Juliette, or The Prosperity of Vice (1801?), is a sequel to the first book in deSade's duology. It follows Justine's sister.

***

I stretch out to catch his lips. One kiss leads to a flurry of short, questioning kisses. The man's competitive streak kicks in, so he returns them with more intensity than I expect. His teeth graze, his beard prickles, his shoulders press me down until my back arches. My breasts roll back from him, opening for a touch. I gasp when it comes, fingers caressing me through the fabric, then peeling it back to reveal a strip of skin.

Yes, Matteo has a competitive streak, but I beat him in the jeans' game, popping the button on his low-riding waistline. Our captors removed the belts, so it's easy to open his pants. Just pushing the metal button through the loop to break into the slot machine.

His tongue pauses in the hollow between my breasts at the same time as my fingers grip and hover on his zipper slider. He rolls his head back from my breasts, eyes flung open, mouth gaping. Then I open the zipper, element by element, every tiny tooth unlocked by the slider. My heavy breathing falls in time with his.

I want him. He wants me.

The color of his eyes startles me the way it always does, as he presses his forehead to mine. Somehow, I always forget just how bright, how alarming the living amber of them is.

"Bryn, you're drunk," he moans. "And I'm drunk too. Fucking not recommended."

The zipper slider hits the bottom stop, hidden in the artfully tailored recess in the fabric. Flesh stirs underneath, because it ignores his wise words. I find him with a certainty that amazes me through the haze of alcohol.

I slur my words, but I say them, for they are true. They're my 'in vino veritas', the revelation brought on by imbibing: "Then don't fuck me. Make love to me."

His palms caress my bare back under the shirt, while I establish a pleasant skin to skin contact of my own, in the restless territory I've set out to conquer. His movements are contemplative. He waits for me to talk... I wonder what taught him this inhuman patience.

"Something good has to happen to us to break this bleak, horrible streak," I whisper to him. My breath bounces back from his cheek at me, tinged by alcohol and hot. "Hope comes in a bundle with love and faith."

"Hope, faith and love," he repeats.

I nod with drunken ardor. "Precisely. I need them. Hope and faith in you, I need them."

It's so pleasant to mumble fluffy things to the rhythm of his heartbeat. Everything that happens to us, binds us. We're the only man and the only woman in the small world we inhabit. It's preordained that we love one-another, or we'll not survive. It's the script as old as humanity, and the sole reason that babies continued to be born during the plague, famine and wars. Who am I to fight the instinct? Who is he?

I hazard a guess, and lick my Matteo-tasting lips before saying to him: "You need this too."

An instant decision flashes through his eyes. A split second later, his body follows, as if a wave pushes his body into mine. He wraps me into a tighter embrace. I wonder what taught him this confidence. "I don't know if I need this, Bryn, but I want you."

He can't carry me. His ribcage is barely knitting itself together under my flannel shirt still binding it. Instead, he guides me to my feet with a steady hand. The jeans' fit is loose after four days of hell, and with the fly down, we lose the pants. Two steps toward the couch, one of them over the discarded pants—and we're just where we want to be.

"Tell me that it's not a I-don't-want-to-die-a-virgin thing," Matteo says.

"No, it's not. It's the other thing, the one I've told you about," I explain to his lovely clavicle and brush his thighs.

He hesitates in mid-step, making me gurgle a throaty laugh. "Matteo, I had four lovers. The first one, let's call him Andy, was my high-school sweetheart—"

"Not now, please."

His hand ruffles the garish clothes covering the couch. "I didn't imagine it would be like this." And he nudges me to the strange bed.

I lie down and out stretch my hands toward him. "How did you imagine it, tiger?"

He picks out a transparent wife-beater, wipes my hand on it carefully, finger by finger. Wipes the cheek I've touched and his own hands. Without soap and water the effects of this clean-up are negligible. We have too much brick dust and grime on us, but I understand why he does it. We shall not smear dirt on each-other in any sense of that word.

"Shit, Bryn, I don't know. I don't have girlfriends, just girls."

Whores, he means.Not in any derogatory way, just, you know, professionally.

"But I'd think it would be something like that. A bed, a long uninterrupted night and a pretty view beyond the windows. The floor-to-ceiling windows. Paris or Venice, maybe. Or an ocean-view... Whatever you like. I don't know what you like."

He hooks the bottom of my t-shirt and rolls it up, over my head.

"Ocean," I reply through the cotton. "I'd kill for an ocean view right now." Heck, I'd kill for a basement window with a patch of light.

A pause before his response is barely there, but unmistakable. A pause while he swallows something important. He closes his eyes. "Ocean is good."

