Through sheer will Aoife limited herself as she slowly slid every bit of him inside, taking tiny sips of his essence instead of the gigantic gulps her body was screaming for, aching for, clamoring for. The pleasure threatened to break her resolve but she managed to both revel in the orgasms that rippled through her and keep from taking him too far - t'was a close thing. As his own climax overwhelmed him she felt his heart skip out of time and missing a beat or two before shuddering back into rhythm. As he collapsed beneath her she noticed the gray hairs on his temples, the lines next to his eyes, all new. Indeed, time to go.
The things he started murmuring as she sprawled next to him only reinforced the need to break it off. She sent him away with a kiss that still tasted like her, and it was all she could do to not slam the door shut and fuck him against it. In the end she more or less shoved him out, slumping against the frame despite the raw energy surging through her. His life would be shortened from having been with her, but not too much. Days, a couple of weeks, maybe a month. She'd learned how to take what she needed and little more, so there'd never be an Eammon again.
Eammon.
She frowned as the guilt that lapped up against her, as if it had been her fault, as if she'd known who that fella was the night he'd shown up at the tavern she worked at, what with his clever words and rakish smile. Didn't know he was mate to that woman who lived in the woods - some called her healer, other called her witch, but Aoife reckoned the latter part had been proven accurate. "Find your own, then," the hag had snarled at her a few days later, before smacking Aoife with what appeared to be a black cat's tail - sans the rest of the cat - dipped in . . . something. Blood? As disagreeable as that sounded it was better than some other options that came to mind. At first she had laughed it off, not afraid of some crazy slag, and it wasn't long before Eammon met her and took her away from a lifetime of being groped and pinched. He had a bold heart and nearly made her pass out from pleasure when they coupled, leaving her feeling even better long afterwards, though she didn't know why.
Not right away.
When her big tree of a man had withered away and died within six months of meeting her, she didn't make the connection. Mayhap it was cancer - medicine in the 17th century wasn't particularly enlightened - but she only knew that while her husband was gone her libido was most certainly not. Ignoring it made her feel weak, tired. Her hair began to turn gray and fall out. Though it had only been a dozen months since the final time Eammon possessed the strength to lie with her, her face bore the ravages of twenty times that. Easy enough to find a willing partner, and after she felt and saw the difference at once. Younger, stronger. This time she fled before there could be a repeat, and so the pattern began. Trying to find her own, if he existed. Trying to break the curse.
She texted him after she was out of town, saying she was too old for him. She was browsing Tinder candidates in her next destination - wonderful thing, technology - when he replied: you don't look a day over forty.
Aoife smiled. "You left off 'decades,' boyo."
