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"I'm holding on to you."

"Hold on to the cabinet."

She held on to the cabinet.

He got his mouth on her and she went off in about ninety seconds, with her heel against his back and her mother asleep two rooms away. She got a fist in her own mouth for the end of it. He laughed against her thigh. She was going to make him pay for that.

"Don't you say one word."

"Wasn't going to say a word."

"You laughed."

"I did laugh," Owen said, and came up and kissed her with her all over his mouth, and she got both hands around the back of his head and let him.

He had the condom out of his shirt pocket.

"You brought that in your shirt?"

"I brought it Sunday too. I've been carrying it since Friday like a boy."

"Owen Royston."

"You said say things out loud," he said, and she was still laughing when he got into her, and then she wasn't.

The counter was the right height for it. She got her ankles crossed behind him and pulled him in and said his name into his shoulder. He had one arm right around her back, holding her up off the tile, and the other braced beside her. It was fast and it was warm and neither of them shut up the whole way through.

"Say it," he said, low, into her hair.

"You first."

"I love you."

"I love you."

"Again."

"You're greedy."

"Thirteen years," Owen said, and she said it again, and he went, with her name in it and his face in her neck and his whole weight coming down on her and the box of plates on the chair beside them.

The kitchen had gone blue by the time she found her boots.

She sat up on the counter with one of them in her lap and did not put it on. He was leaning against the sink with his shirt half done and his hair wrecked. He was looking at her the way he had apparently been looking at her since he was seventeen.

"Mama's going Wednesday," she said.

"I'll drive the van."

"She's hired a van."

"I'll drive her, then. Or Brody will. He's got nothing to do till Burchall fires him."

"He's not fired yet?"

"They've moved him to a desk with no window and they're waiting on him to quit." Owen said it easy. "He's not going to quit. He's enjoying it."

She laughed and got the boot on.