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"Yes?"

"You can't just say that."

"I just did." He puts one knee on the bed. The mattress dips under him like it's taking on a truck. "Color, Tara Iverson."

"Green," I say. "Extremely green."

He gets my jeans off. He's careful about it, unbuttoning, sliding them down, and he folds them, and lays them on the chair with my shirt. Then he's over me, braced on one arm, his wings opening a little behind him for balance and then folding again.

He touches me like he's learning a building. Everywhere. Slowly. One stone-gray hand moving down my side, my ribs, my hip, mapping me. Every time I make a sound, he stops and does it again, the same way, until he's sure what made it. He's checking. He's always checking. It drives me out of my mind.

"You're inspecting me," I say.

"Yes."

"Are you going to tag me?"

"Don't tempt me." His hand slides down between my legs, and I arch off the bed, and the rope catches my wrists and holds. "There. You felt that."

"I felt it."

"The rope. When you pulled." He moves his hand, slow. "I want you to keep feeling it."

So I do. Every time I move, every time I twist, the rope is there, holding me still for him, and his hand is there, patient and relentless, and his eyes never leave my face. When his hand turns to stone, I feel it go. The give of skin fades out of his fingers and they go hard, and heavy, and cool, and it's so different and so good I say his name out loud.

He doesn’t take the stone back this time either.

“Tell me,” he says.

“Don’t stop.”

“I’m not going to stop. Tell me what you want.”

“That,” I say. “What you’re doing. Don’t you dare stop.”

“Good,” he says, and doesn’t.

He doesn’t talk much now. He doesn’t need to. He shifts his weight onto his knees beside me and reaches up with his other hand and wraps it around my bound wrists, over the rope, and holds them there against the ring, stone fingers and red rope and steel. The only thing I can do is feel him. The only way I can move is the way he lets me.

And then his wings open.

Not all the way. But they spread up and out behind him, the whole dark span of them, catching the lamp, and curve down around us on either side the way they did on the roof, until the bed and the room and the brick are gone and there’s nothing but the warm dark under his wings and the stone of his hand on my wrists and the stone of his other hand between my legs, slow and certain, not changing, not hurrying, until I’m shaking with it.

“Look at me,” he says.

I look at him.

“Now,” he says, very quietly, and I come apart.

I pull against the rope so hard the whole bed shifts on the floor. The ring doesn’t move an inch. He holds my wrists through all of it, and he doesn’t take his hand away until I’m done shaking, and then he just rests it there, cool and heavy, while I catch my breath.

He’s still wearing his jeans. I notice that eventually.

“You didn’t...” I say.

“Not tonight.” He lowers his head and kisses the inside of my elbow, right above the rope. “Tonight was for you.”

“That’s not fair.”