I lean forward and kiss the tattoo. Each line. Her skin tastes clean — soap and heat and something faintly salt.
"Your hands," I say. My mouth against her ribs. "I've thought about your hands since Arizona."
Something changes. I feel it in her body before I see it — a release of tension in her shoulders, a softening in the muscles of her stomach. When I look up, her face has shifted. The control is still there but the mask beneath the control has cracked, and what's visible through the crack is not strategy.
It's want.
Raw, visible, undisguised want.
She puts her hands on me.
Both of them. Spread across my ribs, fingers curving around to my back, thumbs on my stomach. Those hands — the long fingers, the scarred thumb, the hands that won championships and then refused to obey and are now pressing against my bare skin with a pressure that saysI know exactly what I'm doing and I am choosing to do it.
She eases me back onto the bed. Follows me down. Her weight over mine — the length of her, the lean solidity, her hips settling between my thighs. The size difference is visceral. She covers me. Not smothering — encompassing. I feel the heat of her stomach against mine, her breasts against my chest, her thigh pressing between my legs.
She kisses me. Deeply, finally, the way the corridor kiss promised and didn't deliver — her tongue finding mine, her hand in my hair, her hips rolling once against me in a motion so controlled it can only be deliberate.
She undoes my trousers. I lift my hips. She pulls them off. Then the underwear — dark, simple, wet. She doesn't pretend not to notice.
"Already?"
"Since you opened the door."
A sound from her — a low exhale through her nose that might be amusement or might be arousal suppressed into something manageable. She presses her mouth to my hip bone. To the crease where my thigh meets my pelvis. To the inside of mythigh, where the skin is softer and more sensitive and where her breath alone makes my leg shake.
Her fingers trace up my inner thigh. Slowly. So slowly that I can feel individual fingerprints against my skin. She reaches the heat between my legs and pauses — her fingers resting against me, not moving, just present.
"Not yet."
"Nerys, I swear to—"
"You're going to stay right here. Right at this speed." Her voice is low, close, spoken against the skin of my hip. "You're going to feel all of it, and when you come, it's going to be because you earned it by waiting."
I whimper.
I have never whimpered during sex. I have moaned, gasped, shouted, talked dirty, performed enthusiasm, performed detachment, performed everything on the spectrum between those two poles. I have never made this sound — small, involuntary, stripped of every layer of performance until nothing remains except a woman who wants something she is not being given and cannot take.
Nerys hears it. I watch the recognition move through her — the slight widening of her eyes, the way her fingers press harder against me without moving, the breath she takes through parted lips.
"You're doing so well," she murmurs. Her fingers begin to move. Slowly. Through the wetness, parting me, finding the exact place and circling it with a precision that makes my vision blur. "You're being so patient. You have no idea how good you look right now."
Her mouth is on my stomach. On the underside of my breast. On my nipple — tongue flat, then pointed, then the edge of her teeth while her fingers work me in slow circles that tighten with agonizing increments.
I grip the sheets. I grip her shoulder. I grip my own hair. I can't find anywhere to put my hands because every surface I touch makes the sensation more intense, and the intensity is building toward something massive and I can't get there because she won't let me.
"I need—"
"Tell me."
"More. Harder. Faster. Anything—"
"Anything is another cop-out. Tell me exactly what you need."
"Your fingers inside me." The words leave my mouth and I feel the heat of them in my face. I've said dirtier things in bed. I've narrated entire encounters with language that would make a sailor blush. But this is different. This is not performance. This is me, on my back, looking up at a woman who has taken everything I use to protect myself — speed, bravado, aggression — and removed it piece by piece until I'm lying here sayingplease put your fingers inside meand meaning it without ornamentation.
She slides two fingers into me. Slowly. Curving forward. Finding the place that makes my spine arch and my breath stop and my hands fist in the sheets so hard my knuckles go white.
"There," I say. Or gasp. Or pray. I'm not sure which.
