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“Don’t,” I say, but I don’t step back.

He doesn’t move his hand, his thumb making a slow circle, and I stare at a point past his shoulder and press my lips together, but my breath is coming differently and I can’t fix that.

“Tell me to stop and mean it,” he says.

I say nothing. My fingernails are pressing into my palms and I know what my silence means. He also knows what my silence means and I hate that we both know.

His hand moves down, slow, no rush, like he has the rest of the night and is certain of every inch of it. He presses his palm flat against me through the nightgown, between my legs, and I feel the heat of it. My hips shift forward by one centimeter before I catch them.

He doesn’t say anything. He just keeps his hand there and looks at me.

“Wet,” he says. One word.

My face is on fire. I’m wet, I know I’m wet, I can feel it, and I don’t entirely understand why because I’m furious at him, at this whole situation, at the fact that my body keeps doing this without consulting me first. I’ve read about this. I understand it in the abstract, the way I understand most things I’ve encountered in books rather than in practice, which until recently was most things involving him. What I don’t understand is the specificity of it, why him, why proximity to this man produces what three previous attempts at this with three previous men never once did, why three weeks of him sleeping beside me without touching me have been sitting under my sternum like something unfinished that won’t leave me alone.

“That’s a physiological response to proximity,” I counter. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

“It means you want my cock,” he says, plain as reading a menu. “Your body knows what it wants even when your mouth is busy calling me a pervert.”

“Those aren’t mutually exclusive,” I say.

“No,” he agrees, and his hand presses harder. I stop breathing for a full second because the pressure hits somewhere new and my brain goes briefly, completely offline. He reads it on my face, I can see him read it, the slight sharpening of his eyes. I hate that he knows my face well enough now to catch what I didn’t choose to show him.

“I could make you come right here,” he says. “Still hating me. You’d let me.”

“I wouldn’t,” I say, but my voice isn’t cooperating.

He leans in, lips at my ear. “I’ll fuck you so good you’ll forget your own name. I’ll have you on your back, on your knees, taking everything I give you, coming so hard you can’t put a sentence together. Your body’s been wanting it since the wedding night and these three weeks without it were worse for you than anything I could’ve done. That’s the truth and you know it.”

He’s right. I’m not going to say he’s right, but he is, and that’s the most maddening part of all of it, that the three weeks of him not touching me have been feeling like something unfinished, but I’d rather burn this house to the ground than say so out loud.

I grab his collar and his mouth comes down hard. I kiss him back because I’m furious and I’ve been lying awake for three weeks and because whatever this thing is that happens to my body when he’s in the room needs somewhere to go. I tell myself it’s just physics, just proximity, just the fact that he’s built the way he’s built and I’ve been sleeping beside him, and something had to give. It’s not him specifically, it’s not about him as a person, it’s a body doing what bodies do, and it means nothing about the rest of it, nothing about my father, nothing about the drive I’ve hidden, nothing about what I’m going to do when I’ve finished what I came here to do.

I keep telling myself that while I pull him closer by the collar.

He walks me backward until my legs hit the bed, his mouth on mine, one hand fisted in my hair pulling my head back so he can get at my throat, and his mouth drags down my neck while I get my hands under his shirt and dig my nails into his back, not gently. He makes a sound low in his throat and goes harder for it.

He gets my nightgown up and off in one pull, and I’m bare. He steps back for one second to look at me, eyes moving over me slowly. I hold very still and let him because I didn’t cover myself on the wedding night and I’m not starting now.

Two fingers push inside me without warning, deep. My back arches off the mattress and I grab his forearm, my nails going in, because I wasn’t ready and the stretch of it produces a sound from me that is not controlled in any way. It’s a considerable amount of sensation and I don’t understand it, my body clenching around his fingers, hips moving toward him before I can stop them, thighs falling open because closing them would stop this and I don’t want it to stop, I want it to keep going even though I’m furious, even though I hate him, even though his fingers working inside me belong to the man who killed my father and I’ve just spent ten minutes telling him exactly what I think of him.

Both things are true, and I’m done trying to resolve that tonight.

He curls his fingers, and I cry out against his shoulder, raking my nails down his back hard. He hisses and goes harder and deeper for it, fingers stroking deep, thumb finding my clit and pressing in slow circles. I come apart with my face in his neck and a sound I’ve never made before in my life, open and completely outside my control. He works me through every second of it until I’m shaking and barely holding myself together.

He gets his shirt off, and I reach for him before he’s done with his pants, getting my hand around his cock, feeling how hard he is. The size of him in my grip still produces something in my chest that I’m choosing to call surprise and nothing else. I run my thumb along the underside the way I learned on the wedding night and feel him go tense under my hand.

He pushes me back onto the bed, gets between my thighs, and pushes in slow. I feel every inch of it, the stretch and the fullness going deep. My back comes off the mattress, and my hands find the sheets because I need something to hold onto. He bottoms out and holds still, letting me breathe through it, walls clenching around him while I adjust. He watches my face the whole time with his jaw tight and everything in him held back.

Then he pulls back and drives forward hard, and the sound I make isn’t a word. He does it again, watching my face, and sets a rhythm, deep and relentless, pulling back until almost nothing is left inside me and then filling me back up completely. The sounds fill the room fast, skin against skin and my own wet heat loud around every stroke, and I stop caring about any of it, stop caring who can hear, stop caring what it means that I’m this loud and this gone for a man I spent ten minutes screaming at about gate keys.

I push my heels into the mattress and meet him on every stroke. He goes harder for it, getting his hand under my ass and tilting my hips, and the angle changes and hits something that makes my vision go briefly white and I cry out and grab his shoulders.

“Look at me,” he orders.

I look at him, his eyes dark and fixed on mine, and there’s something in them tonight that isn’t only anger or want, something I don’t recognize and don’t want to dwell on, so I look away.

He gets his hand in my hair and pulls my head back.