My hand fisted in her hair. Not pulling—gathering. The dark strands wound around my fingers, the tension between us a living thing, a third presence in the bed. My other hand slid under her. Found her. The slick, swollen center of her where every nerve ending had been edged past reason.
“Ask me,” I said.
“Please Daddy.” No resistance this time. No fight. Just the words, given freely, given with everything she had. “Please.”
“Come for me.”
She did.
The orgasm hit her like a wave breaking—her whole body seizing, her back arching against my chest, the sound that tore out of her loud and raw and real. I felt it around me—the rhythmic tightening, the pulse of her, the way her body claimed mine in the act of coming apart. Her hands gripped the sheets. Her teeth found the pillow. She shook.
I followed. The release tore through me with a force that whited out my vision—everything narrowing to the single pointof contact between us, her body around mine, the heat and the pressure and the specific, devastating fact of being inside the woman I loved while she came undone.
I stayed inside her.
My chest against her back. My mouth finding the nape of her neck—the vulnerable place where her hair parted, where the skin was softest, where I could feel her pulse decelerating by degrees.
“Cora,” I said. Against her skin. Into the warmth of her.
Her name in my mouth like a prayer. Like a promise. Like the only word I’d ever need to know.
Westayedlikethatuntil the light changed.
I held her. My arms around her, her back against my chest, the space between us eliminated. Zero distance. The closest two people could get without actually merging, which was a thing I would’ve done if the physics had allowed it. Just absorbed her. Taken her inside the ribcage and kept her there, warm and safe, where nothing could reach her that didn’t go through me first.
Midge had relocated to the pillow at some point during the proceedings. She was pretending to be asleep with the rigid conviction of a creature who had witnessed the entire thing and was electing to have no comment.
“Shower,” I said.
“Mmm.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one you’re getting.”
I carried her. She didn’t argue. Her arms went around my neck. The rabbit dropped from the bed to the floor again. I’d get it later.
The shower was the ritual continued.
I’d run the water to the temperature I’d learned—the threshold between hot and too-hot, the precise degree where her shoulders dropped and her spine curved and the last of whatever she was carrying released. Steam filled the small bathroom. The mirror vanished. The world contracted to the tile and the water and the two of us inside it.
The rosemary shampoo filled my palm. I worked it through her hair — the long strokes, the circles at her scalp, the technique I’d been practicing since the first morning with the brush. She leaned against me. Her back against my chest under the spray, the water running over both of us, her head tipped back against my shoulder. Her eyes were closed. Her mouth was soft. She looked like someone who had set down a heavy thing and was standing there marveling at how light her hands felt.
I rinsed her. Shielded her eyes. The gesture that arrived without thought every time—my palm across her forehead, fingers spread, the instinct so deep I didn’t even register it as a choice anymore. It was just the thing my hand did when water was near her face.
She turned. Looked up at me through the steam. Water on her lashes. Water on the scar through her eyebrow.
“Thank you,” she said.
Two words. Quiet. Carrying more than their weight.
I kissed her forehead. Turned off the water.
We were heading to Caruso’s. Dante and Marco needed to talk to me about our plan to gather the families. Cora, I hoped, would spend some time with Gemma. Have a chance to be small, maybe.
The drive was quiet. The good quiet. The kind we‘d built between us over days—silence that wasn’t absence but presence, the shared understanding that some moments didn‘t need words and were better without them. She held the rabbit in her lap. Midge’s head swiveled, tracking the city through the windshield.
Dante’s building. Brick. The converted warehouse with its expensive renovation that pretended to be simple. I parked. Came around.
