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“Here’s the part I actually want, though.” I moved my mouth along the edge of her jaw. “I want you to ask me for it. Out loud, in words, in the exact voice you’re using right now. Not because I told you to. Because you’d rather say it than not say it.”

Her hips rolled down against me. She hadn’t planned it. The sound she made afterward was mostly frustration with herself.

“I’m demanding,” I said. “I’m going to tell you what to do and I’m going to mean it, and I’m not going to apologize for it afterward. Here is what you get in exchange.” I slid my hand out of her hair and laid it flat where her shoulders met her neck. “You come. Every time, before I do, and I don’t care how long it takes. It isn’t negotiable and it isn’t a favor. It’s the whole arrangement.”

She put her face down into my shoulder.

“Now answer me something.”

“Okay.” She got it out muffled, into my shirt.

“Are you wet?”

Her head snapped up. The careful face she wrote me grocery emails with was gone.

“Yes.” Her voice broke apart on it. “God. Yes. I’m soaked. I’ve been soaked since you grabbed my wrist and I didn’t know I could say that out loud.”

“You can say anything you want out loud in this house.”

“Since the hallway,” she said. “Eli. Since the hallway. You looked at me and you couldn’t talk and I have never in my life⁠—”

I put my hand back in her hair and pulled her mouth down onto mine.

I’d been putting that off since August, and hardest for the last hour, and when it broke, it broke completely. The sound she pushed into my mouth was one I’d be hearing in my sleep for weeks. Her hands locked behind my head. She opened her mouth under mine and gave me all of it. The tape dragged on the split in my lip and the sting of it ran up into my eye socket, and I didn’t stop for it and neither did she. I got both hands under her and moved her against me, hard, once.

She broke off the kiss with a noise, high and startled.

“Do that again?” she said.

“Say it properly.”

“Please do that again.”

I did it again. I set the pace and made it slower than she wanted, and I held her down hard on every pass so she got the length of me through both layers. Her leggings soaked through at the seam and the wet came through to the wool. She tried to speed it up, and then tried again, and both times I stopped her dead, until she whimpered in protest, and then I started her again at my speed. The stool creaked under the two of us on every pass, and her toes curled hard on the rung where she’d hooked them.

“Look at me.”

She looked at me. She was wrecked. Her hair was all over the place, her mouth was open, and she had both hands full of my shirt.

“I bet you can come like this,” I said. “Can’t you?”

Her hips moved down against me before she got a word out.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never done that.”

“That’s not a no.”

“No,” she said. “It’s not a no.”

“Then take it.”

She got a fistful of the back of my shirt and put her forehead against my temple and quit trying to control any part of it. I had her where I wanted her and didn’t let up. Her breath turned ragged against my ear. She said my name and then lost it. Sweat rose along her hairline.

It came up all at once, with nothing gradual in it. She went rigid on top of me, and then it broke loose against the length of me in a hard, stuttering pulse she had no say in, each clench of it driving down through the wool and the leggings and into me. Her thighs clamped down on the outsides of mine and shook there. She was loud into my neck on every breath, past any word she might have reached for, and I got both arms around her and didn’t let go while she came apart in my lap in my kitchen wearing my name.

Then I went. I didn’t plan it and there was no stopping it. I had my hands full of her hips and she was still shaking on top of me, and I came in my own suit pants with my vision graying at the edges. It went on and on, wave after wave through my hips and down the backs of my legs.

I said her name into her hair and got no further.