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"I'm still standing."

"Barely." She tugged on my forearms. "Come up here and lie down with me before you prove it."

I was far too grateful to argue. She drew me onto the bed, and we rearranged ourselves in the middle of the mattress in a tangle of limbs and one muttered apology when my elbow met her ribs. She turned her back to me, lifted her top leg over my hip, and reached down between us to guide me back inside her.

The rhythm we found asked less of my legs and considerably more of my self-control. I kissed her shoulder and the side of her neck, slid my hand across her stomach and down between her thighs, and circled her clit in time with each unhurried stroke while she reached back to hold my hip and keep me exactly where she wanted me.

"Closer," she said, so I gave her closer, my arm wrapped around her ribs and my mouth at her ear.

"I love you," she whispered, turning her head until her mouth met mine at an awkward, wonderful angle.

"I love you too," I said against her lips, and the words came out ragged and half gone. "God, Everly, I love you."

She came again with a soft, startled sound, quieter than the others, a long clenching pulse around my cock that took the last of my restraint along with it. The feeling rose from the base of my spine and wiped out every thought I had. I said her name into her hair, and I may have said other things, though I couldn't have sworn to them. I came inside her in hard, shuddering pulses, my arm locked around her, until there was nothing left in me but the heavy, uneven beat of my heart.

Neither of us moved for a long time. I was breathing as though I'd run for miles, and my muscles had stopped taking instructions altogether. Everly turned in my arms, slowly, as if she weren't certain which limbs were hers, and fit herself against my chest.

I reached down for the blanket. It took me three tries to find it.

Everly lay curled against me, her hair scattered across my chest and one leg resting comfortably over mine. We'd made a considerable mess of the bedding, and I was beginning to appreciate why humans invested in such things as comfortable mattresses and decent pillows.

My muscles ached pleasantly, and I was more tired than I could remember being in my entire existence. I wouldn't have traded the feeling for anything.

Everly lifted her head and brushed her fingers along my jaw.

"How are you feeling?"

"Wonderful. Although I suspect I'm going to discover a few muscles I didn't know could hurt in the morning."

She laughed and kissed me.

"Well, if you're sore tomorrow, I'll take very good care of you."

"That's an offer I intend to remember."

She settled beside me again, resting her hand against my chest. After a while, her fingers wandered down my arm until she found my right hand beneath the blanket.

She turned it over and studied the pale crescent at the base of my thumb.

"I was looking at this last night," she said.

I glanced at the scar.

"I remember you asking about it at the Grand."

"No, I mean afterward, when we were lying in my bed talking about the future." She threaded her fingers through mine. "I kept thinking about what my hand would look like next to yours in twenty years. I'd be almost fifty, and you'd look exactly the same."

I remembered that conversation. I'd watched her studying our hands, but I hadn't realized what she'd been imagining.

She laid them together on the blanket.

"Now we'll both look different."

"We will."

She smiled, running her thumb over my knuckles.

"I suppose neither of us knows whether you'll have gray hair or wrinkles by then."