Sophia
I went down the hall to the bathroom and left him to follow — pulling my old grey t-shirt back on as I went, the soft, shapeless thing I only ever wear inside these walls, because apparently I could spend a whole night bare against a man and still want cotton between myself and a lit hallway. My bathroom was not built for a man like Caleb Maddox.
I ducked in for a towel — a farce, in a room with floor enough for one person to turn around in if they breathe out first — and a moment later he filled the doorway behind.
“Towels are here,” I said. “And the hot tap is the cold tap. You want hot, you turn the one marked cold, slow, or it goes from ice to volcanic with nothing in between. There’s a knack.”
“A knack.”
“Eight years I’ve lived here. I’ve nearly died twice.” I eased the wrong tap round until the water ran hot, steam starting up the little window.
“You’re very competent.”
“It’s my entire personality. Mind the?—”
He’d already stripped — shirt over his head, the rest, not a wasted motion — and promptly cracked his head on the slopeof ceiling over the tub. Six-four of decorated operator, undone by my Edwardian roofline. He didn’t even swear — just ducked, one hand up against the beam like he was holding the house off me, so wrong for the room and so good-humored about it that I laughed before I could catch it.
And then the laugh ran out, because I was looking at him, and there was a great deal to look at.
He stood in all that daylight with one hand still up on the beam and let me look, and I looked my fill. Lean all over, and hard all over under the lean — not a gym’s version of it but a body made by being used, by carrying weight up hills in the dark for years. The flat plates of his stomach. The cut of his hips. Marks I hadn’t found in the lamplight — a seam down one side, a pale knot high on a thigh — that I wanted the stories of and knew better than to ask for.
And he was hard. He’d been hard since the bedroom, by the look of him — since he’d knelt and given me everything and taken nothing back for himself — standing thick and flushed against his own stomach now, unhurried about it, unembarrassed. Some idiot reflex in me began to file an observation about proportion that the rest of me did not need filed, and then it shut up too. The sound I made was not one I’d planned. He watched me look and didn’t cover it and didn’t smirk — just let me get my fill. He’d let me have everything else that morning; he let me have this too.
Then he reached for the hem of my grey shirt.
Every nerve I owned said cover, angle, manage the view. But he was watching me with so much plain want and not one shred of judgement in it that the old instinct lost its nerve before I did. I lifted my arms.
He drew the shirt up over my head and let it drop, and I made myself stand there, in the most honest light in the house, and let him look.
He took me in slow, like there was something here he didn’t want to miss, and every guarded thing in his face put itself down and left him looking at me with nothing held back.
“There she is,” he said.
My throat did something complicated. “It’s a lot of daylight.”
“It’s exactly the right amount of daylight.”
“You can’t possibly?—”
“Sophia. I’ve wanted to look at you in the light since the morning you wouldn’t let me carry your trash. Come here.”
I went. He drew me in under the spray and kissed me — slow, both hands framing my face — and then he stopped and just looked, his thumbs at my cheekbones, water sheeting off the both of us. He didn’t say it again; he didn’t have to. He held the look until I was the one who had to learn how to take it.
And somewhere under that look I decided something. He’d run the bedroom — kept the brake on, called every shot, given and given and let me give nothing back. Fine. He wasn’t running this.
“Let me,” I said, and reached past him for the soap.
I worked it into a lather and set my hands on him — slick, slow, everywhere, the way I’d wanted to for a month and never once let myself. The slope of his shoulders. The flat of his chest. The old white seam under his collarbone I’d traced once already that morning; I followed it again, and he let me. I wasn’t so much washing him as worshipping him by hand: learning what was muscle and what was old healed-over damage, what made him go still, what made him breathe out.
I dragged my nails light down his side and felt him twitch. I put my mouth to the hollow of his throat and felt the sound he made more than heard it. Every time, he gave something back — a hand closing on my hip, a low rough noise — and every time it made me a little bolder. Not because I knew what I was doing. Because I wanted to know what came next.
I soaped a slow line down the center of him and watched what it did. His jaw set. Then both his hands came up and went flat to the tiles above my head, and he braced there — caging me in against the wall, his head dropped between his arms, the water running off the back of his neck, his knuckles gone pale on the wet tile. Every muscle in his back and shoulders was locked down to hold all that size still on purpose. He gave me the room and made himself stay in it.
Then I worked my way down him — soap, palm, unhurried — and wrapped my hand around his cock. He was hot against my palm, hard enough that I could feel his pulse in it, the skin gliding loose over the iron underneath, heavier in my hand than I’d braced for. The breath he dragged in broke against my temple.
“Sophia.” Wrecked. “You don’t have to?—”
“I want to.” I tightened my hand and watched his eyes go. “You’re not the boss of me. I can play too.”
