"On the bed," he says.
I sit. He presses me back. My bound wrists above my head, his hand pinning them to the pillow. The grip firm, certain. His other hand moving down my body, hooking into the waistband of my underwear and pulling it down and off, and the combination—the restraint, the exposure, the absolute confidence of his hands—breaks the last resistance in me.
His mouth follows his hands. Down my throat, my sternum, the hollow below my ribs. Slow. Unhurried. The pace of a man who is in no rush because the waiting is part of it—the deliberate, maddening patience of a man who knows exactly what he's doing and will not be hurried by the sounds I'm making, which are getting louder and less coherent with every inch of skin his mouth covers.
"Please," I say. The word I gave him the first time. It doesn't terrify me now. It feels like breathing.
"Please what?" His mouth against my hip bone. His breath warm on skin that's already burning.
"Don't make me wait."
"You made me wait three weeks."
The words send something through me that is halfway between fury and desire and lands somewhere devastating. He's right. I made him wait. And now he's making me wait and the symmetry is deliberate and the patience is a form of power and the power is what I need from him. The steadiness. The control. The man who holds the frame while I exist inside it.
He doesn't make me wait much longer. His mouth moves lower and his hands hold my hips and when his tongue finds meI make a sound that I've never made for anyone—raw, stripped, the sound of a woman being known by a man who has spent months learning her and is now applying every piece of that knowledge to the project of taking her apart.
I come with his mouth on me and my bound wrists above my head and the orgasm is a detonation—not the slow build of the first time but an explosion, sudden and total, my body arching off the mattress, my hands straining against the silk, a sound torn from my throat that fills the bedroom and dies against the windows.
He doesn't stop. He doesn't give me time to recover. He moves up my body—his weight settling over me, into me, his mouth finding mine, and I taste myself on his lips and the intimacy of that is shattering. Then he's inside me and the sound I make is not a word. It's deeper than language, the sound a body makes when it finds the thing it's been missing for three weeks, for years, for its entire life.
He moves. The rhythm he sets is the one I know—authoritative, unhurried, and precise—but harder now. More urgent. Three weeks of absence compressed into each stroke. His hand is still on my bound wrists, pinning them, and his other hand grips my hip and the pressure of his fingers will leave marks and I want the marks. I want the evidence. I want to look at my body tomorrow and see where he held me and know that the holding was real.
"Look at me," I say.
He looks at me. His eyes dark and completely unguarded and I hold his gaze while he moves and the holding is harder than any weld I've ever done. The sustained act of looking at another person without walls and letting them look back.
"Harder," I say.
He obeys. The pace shifts—faster, deeper, the control still there but straining now, the composure cracking under the force of what's moving between us. His breathing changes. His jaw tightens. I can see him reaching the edge of his own discipline and the sight of Damien Cross losing control—this man, this precise, dangerous, immaculate man—coming undone inside me is the most powerful thing I've ever witnessed.
I come again. Different this time—slower, deeper, a wave that starts in my spine and rolls through me and takes him with it. I feel him follow—his body shuddering, his breath breaking against my neck, the sound he makes which is my name spoken like a prayer—and I wrap my bound wrists around his neck and pull him against me and hold him there.
We lie in the dark. His hand in my hair. My crooked finger against his ribs, in the groove between the bones where it fits. The place it's always fit.
His breathing slows. Mine slows. The city hums outside the windows. The silk is loose around my wrists, warm from our body heat, and I leave it there because it feels like a promise rather than a constraint.
"The sculpture," I say. Half asleep. "The two forms. The space between them."
"Mm."
"That's us. That space. The tension, the leaning." I press closer to him. "You don't close it. You let it hold."
His arm tightens around me.
"I know," he says. "I knew when I first saw your work. The space is where the whole piece lives."
"Nish said something like that."
"Nish is right."
I almost smile. The ghost of it against his chest.
"Don't watch me sleep," I murmur.
"I'm going to watch you sleep."
"I know."
