Page 24

He lets me. For a long while that is all he does: he sits on the edge of my bed with his hands loose on his knees and lets a woman half his size handle him like stock being checked over.

I pull my shift over my head and let it fall beside the bed.

Then I put my mouth on him and he stops being patient.

His hand comes into my hair, not pulling, just holding, and his breath goes out of him against my scalp, and I do that for as long as I can stand it, until the sound of him not making any sound is more than I can be in the same room with.

I get up onto the bed and onto him. He is careful with every touch, too light and then not. Cold hands up the outsides of my thighs. Cold mouth on my collarbone, my throat, the inside of my elbow when I brace my arm past his head against the wall.

Every place he leaves goes hot and stays hot, so I know where his mouth has been without a light.

He lies back and guides me higher, his hands steadying my hips until my knees are planted beside his shoulders.

Then his mouth finds the wet of me, and my knee goes out from under me on the mattress, and he holds me up by the hips with both hands and takes his time, and I have to put the heel of my hand against my own mouth to keep the noise inside my teeth.

He is not in a hurry. He was not in a hurry on the table either, and I know now that he was thinking about this then, and when I come it takes me apart quietly, all of it going into my shut mouth and my shaking arms and nowhere else.

I do not say a word.

The blanket comes off the door at some point and neither of us goes to hang it back up.

I move back down his body until I am kneeling over his hips. My thighs are still shaking from his mouth. All I can hear is our breathing and the mattress and my own pulse in my ears, and the quiet does not frighten me.

I get my hand round his cock and he shudders under me, the whole length of him, once.

“Nothing,” I whisper, when his mouth opens.

He shuts it.

I hold him where I want him and sink down. He is thick, and cold, and I am hot and slick from his mouth, and the first inch of him stops my breath. I go slowly because I have to. I take a little, lift, and take more. His hands stay open on my thighs and he lets me.

When he is all the way inside me I have to stop, bent over him with my forehead against his and both my hands on his chest. I am so full of him I cannot think. I want to move, and I make myself be still. He holds the small of my back and waits, breathing like a bellows, saying nothing at all because I told him not to.

Then I move.

The table was fast. This is slow and close and almost more than I can stand, and I have to bite down on the sounds trying to come out of me because the sounds have words in them and the words have a name in them.

He feels me do it. He puts his hand up into my hair and holds the back of my skull and does not make me stop.

I come like that. Upright. Mouth shut, teeth in my own lip. No noise at all. It goes on and on because there is nowhere for it to go.

Then his hips come up off the bed once, twice, and he breaks with his face pressed into my throat and his arms shut round my ribs hard enough to hurt, and the only sound in the room is a man breathing out hard through his nose, once.

Afterward I lie on him because he is the only thing in this house I can put my head on. He is cold and I am hot, and neither of us fixes it.

His hand moves in my hair, once. The same once as the counting room.

I could say it now. Was that you? Three syllables, and I think he would give me the truth this time.

“You are not talking,” he says.

“You’re going to want to be careful,” I say, into his chest. “That’s very nearly a question.”

His hand goes still.

“I don’t need the noise with you,” I say. “The noise is for rooms with people in them.”

Some long time later he gets up, and he dresses in the dark, and at the door he stops.