Page 9

“A few,” he says, and I laugh, and he takes the laugh out of my mouth.

He is careful with me. His hands stay light, and his mouth goes slow, and every few seconds he stops and looks at me to see whether I have changed my mind since the last time he looked. It is lovely for about a minute. Then it is not enough, and I say so.

“You can stop checking.”

He does not stop checking.

“I mean it. Stop being careful with me. I want your hands hard and I want your mouth where it was going before you stopped to look at me.”

His hands shake.

After that he does not check.

The table is the only furniture in the room. It is filthy, and neither of us cares. He puts his coat down, and I don’t notice him doing it until I am on it, with the grit of the boards under my heels. He gets my knees apart with one hand and then stops there, looking, and I want him to keep looking, and I say so.

“Tell me what you want,” he says.

“You. I’ve wanted you since you stopped my voice flying up into the roof. It’s insane and I don’t care.”

“Louder.”

“I want you.”

He puts his mouth on me.

I am not ready for it. I get a fistful of his hair and make a noise with no words in it, and this beautiful room hands the noise straight back to me, and he makes a sound against my cunt that I feel in my teeth.

He is thorough about it. Two fingers working in me and his tongue slow and filthy, and every time I go loud he does it again, and when I come it goes through me sideways and my heels skid on the boards and the table shifts on the floorboards with a scrape that anyone on the stairs could hear.

“Oh,” I say, when I can. “Get your trousers off.”

He does, and it is not graceful either, and when I get my hand round his cock he stops dead with his forehead against my collarbone and drags in a breath.

“Enora.”

“You said you didn’t know my name.”

“I never said that.”

Then he is pushing into me, and it is too much. The stretch of him stops my breath. The table is cold under my back and he is cold against my front and I am the only warm thing in the room, and I get both hands on his shoulders and hold on while my body works out what to do with him.

Then it is exactly enough. He stops with his whole weight held off me on one arm.

“Move,” I say.

“Wait.”

“I’ve waited my whole life, move.”

He moves. After that I lose the order of things. His hand spread wide under the small of my back, lifting me into it. The scrape of the table. The gull out on the slates.

My own voice going up into that low perfect ceiling and coming back down in pieces, and his, which does not go up at all, which stays where he puts it, right against my ear, saying lady, saying please, saying a word in no language I have ever heard.

“There,” I say. “There, there.”

“I know.”

“You don’t know anything, you won’t tell me anything.”