I start to move, slow, finding the angle, and the water laps over the step with every thrust. It’s clumsy — my elbow slips into the water by her head and I barely catch myself — but it’s messy and perfect and us.
She sets a rhythm and I follow it; then I set one and she follows that, and somewhere along the way we stop being careful about any of it. She pulls me down by the back of the neck until there’s no space left between us, and the sound she makes when I go deep ignites me.
“Don’t speed up,” she says when I start to. “Keep going, like that.”
So I stay there. Her breath turns ragged on the long strokes, and I watch it build in her — the flush climbing her chest, her nails dragging down my back, her hips chasing mine. She doesn’t let go of me through it all, and we find a new rhythm.
She gets a heel braced on the edge and rolls up into me, and the angle changes, and whatever it does takes the words out of her mouth entirely. I feel her start to tip toward it and haul herself back, like she wants to live at the edge of it a little longer.
Then she can’t anymore.
“Right there,” she breathes.
I get a hand under the small of her back and lift her into each stroke, my mouth at the hollow of her throat, her pulse going wild against my lips, and I hold the rhythm for as long as she needs.
Her legs lock around my hips, her breath goes high and fast, and she comes with her whole body pulling taut and her nails buried in my shoulder, a sound tearing out of her that she doesn’t even try to keep down.
The clutch of her around me is what finishes me — a few more thrusts, graceless now, my face buried against her neck — and I come saying her name, loud and rough. There’s nothing between us, and feeling her like that takes me apart.
For a while neither of us moves. Her chest rises and falls under mine, and the pool laps at the step, and my cock slowly softens inside her. We hold each other, her chin on my shoulder, and my face is in her neck.
“Your elbow’s on my hair,” she says eventually.
“Sorry.” I shift.
“Don’t be sorry.” She kisses me, lazy and warm. “Just relocate.”
I do. “That was good.”
“It was,” she says. “But you have terrible form in the pool.”
I laugh as I ease myself out of her, then sit back on my heels in the shallows. I’m still catching my breath when she slides down off the step and into the water, floating on her back, arms out, eyes closed.
“Hold me up,” she says, without opening them. “You owe me.”
I smile and inch closer to her, holding her the way she held me. Then she lets herself go — weightless and bare, hair fanning around her face, breasts breaking the surface, the whole length of her on the water while I take the weight.
“If you say something tender,” she says, eyes shut, “I’ll go under and take you with me.”
“Noted.”
“You get quieter when you go soft,” she says. “It’s a whole thing. I can hear it.”
“You can hear an expression.”
“Yours, yeah.” She cracks one eye open and looks up at me. “What’s that?”
“What?”
“That face. I’ve never seen that face.”
“It’s my face.”
“No, it isn’t. That’s a new one.” She reaches up out of the water and touches the corner of my mouth. “That one’s mine. I want it every day.”
thirty-one
SLOANE
