"Slant rhyme."
"Stretch rhyme. We've covered this."
My hand slides into her hair, red and thick and smelling like the citrus shampoo that has colonized my shower alongside her towel set and her conditioner.
Her head tips back, and the line of her throat catches the lamp light.
The sound she makes when my fingers tighten at the base of her skull is the sound that rewrote my priorities the first time I heard it, and hasn't stopped rewriting them since.
"The plan," she murmurs against my mouth.
"The plan can wait."
"Optimistic."
"I'm a medic. I pace myself."
Her laugh breaks against my lips, and the kiss that follows carries the urgency of two people who know what tomorrow holds and have chosen tonight as the answer to it.
Her tongue slides against mine, and the taste of bourbon from the deck is still on her, warm and dark.
The urgency kicks up because tomorrow is the takedown and tonight is the last night before it and my body has decided that the appropriate response to mortal danger is to put my hands on every inch of this woman and memorize what I'm fighting for.
I stand, pulling her up with me, and my hands find the hem of the hoodie before she's fully on her feet.
My hoodie is on her body, and the combination is a fixation I am never going to recover from.
"This is mine," I say, pulling it over her head.
"Was yours. Adverse possession."
"That's real estate law."
"It applies to hoodies. There's precedent."
Her skin under the hoodie is warm, freckled across the shoulders, and the scar on her shoulder catches the lamp light.
I press my mouth to the ridge of tissue from the surgery that ended her competitive career, and her breath catches against my hair.
I walk her backward down the hall to the bedroom, my mouth still on her shoulder, her hands gripping my arms for balance. The bed catches the backs of her legs and I lower her onto the mattress, and the look she gives me from the pillow, half-dressed and flushed and breathing hard, is the look of a woman who has decided that tonight is not about patience.
The scrub pants come off with my help and without her permission, and the underwear beneath them is dark blue and simple and seduces completely because Ireland in anything is a sensory event I have no training for and Ireland in nothing is the event that ends all others.
I pull the fabric down her thighs with the unhurried deliberation of a man who knows exactly what he's going to find and wants her to feel every inch of the wait.
"You're doing the thing," she says, her voice already thicker than it was.
"What thing?"
"The thing where you go slow on purpose because you know it makes me lose my mind."
"I don't know what you're talking about." My thumb traces the inside of her thigh, high enough to make her hips shift, low enough to make her curse.
"Boone."
"Ireland."
"If you don't put your hands where I need them in the next five seconds, I am going to handle this myself and you can watch."
