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The poem arrives more easily than Juney’s name did. “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.”
Heather’s attention shifts toward the door, in the direction of the other two men. “Appropriate.”
I unfasten the next button. “For you as yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend.”
Heather catches the open sides of my shirt and pulls me between her knees. She removes my shirt, folds it once, and places it over the chair. “Continue.”
I give her the next lines while she opens my trousers. Donne asks his God to break, blow, burn and make him new. Heather listens with one hand inside my waistband and the other working the fastening loose.
When I finish the line, she frees my cock and closes her fingers around it. The poem stops. Heather waits. I find the next word while her thumb passes once beneath the head.
“I, like an usurp’d town, to another due, labor to admit you.”
“Who is the usurper?” she asks.
I look at the pink mushroom lamp, Jamie’s doll beneath her blanket and the door she left unlocked behind me. “Nathaniel.”
Heather pulls my trousers down. “Take them off.”
I step out of them and add them to the chair. Heather looks at my underwear. I remove those too.
She remains dressed. Her hand moves over my chest, down my stomach and around my cock again. She gives me one slow stroke, then tightens at the base. “Who lives in my green room?”
“Oliver.”
“Who locked the front door?”
“I did.”
Heather releases me and points to the bed. “On your back.”
Jamie’s miniature shifts when I lie down. I move carefully enough not to crush it, which feels like a concession he’ll somehow discover and become intolerable about.
Heather takes my wrists and places them above my head. “Keep them there.”
I hold the wooden slats of the headboard because open hands feel too temporary. Heather watches my fingers close around them.
“You may continue.”
“Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend.”
Heather stands and removes her dress. There’s nothing beneath it.
My grip tightens against the headboard. “But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.”
She climbs onto the bed and places one knee beside my head. Her other leg follows until she’s kneeling over my face.
“Captivated reason,” she says. “That does sound like you.”
“The word is captive.”
“I know what the word is.”
Heather lowers herself onto my mouth. The poem ends beneath her.
Her hand closes in my hair and directs my tongue before I can decide where to begin. She rocks against my mouth twice, then stops. “Your hands moved.”
My left wrist has shifted half an inch down the headboard. I return it to the place she chose.