"It's too much?—"
"You told me to keep going even if you begged." He moved it fractionally, found a different angle, and I cried out into the dark. "Are you begging?"
"Yes," I gasped. "Please, Gage, please?—"
"Please what?"
"Please—" I didn't even know what I was asking for. More. Less. Both. "I don't know, I don't?—"
"I do." His free hand stroked down my spine. "I know exactly what you need. You need to lie there and take it and let your body do what it's supposed to do." The vibe shifted again, infinitesimally. "So that's what you're going to do."
I came again. Hard and clenching and desperate, my whole body seizing against the bench, and he kept the vibe exactly where it was and talked me through every second of it in that low steady voice.
"Good girl," he said. "That's it. Feel that? That's your body pulling it in deeper. That's exactly right." His palm pressed warm against my lower back. "Give me another one."
"I can't?—"
"You can. Look at the clock."
I looked.
9:55.
"Thirteen more minutes, darlin'."
"Gage." His name came out wrecked. "I'm so—I'm already so sensitive, I can't?—"
"You can." No negotiation in it. Just certainty. "You're going to give me every single one. Your body knows what to do even when your brain doesn't." He moved the vibe again and I whimpered. "There. See? It knows."
He was right. That was the worst part. My body didn't care that I was oversensitive, didn't care that I was shaking, didn't care about anything except the slow relentless build he was pulling out of me one wave at a time. I stopped fighting itsomewhere around the third one. Just went loose against the bench, let the cuffs hold my wrists, let the padding hold my hips, let him hold everything else.
"There she is," he said, quiet and satisfied. "Good girl. Just like that."
The next one built from somewhere deeper, slower, and when it crested I didn't cry out. I just shook, long and continuous, his hand warm and steady on my back the entire time.
"That's the one," he murmured. "Feel that? Deep?"
"Yes," I managed. "Yes, deep?—"
"That's where my baby is," he said. "Right where I put it. Your body's just making sure."
I was crying at some point. I didn't notice when it started. Not from anything bad—from fullness, from too much feeling and nowhere to put it all, from twenty minutes on this bench in this room where he'd told me he wanted to marry me and I'd told him yes before I'd officially said yes and now this, him taking care of me down to the smallest detail like I was something worth the trouble.
"Almost," he said. "Look at the clock."
10:06.
"One more minute," he said. "Give me one more."
"Gage—" His name came out like a prayer.
"One more, Millie. You've been so good. One more."
I held on.
When it finally crested he turned the vibe off at the same moment, and the silence was enormous, and I shook through it with his hand pressed flat on my lower back and his voice low in my ear sayinggood, good, that's it, perfect, you're perfect.
The clock read 10:08.
