She's responding. I can feel it — the slight lift of her hips, the tension in her thighs, the breath that deepens when I press harder. I love the geometry of this. My compact body on top of her long one. My thighs bracketing her narrow hips. The factthat she extends past me in every direction and I'm still the one pressing her into the mattress.
I lean down. Kiss her jaw. Her neck. The soft skin behind her ear.
She reverses me.
I don't see it happen. One moment I'm on top, mouth on her throat, hands on her wrists. The next, the world tilts — leverage, a smooth rotation of her hips, her long legs hooking under mine — and I'm on my back looking up at her.
Six inches of difference. Her face above mine. Her hair falling forward, auburn and silver framing the gray-green eyes that are looking down at me with something that is not amusement and not authority and is probably both.
"This morning," she says, "you wait."
"For how long?"
"Until I say."
She sits up. Straddles me. Pulls the T-shirt over her head in a single motion and drops it off the side of the bed. In the gray Singapore dawn, her body is a study in contrasts — the lean muscle and the soft skin, the contour-line tattoo dark against her ribs, the small breasts and the long torso and the silver streak falling against her bare shoulder.
She looks down at me the way she looks at a course she's spent three days mapping. Like she knows every contour. Like she's already decided the optimal path and is about to execute it.
Her mouth starts at my forehead. A kiss between my brows. Then my temple. My cheekbone. The scar on my lower lip — she traces it with her tongue and my back arches involuntarily.
She moves down. Throat. Collarbones. The sampaguita tattoo. She spends time here — tracing the petals with the tip of her tongue, and the sensation of being read like topography makes my skin prickle into goosebumps despite the humidity.
She reaches my breasts. Takes one nipple into her mouth — tongue flat, then circling, then the edge of her teeth. My hands fly to her hair.
She catches them. Pins them above my head. One of her hands is large enough to hold both of my wrists against the pillow.
"Hands stay here."
"That's not—"
"Tala." My name in the voice she uses before a difficult shot. Low, certain, carrying the specific weight of a woman who is about to give you information that will change the outcome. "You spent all night touching me. This morning is mine. Your hands stay where I put them."
I leave my hands above my head. Not because I'm obedient. Because the instruction, delivered in that voice, in this light, from this woman, has short-circuited the part of my brain that argues.
She resumes. My breasts. My ribs. My stomach — she presses her mouth to the hollow beside my hipbone and her breath is hot against skin that is increasingly sensitive to everything. She moves to my inner thigh and kisses the crease where leg meets torso, and I feel the wetness between my legs responding to proximity, to anticipation, to the specific torture of a mouth that is near but not where I need it.
"Nerys—"
"Patience."
"I don't have—"
"You do." She lifts her head. Looks at me from between my thighs. Her expression is calm and focused and her eyes are very dark. "You proved it on the sixteenth hole at Kiawah. You aimed center-green when everything in you wanted to attack the pin. You waited for the wind to do the work." She presses her mouth to my inner thigh again. "Wait for me."
She brings me to the edge.
The first time, she uses her tongue — long, slow strokes that build pressure in a steady rhythm until I can feel the orgasm assembling at the base of my spine like a wave gathering offshore. My thighs begin to shake. My breathing becomes rhythmic and desperate. I'm close — so close that the distance between where I am and where I need to be feels like inches rather than miles.
She stops. Lifts her head. Moves up my body and presses her mouth to my throat and holds me.
"Breathe." Her hand strokes my hair. "You're doing so well. I know this is hard."
"It's not hard, it's — I was right there—"
"I know. You'll be there again. Stay with me."
She waits until my breathing stabilizes. Until the urgency retreats from desperate to manageable. Then she goes back down.
