“Hi,” she says, eyes wide open, not looking away.
“Hi.”
I get my mouth on her throat, and her head tips back against the tile. As I’m leaving my mark, she doesn’t pull away, butpresses into me. Her hips roll against me and I feel the heat of her even through the water and my grip goes hard on the tile.
“Okay,” she breathes, “this is not going to work against this wall.”
“Stupid geometry,” I say. “Where?”
“The steps. I planned this.” She’s speaking in short sentences as I suck at her neck.
“You did?”
“Well, sort of.”
We half-wade, half-stumble to the steps, and she goes up onto the broad top step and reclines back on her elbows, the water at her waist. Then, looking me right in the eyes, she lets her thighs fall open a little because she wants me looking.
“You’re staring,” she says.
“I’m allowed,” I say, as I kneel into the shallow water between her legs.
I get a hand between her thighs, and she’s slick under my fingers in a way the pool can’t fully account for, and her hips lift off the step. I slide two into her and her breath punches out, and her clit is right there under my thumb, and I work her slow.
“Oh,” she gets out. “Hi.”
“Stop talking.”
“Make me.” She snorts. “No more Halden Girl, remember?”
So I do. Keeping two fingers buried in her, I kiss down the soft inside of her thigh. Then I get my mouth on her — chlorine and salt and the warmer, truer taste of her underneath — and the sound she makes isn’t careful in the slightest.
As I work my tongue and my fingers, I keep my eyes up, watching her. And she’s looking at me, too, even as her hand fists in my wet hair and her hips chase my mouth. By now, I know what she likes, but this time she doesn’t try to keep quiet.
She’s loud and unguarded and refusing to shrink.
“Don’t stop,” she breathes. “Don’t you dare, Rowan?—”
The sound of it knocks every last plan out of my head, and when she hooks a heel over my shoulder, shameless, I groan against her. And that seems to set her off, because she comes against my mouth with a cry, her thighs locked around my head and her spine bowing up off the step.
I stay with her through every aftershock until she’s pushing weakly at my forehead because it has gone past too much. “Good?” I say.
She hauls me up by the arms, greedy now, her mouth finding mine while she’s wet and still gasping. “Not bad. Hey, Rowan?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m on the pill,” she says.
“Oh.” It comes out rough. “So I don’t need?—”
“That’s the idea.”
“But what about all the strategically placed condoms?”
She laughs and pulls me down. I brace one forearm on the step beside her head and guide myself with the other hand, and when I push into her, we both go still — her lips part, her hand grips the back of my neck, and I feel her stretch around me, tight and slick and warm.
I drop my forehead to hers. “God,” I say.
“Yeah,” she breathes.
