The small, involuntary, reflexive quality of a tongue responding to contact on the lips — finding the trace of what had touched, reading it the way her body read everything unfamiliar.
The taste arrived.
She went still.
The total, eyes-wide-in-the-dark, comprehensive stillness of a woman receiving a taste and knowing what it was and not being able to un-know it.
She had not tasted it before. She did not, technically, have a prior data point.
But her body knew anyway. Bodies have knowledge that precedes experience, and hers knew. The warm, salt-and-something-underneath quality of it on her tongue — the taste of a man, the taste of exactly what she had been very carefully not naming for the last several minutes.
Her hands gripped the edge of the sink.
Her knees registered something.
