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“Say it.”
“Eli.”
“Say it all.”
“You’re running it.” Her voice had dropped into a register I hadn’t heard out of her all night. “I’m not.”
“Again.”
“I’m not running it.”
“Good.” I put my hand back where it had been, and she groaned, and there were no words anywhere in it. “Now don’t talk.”
She didn’t talk.
I kept my own clothes on for the first part of it. I started at her mouth and didn’t stay there, took my time at her breasts until her back arched up off the bed, then spread my free hand on her stomach and pressed her down into the mattress.
“Still.”
She did. Then I took my hand off her wrists and left them where they were. “Keep them there.”
She kept them there. I hooked my fingers in her underwear and drew it down her legs and dropped it off the end of the bed, got both hands under her hips and pulled her down the mattress to me, and put my mouth on her. The noise she made at the first stroke of my tongue wasn’t a word in any language. Her hand came off the sheet and into my hair, and I stopped everything.
“Put it back.”
“Eli—”
“Put it back.”
She put it back.
I went slow, because I had her in a bed with the night ahead of us, and I wanted to learn what she liked. She got quiet a long time before she got loud, and the quiet was what I worked for. When her thighs started to shake against my ears I eased off and waited, and she swore into her own arm, desperate, and I started again from further back. When I finally let her have it she broke against my mouth, her thighs snapping shut around my head and her body lifting off the bed, and I stayed on her with my hand spread across her hipbone to hold her down and took all of it, her clenching against my tongue in hard, uneven flutters, soaking my chin, saying my name in broken pieces until she lost the shape of it.
She was still coming down when I stood up and took my clothes off. She watched me do it, up on both elbows in the dark with her hair wrecked, and she didn’t look away. Nobody had ever looked at me like that.
“Come here,” she said.
“No,” I said. Her breath caught. “Ask properly.”
It took her a second. “Please come here.”
I got the nightstand drawer open. The box in it had been there since the morning, since before I drove my daughter to Peoria. I got one out and rolled it on, and she watched my hands do it.
“That was in there before tonight.”
“Since this morning.”
“You were ready for me.”
“I’ve been ready for you since the pantry.” I put my knee on the mattress. “This morning I was organized.”
Her laugh started and didn’t finish. I got one knee between hers and she opened for me, and I put my hand under her jaw and held her face while I pushed into her, slowly, because I wanted to see her for the first one. I bottomed out against her and stopped there, both arms shaking.
“Look at me.”
She looked at me.
I set the pace and it wasn’t the pace she’d have picked, and whenever she tried to speed it up I stopped moving and waited until she went loose again underneath me. She figured it out after a couple of tries. After that she took what I gave her and was loud about every stroke of it. Then I got an arm under the small of her back and tipped her hips up and changed the angle, and she stopped making noise altogether.
