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She’s soaked before I get there. I spread her thighs with my shoulders and lay my right forearm across her hips, and when she tries to lift into my mouth, it holds her down.

“Colt.”

“Nobody down the hall tonight,” I say against her. “Let me hear it.”

I lick her slow and flat until her thighs start to shake, then find her clit and stay there, and slide two fingers into her and curl them. She grabs a fistful of the sheet and holds on. She’s so wet my wrist is slick with it.

She comes loud. No pillow, no hand, nothing in the way of it. Her pussy clenches on my fingers and her hips fight my arm and lose, and when she says my name it isn’t an instruction. I don’t stop. I keep my mouth on her through all of it, until she pushes at my head with the heel of her hand.

I’m kissing the inside of her knee when she puts two fingers flat on my chest. She doesn’t push. She doesn’t have to. I go over onto my back.

She strips the sweatpants off me herself. She takes my cock in her hand and strokes me once, root to tip, slow, watching my face, and I hear the sound I make.

She gets the nightstand drawer open and rolls the condom down my cock with her eyes on mine. Then she climbs over me, a knee on each side of my hips, and takes me in her hand and holds me right there, the head of me pressed against her, wet and hot, and doesn’t move.

“Astrid.”

“Wait.”

I wait. I’ve held still for a lot of things in my life, and none of them were this.

Then she sinks down onto me, slow enough to kill a man. She’s tight and soaked and she doesn’t stop until she’s sitting all the way down on me, and I lose every word I know.

She sets the pace. Slow at first, her palms flat on my chest, rolling her hips so I feel every inch of her. When I get both hands on her hips and drive up into her to take it back, she gives it to me for three strokes, and she lets me hear exactly what they do to her. Then she lifts my right hand off her, presses it into the mattress beside my head, and leaves her own hand on top of it.

“No,” she says. “Mine.”

My left hand is on her hip, and then it isn’t.

It comes off her the way it’s been coming off things for months, and I go to put it back. She gets there first. She takes it by the wrist, puts it where it was, and holds it there with her own hand flat over the top of mine. She doesn’t say a word about it and she doesn’t slow down.

Since November I’ve been putting that hand back by myself in the dark. I don’t trust my voice, so I don’t use it.

She rides me like she has all night and means to spend it. She leans back with one hand on my thigh, and I watch my cock slide in and out of her, and I’m almost gone, and she knows. She knows before I do. She lifts until only the head of me is inside her and holds there and watches my face until I come back from the edge. Then she takes me all the way down again. She does it until I’m swearing at the ceiling and my heels are digging into the mattress.

“You hold your breath right before,” she says. “Every time.”

“Astrid. Please.”

Something crosses her face that I’m going to be thinking about when I’m ninety.

She comes down over me until her breasts are against my chest and her mouth is at my ear, and she keeps my hand pinned to her hip the whole way.

“Now,” she says.

She grinds down hard and comes first, clenching around me so tight it’s nearly pain, and she takes me right over with her. I come buried in her with her name going into her hair, and it’s a long time before either of us is any use to anybody.

She’s falling asleep on the side nearest the door, which is her side.

“Astrid.”

“Mm.”

“What time does Gabi bring her?”

“Early.”

“Okay.”