Her breathing changes when she hears my clothes hit the tile, a sharp little hitch, but she doesn't turn around.
I enter the water.
She flinches when I touch her shoulder and my hand stays where it is.
"Turn around."
"I don't—"
"Turn around."
She turns.
I don't look down. It takes everything I have, but I don't look down. I look at her face instead—the flush on her cheeks, the uncertainty in her eyes, the way her teeth catch her lower lip.
I want to bite that lip. Pull it between my teeth and make her moan into my mouth while I fuck her against the edge of this pool.
"Sit," I say. "There's a ledge."
She finds it, lowering herself until the water reaches her collarbone, and I sit behind her, close, my knees bracketing her hips.
I reach for the soap.
I wash her hair first. My fingers work through the tangles, and she makes a small sound when I scratch her scalp. I add it to the catalog I'm building—the sounds she makes, thethings that break her composure, the places I'll exploit when she finally lets me.
"You don't have to—"
"Stop telling me what I don't have to do."
She goes quiet.
I rinse the soap from her hair, tilting her head back with one hand. Her throat is exposed. Long. Pale. I can see her pulse fluttering under the skin.
I don't bite.
It's a near thing.
I move to her shoulders instead, working the soap into her skin, feeling the knots of tension under my fingers, pressing until she exhales.
Then lower. Her back.
The scars are easier to see in the water, in the light. More of them than I realized. Some thin, some thick, some layered on top of each other where the whip landed twice in the same place.
Discipline, she called it.
My jaw aches from how hard I'm clenching it.
I wash each one. Trace the lines with my fingers. She's tense under my hands, waiting for me to say something, and I don't. I just touch her. Learn the map her father left on her skin.
When I'm done, I press my mouth to the worst one, a thick ridge near her shoulder blade, and she shivers.
"Órhal," I murmur against the scar. "Mine. These are mine now. Every scar. Every mark. Mine."
"What does that mean?" she asks. "That word."
"Later."
She doesn't respond. But she doesn't pull away either.
