"I want you to touch me."
"Where?"
"Everywhere."
"Everywhere is a cop-out, Tala. Be specific."
The wordspecificin her mouth. The precision of the demand. The quiet insistence that I stop performing desire and start articulating it.
"My neck," I say. My voice sounds different. Lower. Less defended. "Start with my neck."
Nerys leans down. The height — her standing, me sitting — means she folds over me, and the architecture of her body creates a shelter. Her mouth finds the side of my throat. Not a kiss — a press. Open. Warm. Her lips part against my pulse point and she stays there, feeling the speed of my heartbeat against her mouth.
"Good," she says against my skin. "What else?"
"My — under my jaw. Where you held me. In the corridor."
Her mouth travels up. Along the tendon. Under the hinge of my jaw. She kisses the same place her thumb pressed five daysago, and the echo of that moment — the corridor, the keycard, the first kiss — layers over the present until I can't separate memory from sensation.
"What else."
I'm shaking. My hands are gripping the bedsheet. I want to grab her — her waist, her hips, her shirt — and pull until something gives.
"Take my shirt off."
She straightens. Her fingers find the top button of the silk shirt. She undoes it slowly. Not a tease — a deliberate act, one button at a time, watching each inch of skin as it appears. The second button. The third. The shirt falls open. She pushes it off my shoulders, and the silk slides down my arms like water.
I'm in a bralette. Black. Simple. Her eyes track across my body — the collarbones, the tattoo beneath the right one, the curve of muscle in my shoulders, the flat plane of my stomach.
"You are—" She stops. Recalibrates. "The first time I watched your swing on film, I thought your body was an extraordinary instrument. I was wrong. It's extraordinary in every context."
She removes the bralette. Her fingers find the clasp at my back and release it with a precision that I would find clinically impressive if the result wasn't her standing between my knees looking at my bare chest with an expression that makes her gray-green eyes go dark.
She touches me. Not my breasts — not yet. My shoulders. The defined muscle she praised. She traces the line of my deltoid with one finger, follows it down my arm to the elbow, comes back up to the collarbone. She maps me the way she maps a course — systematically, attentively, cataloguing terrain.
"Your skin," she says. "The way the light hits it. Like metal that's been warmed."
Her mouth follows her finger. Collarbone. The hollow of my throat. The rise of my chest. She kisses the top of each breastwithout touching the nipple, and the avoidance is so calculated that I arch toward her mouth and make a sound I didn't authorize.
"Patience."
"You keep saying that—"
"Because you keep needing to hear it." Her thumbs trace the underside of my breasts. Slow circles that tighten incrementally. When she finally brushes my nipples — barely, just the pads of her thumbs crossing the peaks — I jerk like I've been shocked.
She pauses. Watches my reaction. Adjusts the pressure. Brushes again, harder, and my head drops back and my hands release the bedsheet and find her hips instead.
"I want to see you," I say.
"Then take it off."
I reach for the gray T-shirt. The height difference means I have to reach up — my arms extending, my body stretching toward hers. I pull the shirt over her head and she lets me, ducking slightly to accommodate, and the shirt clears her face and her hair falls back around her jaw and she is standing in front of me in a dark sports bra and low-slung trousers with her lean stomach and narrow waist and the shadow of her ribs visible beneath fair olive skin.
I unhook the bra. She lets it fall. Small breasts. Defined collarbones. The contour-line tattoo along her left side — topographical lines from a course I don't recognize, drawn in fine black ink across her ribs. I trace it with my fingertip.
"What course?"
"Aberystwyth. Where I played as a child."
