

Unbound under His thumb, I give her more.

I want to enshrine myself in this blessing and hallow my soul in this sacrament.

I want to live and die and reside forever in heartbeats wrapped in the most intimate song I’ve ever heard.

Fastening delicate hips down to the altar, I give into cries that call me closer. There’s no part of who I am that doesn’t light up as she comes this time, and she holds me more securely than anything ever has as I continue moving through new waves of blessed pleasure.

The last linen threads of my composure shake as Lacie quickens around me, and I blink my eyes open. Lifting my head, I look down in awe as my bride arches into the delicate curve of pure delight, chasing ecstasy so divine I feel it pulse through her body in breathless rushes and swells. Her lids lift, too, showing me staggering gratitude that shines behind candle-bright tears. Trembling fingers grip mine as I hold fast to upturned hips, and love’s favorite color spreads all across her skin.

She moans a low little hymn, and it glides along me while blissful waves ebb out into a hypersensitive and lushly responsive ocean. Eyes I’ve loved as long as I’ve known her widen with pleas her lips can’t shape, but the threads barely holding me back are in His hands. Her hands press wishes for patience into my grip, while my own dig tighter into her.

“Mmm-Mm-Marc,” she pants between small sounds she can’t help making for every push of my hips.

A flicker like panic flashes in her pupils and they open further. Long, completely undone hair moves over her naked shoulders and along white silk as she shakes her head, gripping my wrists. Adoration and desire burn inside her as she tries in vain to bring her knees up and together, to get away.

To wait worldly seconds for composure to regather itself before she comes again.

To question if she even could bear it.

“I can’t,” little light whispers, digging knees I adore with all that I am into my sides with her effort to close up and catch her breath. “I can’t, Marc. I can’t—”

But our Maker’s untying all that’s left of my own authority.

“You can,” I promise, feeling her legs shake with all her strength as I place my palms on pink kneecaps. With a single, slender thread holding me from abandon, I kiss each of them more times than I can count before closing my hands and pushing against Lacie’s doubts.

Kissed-red lips fall open for notes that resound within and all around me as her neck arches. Her head rolls to the left as I guide her legs all the way back, not stopping until cherished knees are pressed against silk and velvet covered marble and love is utterly defenseless to worship.

Soft
, is the only thought I can think for a few fleeting seconds.

Soft. Soft. Soft.

With the heart of light held so open, I bear deeply, carefully down.

“Let me,” I tell her as gently as I can around the force between my shoulders.

“Let go,” I plead, so in need as the final thread around my restraint pulls insufferably tight.

“Let God,” I whisper, and as the words leave my lips, pressure and light suffuse my spine. The brittle control I was cradling with strained sinews and shallow breaths becomes golden, and all I hear in the split second between heartbeats is the most inviting little intake of breath.

Straightening, I lift Lacie just up from the altar, wrapping my arms under and around her as I move.

She’s weak from the exertion and intensity of more than God has ever offered her, but she tries. Wavering arms and feeble legs stumble to find their grip on my unyielding form, irresistibly drawn to the incorruptible stability flowing through me from Him.

Keeping one arm under her back, I bring each of her hands around my neck. Sanctified fingers lace themselves immediately together in my hair while her arms tense with found vigor and her shoulders brace, too. Her legs climb like vines around me, and her most precious, hidden little muscles cling with the most tender, most innate devotion as I find new depth of physical unity in this surrender.

Red roses bloom white hot between us as the girl who’s lit my path her entire life arches in my arms, soft hips struggling to meet mine again and again as I give in. She buries her face in my neck and clings, trembling and soft on the edge of herself.

“Regnum,” I whisper, pressing my right hand over her tailbone, holding her body to mine as my movements quicken.
Kingdom.
“Et potestas,” I murmur, my voice low despite the divine endowment charging through my flesh.
 
I gather her closer still, further opening and completing every part of who she is with every part of myself.
Power.
“Et Gloria.” I breathe just below her ear.

And I feel her become it.
Glory.

The purest cry pours from my purpose as she fulfills the promise of Heaven. Fluttering and attenuated, she comes, and as God moves me, all of my own control and coherence blurs.

Lacie’s grip, her warmth, so given over—
Rolling rosary beads and her so sacred, so surrounding heartbeat—
Soft, pressed-so-close skin and pure, perfect prayers and tight little trembles, all over me, from the inside out—

Everything His gift resounds His name, and I bind her to myself.
It starts behind my eyes, so strong, so heavy, for a second I think I’ll feel it forever, and then it rushes.
Like instinct.
Like light split from the darkness to make day.
Somewhere on Earth, in the same chapel I give love God’s communion and God’s forgiveness, I still her gently surging hips while she adheres to me with fragile limbs.

I give her everything He gives to me.
I give her all that He built her to take, and she takes all that I am.
What started strong and heavy behind my eyes floods down my spine and into my hips, from my body into hers. I can’t help pushing ever-harder, ever-deeper, embedding myself into light with desperate strokes as I come. It detonates in every pulse she draws from me, boundless surges of nascent bliss feathering out into my bloodstream. They radiate truth and life, and the highest sense of rightness through every vein, from the base of my backbone all the way out to the fingertips pressing into the sweetest skin, down legs that strain to stand through the need to keep moving, keep pushing, keep making His word flesh.

The fire He built in me roars in my ears, and I don’t want to stop.

I want to give Him to her this way forever.

The sound that escapes me is caught, a groan falling from barely parted lips as I fill her again and again, helpless to the rhythm of release. I give her all of me, every day of my earthly life and beyond, every cell of my body and more. I fasten light to myself with every stroke I can’t still and every shiver that pours my soul into hers.

I come, and I come, and there is nothing but love, holding onto me and breathing fast in the bend of my neck. There is only her and the staggering need to keep moving that’s only just beginning to ease its force as I open my eyes and seek hers.

There is nothing but the way they shine for me.

Our Father.

Who art in Heaven.

Hallowed be Thy name.
 

Hazel eyes, glossy with tears, are lit with more devotion, gratitude, and awe than ever. The church around us has never held so much love, not with all the voices that have sang here for over a hundred years, and even it pales compared to her eyes, immaculately consumed and consummated as they focus on mine.

“Aeternum,” I whisper, finally still within her.

Love that’s sanctified this place tightens limbs that are frail from so much giving. She presses the prettiest lips together, swallowing so she can echo my vow.