The wistfulness that permeates his voice strums the cord within me. I didn't mean the ocean as an allegory of freedom when I said 'ocean' as my ideal backdrop for our lovemaking, but after hearinghowhe said it, yes, yes, I did.

I lift my arms up to help him in getting me naked, then lean back, but leave them above my head, folded out of the way. Let him see me. Let him imagine me sprinkled with sand, at the surf-line of the ocean.

My throat, heart and the lowlands all pulse at the unobstructed view of his hands releasing my breasts from the bra. His palm rolls over the pebbling nipples. I think he is holding his breath until his hand covers them too.

"Thank you for thinking about lovely places to be with me," I gasp, as his mouth tracks down to the business end of things. His technique of hooking the fabric slightly, then tugging on it works for my panties too, only they slip down my hips, not over my shoulders like the t-shirt. So readily, so readily they slip.

The first tremors come almost the moment his tongue parts the lonely swell laid bare.

"You thought of it too," he concludes after a thorough taste, lifting his head up. "Didn't you?"

"Yes," I admit breathlessly, "yes."

"How," he wants to know, "how did you want it?"

He moves inside and I close around him, the warm slope growing less stable with every swing of his hips. We are lovers, now we are lovers, a couple joined into one lucky beast with two backs.

I wrap protective arms around his midsection, just below the make-shift binding over his ribs. I close my eyes, and drift away on the surf he raises for us with his thrusts.

"Like this," I mean to whisper, but the words come out as soft moans. I don't think he minds, because his movements intensify. "Just like this."

I'm not lying. I've dreamt of feeling what I'm feeling. It's not just that he's pleasing the way a man can be inside.

Something in the way he opens his eyes to check on my reaction between his strokes, then kisses me, then closes his eyes again with a fleeting smile, whispers to me that I, too, unlock an untapped reserve of warmth within him. I want it, this warmth, everything he has to spare, whatever the life has left him. Every drop of it, every shred, every trace. I feel... gosh, I feel like I'm flowing through his veins, I'm so close to him now.

Between the privation and the urgency of our coming together, the union is over when Matteo kisses me on the cheek and turns away for his climax. His unfounded optimism that we'll survive long enough to worry about the consequences of recklessly unprotected sex cuts me to the quick.

Hope rekindles from this unexpected spark. I've asked for hope, and there it is. Hope that comes in the same bundle as faith and love...

I cleave to his muscled back, grazing my lips over his skin, dipping my nose into his hair. My tongue tastes him mindlessly, in lizard-like dabs and in languid licks.

"I love you," I say tentatively, and my heart lurches in response. "I love you. I love you. Oh, Matteo, I love you."

Done, he turns over, wrapping me to his borderless chest. "Don't, Bryn. Don't say that. Simplylikingme enough to warn against the danger to my life brought you here."

"I don't care." At this moment, I truly don't care.

"I fucked it up—and you were fucked with me. Worse than me even. Loving me, your life will end up short, brutal and hopeless. So, don't, Bryn."

I nudge his hand that cradles my hair. Giddily, I shake my head, a smile stretching my mouth irrepressibly. "You have no power to forbid me."

"Okay. We'll talk about it when you're sober. If you'll be still talking to me then."

"I'm not so drunk that I don't understand what you mean. Yes, you are right. You're the wrong man to love..."

He most certainly is. Should I bring him before my parents, even dressed in a plain white t-shirt (a clean one) and faded blue jeans, his exotic good looks alone would out him as an awful choice. My mom would take me by the elbow, lead me out of his earshot to the kitchen. A little crease would cut in between her brows. She would ask me solicitously just how serious I'm about this man, this Scali.

I want you to be happy, Bryn, she would say, and however would linger in the air until I snap that I am happy.

Then she'd tell me to 'just' be careful. And warn me that 'this man' is trouble with the capital T. No, it's his middle name, I would joke. Matteo Trouble Scali. Matty the Trigger.

And she'd titter with nervous laughter to show that we're good, that she'd said her piece and I could do what I wish with my life... but she would peer at me with the same anxious eyes she peered at me when I majored in arts.

If only I could be teleported to my mom's cozy kitchen right now. Even with Matteo, both of us naked... if the ceiling opened up, and we fell right through the hole in it on Mom's granite countertop, overturning her hideous fruit bowl, right under her nose... Oh my God, I would ask for nothing else for as long as I live!

I open my eyes and tell him, loud and clear. "I love you."

"I can't protect you unless I climb the ranks," Matteo explains with the patience of a kindergarten teacher. "Which is unlikely."

I shut my eyes to sigh contentedly. "Love you anyway, even if it's the last of our days."

He sighs in sweet resignation. The imaginary ocean rocks us together. My mouth disappears under Matteo's.

I disappear under him.

I disappear.