"Come for me," I say against her ear.
She does.
Her orgasm hits like the whole thing was waiting for permission and finally got it — her cunt clenching around me, tight and rhythmic, her whole body arching hard off the ground, her nails finding my back through my shirt and digging in. The sound she makes belongs to the dark and the salt air and everything that got her here, weeks of fear and want, and her face in the middle of it is the most undefended I've ever seen her.
She looks like someone who has been given back something lost.
That's what breaks me.
Her face in that moment undoes the last of my control. I follow her over the edge with the next thrust, burying myself deep, my whole body shuddering through the release while her walls are still pulsing around me.
A sound comes out of me, low and wrecked, my forehead dropping to her shoulder. I hold there, buried in her, shaking slightly, which is something I don't do.
My breath comes back slowly. Her chest rises and falls beneath me, ragged at first, then steadying. The mangroves are dark above us. No wind — just the distant pulse of the city, so faint it might be imagined, and beneath that the smell of salt water and wet bark and the two of us.
I roll off her.
The cold air hits immediately, the absence of her warmth registering before anything else. I lie on my back beside her, staring up at the interlocking branches overhead, breathing returning to something functional. My shirt is damp with exertion. Her dress is somewhere to my left, silk in the dirt. She's still bare beside me, still shivering in fine waves — the aftermath of fear and release all leaving the body at once.
The roots press into my back painfully, and I reach over and roll her on top of me, so I can be her mattress. The back of herhead nestles on my shoulder and we both stare at the canopy above us.
Neither of us speaks.
Her hand finds mine in the dark. Not gripping. Just landing there, her fingers resting over mine, the lightest possible contact. She's not asking for anything. She's just choosing to be with me.
I don't move. The city hums its distant hum. The branches hold still above us. Her breathing slows and mine slows and the two of us lie in the cold dark.
Her body rises and falls with every breath I take.
17 - Wren
The forest floor is cold against my back.
The damp press of earth and root and leaf litter, the cool air moving over my skin. My heart is still coming down. My body is still humming, satisfied and wrecked in equal measure, every nerve ending lit and slowly dimming like filament after a power cut.
I lie still for a moment and let it happen.
The mangroves press close overhead, their canopy blocking the sky completely. No stars, no moon — just the green-black dark and the smell of salt and wet bark and us. I can hear my own breathing evening out. I can hear his.
Then a cool breeze wafts over my skin and I remember, with a jolt, that I have nothing on.
I sit up slowly.
My dress is beside me in the dirt. I pick it up and hold it in the available dark and the news is not good. The zipper is intact, technically, but the silk is torn in two places along the bodice and the hem is muddy beyond recovery. The bottle green is a ruin — completely, irrecoverably — and I set it down in the forest with a small sigh.
My heels are somewhere nearby; I find them by touch, but there's no putting them back on — one strap has snapped clean through, and the forest floor between here and the car is nothing a heel was designed for. I set them down beside the dress.
He's standing a few feet away. Fully dressed, jacket somewhere in the car, but everything else on — shirt, trousers,the belt buckled again. Composed. Watching me. His hair is slightly disordered; that's the only evidence of the last hour. He looks like a man who stepped off a path to check something and is now ready to continue.
I am sitting in the dirt naked.
"The dress is ruined," I say.
"Yes."
"You knew it would be."
He looks at me. Says nothing.
