"You don't need lessons," I murmur.
Her hand pauses. "What?"
"You heard me." I open my eyes. "You touch me all the right ways and say the right things, and I come apart. You don't need a single lesson, Ella. Your brother is the only obstacle between you and any man alive falling at your feet."
She stares at me. Her hand resumes its seduction in my hair, slower now, and I can see her processing, filing that statement, testing its weight.
"I still want you," she says. Simple. Direct.
"I still want you too. That's been pretty well established."
"I mean tonight." Her eyes hold mine.
My heart rate does something the team doctor would flag. "Ella?—"
"I know what I'm asking." She pulls her hand from my hair and places it on my chest, palm flat, the way she did that first time on the couch when she felt my heartbeat and realized I wasn't calm. "Is your knee too painful?”
"My knee is …" I glance down at it. Wrapped, elevated, aching in the background, the way it has been for days. "It depends on the position."
"What position feels best?”
I swallow. "If you were on top. That would … my knee wouldn't be bearing weight. And I could…" I stop and try to concentrate. "Having you on top would be incredibly hot, Ella. I want to see you. Your body. Your face."
Something passes across her features. A shadow I've seen before, when she crossed her arms over her bare chest, when she commented on being too big to sit on my lap. The cruel voice in her head that says she takes up too much space.
"I'm not exactly light," she says.
"Ella." I sit up straighter, ignoring the protest from my knee. "Look at me."
She looks.
"You could sit on me right now, and the only thing I'd feel is lucky. I have wanted your full weight on me since I saw you at the airport. I have thought about nothing else. Do you understand? You on top of me is not a compromise because of my knee. It's a fucking fantasy."
Her cheeks flush. Her eyes go bright. She bites that bottom lip, and I watch her face shift from doubt to something that looks like hunger.
"I should tell you something," I say, because apparently I've lost all self-preservation instinct. "I think about you when I touch myself. In the shower. Every time. Since before the first lesson. I think about your body and your sounds and your face when you come, and I," I exhale. "That's not tutoring.“
She's quiet for a beat, then says, "I think about you too."
"Yeah?"
"In your bed. At night. After you fall asleep on the couch." She holds my gaze. "I hear you breathing through the wall, and I think about your hands, and I touch myself, and I pretend it's you."
Every drop of blood in my body swims south. My vision narrows to her face, her mouth, the flush spreading down her neck beneath her scrubs. I can picture it, Ella in my bed, in the dark, her hand between her thighs, my name in her mouth, and I'm so hard it strains against my shorts.
"Show me," I say, and my voice comes out wrecked. "Please. I want to see. I want to see how you touch yourself, Ella. Get on top of me and show me how you get off."
She looks around, seeming uncomfortable. "Not on the couch."
“Wherever you want,” I agree.
She helps me up, careful with the knee, slotting herself under my arm like she's done it a hundred times. We make our way down the hall — me limping, her steady — to the bedroom. Her bedroom. My bedroom. The room that smells like both of us now, the pillows she sleeps on, the space where she's been lying in the dark thinking about me.
She sits me on the edge of the bed, and I scoot back, propping my bad leg on a pillow. She stands in front of me and pulls her top over her head. The sports bra follows. Then the pajama pants, and she's standing there in underwear, and my mouth goes dry because it doesn't matter how many times I see her — every time hits me like Mayhem on dull skates. Except Ella is soft and strong and so beautiful, my chest aches.
She hooks her thumbs in her underwear. Pauses.
“Please, show me,” I say.
