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"Six hundred pounds," I say, into her hip.

"Shut up. Shut up. Get up here."

I get my belt off and my trousers down and she gets one look at me and stops.

"Right," she says. "Okay. We did do this twice already, and I have been telling myself I exaggerated."

"You did not."

"I did not." She swallows. "Come here."

I come there.

She reaches down between us and gets her hand around me, as much of me as her hand goes around, and works it, and the sound I make comes out of somewhere under the floor. I put my forehead down against hers. I get one arm under her hips and pull her to the edge of the oak, and she guides me, and I go in the first inch and stop.

"More."

"Slowly."

"More."

I give her another inch and she opens around it, hot and slick and gripping, and her nails go into my shoulders. I take her in stages the way I have taken everything else in my life, a little and then hold, a little and then hold, her breath going ragged against my jaw, until she has all of me she is going to have tonight and my hips are against the backs of her thighs and neither of us is breathing correctly.

"Okay," she says. "Okay. Okay."

"Yes."

"Move. Please move."

I move.

The oak takes it. The whole table takes it, and I have both hands under her, one at the small of her back and one spread across her hip and thigh, and I go slow and deep and get slower and deeper, and she is under me saying my name in pieces, the first syllable and then nothing, over and over, until the words go entirely and there is only sound.

She gets her mouth against my throat and bites down.

That nearly ends me on the spot. I get a hand between us and my thumb on her while I am still moving, and she goes rigid and then comes apart around me a second time, clenching, wet, her heels hooked in behind my knees, and I go over with her with her name in my mouth and one hand splayed on the oak beside her head, hard enough that the near-side apron makes a sound I have opinions about.

After, on the floor, on a stack of moving blankets, with the polyethylene breathing on the west wall.

She is on top of me, entirely, because that is the only arrangement in which we both fit on a stack of moving blankets, and her head is under my jaw and my hand covers most of her back.

"The apron," she says, sleepily.

"Yes."

"You're going to fix the apron in the morning."

"Yes."

"Before coffee."

"After coffee."

She laughs into my throat.

"My trestle-word," she says. "I've got one."

"Go on."