Page 72

She tried to speed me up. She came off the stone and started chasing it. I took my right hand off her thigh, laid my forearm across her hips, and put her back down where she’d been. She gave it everything she had and my arm didn’t move.

“Oh my god.”

“Slow,” I said, against her. “You’ll get it. You’ll get it the way I want to give it to you.”

She made a sound with no consonants in it.

Then she quit fighting me. Her spine let go against the cabinet, her hands went loose in my hair, her hips stopped trying to steer. Nobody had taken it off her. I’d asked, she’d answered out loud, and now she was lying back on my own granite handing it over a piece at a time, and the sound she made while she did it was relief.

I settled in and found the stroke that made her thighs shake, a long slow drag and then a pull with my lips, and I did only that, over and over, until she was making a noise on every breath and the noises ran into each other.

She said please twice. The first one was a negotiation. The second one wasn’t.

“Look at me,” I said.

She got her head up off the cabinet. It took real effort. Her eyes came down the length of her own body and found mine and stayed there, wide open and wrecked, and she didn’t look away, and I’d been wanting that since a hotel bed in Calgary.

I took her clit into my mouth and sucked and didn’t let go.

She came with her eyes on me. She had both fists in my hair, pulling until it stung, and her thighs locked around my ears until the room went muffled and a long way off, and her back came up off the stone against my forearm and stayed there. I didn’t let up. I stayed on her through all of it and brought her down gentle and then gentler than that, and I kept going until she got a hand on my shoulder and pushed.

I straightened up.

She was flat back against the cabinet with her legs shaking and both hands out beside her, palms up on the stone. She got her eyes open and put them on my face and produced no words at all. Her hairline was wet and so was the hollow of her throat.

My mouth and chin were wet with her. I left it. I wanted her to see it there, and she did, and her eyes dropped to my mouth and her thighs came together and opened again.

“Don’t,” she said. “That was all of it. There is no more of me in here.”

“Noted.”

I didn’t ask her if it was good. Neither of us needed it said out loud.

I ran the tap until it went cold, filled her mug, and put it in her hand, and she drank half of it down without taking her eyes off my face. Then I put my hand on the back of her neck, damp under my palm, my forehead against hers, and stood there while her breathing dropped to a pace a person could live at.

Her jeans were on the tile by my foot, still inside out. I picked them up, worked her underwear out of them, and put both into her hands.

“Don’t watch me do this.”

“I’m watching.”

She got into them sitting on the counter, two attempts and a hand on my shoulder, and gave up on the zipper and called the button good enough.

Across the kitchen Gerald sat facing the window with his back to all of it. It was the most tact anybody in my house had ever shown me.

She got down off the counter eventually and had to hold my arm to do it.

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay.”

“I’m going to go out through that door now, and it’s the worst thing I have ever done.”

“Noted.”

“You’re not going to say anything else, are you?”

“No.”