"That's insane. She's not dead. She's in a hotel. She's probably asleep in a silk eye mask being furious in her dreams." My voice does something ugly. "So why does it feel like she's dead?"
"Because you buried her." She slides the omelette onto a plate, adds a fork, and sets it down in front of me. "That's what yesterday was. You put down a woman you've been carrying for thirty-two years, and now you're standing there with empty arms and you don't know what to do with them." She sits down across from me. "Eat."
I eat.
It's very good. Of course it's very good.
"Cat."
"Mm."
I put down the fork.
"I need you to take me back to bed," I say. "And I need you not to be gentle with me."
She goes very still.
"Iris—"
"She called it a perversion." My voice comes out perfectly level. It is not a nice level. "She stood in our garden, and she looked at your hand in mine, and she said the wordperversion.And I've been lying awake for three hours letting her have the last word." I stand. "I'd like to take it back."
Cat looks at me for a long moment. Something moves behind her eyes — heat, and something rougher underneath it.
"Right," she says. And stands. And takes my hand.
We don't make it quietly down the hall.
She has me against the wall before we're anywhere near the bedroom, her mouth hard on mine, her fist in the shirt I'm wearing —hershirt. And I let her. And then I stop letting her and start taking, which is new, and which she notices instantly.
"Oh," she breathes, when I push her backward through our bedroom door. "Hello."
"Get on the bed."
"Bossy," she says, delighted, and goes.
I don't want to be handled tonight. I don't want to be soothed, or cherished, or told that I'm beautiful. I want to bewanted— obviously, greedily, with no apology anywhere in it — and Cat, who reads me better than anyone alive has ever bothered to, gives me precisely that.
She's rough with me and I ask for more. She pins my wrists and I tell her yes. When she asks — because she always asks, even like this, even with her teeth at my throat — I hear myself sayyes, God, don't stop,and the voice coming out of me does not sound like a woman apologising for existing.
I come with her name in my mouth and my mother's word burned clean out of my head.
Then I put her on her back and take my time about it.
"God," she says, much later, when she can speak again. "That was—"
"Yeah?"
"Where did you learn to do that thing with your—"
"Research." I bite her shoulder. "Remember?"
She laughs, wrecked and pleased, and pulls me down onto her chest.
And then, after a while, I notice she's gone quiet.
Not the good quiet. Not the boneless, sated, half-asleep quiet.
She's holding me exactly the way she always holds me — hand moving slow up and down my spine, chin resting on my hair — and she is somewhere else entirely.
