"That's cruel," she breathes.
"Yes," I agree.
I pull her underwear down her legs and she steps out of it without being asked.
I put it in my pocket and watch the look on her face when I do — that flash of something that is equal parts scandalized and desperately turned on — and then I hike her leg up around my hip and pin her against the vanity and look her in the eye.
"Tell me to stop."
She grabs the back of my neck and pulls my mouth down to hers instead.
I push inside her in one slow, deliberate stroke and swallow the sound she makes.
She's still tight around me, still adjusting, and I don't move, I just stay there, buried to the hilt, my forehead dropping to hers, both of us breathing and I feel her everywhere, feel every place we're connected, and the wordminemoves through me like something breaking loose from its foundations.
Fuck. Fuck, this woman will be the death of me.
"Look at me," I say.
Her eyes open.
God, those eyes.
"Remember this," I say, and I start to move.
I don't go easy on her. That's not what this is. This is not tender, not gentle and when she gasps and her head falls back I bring it back up with a hand in her hair because I need her eyes on me, need herhere, need her to understand with her whole body what she's choosing to walk away from.
She understands.
I can feel it in the way she moves with me, in the way her nails carve lines down my back through my shirt, in the sounds she's swallowing against my shoulder because we are thirty feet from her future father-in-law and she cannot make a sound and the effort of staying quiet is making her shake.
I feel her come apart, the full-body shudder she can't control, the way she buries her face in my neck and bites down to stay silent, the desperate clench of her around me and I follow her over the edge with my jaw locked shut and my face pressed against her hair and something in my chest cracking open that I don't have a name for.
We don't move for a long moment.
Her breathing slows. My grip on her loosens by degrees. The sounds of the house come back in, the planner's voice somewhere distant, the ordinary movement of staff, the world that doesn't know what just happened in this bathroom continuing to turn without us.
Isabella lifts her head.
She looks wrecked. She holds her hand out without a word, not looking away from me.
I reach into my pocket.
I hold her underwear for just a second. Her eyes narrow fractionally.
I give it back.
She steps into it. Smooths her dress with steady hands. Turns to the mirror and repairs her lipstick and fixes her hair with the methodical efficiency of a woman who has been composing herself in mirrors her whole life and does it so well that by the time she turns back around she looks like nothing happened.
Only I know better. Only I can see the slight color in her face, the bruise forming at her throat where I was careless, the way she doesn't quite meet my eyes.
"This doesn't change anything," she says.
The words land like they always do. Like she's saying them to herself as much as me.
"I know," I say.
She walks out.
