His hand slides down my neck. Slow, proprietary, and devastatingly thorough. He’s learned my body in pieces and assembled the sum of it with an alarming confidence.
There are days I wish I minded. This day is not one of them.
He backs me toward the bed. Our bed now, even if I still feel, on occasion, the trespass in each thread of the imported linen. Alessandro likes everything beautiful and forbidding. The bed isboth. My knees touch its edge. He pauses, leaving just enough space between us to shiver.
Sometimes I wonder if he gets off on restraint more than its lack. Maybe I do, too.
He leans in, kissing the angle of my jaw, the hollow just beneath my ear. Bites a little, hard enough for the first snap of pain.
I don’t gasp. I don’t give him the satisfaction.
He yanks my hair, pulling my head back, and his mouth finds the arch of my throat. His teeth leave a trail that burns. My hands are on his chest, then under the buttons, clawing the shirt apart before I realize I’m the one making the low, angry sound in the sunlit air.
He grins into my neck, predatory, because he has learned, finally, perfectly, how much I like being pushed to the edge of violence inside the calm, solvent days of our peace.
“Tell me,” he says, voice fuzzy with want. “Tell me you want this.”
I answer by grinding my hips into his, feeling how ready he is, how ready I am, how long it’s been since we gave up even the illusion of moderation. I want to say something sharp. I want to win something.
He rips my shirt over my head. Bra, gone. His palm is rough, or maybe it’s been too long, too much time spent performing competence, not enough time spent dissolving in him. I twist in his grip, and the pleasure spikes, the pain a clean, beautiful line through the miasma of negotiation and patience and motherhood.
I latch onto his shoulder, biting down, savoring his sharp intake of breath.
Maybe hurting him is the closest I get to forgiveness.
I want to tell him this. I want to hurt him until it redeems us both. Instead, I moan, low and furious, as he bends me back overthe edge of the mattress. His weight pins me in place, and his hands map me with violence disguised as worship. The silk skirt crumples uselessly around my hips, and I’m not even sure when or how my underwear vanishes.
I do feel it, though, as he lies me back on the bed and presses his cock to my lips.
He holds me there, gaze heavy, waiting for the signal that I’ll never give but always send. I open my mouth for him, and he’s there, thick and hot and inevitable, pushing past my lips. He tastes of salt and espresso and something knife-edged, the way air tastes after a gunshot, metallic and raw.
He grips my jaw. Not gently. Not cruelly, either. The careful brutality of a man who knows exactly how not to break things he values. My tongue circles him, slow at first, then faster as need overtakes any plan I had to draw this out. I suck him until I feel his hips stutter, until the edges of his control go ragged.
He pulls out—a string of spit, mine, his, ours—tethering us for half a second before snapping.
“On your stomach,” he says, rough, and I know what that means. He wants my back. He wants my throat bared and my hands out of reach.
I turn, skin burning with friction from the sheets, and hear the wet, animal sound of his belt unfastening before I feel the bite of leather wrapping my wrists. I don’t fight. Not really. Not in the way that matters. I tense, testing the restraint, feeling the pulse of blood under it, the tremor of anticipation.
My face is mashed to the mattress, breath coming quick and bright between gasps, but my body is already pushing helplessly back, eager, open, empty in the way that makes me both hate and worship him.
His palm slides down my spine, slow and firm, as if resetting each vertebra, reconstructing me from the outside in. When he enters me, it’s brutal by design. One hard, claiming thrustsplitting me so suddenly, I fumble for air, mind blanking to a single, shameless need.
He teases my entrance, the tip of his cock circling, then thrusting, then withdrawing just enough to make me sob into the sheets. I try not to beg, but I do, anyway—no words, just need. He shoves deeper, punishingly deep, and I can feel the length of him rearrange everything inside me that has built up over years of control, composure, all the things I built to survive.
He undoes me with rhythm and violence and undiluted intent, fucking me hard, fast, holding my hips in place like anchors on a shipwreck. The belt bites, a small and perfect pain. I press my forehead to the mattress and let myself dissolve around him, let the world outside the room vanish, let the only thing that matters be this. Skin, muscle, sweat, the press and drag, the collision of bodies built to destroy and forgive each other in the same hungry breath.
He says my name. Not as a question. As a fact, and I come apart, soundlessly at first, then choking out his name like a threat, like a prophecy, like the answer to every question I never got to ask.
He doesn’t let up. He chases me through the aftershocks, through the raw spasms that crack along my spine and wipe my mind blank. I claw at the bedsheet, eyes streaming for reasons I’ll make up later, and he grips my hip harder, dragging me back onto him as if the whole world is measured in the depth of this collision.
His breath turns ragged, matching the slap of skin and the wet noises that fill the room. One hand snakes into my hair, anchoring me to the moment, and the other works at the wrist restraint, loosening it incrementally, as if the knowledge that I can fight is more important than the reality that I won’t take it.
I want him to have it. All of it. I want him to come inside me with the same violence that broke me from my old life. Thesame violence that made me his, made me a mother, made me someone new and ferocious and alive.
I sob again, wordless, crushing the pillow with both hands as he shoves inside so deep, my vision whites out.
He finishes with a shudder, his whole body locking against mine. For a moment, the only sound in the room is our breathing, a low and brutal tide. Then he lets go, sliding out with a wet heat and leaving the burn of emptiness, of after, of nothing that matters but right now.
