He is hard and ready, the tip of him leaking.
I spread my legs and pull him into me in one shuddering movement.
His palm finds the window frame, the muscles in his forearm flexing with each thrust, and he begins to move, notwith frantic desperation, but with a rhythm so sure, so perfectly measured, it feels like I am being played—like he knows exactly how I need it before I do.
The oil lamp flickers, painting us across the ceiling in long, tangled shadows, and I watch them stretch and ripple in time with the tension coiling low in my belly.
He adjusts his angle, shifts just slightly, and the next thrust brushes a place inside me that makes my vision scatter at the edges.
I gasp again, louder this time, and he hears it, feels the way I tighten around him, and growls low against my neck.
"That's it," he murmurs, his voice like smoke dragged across velvet.
"Right there. You feel that?"
I nod, or try to, but the movement breaks apart as he rolls his hips deeper, slower, then faster again, never frantic, always exacting.
One hand slides between us, his fingers finding that aching spot already slick and swollen, and the moment he touches me there, circling, pressing, my back bows and the first climax rushes through me with such force I cry out his name, my voice broken and bare.
He doesn't stop.
He rides me through it, his cock relentless, hand merciless, pushing me higher again before I can come down, and when the second wave hits, I nearly sob.
My whole body clamps around him, desperate and involuntary, and I feel him pulse harder inside me, feel the way his rhythm breaks, stutters, and then steadies again with sheer control.
"You don't get to stop yet," he says, words rough against my ear, and he shifts again, angling deeper, harder, each stroke hitting that place inside me with unerring precision until I am nothing but nerve endings and fire, until I am writhing beneath him with tears caught at the corners of my eyes.
The third climax builds slower, thicker, dragging through me like syrup, my thighs shaking around his hips, my hands scrambling for purchase in his hair, on his shoulders, anywhere I can hold him to me.
When it crests, it doesn't explode so much as shatter, my whole body going rigid before melting entirely, boneless and wet beneath him.
Only then does he let go, with a guttural sound torn from his chest, one final thrust that buries him deep, his whole body shuddering as he spills inside me.
He collapses over me, breathing hard, his mouth pressed to my shoulder, and we lie like that, our sweat mingling, our shadows gone soft on the walls as the oil burns low.
A while later, he stands up, drapes a blanket over me, and strides to the window.
For a while, I float on the surface of my own skin, nothing left but pulse and afterglow, the sweat cooling into salt.
The room is blue and black, all color leached by the dying lamp.
I stay on the chaise, legs tangled in the blanket.
Ruairí stands by the window, his reflection a double exposure against the world beyond.
He buttons his shirt with the slow precision of someone reassembling armor.
When he is dressed, he does not move to leave.
He rests his forehead on the glass and exhales a long ribbon of vapor.
Outside, the wind has picked up, and the branches of the old birch scratch at the pane with the persistence of small, angry birds.
I imagine him counting the seconds between gusts, recalibrating whatever internal clock governs his patience.
I sit up, comb my hair with my fingers, and pull the gown tight around my waist.
I am not cold, but I pretend to be.
