I pick up my pace, and she arches against the tile.
“Oh my?—”
“My name,” I say, low, in her ear. “That’s the only name you can call while I’m inside of you.”
“Rolan.” It’s not delivered in a gasp. It’s deliberate. She says it on purpose, looking at me, and the combination of my name on her lips and the eye contact removes the last of my control.
I follow her over with an orgasm.
I wash her after.
My hands find the soap before I’ve decided to reach for it. She goes still when I start, surprised but not protesting, and I run my hands over her shoulders, her back, the curve of her waist and breasts, learning her body with my palms. Her skin rises in goosebumps despite the shower’s heat.
She doesn’t speak. Neither do I.
We dry off, and she reaches for her pajamas.
“No,” I say.
She glances at me.
“The shirt.” I indicate mine, hung on the back of the door.
She looks at it. Then at me. “Why?”
I think about this question. The honest answer is that I want to see her in my clothes. That I want her to carry the smell of me through the night, to turn over in the dark and breathe it in, to have some part of her tethered to me even in sleep.
“Because I told you to.”
She considers this explanation, and for now, accepts it, slipping on the shirt.
Morning comes fast. It always does since she started sleeping here.
I’m awake before five, as I’m used to. I lie still for a few minutes first, which is new. The stillness has a reason.
She’s on my chest.
At some point in the night, she migrated and curled against me, her face against my chest, one hand open on my sternum. Her hair is loose and dark against the pillow. Herbreathing is the slow, complete breathing of someone entirely at rest.
She looks peaceful. The anxiety she carries in her face during waking hours, the vigilance she maintains even when she’s laughing, even when she’s at the breakfast table or in the sunroom with Anya, is gone. Whatever she puts down when she sleeps, she’s put it down completely.
I want to tell her she’s safe.
The impulse is strong, and I stay with it, my hand moving through her hair.
I want to say,Nothing will reach you here. I will make sure of it.
I don’t.
Because I know what I am, and I know what this is. I know the world outside this room.
I get up carefully. I’ve learned how to move around her, the places where the mattress gives, the angle that avoids disturbing her, so she doesn’t stir. She never does. She sleeps like she trusts the world, which she shouldn’t, and which I’m choosing to interpret as trust in me specifically, and I probably shouldn’t.
After changing, I go to the door and look back.
She’s shifted slightly into the space I’ve left, still asleep. Her hand is open on the sheets where my chest was.
26
